Ghost Force

by Patrick Robinson

  Douglas Jarvis said softly, “Wake everyone, get into combat gear, weapons primed, and pack up everything in case we have to move fast. If we have to, we’ll take ’em out, but I’d like to avoid that, because if we do, there’ll be all hell let loose.”

  “Okay, sir…binoculars are right there near the sniper rifle.”

  Swiftly the SAS men slipped into fighting mode, boots tightened, gloves on, hoods fastened, ammunition belts slung into place. The sleeping bags and ground sheets were all packed by two troopers. All of the other six were ready either to repel an attack or launch one of their own.

  Douglas Jarvis watched the Jeep pull onto the quayside and stop outside one of the houses that was lit inside. He saw two men jump from the front seats and bang on the front door, which opened immediately, and the light spilled out onto the jetty. One man came out to join them, and moments later a powerful searchlight on the roof of the Jeep began to sweep the hillside, making long lines past the boulders and scrubland below them.

  The Captain assessed they were perhaps six hundred yards away, and with every sweep the beam of the light grew nearer their clump of bushes.

  Down, guys. Stay well down. We don’t want to make this any uglier than it is already…

  So far as he could tell, there were only two possibilities. Someone had seen them moving across the foothills of the mountain, or a shepherd had seen a couple of shadowy figures make off with a couple of lambs. He had always recognized this as a danger, because shepherds are inclined to wander around in the twilight.

  And he was correct. Luke Milos, a sixth-generation Falkland Islands shepherd, had been darned near certain he saw someone in the pasture running away carrying something. And he knew the main Argentine garrison had issued a warning about wandering intruders who may be armed and dangerous.

  And he had placed a call to the small Argentine military compound at Goose Green, which is situated right on the narrow causeway that divides Choiseul Sound.

  The duty sentry said he’d have a patrol take a ride up there and maybe stay until first light. There were some British troops, unaccounted for in the battle, who might be about ready to rob and plunder local homesteaders. He’d have someone there inside an hour.

  And here they were, combing the hillside with a big mounted flashlight, and right now its beam was slicing into the bushes where Douglas and his men lay facedown, pressed into the ground, gripping their machine guns.

  So far as Douglas was concerned, anything was preferable to a fight. But if they had one, they had two tasks, to kill every man in that Jeep, and then make sure no one found it. The first was easy, the second damn near impossible.

  And there was a dull ache of anticipation in the stomach of Douglas Jarvis when he heard the Jeep’s engine kick over and begin to rumble toward them. Worse yet, he could hear the clatter of machine guns, as the Argentinian patrol raked every bush and rocky outcrop with real live bullets.

  “Fuck,” hissed Douglas. “Peter, Bob, take the guys on the left side of the vehicle coming toward us. I’ll take the driver, Jake takes the backseat on the right.”

  No one spoke, but each man wriggled and crawled into position, spreading out, ready to open fire in an instant. Suddenly the Argentinians went quiet, then the searchlight went on again, and swept the copse where they had been sleeping, two hundred yards from the edge of the pasture.

  The Jeep roared forward again, and a burst of machine-gun fire ripped into the very spot the SAS team had lately vacated.

  “Okay, fuck it, that’s it,” snapped Douglas, “Take ’em now !!”

  His own Enfield L85A1 assault rifle spat fire at fifty yards’ range, the heavy SS109 steel-core rounds ripping through the head and neck of the driver and the front passenger. Troopers Wiggins and Goddard put two savage bursts into the rear seat from the left, Jake Posgate slammed ten rounds into the backseat from the right.

  Doug Jarvis ran in, now from the rear of the vehicle, and fired another burst. But there was no movement from inside the Jeep. Four men lay slumped in their seats, dead or very quickly dying.

  “Okay, guys,” said Douglas. “You see the nearest hillside over there—probably about a mile if this damn flashlight is any good. I’m gonna drive over there, and I’ll drop off a trooper every four hundred yards. That way we’ll all meet when I find a spot.

  “Then we’re going to hide this bastard and its passengers. It won’t stay hidden forever. But it’ll stay hidden for possibly a week ’til someone finds it. By then we’ll be long gone. You all know I did not want to do this, but I was just beginning to feel it was us or them, and this way’s best.”

  They manhandled the dead men into the rear seat and then clambered all over the vehicle as it set off toward the distant slopes of Mount Usborne. It took a half hour to find a really secluded gully, and they shoved the Jeep down into it, about six feet below the track they were on. Douglas went in and personally severed the wires that powered the vehicle’s radio.

  One hour later they had about a half ton of gorse and tall grass piled all over it. You could have walked past it twenty times and never seen the Jeep in the man-made copse.

  “That’s it for us,” said the Captain. “Those guys won’t be reported missing for several more hours. Meantime we’ll head back to the coast for the next three hours. When it’s light, we’ll hide up somewhere and try to get past Port Darwin this evening. But we have to stay right next to the seashore. It’s our only way out.”

  1530, SATURDAY, APRIL 23

  U.S. NAVAL AIR BASE

  NORTH ISLAND

  Commander Rick Hunter, in company with Lt. Commander Dallas MacPherson, Chief Mike Hook, and the rest emerged from the final briefing room dressed in full combat gear. Their rucksacks were already loaded. They were armed and ready, and they carried with them the special heavy-duty, hooded wet suits with flippers that would prevent them from sinking and freezing to death in the South Atlantic.

  The parachutes and the reserves were already loaded. These would unclip and release the moment the men hit the water. The rest would be up to Captain Hugh Fraser’s highly skilled submariners from USS Toledo working the inflatable boats in hopefully reasonable seas.

  Rick Hunter walked out to the edge of the runway where the Lockheed C-130 stretched Hercules was already fully boarded and running its engines. He walked to the steps of the aircraft, followed by Dallas and Mike Hook. But before he began the climb toward the cabin, he paused for a few moments to chat with Admiral Bergstrom, who had materialized from nowhere.

  “Sir, one favor…?”

  “Of course.”

  Rick handed him a piece of paper with a phone number in faraway Kentucky. “Could you please call Di…just tell her I’m fine?”

  They all heard the Colonel call out, “I’ll do it this morning…and, Rick…good luck.”

  Dallas stood grinning cheerfully as the officer from the Blue Grass walked firmly up the steps.

  Inside the aircraft, the crew was waiting at the door. As Rick walked in, one of them said, “Okay, sir?”

  “Let’s go,” said the Commander, walking back and strapping himself into his reserved seat. And he felt the great aircraft shudder as it made its way to the end of the runway, swerved around and rumbled forward, its speed building, the noise shattering.

  No one spoke until the fuel-laden Hercules had fought its way off the ground, hard into the southwest breeze gusting in off the Pacific. They all felt it gain altitude, and then bank left onto its course of 150 degrees, bound for the cold south, and the windswept craggy moonsc
ape of the Falkland Islands.

  They climbed into the warm spring skies. The Hercules, always a lumbering giant, seemed noisy this morning thanks to the giant echoey gas tank set in the middle of the main cargo area. Right now they were flying through sunny clear skies. By the early hours of tomorrow morning, they would be close to the Antarctic convergence, flying in temperatures probably eighty below freezing.

  No one spoke for a half hour, at which point Dallas turned to Commander Hunter and said, “Sir, do you think we’re supposed to be scared?”

  “Us? No, not us. We’re invincible.”

  “No, sir. I’m serious. Is this really dangerous, or are we just dealing with a bunch of jokers?”

  “I don’t think anyone knows that, Dallas. But we have been tasked to find the lost Brits and slam the fighter aircraft.”

  “Shit, when you think about it, kinda sounds a bit tricky, eh?”

  “A bit. Nothing you and I can’t deal with.”

  “Yeah, but hold on a minute, sir. Let’s say they send a chopper up after us and start blasting away. What happens then?”

  “Dallas, we are about to conduct a standard, classic SEAL operation, infiltration of enemy territory. If they are mad enough to come after us, we’ll blow their fucking helicopter right out of the sky with the Stinger, right? Get your mind straight, kid. We’re the U.S. Navy SEALs and we’re going in. Anyone gets in the way of our mission dies, right?”

  “Yessir.”

  Dallas fell silent, and the Hercules, guzzling fuel by the gallon every few seconds, kept rumbling south at 42,000 feet. They would refuel in Santiago, the capital city of Chile. Tom noticed the veteran Mike Hook was sound asleep. Chief Ed Segal was lying back in his seat, his eyes wide open, his mind on the cold south .

  The crew served them coffee at 1900, with hot soup and sandwiches at 2200, and most of them slept through the night until 0330, when they landed in Santiago. The refuel took just thirty minutes, and everyone seemed to awaken, but no one had much to say.

  At 0600 Rick Hunter and his team began to change. Their gear and weapons were already secured in the four big waterproof containers they would take with them on the drop. They pulled their heavy-duty, hooded wet suits over the special deepwater Gore-Tex body vests and tight-fitting trousers they would wear for the jump into the freezing South Atlantic. The last task before fitting the parachutes was to pull on their life jackets.

  Two hundred and fifty miles farther on, the staff of the submarine USS Toledo was preparing for the pickup under still dark skies with intermittent cloud cover. The hard-copy satellite signal was unambiguous. It contained the accurate GPS rendezvous position, time, and details, plus code word Southern Belle.

  Captain Fraser’s crew were already lowering two diesel-powered inflatables into the water. It had taken a small crane to haul the deflated boats up onto the casing, and then the engines separately. And even out on the deck it was more trouble than usual because of a heavy Atlantic swell, but Captain Fraser had preferred the boats to a Chilean helicopter, which was apt to be both noisy and slow. And he realized the importance of scooping the SEALs out of the frigid ocean in the fastest possible time.

  The Hercules flew on southeast, and 130 miles north of the Falklands the navigator hit the radar button and immediately got a paint on the ocean thirty miles away. He switched the radar off instantly to avoid prying Argentinian eyes, but Captain Fraser’s ops room had picked them up… low flying contact…5,000 feet…speed 250…course three-five-five…range thirty miles…IFF transponder code correlates Southern Belle…

  All four of Toledo ’s inflatables were now running free, right off the port side of the submarine. The drop was scheduled to happen a thousand yards away, but for the moment the helmsmen kept their distance, just in case one of the SEALs came plummeting down out of a cloud bank and crashed straight into the Zodiac.

  Back in the Hercules, Rick Hunter and his men were struggling toward the door carrying the waterproof containers. The dispatcher was shouting out to them, “Okay, get ready now…we’re heading right toward the zone…another couple of minutes…”

  Mike Hook was behind the Commander and Dallas MacPherson, and, generally speaking, Rick sensed they were all very scared. He watched the tremble of his own hands as he hooked on to the static line. Mike’s face was white, his mouth dry. Rick called for a bottle of water, mainly because his own mouth was pretty dry as well. Dallas appeared unconcerned, all business, while Ron Wallace was quiet, unsmiling, no jokes, coping with the pressure and his own fear as well as he could. No one looks forward to a mission like this, beginning out on the frontiers of death.

  But Rick’s adrenaline was running now. He was scared, but the light of battle was in his eyes. Some inherent gene of the Hunter family was driving him forward into the most terrible danger. And in one corner of his soul, he looked forward to it, diving out of that door at the head of a group of hard-trained SEAL assault troops. This was what he had joined for, and it sure beat the hell out of frigging around with baby racehorses.

  “One minute!” yelled the dispatcher above the roar of the engines. Rick squeezed his nose and blew hard to clear his ears as the aircraft lost altitude. He turned back to Mike Hook and told him not to worry, just to jump, “right after me, remember the drills and stay cool.”

  Right then, the aircraft throttled back to a speed of only 130 knots, and the dispatcher opened the big aircraft door on the port side. The screaming rush of ice-cold air was a major shock, doubling the noise, and tripling the scare factor. But Rick Hunter was not scared anymore. Not at all. He experienced only a sense of exhilaration. And he gripped the static line, watching the dispatcher, glancing downward at the deep blue of the dawn ocean, the big white marks of the breaking swells. Right now he could not see the U.S. submarine.

  “We’re coming to the Drop Zone now, right on our nose…Action stations…”

  They could hardly hear the dispatcher above the howl of the wind, but everyone in the two groups, all twenty, checked their static lines, and they moved forward to the area immediately in front of the opening.

  “Stand in the door, number one!!”

  Rick came forward, his face grim, shrugging his shoulders like a heavyweight fighter in his corner preparing for round one. On another man, this might have been bravado, but it was not so for Rick Hunter. He was in battle mode, ready for this fight, ready to go.

  “Red on!!”

  The Hercules was now running at dropping speed, but the force of the howling wind outside the fuselage formed a wall of freezing air, a curtain of transparent steel. Rick thought he might be forced right back in again. But now he could see the glare of the red light above the door. They were right on the Drop Zone, and he braced himself and stared out.

  “Green on…go!”

  The dispatcher slapped him on the shoulder, and Rick Hunter plunged out of the aircraft. He swept clear in the slipstream, and then dropped swiftly, sideways. He held his knees together, feeling the familiar sensation of rolling backward, staring upward, waiting for the moment the canopy would billow out. He hoped Dallas, Mike, and the rest were also out. But then his parachute opened and he did not see anyone above him.

  Back inside the cockpit the radio operator snapped into the secure VHF encrypted, Southern Belles go.

  Toledo came back on “cackle”… Roger. Out.

  All twenty chutes deployed faultlessly, slowing down the headlong flight of the two SEAL teams. In the split seconds
of the jump, away to the southwest, Rick glanced below and the sea looked markedly less friendly than it had from a thousand feet. He guessed he was less than 200 feet above the surface, and he could see quite clearly now the outline of the submarine. At 180 feet he could see all four inflatables, still circling close to its port side.

  The real difference was the surface of the water, which showed deep troughs and white lacey patterns. The wind was strong, and as he descended Rick could see it whipping the froth off the top of the waves, some of which were breaking, sending a cascade of broiling white water down the leeward side. The sea was running out of the southwest, as was the wind. Long studies of the charts had suggested this was bad news, since the roughest, coldest gales around the Falklands came raging in from the Antarctic shelf.

  Rick assessed this was not yet a full-fledged gale, but it was probably building, and he was not real sure how he was going to enjoy the experience of sitting in a submarine in an Antarctic storm. However, he assumed it might be a whole lot better than bobbing around in the Atlantic in a wet suit.

  And now, dropping downward to 150 feet, he pulled the harness forward under his backside, so he effectively was sitting in the harness. He quickly banged the release button on his chest, and freed the straps to fall away beneath his feet.

  Hanging there now, in a sitting position, holding on to the lift webs above his head, Rick waited the last fleeting seconds, staring down at the shape of the water, which was not good. Twenty feet above the surface, he could no longer see the submarine, or the inflatables. He just felt himself hurtling toward the ocean, as if he had jumped from a diving board. He immediately breathed in deeply, held his breath, gripped the lift webs tighter and thrust his legs downward, underneath him, until he was standing upright.

  Ten feet above the surface of the ocean, Rick let go of the parachute and crashed into the Atlantic, submerging perhaps ten feet. He kicked his way to the surface, flippers gripping the water, and felt the freezing cold ocean on his hands and face, but his body remained surprisingly warm.