Lion Resurgent

by Stuart Slade

  He relaxed and watched his command group go to work. All he had to worry about now was whether the Argies really would lob their strike at Glorious.

  Savoy Hotel, London

  Igrat liked the Savoy. There was something about the place that appealed to her more old-fashioned instincts. The renovation that had been finished a few years before had only added to the charms it held for her. It had needed the work badly. Bomb damage from the war and almost twenty years of near-total neglect had come close to leaving the hotel derelict beyond restoration. But, it had been saved. The new owner had invested almost another decade and millions of sovereigns in rebuilding its glories. Now, it was something quite unique. It was a hotel that appeared to belong in the 1920s. It was full of the promise of a golden age before the horrors of the depression and World War Two had given the world a darker and less optimistic shadow. Yet within the shell of the past was a modern and very well equipped hotel. Igrat approved of the blend.

  What she didn’t approve of was the way her instincts were working overtime to tell her something was wrong. It was a lesson she had both known for herself and one that she had been patiently taught. The one had reinforced the other. Instincts are your senses picking up information below the level at which you are consciously aware of them. But, your brain knows they are there and is frantically screaming warnings. Then one thing did catch her eye. She had left a horse hair trapped in the doorframe when she had left. That hair was now on the carpet.

  Casually, seemingly by accident, Igrat lightly kicked the door of the room next to hers twice. The kicks were too rapid to be a real accident. A slight pause and then a third kick. Then she went into her own room. Her senses kicked into overdrive. Heather Watson was already there.

  “You’re a whore.” Her voice was a near scream, loaded with viciousness and spite. There was even a trickle of saliva from one corner of her mouth. Heather’s sheer rage seemed to charge the air in the room with electricity

  “I know,” Igrat smiled politely. “I’m one of the best whores around. Everybody knows that. It’s just that I stopped charging for it a long time ago; well, mostly anyway. Now, I just accept the presents they give me. Just out of interest, how did you get in?”

  “I’ve got a greyhound badge too. I told the floor manager I had messages for you.”

  Igrat shook her head, tut-tutting theatrically. “You’re only supposed to use it on official business. You’re a naughty girl, Heather.”

  To Igrat’s secret glee Heather actually flushed with guilt before her anger reasserted itself. “You, you call me names? You’re a…”

  Igrat listened to the outburst, ostentatiously counting on her fingers. When Heather paused for breath, she cut in on the tirade. “You missed out tramp and slut. But they’re Americanisms so I’ll forgive you for those. You ought to try for a comprehensive description though. A description is useless if it isn’t complete.” Behind her air of amusement, Igrat was watching Heather carefully, intentionally goading her into losing her judgment. Another thing Igrat had learned a long way back. When she kept herself cool and the person threatening her didn’t, the odds swung dramatically in her favor.

  It was working. Igrat saw the skin around Heather’s eyes flush red and the corners of her eyes and mouth tighten. Heather had one hand in her bag when she screamed in rage. “Keep your hands off him, you bitch!”

  She dropped the handbag, clumsily drawing a knife in the process. Her hand lashed out, holding a kitchen carving knife with a six-inch blade. She slashed at Igrat who delicately side-stepped and grabbed Heather’s right wrist. Igrat then took a pace forward and made a half turn before she hooked her foot behind Heather’s left leg and jerked it out from under her. Heather Watson swayed for a split second before she crashed to the floor with Igrat on top of her. At some point in her fall, the hand holding the knife had been twisted up Heather’s back, keeping the blade well away from Igrat’s body. Once she was convinced Heather was pinned down, Igrat used her free hand to press a nerve center in the wrist. Heather’s hand went slack and the knife slipped from between her fingers.

  An ironic burst of applause echoed in the room. Igrat picked up Heather’s knife, then half-turned to look at Achillea who was standing in the communicating door between the two rooms. Henry McCarty was behind her, one of his Colt revolvers drawn. “Well, do you approve? You can have the knife for your collection if you want.”

  Achillea shook her head. “You were a little slow in taking her down. As to the knife, why would I want a cheap thing like that? Not worth the shelf space. Heather, when you’re buying a knife you get what you pay for and paying top dollar is worth every cent. Take a look at this.” She walked over to the desk, trapped the knife blade between the frame and a drawer, then jerked sharply downwards. The blade snapped with a dull click. “Hear that? Third or fourth-rate steel, no better than a table knife. It’ll break just when you need it most.”

  “And it’s too big.” Igrat chimed in. “Distance from the skin to vital organs is three inches, four at the outside. Anything more than that just makes the knife clumsier to use. Incidentally, do you plan to lie on the floor all evening?”

  Heather got up, crying from a mixture of shock and humiliation. Even so she was shocked to see that she was at least four inches taller than Igrat. Somehow, in the brief seconds of the fight, Igrat had kicked her stiletto heels off. Her sobbing redoubled.

  “You have every man you want. Why did you take mine away?”

  Igrat shook her head. “I haven’t taken him away. I just borrowed him, tried him out and returned him. Look Heather, you know Robbie always was a womanizer. I’m what you called me, a whore. Leopards never change their spots. Not me, not Robbie. You either have to accept it or leave him. Your decision. If it’s any consolation my partners have faced the same choice. They mostly leave.”

  Igrat patted Heather on the back sympathetically, hoping that Heather wouldn’t ask any more questions. The one thing Igrat didn’t want was to explain the real reason why Sir Robert Byrnes had ended up in her bed. Well, actually one of the Caledonian Club’s beds she reminded herself. The fewer people who knew she was interested in the Auxiliary Units the better. Sir Robert Byrnes had been a possible lead in to them from the financial side. They had to get funded somehow. Yet, if even half the stories were true, finding anything out about them was terminally dangerous. That train of thought caused her look at Heather sharply. The fight between them had really been very easy.

  “Anyway, Heather, if you decide to stay with him, look after him. Did you know he’s pining to have a kipper for his breakfast? Get him one now and then, even if you have to work hard to get it for him. A little bit of tender care like that and you’ll avoid most situations like this. Learn to live with who he is or accept being very lonely for a very long time. Now get out and never, ever, pull a knife on me again. This time I disarmed you. Next time… .” Igrat waved at Henry and Achillea. “They’ll do what they have to. Which is whatever it takes to protect me. Capische?”

  Heather left, slamming the door behind her. McCarty relaxed and returned his Colt to its holster. “Well, Iggie, do you think …”

  Igrat shook her head and rubbed her ear frantically. She had been putting facts together and the whole incident had been just too pat. It was a set up of some sort. The only question was why? The logical assumption was that this room was bugged. In fact, Igrat thought, that had to be why Heather had been here. She’s been bugging the room and I walked in on her. Everything else was a bit of inspired acting.

  McCarty nodded slightly. He’d followed the logic and come to the same conclusions. He picked up where he had left off smoothly. “… this will be a lesson for you? The only thing that puzzles me is why you don’t have angry wives coming after you more often. Or angry husbands for that matter.”

  “Raven says that if I’d grown up in her village, I would have had my nose cut off. Just the way I’m made, I guess. Heather just wanted to scare me off, that’s all. It’s all
over now and she won’t be back. I guess poor Robbie won’t be getting anything from her for weeks and weeks. I’ll have to try and make it up to him.”

  Achillea made a snorting noise; McCarty just laughed. Igrat bobbed her head slightly to acknowledge the response. “Thanks for the help guys.”

  The connecting door closed, leaving Igrat alone in her room. Before she showered and went to bed, Igrat looked around the room speculatively. I wonder here she put them?

  CHAPTER THREE SLUGGING MATCH

  Sea Mirage F.2 XD-321. Over the South Atlantic

  “Here they come.” Lieutenant Commander Toby Matthews heard the frantic bleeping of his radar warning system and passed the alert out to the other three Sea Mirages in his formation. Their radar warning equipment should sound the alarm as well, but there was no extra hazard in giving the verbal warning. There was always the possibility that somebody’s radar warner was on the fritz. He had already blown his drop tanks, taking a grim satisfaction in the act. The big tanks were in short supply and orders were to bring them back if possible. Nobody would argue that facing over a dozen Super-Crusaders made bringing them home impossible.

  Long white fingers of smoke were already reaching out towards him. He pulled his Mirage up into a loose barrel roll while he fired off the chaff dispensers built into his missile launch rails. Faced with over a dozen Sparrow missiles heading at his section of four fighters, he hoped that the chaff and the output from his jammer would be enough. The Argentine fighter pilots had probably fired off a single missile each, holding back their other pair for when the situation had matured. Matthews’s section was taking the Argentines head-on, hoping to fix their attention forward. That would exploit one of the F9Us weaknesses, the narrow scan of its radar. The large nose of the twin-engined Super-Mirage gave the radar mounted there a wider field of view. The hope was the dozen additional fighters coming up from Glorious would be able to stage an ambush.

  That put the four original CAP fighters into the unpleasant position of being bait. They were scattering in the face of the barrage of inbound missiles, each maneuvering to get away from the fingers that were reaching out to touch them. Half way between the groups of aircraft, Matthews saw a black ball of smoke, quickly followed by a second. It looked as if the AIM-7 Sparrow was following its known habit of exploding prematurely. The next explosion wasn’t so harmless. It enveloped one of the four Sea Mirages in a ball of fire. That left just three of them. Their trio of R-530 missiles seemed as puny a counterblow as it really was. The AIM-7 was a flawed and faulty missile that had never fulfilled its designers expectations; everybody who had studied weapons knew that. They also knew that the R-530 was even worse. All three missiles missed hopelessly.

  Matthews watched glumly as the radar contacts that represented the Argentine formation accelerated. The F9U could reach 1,900 miles per hour; its single J-93 engine gave as much thrust as the two Atar 9s on his Sea Mirage. It could outclimb and outdive him as well, by a wide margin. The only edge he had was that his larger wings meant he could out-turn the dark blue Crusaders. Sure enough, the Argentine formation started to swing upwards in an obvious preliminary to a dive through the Royal Navy aircraft before zooming up to high altitude again.

  That was when the trap was sprung. With their nose pointing upwards and their limited search scan, the Argentine formation had no warning of the salvo of R-530 missiles that engulfed them. The ambushing Sea Mirages had fired both their R-530s in the hope that if some didn’t bite, others would. The sky around the Argentine formation blackened with explosions and Matthews saw at least three of the Super-Crusaders dissolve in the black and red balls of flame. The Argentine formation had completely shattered with the assault. Their aircraft were all over the sky, their pilots trying to get them back under control. That was the trouble with the Mach 3 hot-rods Matthews thought. Once the pilot lets the bird get ahead of him, there’s no recovering. That wasn’t strictly true, but the fighter escort for the Argentine attack formation was all over the sky. The way was open for his group of three aircraft at least to engage the Skyhawks skimming the sea below.

  Those attack planes presented him with a target-rich environment, of that there was no doubt. The Skyhawks were spread out across a wide area. Nobody bunched aircraft together in tight formations any more. The use of nuclear-tipped air-to-air missiles had ended that. Here, the spread-out group of aircraft meant that engaging them would be hard and time consuming. Matthews put his Sea Mirage in a long curving dive that would bring him out behind the nearest Argentine aircraft. His annunciator was already growling when he saw four of the Skyhawks jettison their bombs and missiles. Those four were turning to meet his fighters. He could see the Sidewinder missiles on their outer wing hardpoints. He switched targets quickly; those four aircraft were no longer a threat to the surface ships.

  His wingtip R-550 missiles streaked out towards one of the bomb-carrying aircraft. One of the heat-seeking missiles flew straight into the sea; foxed by the flares the attack aircraft were dropping or perhaps seduced by heat reflecting off the surface of the sea. The other missile exploded right behind the Skyhawk. It cartwheeled into the sea. Matthews pulled out of his dive and tried to climb clear. The four Skyhawks that had assumed the role of escort were closing in fast. He rolled, racking his Sea Mirage around in a turn that sent his vision graying out. It was too close for missiles even if he’d had one left but his two 30mm cannon still had the punch needed. Their shells slammed into one of the attacking Skyhawks. He saw its pilot eject a split second before his aircraft exploded.

  Matthews climbed clear for a second, while he watched another one of the Skyhawk bombers crash into the sea and a third start to trail smoke. For a moment he wished he’d been armed with the R-510, the missile intended to shoot down America’s B-52s. It was slower and less agile than the R-550, but it had a much larger warhead. Then he saw that two of the Argentine Skyhawks that had come after his fighters had survived. More than that; they had finished off another one of his Sea Mirages. Everybody was down to cannon now. That meant those two Skyhawks had to go before he could get back to attacking the bombers that were now perilously close to Glorious and her escorts. He curved after them and watched them respond in kind. They might be slow and poorly armed, but the little Skyhawks could turn tighter than any of the supersonic jets could manage.

  They proved that by turning into the two attacking Mirages. Matthews could see the flashing from the wing root-mounted 20mm guns. Balls of fire streaked past his cockpit. He squeezed the trigger on his own guns, sending the 30mm shells out in return. Some of them bit home. One Skyhawk lurched and headed downwards. Matthews racked his Sea Mirage around to administer the coup de grace but it wasn’t necessary. The Skyhawk had made an emergency landing on the sea and was already sinking, its tail pointing upwards as it slipped under. Beside the fuselage, the Argentine pilot was scrambling into a rubber raft. What had happened to the other Skyhawk and the one remaining Mirage of his section? Both had gone and Matthews guessed what had happened. The two pilots had been so fixated on firing at each other they had left pulling out too late and the two aircraft had collided head-on.

  Feeling very lonely and wondering what had happened to the other CAP Sea Mirages, Matthews set off after the distant Skyhawks. They were already closing on Glorious and her escorts. He guessed he wouldn’t get there in time to do any good. In the event, it wouldn’t matter. He felt a violent explosion aft and saw the engine dials on his instrument panel had either gone dead or flipped into the red zone. Behind him, a pair of F9Us were already arching skywards. The AIM-7 might be a tricky and unreliable beast, but the AIM-9 was simple and trustworthy. One of them had taken both his engines out. Matthews had just enough control left to ditch his fighter. Then, he too was straggling to get into his raft before the plane sank under him.

  Operations Room, HMS Glowworm

  “Air Warfare Team ready, Sir.” Lieutenant Commander Simon Baxter was standing in the Air Warfare Alley, beside the main plot. Th
e screens were a confused mass that showed the dogfight going on out along the threat axis and the raid that had broken through the combat air patrol. Admiral Lanning had his three Sea Dart armed G-class destroyers out along the threat axis. The Sea Slug-equipped Electra and Eclipse were guarding the back door. That put Glowworm, Grafton and Greyhound right in the front line. Our job, if necessary, is to die gloriously in defense of the carrier. Baxter winced to himself at the involuntary pun. There was a strange quiet in the Ops Room; the kind of quiet one felt rather than heard. It reminded Baxter of a public library full of well-behaved citizens

  “Fighters are breaking off, Sir.” Air Warfare gave the status report unemotionally Baxter looked at the plot. It showed twelve tracks coming over the radar horizon in a great arc. The Argentine pilots knew their business. They’d spread out to prevent the radars on the defending destroyers from engaging multiple targets. This is going to be hairy.

  “Engage designated targets.”

  He felt Glowworm lurch under his feet as the first of the missiles in her vertical launch silo amidships left its tube. Ten second later it was followed by a second and then a third. On the target display, the missiles reached out to touch the inbound Skyhawks. Other tracks came from the Glowworm’s sister ships. The position of the Skyhawks blurred as their jammers tried to deceive the missiles. Then their tracks vanished completely as the chaff clouds masked their position. The interference cleared quickly as the radars switched to different frequencies.