Mission to Argentina

He thought about Lynsey. She was two years older than him, and had a kid already from her marriage to Jake. Mozza did not mind that at all: Hannah was a lovely kid and she seemed to like him. Jake had disappeared into thin air about two years ago, so it was hardly as if he was competing with anyone for the father role. And Lynsey…well, she was just perfect. She was kind, she was bright, she was gorgeous. And, after almost three months of intermittent courtship, she seemed to love him. He was a lucky man, all right.

The fourth man in the patrol was feeling rather less fortunate. Hedge – a nickname grounded in both his surname and the unruly tangle of wiry hair which graced his scalp – was suffering from periodic stomach cramps, and wondering what he had done to deserve them. Eaten navy food, probably. He hoped they were a passing phenomenon, so to speak, because in thirty hours or so they would all be sharing a small hide, and if he was still farting like this the others would probably insist on him giving himself up to the Argies.

He grinned in the dark and turned a full circle, peering into the gloom. There was nothing out there but wet grass and sheep, he thought. Life in the fast lane.

Maybe his stomach was feeling better. Maybe it was just nerves. Hedge had seen enough action in Northern Ireland not to feel like a combat virgin, but he supposed being behind enemy lines was a reasonable enough place to feel nervous no matter how often you visited. Crossmaglen was bad enough, although you knew help was in calling distance. But this felt like being out on a limb.

People said the Argies would be poor soldiers, but he had seen their football team play, and they took no fucking prisoners, so fuck only knew how their Army would behave. Hedge was not keen to find out, not just yet. A day or so of acclimatization, that was what he needed, and a digestive system more at peace with itself. Then they could start throwing the bastards his way.

As often at times like this, he thought about his father, killed in a steelworks accident when Hedge was only fourteen. Although he knew it was stupid, he always wished his father could see him in this sort of situation, all grown up, doing something necessary and doing it well. His father had been a Labour man through and through, but he had also been a real patriot, and Hedge knew he would have felt really proud of England these last few weeks. And of his son.

What his father would have felt about an army career, Hedge was less sure, though from what he could remember getting out of the house and away from his wife and two daughters had been one of his dad’s main aims in life. Joining the army had achieved a similar result for Hedge, and once he was in he had quickly found more positive reasons for staying a soldier. There had always been new challenges to drive him forward, right up to the ultimate goal of making it into the SAS. It had been a close-run thing on the Brecon Beacons – he had damn near given up – but the voice inside his head whispering ‘I’ll be so proud of you’ had somehow pulled him through.

They marched on through the night, making frequent short stops to check their position and a couple of long ones to evade what turned out to be imaginary enemy patrols. About two hours before dawn Brookes decided it was time to dig in for the day. They had covered over two-thirds of the distance required, but the final quarter would bring them close to known enemy positions and called for a much more cautious approach. There was certainly no chance of completing the journey that night.

As it was, they were almost too tired to dig out the lying-up positions for use through the coming day. Brookes chose the western slope of a gentle ridge for their camp, and each man had the duty of digging out a large enough ‘scrape’ for himself, and making a roof for it with wire and turf. The excavated earth, which would be clearly visible to Argentinian pilots, then had to be removed from sight. Fortunately, a shallow stream ran down beyond the next ridge, and the soil could simply be spread along its banks.

As the first hint of dawn began to appear in the eastern sky all four of them were entrenched under their own camouflage roof, too tired to worry about the damp seeping out through the earthen floor of the scrapes. Brookes’s last thought was ‘so far, so good’, while Hedge was thinking about the explosive properties of methane and Stanley was remembering his first time with Sharon.

Mozza was using the patrol’s telescope through a hole in his netting to watch the stars fade away in the east, and wondering how the hell he was going to stay awake for his two-hour watch.

Bryan Weighell, or ‘Wheelie’ as he had been known in younger days, briskly made his way through the various checkpoints separating the car park from his destination in the bowels of Whitehall. It was a sharp spring Sunday, sunny but far from warm, and he was still wondering what the hell he was needed for. It could not be anything to do with the teams inserted into East and West Falkland the previous night; all that was being handled through the usual channels. Starting in the ladies’ lavatory aboard Resource, he reminded himself with a grin. He could still imagine Mike Phillips’s face when the Navy told him that this was the SAS’s floating HQ for the duration.

He wished he was there in person. They also serve who sit around and drink Guinness, he told himself. But it did not feel the same, not at a time like this.

In Conference Room B only one empty seat remained. The Prime Minister, whom rumour claimed had been known to punish unpunctuality with exile to one of the caring ministries, actually greeted him with a smile. What does she want, Weighell wondered.

‘Lieutenant-Colonel Weighell, Officer Commanding 22 SAS Regiment,’ she introduced him.

He acknowledged the various nods and half-smiles.

‘Perhaps I should go round the table,’ the PM decided. ‘Cecil Matheson,’ she began, smiling at the tall, patrician-looking individual on her left, ‘Deputy Head of the Foreign Office and Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee.’ On his left was Reginald Copley, a thin, grey-haired man who was apparently head of the Foreign Office’s Latin American Desk. Last in line was the moustached Air Marshal Sir George Railton, Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff.

At the end of the table an arrogant-looking young man in a plain dark suit represented MI6. His name, hard though Weighell found it to credit, was Anthony Sharp. On the PM’s right, between her and Weighell, sat Brigadier Mark Harringham, representing Fleet HQ at Northwood, and the imposing bulk of Dennis Eckersley, the Number 2 at the Ministry of Defence.

Seven men and one woman, Weighell thought. Seven professionals and one politician. Seven smelling of Old Spice and one of gardenia. He remembered a particularly disgusting joke about Snow White and her favourite Seven-Up. He told himself to snap out of it.

‘We have a problem,’ the PM began. ‘Cecil?’

Matheson recounted the gist of his telephone conversation with the American State Department the previous evening, and though he made no overt criticism of the American decision to deny the Task Force AWACS assistance, he left little doubt in the minds of his audience what he thought of it.

The Prime Minister’s stony face suggested to Weighell that she shared Matheson’s irritation but had had enough time to suppress her natural instinct to express it. Maybe there was an inflatable model of Reagan hidden away somewhere in Number 10, on which she launched occasional assaults with her handbag.

‘Do you have comments, Brigadier?’ she asked Harringham.

‘It’s not good news,’ he said mildly. ‘I don’t want to sound alarmist, but the AWACS were our last chance of going into action with even half-decent air protection…’

‘Perhaps you could spell out the details, Brigadier,’ the PM suggested. ‘I doubt everyone here is fully aware of them.’

‘Certainly. But there’s nothing complex involved. Our ships in the South Atlantic are simply under-protected, particularly against the Super Etendards and their Exocet missiles. The Sea Dart missile systems on the Type 42 destroyers have no defensive efficacy against low-level attack. The Sea Wolf system, which does, is only mounted on the two Type 22 frigates. For air defence we have only the Sea Harriers, and there are pitifully few of them. In fact, there are only thirty-two Harrier airframes in existence. Once they’re gone…’

‘What about radar?’ the MI6 man asked.

‘Shipborne radar is notoriously ineffective in heavy seas,’ Harringham said, ‘and we have no airborne radar. This is not,’ he added with an air of understatement, ‘the war we were designed to fight. But…’

‘Thank you, Brigadier,’ the PM interjected. ‘Very well, gentlemen. This is the problem we are here to discuss. There appears no way in which the Task Force can be certain of protecting itself, and I need hardly spell out the consequences if, say, one of the carriers were to be put out of action. In such an instance I don’t think we could countenance the recapture of the islands. We would have no choice but to return with our tails between our legs. Another Suez, gentlemen. Britain would be a laughing-stock.’ She glared at the company, as if daring them to imagine such an outcome.

‘But,’ she continued, ‘there are other options. Mr Sharp, would you like to give us an update on the intelligence situation within Argentina?’

Sharp almost preened himself, Weighell thought sourly. He had never had much time for intelligence types. As one of his friends had memorably put it: these were the boys at public school who tried to wank in silence.

‘We now have an agent in place,’ Sharp was saying. ‘And we’re expecting some useful information about the location of particular units, and about the sort of stuff the Argies are airlifting into Port Stanley.’ He surveyed the table in triumph.

The PM ignored him. ‘Is that it?’ she asked Matheson. ‘We have one man in Argentina?’

Our man in Argentina, Weighell thought irreverently, and, as it turned out, wrongly.

‘It’s a woman,’ Matheson said coldly. ‘I need hardly remind everyone here,’ he went on, ‘that the budget for what is called “humint” – human intelligence – has been cut to the bone in recent years, with most of the available resources going to the procurement of “sigint” – signals intelligence, of course – either from GCHQ or the Americans. It’s an unfortunate fact of life, but like the Navy’ – he glanced across at Harringham – ‘the Intelligence Services have been organized with Europe in mind, not South America.’

The PM looked less than mollified. Weighell found himself idly wondering who would come out of this particular imbroglio with more egg on their faces: the Foreign Office, the Navy or the Intelligence Services.

‘As a matter of interest,’ the Latin American Desk man was asking, ‘where is this agent “in place”?’

Sharp hesitated, caught the look on the PM’s face, and blurted out: ‘Rio Gallegos – it’s one of the two airbases closest to the Falklands…’

‘But unfortunately not, as we had thought, the one with the Super Etendards,’ Matheson admitted. ‘It seems they are based at Rio Grande on Tierra del Fuego.’ He reached into his briefcase, extracted a clear plastic folder full of photocopies of a map, and passed them round.

Weighell examined it with interest. He had spent so much time poring over maps of the Falklands that the mainland 400 miles to the west had more or less escaped his attention.

‘Brigadier,’ the PM asked, ‘I take it that the destruction of these airfields and the planes based there would drastically reduce the vulnerability of the Task Force?’

‘Of course.’

‘Does the Air Force have the capacity, Air Marshal?’

‘I would like to say yes, Prime Minister, but frankly I doubt it.’ He looked round the table. ‘Most of you probably haven’t heard the news, but early this morning one plane dropped a stick of bombs on the runway at Port Stanley…’

There were murmurs of appreciation all round the table.

‘It was an epic flight,’ Railton conceded, ‘and the psychological impact on the occupying force may have been worth something, but I’m afraid the military efficacy of the operation was rather more doubtful. Only one bomb actually hit the runway, and bear in mind that Port Stanley, unlike the Argentine bases, is known territory. Even more to the point, the Vulcan needed seventeen in-flight refuellings en route. I doubt if we could send more than one plane at a time against these two mainland bases. They’d be sitting ducks.’

‘Thank you, Air Marshal,’ the PM said coolly. On her left, Weighell noticed, Matheson was having a hard job concealing his relief. But the Foreign Office man had been conned, Weighell decided: the PM could not have been expecting anything else from Railton. Where was all this leading?

‘One question,’ the Latin American Desk man said. ‘Since the Super Etendards and Exocets pose the main threat, could we not just move our agent in Rio Gallegos to Rio Grande and set up some sort of communication link between her and the fleet?’

It was an intelligent question, Weighell thought.

‘It might be possible,’ Sharp agreed, ‘but it would certainly place the agent at risk. She has a good cover where she is, and promises to provide invaluable intelligence on the airlift. Agents are always more vulnerable when moved, and there would be the extra risk involved in getting the radio to her.’

Weighell suddenly knew where it was all leading, and why he was there.

As if on cue, the PM turned her beady gaze in his direction. ‘Lieutenant-Colonel Weighell, how would the SAS like to have a crack at these airfields?’

Weighell noticed Matheson’s eyes roll in horror, and resisted the temptation to let her steamroller right over him. ‘If it’s a feasible option,’ he said, ‘then of course we’d like nothing better.’

‘Does it look like one?’ she persisted.

Weighell imagined he was being given a major insight into how cabinet government worked in the modern age. ‘I’m sorry, Prime Minister,’ he forced himself to say, ‘but I’d need a lot more data than I have now, not to mention a clearer idea of the task required. Are we talking about observation or military action here?’

‘Either or both,’ she said decisively.

‘Prime Minister…’ Matheson interjected.

‘Hold on a moment, Cecil,’ she said, patting him on the arm in as patronizing a manner as Weighell could remember witnessing, ‘let’s find out what we’re capable of before you start explaining why we shouldn’t risk it.’ She turned a smile on Weighell.

You could rob a bank with a smile like that, Weighell thought. ‘We’re talking about two totally different missions,’ he said. ‘An attack on either airfield would require up to a squadron of men – around sixty that is – inserted from the air at night. Probably a high-altitude low-opening parachute drop. From a C-130.’ He paused, gathering his thoughts. ‘That in itself would not present any great problems, unless of course they were dropped into the middle of an Argentinian military base we knew nothing about. But there are always unknown hazards – the mechanics of insertion are simple enough.’ As the bishop said to the actress, he thought to himself.

‘The obvious problem,’ he continued, ‘would come with the extraction. Particularly if we’re planning to hit two bases simultaneously. I don’t see any way of getting two squadrons out, by air or sea. You’d need either every submarine in the fleet or, at that sort of range, every helicopter. And I presume the thought of 120 SAS men crashing across the border into Chile is hardly desirable, even assuming they could get to it…’

‘God forbid,’ Matheson muttered.

‘What if the C-130 drops the troops and they secure the airfields?’ the PM asked. ‘Surely then the planes could land and take the troops off?’

‘It’s theoretically possible,’ replied Weighell. He had to admit a part of him was thrilled by the idea. The rest of him urged caution, however. ‘For such an operation to be anything more than a suicide mission,’ he went on, ‘we’d have to know a hell of a lot more about the airbases in question.’

‘Prime Minister,’ Matheson interjected again, and this time she let him have his say. ‘Such action…’ he began, before pausing, apparently lost for words.

‘Such action would have Washington in uproar,’ she said. ‘I know. Obviously we have no desire to upset the United States. Nor would it serve us well to do so, at least in the long run. But we have to balance such concerns against the well-being of the Task Force. Whether we like it or not, Britain’s standing in the world is in their hands, gentlemen. I am not prepared to risk defeat merely for the sake of not offending a few American politicians. So please, Lieutenant-Colonel, I would like some contingency planning done. Just in case.’

‘Very well, Ma’am.’

‘Now, for the second possibility you mentioned – observation.’ The basilisk stare transfixed him one more.

Here at least, Weighell felt on much safer ground. What the four-man patrols were already doing on East and West Falkland could just as easily be done on the mainland. Or almost. ‘We could put two four-man teams down close to the two airbases,’ he said, ‘probably by Sea King helicopter, though I’d have to check the range-to-weight ratios. I would guess it would have to be a one-way trip. The terrain hardly lends itself to staying unseen, but that’s just as true of the Falklands, and we already have patrols ashore on both islands.’

‘If the trip in was one-way,’ Matheson observed, ‘you still have the problem of how to get the men out again.’

‘True,’ Weighell conceded. ‘But eight men is a very different proposition to 120. One or two submarines could probably take them off. At worst, as few men as that could seek asylum in Chile without causing a major row.’

‘My objections remain the same,’ Matheson said. ‘Of course I agree with you, Prime Minister, that we may have to take diplomatic risks for the sake of a military victory. Or at least to avoid a military humiliation. But I cannot see that the military situation at present is such as to justify this sort of operation.’

‘Brigadier?’ the PM asked Harringham.

‘I cannot comment on the diplomatic issue, Prime Minister. Any improvement in the fleet’s AEW capability would obviously be beneficial, but I am yet to be convinced that the enemy air force poses much more than a theoretical threat to the Task Force.’

‘Dennis?’ she asked.

‘I would have to agree with the Brigadier,’ Eckersley said. It was the first time Weighell could remember him speaking.

‘Very well,’ the PM said. ‘I cannot say I feel entirely happy about it, but for the moment we shall shelve the idea of mounting mainland operations.’ She paused. ‘However,’ she continued, turning to Weighell, ‘I want detailed contingency plans prepared for those operations we have discussed. And I expect’ – this time Harringham was her target – ‘the SAS to receive the full cooperation of the fleet in this matter. If and when something happens to tip the balance – if the threat to the Task Force does become more than theoretical – then I shall expect both a different consensus of opinion and the possibility of immediate action.’ She surveyed those around the table – making sure she remembered who had been present, Weighell decided – flashed one wide smile at them all, rose from her chair and swept out through the door.

Around the table there were several heartfelt sighs of relief. Weighell found himself wondering whether sending the Junta a video of the meeting might not encourage an early surrender.

That same Sunday Isabel Fuentes drove out of Rio Gallegos in the black Renault 5 and headed south across the almost undulating steppe towards the Chilean border some 40 miles away. There was almost no traffic on the road: in the first 10 miles she encountered two trucks, one bus and about a dozen cars.

It was one of those late autumn days she remembered from childhood, clear but cold enough to make you think of the winter to come. On the seat beside her she had a vacuum flask full of coffee and a couple of spicy empanadas wrapped in a paper bag. Under the seat, sealed in a plastic bag, were the facts she had so far managed to accumulate concerning the military situation at the Rio Gallegos airbase. There were not many of them, but she had had only two meetings with her sad-eyed pilot, and all he had wanted to talk about was the girlfriend he had left behind in the north.

Which she supposed was both good news and bad news. She had been prepared to sleep with him, at least on that first evening with the alcohol running through her blood, but she had also known that to do so would have marked a new low, a new stage in what felt almost like a self-imposed programme of dehumanization. On the negative side, her new status as a friend and confidante, though easier to live with, did not promise quite the same degree of mutual intimacy or trust. She had the feeling she could get him into bed with her, but was far from sure that her state of mind would survive such a level of pretence.

She was approaching the bridge she had chosen for the dead-letter drop. It was one of about ten such bridges in a three-mile stretch two-thirds of the way to the border. All of them were simple girder affairs, slung across dried-up streams. Presumably when the snow melted in the distant Andes they sent a swift current down to the Magellan Straits a few miles to the south.

The bridge Isabel had chosen had nothing to recommend it but the faded letters ERP, which someone had painted in fiery red a decade before.

Just beyond the bridge, she stopped the car, pulling over onto the dry gravel of the steppe, reached over for her vacuum flask and at the same time conveyed the plastic bag from its place under the seat to its new hiding place, stuck into her belt beneath the thick sweater.

She got out of the car, poured herself a cup of coffee and surveyed the road. It was empty for as far as she could see, which was at least a mile in each direction. She clambered down into the streambed, lifted out the two rocks she had previously chosen, and wedged the bag into the space. Then she replaced them, covering one corner of plastic with gravel.

The bag would not be found by anyone who was not looking for it. As a last safeguard she took the small plastic bottle out of her pocket and emptied its contents onto the dry earth beneath the bridge. After all, where else would a woman stop to urinate on such a road?

‘You’re really getting into the spirit of things,’ she told herself wryly.

After sleeping in shifts through the daylight hours, Brookes’s patrol set out once more, this time in a cross between drizzle and fog, to complete their journey. They were only a few miles from the coast of Falkland Sound now, and the signs of civilization, if sheep farming qualified as such, were thicker on the ground.

So too was evidence of the occupation. On one frequently travelled piece of ground – ‘track’ seemed too grand a word, ‘road’ a ludicrous exaggeration – signs of wheeled traffic had recently been overlaid by the marks of a tracked vehicle, presumably military. Halting for a moment’s rest at a gate in a wire fence, Mozza bent down to check his bootlaces and discovered a discarded cigarette end of decidedly alien appearance.

‘At least it proves we’re on the right island,’ Hedge whispered above the wind. ‘You’re a regular little Sherlock Holmes, you are.’

It also proved that the Argentinians were in the habit of passing in this direction, which increased the patrol’s caution and slowed their progress still further. But they found no other sign of the enemy before reaching their destination on a hill a mile and a half north of Port Howard. They thought they could detect the faintest of lights where the settlement should be, but, with the rain not so much falling as hanging like a sheet of mist, it was impossible to be certain.

There was still about three hours until dawn, and Brookes allowed himself the luxury of a fifteen-minute exploration of the immediate area. In such conditions, he decided, it was almost impossible to pick out the best site for their hide with any certainty, and he was reluctant to undertake major earthworks twice. It was not a matter of the effort involved, but the virtual doubling of the chances that their interference with nature’s handiwork would be spotted from the air. He told the men as much. ‘We’ll have to spend another day in scrapes,’ he said. ‘Behind this ridge line, I think,’ he added, looking upwards. ‘As far above the water-table as we can manage without unduly advertising our presence.’