Prince Hunter

by Garrett Russell

  ‘I’ve kept my end of the bargain to the letter,’ said Hawker.

  ‘Yes, so far at least.’

  ‘So far and further. My wife and daughter will remain unharmed from here on, regardless of whether I succeed or fail. That is the agreement, remember.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘Then give me your word you will ensure that Anaya and Gaffney remember as well.’

  ‘You speak as if you intend to fail,’ Grivas said with a tone of suspicion.

  ‘I intend to stop this stupid damn war before any more lives are wasted,’ Hawker said with fiery conviction. ‘I intend to succeed, to survive, and to come back to hold you personally responsible for the safety of my family. But I am a realist, not a fanatic, and I recognise the risk that I may fall at any time before any of this can happen. That is why I demand again, your fucking word!’ He stopped and realised his voice had risen to a bellow. And that he had grabbed Grivas by the shoulders and was shaking him like a terrier. He also became aware that one of the loadmasters had stepped forward from where he was lounging against the curve of the airframe under the cockpit. The webbing flap of his holster was unclipped and his hand hovered close to the butt of his sidearm.

  Hawker released Grivas and dropped to a hoarse whisper, ‘Your word, man. Give me your solemn oath’

  Grivas looked away. His dark eyes darted to avoid Hawker’s.

  ‘My word,’ he said at last. ‘You have it. I will do as I have sworn.’

  He grasped Hawker’s hand, shook it once and marched away to disappear in the dark shadows beyond the aircraft.

  Hawker climbed through the door, relieved to see that Linda, O’Hara and Kreuzer were nowhere to be seen and therefore unlikely to have overheard his explosion outside. The loadmaster came in after him. He clipped the flap back on his holster before reaching to pull the heavy door closed.

  ‘Begging your pardon, sir,’ he sounded embarrassed. ‘I meant no disrespect, but I had my orders.’

  ‘To keep close watch on me?’

  ‘Yes.’ He sealed the door closed. ‘Capitán Rodrigues would be pleased to see you on the flight deck.’

  There was hardly room to move in the cargo bay. Sleipnir’s bow towered over them, throwing huge dark shadows from the overhead lights in their sturdy wire cages. Hawker squeezed through the half metre between the cradle and the bulkhead which separated the cargo bay from the cockpit and reached the access door on the other side of the aircraft.

  As he went through the door, he could hear the slow whine of the first Allison turboprop engine starting to turn over outside. By the time he had shuffled past Kreuzer, O’Hara and Linda where they had settled into the webbing and tubular aluminium seats of the crew rest cabin, the turbo prop had wound up to an ear-splitting scream. With a nod to them all he climbed a set of stairs through another narrow doorway and stepped into the magician’s cave of the cockpit.

  Small lights winked red and green and yellow on panels to Hawker’s right, ahead of him and overhead as the flight crew huddled in blue flight suits at their various stations. Hawker moved forward and tapped the figure in the left pilot seat on the shoulder.

  ‘Capitán Hawker? Welcome aboard,’ the figure said, turning to thrust a leather gloved hand out for a handshake. He tried to look unsurprised at Hawker’s ragged appearance and failed, giving Hawker a moment’s satisfaction in the confirmation that his windblown hair and untidy beard growth were having the visual effect he had planned on. It also meant that such an unmilitary appearance was likely to prevent immediate recognition by any officers he had worked with on his secondments to the Royal Navy, and who he might have the misfortune to encounter after penetrating their task force.

  ‘Captain retired,’ he had to shout over the three engines that were now spinning fast, with the last propeller starting its first slow turns on the starboard wing in the periphery of his vision.

  ‘I see,’ yelled Rodrigues, but the slight crease in his brow showed that he didn’t. The navy was obviously not telling the air force anything more than the one thought the other needed to know. ‘Sergio, show Señor Hawker our flight plan.’

  The navigator slid a chart across his small table and pointed out routes he had marked with an erasable pencil.

  ‘Looks fine to me,’ Hawker called loud enough for both men to hear.

  ‘Perhaps you’d like to take the jump seat for take off,’ Rodrigues called back.

  Hawker pulled the folding tubular frame down and strapped himself in as the co-pilot pushed two throttle levers forward and the big aircraft lumbered forward in a hard turn to the left. The powerful beam of its landing lights swung around, picking up detail where there had been blackness before, and as they continued their turn Hawker caught a glimpse of Grivas standing by a Falcon parked against the wall of a hangar.

  They trundled down a taxiway with the co-pilot playing the throttle levers like a musical instrument, turned onto the deserted runway, where he pushed all four levers forward to their stops before they had fully lined up. The aircraft surged forward even as its nose settled on the runway centre line. The broad white lines marking the threshold rolled under them in the beginning of a blur which increased in intensity as runway markers appeared and disappeared in the light beam more and more rapidly.

  There had been no formality of calling for clearance from the tower because there was no need. No one was there to talk to.

  The Hercules continued its headlong rush until, just over a thousand metres down the blurring runway, the spotlight beams left the ground and stabbed the darkness of the sky now in front of them. The co-pilot flicked a switch among the bank of switches and dials in front of him and the sky went dark. Buenos Aires lay like a chequerboard of lights under them to the right with the darkness of the Plata to the left as they climbed, then levelled out and turned south.

  Four and a half hours after leaving Buenos Aires they landed. Hawker stayed up on the flight deck until the Hercules had taxied off the runway and been guided by a rugged-up ground marshal with a pair of signal wands to park between a row of scarred and battered looking Mirage jet fighters in flat camouflage paint and a contrastingly trim little BaE 125 executive jet in the blue and silver non-combat livery of the Argentine Navy.

  ‘How long?’ He asked Rodrigues.

  ‘About twenty minutes if the ground crew are as hot as they claim,’ the aircraft commander checked his watch. ‘You should be able to count on being airborne again by 0645 local.’

  ‘Good. I’ll take that time to get my crew acclimatised,’ said Hawker.

  Rodrigues laughed.

  ‘Better them than me. I’m staying right here where it’s warm. Menendez can do the walk around check.’ The young co-pilot groaned and reached for a well-used anorak packed behind his seat. Hawker let him lead the way down the steps from the cockpit into the cramped cabin below.

  ‘Come on. Time to stretch your legs,’ he called to the three figures sprawled untidily around, pleased to note they appeared to have spent the flight sleeping. He passed through the door to the cargo bay and felt the first icy bite of the air now flowing in through the exterior personnel door.

  It was like diving into a pool of liquid nitrogen. The air on the tarmac was so cold that it took Hawker’s first breath away. When he caught his breath and exhaled, a cloud of mist formed in front of his face and he could feel icy droplets of moisture freeze onto the stubble of his moustache.

  The morning was still as dark as midnight, and this was the coldest time of the day. Hawker was stamping his feet by the time Kreuzer, O’Hara and Linda emerged from the doorway. Technicians in fleece-lined anoraks were already swarming around the aircraft, connecting huge black hoses from a tanker truck to its fuel intakes and backing a small truck carrying what looked like soft cargo towards the rear ramp, which the loadmasters were lowering to open.

  ‘By the blessed mother, this is colder than the North Sea ever was,’ O’Hara bitched. He glared accusingly at Hawker.

  ‘
It was your choice to be there,’ Hawker shot back. ‘You left your chance to drop out two and a half thousand kilometres back that way, in Montevideo.’ He thrust his thumb roughly in the direction of north. ‘So, grit your rotten teeth and put up with it like the rest of us.’

  ‘Oh, that I will, sure enough,’ said O’Hara. ‘I’ll be there when the grunt’s needed. But not for you and your dago bloody orders. I’ll be there for the sake of Ireland.’

  ‘You’ll obey my commands as if your life depended on it, which from here on in is most likely true,’ said Hawker. Now was the time to dare the oaf to challenge back. ‘And you’re wrong about dago orders. I’m only half dago, and that’s a damn sight more to be proud of than being bred in an Irish bog.’

  O’Hara glared back, his discipline on a knife edge, but it was Kreuzer who broke the tension.

  ‘Where is the truck?’ he asked, gazing around the tarmac. O’Hara followed the German’s gaze and for the first time became aware of the surroundings. He blinked and stared at the line of sleek fighters fading off into darkness. The only light on the tarmac was from the small pools of brightness from spotlights on the machinery around the Hercules.

  ‘Where is the damn truck?’ Kreuzer repeated. ‘I know time must be of the essence for this mission now, so where is the truck to take the yacht to the water. I assumed it would be waiting for us.’

  ‘You have also assumed that we are at Port Stanley, or rather Puerto Argentino,’ said Hawker.

  ‘Of course. Where else would we possibly be?’

  ‘Rio Galegos Airforce Base,’ Hawker said truthfully. ‘Refuelling, as you should be aware, to get us as far as the Royal Navy’s total exclusion zone.’

  ‘A waste of valuable time,’ Kreuzer sneered. ‘Unless the blockade has succeeded in denying you fuel at Port Stanley.’ His patronising tone was irritating. Time to shut him up.

  ‘We’re not going anywhere near Stanley.’

  ‘Then where do you intend to unload the yacht?’ Kreuzer started, then stopped. His pale eyebrows arched in sudden realisation.

  ‘Don’t tell O’Hara,’ Hawker said softly. ‘He’ll find out soon enough, and I need his muscle to make it happen.’

  Kreuzer nodded and looked thoughtfully at the big Irishman, strolling away to inspect the Mirages. Linda had heard, though, and understood.

  ‘Let’s walk,’ she said to Hawker. ‘The exercise will stop us from freezing to death.’

  She moved towards him as a woman attracted to the larger body for warmth, but after half a pace she stopped. She looked straight up at his face and he thought he saw tears well in her eyes. She turned abruptly away and walked on. Kreuzer and Hawker followed.

  Nineteen minutes later the Hercules taxied out into the darkness again and took off from a pitch black runway. The only time the runway lights had been on was for a brief time on their approach when the aircraft had come in on the invisible radio beacons of modern aviation and the pilot needed visual confirmation for the final approach to their landing. One couldn’t fault the air force for this kind of caution, Hawker thought at the time, because Rio Galegos is on almost the same parallel as the islands, less than two hours away for a strike aircraft. For them in the lumbering Hercules, however, their destination was at least another three hours away with Rodrigues now the pilot flying.

  Half an hour out of Rio Galegos, Rodrigues came down from 15,000 feet to 200 feet above the invisible waves of the South Atlantic.

  ‘Standard procedure against radar detection,’ he said to Hawker. ‘Although it is unusual to take such action so early in the run. It’s a strange feeling, avoiding our own radar as well as the enemy’s.’

  Anaya had arranged it all at top level. No operational personnel in the air force outside the crew of this aircraft knew anything of this mission. Not even Major General Mario Menendez, head of the Argentine military’s Malvinas Joint Command on the islands, had been informed. He would today be given hand delivered orders not to fire on any British helicopter approaching the islands unless it fired first. The same order would be issued to the air force and naval air combat sector commanders in Rio Galegos and Comodoro Rivadavia.

  Rodrigues had not filed any flight plan during their refuelling stop. The Hercules had never officially left the air base and would not until he filed a flight plan to return to Buenos Aires when he touched down again with an empty cargo bay.

  At 0830 the navigator looked up from his table and announced, ‘Puerto Argentino abeam to port … now.’ No one in the cockpit bothered to look. They knew there would be nothing to see. For a start, the islands were lost somewhere below the horizon over 300 kilometres north of their position, and the clincher was that there was no horizon to see yet anyway. The sun would not rise for another hour and a half, and the only hint of twilight was a gradual fading from black to grey ahead through the windscreen. The cloud was so thick that even full daylight would render the sea and sky almost the same leaden colour. In this light they may as well be flying in fog.

  Hawker stepped down from the flight deck into the confines of the crew rest cabin. Kreuzer, O’Hara and Linda were all stretched out on folding aluminium frame bunks, and Hawker discovered that it must have been O’Hara who he had heard snoring so loudly in the bow of the yacht. He was snoring again, a rumbling animal sound over the drone of the aircraft engines, and Hawker added another small annoyance to his list of reasons for disliking the man.

  Linda stirred as he eased his way past. She was on an upper bunk and their eyes met at the same level.

  ‘You should be sleeping,’ she mumbled.

  ‘Ssh. I’ve rested enough,’ he whispered and moved on towards the cargo bay door. She propped herself up on one elbow and looked at him with the same strange expression she had shown for the past 24 hours – sad and fierce, intimate and distant all at once.

  ‘Paul,’ she said.

  ‘Yes?’ He paused at the doorway.

  ‘Nothing.’ She buried her face in the pillow.

  He went through to the cargo bay and found the two loadmasters dozing on the floor. He cat-stepped past without disturbing them and started to climb the rough structure of the yacht cradle up to the roof of the cargo space and Sleipnir’s bow.

  The stainless steel pulpit railing was only centimetres from the roof. Hawker had to contort himself to climb through the rail and slide onto the yacht’s foredeck. He cursed his size and envied the skinny little loadmaster. He would have had nowhere near this trouble getting from one end to the other. Hawker twisted himself more and slid on his hands and knees down the deck and around the cabin. At least in the cockpit there was space to stand in a crouch. He slid the companionway hatch open enough to get one arm through and felt around on the bulkhead inside until his fingers found what he was searching for. Good, the loadmaster had followed his orders perfectly, and Grivas had kept at least part of his bargain in delivering them. Hawker brought his hand out and thrust it back in, memorising the location of the object and the heavy tape that held it securely to the bulkhead. He slid the hatch closed again, making doubly sure that it would be watertight. Then he turned to look at the stern.

  The area aft of the cockpit was a mass of thick webbing, carefully secured around the mooring cleats and stern railing. On top of the webbing, in a neat military row, sat three huge alloy quick release buckles. Hawker examined the work with satisfaction. He leaned over the transom and saw what appeared to be three rucksacks made for giants lying side by side on the sloping deck of the closed tail ramp. These and all the webbing were the soft cargo which had been quickly loaded off the truck at Rio Galegos while Hawker and his crew walked the tarmac at the opposite end of the aircraft. The sacks were in thick woven nylon, coloured the same dull green grey as the aircraft’s camouflage paint. The top of each one was a patchwork of overlapping flaps and a length of extra thick webbing snaked out of each forward end and connected to the mass of the webbing network which smothered the yacht’s stern.

  Hawker smiled in silent a
pproval. The loadmasters seemed to know their job.

  He stepped forward in the cramped confines of the cockpit to check the clearance above the jagged stump of the mast, then turned back to finally reassure himself that everything at the stern would hold. And then he froze.

  A man with less survival training would have missed what caught Hawker’s attention. He was not sure himself that he had actually seen anything. There had been only the flicker of a shadow in the edge of his vision, a hint of movement that stood out as an anomaly in the visual pattern of the Hercules tail section.

  Hawker stayed frozen, all his senses tuned to high alert.

  Nothing. There was no movement or sound except the steady drone of the engines and his own heartbeat. He told himself he was getting jumpy, yet his instinct insisted that he had not been mistaken. Slowly, silently, he moved to the stern and slid down over the edge. Before his feet cleared the bottom of the transom he pushed back with both arms and landed on the cargo deck in a fighting paratrooper’s crouch. His eyes probed the jumble of framework around and under the yacht’s hull, but he saw nothing in the darkness.

  Then he heard the click of a pistol safety catch and a soft voice that said, ‘Buenos dias, Paolo. I’ll have that loadmaster’s balls for cufflinks for letting you get down here.’ And Raoul Grivas stepped out from the deep shadow under the boat.

  He held the pistol ramrod straight in the double handed target grip. It was aimed at Hawker’s chest.

  ‘There is no need to seem so surprised, old friend,’ Grivas allowed himself a smile at Hawker’s stunned expression. ‘You did not seriously believe we would permit you to go this far alone, surely?’

  ‘But how? When?’ Hawker found his tongue, his mind scrambling for an explanation. He had clearly seen Grivas on the tarmac as they taxied away at Buenos Aires. Then he remembered the navy BaE 125 parked at Rio Galegos.

  Grivas saw the realisation in his eyes. ‘I enjoyed a much more comfortable flight south than you, I imagine.’