Prince Hunter

by Garrett Russell

  Linda spoke first. She stood up from where she had perched in the companionway and looked directly at Hawker. ‘I’ve already said it. I’m in no matter what.’

  ‘Same,’ said Sullivan, standing on the dock beside Grivas. ‘For Ireland!’

  O’Hara shuffled his feet in a clumsy pattern on the deck.

  ‘Aye!’ he called out without looking up.

  ‘Ja!’ Kreuzer raised his hand in a Nazi salute exaggerated almost to the point of unaware caricature.

  Grivas nodded with pleasure. ‘Capitán Hawker,’ he stated with his own much less ostentatious salute, ‘let us sail into history.’

  The morning breeze being still light and fitful they nosed out of Playa Brava under power. Sleipnir’s compact four cylinder Renault marine diesel engine pushed her along at a leisurely five knots. Her hull speed was slowed by the slight beard of marine growth sprouting from her undersides, but Hawker wanted it left that way – just as a boat that has been to sea for an extended ocean passage would be expected to look.

  The Bertram ploughed through the water astern of them, Grivas casually handling the flybridge helm.

  ‘You told me you were out of the military,’ Linda sat close to Hawker at the big stainless steel helm shortly after they settled into cruising routine. ‘So, what in hell is all this about, Capitán?’

  ‘You’ll get as much briefing as I need to provide when we’re established under sail,’ he said in reply to the challenge.

  ‘Let me guess. We’re going to load this tub with high explosives and kamikaze it into a British carrier.’

  ‘Very astute,’ Hawker laughed freely for the first time in a week. ‘You’re closer than you think.’

  ‘It doesn’t take an Einstein to add Gaffney to your Junta pals and come up with an English target. Though I have to admit I’m a teensy bit disappointed. I’d figured we might be going in to somehow overthrow Galtieri.’

  An hour and a half out, the breeze freshened from the northeast. They set sail for a broad reach on a diagonal course across the Plata. Sleipnir’s wardrobe of cruising sails did not include a spinnaker so they made do with the main and big overlapping genoa. Hawker stayed on the helm and watched the others work on the deck without giving them a word of command once they started. Kreuzer was good on the foredeck. O’Hara was unfamiliar with the rig, but he worked well and comfortably under Kreuzer’s direction. Linda’s ability needed no further proof and Sullivan proved adept at setting the main and trimming the sheets to variations in the wind.

  When he was satisfied that they were trimmed comfortably for the course, Hawker called them all to the aft cockpit, handed the helm to Linda and sat up on the coach house roof to address them. When he finished 20 minutes later, Sullivan let out a long slow whistle of admiration.

  Kreuzer repeated, as if to convince himself he had understood correctly, ‘we take this boat to the midst of the British fleet; we board Invincible; we take their prince from under their noses; we do it in his own helicopter. Mein Gott, if we succeed, what glory!’

  ‘We will succeed because it is so surprising,’ said Hawker. ‘Now you know why a non-Latin crew was so essential. In the minds of the Royal Navy we have no connection to the Falklands conflict, yet a highly plausible reason to be in the combat zone.’

  ‘I still don’t get it,’ said Linda suspiciously. ‘Why are you involved in this, Paul? You’re half English for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Hawker nodded. ‘Already too many of my countrymen – my countrymen on both sides – have died for a few hectares of icy rock. This is the only way I know how to have a chance of ending the fight before many more die. If we succeed, we will not add one more drop of blood.’

  ‘What about Prince bloody Andrew?’ sneered O’Hara.

  Hawker slid off the cabin top and leapt across the cockpit in one swift move. He grabbed O’Hara’s windproof jacket in both hands and hauled him to his feet so smoothly that the big man helped lift himself in surprise. Hawker then pushed hard with both fists. O’Hara tipped back off balance. His legs caught on the cockpit coaming and he fell until his head and shoulders fouled the wire of the safety rail. Hawker carried himself forward onto O’Hara’s chest, using his own weight to pin the Irishman down. He brought his face within a hand breadth of O’Hara’s and yelled loud enough for all to clearly hear, ‘What about Prince Andrew is this: he stays alive. That is the one and only objective of this mission. Andrew alive is what we need to bring Britain and Argentina to bargain with honour. He must be handed back to his country humiliated but unharmed, despite the basest desires of the IRA, the Hitler Youth or even your own black heart. That is why your orders, issued to you now, are to protect Prince Andrew with your own life if necessary. Do you understand?’

  O’Hara glared back, cold and fanatical.

  ‘Aye,’ he said at length. None of the others had moved as much as an inch.

  ‘Do you?’ Hawker let his hands move to O’Hara’s throat, thumbs feeling for the windpipe.

  ‘Aye,’ said O’Hara. He nodded his head in unison with every other head in that cockpit nodding.

  ‘Hola! What happens?’ Grivas’ voice, metallic and distorted, broke the tableau. Hawker stood back and O’Hara sat up, swallowing hard and silently.

  ‘Answer me,’ Grivas was talking through a loud hailer from the flybridge of the Bertram, which he had brought close alongside.

  ‘Nothing to worry about now,’ Hawker called back. ‘Another slight misunderstanding.’

  Grivas gave him a menacing stare but throttled back and resumed his station on their aft starboard quarter.

  The yacht fell into a long silence that some filled attending studiously to sail trim or tidying lines which were already neatly coiled. Linda decided to break it, clearly trying to bring them all back to an even keel with a mild and unconnected question.

  ‘What happens to Sleipnir when the British pick up the crew?’

  ‘She dies,’ Hawker replied simply. ‘My last action on board is to scuttle her. We’re supposed to be sinking anyway, remember?’

  ‘Mary Mother of God,’ Sullivan whispered with a low whistle under his breath. ‘Sleipnir’s the right name for us, then.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Linda.

  ‘It’s what the name means,’ Sullivan replied. ‘Quite appropriate really. It’s the name of a horse.’

  ‘You mean the Trojan horse?’ said Hawker. ‘I used that analogy myself to describe the plan. Didn’t know it had a name.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant at all,’ Sullivan said thoughtfully. ‘Sleipnir is a Viking word, from Norse mythology. It’s the name of Odin’s eight-legged horse, believed to carry dead warriors from the battlefield to Valhöll.’

  ‘The way this one could carry all of us if the mission does not go according to plan,’ Kreuzer mournfully concluded, breaking the silence he had maintained since his stated dream of glory.

  Hawker left them all to their thoughts and went below to fetch his half-completed ship’s log from his sea bag. He had planned to write as much as possible of it on this little voyage with the thought that the pitching of the boat would add a convincing touch of realism.

  Before starting on the log, he jotted a list of their names on a loose sheet of paper and brought it back up topsides.

  ‘Here,’ he handed it to Sullivan, addressing them all. ‘I’ve worked out the watches. Two on, three off, in a two hour rotation. The day sailing pleasure cruise we’ve indulged in since Playa Brava is now over and the watch keeping starts when the next hour ticks over in …’ he glanced at his watch, ‘… sixteen minutes. Get yourselves sorted now. And don’t think the off watch can just play lazy buggers. I’ll be back up in a minute with some books for you to study. They’re accounts of sailing around Cape Horn, as we’re supposed to have done.’

  They sailed into the sunset and on into the inky darkness of night, still too far away from the southern shore to pick up any of Buenos Aires’ sprawling light. The loom of Montevid
eo sat like a ghost on the horizon behind their right shoulder, and under it the white and red running lights of their Bertram escort. There was little other traffic either port or starboard, and Hawker wondered what effect this stupid war was having on the economy of his native country. Even on a Sunday he would have expected to see a good handful of bulk carriers entering and leaving port.

  O’Hara surprised them all when he volunteered to take galley duty and amazed them more when he produced a respectable meal. ‘Learning to cook’s like a case of survival on a trawler,’ he muttered in response to the compliments.

  They were drinking coffee from thick-rimmed mugs when Hawker tuned the radio to the BBC World Service. The headlines were from the Falklands: the islands had been bombed by British forces from the air and sea that day. Linda saw the strain on Hawker’s face.

  ‘Poor Paul,’ she said with sympathy. ‘You really believe in this, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s the only thing I can believe in,’ he said, drawing his hands across his eyes, ‘and I’m afraid time is running out too fast.’

  ‘There’s something more. Something you’re not telling that’s driving you on,’ she said with gentle and surprising insight.

  ‘There’s nothing,’ he said, and covered his face with the coffee mug to hide the horrible truth.

  Over 11,000 kilometres away another man switched off the BBC News. He was sitting by a darkened window looking at the cosy lights of the cottage across and a short walk down the road. An American-made M-16 automatic rifle with a full magazine was propped against the wall beside him, and next to it a sniper’s rifle with night sight.

  ‘Boring,’ he lamented with a yawn. ‘When’s the next call we’re supposed to get from Gaffney?’

  ‘A couple of hours,’ said a voice from the interior darkness behind him.

  ‘I hope he doesn’t bloody make it. This waiting’s killing me.’

  ‘He’ll make it, that’s to be sure. Then a few hours more and it’ll be two in the morning and Tom’n’Mick’ll be up to relieve us.’

  ‘I wish I knew what Pat Gaffney’s got cooking down there with the dagoes.’

  ‘Whatever it is it’s important and it’s getting close. I can tell by the tone in his voice.’

  ‘I bloody hope so,’ the man at the window picked up the sniper rifle and trained the sight on the warm glow of the cottage windows. He focussed on the woman with the golden hair, brushing it in a mirror. He placed the crosshairs between Anne Hawker’s ear and her eye.

  ‘My trigger finger isn’t half getting itchy. And that’s not all.’ He dropped the rifle barrel a fraction to shift his focus to the silhouette of her breast under the nightgown. ‘I’m fairly scratching to give her one right between the legs.’

  Monday 10 May 1982

  They made Buenos Aires by late afternoon.

  Grivas brought the Bertram alongside the yacht when the city skyline first began to sprout on the horizon ahead. Hawker hove Sleipnir to while Grivas handed the helm to his crewman, then waited as the crewman manoeuvred to bring the powerboat closer. Picking his moment as the lazy swell briefly nudged the gunwales of the two vessels together, he stepped across with practised ease.

  Transfer completed, the Bertram broke away and arced around their bow to power away on a more easterly heading. It lifted quickly to the plane leaving a wake of frothing white water and a thick pall of smoke as the twin engines coughed themselves free of the oil accumulated in hours of running just above idle.

  ‘I thought it better to separate out here,’ Grivas explained as he clambered into the cockpit. ‘We don’t know what prying eyes are watching closer to the naval base. Should you consider covering the name on the transom as a further precaution?’

  The Bertram was heading to the east of the city, to the base from where they’d departed on Friday. Sleipnir was headed west of the city, towards Olivos and Hawker’s own marina.

  The sun was low and red in the sky by the time Hawker nosed up to the dock. Luis was waiting to take the mooring lines, a broad white smile splitting the carved teak features of his old face. Behind him a couple of toughs in sports jackets and dark glasses tried to look part of the scene.

  ‘Ah, padrone, it’s good to see you again,’ Luis beamed. He pointed a thumb back over his shoulder at the two toughs. ‘They told me you would come and I …’ he slapped his hand on his heart, ‘… I did not believe them.’

  ‘Believe it, old friend,’ Hawker answered cheerfully. ‘You’ll know it’s real when you see how much work I have for us to share.’

  Luis made fast the lines and fretted about setting a spring line to hold the yacht snug to the dock. Hawker stepped ashore with his sea bag slung over his shoulder and held it out to one of the toughs with an imperious, officerly gesture. The man accepted the command without comment and took the bag from him. He’s supposed to be a chauffeur, Hawker thought to himself, make him act like one.

  The toughs loaded everyone’s bags into the boots of two identical Ford Falcons and beckoned them all into the cars.

  Grivas, Linda and Hawker climbed in to the first. Sullivan, O’Hara and Kreuzer piled in to the second. They were gone from the marina within five minutes of docking.

  ‘You’ve left Luis on his own,’ Hawker said to Grivas as they pulled out to the main road. ‘You must trust him more than you trust me.’

  ‘He knows much less than you. And he remains under surveillance,’ said Grivas, telling Hawker what he already suspected but had wanted to confirm.

  They drove quietly through the early evening traffic, the two Falcons close together, cutting across the city centre on the Diagonal Norte road to the huge roundabout at Plaza de Mayo, then out towards the Naval School of Engineering.

  ‘It’s nice to be home,’ Hawker said with a wry smile as the Falcon’s tyres crunched into the gravel of the driveway past the sternly official sign announcing where they were.

  ‘You’re kidding. You actually live here?’ said Linda, peering up at the domineering façade.

  ‘No, not usually,’ Hawker replied. ‘I was thinking of the last time I arrived here. The company was similar, the circumstances weren’t.’

  ‘You’ll have a different room this time,’ Grivas said quickly. Too quickly. Linda’s eyebrows arched lightly as she noted his discomfort.

  The cars crunched to a halt and the men tumbled out of the second one before the first driver had got around to deferentially opening the door for Grivas.

  ‘Hey, where the fuck is this?’ O’Hara demanded. ‘Gaffney didn’t say anything about any Escoola Ignorama.’

  ‘Escuala de Ingeniaria,’ Grivas corrected politely. ‘It may not have five stars from Michelin, my friend, but I am sure you will find your accommodations most satisfactory. The orderly will show you to your quarters. Capitán Hawker and I have a meeting to attend.’ He barked an order to the uniformed sailor who stood to attention by the door, then continued in Spanish to Hawker. ‘Follow me. The old man wants to see us immediately.’

  Anaya was in his office drinking coffee from one of his liveried cups. Platters of neatly cut ham sandwiches and Viennese style pastries were spread on the table in front of him, and two more places for coffee were set. The fine bone china service with its blue and gold decoration, the ambience of the richly wood panelled room and the delicacy of the food made a scene of suitably refined elegance for the most civilised occasion in every self-respecting Argentine’s day. The six o’clock coffee and pastry ritual is a hallowed tradition, and an essential one in a land where dinner is never served before ten or twelve at night.

  Once again, Hawker felt like an executive about to sit down and discuss a deal in the pampered atmosphere of a private club. Anaya’s set dressing would have been perfect for effect but was let down by the man himself. His face was heavy and grey, his hands shaking so much that they rattled the fine coffee cup dangerously in its saucer.

  ‘You’ve heard the news?’ he groaned. ‘Galtieri and Costa-Mendez tango with the bureaucr
ats of the United Nations while Thatcher bombs our Malvinas from the sky and the sea.’

  ‘It is not good,’ Grivas shook his head gravely.

  Anaya’s voice sounded old and brittle. He clattered his cup down on the table and cleared his throat. ‘It makes your operation more important than ever. I am the only leader with the power to save the situation. I … we … must move at once. Hawker, you will leave tonight.’

  ‘Impossible,’ said Hawker.

  Anaya leaned forward, threatening. ‘I tell my junior officers what is possible, not the other way around.’

  ‘I am not one of your junior officers, Anaya.’

  ‘Almirante Anaya!’ He huffed with rage. ‘And I order you to go now.’

  ‘We’re not prepared,’ Hawker said evenly.

  ‘You have the crew you demanded. You have the boat you insisted upon and wasted two valuable days to deliver. What more do you want?’ His anger brought him upright, chest puffed proud.

  Hawker stayed cool. ‘The documents aren’t yet delivered. The boat needs preparation work which we can’t even begin until tomorrow. There is another test of the crew I must do before I can be sure of these Irishmen. And you have not given me the information on Invincible’s position which you undertook to provide.’

  Anaya deflated. ‘The weather around the Malvinas has been appalling. Low cloud, fog and winter storms blowing early. My naval Super Etendards fly daily from land bases, but …’ he gave a Latin shrug, ‘I can give you no more than the general position of the fleet.’

  ‘Not good enough,’ said Hawker, standing up. ‘I will need two more days to have the boat and crew ready. If I don’t have a plot on Invincible by then the whole mission will have to be aborted because there is no other way that I can have any confidence in getting aboard. You have until Wednesday to gather that intelligence and then we can go that night. But no sooner.’

  He strode for the door. Grivas sprang from his seat to stop him but Anaya waved him away. Grivas followed Hawker out and down the corridor.