Prince Hunter

by Garrett Russell

  If any of them had noticed the mysterious presence of Grivas they made no sign of acknowledgement. They clearly all had more personal and pressing thoughts on their minds.

  Hawker trudged up the inclining deck towards them and said, ‘Okay, you know what’s coming next, and there’s no need to thank me for the practice run I so thoughtfully gave you.’ He moved past them. ‘Follow me and get your chutes on, on the double!’

  ‘I should have known,’ spat O’Hara, and his voice was thick. ‘How could I ever trust a prick like you?’ And he spat on Hawker’s sea boots.

  ‘You’d better trust me. Your life depends on it,’ Hawker said evenly.

  ‘You said we were going to land at the Falklands. You never said nothing about no bloody parachutes.’

  ‘You said we’d land at Port Stanley, not me,’ Hawker moved closer. ‘If you had half a brain in your thick skull you would have realised well before this. Like the others.’

  O’Hara shot an accusing glance at Kreuzer and then Linda. Their faces remained passive, not saying a thing, but their eyes were alert. He shifted his ground. His eyes faltered and dropped from where he had tried to hold Hawker’s gaze.

  ‘And if you want to talk trust,’ Hawker pushed on, ‘ask your good friend and countryman Patrick Gaffney. He knew this much of the mission from the beginning, before he even wished you on me.’ He took another pace forward and pushed between Kreuzer and O’Hara, shoving O’Hara aside. As he stepped past, he wiped his sea boots on O’Hara’s leg. He strode on towards the forward bulkhead. The others and then O’Hara turned and followed him.

  ‘I’ll go first,’ said Hawker when they were all kitted out in their parachute harnesses. ‘That will give you a chance to see how the wind will blow you. Then you, Linda, with O’Hara, and Kreuzer last.’

  They were now at 1500 feet, as high as Rodrigues dared take the Hercules under the radar of the British ships, orbiting Sleipnir in a tight bank.

  Hawker stepped to the lip of the cargo ramp and looked over to where Grivas nursed his mangled arm, still propped against the rib and fuselage.

  ’36 hours,’ he called out in Spanish, mouthing the words with exaggerated clarity. Grivas nodded and removed the webbing from his mouth to shout something back, but the words never reached Hawker. They were lost in the slipstream as he stepped off the ramp and hurtled towards the sea.

  The wind and sea were heavier than they had seemed from inside the cocoon of the aircraft and it was bitterly cold, even through the thick skin of the sailing suit. Hawker juggled his control lines and aimed for the bow of the yacht, praying that all the lines had unravelled as he planned. He had tied half a dozen light ropes, each forty feet long, to the handrails running back from the bow pulpit on each side of the boat. They had been slung in loose coils along the sides of the cradle so that they would stream out in mid air and trail like a wispy old Chinaman’s beard downwind from the bow when the boat settled in the water. He could see where they went into the water, but the choppy surface made them all but invisible for most of their length. So, he decided, he would aim for the middle.

  They were there. He grabbed the first line he felt as he hit the water and wrapped it around one hand at the same time as he snapped the harness release open with the other. His harness and its control lines slipped away as if pulled by an express train, the grey nylon canopy of the parachute flopping like a giant jelly fish as it swept away on the peak of a wave to disappear from his view in the murky oblivion of the southern ocean.

  He hauled himself hand over hand towards the yacht, trying vainly to keep his head clear of the frigid water. The head is a critical point for the heat loss that leads to the deadly danger of hypothermia, and while the suit was effectively keeping Hawker’s body dry, he could feel himself shivering violently by the time he reached the boat.

  ‘Damn!’ he roared and punched at the water. The rope ladder he had coiled on the starboard side of the bow had somehow failed to unfurl itself through all the buffeting of Sleipnir’s descent to the sea. He was assessing his chances of working hand over hand down to a lower section of the gunwale when a large swell brought him high on the bow. With nothing more than a reflex he let go of the rope and grabbed the bow rail with both hands as it came within reach. The wave passed by with the same speed that it had come. Almost before he had secured his grip on the slippery wet stainless steel, Hawker was hanging clear of the water down to his knees.

  He had to move now. His hands were slipping, his fingers burning with the cold and strain. He swung his legs out of the water and up towards the gunwale. The first swing was too short. On the second, he hooked his heel over the edge and held on like grim death. His teeth were chattering uncontrollably now, and he could feel his strength fading away too fast. His vision blurred to shadowy grey and white. Then he saw, like a faded newspaper photograph, the images of two faces forming out of the blur. They didn’t move. They were frozen as if in a black and white photo print, and Hawker remembered where he’d seen it before – on Anaya’s desk, with Gaffney’s obscene red ink scrawl around it.

  ‘No!’ Hawker roared and hauled with all his fading force. The world went black for a moment. He felt something hard hit against his cheek. When he blinked, Anne and Elizabeth were gone, and he found himself lying on the deck of Sleipnir.

  The ladder had tangled itself against the mooring bollard, probably under the surge of solid water that had boiled across the deck when the hull first splashed down. Hawker freed it, dropped it over the side, and looked up to see three parachute canopies blossoming above him. Above them, the Hercules had broken out of its circular flight pattern. It was flying away in a straight line towards the south west, diving so steeply for the cover of the sea that it was already down to about 500 feet.

  One of the parachutes was a few hundred feet below the other two, which appeared to be within about fifty feet of each other. Hawker watched as the lower chute started to drift downwind with critically little distance to go. He cupped his hands to his mouth to call out instructions over the constant hiss of the waves, but his lungs were still spent from the effort of clambering aboard.

  The bright yellow figure splashed into the water dangerously close to the ends of the forty foot ropes, and Hawker recognised Linda Kelly’s flash of red hair.

  ‘Ditch your chute, quick,’ he yelled out when he saw she had got hold of a line. She held it high out of the water and he could see barely a foot of loose rope between her hand and the figure-of-eight stopper knot at its end. He lost sight of her as a wave crested between them, then saw her again as the wave top foamed past her, pulling the rope taut across the trough that was now between them.

  ‘Hang on tight,’ he called again, and hauled on the line, ignoring the bite of its fibres into his pulpy cold and wet hands. He helped her aboard up the ladder and left her gasping on the deck while he turned back to the other two parachutes.

  They were dangerously close together and Hawker soon saw why. O’Hara was under the first canopy. A few feet above him and quite a few more feet downwind, Kreuzer was yelling a constant stream of instructions, though Hawker could hear only the few snatches that reached him against the force of the wind. O’Hara was fifty feet from the water when Hawker realised what would happen. He cupped his hands again and screamed with the wind behind him, ‘Kreuzer! Forget him! Come upwind!’

  O’Hara had drifted too far downwind, taking Kreuzer with him. They would hit the water with O’Hara about as far down the lifelines as Linda had landed. Kreuzer was hopelessly beyond reaching them unless he abandoned the Irishman and tried to angle into the wind to splash down ahead of him.

  Kreuzer heard Hawker, but seconds too late. Hawker watched as both yellow figures dropped into a trough. He lost them behind the wall of a wave before they hit the water. He waited for the crest to see if either had made it.

  The crest broke and O’Hara’s head came smashing through the foam. He had hold of two lines that he struggled with clumsily, but there was no sign
of Kreuzer.

  Hawker cursed loudly and clambered back along the cabin top to the companionway hatch. He had his hand to the latch, holding himself steady against the drunken pitching of the yacht, when he stopped and stared in wonder across the bow.

  Thirty feet behind O’Hara, Kreuzer’s head broke through the foam of a wave crest and stayed there the same distance behind as O’Hara laboriously hauled on his lifelines. It could not be. There was no possible way Kreuzer could have caught a trailing rope. He should have been blown away as fast as the parachutes.

  Then Hawker realised Kreuzer had caught a line. He was clinging to the control lines of O’Hara’s parachute. That’s why the Irishman was making such heavy work of hauling himself in. He had not had the sense to release his harness on splash down, and that was what saved Kreuzer.

  ‘Hang on!’ Hawker bawled as he scrambled back to the bow, almost knocking Linda back down to the deck from where she sat shivering on the cabin.

  He reached the bow rail as the two yellow figures disappeared into another trough, O’Hara about thirty-five feet away. When they came through the crest, he could see Kreuzer had greatly closed the gap between them. He was making good progress, clawing his way up the fine web of parachute lines. O’Hara, though, was no closer to the boat. Hawker located the right line for him on the frame of the rail and hauled on it hard, his feet jammed against the gunwale.

  O’Hara screamed as his arms took the strain. Hawker ignored the noise and kept hauling hard. The two men had already been in the water too long. He paused for breath as they disappeared behind another wave – no point in pulling against the strength of the ocean – then hauled with renewed vigour as the two heads bobbed through the crest. Again, O’Hara screamed and again Hawker ignored him. He put his head down and bent all his weight into the effort, then suddenly fell sprawling backwards onto the deck with the line almost slack in his hands.

  Hawker sprang back and peered over the bow. O’Hara was no longer screaming. He was hauling himself slowly hand over hand along the line. But the scream was still there. It was Kreuzer, now twenty feet behind O’Hara and slipping further away fast.

  ‘You bog-bred bastard!’ Hawker muttered hoarsely under his breath as he scrambled frantically aft to the cockpit, like a crab, keeping his eye on O’Hara and the fast disappearing Kreuzer as he went. Kreuzer was being washed away at almost the same speed as O’Hara’s discarded parachute.

  Hawker threw open the hatch and reached inside to the bulkhead. His hand felt the cold, solid metal. He yanked hard against the tape that held it in place and pulled a Fabrique Nationale FAL automatic rifle out through the hatch. He didn’t pause to check the magazine or rip fragments of tape off the barrel and butt. He flicked the safety switch to automatic as he put his eye to the sight, braced his leg against the cabin side, and waited for the yellow figure to come through the crest of another wave.

  He squeezed the trigger and the water around the figure plumed with spray. He paused, squeezed again, and saw the figure jerk into the air as three 7.62mm bullets traced across his chest. The figure flopped back to the water and slid down the side of the retreating wave. Hawker pumped half a dozen more rounds into it, the bullets spouting red where they tore through the thick sailing suit, until he was satisfied that Wolfgang Kreuzer was dead. He let the weapon drop from his shoulder and looked straight into Linda Kelly’s eyes.

  ‘The right thing to do,’ he said with a hapless shrug. ‘Better for him to die quickly than freeze to death alone in the ocean. And this way, with any luck, his body will sink and be disposed of by predators attracted by the blood.’

  She said nothing. Her face was as white as her knuckles where she held the cabin rail in a grip like death. He eased past her and moved forward along the heaving deck to the bow railing.

  O’Hara was five feet away from the ladder, hauling himself slowly along the lifeline. Hawker wedged himself into the rail, slipped the FN to single fire, and aimed it slowly and deliberately at O’Hara’s head.

  ‘Now that’s a fine welcome for a man who’s just saved your mission,’ O’Hara wheezed. Hawker kept his aim and said nothing.

  ‘It was him or both of us, you know, man,’ O’Hara’s voice now had a tinge of panic about it. ‘I couldn’t hold on with the weight of two of us any longer. And where would you be with both of us gone? Him or both of us, it was. Him or me too.’

  ‘Pity it wasn’t the other way around,’ said Hawker. He lifted his head from the gunsight and threw the rifle like a spear. It hit the water a foot from O’Hara’s shoulder and sank into the grey sea. Hawker turned his back on O’Hara, leaving him to get himself out of the water, and moved back towards the cockpit.

  ‘Maybe that was God’s will,’ O’Hara muttered under his breath as he reached for the ladder. ‘And Ireland’s destiny.’ And he grinned to himself, the terrifying grin of a fanatic, as he hauled himself over the gunwale.

  It took Hawker nearly an hour of backbreaking work to loosen off the webbing and disentangle the Sleipnir from her makeshift parachute harnesses. At least the work helped to generate body heat and for this reason he snapped orders at Linda to get her to help. O’Hara busied himself at the other end of the boat letting go all the lifelines, retrieving the ladder, and then down below coaxing the diesel engine into life.

  The hull was sound and taking no water despite its harsh treatment, though below decks was a shambles of broken locker doors and spilled equipment.

  They bundled the webbing into as solid a mass as they could manage, then added an anchor to pull the huge chutes down. Hawker let go of the line and watched it sink, then ordered Linda below to help O’Hara clear up the mess and get started on some food. The colour had come back to her cheeks after the hard work, as if the feel of a small boat in big seas had brought her back to herself.

  They had their first meal with the boat hove to, now riding head first into the waves as a sea anchor held her bow to the sea in the same way as the drag of the chutes had held the stern. They drank Baxter’s broth from big enamel mugs, and Carr’s biscuits from an airtight plastic pack. The warmth of the soup glowed through their bodies and Linda cheered some more.

  ‘What now?’ she asked across the gimballed table.

  ‘We need to get as many sea miles under our keel as we can, towards the British fleet,’ replied Hawker. ‘O’Hara, you and I will share watches on the helm. Linda, you will look after the radio and keeping us victualled. I’ll take the first watch while you two get a jury-rigged radio mast up and start transmitting.’

  ‘What do I transmit?’ said Linda.

  ‘Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. British sloop Sleipnir, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday,’ said Hawker. He slipped into a safety harness, went out through the hatch, let go the sea anchor, leashed himself to the wheel and turned the yacht through 180 degrees to throttle up and push her at five knots with the wind and waves howling at his back.

  He slipped back the tight sleeve of the sailing suit to check his watch. An hour had passed since he left Grivas in the Hercules. Only 35 hours left to save his family.

  Monday 17 May 1982 – PM

  Grivas had kept his word. He had phoned Anaya in Buenos Aires as soon as the Hercules transport landed at the Rio Galegos base, before allowing the air force doctors to look at his arm.

  His mind was fogged and his tongue was slurred from the effects of an ampoule of morphine one of the loadmasters had jabbed into his arm soon after they had closed the cargo ramp, but he was still sharp enough to give Anaya the kind of story he knew the admiral wanted to hear.

  He could truthfully report that he had seen Hawker and his crew follow Sleipnir down to the ocean and satisfied himself that the mission was successfully underway. But there was no point in telling the truth about his broken arm – he must still appear to have commanding power over Hawker – so he invented a convincing accident and claimed he had decided to risk sending Hawker off rather than jeopardise the mission with an injured leader. Anaya agreed, and Grivas let out a
silent sigh of relief. He told Anaya of the 36 hour deadline, saying he had declared it for Hawker, not that it was Hawker’s demand. He recommended that they adhere to it in the interests of seeing the mission succeed.

  ‘Yes, I agree. The decision of an officer in action,’ Anaya said on the phone. He glanced at a sheet of Telex paper on his desk. It was a decoded message addressed to all three members of the Junta from Eduardo Roca, the Argentine Ambassador to the United Nations in New York, where desperate diplomatic negotiations were in their last throes. ‘So, that will make it 2230 hours tomorrow local time. The way things are going for us, it will be not a minute too soon.’

  The call over, Grivas let himself collapse into the care of the base medical centre and the welcoming arms of unconsciousness.

  Anaya reached to the intercom on his desk and snapped, ‘Get Señor Gaffney over here at once.’

  Gaffney was staying at the Claridge Hotel. He hung up after the call from Anaya’s office and dialled the number for Sullivan’s room.

  ‘Be ready to leave in ten minutes,’ he said without introduction as soon as Sullivan answered. ‘There’s a car coming to pick us up. Seems everything is going fine and dandy for us, my lad.’

  They were escorted into Anaya’s office and listened intently to his account of the call from Grivas.

  ‘I trust our other arrangements are in order, Admiral?’ Gaffney said when Anaya had finished.

  ‘Of course,’ said Anaya.

  ‘If the rendezvous is to be made outside of your national waters, we will have to leave tonight,’ said Sullivan.

  ‘That is arranged,’ Anaya replied. ‘The Inconquista is loaded and ready to sail. You will have to share the non-commissioned officers’ quarters. You may find them a little cramped, though not intolerably uncomfortable.’