Land of Fire

by Chris Ryan

  An hour later we had made about a mile, and we came to a halt. I was leading, and as I stretched out my hand in front of me my fingers touched a strand of wire. My pulse gave a sudden jump. Had I touched the trip-wire of an Argentine anti-personnel mine placed on a tripod a couple of metres ahead, ready to sweep the grass with a deadly hail of ball bearings? The Argies loved mines. The Falklands were lousy with ones they'd left behind. Or was it an alarm wire that would send phosphorous illumination rockets blazing into the sky and bring down crashing mortar rounds about our heads? I waited tensely but nothing happened, and I began to breathe again. Withdrawing my hand and parting the grass carefully, I saw that I had run up against a sagging barbed wire fence abutting an overgrown track.

  I squirmed around on my stomach to warn Josh. For all we knew there might be a sniper lying up the slope with one hand on the wire waiting for the tug that would tell him someone was trying to slide through. We found a point where the wire was broken, checked that no one had stuck a mine in the gap, and wriggled through.

  The track leading down to the estancia was deeply rutted. It looked to have been used by vehicles within the past few days, whether going or coming there was no way of telling, but there was fresh snow in the tyre marks. We crossed over, dragging some grass behind us to hide our footprints, and dived into cover again on the other side.

  It was 3.00am by the time we arrived back at the reed beds. We had found no indication of an ambush, but there still remained the possibility that the Argentines might have opted for the simple tactic of holing up in the ruined barns and were waiting for us to show. The only way to find out was for one of us to go in. And that person had to be me.

  In sign language I indicated to Josh that I was going in to the chimney and he was to follow and cover me over the last stage. In single file we crawled to the edge of the farmyard. From here it was apparent that the place had been deserted for a long time. There was no roof to the main house and most of the walls were tumbled down. We waited a long time in perfect stillness. Nothing moved. Then I edged forward into the shadow of a collapsed shed and pushed my head through the undergrowth on the far side. I was now looking directly at the stump of the massive main chimney of the original house. Parked right up against it, in the centre of what must once have been the main living room, was a four-wheel-drive utility vehicle.

  I trained the night sight on it. The vehicle was facing towards us and there was a man in the driver's seat. I could make out his head leaning back. He wasn't moving. Maybe he had fallen asleep. I swept the scope round the yard. There was no sign of other life in the vicinity. From my harness I extracted my GPS unit and pressed the button for my position. The coordinates exactly matched the RV point we had been given at the briefing.

  It was now or never. If there were Argentines lying in wait among the ruined barns I would find out about it in another minute. Signing to Josh to cover me, I rose to a crouch and picked my way around the edge of the yard, my rifle at the ready. It must have been all of thirty yards to the far side and it seemed like the longest walk of my life. At every step I expected a bullet to take me.

  A dozen yards from the line of crushed rubble that had once been the front wall of the house, I halted and rose to my full height. I wanted the agent, if it was him, to be able to see me clearly. For several seconds I stood there unmoving in the silence of the deserted estancia. Nothing in the car stirred. Maybe the guy was asleep. Maybe it was a dummy made to look like a man and the ambush party was playing a game

  There was a metallic click and I stiffened. Slowly, very slowly the driver's door opened. "Buenos noces, senor," said a quiet voice. "Are you lost?"

  My mouth was so dry I could hardly speak. "Buenos noces," I replied. "I am looking for a place to sleep."

  "I know of a place. Are you alone?"

  "No, there are others with me."

  The car door opened further. "I am coming out," the man called softly. "I am unarmed."

  I covered him even so as he emerged into the yard. He was a bearlike man in civilian clothes, his face shadowed in the moonless dark. He wore a long sheepskin coat against the cold and he held his arms in front of him so I could see he was not carrying a weapon. He was taking no chances. He must have known there were guns trained on him but he didn't seem nervous. He had made all the responses correctly. He was in the right place. He had to be our man.

  I moved in closer, being careful not to block Josh's line of fire. "We are SAS."

  He nodded. "I have come to meet you." His voice was low and even, remarkably composed, a Spanish accent overlaying the English. "My name," he added, 'is Seb."

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Seb! At the sound of the name a flood of images rushed through my mind: our first encounter twenty years ago in the valley near the border, when the two of us had almost shot one another; Seb's offer to lead the pursuit away from our trail, and the final ambush when Andy was killed. It had never occurred to me that Seb would still be active.

  Seb seemed equally surprised to learn I had been on the earlier mission. Our meeting on that occasion had been so brief that he had scarcely had time to register faces.

  I filled him in on the loss of the boat with Jock aboard, and he grew serious. "That is bad," he said. "The prevailing winds on this part of the coast mean that any drifting object will wash ashore at some point. If the authorities are presented with an inflatable boat containing military equipment they will draw the obvious conclusion that a clandestine landing has been attempted and the airbase is the only logical target."

  "There's a chance the major may have reached land somewhere alive, but his radio isn't working. We've searched the beach along the lagoon, without result."

  "I will send people out to scour the shore as soon as dawn breaks. They are Yaga indians, a despised minority in these parts who can be trusted not to talk. If they find your major they will bring him to me; if there is only a body they will bury it on the beach."

  I radioed in to Doug a pre-arranged code to summon the other three to join us at the RV point, and we settled down to wait in the shelter of Seb's Toyota. As he lit a cigarette, I made out his face for the first time, bearded as before, harsher and more gaunt than I remembered. I dare say the same was true of mine. The intervening years had been hard for both of us.

  We talked of the previous mission.

  "After we parted, I made contact with the pursuing patrol," he told us. "They accepted my story and moved off towards the south as I hoped. Very soon afterwards though there came the sound of heavy firing and I heard later that you had run into an ambush."

  I told Seb how the Argentines had laid a trap for us on the other side of the border. I described the battle and how Andy and Guy had died.

  "I am sorry," he said. "If I had come with you the odds would have been better."

  "You did everything you could," I told him. "You risked your life to try to draw the other patrol off."

  "I was born not far from this estancia. As a boy I learned to know this sector of the coast well. Not till I was twelve did we move to the Falklands."

  "Then you came back?"

  "Yes, my mother was Spanish, from an Argentine family. She felt trapped on the islands."

  "How long ago was that?" I asked him.

  "Thirty years near enough. There was no work on the Falklands except sheep or fishing. Here I am a geologist. I do consultancy work for the oil companies." He shrugged. "It's a useful cover."

  Doug and the others made good time even though they were burdened with packs, and were with us in not much over an hour. I went out to meet them. I wanted to break the news of Seb's return to Doug personally.

  In the intervening hours Doug had been brooding on our current position and now he was tired and edgy. "They sent who?" he said incredulously when I gave him the news. "Seb? But that's the bastard who steered us straight into a fucking ambush, man! If he's not working for the Argies, then he's fucking useless."

  "He did his best to save our liv
es, for God's sake. He's come out here to meet us. He has a vehicle and says he can take us to a place where we can lie up in safety, close to the airbase."

  "How do we know we can trust the bugger?"

  "We don't have any choice, dammit. He's all the help we've got. We have to trust him."

  Doug curled his lip. "You trust him if you want. So far as I'm concerned he's an Argy."

  In the end Doug consented to meet Seb and he shook hands with ill grace. I could see that his hostility was being picked up by Nobby and Kiwi, who were becoming suspicious in their turn. If Seb noticed this attitude he did not let it show. At his direction we stowed our kit in his Land Cruiser and climbed aboard ourselves. The snow was getting thicker now, driving in from the sea. Seb told us to take off our ponchos and put on some civilian coats he had brought along so that we would not seem obviously like soldiers to a passing vehicle. When we were all safe aboard he spread a rug over our kit to conceal it.

  He kept his lights off as we bumped along the farm track, explaining that he did not want to attract the attention of any vehicle passing on the main road. I offered him my night-vision goggles, but he declined. He seemed to have eyes like a cat, for he never once missed the way. He said the estancia was one of many abandoned when the bottom fell out of the sheep market two decades ago.

  I asked what he made of the political situation here now. Was there a strong likelihood of war?

  "I will tell you," he said. "These people are desperate. The economy has broken down. There are no jobs, there is no money. The banks have shut up. Ordinary people's savings have been wiped out. All that is left are debts. We are reduced to a barter economy. Even the foreign oil companies cannot get currency to pay their workers.

  "People have lost their jobs, their pensions; they have lost faith in the government, lost faith in each other. They live day by day with no idea how they will feed their families. New administrations are formed and fall within hours. There are strikes and demonstrations every day. The people are desperate."

  "Desperate enough to go to war?"

  Seb lifted his eyes from the track a moment to look at me in the darkness. "Understand this, my friend among all the quarrels and political divisions that are tearing this unhappy people apart, one topic only unites them. Socialists, communists, Peronists, right wing, left wing, from the gutter to the mansion, there is one common cause: the Malvinas a belief that the islands are rightfully Argentina's and should be returned. The militarists have taken over power; they will snatch at anything that will bring the country behind them again. Some of them believe that if they could pull off a great coup, somehow seize the islands and hold them, it would act as a catalyst, healing the nation's wounds."

  "Have they forgotten what happened last time?"

  Seb glanced back towards the track, twisting the wheel gently as we ground forward up the snow-covered surface. "You forget, this is South America, where memories are short and passions hot. Anything is possible."

  We reached the blacktop road and turned south. Seb switched on the headlamps. The beams shone on the driving snow and the screen wipers worked steadily.

  "There is another thing you should know," he said after a while. "Tierra del Fuego is the territory of the Argentine Third Marine Division, officered by fanatical supporters of the military coup. The division fought fiercely in the Malvinas war. It has re-equipped with modern arms and there are many in its ranks who would leap at the chance of a second invasion."

  We drove on along the highway. I assumed it was the same road Doug and I had followed on our epic trek twenty years before. Then, though, it had been composed entirely of gravel. Now it was half and half- one lane was made up with tarmac, and a gravel bed ran alongside.

  We had covered three or four miles when suddenly, about two hundred yards ahead of us, the lights of a vehicle clicked on.

  Seb let out a curse. He slowed and dropped a gear to bring the revs up. "All of you, quickly, get down below the seats and cover yourselves." The guys in the rear squirmed down under the rugs Seb had provided, and I curled myself up in the foot well The lights evidently belonged to a big truck, because we pulled over on to the gravel to get by.

  "Military?" I said to Seb.

  He nodded. "Almost all traffic is army. No one else can afford the gasoline. I use this vehicle to drive survey parties for an oil company. It provides useful cover."

  My rifle was stowed in the back. I drew my automatic pistol from its holster. It was a Sig-Sauer P228, designed in Switzerland and made in West Germany, and probably the finest weapon of its kind ever produced. It could be chambered for 9mm parabellum, 0.45 automatic Colt or .357 magnum, and was the pistol of choice for the US Secret Service as well as the SAS. My particular model carried nine 9mm rounds plus one ready in the breach.

  I could hear the boys in the back releasing safety catches and slotting rounds into their grenade launchers. Doug was swearing in a monotonous undertone, as he often did before going into action. "Fucking Argies, fucking country, fuck the lot of them!"

  Seb kept the Toyota moving at a steady, slow pace on the gravel surface. If the truck flagged us down or tried to pull across us, our best bet was probably to use our manoeuvrability to pull a J-turn and hare off back the way we had come, trusting our greater speed to outrun them. If for any reason that was not possible and we were forced to stop, we would burst out from the doors either side, firing as we ran. I would let the others go first; my pistol was chicken-feed beside the massive firepower of their C-5s firing on full auto. A single salvo of grenades from four weapons would take out the truck and all its occupants. Chances were there would be no more than ten men facing us; I was confident we could cut them down before they realised what had hit them.

  If that happened, though, there could be no question of continuing with the mission. It would be a case of high-tailing it for the border with all possible speed before the inevitable helicopters had a chance to get on our track.

  The truck stayed where it was while we ground slowly towards it. A hundred and fifty yards now. Was it a regular roadblock with orders to stop and search suspicious-looking vehicles on the roads at night, or was it hunting us?

  Seb spoke. "It's a checkpoint to catch smugglers from over the border." His voice was flat, without emotion. He reached down into the glove pocket and took out a big automatic. It looked like a Colt or Browning High Power. He thrust it into his waistband without taking his foot off the accelerator. The distance between the headlamps was under a hundred yards. "With luck they will not bother us. If they wave us down I will get out and speak to them. Do not move unless I call to you to join me, then come out shooting."

  "Don't worry about us, mate," Doug growled. "We've done this before."

  One time in Ireland he and I had run into a paramilitary roadblock manned by the Continuity IRA. The usual trick when encountering one of these was to spin out and disappear. On this occasion things had happened too fast we came around a corner and there was a farm trailer backed across the road, and four guys in balaclavas manning it with AK47s. Doug hadn't hesitated. He'd put the car into a broadside skid that sent it sliding towards them at fifty knots. I would never forget the expression of the nearest player as two tons of vehicle came slicing down on him, catching him by the knees and pitching him over the bonnet. A second later I was de bussing rolling out of my door and laying down bursts of fire from my HK53 as I hit the ground. I dropped two guys and the last one had just time to throw up his hands and shout, "Don't shoot!" Result: two players dead, one maimed, and a prisoner so shit scared he'd wet himself. Only one of them even got a shot off. Doug was a good soldier even if he was a prat.

  While all this was running through my head we were closing on the truck. It was now only about thirty yards off. There was a ditch running along the side of the road. If it came to a fight, when we had killed the soldiers we could throw the bodies in there and take off in the truck.

  The lights of the truck were muted by the falling snow. "A
>
  five-tonner, canvas topped, maybe half a dozen men with light automatic weapons," Seb called out softly. "They will not be expecting to meet resistance." He was keeping well over to the right-hand side of the highway and the gravel rattled against the underside of the Toyota. As we drew close, the driver of the opposing vehicle suddenly let out a double toot-toot on his horn that made me jump.

  "Steady," Seb said between his teeth. "It is only a greeting. They recognised the vehicle. I am known on this road." He pumped his own horn twice and next moment we were back in the darkness, moving past the truck's length with snow spraying up against our sides. Even if they had wanted to, no one could have seen how many of us there were inside.

  "Sometimes they stop cars to demand bribes from drivers," Seb said as we slowly relaxed. "Tonight we were lucky the weather is bad. The soldiers wanted to stay under cover."

  I snapped the safety back on the Sig and restored it to its holster. Behind, Doug and the others were picking themselves up from the floor.

  Seb turned on the radio. A girl's voice came on, crooning in Spanish, a sad song. I asked Seb about the security around the airbase at Rio Grande.

  "In recent days security on the military sector has been tightened considerably and is now very intense indeed. All vehicles have to show passes at the gates and there are regular patrols of the perimeter fences." He shook his head. "I do not know why London has sent you in to do this when I could have given them all the information they needed."

  "Maybe they'll want us to take these planes out," said Doug.

  Seb drew on his cigarette, dragging the smoke deep down into his lungs before he replied. "Madness," he said finally. "What are they trying to do, hand the Argentines an excuse for war?"

  "We just obey orders," I said.

  Seb let out a mirthless laugh. "It is OK for you boys. You will do your job and get out. I have to live here."

  I told him about the salmonella outbreak in Port Stanley, and the Tornado crash we had witnessed. Seb let out a low whistle.

  "We have heard nothing of this. They must have imposed a blackout on the news leaving the islands. You think these incidents are connected to the current crisis?"