Soldier K: Mission to Argentina

by David Monnery

  There was in any case quite a lot to do, particularly for the two PCs. They were responsible for deciding on, acquiring and checking the equipment each patrol would need. All eight of them were expected to familiarize themselves with all the available knowledge concerning the terrain, and be able to recognize any item of Argentinian military equipment from, as Hemmings put it, an Exocet to a standard-issue General’s jockstrap.

  ‘Sky blue and white, right?’ Razor said with a grin.

  ‘On the button, son,’ Hemmings replied. ‘Now go and study these diagrams.’

  ‘They’re not of Gabriela Sabatini, are they?’ Stanley wanted to know.

  When they were not memorizing aircraft silhouettes, Argentinian rank insignia and inadequate maps, the eight of them were getting used to operating two new state-of-the-art PRC 319 radios. These could be used for normal voice, burst Morse or liquid-crystal keyboard transmission via satellite. They were, as their proud instructor pointed out, Direction Finder Unfriendly.

  As the two signalling specialists, Wacko and Mozza took the keenest interest in this new technology, but all eight of them were expected to be familiar with its operation.

  Many of their non-study hours were devoted to strenuous physical exercises, as each man sought to reach and maintain the level of physical fitness they all knew they would need in the days to come.

  The remaining hours were spent in sleeping, eating, noisy games of Cheat and various solitary pursuits. Each man wrote home, albeit with varying degrees of willingness and sincerity. Brookes and Wacko wrote letters to their wives that said nothing of what was in their hearts, while Mozza found it impossible to write about anything else. Docherty tried writing to Liam McCall about what he was feeling, and found he did not really know.

  By Wednesday all of them were eager to go, and hoping that the earlier date had been chosen. But Brookes, delegated to extract the latest news from Hemmings, found the Green Slime man more than a touch reticent on the subject. The early date was extremely unlikely, Brookes was told, but beyond that Hemmings could not say. He was waiting for clearance from Northwood, and preferred not to speculate on why it had not yet arrived.

  Brookes reported this back to the others, and Stanley, reaching deep into his vocabulary, expressed what they were all thinking: ‘Fucking politicians couldn’t run a fucking war if their fucking lives fucking depended on it.’

  Bryan Weighell turned off the TV in the middle of the weather forecast. He was more interested in conditions in the South Atlantic than Britain, he thought. Desk work for the SAS was like life after death: your soul was still out there where the action was but your body was rotting by a telephone.

  He had just watched pictures of the QE2’s departure from Southampton that morning, with 5th Brigade lining the decks, and probably the bars as well. The diplomats were still shuttling to and fro like pompous penguins, but as far as he could see the die was cast, and a forced landing on the islands just a matter of time.

  So why could the regiment not get clearance for Operation Backyard? All that day he had been trying to get an answer out of somebody, but all to no avail. As far as he could tell the operation had not been called off, but neither did anyone seem inclined to admit it was still on. Basically, no one seemed to want to talk about it at all.

  Weighell poured himself a generous slug of malt whisky and gently simmered. He was beginning to wish they had pushed for an immediate insertion, rather than allow Brookes’s patrol such a generous recovery period. But the Intelligence assessment was that ten undiscovered days on the mainland were the most they could reasonably hope for, and the general consensus at Northwood was that advance warning of air attacks would be most valuable during the actual landing operations on 21 and 22 May.

  So they had agreed to insert the two patrols on the 14th. And now it was the evening of the 13th, and Whitehall and Northwood had become deaf to all enquiries. Weighell could imagine how the men on the Resource felt: waiting for the signal to go was bad enough when you knew it was definitely coming.

  Who else could he ring? He could think of no one. After all, if the Prime Minister was pointedly not returning his calls, then who would?

  He looked at the telephone, willing it to ring. And it did. In his haste to pick it up Weighell spilt most of his whisky across the table.

  ‘Bryan?’ a voice asked. It was Brigadier Mark Harringham from Northwood.

  ‘Mark. I tried to get hold of you today.’

  ‘That’s why I am calling. I can guess what you want to know … I assume this is a secure line?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. The answer is – we still don’t know if Backyard is a starter, and if so when. The 14th seems unlikely …’

  ‘Why, what’s happened?’

  ‘Politics, of course. The Foreign Minister threatened to resign if our troops were put ashore on the mainland before all the possibilities of the peace process – so called – had been exhausted.’

  ‘Why didn’t she let him?’ Weighell asked angrily.

  ‘Well, it’s hard to say, but I’d guess that since the Belgrano she’s been under a lot of pressure to at least go through all the right motions – diplomatically, that is. And of course he’s on the other wing of the Party, and she only appointed him a month ago … he’s in a strong position.’

  ‘Ok, OK. But what’s he waiting for? As far as I can see, all the proposals are dead in the water.’

  ‘Not quite. Apparently, Galtieri’s done a back somersault today; he told the UN chap – Pérez de Cuellar – that sovereignty is not a pre-condition for more talks. Of course, he’s probably just playing for time, but Henderson and Parsons have been called back here from New York for more meetings, and we’ve been told not to rock the boat for a couple of days. No more Belgranos and certainly no SAS adventures on the mainland.’

  A couple of days, Weighell repeated to himself. He swore under his breath. ‘So what do you think the chances are?’

  ‘About 50–50, I’d say. She’s still all for it, but she needs some help … preferably a statement from the Junta saying all bets are off and inviting us to do our worst.’

  ‘Which isn’t very likely.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. From what I can gather there doesn’t seem to be much coherent policy-making going on over there. They might invade Chile – just for the hell of it.’

  Weighell laughed, but his heart was not in it.

  Raul was almost an hour late getting to the Rakosi, and Isabel had already drunk more than was sensible for her. Which was nothing unusual, she reminded herself. It might be the winter closing in, or being back in a place where heavy drinking was the norm, but she suspected her increasing level of consumption was inspired by a more personal malaise. She was drinking to blur the edges of deception. As well as self-deception, she added to herself, as Raul finally came in through the door.

  His face broke into a smile when he saw her, as it always did. The same smile twisted a knife in her heart. But at least he was not falling in love with her. That night by the river, when he had sobbed out his fears, had thankfully put paid to the chance of any such relationship. It had opened the way for others – the older mistress or the older sister – and she had managed without much difficulty to steer him in the latter direction.

  ‘My guardian angel,’ he greeted her gaily, and she winced internally.

  He seemed in a good mood and for half an hour they swapped small talk, his attention often distracted by the football match on the TV behind the bar. She told him what she had done that day – which was to check all the Rio Gallegos bus companies for their routes and fares – and what she was planning to do the next day: travel down the coast to investigate the local accommodation possibilities for tourists visiting the penguin colony at Cabo Virgenes.

  He said he wished he could come with her, but some bigwig from Military Intelligence was arriving from Buenos Aires. ‘Some Colonel named Solanille …’

  The combination of shock and alcohol loosene
d her tongue. ‘Tomas Solanille?’ she blurted out.

  He seemed not to notice the emotional charge which edged her voice. ‘Yes, I think so. Why, have you heard of him?’ he asked offhandedly, his eyes on the TV, where Racing Club had just been awarded a penalty.

  ‘I think my uncle knows him,’ she said steadily, as the goalkeeper went one way, the ball the other. Major Tomas Solanille had been one of the men who had questioned her after her arrest: a cold, arrogant man, the sort who commissioned genealogical charts to advertise his good breeding. He had done nothing to her, except hand her over to the animals at the Naval Mechanical School.

  Which was more than enough.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Raul asked.

  She looked up guiltily. The football match had ended. ‘Just tired,’ she said.

  ‘Too tired for our walk?’ he asked, with the air of a small boy whose promised treat seemed in danger of disappearing.

  ‘No,’ she said, smiling. ‘Some fresh air would be nice.’

  It was fresher than she had expected, and for once taking his arm and snuggling up to his shoulder needed no more justification than the temperature and the chill breeze blowing across the estuary.

  ‘It will soon be winter,’ he said. ‘I have never seen a winter in the south.’

  ‘Maybe some agreement will be reached,’ she suggested. ‘Or we will win a quick victory,’ she added, remembering that optimism was still the official order of the day.

  He grunted. ‘There might be an agreement,’ he said seriously, ‘but I don’t think we can win a war with the English. I think we must prepare ourselves for the worst.’ He turned suddenly to face her. ‘Of course we will do our duty,’ he added hastily, ‘you must not ever think otherwise.’

  ‘I know you will,’ she said. ‘But maybe there is still hope. The English are a long way from home …’

  He explained the situation to her as he saw it, then added something almost as an aside: ‘of course, we are saving our best hope for the moment when it will most matter.’

  ‘What is that?’ she asked.

  He looked at her, and for a moment she thought something in her voice or her face had given her away, but what she had taken for suspicion turned into a rueful smile. ‘The missile that sank their ship Sheffield, we have very few of them. We must make them all count.’

  How many, she wanted to ask, but that would be too much. ‘Have you one for each English ship?’ she asked, almost playfully.

  ‘If only,’ he replied, and asked her how much longer her work would keep her in Rio Gallegos.

  ‘A few more weeks,’ she answered, and started listing what she still had to do. There was no way now that she could get a precise figure for the Exocets.

  When they parted outside the Covadonga Hotel half an hour later he hugged her and kissed her lightly on the cheek. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she replied.

  ‘No, not for the evening,’ he said, ‘thank you for being my guardian angel.’

  She walked upstairs, tears welling up in her eyes, and angrily threw her coat down on the bed. Then for what seemed liked a long time she sat in the only chair staring at the empty wall. Images from a film she had seen on British TV came into her mind, though at first she could see no reason why her memory had dragged them up. Someone – she thought it was Michael Caine – had been strapped into a chair, and was being subjected to a mélange of futuristic lights and sounds that were intended to scramble his psyche. But Michael Caine had managed to get a piece of glass – no, a nail – and was gouging it into his own hand to take his mind off the weird light-show.

  And it worked.

  It would work for her, she realized. But she did not need a nail, only a pen. She would start writing down what had happened to her, to all of them, all those years ago. How could the life of one sad-eyed pilot compete with the ghostly hordes of the dead and disappeared?

  She would start now. This moment.

  Giuseppe had been first. Giuseppe with the dancing brown hair and blue eyes. He had been a medical student, a lover of football and blonde girls and the poetry of Neruda. Every Tuesday, come rain, shine or bank robbery, he had visited his mother in her small apartment in La Boca, and told her fictional tales of the college life he had abandoned for the ERP. And one Tuesday he had been on his way back to Avellaneda, walking on the high girder bridge across the oil-stained waters of the Riachuelo, when the black car had stopped and swallowed him.

  They had found him the next morning, in the woods at Ezeiza near the international airport, though it was only the valueless ring he had worn on one finger which had enabled an identification. The body was a charred hulk, held together by half-melted wire embedded in the charcoal crust of what had once been wrists and ankles. He would never trouble the sleep of the Junta again.

  And none of his comrades had ever slept soundly again. Fear had taken their hearts, but they had carried on. They had not known how to stop.

  Isabel put the pen aside and walked across to the window. The street was empty, the town sleeping. She wanted to wake every one of them, to scream at them: ‘Where were you when Giuseppe Trappatoni died?’

  It had worked, she realized. Raul’s life or death no longer seemed to weigh so heavily on the scales.

  She went to bed and managed to sleep for a few hours. As dawn showed outside she went for a walk through the empty town, down to the riverside park. The sun was rising above the mouth of the estuary, throwing a line of reflected light along the centre of the wide river, between the anchored freighters. Behind her an oil tanker rumbled along Calle Orkeke.

  Isabel remembered another tanker, another early morning. In Córdoba four of them had invaded a dairy depot, all wearing red masks, and hijacked a milk tanker. Then they had driven it to the Sarmiento shanty town, and dispensed milk by the bucketful to people who could not have afforded to fill a thimble. The looks on their faces had been worth a thousand theories.

  They had mounted a similar operation a month later – only this time it had been a lumber company they had held up. Building materials had been stashed aboard lorries, and driven out to another shanty town, where families lived in homes made from packing cases. There too they were greeted as deliverers, if only from rain through the roof.

  She had been telling that man in London the truth when she said she felt no guilt. On the contrary, she felt proud of everything they had tried to do, and sometimes done. Her comrades might all be dead, and the Junta still alive, but they had not died in vain. None of them. They had brought hope, no matter how short-lived; and they had demonstrated a simple humanity when such demonstrations invited a lonely and painful death.

  And if she had any say in the matter, then one day they would get the recognition they deserved.

  Please let this be good news, Weighell told himself as he climbed the last few stairs on his way to Conference Room B. The men gathered round the table were not quite the same as on the previous occasion. The FO’s Latin-American expert was absent, as was Air-Marshal Railton. And this time Cecil Matheson was flanked by his superior, the grey-haired, weasel-faced Foreign Minister.

  Weighell’s first impression was that the latter looked thoroughly pissed off. Which probably did mean good news, he told himself.

  The MI6 man, Anthony Sharp, looked full of the joys of spring, but that could just be congenital idiocy. Harringham appeared his usual cheerful self, while the MOD’s Dennis Eckersley seemed more bored than anything. Weighell thought he could detect the faintest of knowing smirks on Cecil Matheson’s lips.

  There was no mistaking the Prime Minister’s mood. The eyes had a definite glint to them, and the mouth showed about as much warmth as a Venus fly-trap. ‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ she said coldly. ‘There is only one item of business to deal with – Operation Backyard.’ She glanced at her Foreign Minister, and received a bleak stare in return.

  She asked Weighell to explain the reasons why any further delay would severely reduce the value of the operation. He e
xplained them. Harringham was asked to concur, and did so. The PM then outlined the Foreign Minister’s objections, rather than let him do so himself. Such an operation might compromise the last chance of peace, she said, with about as much conviction as an English batsman facing the West Indian bowlers.

  It was like watching a child tearing the limbs off a spider, Weighell thought, and for a fleeting moment felt almost sorry for the Foreign Minister.

  Matheson provided the coup de grâce to his own boss, with some assistance from the beaming Sharp. Intelligence agents in New York – exactly whose agents was not specified – had managed to bug the Argentinian Consulate, and to record one end of a conversation between the Argentinian envoy to the UN and General Galtieri. This conversation – and other scraps recorded in the Consulate – clearly showed that the Argentinian Government had abandoned any hopes they might have had of reaching an agreement with the British which they could sell to their own people. The Junta’s only remaining interest lay in putting off the evil day, in buying all the time that they possibly could in the forlorn hope that something somehow might provide the miracle needed for their own salvation.

  ‘I believe this removes all the objections to proceeding with Operation Backyard,’ the Prime Minister concluded. The Foreign Minister gave her a look which Weighell could only interpret as pure hatred, and muttered his acquiescence.

  The silence in the newspapers was ominous, Isabel thought. The chance of peace was gone; now the Junta was just waiting for the blow to fall. She wondered if any of the uniformed idiots still thought they had any chance of victory, or if they were all just paralysed by the prospect of imminent defeat.

  It was a raw, cold day, and the Patagonian steppe looked even more inhospitable than usual. Out in the distance, swirls of dust hovered in the wind like miniature tornadoes, while closer to the road the dry clumps of grass were being tugged this way and that with a violent intensity. Away to her left two small dark clouds had dropped out of the overall grey to mount guard over the blunt peak of Mount Aymond.