Special Deliverance

by Special Deliverance (retail) (epub)

  ‘Was it Etta?’ Strobie explained to the others, ‘Before my time. Well, I’d’ve been a kid, back home. Start of the century. When their cash began to run out they started their old tricks again around these parts — Gallegos, Santa Cruz… Etta used to hold the horses’ heads outside the banks while her boyfriends went in and stuck ’em up.’

  The Cassidy gang had departed the scene before grandfather Robert MacEwan had arrived in it, but the stories about them had been fresh then and old Fiona had absorbed them all, later frequently re-told them for the entertainment of her grandson Robert — while her other grandson, ‘Joannie’s runt’, had also listened but from a distance.

  Yarning, snoozing, clock-watching: a day in limbo, suspended in comfort but with nerves taut, between the penultimate and final stages. If there were to be later stages – like getting out of this country — he still wasn’t sure he’d have any part to play in them. No certainty either way, and several conflicting indications. Beale and Hosegood were answering Tom’s questions about their wives and babies, family life in England; listening intently to whatever they told him, Strobie was deeply absorbed. A lonely man, isolated, he’d been on the outside looking in — or looking back over his shoulder — for so long that he might have been a creature from some other planet asking about life on Earth.

  He’d arranged for yet another meal to be ready before sunset — chicken stew with pasta, as proposed by Señora Torres. She was also providing them with local-origin rations to take with them: mutton, and a lot of hard bread rolls called galletas. Chocolate in plain wrapping was the only item from the Service-issue ‘ratpacks’ to be allowed; its origins wouldn’t easily be identifiable. The same applied to ‘hexie’ blocks, fuel for the little Korean-made cooker that would heat their maté. The frugal menu, all they’d have for several days, accorded with the principle laid down by Cloudsley: ‘If they caught us, we wouldn’t be Marines. Wouldn’t be anything. They’d shoot a bunch of God knows what.’

  Geoff Hosegood suggested, ‘Bunch of bloody wallies.’ Strobie didn’t know that word. He said, ‘Diaz’d have you shot, all right. When he’d finished with you.’

  The US-made Ingram pistols — no bigger than the old colt .45s when their stocks were folded — were no give-away, Cloudsley pointed out. ‘You could be an East German, or an Argentine, and carry one. Same as I might wear a Heckler and Koch, or a Makarov and it wouldn’t make me German or Russian.’

  Thoughts of capture, interrogation and firing-squads, Cloudsley’s ‘If they caught us’, recalled to mind the phrase he’d used in an earlier explanation. Consequences accepted… Reminding all of them, maybe; anyway there was a silence, Cloudsley staring into the fire, locked in his own thoughts; but he came out of them abruptly, glancing round at the others: ‘Let’s get the gear sorted.’

  Watching from the doorway of the bedroom Andy had glimpses of various items as they vanished into the ponchos’ numerous, specially made inner pockets. Some of the things were packaged and not identifiable, but he thought he saw, as well as such mundane articles as spare socks and rolls of toilet paper, a tube of rolled nylon mesh, a ball of brown string and a bundle of meat-skewers taped together. Field dressings, spare Ingram magazines… They were leaving a quantity of stuff here, which was encouraging, suggesting they really did intend returning this way… Watching them open the big containers, divide the heavier stuff into three loads for the Czech-made backpacks. Each of which had externally, in nylon straps, a roll of rubberised material and what looked like a folding shovel. Beale explained, ‘Sleeping-mat, civvie-type, and entrenching tool, campers for the use of… Want to try this lot for weight?’

  He could lift it — with some effort — but having got it on his shoulders he tried jogging with it.

  ‘Christ…’

  ‘Yeah.’ Beale took the weight off him. ‘Thank God for the gee-gees.’

  Back in the other room Andy told Strobie, ‘We’ll pay you for the food, of course.’

  ‘No, damn it—’

  ‘It’s what we brought pesos for, Tom.’

  Strobie drank whisky with his chicken. Outside, the light was fading. Peóns had been riding in, unsaddling and turning their horses out to graze on the mallin. The men’s working hours were sunrise to sunset, Strobie said, with one Sunday off in every month. The meal was about finished when Pepe Torres knocked on the kitchen door and came clumping in, pulling his cap off and grinning as he bowed.

  ‘Señores…’

  ‘How’s it going, Don Pepe?’ Strobie asked him, ‘Are the horses ready?’

  In five minutes, they would be. The same animals they’d ridden yesterday. Those five had had a good stand-off, and Félix was now preparing them, round at the back where there’d be nobody to witness the departure.

  *

  He didn’t lead them due north as he’d proposed before. Working it out on the map this morning it had been decided to cut across Strobie’s land to his number six gate, which was in the centre of the northwest section of his boundary fence. It meant starting out on the track by which they’d arrived last night, then taking a right fork. You had to use gates and therefore the tracks that led to them; these horses had never been asked to jump a fence in their lives. But even allowing for the fact that if they’d been yomping they’d have taken a much shorter, straight-line route, this way was still saving them about a whole night’s slog — heavily burdened, at that. Leaning down from the saddle, he identified the turn-off: he’d been scared of missing it but it was OK now, and they worked up to a canter. To the first fence, an internal one dividing paddocks. He opened the gate without dismounting, backing the oscuro so there was enough of a gap for the others to file through, then shutting it and spurring to catch up.

  They rode with their chins down, eyes slitted against the cold and the flying dirt. Cantering again, the easy, distance-covering gait to which the horses were accustomed; turning to look back from time to time like a riding-school instructor watching his pupils. At the boundary gate he dismounted to unlock it, and again waited for the others to pass through. Cantering up, then, between them and the fence that was Tom’s northwestern boundary; it would be roughly three miles from here to the point where the fence met the public road and turned east along the road’s south side. If you did turn that way along the road you’d have Strobie land on your right and Diaz on the left, all the way to the Sandrini ruin. The thought of this gave him an idea, and he pulled back to ride alongside Cloudsley.

  ‘Harry — if you could set a night for it, I’d bring horses up to meet you. Using the Sandrini place as a rendezvous. Or I could be there several nights running. Even if I brought just one horse, for your gear?’

  ‘Nice thought, and thanks, but’ — Cloudsley shouted, over wind-howl and hoofbeats — ‘could be anything from two nights to a week or so.’ He had a hand up at the earflap of his cap. ‘Any case we can yomp it, no problem — coming back. Won’t have the grand piano, you see.’

  Andy waved acknowledgement, and took the lead again. Cloudsley had his answers pretty well cut and dried, invariably. He wasn’t dogmatic, but he had a knack of seeing straight through all the pros and cons and coming up with an immediate yea or nay, no hesitance at all. He’d said in the course of some debate this afternoon, beside Strobie’s fire, ‘This isn’t some speculative adventure, old chum. You look at what’s wanted, and if there’s a way to do it you go ahead. If there isn’t, you don’t mess about, you leave it alone. We aren’t either chancers or kamikaze warriors.’

  Their confidence was one of the impressive things about them, and it would stem partly from that philosophy, he guessed. It was a quiet, unassuming confidence, with a complete absence of self-advertisement or self-satisfaction.

  He shortened rein. ‘Road’s just here ahead!’

  There was no fence to negotiate, both sides of the road now being the former Coetzee property. The divide between the Coetzees and Diaz, even if Diaz did now own this territory as well, started on the other side of the road
and ran due north. Andy walked his horse across, over two low banks with the road sunk between them, picked up the line of posts extending northward and waited for the others to join him. Straining his eyes into the dark, ears for sounds other than the wind’s, as Cloudsley came up beside him. Cloudsley alert too, staring around, very upright in his saddle. There was a stretch of four miles to be covered now, to reach Diaz’s northwest corner post; after which there’d be no more fences to follow, no markers, only the compass course they’d decided on this morning with the map spread on Tom’s kitchen table. Hosegood and Beale pressed up from behind, their horses’ hard breathing rasping against the wind, ears back at the sudden bunching. Andy dug his heels in, and led on.

  On foot, as the SBS team would have done it, with all that weight on them this bit would have taken as much as two hours, he guessed. This way it took less than twenty minutes.

  ‘Ready for the compass work, Andy?’

  ‘Let’s have it.’

  The compass was Cloudsley’s; he passed it over.

  With no landmarks to sight on, and no stars visible, all you could do was hold the luminous compass down by your crotch as a backsight and use the horse’s ears as foresight. He rode twenty yards ahead of the others, and they spread out — Cloudsley to the right, on his flank, Beale to the left; and Hosegood between them, astern of Andy, leading the pack-horse. The target was still two leagues ahead, to the northwest. Cantering, maintaining that formation which they’d decided on first so the compass would be clear of the magnetic influence of gear in the packs, second because the nearer you came to the target the more likely it was you might run into a patrol. If the Argies had patrols out. There was no reason to believe they had, except for another dictum of Cloudsley’s: ‘You have to put yourself in the opposition‘s boots, ask yourself what you’d be doing…’

  In fact they rode into nothing except space — Patagonia’s prime commodity.

  He’d been concentrating on steering them as accurately as possible, while Cloudsley watched the passing minutes as a guide to how far they’d come. The yomp was to be started about one league, five kilometres, from the target. Unexpectedly soon Cloudsley came slanting over, shouting to Beale and Hosegood and closing up beside Andy in a sudden thunder of hooves.

  ‘Far as you go, Andy Mac!’

  The drop-off point, already. Time to dismount, unload the animals and load themselves. Time to say goodbye, good luck.

  9

  Saddler said into his microphone, ‘Disregard…’

  The sonar contact was non-sub. They’d been tracking it for the last twenty minutes, and it might have been a whale: there’d been doubts right from the start, but doubts had to be solid before you relinquished a contact that might have been an Argie submarine stealing into San Carlos Water to sink ships. He saw disappointment cloud the young faces round the plot as one of the radarmen reached over to wipe out chinograph markings; he said into the Open Line, ‘Officer of the Watch — increase to revolutions one-two-eight. Ask the navigating officer for a course.’

  He pulled off the headset. The radarmen’s faces showed strain as well as disappointment. He told Bernard Knight, ‘PWO — I’ll be on the bridge.’ He was taking Shropshire northward out of North Falkland Sound — she’d been nosing up through it when sonar had picked up that contact — and thence east to join the carrier group’s escort. Out there in the deep field they were to be allowed a quiet day in which to make temporary repairs to the bomb damage aft and to 30-mm cannon-fire wounds sustained this morning.

  The ship was heeling to her rudder as he got into the lift. Arriving in the bridge a few seconds later he heard the order, ‘Midships, steer three-four-zero…’ Dark figures drew aside to let him through to his seat at the command console, in the starboard for’ard corner.

  The bomb damage was two days old. Four A4s had swept over, in the Sound. An intensity of gun, missile and small-arms fire from Shropshire and from other ships nearby had discouraged three of the pilots, but the fourth had pushed his attack right home. The bomb had slammed into the port for’ard end of the flight deck near the hangar doors and slanted out through the crew’s dining hall immediately below it, passing out through the ship’s side without exploding or causing any casualties. The ‘after battery’ of riflemen on the flight deck had seen the bomb coming, thrown themselves flat and had difficulty believing, seconds later, they were still alive. But this morning’s strafing attack, cannon-fire from a Mirage, had left five men wounded and one dead. The sailor who’d been killed had been the port Seacat operator, the yellow-headed Pitts. Three days ago in San Carlos Water — or four days ago — Saddler had stood beside the director and chatted with Pitts about various Seacat problems. He’d been talking to him when an attack came in and he’d had to run for it, but he could see the boy now like a snapshot in his memory, narrow acne-scarred face incongruously small-looking under the tin hat. He’d already started writing a letter to the parents.

  On his high seat in the bridge now — wrenching his thoughts away from the problems involved in writing that letter — hearing Vigne propose a course of 343 instead of 340… Saddler concurred. Shropshire would steer this course until she’d cleared the Eddystone Rock well enough to turn east and pass clear to the north of it. The carrier group would also be steering east, increasing their distance from the islands after a night of Harrier strikes against shore targets.

  Yesterday the Argentines had celebrated their National Day by sinking Coventry by bombing and the Atlantic Conveyor by Exocet. Coventry had been in company with Broadsword, the pair of them forming a ‘combo’ to operate a missile trap to the north of West Falkland. The system had worked well on several previous occasions; the Type 42’s long-range Sea Dart would engage attackers when they were visible only on radar, and then as surviving Argies closed in to take revenge Broadsword’s Sea Wolf would take them on at close range. Coventry had jollied up the celebrations by splashing three attackers before the fatal assault came in. It came in the form of four Skyhawks, two of them first at sea-skimming height; they’d swung away from Coventry’s shooting and headed for Broadsword, half a mile astern of her. In Broadsword, Sea Wolf was activated, but the two targets were so close together that the computer couldn’t decide between them, suffered an electronic brainstorm and switched off the system. Broadsword’s gun and close-range defence were in furious action as the A4s flashed over, the roar of their passing punctuated by a ringing clang from somewhere aft as the bomb struck; some seconds elapsed before the realisation took root that this one wasn’t going to explode either. The second pair of attackers came screaming in and this time the computer kept a clear head, Sea Wolf gained a solution and was about to fire when Coventry swung to starboard across the destroyer’s bow, fouling the range. Two one-thousand-pound bombs exploded deep inside Coventry, tearing the ship’s heart out.

  Sickeningly familiar scenes, then. A stricken, burning ship, and the frantic efforts to save lives — efforts collective and individual and in some cases heroic. Afterwards, the reckoning, the heavy overhang of sadness and the permanence of loss; and awareness that the ship’s name in the news bulletin could as easily have been Shropshire as any other, and that if the issue rested in human hands at all and not simply in blind chance, those hands were your own.

  Shropshire was pitching harder as she ploughed out from the Sound’s shelter, seas almost phosphorescent-white in contrast to the surrounding blackness, sheeting back from her rhythmically plunging stem. The glisten of seas exploding across her foc’s’l, and a tentative greying in the eastern sector, reminded him that dawn wasn’t far away. He had a hope that after securing from dawn action stations he might have the luck to get a couple of hours’ uninterrupted sleep. Except that first he’d finish the letter to the Pitts parents. There hadn’t been much chance of anything more than catnaps, just lately. In daylight there’d been the constant air threat, and nights had been spent ‘on the gunline’, lobbing shells into the dark, corrections to fall of shot coming
by radio from forward observation officers who’d be crouched in scrapes on rain-swept hillsides to call down fire in support of operations by SAS and SBS. Special Force teams were all over East and West Falkland now, infiltrating enemy outposts and pinpointing their strongpoints.

  The Atlantic Conveyor had been sunk by an AM39 missile from one of a pair of Etendards which had refuelled in the air north of the islands before turning south to attack the carrier group, the vital targets of Hermes and Invincible from which the Sea Harriers were operating. Thirty miles to the north the frigate Ambuscade gained radar contact, identified the nature of the threat and alerted the fleet. Warships fired chaff to deflect the missiles; the Etendards had launched them at a range of twenty-six miles and turned for home Etendard safe, never in much danger. One of the missiles vanished, but the other swung aside from its intended targets, impacted on the Atlantic Conveyor two miles away. The Conveyor had on board ten Wessex helos and four of the giant troop-carrying Chinooks; they’d have been flown off that evening after preparation including the fitting of their rotor-blades, and they were important elements in the plans for an advance inland from the San Carlos beachhead. So those plans had been set back. Another point — in the back of Saddler’s mind, and doubtless in others too — was that the Argies had been generally assumed to have had three AM39s left, and in this attack they’d used two of them. Leaving one: one deployed, probably already slung under the belly of an Etendard and ready for use. Saddler hoped to God that the SBS team, guided by Lisa’s boyfriend, would by this time have reached their target and dealt with the reserve missiles before they were deployed as replacements.

  David Vigne’s voice rose over the exterior noise of wind and sea and the ship’s straining hull, interior hum of machinery… ‘Time to come round — to zero-nine-zero, sir.’