Prince Hunter

by Garrett Russell

  ‘You were very quiet in the face of such scandalous insubordination,’ said Hawker.

  ‘I was thinking,’ replied Grivas.

  ‘An independent thought. That would be a change.’

  Grivas ignored the provocation. ‘I was thinking about another way to get intelligence on Invincible.’

  ‘That is an independent thought,’ Hawker stopped in mid stride and gave Grivas a glance of grudging admiration. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Later,’ Grivas smiled tightly. ‘I need to develop the thought. And I also want to let Anaya fail at it first.’

  Their quarters were at ground level in a small wing at the rear of the building. There was a row of small bedrooms along a deep colonnaded verandah that looked over a small square of garden. On the other side of the garden was a high brick wall topped with barbed wire and broken glass. At one end of the row of bedrooms was a slightly larger common room, sparsely furnished with a couple of cracked leather armchairs and a rickety sideboard. They appeared to be cast offs from a senior officers’ mess in Hawker’s not inexperienced estimation. At the far end of the verandah was a communal lavatory block.

  ‘Accommodation for junior officers here on short term courses,’ Grivas explained. ‘Not in current use so we have it all to ourselves. I’m staying here with you until you leave.’

  Their kits were already deposited on the beds of rooms which had been assigned to them by some invisible bureaucracy. Grivas had the room next to Hawker, not by coincidence, he was certain. Linda Kelly was next to him on the other side, then Sullivan, O’Hara and Kreuzer furthest away.

  ‘The common room has a reasonably stocked bar,’ said Grivas.

  Hawker said, ‘I’ll be there as soon as I’ve been to the head.’

  Kreuzer was in the washroom standing at a cracked porcelain basin at the far end of the room, his face covered in thick lather. He acknowledged Hawker with a perfunctory nod over his shoulder.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Hawker blurted in sudden alarm.

  ‘Shaving. What else does it look like?’ Kreuzer lifted the razor to his cheek.

  Hawker sprinted to cover the distance between him and the German.

  ‘Stop it!’ he commanded at parade ground volume.

  Kreuzer was in no mood to listen. He brought the razor up to his right ear and brought his other hand up to his chin to tauten the skin. Hawker just made it before the first stroke to grab Kreuzer’s wrist from behind. With a wild pull he tried to get the razor away from the skin but Kreuzer resisted savagely. The blade slashed diagonally down his cheek, a sharp line of pink then red staining the thick foam in its wake.

  ‘Scheisse!’ Kreuzer felt instinctively for the cut. Hawker ripped the razor out of his hand. ‘Britisher bastard! Look what you’ve done.’ He dabbed gingerly at his cheek with a towel, leaning closer to the mirror to inspect the damage. ‘What am I to tell the señoritas tonight?’

  ‘You won’t be seeing any señoritas tonight,’ Hawker tossed the razor in a bin.

  ‘Oh, I know I will. There’s a bar in Calle Florida where the girls go crazy for a man with blue eyes.’ Kreuzer bent to retrieve the razor but Hawker stopped him with an iron grip.

  ‘Or any other night while you’re under my command,’ he continued as if Kreuzer hadn’t uttered a word. ‘You are not even in BA, remember? You are supposed to be battling for your life in a sinking boat a thousand sea miles south of here. Where you have no time for such niceties as shaving.’

  He grabbed the towel from Kreuzer, wiping it across his cheek to clear the lather and reveal the cut. Kreuzer winced as the air hit the slashed skin.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ Hawker looked closely at the red line down Kreuzer’s face. ‘It will pass for a wire cut. A lucky escape when you were cutting away a shroud, perhaps. Not a bad touch, come to think of it. They would expect some of us to have minor injuries.’

  He dropped the towel and grabbed the neck of Kreuzer’s T shirt, twisting it into a tight ball that brought his fist dangerously close to the German’s throat. ‘If you try such a stupid trick again, or if you so much as disregard an order once more, you will have more than a minor injury to take aboard the Invincible with you. It will be my personal pleasure to have one of Grivas’ goons break your ribs. Or would you prefer a broken arm? They have much practice in both.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ Kreuzer put both hands up to try easing Hawker’s fist away from his throat. It looked and felt like a gesture of supplication. ‘I did not think.’

  ‘You’re not here to think. Just do as you are told.’ Hawker released his grip and turned calmly away. He stepped into one of the toilet cubicles and close the door.

  When he came out Kreuzer was gone. He walked back along the verandah past the sleeping quarters towards the common room. The bedrooms were all in darkness except Kreuzer’s. Hawker shivered in the sudden freshness of the night air. It was remarkable how much difference there could be in the temperature from the north side of the Plata to the south. He shivered again at the thought of how much colder it would be further south, in the full blast of the wind that howls from the west across the southern tip of Patagonia and on across the grey wastes of the South Atlantic. He lengthened his stride towards the warm glow of light spilling out through the common room door.

  Before turning to go inside the force of habit and training and tension took over. He stopped long enough to scan the small courtyard and saw, with his eyes now more accustomed to the dark, the shadowy figure of a guard with a rifle against the far wall. This didn’t surprise him. If he were Grivas he would have also had a strong guard posted.

  He had not expected Kreuzer to be in the room but nor was Grivas. Sullivan, Linda and O’Hara occupied the space like three strangers. Passengers in a departure lounge only peripherally aware of each other.

  Sullivan and Linda sat on opposite sides of the room in the decrepit armchairs, each nursing a drink and flipping through magazines. At least Linda was flipping, sifting through the dog-eared titles you’d expect to find around a barracks, devoted to football and boxing, fast cars and electronic hobbies. Sullivan had managed to find an old sailing publication, so he looked less bored.

  O’Hara was at the sideboard pouring himself another drink.

  ‘Hey, what’s this about some flying lark we’re expected to be going on?’ he challenged across the room as Hawker came through the door. ‘Gaffney never said nothing about that.’

  ‘Who said anything about flying?’ Hawker’s eyes flared in alarm.

  ‘Your friend Grivas,’ Sullivan looked up from the page he was reading. ‘He said he had to go to an air base for a meeting. I put two and two together.’ He shrugged back to his idle reading.

  ‘That’s a hell of a conclusion to jump to,’ Hawker replied, inwardly impressed by the Irishman’s astuteness. He was pondering what to say further when O’Hara added a rare third sentence to the conversation.

  ‘Don’t like flying,’ he mumbled darkly into his glass.

  ‘Your likes don’t come into it!’ Sullivan snapped suddenly and viciously. ‘You’re here to do a job, whatever it takes, and to obey orders, wherever they take you. That’s what you signed up for and I will bloody well make certain you do it. Or leave your fat Ulster bones to rot wherever it is we end up. Do you hear me?’

  O’Hara opened his mouth and moved forward, full of animal threat towards Sullivan. But the little man stayed sitting where he was and stared the big man down.

  ‘Do you?’

  O’Hara backed off with a humbled nod.

  Hawker watched both of them closely. There was nothing new in O’Hara’s behaviour. But Sullivan? Hawker regarded him with doubly new respect.

  Wednesday 12 May 1982

  Hawker woke up and immediately felt guilty.

  He rolled over in the lonely little barracks bed and realised he had just spent a whole day without thinking once of Anne and little Libbie. He had spent the whole of Tuesday working with his mind and his body, leav
ing him no time to brood. More, he realised he relished the action. It was the old soldier’s thrill of going over the top once all the agonising and decisions were done. There was no time for questions of why, only questions of how he could get everything done in time. He had worked like a slave and enjoyed it. He had howled at O’Hara and Kreuzer with the spleen of a parade ground sergeant-major and glowed with the pleasure of seeing them jump to obey.

  Hawker was not sure he liked the side of his character this revealed. What he had thought of as an attitude of training, one he could shed as easily as taking off his uniform, turned out to be steeped in his blood. But now was not the time to worry about that. Yesterday he had forced his crew to achieve what would normally be reasonable to expect from a week of work. Today he would have to be tougher still.

  They had loaded Sleipnir with enough gear and provisions to look as convincing below deck as she would soon look above. Hawker was careful to check that no item or package was labelled with the remotest connection to South America. He went as far in the detail as insisting that all the canned soup they stored in the lockers be Baxter’s, which he forced and cajoled Grivas to buy at considerable expense from the food hall in the Buenos Aires branch store of Harrods.

  Linda Kelly was set the task of checking all their clothes and foul weather gear and changing any suspect labels for UK or US brands culled from Hawker’s own wardrobe.

  Hawker had begun his own day on Tuesday by designing a cradle for Sleipnir. He worked off measurements he took with the boat hauled up on the slip and briefed Luis on the special qualities the cradle must have. He kicked O’Hara into action and the three of them worked, hauling pieces of angle iron and welding like demons, through the day and well into darkness.

  Today Luis would have to finish the cradle alone. Hawker had other plans for O’Hara and the rest.

  They left the Escuala Naval de Ingeniaria in the same pair of Ford Falcons that had picked them up from the dock and in the same distribution of personnel in the cars. They drove north through the suburbs towards Costanera Norte on the banks of the Plata. They drove through Los Carritos and turned off towards El Plumerillo, a tertiary commuter airport of Buenos Aires only a few miles from the centre of the city.

  They followed the access road towards the long low terminal building, joining a couple of black and yellow taxis. The road to the airline terminal curved right. They turned abruptly left and Hawker saw the question in Linda’s eyes as they accelerated up an empty stretch of road that flanked the runway. He ignored it.

  They drove on past rows of light aircraft parked close to the fence and around a cluster of low curved roof hangars where men worked on the skeletal silhouettes of dismantled aircraft, until they finally stopped at a rusting iron gate in the perimeter fence. Beyond the fence, sitting among a flock of Cessnas and Pipers like a pelican among seagulls, was a Douglas DC-3 Dakota in the white and blue livery of the Argentine forces.

  Hawker climbed out of the car and opened the gate. The others followed, O’Hara the last to open his car door and reluctantly walk towards the tarmac.

  ‘Kick him in the arse,’ Hawker called in Spanish to Grivas, who stood by the gate. O’Hara shuffled through. Grivas closed the gate behind him, then strode back to his Falcon, disappearing behind the darkly tinted windows as he climbed into his passenger seat.

  ‘Move, O’Hara,’ Hawker yelled from the foot of the Dakota’s boarding ladder.

  ‘Where the hell is this thing taking us?’ O’Hara growled grumpily.

  ‘Have you heard of a pleasant seaside place call Mar del Plata? That’s where you’ll enjoy lunch today. If you obey orders to the letter and if you’re lucky. Now get aboard before I kick your arse up these steps.’

  O’Hara scrambled up the aluminium rungs and fell into the Dakota cabin with Hawker hard on his heels, pushing him forward to where the others were gathered.

  A uniformed airman pulled the ladder in after them. O’Hara failed to notice that the airman didn’t close the door behind them because there was no door fitted.

  The airman spoke briefly into an intercom and almost immediately the Dakota’s old airframe shuddered as the starboard engine started to turn over. The aircrew were in no mood to sit around. Hawker smiled cynically and said to O’Hara, ‘Sorry, first class is all filled up for this flight. Find yourself a seat here in economy. The stewardess will take your drink order as soon as we take off.’

  ‘Very fucking funny,’ O’Hara glowered back.

  The interior of the aircraft was as raw and as rough as it had been when it first went into service, probably with one of the allied air forces in World War II. There was no lining in the fuselage. No one had ever tried to hide the ribs and rivets that held it together, other than with a spray of flat grey paint, and even that had been worn away in many places. The centre of the floor panels was worn to a track of dull raw aluminium under the impact of thousands of pairs of military boots. The skin of the fuselage was chipped and scarred where heavy field packs or the steel of weapons had scraped against it. Sections of rib which could serve as handholds had the paint completely worn off, showing only the worn patina of raw metal gripped by thousands of sweaty, nervous hands.

  Hawker wondered how many young recruits had been bullied aboard this old bus, the way he had just hounded O’Hara. And for how many it had been a flight to bloody agony and death.

  The only concessions to human comfort inside this mechanical womb were the two shaped aluminium bench seats that ran along both sides of the interior all the way forward to the bulkhead which separated the cabin from the cockpit. The others of the crew were already sitting on them, strapped into positions just forward of the wings. Sullivan and Linda were sitting to starboard, Kreuzer facing them to port. He craned his neck to look through the scratched opacity of the window to where the second engine was spluttering into life. The propeller to the right, behind Linda and Sullivan, was now spinning fast, its blades melted to gossamer in the morning sunlight. The engine’s roar surrounded them like the sound of a blowfly caught in a tin can.

  The aircraft was already lumbering forward as Hawker and O’Hara strapped themselves in, O’Hara next to Kreuzer and Hawker beside Linda.

  ‘Can you tell us where we’re going now?’ she shouted loud enough to be heard by all of them above the engine din.

  ‘I’ve already told O’Hara,’ Hawker shouted back. ‘We’re going to the seaside. Mar del Plata. You can relax for a couple of hours. You’ll find out what it’s all about as we approach.’

  The Dakota rolled down the taxiway on the far side from the air terminal and swung sedately around to line up on the runway. Hawker noticed two commuter aircraft, no doubt packed with businesspeople on their way to Montevideo or some regional centre to the south or west, lined up and waiting on the opposite taxiway. They would have been there before the Dakota and Hawker was not surprised to note that air traffic control must have been briefed to give his group VIP priority.

  The engines roared louder, and they trundled down the runway. The cabin floor lifted smoothly to the horizontal plane, then a short while later back to a shallow skywards angle as first the tailwheel and eventually the main gear had lifted off for the climb away. Hawker closed his eyes and dreamed of Anne and Elizabeth.

  Mar del Plata is about 250 nautical miles by air from Buenos Aires. It sits at the point where the Argentine coastline shoulders out into the Atlantic Ocean before plunging sharply south. They flew there across country, passing almost directly over the agricultural town of Maipu, a blister of terra cotta roofs in the middle of the rich rural land that stretched out flat and unbroken into the haze. The harvest was on and every second field seemed to billow with the dust of combine harvesting machines, obscuring the land in a golden shroud for as far as Hawker could see.

  One hour forty-eight minutes out of El Plumerillo the haze ahead began to fade. A few minutes later they crossed the coast, passing the apartment blocks and seaside mansions of Mar del Plata to the right. Th
e pilot banked steeply, turning to starboard so that they flew parallel to a line of cliffs where the land fell away abruptly to a series of shallow beaches sheltered at their base. Hawker craned to see the seas below. There was nothing more than a light surf breaking on empty beaches. Perfect.

  The crew sat back in their places and pulled their seat belts tight in anticipation. Hawker said nothing. They would find out soon enough.

  They flew on south along the coast past the last of the buildings that ribboned out from the Mar del Plata centre and Hawker sensed another quizzical glance from Linda. She’s sharp, he thought, the first to realise they weren’t going to turn for an approach to the airport.

  The looks from the others came when the aircraft banked steeply to port, straightened up, and stayed on that heading straight out to sea.

  ‘What have you not told us?’ Sullivan spoke for the group. ‘What the hell is going on here?’

  ‘An exercise,’ Hawker said as he unbuckled his harness. He went forward to the cockpit door and stuck his head through. ‘How far away now?” he shouted to the pilot in the left-hand seat, a youthful looking man with the shoulder flashes of a lieutenant on his flying suit.

  ‘About 25 minutes.’

  ‘Good.’ Hawker stepped back to the cabin.

  He went past the two rows of seats, ignoring the questions in the eyes of his crew, and on past the doorway which the airman had secured with a barrier of heavy netting, to where he was already unfastening the cargo nets over two piles of canvas bags packed into the tail space.

  Hawker helped the airman to unfasten some of the bags. Together they sorted through the bulky garments inside, Hawker occasionally glancing back up the cabin to make a mental calculation of someone’s size. He settled on five garments, bundled them into his arms and moved forward to the seats.

  ‘Strip off to your underwear and get this on,’ he said as he dropped a garment on each of their laps.

  ‘What on earth are these for?’ asked Sullivan.