Soldier K: Mission to Argentina

by David Monnery

  Fuck ’em all, he thought. He considered the possibility of fucking Corinna. She would be all cool and collected, he reckoned, the sort who neatly folded her clothes on the chair and lay there with the sheet up to her neck, waiting for you to pull it down.

  Hmmm, he told himself. Down, boy.

  It would be a fun way to spend a night, all right. But not, he suspected, much more.

  It was a definite handicap, he decided, having a mother who was more interesting than his girlfriends. He could not understand why she had not found someone for herself – she was attractive, clever, had lots of interests, and was as nice as you could find. You would think there would be a queue of men stretching down the street.

  He knew she had stayed single on purpose until he left home, but that was nearly six years ago, and she was not getting any younger. Maybe she was too interesting, and scared them off. He was convinced she wanted someone. It was such a lonely life when he was away, which was most of the time. And she worked so bloody hard for next to nothing. It made him angry just thinking about it. Fucking government.

  He got out of the bath, dried himself and went downstairs in the Spurs dressing gown she had made him ten years before. The phone was ringing.

  ‘Yes, he’s here,’ his mother said, handing him the receiver.

  His orders were the same as Ben’s. ‘I’m afraid Corinna has missed her chance,’ he said mildly.

  Nick Wacknadze examined the prints on the walls of his host’s home and sipped at the glass of wine Brendan had poured for him. It was not bad, and probably expensive: Brendan seemed like the sort who would enjoy demonstrating that he had a degree in yuppieology.

  Not to mention modern art: none of the prints seemed to bear any relation to the world Wacknadze lived in, and they all seemed to be by men whose names began with M. Miró seemed to be a child, Munch someone who badly needed a good laugh, and Matisse was obviously colour-blind. Modigliani sounded like an ice-cream. Picasso, who at least had a name which began with another letter, must have felt pretty chuffed to make so much loot with such a bad squint. What a fucking con it all was.

  ‘Are you interested in art?’ Brendan asked, appearing at his shoulder like a wraith. He made the question sound like sympathy, as if it were impossible for someone like Wacknadze – a soldier, for God’s sake – to appreciate any of civilization’s finer points.

  Wacknadze felt like hitting him, but that was not the sort of response which would please his wife, Anne, busy chatting in the kitchen to Brendan’s wife, Judy. The two women had met in pre-natal classes the year before, which was why he was enduring this particular ‘dinner party’.

  ‘I’m more into music,’ he said.

  ‘Oh. What kind?’

  He’s probably expecting me to say Abba, Wacknadze thought. Some kind of Celtic folk music was dribbling out of their hosts’ expensive sound system, so he decided to take a chance. ‘Early classical, Bach, medieval church music,’ he said, and enjoyed watching Brendan’s jaw drop a millimetre. And he really did have an interest in those kinds of music; he just never seemed to get the time to pursue it. The last time he had got an album of Gregorian chant from the library Anne had asked him whether it was playing at the right speed.

  ‘Dinner’s ready,’ Judy said from the doorway, and the two men went through to the other half of the through lounge, where a walnut dining table occupied pride of place. Anne smiled up at him, but not as warmly, Wacknadze thought, as she smiled at Brendan. A glimmer of suspicion flickered across his mind.

  He looked at Judy, wondering if she seemed aware of anything. She didn’t. But she was not half as attractive as Anne, Wacknadze thought.

  She was a better cook though, he thought, tucking into the meal. The other three were talking about the local housing market, a topic which proved easy to exhaust.

  ‘As an Army man, how do you see this whole Falklands business?’ Brendan asked after a long lull.

  ‘In what way?’ Wacknadze asked carefully.

  ‘Well, don’t you think the whole business seems a bit disproportionate? Sending an enormous fleet down there just to save a few hundred sheep farmers. It would be cheaper to pay them each a million pounds and hand the whole lot over to Argentina.’ He laughed at his own acumen.

  It would be cheaper, Wacknadze thought, but not in the way Brendan was using the word. ‘I don’t think you can put a price on principle,’ he said shortly, hoping someone else would change the subject.

  ‘Which principle do you mean?’ Judy asked.

  ‘That an aggressor shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.’

  ‘OK,’ Brendan agreed, ‘but we’re always letting them do just that. When the Russians invaded Afghanistan we didn’t do anything.’

  ‘There was no way we could do anything.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Brendan triumphantly. ‘So this is not a matter of principle at all – we’re only going to war with Argentina because we can.’

  Did his host really believe this shit, Wacknadze asked himself. ‘The way I see it,’ he said, ‘it’s very simple. Those people want to be British – every last one of them – and if we can stop them being taken over by another country then we should.’

  ‘You don’t think Argentina has any case at all?’

  ‘Nope. And even if it did, this is not the time to say so. We lost a ship yesterday, and a lot of men.’

  ‘They lost a lot more men a couple of days ago.’

  Wacknadze smiled. ‘Well, they started it.’

  ‘I don’t …’

  ‘Brendan, why don’t you open another bottle,’ Judy said, ‘and let’s talk about something more cheerful, shall we?’

  The rest of the evening passed smoothly enough, with Wacknadze leaving most of the talk to the other three, and trying to ignore both the sharp looks from Anne and the glow on her face when she listened to Brendan.

  In the car on the way home she was first silent, then angry. ‘Why were you so rude at dinner?’ she wanted to know. ‘There is more than one way to look at the world, you know.’

  ‘You mean, I should learn to see both sides?’ he asked sarcastically.

  ‘It is generally considered a sign of maturity,’ she said.

  ‘Fuck maturity,’ he said. ‘Some of my mates are probably going to get killed out there, and you want me to feel sorry for Argentina? Jesus Christ, you can’t send soldiers into a war and expect them to see both sides.’

  ‘You mean, you have to wear blinkers before you can start killing people,’ he said coldly.

  He wanted to hit her, but she was driving. And by the time they got back home he just wanted to see the back of the whole fucking evening. He paid the babysitter her usual exorbitant fee and let her out the front door.

  ‘Oh, by the way,’ the girl said, just as she was about to shut the door, ‘there’s a phone message for you in the hall. Something about reporting in first thing in the morning.’

  Another day would have helped, Docherty thought, examining himself in the toilet mirror. His eyes had lost their rusty edges, but his face still seemed almost preternaturally pale. He looked like a fucking ghost.

  In fact, he thought, weaving his way back down the aisle to his seat, he looked even worse than he felt. Which was both good and bad, depending on which way you looked at it. Good because it meant it would not take that long to regain his usual fitness; bad because the bosses might think he was not up to whatever they had in mind for him.

  He hoped to God it involved travelling a long way from Glasgow – the moon might just be far enough. Though wherever it was, as long as he had something to keep mind and body occupied it would be fine. The Falklands would be just dandy. Spitzbergen would be great. The only place he did not think he could stand was Belfast, and all those bloody hours sitting in cars both bored out of your skull and hyper-aware that someone might just walk up and blow your skull away.

  If they ordered him there he would tell them to shove it, he thought, surprising himself with the vehemence of the
feeling. Was he really ready to throw thirteen years of Army life out the window? Maybe he was.

  And maybe not. He did not really know how he felt. He had held himself tight as a vice until his father’s funeral, then taken to the drink with a vengeance. Neither form of existence had allowed for much in the way of feeling, which he supposed was why he had embraced them. Now, sober enough to feel the inside of his head shaking, he needed a third way of avoiding himself. Like playing cat-and-mouse with the Argentinian army on the Falklands.

  The train was pulling into Preston. The old Ricky Nelson hit ran through his head: ‘I’m a travelling man, made a lot of stops, all over the world …’ And he had. The Arabian desert, the mountains of Oman, Hong Kong, Belize and Mexico. ‘And in every port I own the heart of at least one lovely girl …’

  He had only ever owned the heart of one, and he had never been outside Britain with her. He was twenty-six, and Chrissie only eighteen, when they first met, at an exhibition of Islamic architecture in Edinburgh. Docherty fell in love with the graceful minarets and domes during his time in Oman, and he fell in love with her in front of a large photograph of Tamerlane’s mausoleum in Samarkand. ‘A soldier’s tomb,’ he said out loud, not realizing she was behind him.

  ‘You must be one yourself,’ she said with that simple directness she applied to everything and everyone.

  ‘Is it that obvious?’ he asked.

  ‘My dad was one,’ she said by way of explanation.

  They had coffee together, then a walk in West Princes Street Gardens and a meal at an Italian restaurant on Castle Street, talking all the time. He admired her quickness and her knowledge, loved her sense of humour, felt almost intimidated by the loveliness of her face. He could hardly believe she could have any real interest in him. But at Waverly Station, where she came to see him off on the last train back to Glasgow, she returned and amplified his goodnight kiss, and agreed to meet him again the following weekend.

  Three months later they were married. Another six months and she was dead, knocked down by a car on a zebra crossing less than 100 yards from their Hereford flat.

  Docherty had not known what to do. For several weeks he ranged the streets of Hereford and the surrounding countryside like a wounded dog, both pathetic and dangerous. Then one day he suddenly realized he had to get away – it did not matter where. He went into a library, opened an atlas at random, and found himself looking at a map of Mexico. He cleared his bank account and bought a return ticket – Mexico refused to admit travellers without one – and told his mates he was off. They managed to persuade him that compassionate leave would look better on his record than desertion, and for another twenty-four hours, while the formalities were gone through, he managed to hold himself together. The next day he was airborne, and that same evening he was strolling across Mexico City’s central square, still in turmoil but somehow out of danger.

  Over the next few months he travelled all over the country, staying in cheap hotels and eating in cheap cafés, falling in love with Spanish architecture as he had with Islamic. Chrissie was always with him, occupying a space in his heart and mind which nothing could apparently touch, but the rest of him slowly came back to life, reflecting the brightness of the Mexican light and landscape.

  After five months he felt the country and the travelling way of life had done everything for him that they could. He began to hunger once more for his old, disciplined sense of purpose – that sense of service which he knew came from his father, but which he had offered to first the Black Watch and then the SAS. In any case he was running out of money.

  He returned to Hereford and, somewhat to his surprise, was taken back into the regiment’s fold. In the five years that had since passed neither he nor they had found any reason to regret the decision, but neither had Docherty learned to reopen Chrissie’s mausoleum in his heart.

  One day he would, Liam McCall had told him, but he was not so sure. He had always thought that one day he would come to terms with his father, but now he could only come to terms with not coming to terms. Or something like that. The bastards kept widening the goalposts. Jesus, he thought, I could do with a drink.

  Fortunately the buffet bar was closed. The train was gliding through Warrington: in another twenty minutes it would be at Crewe, where he hoped there would be a connection for Shrewsbury and Hereford. Once the wait had only been ten minutes, but once it had been six hours.

  This time they split the difference, and it was three. He watched the sun rising behind the Shropshire fields, silhouetting the mass of the Long Mynd, ate his breakfast of Mars bar, Pepsi and crisps between Ludlow and Leominster, and did his best to make himself look less dead than alive as the train rolled the last few miles into Hereford.

  A cab took him to the Stirling Lines barracks in Redhill, where the orderly sergeant informed him that he was expected in the ‘Kremlin’ briefing room at 0900 hours. ‘Christ, you look dreadful,’ he added sympathetically.

  It was only eight-forty: there was time for a proper breakfast. Docherty stowed his gear in his empty locker and made his way to the canteen, where three familiar faces already had their snouts buried in the trough.

  ‘It’s the boss,’ ‘Razor’ Wilkinson announced.

  ‘Welcome back, boss,’ ‘Wacko’ Wacknadze said seriously.

  ‘Ben’ Stewart just smiled.

  ‘And they promised me a new team of comics,’ Docherty told the woman behind the servery, as he collected eggs, bacon and toast and a large mug of tea. ‘A funny one, this time.’

  She pursed her lips in sympathy.

  ‘So where’s the rest of B Squadron?’ he asked the others as he sat down.

  ‘All in the bosoms of their families,’ Razor told him, ‘except for Banjo – he’s in detention for assaulting a parking meter in the High Street last night.’

  ‘What did he assault it with?’ Ben asked.

  ‘The ultimate blunt instrument – his head. Some civilian wound him up about the war – about his not being down there – so Banjo charged him like a bull, and the other bloke just stepped out of the way …’

  ‘Like a bullfighter,’ Ben murmured.

  ‘Exactly. And the bull head-butted a parking meter.’

  Docherty could not help grinning.

  ‘Anyway, boss,’ Razor went on, ‘to answer the unstated part of your question – we four are the only ones who’ve been called back. Which seems a bit weird. I mean, they’re hardly likely to be chartering a C-130 just to send us down south, are they?’

  ‘Maybe they’ll stick us in with supplies or something,’ Wacko observed.

  ‘Oh great. Us four and a Hercules full of toilet rolls for G Squadron. But why just four of us? And why us four?’

  ‘Spanish,’ Ben suggested. ‘You three all speak it, and they probably reckoned I was needed to make sure you didn’t get lost.’

  ‘With your map-reading skills we should take a sundial,’ Razor said.

  ‘All will be revealed in about five minutes,’ Docherty said. He thought Ben was probably right about the Spanish, and that, coupled with the fact that only four of them had been summoned, suggested something very interesting indeed. ‘Come on, let’s get over to the Kremlin.’

  They were the first to arrive, not counting the mounted water-buffalo’s head which had surveyed the room since the regiment’s Malayan days. It looked even more pissed off than usual, Docherty thought. Or maybe it was just him. He had probably needed more than the hour’s sleep he had got.

  ‘You look terrible, boss,’ Razor told him.

  ‘I know,’ Docherty grunted. He closed his eyes, but only for a few seconds. Footsteps behind him announced the arrival of Lieutenant-Colonel Bryan Weighell and Major Neil Strachan.

  ‘You look awful, Docherty,’ was Weighell’s first comment.

  ‘Just a long train journey and no sleep, boss,’ Docherty said brightly.

  ‘If you say so. Anyway, good morning, gents. This is not a normal briefing – you’ll be getting that on
the Resource – but …’

  ‘Does that mean the Task Force, boss?’ Docherty asked.

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry, I’m jumping the gun …’ He noticed that all four men were grinning at him. ‘I’m glad to see you’re all eager to go,’ he said, ‘but don’t get too carried away – this is a volunteers-only mission, and we want you to think seriously about what you’re letting yourself in for before you volunteer.’

  I was right, Docherty was thinking. It had to be the mainland.

  ‘Neil here will give you the bare bones,’ Weighell said.

  Strachan got up to stand beside the map which had been hung in front of the blackboard. ‘It’s very simple,’ he said. ‘Even you lot should be able to understand it. Here are the Falklands’ – he pointed them out – ‘and here, more or less, is the Task Force. As you no doubt know, it has no air early warning system, and the perils of being taken unawares were demonstrated only too clearly the other day. The Sheffield,’ he added unnecessarily. ‘The Exocets are our major concern, but we’re not even completely sure at which of these two airfields’ – he pointed out Rio Grande on Tierra del Fuego and Rio Gallegos on the Argentinian mainland – ‘they are stored. The Task Force needs advance warning of flights from both, and the plan is to put two four-man patrols ashore, one to monitor each airbase. They will report take-offs as they occur, thus giving the fleet about four times the warning they are getting at present.’ He paused. ‘It’s hard to exaggerate how important such an increase in warning time could be. It could save one of the carriers, and that might mean the difference between victory and defeat, because if we lose one or both of them then we’ll also have lost any chance of air cover for a landing operation in the islands. And such an operation is going to be difficult enough with air cover.’ He paused again. ‘Right, that is the why. Any questions there before we go on to the how?’

  Jesus, Docherty thought. Was the Task Force that vulnerable? Apparently it was. In which case, the whole thing made sense and he had no questions.

  ‘Right,’ Strachan continued, ‘the how. You will be flown to Ascension, and then flown on from there to the Task Force. A parachute drop, I’m afraid. You will receive the full briefing on the Resource, and it should be no more than a couple of days before you are flown in by helicopter. How long you remain will depend on the situation, but it should be no more than a fortnight – because by that time the bridgehead on the islands should be more than secure. Extraction will be by submarine, from a predetermined location at a set hour on a three-day pattern. Any questions?’