Ghost Force

by Patrick Robinson

  Huddled behind the windshields, trying to keep down out of the cold, the U.S. Navy SEAL team took another half hour to make White Rock Point. They never saw a boat, never heard an aircraft, never even saw a light, neither onshore nor at sea.

  They cut back the throttles at the sight of the flashing beacon on the point, and came trundling slowly over the shallow kelp beds with engines slightly raised, and into Falkland Sound. Rick Hunter ordered a course change to one-seven-zero to bring them back into the south-running channel, and at this speed, on much calmer waters, they made hardly a sound, even in the shattering silence of the night.

  But they did make some sound, and an alert military surveillance system would have picked it up. Commander Hunter could only ascertain there was no one around, that the Argentinians had abandoned all forms of observation in the remote, scarcely populated northern waters of both West and East Falkland. Coronado, as usual, was correct.

  After two miles, running at only eight knots, Commander Hunter ordered another change—“Two-two-five, Eddie…we want to head down the shore of West Falkland, slowly, for about eight miles. That’s when we turn away and find shelter…”

  “You know where we do that, sir?” asked Ed Segal.

  “Sure,” said the Commander. “We’ll head into Many Branch Harbor…that’s to our right, a landlocked bay with only one narrow entrance…”

  “Wouldn’t want to get caught in there, would we?” said Mike Hook. “Not with only one way out.”

  “It would be almost impossible to get caught in there,” said Rick. “It has probably six narrow bays within the bay, three of them a couple miles long. And there’s probably another three just as sheltered. Plus the place is surrounded by mountains, some high, some lower, but protective hills. We could hole up in there for a month and never be found.”

  “Unless we got spotted by some goddamned shepherd, sir—isn’t this place supposed to be covered in sheep?”

  “Not in Many Branch Bay, Mike. It doesn’t even figure on Coronado’s Falklands farming chart—and the words settlement or sheep station do not appear in a fifteen-mile radius of the harbor. These Royal Navy charts are excellent, and this doesn’t show even a dock, or a group of moorings.”

  “Anyway, we land in the dark, and leave in the dark, right?” said Mike. “How long are we in there for?”

  “If we get through to Foxtrot-three-four—we’ll be gone by 2030 tonight.”

  0900, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 27

  ARGENTINE MILITARY GARRISON

  GOOSE GREEN, EAST FALKLAND

  Goose Green—Mount Pleasant HQ. We have reports of a massive attack on the airfield at Pebble Island. All fighter aircraft destroyed, ammunition dump still blazing, everything destroyed. No casualties, but Pebble air base requests assistance for aerial surveillance. Proceed all three helicopters to Pebble Island immediately, with troops embarked. Repeat, proceed to Pebble Island. Runways and landing areas intact.

  Will extra assistance fly up from Mount Pleasant?

  Affirmative. Six helicopters and three fixed-wing aircraft, containing a detachment of seventy-five troops.

  Do we have a warship in the area?

  Negative. But destroyer scheduled to depart Mare Harbor at 1100 today.

  We’re on our way, sir.

  The problem with that final piece of Argentinian naval intelligence was that it would never happen. Even as the radio communications flashed between Mount Pleasant and Goose Green, U.S. Navy SEAL Lt. Commander Chuck Stafford and his underwater team were edging their way back to their base camp meeting point on the shores of East Cove.

  They had been holed up for three days, with all their gear and two inflatables in a deep cave right on the shore, which had the inestimable advantage of flooding to a depth of almost two feet at high tide. This meant they kept everything in the boats, and jumped aboard, all twelve of them, when the cave floor started to submerge.

  Their getaway was timed for the rising tide at 1900 this evening, when there would be just sufficient water in the cave to escape fast, approximately ninety minutes before the tide peaked at 2030.

  More significant, however, was the fact that the veteran explosives expert Stafford and five of his crack underwater crew had attached limpet bombs to all four of the Argentine warships currently moored in Mare Harbor, two old Type-42 destroyers and two guided-missile Exocet frigates.

  They were timed to detonate at 2230, which gave the fleeing SEALs ample time to make the three-mile journey back to their cave, over very rough ground, and then get well under cover for the blasting of Mare Harbor.

  Right now, Lt. Commander Stafford and his team were cooking hot soup on their Primus. And no one south of Coronado, except for the crew of USS Toledo , had the slightest idea they were there.

  Forty miles away to the northwest, Commander Hunter’s team were hunkered down in the long narrow landlocked bay that runs to a cul-de-sac, southwest out of the main harbor, following the line of the shore.

  After a two-hour search they found this utterly desolate spot and chugged into a fifty-foot inlet surrounded by rocky cliffs perhaps fifteen feet high. Rick Hunter had taken one look at it and ordered Brian Harrison to jump out and see what he could see from the cliff top to the east.

  The SEAL Petty Officer climbed the easy sloping rock face and was gone for fifteen minutes. When he returned, he told them, “There’s a line of low hills about two hundred yards from here. From the top I can see the Sound, way beyond the entrance to the harbor. Aside from that there’s nothing, not even a house, not even a shed. And no sheep.”

  Rick Hunter had already dismissed the idea of any warship coming after them because the water through the harbor entrance was too shallow, maybe eight feet. Even a patrol boat would think twice.

  Which essentially meant that the two teams of United States Navy Special Forces, the specialists from SPECWARCOM, were, for the moment, safely in their daytime quarters, unseen, and unknown to their enemy. Which was the way they liked it.

  On the other hand, on the far distant shore, Captain Jarvis and his team were slightly the worse for wear. They had made their way to a lonely hillside above Egg Harbor, and positioned themselves in a gully from where they could see down to the waters of Falkland Sound. However, the damn place had little vegetation, and they’d used up much of it on the first night, when they cut the gorse and pulled up grass to give themselves shelter from aerial search.

  They’d twice almost been caught moving across the narrow causeway that passes Goose Green, both times by vehicle patrols, but each time they had gone to ground, flattened into the earth, machine guns primed in case they were seen. Both times happened in the late afternoon, and both times the patrols were moving too fast, but the second one passed less than twenty feet from where they were all prostrate, facedown in a ditch.

  But the Argentinians did not see them, and when the night grew darker Captain Jarvis steered his men across the barren wasteland of East Falkland to the tiny harbor where he expected the American, Sunray, and his guys to show up.

  The silence of Tuesday night, at least it was silent on East Falkland, was a major disappointment to the Captain. No radio communication had been received, and the SAS men were growing tired in their filthy, dirty clothes, totally without any form of washing kit, bereft of razors or shaving soap, no deodorant.

  They had maintained fairly high standards of eating, and last night, against his better judgment, when it was clear Sunray had gone missing, Douglas authorized a new sheep rai
d, and at midnight they had all enjoyed excellent roast lamb and some kind of pressurized bars of spinach that tasted like cow shit. At least according to Trooper Wiggins they did.

  But there was no injury or illness. Everyone felt fine, but disheveled. And up here in the hide above Egg Harbor they were nowhere near fresh water, and their supplies were running short. That night Troopers Goddard and Fermer went to sleep in the gully under the bushes with sheep’s blood on their hands.

  As Jake Posgate had remarked, “It’s like a scene from Dracula’s Revenge up here.”

  “Just so long as it’s not the revenge of Señor Alvarez, the Argentine monster, it’s okay with me,” said Peter Wiggins.

  And so they slept, aware only faintly of the Argentine search going on for them, because it was being conducted in a thoroughly halfhearted way. Just the occasional helicopter flying north, and nothing overhead along the Egg Harbor shoreline. Douglas guessed, correctly, the Jeep that contained the bodies of the four Argentine soldiers had not yet been found.

  But this morning, Wednesday, the skies suddenly resembled World War III. It was now 0930 and three helicopters had taken off in quick succession from Goose Green headed due west, straight over the SAS hide at high speed, not slowing, heading up Falkland Sound.

  Three fixed-wing military aircraft had also flown just to the north of them, heading the same way, at no more than 5,000 feet. In the distance they could hear more helicopters clattering, just west of Carlos Water, all apparently heading for the same objective.

  “Jesus,” said Douglas, “they must have found the bodies.” He was as yet unaware of the devastation on Pebble Island, and an hour from now he would be too far away to comprehend the ensuing chaos in Mare Harbor. Right now he was merely counting off the hours to 2000 tonight, when he prayed he would hear again from the elusive Sunray.

  Rick Hunter, too, and all of his team, watched the helos thumping through the leaden skies directly overhead. But they were not surprised, only thanking God they had risked the heavy seas and put ten miles between themselves and the Pebble Island airfield. It was crystal clear to them where all of that Argentinian military hardware was headed.

  Rick was very contemplative, as they sat in the lee of the rocky overhang in their tiny bay, within the big long bay, which in turn was within the five-mile-wide Many Branch Harbor. He knew it would be impossible to see them from the air, and even from the south they must surely have been completely hidden.

  To find SEAL Assault Team One, an Argentine search helicopter would need to be flying about fifty feet above the ground, very slowly, southwest of them, heading northeast. And even then it would be touch and go. The chances of a pilot finding exactly the right height, speed, and direction were, in Rick’s view, negligible. Unless, of course, someone had told him where they were.

  At 1030 it was still silent in Many Branch Harbor. No fishing boats. No boats of any kind. Although from the bluff, Brian Harrison reported a couple of trawlers heading north up Falkland South, maybe two or three miles from their little bay.

  At 1030 in Mare Harbor, however, things were not silent. Lt. Commander Stafford’s twelve limpet bombs, stuck on the warships’ hulls, below the waterline, for’ard, midships and aft, all detonated together with a dull underwater k-e-r-r-u-m-p!! , which caused the jetties to shudder and the harbor waters to rise up into a boiling maelstrom, which crashed onto the shore, obscuring for a moment the savage destruction of all four ships.

  When Argentinian naval personnel looked again, staring through the spray and billowing smoke, they were unable to comprehend what they were most certainly observing. Four warships, calmly moored on the jetties, with no enemy on the horizon, ablaze from end to end. And the skies were completely empty—no one had dropped a bomb, never mind four bombs.

  Officers gathered together and quickly leapt to the alarmingly false conclusion that someone’s Navy had lambasted the ships with guided missiles, well-aimed guided missiles at that.

  But no one had seen anything, no dart-shaped winged killer with a fiery tail hurtling out of the skies. And these ships must have been hit by more than one missile apiece since all of them were ablaze in three different places. Great fires were raging below the foredecks, huge flames and billowing black smoke were surging upward from the engine room area, and one of the frigates looked as though its stern was blown clean off the hull. This was a big multi-hit, carried out by forces who knew precisely what they were doing.

  But whose forces? The surrendered Brits, what was left of them, were limping home. Caramba! Everyone in Argentina had seen the aerial photographs of the defeated Royal Navy Fleet heading north back up the Atlantic. No, the Brits had not done this. Then who had? There was not a sign of a foreign warship in the waters surrounding the Malvinas within a two-hundred-mile radius. And the skies were clear of military aircraft. Any aircraft, for that matter.

  And if it was not bombs or missiles, then what was it? The gathering of Argentinian naval officers, still staring in disbelief at the torrid scene of absolute devastation in the harbor, were totally baffled. Nonetheless, they moved into action, trying to organize stretcher parties to evacuate the wounded, trying to connect fire hoses to aim at the ships, which were growing hotter by the minute.

  They were also trying to work out how quickly to evacuate the entire area when the first fire blazed into one of the ships’ missile magazines and unleashed the kind of power that could swiftly knock down a town, never mind a few stone buildings in a scarcely used harbor.

  As a matter of fact, the scene was much like that which faced the British in February, when their 1,400-ton lightly gunned patrol ship Leeds Castle was obliterated by Argentinian missiles. As Saint Matthew mentioned in Chapter XXVI, Those who take the sword, will perish by the sword. And, since Matthew was quoting Jesus Christ, those words were presumably equally applicable in both the Roman Catholic church in Rio Grande and in the Protestant Christ Church cathedral in Port Stanley.

  And on the subject of death, Lt. Commander Stafford’s men had caused a lot more of it than Rick Hunter’s team, and they made Douglas Jarvis’s skirmish on the mountain look like kids’ stuff.

  There were crews of at least twenty-two officers and men resident in each of the warships, some on watch, some asleep, some working on maintenance in the engine rooms. A total of only nine survived the savage blasts, the ramifications of which would be heard around the world.

  By 1100, there was virtual chaos in the Argentine military headquarters at Mount Pleasant, as commanders tried to make sense of the barbaric unprovoked attacks on their bases by an unknown enemy. Just the previous day, the Marine Major Pablo Barry had flown in for a visit, and the entire officer community, on sea, air, and land, was now looking to him for guidance. Major Barry had, after all, been the commander who conquered the damn place in the first case.

  But he was as bewildered as any of them, and, generally speaking, was greatly concerned that the enemy, whoever the hell it might be, would probably be considering flattening the only Argentine military base on the Malvinas they had not already eliminated: that is, the very ground on which they stood.

  The news from Pebble was plainly terrible. But the news from Mare Harbor was much worse, given the heavy loss of life. Major Pablo Barry stared out at the airfield in silent rumination. Lined up were Argentina’s all-conquering Skyhawks, Daggers, and Etendards, the most dangerous air combat force in South America. And he did not have the slightest idea at whom to unleash them.

  The entire situation was, in his opinion, extremely unnerving. Here they were being smashed to pieces by an enemy who was refusing to identify himself, an enemy they could not see, no
r even discern. Only one thought evolved in his mind: Those ships were not hit by incoming bombs, nor missiles. And, given the near-simultaneous attack on Pebble Island, there was no question of sabotage.

  No , thought Major Barry. Those ships were blown up inside the harbor, by bombs that must have been attached to the hulls . Nothing else fit. Nothing else made the slightest bit of sense. Someone, somehow, had crept into the little dockyard, underwater, and planted bombs under the surface, all timed to go off bang at once.

  Major Barry now knew that someone had done something very similar to the fighter aircraft at Pebble. The question was, who? Which country hated Argentina so badly they would do such a thing? And did it all have anything to do with the sheep stealers up at Port Sussex? And, if so, where the hell were they? Why had they not been found? And where was the missing patrol? Major Barry had about a thousand questions and no answers to any of them.

  But shortly after noon, someone provided him with just one answer. Luke Milos, wandering among his sheep up in the high pastures above his house, had found the Jeep, and all four men inside had been assassinated, shot to pieces, dozens of bullet wounds. What’s more, they had been dead for at least three days, probably since Sunday night. The Goose Green garrison had a medical team up there already and were towing the Jeep out, bringing its grisly cargo back in body bags.

  On the face of it, the Argentine military had now been slammed three times, and Major Barry considered it inconceivable the three were not, somehow, connected. Although what the sheep stealers had in common with possibly two highly trained groups of Special Forces…well, heaven alone knew the answer to that.

  But the Major was aware the sheep stealers were very possibly a British SAS assault team trapped, and surviving, on East Falkland after the surrender. Were the bombers of Pebble and Mare somehow connected? Did Great Britain have an ally who was prepared to fight on when all seemed lost?