Rick decided this was such a remote beach he would risk placing three dim chemical light markers with each pair of SEALs in order for everyone to know precisely who was where, a considerable luxury in a pitch-black, moonless night like this. It would also give them the best possible chance of seeing the canister’s arrival. They all knew the B-52 would see nothing visually, but would rely totally on the laser beam from the target-finder.
At six minutes before midnight Commander Hunter activated the beam, hitting the switch that would send it flashing up into the dark skies, a lonely beacon in the heavens, ready to guide the precious canister down.
Right now Lt. Colonel Jaxtimer was still thirteen minutes out, which put the Stratofortress a little more than a hundred miles to the east, 61.10 West, flying high and fast toward the jagged headland of Byron Heights, the northwesterly point of West Falkland’s mainland.
On the ground, the wind was rising out of the east, gusting a wicked chill across the exposed beach where the team from sunny Coronado was waiting, shivering and hopping around to keep warm.
Rick Hunter knew he would not hear the huge jet arriving eight miles above the earth’s surface, but they might catch an echo of the engines as the aircraft rumbled on upwind, and out over the Atlantic.
At four minutes after midnight the laser marker suddenly started painting on the aircraft’s receiver. Three minutes to release, and the final seconds were ticking by automatically on the computer.
We’re locked on…red light, sir…bomb doors open…looking good…left…left…on track…five-nine-two-seven coming up…still looking good…that’s it, sir…the bomb’s away.
Beneath the huge bulk of the B-52, the doors of the weapons bay in the central fuselage began to close behind the falling canister, as it hurtled through the darkness, straight down Rick Hunter’s laser beam.
On the ground the SEALs were just beginning to gripe and moan about the Air Force lateness, when suddenly they heard the far-distant growl of eight mighty Pratt & Whitney turbofan jet engines.
“It’s gotta be them,” snapped Rick. “Look up and for Christ’s sake keep your eyes open…this thing could kill you.”
They all peered into the darkness, and it was Dallas who spotted the flickering ghostly shape of the parachute. “Right here, sir,” he yelled. “Watch your backs…the fucker’s down!”
Twelve feet from where Rick stood the huge canister crashed onto the beach with a shuddering thump. Two SEALs rushed forward to grab the chute and stow it under the boats. The rest of them grabbed the long leather padded lifting bars on either side, and began to carry it back to their hide. It was heavy, but not as heavy as a Zodiac, and they manhandled it with some ease.
Inside was the required explosive for the destruction of the fighter aircraft. That took up two-thirds of the canister, but there were also two extra shovels, eight extra machine pistols, and wet suits for the short ocean crossing to Pebble. There were fuses and timers, plus wire and an extra radio transmitter. Best of all there was canned ham, baked beans, cheese, bread, cold cuts, coffee, and chocolate. Plus two Primus stoves with a couple of containers of fuel.
They immediately dug a large hole in which to bury the canister, which would not be found for a hundred years. And then they lit the Primus stoves and made themselves a midnight feast. The weather was growing worse by the hour, and they all wore their waterproof smocks before turning in for the night, against the rocks, hoping the weather would calm down before tomorrow evening’s mission across the water.
The trouble was, the weather deteriorated. And five hours later, when dawn cast a grim light on the gray beach, every member of the SEAL team was shocked by the seascape. Great white-capped waves were rolling through the Tamar Pass and onto the shore. They were whipped by the howling wind. The clouds were high, but the sun was low and hidden. The prospect of pushing an inflatable out into this particular sea was nothing less than daunting. The only sound above the gale was the long sucking noise of shingle, followed by the thumping crash of long rolling waves.
“We could,” revealed Mike Hook, “drown our fucking selves before we get five yards. There’s no way we’re going anywhere in this. Not if they really want that airfield blowing up. My guess is not tonight, guys.”
He was right, too. For hour after hour the gale never abated. The sea came raging in through the narrows that separated this rocky outpost of West Falkland from Pebble Island. The tide seemed to turn in the late afternoon, and the wind whipped the water into a frenzy as it surged out between the two headlands.
“Jesus Christ,” said Dallas, “if you tried to row across there, you’d get sucked right out through the entrance into the open ocean…I know this mission is supposed to be urgent, but we couldn’t survive out there. No way.”
The better news was that the entire landscape around them seemed bereft of human habitation. Or any other habitation for that matter. Not as much as a stray sheep or even a goat from the local hill came wandering their way. They had chosen a desolate spot, plainly safe from prying eyes, and in any event, with the machine gun rigged as it now was, they could hold off an army, tight against this rock, protected by solid granite on all sides except the front.
“What d’you think about the radio, Mike?” asked Don Smith. “We safe to use it here?”
“Yeah, I’m sure we can. So long as we restrict ourselves to short bursts. It’s darned tricky, tuning into someone else’s messages, especially if they only broadcast for a few seconds. Anyway, even if the Args did hear us, it’d be damned near impossible to locate us from that, unless you had really sophisticated equipment, which I doubt they do out here. You wouldn’t expect anyone to be here, would you? No one in their right mind anyway.”
“No one wants a postponement,” said Commander Hunter. “But we’ll have to bag it for another twenty-four hours because the journey has to be made at night. And we sure as hell can’t do that. No one’s gonna thank us for getting drowned.”
And so they waited it out for the day, and the sea remained far too dangerous. They fired in a message to Douglas Jarvis on Foxtrot-three-four to stay on hold for forty-eight hours, and once more waited out the night.
Not until noon, however, did the sea begin to die down, along with the wind. It was still very turbulent, even in the relative shelter of Pebble Sound, and the waves still hit the shore with a thumping crash, but it was not like the previous night, nothing like the gale that had been building when the canister first hit the beach.
A blanket of fog closed in over West Falkland by 1300, and it was no longer possible to see across the stretch of water that divided the mainland from Pebble. This was a blessing, because they could relax and use the Primus stoves to make soup and coffee with not the slightest chance of detection by the Argentinians. The South Americans, they hoped, were, anyway, not even looking, with their own enemy long departed.
By 1400, Commander Hunter assessed they could leave when the light began to fail at 1700, and then row as fast as possible across the channel. So far as he could tell, the sea would flow in from their port-side quarter, giving them some assistance, but they would need to keep steering left in order not to drift too far off the headland at which they aimed. The compass bearing would read three-zero-zero all the way. If they were lucky it might be possible to knock it off in two hours, but the wind, calmer now, was still out of the northwest, and it would gust right on their nose.
At 1500, he radioed a satellite signal back to Coronado… Stormy Petrels seaward 1700. Shingle forecast 1900.
They began changing into heavy-duty wet suits for the journey, right after 1600. Each man would have flippers and rifle clipped on, the
idea being that if either or both inflatables capsized—a fifty-to-one chance at worst—they would be clipped on to the unsinkable hull and able to propel forward with the big flippers.
The engines were of course out of the question because of the noise, and rescue, so far away, ruled out the use of one-time survival suits. If the SEALs went into the sea, they would have to fight their own way back to shore. The waterproof radio was sealed tight and placed in the care of Mike Hook, who anticipated no accidents. The sea looked fierce, but navigable.
At 1700 precisely they carried the two inflatables down the beach and loaded in their equipment and the engines for the getaway.
Hoods up, tight rubber gloves on, Rick gave orders for the four men in the second boat to watch him mastermind the first launch and then follow. His plan was to push the raised bow out into the surf, wait for the wave to thump and pass, then shove, running the boat forward through the frothy shallows. Then they would all leap inboard, and paddle like hell to beat the next breaking wave. “What you wanna avoid, guys, is to get caught under the wave, because it’ll swamp the boat and then you’ll have to start again.”
Rick, forward on starboard, moved into the water, keeping in step with his partner on the port side. They watched the next wave crash twenty feet in front of them, felt it swirl past, knee-deep. Then Rick yelled, “G-o-o-o-o!” and all four of them pounded forward, racing through the undertow, watching the rise of the next wave up ahead.
“N-o-w-w-w-w!” roared the Commander, and the three troopers leaped over the side, grabbed the paddles, and straddled the inflated hull as if it were a horse, driving the thick wooden oars into the water and heaving long, deep strokes. They just made it, climbing the breaking wave, paddling with every ounce of their strength, until they broke free at the crest and pushed on into flatter water.
Behind them the second boat was obscured, but as the wave crashed onto the shore they could see Dallas MacPherson and his men charging into the shallows and then diving over the side into the boat. For a minute, Dallas thought the wave had them and would send them tumbling back onto the beach.
But suddenly the boat came barreling off the crest, driven essentially by brute force and ignorance, but staying more or less dry, and now free of the breakers, Dallas and his men rowing with frenzied clumsiness, but moving the boat forward.
“Good job, kid!” yelled Rick across the foggy water. “Now fall in. Get that boat right off our starboard beam where I can keep a good eye on you.”
“I’ll say one thing, Commander Hunter,” the officer from South Carolina shouted back, “even when I’m inches from fucking death in a hellhole like this, you still think I’m as crazy as you!”
Rick’s great roar of laughter somehow recalled for both him and Dallas other times when they had cheated death together. And each of the eight men sensed it, and somehow found it comforting as they settled into a steady rhythm, moving the boats forward, through the drifting fog, leaving behind a small bubbling wake on the leaden surface of Pebble Sound.
They stayed close, separated by only fifteen feet. Rick Hunter called out the stroke rate… And now…and two…and three…and four …
Occasionally glancing at the tiny light on his compass, he would order a minor course change… Dallas…follow us…port side easy, and starboard side two hard…now all together…and one…and two…and three…
They kept going for a half hour, then rested. But Rick was afraid to wallow around for long because he knew the tide would drag them off course. They each had a drink and settled back to row for another thirty minutes, warm in their wet suits but going slower than they had hoped because of the short, choppy sea, which kept shoving the light bows of the boats upward. It was not, however, life-threatening, nor even capsizing, weather. Just roughish water, hard to row through, but ultimately navigable for eight powerful pullers.
By 2030 they were still going in the pitch dark with no sign of land. Rick’s GPS was telling him they ought to be on the beach by now, but visibility was so bad he could not know how close they were. Eventually he called the tired rowers to a stop and told them the boats might be somewhere up a bay, with the headlands on either side. Thus he was proposing to make a right turn and hope to hit a beach.
The weary troopers just nodded and did as they had been told, and Rick’s boat scraped up onto a sheltered shingle beach just five minutes later. They had been rowing along this shore for a half hour, about 250 yards from the beach, unable to see anything.
They landed in the shallows and dragged the boats out, unloading the equipment and moving toward the low hills behind the shoreline. There was no sign of life, no light, no buildings. Visibility was still only about twenty yards, and they went back for the boats, and then made camp for the night, brewing some more tea, and heating soup, silently preparing themselves for the opening mission at the airfield.
At 2100 Rick Hunter sent in his signal to Coronado… Petrels nesting on shingle.
With machine guns cocked and ready, the troopers had tea with bread and cheese at 2200, and for the third time, Rick issued his detailed final briefing…“We cut the wire right here and move forward onto the runway, all together…all the aircraft are parked a hundred yards farther on, to the right…we all move down together…unless there is an emergency or a patrol, in which case Bob and Ron peel off left and right of the concrete and take ’em out. The rest of us hit the deck, in the grass.”
“That applies both before and after we fix the aircraft?” asked Dallas.
“No. Only before. Ron and Bob are not explosives guys. During the operation, Bob will man our big machine gun, the one that arrived in the canister…right here…that way he can cover all directions. His relief will be Ed Segal because he’ll be leaving early…and, anyway, a patrol can come from only one direction…straight down here from the building. The trick is to stay quiet.”
“Okay, sir. Gottit.”
“Right,” continued Rick. “Only six of you will work on the aircraft. Ed stands guard, while Bob cuts out the new exit.
“Now, the timers are set for sixty minutes after we’ve finished. That’s our getaway window. And we’re moving out fast to the west, on a different route back to the beach. There’s a gate in the way, which Bob will have dealt with before we reach it. You all know the reason for this…if we are caught on the fucking airfield, we don’t want to be restricted by just one way out through the wire, because that’s where any Argentinian patrol will be waiting for us, if they find it, and if they’ve got any sense.”
Everyone nodded, and Rick pressed on, lighting the map with his narrow flashlight.
“Okay, guys, we charge through Bob’s gate right here…and four hundred yards along here…on this track where we’re headed…the guys in planning have marked a very large low building, surrounded by wire, which they think is a huge ammunition dump.
“By the time we arrive there, Bob will have cut an entry gap, and we’ll proceed to blow it sky-high with the hand grenades. These places usually have a few minor explosions first, and then it takes about four more minutes for the whole lot to go up, which gives us time to get clear.
“As you all know, the massive blast will attract the Argentine patrols, and hopefully they’ll think it was some kind of accident. And hopefully no one will even guess we might blow the aircraft, and that’s important. Because until they see that ammo dump go up, they will not even suspect we were there.”
“How big a blast is it, taking out one of those aircraft?” asked Bob.
“Not much. Because it’s internal,” replied Rick. “Our aim
is to split the engine in half. This makes a bit of a thump, but it’s dull, muted, with hardly any flash. There’s a good chance they won’t even notice ’til the morning…if the guys at Coronado are correct, that ammunition dump is going to look, and sound, like Hiroshima for about twenty minutes. It’s full of fucking bombs and missiles and Christ knows what else…”
The SEALs spent another five minutes staring at the map, and then, gathering up the magnetic bombs and detonating gear, plus their own machine guns, hand grenades, and ammunition, they set off for the airfield, moving low through the elephant grass.
Using just the compass and GPS, they followed the detailed maps, which would lead them to the airfield and the destruction of the entire Argentinian air operation right here on Pebble Island.
It took them a couple of hours to get there, moving well off track, through the pitch-black night. When they arrived, they checked out the small settlement located close to the airstrip, on the south part of a narrow piece of land, about five miles from the landing area.
Each house was marked on the map, but the entire place was dark, no lights, no sentries, probably just the homes of Falkland Islanders, farmers. Anyway, there was not one sign of Argentinian military personnel.
The air base, according to all Coronado intelligence, now contained less than 75 personnel, and Rick’s map showed, accurately, he hoped, the position of all fifteen fighter aircraft on the ground parked in lines of three west of the runway. By 2300 they had not seen one guard patrol.
The problem was, as it so often was down here in the fickle, frigid weather systems of the South Atlantic, the wind seemed to be rising again. Rick Hunter could sense it gusting across Pebble Sound, and he imagined it putting whitecaps on the short, low waves through which they must drive the inflatables.
Out in front of the air base where they now stood, he could hear the wind tugging at the beach grass, and the black sky overhead seemed ominous. Rick imagined the dark cloud banks in layers that completely blocked out the moon and the stars.
Ghost Force Page 41
