Land of Fire

by Chris Ryan

  The bells and sirens continued to sound intermittently. We could hear equipment being dragged about and sailors shouting to one another. There was no sign of panic that I could make out. Kiwi laid down his book and glanced across at Jock, one eyebrow raised. I saw Jock shake his head slightly. All we could do was wait.

  The door to the passage opened and a young officer stuck his head in. "Don't want to cause alarm, but the captain just wanted to check that you chaps are all familiar with our escape drill."

  "You mean underwater escape? "Jock said. "Everyone here has done the course. Some of us," he nodded in the direction of Doug and myself, 'have more experience than others."

  "Excellent. If it does become necessary, your departure station will be in the torpedo room forward. Just a precaution, you understand, so you know where to go if you have to." He cast an eye at our berg ens "I should try to take as little as possible if I were you."

  I told myself that this was just procedure. If the situation got that bad we would still have residual power left in the stand-by batteries sufficient to blow the tanks and bring us to the surface. But that would effectively mean surrendering the ship to the Argentines. The captain would rather die.

  It was getting hotter in the cabin and the air quality was noticeably deteriorating. The captain must have switched off the air conditioners to prevent smoke from circulating through the rest of the boat. On a submarine fumes can kill quickly. Battery compartments and electrical wiring release toxic vapours when they burn and portable oxygen sets provide only a few minutes' breathable air.

  Nobby cracked open the door to our cabin. "What's happening, mate?" he called cheerily to a seaman. "Are we sunk yet?"

  "Nah," came the reply. "Just the fucking engineers set their grots alight." The fire, the mate lot told us, had begun in a storeroom on the engine deck, next to the turbines. Lagging on a lubricant feed pipe had suddenly caught ablaze. No one knew how it happened. There was no flame source nearby. Equally inexplicably the sprinklers in the compartment failed to function. Flames spread through air vents into the turbine room. Huge volumes of smoke made it difficult to isolate the source of the blaze. At one point the heat was so intense it had cracked a steam pipe. Fortunately a courageous rating turned off the valve before major damage was done. At one point it had looked as if the blaze might go critical. Luckily the rear bulkheads held and sprinklers in neighbouring compartments kept the heat down and prevented a flashover.

  The lights went out, leaving only an orange emergency bulb in the ceiling. From time to time the hatch nearby would clang open, letting in fresh draughts of smoke. We could hear more feet on the ladders, calls over the intercom for a medical team, and the sounds of an injured man being removed to the sick bay.

  Meanwhile we still had the patrol vessel to worry about. We had heard over the intercom that the sonar trace was continuing on the same heading. The range was now down to 8000 yards, four nautical miles but after an anxious few minutes it started to open up again. Evidently while the soot-blackened fire parties fought to bring the blaze under control, the sonar operators had continued calmly at their posts, listening to the engine sounds and computing the track.

  If the patrol boat was conducting her own sonar search, she must have picked us up by now. We were making enough noise to be heard at twice the range. Maybe the walls of the canyon were confusing the return signal. Or maybe she was hanging back, waiting for an armed helicopter to join the hunt. If we came to periscope depth and stuck up an air mast for ventilation they would spot it on radar.

  I was sweating in my survival suit but couldn't take it off. I might need it in a hurry. The lights came back on, which cheered us, but although someone had restored the circuits the ventilation stayed shut down. After a while the air quality became even worse as the hatches below were opened up again. But it was a sign the flames must be finally out. A nauseating cocktail of fumes eddied through the boat until the captain at last gave the order for the air conditioning to be switched on to scrub the atmosphere.

  Nobby went out to see what was happening. The submarine was in a filthy state. The lower deck was running with water and foam and powder residue. There were ash and smoke stains on bulkheads and overhead panels. Half a dozen men had been injured, two with serious burns. We had full power available on the turbines again so if necessary we could come up to periscope depth, find room to turn around and make a run for the open sea. At least we weren't going to be frazzled by radiation or poisoned by smoke or drowned!

  The launch didn't come any nearer, though. A few minutes later sonar announced that she had broken off the search and was heading away south along the shore in the direction of Rio Grande. Either she had found what she was looking for or else had given up.

  Even so the skipper didn't move. For the next two hours we stayed just where we were. His patience was immense. He set his men to work cleaning up the ship, and while they did he waited. For us it was intensely frustrating. All we could do was wait, with nothing to do but speculate over whether the mission was blown. Doug, of course, took out his boredom on the rest of us. Even Kiwi got scratchy, telling him to button his mouth before he got it shut for him permanently.

  At nine-thirty half an hour after our planned drop-off time with no sound detected by the sonar, the skipper ordered the tanks blown gently to bring us up to periscope depth. Briefly we stuck an ESM aerial up to check for radar emissions. If there was a helicopter up there still searching we wanted to know about it.

  A few minutes later a message came down for Jock saying he was wanted in the operations centre. He was gone some minutes. When he returned he was grim. He shut the door of the cabin.

  "This is the position," he said. "The patrol boat has gone. The fire is out. The skipper says his people can't be certain but it looks very like sabotage. An incendiary device inserted behind the lagging of a pipe in the machinery area. Nothing else could explain a fire of such intensity at that location." Every inch of the sub was being searched now for further firebombs, he added.

  "How does the captain think it was brought aboard, this device?" I asked.

  "During replenishment back in the UK most probably. There aren't many other moments when an outsider gets access to a sub. That's a matter for the security people. It was probably just luck that it detonated when it did. The point is the damage is serious but not critical. The reactor is unaffected but power is reduced. We can still make it back to the Falklands."

  "And the mission?" Doug said. "Do we abort?"

  "That's up to us. We are a mile from the drop-off point now. The captain is prepared to surface to let us off but he says he can't promise to remain on station indefinitely to bring us out again. The possibility of damage to the steam plant means he must return home for repairs. He can't hang about here waiting for us. If we choose to go ahead, we'll be on our own. No backup, no exfiltration."

  I looked at Doug. "In short, it means a walk-out like last time."

  We could talk and vote on this but it was Jock's decision. The SAS is more democratic than most units in the army but at the end of the day it is a fighting force. We obey orders. If the damage to the submarine was deliberate, that made it all the more urgent to put a recon party ashore to find out what the Argentines were preparing.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I could hear compressed air hissing into the tanks, indicating that Superb's black conning tower was rising out of the waves. The submarine continued to surface, pumping water ballast out. A seaman opened a hatch in the base of the tower and clipped it back, and a sudden draught of cold air struck my face. The sub's casing diver stepped out on to the deck and beckoned to me to follow. He wore a dry suit with a tiny LED torch strapped to his head with a red filter so as not to destroy our night vision. It was his job to prepare the Gemini inflatables for release and guide us into them.

  The lighting was almost invisible a few metres away. With all the spray and water in the air we were pretty much undetectable. Our sonar wasn't picking up any
noise, but there could be a boat lurking out there with its engines off. We didn't dare turn on our radars for a sweep for fear of alerting the Argentines. That was why the captain was keen to float us off quickly and get the hell out of here.

  I trod out carefully on to the casing. Waves were slapping up against the submarine's smooth hull, flinging up sheets of spray that drenched us instantly. It felt bloody freezing and I was thankful for my survival suit. The crew had rigged rails to help us, with safety lines clipped to stanchions in case anyone fell overboard. The lines were a mixed blessing: if, say, a helicopter materialised out of the night, then the sub would have to crash dive, and anyone who didn't have time to cast off his line would be dragged down with it.

  The two Gemini boats were stored in wells in the submarine's deck casing, their engines encased in dry-bags. The engines were silenced the exhausts ran out underwater which reduced speed but cut noise by a hell of a lot. Running silent we could sneak up on a beach at night and not be heard by anyone a hundred yards off.

  It was a complex procedure extracting the boats from the deck wells in the darkness. The casing diver opened the gas-bottles that automatically inflated the air cells, then stripped the dry-bags from the engines, fitted them on and screwed them down. Next our kit was loaded in and strapped down, with important items like guns and paddles secured by lines. Then the boats were slid off one at a time and the engines started. An officer leant down to give us a last-minute weather report. Sea conditions were deteriorating. The sooner we got started the better. Jock was checking the GPS heading. On a night with no stars and heavy seas it was vital to get properly orientated at the start. In this case we were being advised to offset to the north by a few degrees to avoid finding ourselves carried down into Rio Grande by wind and currents.

  It was lucky we had Kiwi on the team. His parent unit was the Royal Marines and he had originally qualified with their Special Boat Service. The SBS train off the west coast of Scotland in all weathers, practising exit and recovery from submarines in deep water or parachuting with canoes into open sea and paddling in to the shore. They think nothing of thirty-mile non-stop paddles. Tonight's operation would be a piece of cake to Kiwi. The incredible thing about him was that he'd been the runt of the litter; he had three brothers all bigger than him. What a family. Dave was twenty-four and the nicest guy you could meet. Was it the Maori blood in him that made him simply indestructible?

  The GPS fix put us about eleven miles out. GPS has made life a lot easier for special forces it showed us our position down to the nearest metre. The captain had brought us closer in than he had promised, which was decent of him. That meant a total distance to the shore of around thirteen miles, allowing for tide effect. I doubted we'd be able to average more than about eight knots, so we could reckon on being in the water for an hour and a half to two hours. We were aiming for a landfall in a sheltered lagoon protected by a sand bar across the entrance. From there, if all went according to plan, we would strike inland to rendezvous with the agent sent to meet us about three kilometres behind the beach.

  It was a chilly few minutes, getting ourselves sorted out, making sure our weapons were secure. The waves slamming against the sub's hull were kicking us up and down through four and five metres. Josh clambered into the lead boat with me and Kiwi. Nobby Clark and Doug were following behind with Jock. Finally we got the signal from Jock in the second boat to say they were all set. I had a torch with a green filter and flashed back acknowledgement, then cast off the warp holding us to Superb's side. Kiwi let the engine have some juice and we pulled out from the lee of the hull into open water. We were on our way.

  It was a wild trip. We were riding waves the size of houses. The official definition offeree seven on the Beaufort scale is for wind speeds up to thirty-four knots, with heaped seas and white foam from breaking waves blowing in streaks. Four metres is the average wave height. The extreme peaks can spike the graph at anything from fifty to a hundred per cent higher. In fact, wave-height depends on the fetch that is, the distance over which the wind has travelled. Distances in the South Atlantic are vast. Antarctic storms can generate swells that measure half a mile or more between crests and reach thirty knots. They hit the Falkland Islands as breakers fifteen metres high.

  The skipper had told us that he would wait at the departure point for two hours exactly. If we got into trouble on the run-in and had to abort before reaching shore, then we could turn around and signal for him to pick us up. It was immediately evident however that putting about in these seas was a complete impossibility. If we turned broadside on to one of these waves, we would broach and be flipped end-over-end, buried and broken. We had no choice but to keep on going.

  We were all wearing heavy-duty survival gear. And we were frozen. The cold numbed my limbs so it was all I could do to hang on in the boat. Josh was a hooded silhouette barely discernible across the thwart in the darkness and spray. I was thankful we had an SBS man along. Kiwi was gripping the tiller bar and peering through the spray into the waves. God knows how he could see in the darkness, but he steered us effortlessly up the rollers and down the other side. The only way you get through the SBS selection course is if you enjoy this kind of life. Kiwi had told me that the R.A.F helicopter rescue hate the SBS, because they are always getting called out by civilians who've seen some mad swimmers miles out at sea in a storm and when they get there it's the SBS who wave them away and carry on happily with their exercise.

  The SBS are responsible for the protection of oil platforms in British waters. Not a single UK rig has ever been attacked by terrorists, which is a testimony to their fearsome reputation. Nowadays they work closely with the SAS, and there is no finer body of men.

  We'd been running twenty-five minutes. The cold was numbing even through my survival suit, and the waves caused a constant jarring. I tried to concentrate on our various exit options. Walking out had been tried the last time and was not the ideal option, as we had learned to our cost. The best bet seemed to be to have a helicopter slip in over the border under the radar net and pick us up. Maybe with all the oil exploration going on in the area it was unlikely that a single chopper flight would excite too much attention, and with luck by the time they scrambled an aircraft to investigate we would be back over the border into Chile. It would only be a short flight and the six of us could pack in tight. Our equipment might have to be ditched, but that's a penalty of clandestine ops.

  Then I thought about the landing. Waiting for us at the RV point inland was supposed to be a British guide who would lead us to the base. I wasn't too happy about relying on local help it's too easily infiltrated by the other side. Jock seemed content, though.

  Rio Grande intrigued me. Last time the mission had been called off at the start and we never got near the air base. It would be interesting to see what the de fences were like. What would London's response be if we did find evidence of an invasion being planned? A strike by Tornados was one option but would be tantamount to a declaration of war and the Americans might exercise a veto. The same went for a Tomahawk missile attack. Which left assault by special forces as the only viable alternative. It could be a rerun of the Falklands campaign of twenty years before.

  I uncovered the luminous dial of my watch; we had been travelling for forty minutes. That put us half-way to the coast. The waves were getting shorter and steeper which was an indication of shelving water. Somewhere up ahead of us the rollers would be breaking along the surf line, dumping their energy in one final explosive burst. I could sense Kiwi peering ahead to try and spot any patches of whiteness.

  A larger-than-usual wave surged underneath us. It was so steep it felt like riding the side of a mountain the dark slope loomed over us and for several seconds I thought we would topple back and slide under. Then at the last moment we topped out and burst through the crest. I caught a brief glimpse of lights scattered in the darkness ahead. That was the shore, less than a mile away at a rough estimate. The lights were grouped over to the south, which
was where Rio Grande ought to lie. We were coming in dead on target.

  At about 600 metres we had to slow for our run-in. Although it was after midnight there was still the possibility of some vessel creeping along the shore making a night run into Rio Grande, or even of guard boats patrolling the coast. Our muffled engines would be inaudible except at very close range, and we were so low in the water we would be hard to spot. We were aiming for a point about five miles up the coast from the mouth of the river, where a sand bar broke the force of the waves. According to the chart, there was a narrow gap allowing access to a shallow lagoon behind with a shoreline of sand dunes backed by scrub -ideal for concealing the boats.

  We began crabbing up the shoreline towards our objective. It was slow going because we were moving against the current. As we drew nearer we made out the sand bar as a line of broken water about half a mile off shore. The entrance was intermittently visible as a dark gap, two-thirds of the way along. Huge waves were pounding the breach here, and shooting the gap was going to be exciting.

  We were about 400 metres off when Jock's boat flashed a covered light at us to signal that it was in difficulties. We drew alongside and Jock shouted that their engine was playing up. There was a brief discussion, and it was decided to tow the other craft in behind our boat. We wallowed uncomfortably in the heavy seas for several minutes while tow lines were exchanged and made fast. To lighten the disabled boat, we transferred Nobby Clark across into our craft, leaving only Jock and Doug behind. It was exhausting work, having to seize moments between huge waves then cling on while the sea swept over us, but finally we got Nobby aboard. Jock and Doug would do the best they could to steer with paddles, while we towed them into the lagoon.

  As soon as we had tethered the boats we set off again, with our craft straining beneath the increased load. As we neared the narrow entrance to the lagoon the battering from the rollers breaking across the sandbar increased. Our boat was tossed about like a chip of wood. Josh and Nobby and I clung on for our lives. The engine was roaring; the prop shaft and exhaust exposed as they bucked and rolled in the boiling surf.