Mission to Argentina

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‘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 (#ud5f573c4-96a7-5596-916b-8865447c19dc)

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.’