Mission to Argentina

DAVID MONNERY

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by 22 Books/Bloomsbury Publishing plc 1994

Copyright © Bloomsbury Publishing plc 1994

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

Cover Photographs © IWM/Getty Images (main image); STF/Staff/Getty Images (planes); Shutterstock.com (textures)

David Monnery asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008155094

Ebook Edition © December 2015 ISBN: 978008155100

Version: 2015-11-02

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Epilogue

OTHER TITLES IN THE SAS OPERATION SERIES

About the Publisher

1

There had not been a silence so complete in the public bar of the Slug & Sporran since Rangers won an ‘Old Firm’ match at Parkhead in injury time. Every head in the bar was turned towards the TV, and every right arm seemed suspended between mat and mouth with its cargo of beer. On the screen the aircraft carrier Invincible was moving slowly out towards the Portsmouth harbour entrance, past quaysides lined with cheering, weeping, laughing, flag-waving crowds. The British were not just going to war; they were going in style.

James Keir Docherty could hardly believe any of it. He could not believe such rapt attention from a bar more used to toasting the IRA than the English overlord; he could not believe the Government was actually standing up to the Argentinian generals; and he could not believe his unit, B Squadron, 22 SAS Regiment, had merely been placed on permanent standby. Those lucky bastards from D Squadron were already on their way to Ascension Island, with G Squadron next in the queue.

At this moment in his life Docherty was even more disposed to military adventure than usual. A couple of miles away to the south, in one of the developments built on the grave of the Gorbals, his father was slowly dying of emphysema. And it looked like the old bastard was intent on taking with him any last chance of a meeting of minds between father and son.

Docherty was not needed at the bedside, that was for sure. His mother, his two sisters, half the block, probably half the city’s trade-union officials, were all already there, drinking tea, swapping yarns, reliving the glorious defeats of the past. His father would be a candidate for best-loved man in the city, Docherty thought sourly. He would leave this earth on a river of good will, arrive at the heavenly gates with enough testimonials from the rank and file to make even St Peter feel inadequate.

He took the penultimate swig from his pint. The ships were still sailing out of the harbour, the crowds still waving. Every now and then the cameramen would find a particularly sexy-looking woman to zoom in on. Several seemed to be waving their knickers round their heads. Sex and death, Docherty thought.

He sighed, remembering those weeks on the beach at Zipolite, both bowed down by grief and lifted up by…by just sun and sea really, by the wonder of the ordinary. The best decision he had ever made, buying that air ticket; one of the few he had not regretted. ‘My life’s a fucking mess,’ he murmured into his glass. A dead wife, a dying father, and he could not come to terms with either of them. Why the fuck hadn’t they called up B Squadron?

Should he have another drink? No – getting pissed in the afternoon was never a good idea. Getting pissed alone was never a good idea. He drained the glass and got to his feet.

Brennan Street was wreathed in sunshine. A good-looking girl walking down the opposite pavement – long legs in black tights and big silver earrings dancing in dark red hair – reminded him how long it had been since he had had a woman. It was almost two years since his self-appointed mission to screw every whore in Glasgow had fizzled out in the near-bankruptcy of both pocket and soul.

It would be a while longer before he broke his fast, Docherty decided. He grinned to himself. He would go and see Liam McCall instead. After all, what else was religion but a substitute for sex?

He walked down Brennan Street, cut across Sauchiehall Street, and worked his way through the back streets to the Clyde. Every time he came back to Glasgow he was surprised by the speed with which it seemed to be changing, and mostly for the better. Sure, the shipyards were almost a memory, but new businesses seemed to be springing up everywhere, along with new eating places and theatres and galleries and leisure centres. There seemed to be so much more for young people to do than there had been when he was a boy.

But it was not all good news. The Gorbals of his youth – ‘a jungle with a heart of gold’ as one wit had named it – had simply been wiped away, and replaced by a desert. One without even the pretence of a heart of gold.

And unemployment was still going up and up, despite all the new businesses. If he had taken his father’s advice when he was sixteen he would be on the scrap heap by now, a thirty-one-year-old with skills no one wanted any more. But would his father ever admit that? Not till fucking doomsday, he wouldn’t. Joining the Merchant Navy had been irresponsible, joining the Army something close to treason, getting into the SAS about as kosher as screwing Margaret Thatcher and enjoying it.

Why did he care what his father thought? Why was he in Glasgow when he could be enjoying himself at any one of a hundred other places in Britain? He knew he had made good decisions. His life was a fucking mess despite them, not because of them.

He crossed the river. At least he was in good physical shape, no matter what the state of his psyche might be. A couple of drunks were happily throwing up on the bank below. Two leather-jacketed teenagers with outrageously greased quiffs were watching them from the bridge and laughing. They had empty Chinese food cartons all around them, probably bought with the spoils of a mugging. A walk across Glasgow in the early hours of Sunday morning might be a good SAS training exercise, Docherty thought. Requiring stamina, unarmed combat skills and eyes in the back of your head. Not to mention a sense of humour.

Another couple of miles brought him to his friend’s parish church, which stood out among its high-rise surroundings rather like the Aztec pyramid Docherty had seen half-excavated on the edge of Mexico City’s central square. Father McCall, whom even the schoolkids simply called ‘Liam’, was standing on the pavement outside, apparently lost in thought. He looked older, Docherty thought. He was nearly sixty now, and his had not exactly been a life of ease.

‘Hello, Liam,’ he said.

The frocked figure turned round. ‘Jamie!’ he exclaimed. The eyes still had their sparkle. ‘How long have you been back? I thought you’d be gone, you know, on duty or whatever you call it.’

‘Duty will do. But no. No such luck. There aren’t enough ships to transport all the men who want to go. I’m on twenty-four-hour standby, but…’ He shrugged and then grinned. ‘It’s good to see you, Liam. How are you? How are things here?’

‘Much the same. Much the same.’ The priest stared out across the city towards the distant Campsie Fells, then suddenly laughed. ‘You know, I was thinking just now – I think I’m beginning to turn into a Buddhist. So much of what we see as change is mere chaff, completely superficial. And deep down, things don’t seem to change at all. Of course,’ he added with a quick smile, ‘as a Catholic I believe in the possibility of redemption.’

Docherty smiled back at him. He had known the priest since he was about five years old. Liam would have been in his early thirties then, and the two of them had begun a conversation which, though sometimes interrupted for years on end, had continued ever since – and seemed likely to do so until one of them died.

‘Do you have time for a walk round the park?’ Docherty asked.

Liam looked at his watch. ‘I have a meeting in an hour or so…so, yes. And you didn’t answer my question. How long have you been here?’

‘I didn’t answer it because I felt guilty. I’ve been here almost a week. My father’s dying and…well, I always seem to end up dumping all my problems on you, and, you know, every once in a while I get this crazy idea of trying to sort them out for myself.’

Liam grunted. ‘Crazy is about right. Are you trying to put me out of business? How long would the Church last if people started sorting out their own problems?’

Docherty grinned. ‘OK, I get the message. You…’ He broke off as a football came towards them, skidding across the damp grass. The priest trapped the ball in one motion, and sent it back, hard and accurately, with a graceful swing of the right leg. ‘Nice one,’ Docherty said. Maybe his friend was not getting old just yet.

‘You know, it’s a frightening thought,’ Liam said, ‘but I’m afraid I shall still be trying to kick pebbles into imaginary goals when I can barely walk.’

‘Makes you wonder what sort of God would restrict your best footballing years to such an early part of life,’ Docherty observed.

‘Yes, it does,’ the priest agreed. ‘I’m sorry about your father,’ he went on, as if the subject had not changed. ‘Of course, I knew he was seriously ill…Is there no hope?’

‘None. It’s just a matter of time.’

‘That’s true for all of us.’

‘It’s a matter of weeks, then. Maybe even days.’

‘Hmmm. It must be very painful for you.’

‘Not as painful as it is for him.’

Liam gave him a reproachful glance. ‘You know what I mean.’

‘Aye. I’m sorry. And yes, it is painful. He’s dying and I don’t know how to deal with it. I don’t know how to deal with him. I never have.’

‘I know. But I have to say, and I’ve said it to you often enough in the past: I think he must carry more of the blame for this than you…’

Docherty scratched his ear and smiled ruefully. ‘Maybe. Maybe. But…’

‘Everybody loves him. Campbell Docherty, the man who’d do anything for anyone, who worked a twenty-hour day for the union, who’d give his last biscuit to a stray dog. One of our secular saints. He loves everybody and everybody loves him.’

‘Except me.’

‘There was no room for you, no time. Or maybe he just couldn’t cope with another male in the family circle. It’s common enough, Jamie. Glasgow’s full of boys sleeping rough because their fathers can’t cope with living with a younger version of themselves.’

‘I know. I agree. But what do I do? It’s nuts that I let myself get so wound up by this, I know it is…’

‘I don’t think so, Jamie. Fathers and sons have been trying to work each other out since the beginning of time. It’s just something they do…’

Docherty shook his head. ‘You know, every time I come back here I feel like I’m returning to the scene of the crime.’

‘There’s no crime. Only family.’

Docherty could not help laughing. ‘Nice one, Liam.’

‘Do you talk to him like you talk to me?’ the priest asked.

‘I try to. He even agrees with me, but nothing changes.’

‘Maybe this time.’

‘Maybe. There won’t be many others.’

They walked in silence for a while. The dusk was settling over the park, reminding Docherty of all those evenings playing football as a kid, with the ball getting harder and harder to see in the gloom. ‘Sometimes, these days, I feel like an old man,’ he said. ‘Not in body, but in soul.’

‘Think yourself lucky it’s only your soul, then,’ Liam observed. ‘It only needs one dark cloud coming in from the West, and every joint in me starts aching.’

‘I’m serious,’ Docherty insisted.

‘So am I. But I know what you mean. You live too much in the past, Jamie…’

‘I know. I can’t seem to shake it, though. You know’ – he stopped underneath a budding tree – ‘there are two scenes which often come into my head when I’m not thinking – like they’re always there, but most of the time they’re overlaid by something more immediate. One is our parlour when I was a small kid. I must have been about six, because Rosie is still crawling around and Sylvia is helping Mum with the cooking, and Dad’s sitting there at the table with a pile of work talking to one of the shop stewards, and I’m doing a jigsaw of the Coronation Scot. Remember, that blue streamliner? Nothing ever happens in this scene; it’s just the way things are. It feels really peaceful. There’s a kind of contentment which oozes out of it.’

‘I remember that room,’ the priest replied.

‘The other scene is a style on a path up near Morar, for Christ’s sake. I’m just reaching up to help Chrissie down, and she looks down at me with such a look of love I can hardly keep the tears in. Just that one moment. It’s almost like a photograph, except for the changing expression on her face. It was only a couple of weeks later that she was killed.’

Liam said nothing – just put his hand on Docherty’s arm.

‘It’s weird,’ Docherty went on. ‘I’ve seen some terrible things as a soldier. Oman was bad enough, but believe me, you won’t find a crueller place than Belfast. I got used to it, I suppose. You have to if you’re going to function. But sometimes I don’t think I’ll ever get over that room or that woman.’ He turned to face the priest, smiling wryly. ‘I couldn’t tell this sort of thing to anyone but you,’ he said.

‘Most people couldn’t tell it to anyone at all,’ Liam said. ‘You underestimate yourself. You always have. But I don’t think you should put these two scenes of yours together. I think you will get over Chrissie, even if it takes another ten years. But that room of yours – it sounds almost too good to be true, you know what I mean? Like a picture of the world the way we want it to be, everyone in their proper place, living in perfect harmony…’

‘Yeah. And what’s even crazier: I know it wasn’t really like that most of the time.’

‘That doesn’t matter. It can still be a good picture for someone to hold in their head. Particularly a soldier.’

‘How did you get to be so wise?’ Docherty asked him with a smile.

‘Constant practice. And I still feel more ignorant every day.’

‘Don’t the Buddhists think that’s a sign of wisdom?’

‘Yes, but I have to beware the sin of pride where my ignorance is concerned.’

Docherty grinned. ‘I think you’re probably the most ignorant man I’ve ever met,’ he said. ‘And your time is up.’

The priest looked at his watch. ‘So it is. I…’

‘I’ll drop by again tomorrow or the next day,’ Docherty said. ‘Maybe we can get to a game while I’m up here.’

They embraced in the gloom, and then Liam hurried back across the park. Docherty watched him go, thinking he detected a slowing of the priest’s stride as he passed the kids playing football. But this time no ball came his way.

Docherty turned and began walking slowly in the direction of his parents’ flat, thinking about the conversation he had just had, wondering how he could turn it into words for his father when the time came. Half the street lights seemed to be out in Bruce Street, and the blocks of flats had the air of prison buildings looming out of the rapidly darkening sky. Groups of youths seemed to cling to street corners, but there were no threatening movements, not even a verbal challenge. Either his walk was too purposeful to mistake, or here, on his home turf, they recognized Campbell Docherty’s boy, ‘the SAS man’.

His sister’s face at the door told him more than he wanted to know. ‘Where have you been?’ she said through the tears. ‘Dad died this afternoon.’

She was frightened for the first few minutes. The whole situation – sitting beside him in the back seat, her hands clasped together in her lap, watching the traffic over the driver’s shoulder – seemed so reminiscent of those few hours that had devastated her life seven years before.

But this was London, not Buenos Aires, and the policeman beside her – if that was what he was – had treated her with what she had come to know as the British version of nominal respect. He had not leered at her in the knowledge that she was the next piece of meat on his slab.

That day it had been raining, great sheets of rain and puddles big as lakes on the Calle San Martín. And Francisco had been with her. For the very last time. She could see his defiant smile as they dragged him out of the car.

Stop it, she told herself. It serves no purpose. Live in the present.

She brought the crowded pavements back into focus. They were in Regent Street, going south. It was not long after three o’clock on a sunny spring afternoon. There was nothing to worry about. Her arrest – or, as they put it, ‘request for an interview’ – was doubtless the result of some bureaucratic over-reaction to the Junta’s occupation of the Malvinas the previous Friday. Probably every Argentinian citizen in England was being offered an interview he or she could not refuse.

A vague memory of a film about the internment of Japanese living in America in 1941 flickered across her mind. Were all her fellow compatriots about to be locked up? It did not seem likely: the English were always complaining that their prisons were too full already.

Today was the day their fleet was supposed to sail. A faint smile crossed her face, partly at the ridiculousness of such a thing in 1982, partly because she knew how appalled the Junta would be at the prospect of any real opposition. The idiots must have thought the English would just shout and scream and do nothing, or they would never have dared to take the islands. Or they had not bothered to think at all, which seemed even more likely.

It was all a little hard to believe. The shoppers, the late-lunching office workers, the tourists gathered round Eros – it looked much the same as any other day.

‘We’re almost there,’ the man beside her said, as much to himself as to her. The car pulled through Admiralty Arch, took a left turn into Horse Guards Road, and eventually drew to a halt in one of the small streets between Victoria Street and Birdcage Walk. Her escort held the car door for her, and wordlessly ushered her up a short flight of steps and into a Victorian house. ‘Straight on through,’ he murmured. A corridor led through to a surprisingly large yard, across the far side of which were ranged a line of two-storey Portakabins.

‘So this is where M hangs out,’ she murmured to herself in Spanish.

Inside it was all gleaming white paintwork and ferns from Marks & Spencer. A secretary who looked nothing like Miss Moneypenny gestured her into a seat. She obliged, wondering why it was the English ever bothered to speak at all. It was one of the things she had most missed, right from the beginning: the constant rattle of conversation, the noise of life. Michael had put it all down to climate – lots of sunshine led to a street-café culture, which encouraged the art of conversation. Drizzle, on the other hand, was a friend of silence.

She preferred to think the English were just repressed.

A door slammed somewhere, and she saw a young man walking away across the yard. He looked familiar – a fellow exile, she guessed. In one door and out another, just in case the Argies had the temerity to talk to each other. She felt anger rising in her throat.

‘Isabel Fuentes?’ a male voice asked from the doorway leading into the next office.

‘Sí?’ she said coldly.

‘This way, please.’

She walked through and took another offered seat, across the desk from the Englishman. He was not much older than her – early thirties, she guessed – with fair hair just beginning to thin around the temples, tired blue eyes and a rather fine jawline. He looked like he had been working for days.

The file in front of him had her name on it.

He opened it, examined the photograph and then her. Her black hair, cropped militantly short in the picture, was now past her shoulder, but she imagined the frown on her face was pretty much the same. ‘It is me,’ she said helpfully.

He actually smiled. ‘Thank you for coming,’ he said.

‘I was not conscious of any choice in the matter.’

He scratched his head. ‘It’s a grey area,’ he admitted, ‘but…’ He let the thought process die. ‘I would like to just check some of the details we have here…’ He looked up for acquiescence.

She nodded.

‘You came to the UK in July 1975, and were granted political asylum in September of the same year…that was quick,’ he interrupted himself, glancing up at her again.

‘It didn’t seem so,’ she said, though she knew her father’s money had somehow smoothed the path for her. She had friends and acquaintances who were still, seven years later, living in fear of being sent back to the torturers.

He grunted and moved on. ‘Since your arrival you have completed a further degree at the London School of Economics and had a succession of jobs, all of which you have left voluntarily.’ He glanced up at her, as if in wonderment at someone who could happily throw jobs away in such difficult times. ‘I presume you have a private source of income from your parents?’

‘Not any more.’ Her father had died four years ago, and her mother had cut all contact since marrying some high-ranking naval bureaucrat. ‘I live within my means,’ she said curtly.

He shrugged. ‘Currently you have two part-time jobs, one with a travel agency specializing in Latin-American destinations, the other in an Italian restaurant in Islington.’

‘Yes.’

‘Before you left Argentina you were an active member of the ERP – the Popular Revolutionary Army, correct? – from October 1973 until the time of your departure from Argentina. You admitted being involved in two kidnappings and one bank robbery.’

‘“Admitted” sounds like a confession of guilt. I did not feel guilty.’

‘Of course…’ he said patiently.

‘It is a grey area, perhaps,’ she said.

He smiled again. ‘You are not on trial here,’ he said. ‘Now, am I correct in thinking that the ERP was a group with internationalist leanings, unlike those who regarded themselves as nationalist Peronistas?’

‘You have done your homework well,’ she said, wondering what all this could be leading to. ‘I suppose it would do no good to ask who I am talking to?’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘my name is Baldwin, Phillip Baldwin.’

‘And you work for?’

‘Oh, the Foreign Office, of course.’

‘And what is this all about? Is the Foreign Office worried that the exile community is going to undertake a campaign of sabotage against the war effort?’

This time he did not smile. ‘How do you view your government’s invasion of the Falkland Islands, Ms Fuentes?’

‘As just one more attempt to divert the attention of my country’s people from their rulers’ cruelty and incompetence.’

‘Ah,’ he said, twiddling his pen and looking out of the window. ‘In that case, would you consider returning to your country to work for us?’

She was momentarily stunned. ‘You mean as a…as a spy?’

‘Yes, I suppose you could call it that.’

She half-laughed: the idea seemed so ludicrous.

Balwin seemed to take slight offence. ‘Is it such a surprising request? You opposed that government once by force of arms. And it must have crossed your mind that defeat in this matter would probably finish the military as a political force for years.’

That at least was probably true. As was the reverse: victory would keep the beasts in power for the rest of the century. She looked across the desk at the Englishman, still idly twirling his pen. He was just going through the motions, she realized. He did not expect any Argentinian exile to agree to such a proposal, but someone somewhere in the bureaucratic labyrinth had decreed that they all had to be asked. As far as he was concerned, she would soon be walking away across the yard and another of her compatriots would be sitting in the chair answering the same questions.

‘To spy on what?’ she asked.

‘That would depend,’ Baldwin said slowly, stirring slightly in his chair. ‘For the moment we are more interested in establishing a willingness in principle.’

‘Are you offering anything in return for my services?’ she asked.

His eyes narrowed. ‘I think it would be hard to establish a real basis of mutual trust if remuneration was involved,’ he said piously.

‘Success would be its own reward,’ she suggested sweetly.

‘Something like that,’ he agreed, with the faintest of grins.

‘And if I wanted something other than money, like, for example, permanent residency visas for several friends?’

‘That could probably be arranged.’

‘I will consider it,’ she said. The idea still seemed ludicrous, but…

Looking pleasantly surprised, Baldwin wrote down a number on his notepad, tore the sheet off and handed it to her. ‘You can reach me on this number,’ he said. ‘Day or night.’

Isabel walked back to Piccadilly, phoned the travel agency with the news that she would not be back that day, and took a 19 bus to Highbury Corner. It was almost five o’clock. Her flatmate would probably not yet be home, but Isabel felt reluctant to risk having her thoughts interrupted by more instalments of the endless romantic soap opera which Rowan passed off as a life. She bought a cup of tea at the outdoor café in Highbury Fields and carried it across to one of the seats in the area barred to dogs.

For a while she just sat there and watched the world go by. Or rather, watched England go by. Since the meeting in Baldwin’s office she had felt like she was living in an alien country. Which, of course, she was. It was just that most of the time the feeling was buried somewhere at the back of her mind.

‘You must miss the heat,’ people used to say to her when she first arrived. She had tried to explain that her birthplace in the far south of Argentina was just as cold and a lot windier than most of Scotland, let alone England, but nobody really listened. South America was jungle and gauchos and Pele and the carnival in Rio. It had to be hot.

She conjured up a picture of ice floes in the Beagle Channel, the wind like a knife, a beach full of penguins, the aurora australis shimmering in the southern sky. That was her home.

It was the one line, she realized, which had got to her. ‘Would you consider returning to your country?’ That simple question had somehow brought it all back. She had not been really unhappy in the prison of exile, not since the year or more of grieving for Francisco and of learning to live with what they had done to her. But she had not really been happy either, just endlessly marking time. The line from that Bob Dylan album of Michael’s said it better than she ever could: ‘And I’ve never gotten used to it, I’ve just learned to turn it off.’

That was her life – turned off. Friends, a lover, but no real comradeship, no real love. No purpose.

But could she really work for the English?

‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend,’ she said softly to herself. ‘Sometimes,’ she added. Surely the Junta would lose this war anyway, without her putting her own life at risk?

‘If no one else will fight, then all the more reason for us to.’ She could hear Francisco saying it, in the candlelit lodgings in Córdoba. They had just made love, and as usual he had been lying on his back, blowing smoke rings at the ceiling, surveying the world situation.

They had tortured and killed him, and maybe this was fate’s way of giving her the chance to even the score. Maybe the wretched Malvinas had finally found a use for themselves, as a grave for the military’s prestige. Defeat would bring a new government in Buenos Aires, one with untainted hands, one that could admit to what had been done to all those tens of thousands. Such honesty might bring the hope of redemption for her country. And for her.

‘Don’t cry for me, Argentina,’ she muttered ironically.

She got up and walked slowly across the park to the flat she shared. Rowan was not home yet, and for once Isabel felt the need of some alcohol. An opened bottle of burgundy supplied the necessary, and she sat nursing a glass in front of the six o’clock news. The fleet was sailing out of Portsmouth harbour, flags flying, men saluting, loved ones waving. She remembered what Michael had said the previous evening, that no matter how much he despised the patriotism and the flag-waving, no matter how clearly he could see through all the sanctimonious crap, he had been appalled to discover that there was still a small part of him that felt somehow connected, even proud, of all this.

She had understood exactly what he meant, because she knew that a small part of her wanted the English to fail in this war, wanted the beasts of the Junta to triumph in Argentina’s name. And more than anything else, or so she later came to believe, it was the need to silence that small voice which led her to call Baldwin the next morning.

The next few days seemed more than a little unreal. She called in sick to her two jobs, perhaps not really believing that her new career as a Mata Hari would amount to anything. The Englishmen who were supposedly preparing her for her new career certainly did not inspire much confidence.

For one thing, it rapidly became clear to Isabel that they knew next to nothing about her country, either in the general sense or in terms of the current situation. What information they did have seemed to come from either the Argentinian press or American signals intelligence. The latter source offered great wads of information, almost all of which was rendered useless by the lack of any accompanying indication of the enemy’s intentions. The newspapers, needless to say, offered only lies and conceits. It was obvious that British Intelligence had no one on the ground in Argentina.

Now, faced with the prospect of having someone, the Intelligence people seemed initially incapable of deciding what to do with her. Isabel could imagine them discussing the possibility of her seducing General Galtieri and learning all the Junta’s secrets. Still, she did not fool herself into believing that they thought any more highly of her than she did of them. She was, after all, an Argie, a woman and a communist – which had to be three strikes and out as far as the Foreign Office was concerned. If it was not for the fact that she was the intelligence services’ only proof that they were doing anything at all that was useful, she would probably have just been sent home in a taxi.

It was on Friday 9 April, the day the other Western European countries swung into line behind Britain’s call for sanctions, that some semblance of a coherent mission was offered to her. Baldwin escorted her through a maze of Whitehall corridors and courtyards to a spacious top-floor office overlooking St James’s Park, and into the presence of a cadaverous-looking Englishman with slicked-back black hair and a worried expression. His name was Colonel William Bartley, but he wore no uniform, unless the City gent’s pinstripe suit counted as one.

‘We have thought long and hard about where and how you could be most usefully deployed,’ he said, after the exchange of introductions and Baldwin’s departure. ‘And…’ He stopped suddenly, sighed, and leaned back in his chair. ‘I’ve read your file, of course,’ he continued, ‘and you wouldn’t expect me to sympathize with your politics…’

‘No,’ she said.

‘But of course, if these weren’t your politics then you would not be willing to betray your own country on our behalf, so I can hardly complain.’ Bartley grunted, probably in appreciation of his own logic. ‘But you’re obviously intelligent, and you can doubtless see our problem.’

She could. ‘You don’t want to tell me anything which I might turn over to my beloved government. Well, what could I say to convince you?’

‘Nothing. In any case we are not merely concerned at the possibility that you will pass on information willing. There is always the chance you will be captured. And of course…’ Bartley left the unspoken ‘tortured’ hanging in the air.

‘I understand. And you are right – there’s no way I would endure torture to save your secrets.’ As I once did for a lover, she thought. ‘So,’ she said, ‘it’s simply a matter of calculating risks, is it not? The risk of my being a double agent, or of getting caught, against the risk of not telling me enough to make using me worthwhile.’

‘Exactly,’ Bartley agreed.

She stared at him in silence.

‘You are from the south,’ he said, ‘which is useful from our point of view. How difficult would it be for you to set up shop, so to speak, somewhere like Rio Gallegos? Are there people who would recognize you? What sort of cover story could you come up with?’

‘I come from Ushuaia, which is a long way from Rio Gallegos. I might be recognized by someone – who knows? – but not by anyone who would question my presence in the area. I could say I was looking up an old college friend…’

‘Who is not there?’

‘I did not know she had moved, perhaps?’

‘Perhaps. Since you know the country and the people I will leave it to you, but I will give you one other suggestion: you are researching a travel book, perhaps in association with an American equivalent of that agency you work for, checking out hotels, local transport, things to see. It’s a good excuse for moving around.’

‘Perhaps.’ She admitted to herself that it sounded a good idea. ‘And what is my real motive for being there? The airbase, I suppose. You want to know which planes, what armaments, the pilots’ morale.’ She paused. ‘And you’d probably like to know each time they take off. Am I going to have to carry a radio set into Argentina?’

‘I doubt it,’ Bartley said, obviously taken by surprise. ‘How did you work all that out?’ he asked.

‘By reading the Observer. The British fleet was created to operate in the eastern Atlantic, within the defensive cover provided by shore-based aircraft, and the one thing that scares the Admirals is their vulnerability to air attack without such cover.’ She looked at him. ‘Is this the secret you were afraid I’d tell the Junta?’

Bartley at least had the good grace to blush. ‘We think the Super Etendards may be based at Rio Gallegos,’ he added, ‘and doubtless the Observer pointed out how concerned we are about the Exocets they carry.’

‘It did. But if advance warning is what you need, surely it has to be by radio?’

‘Perhaps. We have several weeks to worry about that, and if it becomes absolutely necessary then one can be brought across the border from Chile when the time comes. First, we need to get you bedded in.’

For the next few days she was given an in-depth briefing on military matters, at the end of which she could not only recognize a Super Etendard by its silhouette but also identify a wide range of military equipment which might conceivably be en route to the Malvinas from the Rio Gallegos airbase.

In the meantime her journey to Santiago – via New York and Los Angeles on three separate airlines – had been booked, her share of the rent on her flat paid six months in advance, and four fellow exiles had been given reason to wonder at the sudden beneficence of the Home Office in allowing them permanent residence status. Rowan and her other friends had been told that she had been given a three-month commission to update tourist information in Peru and Bolivia. They were all suitably jealous.

Michael was also angry. Why had she not consulted him? Did she think she could behave in a relationship as if she was a single person? Did she care about him at all?

The answer to the last was: not enough. She liked him, enjoyed talking with him, found sex with him occasionally pleasurable but mostly just harmless fun. It was not his fault, and she would have felt sorrier for him if she believed he really loved her, but as it was…The last night before her departure, as she watched her nipple harden in response to his brushing finger and kiss, the bizarre thought struck her that she was like a ship which had been struck below the waterline, and that her captain had ordered the sealing of all the internal bulkheads, the total compartmen‌talization of the vessel. The rooms were all still there but she could no longer move from one to another. There were no connections. In the torture chambers of the Naval Mechanical School she had lost the pattern of her being, which was probably just a fancy description of the soul.

Her plane landed in Santiago de Chile at five in the morning on 19 April. According to the newspapers, the Junta’s response to US Secretary of State Haig’s peace plan was being conveyed to London, but no one seemed too sanguine about the prospects. According to her own calculations, the British Task Force would be just over halfway to the Malvinas by this time. There was still between ten days and a fortnight before it came within range of the Argentinian Air Force.

The men in London had given her a new identity, albeit one very close to her own. She was now Isabel Rodriguez, a thirty-one-year-old Argentinian who had lived for several years in the United States, and who had never involved herself in the politics of her homeland. Later that evening, in her room at the Hotel San Miguel, she received the expected visitor from the British Embassy, a sallow, dark-haired man with wire-rimmed spectacles who looked distinctly un-English.

He introduced himself as Andrew Lawson. ‘I am British,’ he said apologetically, as if in the past doubts had been raised. ‘I just look like a South American. Probably because my mother was Spanish. I have brought you the money’ – he laid two piles of notes, one smaller Chilean, one larger Argentinian, on the bed – ‘and the car is in the underground car park. A black Renault 5, AY1253S, in space B14. Have you got that?’

She nodded.

‘I shall also be your contact in the south,’ Lawson went on, taking a map from his pocket and unfolding it on the bed. ‘See, this is Argentina…’

‘I know. I was born there,’ she said acidly. Maybe the Junta would win the war, after all.

‘Ah, I’m sorry, of course. You know the south well?’

‘I grew up in Ushuaia.’

‘Ah, right. Do you know this road here, between Rio Gallegos and Punta Arenas?’

‘I have travelled it many times, by car, by bus.’

‘Good. What we need is a dead-letter drop – you understand? Somewhere where we can leave each other messages for collection. It should be on the Argentinian side, because the fewer times you have to cross the border the better. A stretch of empty road, a bridge over a stream, something like that.’

‘It would be harder to find a stretch of road that isn’t empty,’ she said drily. ‘Why must I cross the border at all?’

‘A good question. And the simple answer is, I can’t think of a safer way for you to let me know the location you’ve chosen. If you can…’

She thought about it. ‘You can’t come to me?’

‘I could risk it, but let’s face it, I’d have trouble passing as a local at the border. I may look like a Latin American, but my Spanish isn’t good enough…’ He shrugged.

‘A go-between,’ she suggested.

‘The fewer people know who you are the better.’

That made sense. ‘OK, so I come into Chile…’

‘To Punta Arenas. Your cover is a tourist guide, right? So you have to check out the local museums. There are three in Punta Arenas: the Regional Magellanes, the Patagonian Institute and the Salesian College. I’ll be at the Salesian each Thursday morning from the 29th on.’

She looked at him. The whole business suddenly seemed completely insane. ‘Right,’ she said.

The road across the Andes was full of wonder and memories. Isabel had last driven it with Francisco in the early spring of 1973, when they had visited Chilean friends in Santiago, both of whom had perished a month or so later in the military coup. Then as now the towering peak of Aconcagua had shone like a beacon, sunlit snow against a clear blue sky, but then the love of her life had been with her, and the darkest of futures still bore a gleam of hope.

This time too she stopped at the huge Christ of the Andes, bought a steaming cup of coffee from the restaurant and walked up past the statue and its admiring tourists to where she could see, far down the valley, the distant green fields of her native country.

She had over 1000 miles to drive, and she planned to take at least three days, acclimatizing herself to the country as she travelled. That evening she stayed in Mendoza and, after eating in a half-empty restaurant, sat in the city’s main square and listened to the conversations going on around her. Most of them seemed to be about the Malvinas dispute, and she found the level of optimism being expressed hard to credit.

The purchase of a newspaper helped to explain the high spirits. According to the Government, the British were bluffing – there would be no war between the two countries. Britain would huff and puff, but eventually it would come to its senses. After all, what nation would really send a huge fleet 10,000 miles for the sake of 1800 people? Though, of course, the editorial was swift to mention that, if by some mischance it really did come to a fight, then the armed forces of the nation were more than ready to do what was necessary for the glory of, etc, etc.

‘Wrong,’ Isabel muttered to herself, staring across the square at the vast wall of the silhouetted mountains to the west. There was no hope of the British coming to their senses, and consequently no chance that they were bluffing.

Isabel’s sense of a nation with its head buried deep in the sand did not fade as she travelled south over the next few days. Everywhere she went she heard the same refrain: there would be no war. How could the British fight one so far from home? Why would they do so even if they could? There was no antipathy towards distant England; if anything, the old connection between the two countries seemed almost stronger for their mutual travail. Isabel was half-amazed, half-amused, by how many of her countrymen and women felt vaguely sorry for the British. It was almost pathetic, people told each other, the way the old country clung on to these useless relics of their past imperial splendour.

Her own state of mind seemed to be fluctuating more wildly with each day back in her native country. It all seemed so familiar, and pleasantly so, and it took her a while to realize that what she was reliving was her childhood and youth in the countryside, that memories of the city years with Francisco would need different triggers – the smell of San Telmo streets on a summer evening, book-lined rooms on a college campus, young earnest faces, a gun laid out in pieces on an oilskin cloth.

Each mile to the south took her further from those years, closer to the innocence which they had destroyed. Driving down arrow-straight roads across the vast blue-grey steppes of Patagonia seemed almost like a trip into space, cold and cleansing, more than human.

It was four in the afternoon on Saturday 24 April when Isabel reached the outskirts of Rio Gallegos. The town seemed much changed from when she had last seen it some ten years before. The oil industry had brought prosperity and modernity, along with a refinery which peeked out over the mostly brick-built houses.

The Hotel Covadonga in Avenida Julio Roca seemed to avoid the opposite extremes of ostentation and a clientele composed entirely of sex-starved oil workers. It was also centrally located and spotlessly clean. The manager proudly announced himself as Manuel Menéndez, and was surprised but pleased to learn that she intended to make a lengthy stay. Rio Gallegos was not usually noted for its tourist potential.

After a brief but enjoyable bargaining session over a reduced long-stay rate, Isabel explained about the guide book she was researching, and how the town was ideally located as a centre of operations. But perhaps, she wondered out loud, the trouble with the British over the liberation of the Malvinas had led the military to place temporary restrictions on the ordinary citizen’s freedom to travel?

Not as far as Menéndez knew. There was no longer any civilian traffic from the airbase, and Navy ships were more often seen in the estuary, but nothing much else had changed over the last few weeks. The border with Chile was still open. ‘It is all over, is it not?’ he said. ‘We have the Malvinas back, and I suppose we must thank the Government for that.’

Isabel agreed and went up to her room. After unpacking her meagre travelling wardrobe, she felt tired enough to lie down for a short nap. But her mind was racing too fast for sleep, and she soon decided that she should not waste the last hour of light in her room. Wrapped up in an extra sweater and her Gore-tex windcheater, she strolled purposefully down the Calle Rawson towards the estuary shore. Here she found that a new and pleasant park had been created along the river front. Many families were in evidence, the children already sporting their winter woolly hats. Over by the balustrade a group of young men in Air Force uniforms were enjoying a boisterous conversation.

She walked the length of the park along by the water. Two coalers were anchored in the mile-wide estuary, and beyond them the northern shore offered only a vista of steppe extending into the grey distance. As she turned to retrace her steps a growing roar lifted her eyes to the sky. A Hercules C-130 transport plane was coming in to land at the airport south of the city.

Back at the Covadonga, Isabel lay in the bath, thinking that any delay was likely to weaken her resolve. Wearing the dress she had brought with such an eventuality in mind, she went downstairs to the desk and asked Menéndez’s advice. ‘Where could she have some fun on a Saturday night?’

It turned out there was a big dance that evening at a hall in Calle Pellegrini. After eating a less than exciting dinner at a restaurant off the main square, she made her way across to the hall. At the makeshift bar there were several single women, presumably prostitutes, so Isabel kept her distance and tried to look suitably lost. It was not long before a middle-aged businessman’s wife gave her the chance to tell her story: a single woman in a strange town, wanting some company but…She was soon adopted into their circle, a cross between a guest and a surrogate daughter.

She actually enjoyed the evening, and had almost despaired of it leading anywhere useful, when the party of Air Force pilots arrived. They were given a standing ovation, treated to free drinks and generally feted as the nation’s favourite sons. It did not take Isabel long to pick out her choice: he was tall and dark with a diffident manner and sad brown eyes. He looked as out of place as she felt.

His name was Raul Vergara, and fifteen minutes later they were dancing together, the rough serge of his uniform rubbing against her cheek. For one appalling moment she was back in the whitewashed room at the Naval Mechanical School, the lieutenant’s swollen dick pushing against her obstinate lips, the smell of it mixed with the stink of fear that filled the building.

‘You dance really well,’ the shy young pilot whispered in her ear, breaking the dreadful spell.

2

The last slice of orange sun was disappearing into the western sea as the eight SAS men made their way across the deck of HMS Hermes toward the waiting Wessex helicopter. For the first time in many days the sky was clear and the ocean was not doing its best to tip the ship over. Maybe it was a good omen. But it was still bloody cold.

Each man was wearing camouflage gear from head to toe, with the exposed areas of the face painted to match. Somewhere in the bergen rucksacks slung across their backs, among the 90 lb or so of weaponry, communications equipment, medical kit and rations, each man was carrying the tubes of ‘cam’ cream he would need to freshen his make-up when the need arose.

They had split into pairs to check each other’s cosmetic efforts before the final load-up. One of the two patrol commanders, Major Jeremy Brookes, had received five point eight for technical merit but only a minus score for artistic impression. He smiled through his mask at the thought.

Brookes’s patrol, all of them members of G Squadron’s Mountain Troop, were headed for the hills overlooking Port Howard on West Falkland, and none too pleased about it. ‘But all the fucking Argies are on East Falkland, boss,’ Trooper Kenny Laurel had observed, with all the mildness of an articulated lorry.

‘No, Hedge, they’re not,’ Brookes had explained, ‘just most of them. And that’s only as far as we know. The point of this exercise is to determine exactly where they are, every last one of them.’

‘And where they’re not,’ Trooper Davey Matthews had observed.

‘Thank you, Stanley. Besides which, someone had to draw the short straw, and it was us, OK?’

‘Yes, boss.’

Admittedly, Brookes thought as he clambered aboard the Wessex, the straw no longer seemed quite so short. There might not be many Argies on West Falkland, but there was likely to be more than four of them. This was hardly a picnic they were embarking on. At the best it would probably consist of lying in a damp hole for days on end, bored out of their minds. He tried to remember who had said that a soldier’s life was ninety-nine per cent boredom, one per cent pure terror. Was it Wellington? No, it was somebody else, but he could not remember who.

As they sat there waiting for the Wessex crew to appear – ‘Fucking Navy were even late for the Armada,’ someone observed – Brookes foolishly asked his seven co-travellers if any of them could remember.

‘Genghis Khan?’ a member of the other patrol offered.

‘Nah, he said it was ninety-nine per cent terror,’ someone corrected him.

‘Bruce Forsyth,’ Hedge suggested. ‘What do you think, Mozza?’

Trooper David Moseley emerged from his reverie with a start. ‘What?’ he said.

‘His mind’s on other things,’ Stanley said.

The little woman back home, I expect, Hedge thought. ‘It drains your strength, Mozza, even thinking about them.’

‘I was thinking about where we’re going,’ Mozza said, wondering guiltily whether not thinking about Lynsey at such a moment was something of a betrayal.

‘We’re all going to sunny West Falkland,’ Hedge told him, ‘where the beaches stretch golden into the distance and the hills are alive with the sound of sheep farting. We’re all going on a summer holiday,’ he sung, with a gusto Cliff Richard would have killed for.

So would their pilot, who had just arrived with the other two members of the crew. ‘If you don’t stop that horrible row Falkland Sound will be alive with your cries for help,’ he said trenchantly.

‘If you dropped him into Falkland Sound,’ one of the other patrol noted, examining Hedge’s undoubted bulk, ‘it would probably drain it.’

‘Then there’d only be one island to argue about,’ someone else realized.

Major Brookes listened to the banter with half his mind, knowing it for what it was, a giddy chorus of nerves and apprehension. He still could not remember the author of his quote, and as he checked through his memory, another, less amenable one came to mind. He had first heard it from the lips of a dying IRA terrorist the previous year. Lying there, blood flowing freely from a neck wound into sodden leaves in an Armagh lane, the man had looked at him, smiled and recited: ‘this is war, boys flung into a breach, like shovelled earth, and…’

He had died then, and it had taken Brookes many months to find the rest of the verse, and its source. Finally, the wife of an old friend had recognized it as a poem by the American Amy Lowell. He had looked it up and found the rest: ‘and old men, broken, driving rapidly before crowds of people, in a glitter of silly decorations, behind the boys and the old men, life weeps and shreds her garments, to the blowing winds’.

These are the boys, Brookes thought, looking round at them: Mozza with his fresh-faced innocence, ginger-haired Stanley with his sleazy grin, the overwhelming Hedge.

At that moment the lights went out, the rotor blades reached a pitch which made conversation impossible, and the Wessex lifted up from the aircraft carrier’s deck and started moving south-westwards, low across the South Atlantic swell.

Cecil Matheson poured himself a modest finger of malt whisky, took an appreciative sip and carried it across to the window. Through a gap between darkened buildings he could see light reflected on the Thames. In the street below he could see theatre and cinema-goers threading their way through the Saturday evening jam of taxis.

The buzzer sounded on his phone, and he took three quick strides across the room to his desk.

‘Mr Lubanski is on the line,’ his secretary told him.

‘Mr Lubanski,’ Matheson said jovially, wondering, not for the first time, why the American State Department seemed to employ more Poles than the Polish Foreign Ministry. He had met this particular one on his last official visit to Washington, and been more impressed than enamoured of him. The fact that Lubanski was known to privately support a neutral American position vis-à-vis the current dispute only made the coming conversation more fraught with difficulty.

The lack of liking seemed to be mutual. ‘Cecil,’ Lubanski replied, with more familiarity but rather less enthusiasm. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘I’m sorry to take up your time at the weekend,’ Matheson said with as much sincerity as he could muster at short notice. ‘It’s just a matter-of-clarification.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘The President’s speech on Friday…’

‘The “ice cold bunch of land down there” speech?’ Lubanski asked, a twist of malicious humour in his voice.

That was how Ronald Reagan had described the Falklands, and Matheson winced at the memory. ‘Yes, that one,’ he confirmed. ‘Of course, we don’t share the President’s opinion in that respect, but we are…’ He wanted to say ‘glad that the US Government has at last realized its responsibilities to a NATO ally’, but that would hardly be diplomatic.

‘Pleased that we’ve finally fallen off the fence on your side?’ Lubanski offered.

‘That’s certainly one way of putting it,’ Matheson agreed, ‘though I’d prefer to think you’d stepped down. In any case,’ he continued hurriedly, ‘we’re obviously gratified by the sanctions announced by your Government, and by the President’s promise of matériel aid. As regards the latter…’

‘You’d like to know what’s on offer.’

‘Of course, but I’m sure that question can be handled through the normal channels. I have something more specific in mind.’

‘Which is?’ For the first time, Lubanski sounded vaguely interested.

Time to bite the bullet, Matheson told himself. ‘AWACS,’ he said. ‘Airborne warning and control systems.’

‘I know what AWACS are,’ Lubanski said drily. ‘And without putting too fine a point on it, I think I can safely say the answer will be sorry, but no.’

Like hell he was sorry, Matheson thought. ‘Her Majesty’s Government would like to formally request the loan of just two AWACS,’ he pressed on.

‘Like I…’

‘If I could just continue,’ Matheson said, rather more harshly than he intended, ‘large British naval losses will hardly serve the interests of the United States. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that the Royal Navy’s primary raison d’être is to safeguard the passage of American troops and armaments to Europe in the event of a major war…’

‘No, you don’t.’

‘Then I fail to see the justification for a refusal of this request.’

‘Bullshit, Cecil. You know damn well why we’re refusing it. Put our own military into this little exercise of yours and twenty years of Latin-American policy goes down the tubes. You’ve already dragged us off the fence for the sake of 1800 sheep farmers, and now you want us to send AWACS planes? Are you sure you wouldn’t like us to nuke Buenos Aires for you?’

Matheson took a deep breath, and swallowed the temptation to tell Lubanski the best thing the State Department could do with its Latin-American policy was to tear it all up and start again. ‘If we can’t defend our ships against attacks from the mainland,’ he said carefully, ‘we may be forced to move against the source of the problem ourselves.’

‘You mean bomb their bases? What with?’

‘Vulcans from Ascension.’

For a few moments there was a silence at the other end. Then Lubanski, sounding more formal, replied: ‘I think the British Government would be wise to examine the United Nations resolutions so far invoked, and particularly Article 51’s definition of self-defence. I’m not at all sure that the United States would regard military action against mainland Argentina as falling within the scope of that definition. And, regardless of such legal niceties, I am completely certain that continued US support is contingent on a certain level of self-restraint in the British prosecution of the war.’

Another short silence ensued.

‘You do realize how this looks from the British Government’s point of view,’ Matheson said eventually. ‘You won’t help us to protect our ships, and you won’t allow us to protect them ourselves in the only way open to us. We’ve got young boys out there,’ he went on, wondering whether sentiment would help, ‘with next to no cover. And they’re not fighting for sheep farmers – they’re fighting against aggression, and for self-determination. I seem to remember,’ he could not resist adding, ‘that one of your presidents almost invented the phrase.’

‘Before my time,’ Lubanski said wearily. ‘Look, Cecil, let me be as frank as I can about this. I personally think your war is a crock of shit, and I wouldn’t have risked alienating a single Hispanic voter or a single Latin-American government to support it. I have colleagues who disagree with me, and who’d love to support the old country, you know, all that Ivy League shit. But even they wouldn’t loan you a single airplane. It’s just too much to ask. This is not our war – it’s yours. You fight the damn thing with what you’ve got.’

‘We intend to,’ Matheson said, struggling to keep his voice level. ‘Thank you for your time,’ he said coldly, and hung up. He could almost hear Lubanski 3000 miles away, smirking about some Brit in a snit.

He shook his head to clear it, and poured out a more generous shot of whisky. He had, after all, got exactly what he had expected from the call. Nothing. And it would do no harm to make the Americans aware, privately, of how angry the British were with them. A measure of guilt might increase their generosity in other matters.

The real problem lay not 3000 miles away, but less than one. Matheson was almost afraid to imagine what alternatives to the AWACS were brewing in the Prime Minister’s restless mind.

The flight took slightly less than a hour, most of it over the sea. Darkness had fallen, but despite the lack of a moon the Wessex crew had no trouble identifying the northern coast of Pebble Island on such a clear night. The Passive Night Goggles, or PNGs, which they had recently received from American sources, only came into their own when they were contour-chasing across the north-central part of West Falkland proper.

They set the Wessex down in a wide stretch of desolate grassland. The ground looked hard enough, but for an instant seemed to give alarmingly. It was, Brookes thought, as he leapt down onto it, like landing on a springy pine-forest floor.

The other three followed him out, and the door closed on the grinning, waving members of the other patrol, bound for a similar mission further down the island. As arranged, Hedge moved off ahead to take up a defensive position on the slight ridge 100 yards to the east. The words ‘So where’s the fucking hotel?’ floated back across the din of the helicopter taking off.

The others grinned, and Brookes examined the map and illuminated compass as the silhouette of the Wessex faded with the sound of its rotors. An almost eerie silence descended. I’m a long way from home, Mozza thought suddenly. At least there’s no fucking wind, Stanley was consoling himself.

Hedge inched his eyes over the ridge line and suddenly came face to face with a dark and menacing shape. ‘Baa-aaa,’ it said. ‘Kebabs!’ Hedge whispered viciously.

They had been deposited just over 14 miles, as the crow flew, from their chosen site for an OP, or observation point, overlooking the small Argentinian base at Port Howard. Of course, there were no crows in the Falklands, and it was, as one of the SAS planners on Resource had observed, a bloody sight further as the penguin flew. The same terrain in, say, Wales, would not have been considered particularly difficult, but here the general dampness and usual high winds made everything twice as difficult.

The spongy ground often seemed as sapping as the Wembley turf in extra time, but occasionally it would either turn hard enough to jar every bone in the body or soft enough to swallow each foot in a clinging, gelatinous muck. The hills were not exactly steep, but large expanses of the slopes were strewn with flat rock slippery with lichen. And no matter which way you turned the wind always seemed to be blowing right in your face.

Given that this particular stretch had to be covered in relative darkness and near-total silence, with 90lb on each back and a less than perfect map, Brookes fully expected the journey to take two whole nights.

He told himself to look on the bright side. At least it was a clear night – no one was likely to walk off a cliff or trip over a sheep. And what had he joined the SAS for if not to experience moments like this, dumped behind enemy lines in a hostile environment with only a few good mates and his own wits to keep him alive, the stars shining bright above? At his age there would not be many more of them. The Falklands might not be Tahiti, but they sure beat the hell out of south Armagh.

They were walking in a staggered version of the diamond formation generally favoured by SAS four-man patrols on open ground at night. Stanley was out front, the lead scout, picking out the required route, with Brookes himself some 20 yards back and to the left. He was the navigational backup, and responsible for the patrol’s left flank. Further back still, out to the right, Mozza was taking care of that flank, while Hedge was ‘Tail-end Charlie’, occasionally spinning round to check their rear. He was about 50 yards behind Stanley.

As was true of any SAS four-man patrol, each man had one or more of the four specialized skills: Brookes had languages and demolition, Stanley demolition and signalling, Mozza signalling, and Hedge medicine and languages. All but Stanley had some knowledge of Spanish, but there was not likely to be much call for it on this trip, unless they took prisoners. Or were taken prisoner themselves.

As an officer, Brookes was enjoying his second term with the SAS; in fact, his military career had become a series of alternating periods spent with them and his own parent regiment, the Green Howards. His first tour of duty with the SAS had involved active service in Oman and training secondments in two other Arab states, while the current stint, now nearing its end, had found him dodging bullets and bombs in Armagh’s ‘bandit country’ and dispensing advice to local defence forces in several newly independent West Indian countries. Hairy it might be, and often was, but service with the SAS had been a great deal more interesting than service with the Green Howards, whom fate had given a less than fascinating peacetime role. War games in West Germany were a lot less fun than he had at one time imagined.

His wife, Clare, had preferred life with the Green Howards, in the days when she had still cared. Now, with both the boys at Shrewsbury and her own small business taking off, Brookes did not believe she even noticed which unit he was attached to. She was too busy scouring the Welsh Marches for the antiques she flogged off to her fellow-countrymen across the Atlantic. Their Hereford house looked more like a museum every time he returned from active duty abroad. Even the Spanish villa they shared with friends of hers seemed like a little piece of Hay-on-Wye.

He found it all hard to think about, and wondered why he was doing so on a starlit stroll through the Argentinian-held Falklands. Where better? he asked himself.

He was not getting any younger – that was half the problem. Sure, he still had most of his hair, although no one would know it from the grey stubble which protruded skinhead-style from his head. And he was just as fit as he had ever been. But he was not Peter Pan, and maybe the bergen on his back did feel a bit heavier than it should. You could make up in experience what you lost in suppleness of limb, but only up to a point.

He was thirty-eight. What was he going to do in seven years’ time, when his active career ran out? Fight for one of the desk jobs? Not bloody likely. But what else? He had always vaguely imagined that Clare would be there to share their old age. He knew it had been completely unfair, not to mention stupid – after all, what possible reason could she have for putting her life on permanent hold while he had fun? – but he had somehow expected that she would. Now when she bothered to write letters they were full of Stephen, her semi-partner. He was queer, of course – ‘He’s gay, Jeremy, not queer!’ – but then again, what did it matter whether or not she jumped into bed with the bastard: the point was that she obviously found him more interesting than her husband.

And then there were the boys. Total strangers to him, and he really had no one to blame but himself.

This was his real family, he thought, this bunch of highly trained lunatics. Men who could mention Genghis Khan and Bruce Forsyth in the same breath. Unfortunately it was a family with a cut-off date.

Up ahead of Brookes, Stanley paused for a moment to check the map against the reading on his illuminated compass. Satisfied, he resumed his progress across the sodden heathland towards the distant silhouette of a low hill, the M16 with attached M203 grenade-launcher cradled in his arms.

How, he wondered, could a man’s mouth feel so dry in such a place? Walking across this island was like walking along the back of an enormous wet dog. He could feel the damp creeping up his legs and thought about the next few days of endless fucking misery in a damp hole. Worse than a Saturday morning in the West Bromwich Shopping Centre with his ex-wife.

The thought of Sharon cheered him up. With any luck she was having a worse time than he was since Brett – what a fucking name! – had been sent down for armed robbery. Stanley nearly laughed out loud. The prat had rushed into a local sub post office, waved a gun around, escaped with about fifteen quid, and then run out of petrol on the slip road to the M6. Brilliant! And this was the man she had left him for, the Inspector Clouseau of the West Midlands underworld.

Still, he had to admit she had been wonderful in bed. That tongue of hers would win the Olympics if they ever introduced it as a sport. He sighed. So it went. There were plenty more tongues out there.

And come to think of it, the hill ahead looked just like a breast. That was the trouble with the SAS: the old winged dagger was certainly a come-on in the pubs around Hereford, but wearing it seemed to involve long stretches of time in places like this where women were particularly thin on the ground. According to one of the sailors on the old ‘Herpes’, the members of Scott’s Antarctic expedition were away from women so long that they had started sleeping with penguins. ‘Not right away, of course,’ the sailor had said, ‘and only heavy petting to begin with. They just kind of slipped into the habit.’

Stanley had not believed a word of it, of course. But he could understand that sort of desperation, he really could.

About 30 yards behind him, Mozza was snatching glimpses at the night sky between watching the men ahead and the empty country on the patrol’s southern flank. This was undoubtedly the clearest night since his arrival in the South Atlantic, but the book he had brought all the way from England was back on the Hermes, and he was having trouble matching up his memory with the constellations filling the heavens above him.

Not that he supposed it mattered which was which. Though he had always liked the idea of the constellations, and as a kid often wondered who had first connected the dots and made them all up. After all, the stars in Orion did not actually suggest a hunter; it was possible to connect them up that way, that was all. In reality it was chaos, which was just as wonderful, and maybe even more so.

He glanced round to check that Hedge was still in sight behind him, then turned his eyes right again. It was funny: he had been really nervous in the helicopter, but now they were down on the ground and alone and in real danger he felt fine. He did not even feel homesick any more, though maybe he would once they got back to the ship.

Did the others feel like that, he wondered. Both Hedge and Stanley had several more years than his twenty-three, and of course the PC was almost middle-aged. It was not just the years, either: sometimes he felt like a real innocent in their company, although there was no real reason why he should. There were not many tougher places to grow up than Manchester’s Hulme estates, so he knew how to use the two great weapons of self-defence: fists and a sense of humour, and not necessarily in that order.

Sex was another matter. Stanley and Hedge hardly ever seemed to talk about anything else, but Mozza could not help wondering whether they actually enjoyed the act as much as the endless anticipation. According to Stanley there was only one difference between sex and an SAS mission – the briefing and debriefing came in a different order. And that was funny, and Mozza had laughed as hard as the rest of them, but it had nothing to do with real life or real people. When he was with Lynsey…well, it was magical. It was not a joke. And he would not dream of making it into one.

Maybe he was just lucky, he thought. He had often thought it. Maybe most people would not have wanted to grow up in Hulme but he would not have changed places with anyone. He supposed his family was poor by British standards, but only when it came to things, and even then, well, they had always had a TV. He had three sisters and two brothers, which had felt a bit too much at times, but they all got on, and being a bit cramped in the flat was probably what had started off the family tradition of spending each Sunday out in the country. That and the fact that his dad’s job with British Rail got them a good discount on rail tickets.

And it had made him self-sufficient. It seemed strange maybe, but Mozza had thought a lot about this, about his ability to be alone in a crowd, to ‘make his own space’ as Lynsey put it, and he reckoned it was just something you had to learn as part of a big family in a small flat.

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.’

‘I think we’ll need stilts to get above this water-table,’ Stanley observed.

A few minutes later, in a sheltered hollow on the northern slope, they had found what Hedge pronounced to be ‘the shallow end of the pool’.

‘Why is it we’re always getting into scrapes?’ Stanley wondered out loud as they started digging.

3

Shortly before ten a.m. on Tuesday 4 May 1982, in the operations room of the Type 42 destroyer Sheffield, a blip appeared on the radar screen. Whatever it was seemed headed their way, and fast. Less than three minutes later, on the ship’s bridge, the officer of the watch and the ship’s Lynx helicopter pilot made visual identification. ‘My God, it’s a missile,’ they exclaimed simultaneously.

A few seconds later the Exocet ripped through the ship’s side, starting fires that proved impossible to control, causing the deaths of twenty-one men, and ultimately dooming the vessel to a South Atlantic grave. For the Task Force as a whole, the war had suddenly become real.

News of the catastrophe reached the British people seven hours later, at nine p.m. Greenwich Mean Time. Even the Ministry of Defence spokesman, who always looked and sounded as if he had been preserved in a cryogenic chamber since 1945, could not flatten the emotional charge of such news.

All those refrains of ‘Britannia rules the waves’ which had accompanied the Task Force’s departure now came back to haunt the cheerleaders. Plainly the Royal Navy was in less than complete control of this particular stretch of ocean. The mindless glorification of slaughter which had accompanied the sinking of the General Belgrano two days earlier took on an even hollower ring. Were tabloid typesetters in Buenos Aires now arranging the Spanish equivalent of ‘Gotcha!’ for the next morning’s front page?

More insidious still, for the first time the dread possibility of failure seemed to hover in the British air.

James Docherty watched the announcement on a pub TV somewhere in the middle of Glasgow, and felt for a few minutes as if someone had thrown a bucket of cold water over him. When it was over, when the news had been given, the analysis offered – all the usual crap – Docherty sat at the bar, beer and chaser barely touched, head in hands.

For four weeks now he had been floating in a drunken ocean of self-pity, anger and hopelessness. He was ‘heading on down’ he had told any stranger who cared to listen, ‘just like the Task Force’, floating further and further away from all those problems which could not be resolved by the heady mixture of modern technology and judicious violence.

Now, three hours into another magical mystery tour of Glasgow’s bars, he took the destruction of the Sheffield very personally. That fucking Exocet had hit him too, he realized, ridiculous as it seemed. But it wouldn’t sink him, oh no. In fact, it would wake him up. Or something.

He gingerly eased himself off the stool, wondering if his body had been as sobered by the news as his mind. It had not, but after an endless piss, his head leaning against the tiled wall of the Gents, he felt ready to face the night.

A chill breeze was blowing down Sauchiehall Street from the east. Docherty leant up against a shop window and let the cold blast revive him.

After the death of his father he had asked for extended compassionate leave. They did not want him for the war, so what was the point of hanging out in Hereford listening to all the others bellyaching? In any case, he was not at all sure he had any desire to go back. And if the bosses could see him now, he thought, the feeling would be mutual. A faint grin flickered across his unshaven face, the first for a while.

Two men walked past, talking about the Sheffield, and brought it all back. Enough, Docherty told himself. This is as far down as you’re going. Anything more would be fucking self-indulgence. In fact it already was.

‘Who knows?’, he asked himself out loud, as he walked back towards the dump he had been staying in, ‘if things get bad down there, then maybe they’ll need more of us.’ It was not exactly likely, but if the call did come he wanted to be in some state to receive it.

Four hundred miles to the south the Prime Minister arrived back at Number 10 from the House of Commons. In the chamber she had sat there looking stunned as John Nott announced the ship’s loss, but earlier that day, in the relative privacy of Number 10, tears had been more in evidence. Now she was entering the third phase of her reaction – anger.

‘I want someone from Northwood – preferably Harringham – and Cecil Matheson,’ she told her private secretary.

‘You have the full Cabinet in the morning, Prime Minister.’

‘I’m aware of that, Richard. I want Harringham and Matheson here now.’ She started up the stairs, throwing ‘please tell me when they arrive’ back over her shoulder.

Matheson was still working at the Foreign Office, but Brigadier Harringham had to be pulled out of his bath and shuttled across from Northwood by helicopter. By the time of his arrival he had conquered his irritation – he could guess what kind of a day the PM had endured.

Once the three of them were gathered around one end of the huge Cabinet table she lost no time in coming to the point. ‘Two days ago, Brigadier, you said, and I quote, that you were “yet to be convinced that the enemy air force poses much more than a theoretical threat to the Task Force”. I take it the events of the day have changed your mind?’

‘Sadly, yes,’ Harringham said quietly.

‘If it had been one of the carriers instead of the Sheffield we would now be in severe difficulties, would we not?’

‘Yes.’

‘Prime Minister,’ Matheson interjected, ‘obviously I do not want to minimize the potential dangers here, but I feel I must point out that the best intelligence we have suggests that the enemy only possesses five more of these missiles, and has next to no hope of procuring any more.’

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.