Special Deliverance

by Special Deliverance (retail) (epub)

  About time for dawn action stations too. The new day was a distant flush of silver on otherwise black, heaving ocean. Saddler said, ‘Yes, bring her round.’ Wondering what he could say in his letter that would be anything but clichés, whether words existed that could even slightly mitigate the agony of Mr and Mrs Pitts.

  *

  The generator filled the night with its noise, supplying power to flood-lights which yellowed the missile compound and the hangar’s walls 150 yards down the uneven slope. The near end of the perimeter fence was only about a hundred yards away, but there was a slip-road to cross before you’d reach it and the light spilled out on to the road too. The double gates — shut now — were in the longer, north side of the fence, with the guardhouse on this side of them. The sentry was there, at this moment, pacing up and down, probably as much as anything to keep warm — or less cold — and like the man he’d taken over from half an hour ago he worked to a set routine: every fifteen minutes he left his position at the gates and made one circuit of the outside of the fence — clockwise, each time, and never taking less than six or more than seven and a half minutes. Cloudsley had timed them both; the seven-and-a-half minute circuit had been when the previous one had stopped to pee. This hide, the one nearest to the target and with a view of it, was finished. Cloudsley leant in to tie the loose end of a ball of string to a spike just inside the entrance, then squirmed around, keeping low to the ground because if the sentry or anyone else happened to look this way at the wrong moment he might otherwise have been visible against the skyline — would be soon, anyway, with dawn not far off — and crawled back to the other hide, laying out string as he crossed the fifty feet that separated them.

  ‘OK?’

  ‘About done.’ Beale didn’t pause in his work: minutes counted, now. He muttered, ‘Roof in a mo’.’ Hosegood said from six feet away, ‘Started, this end.’ Cloudsley crouched, seeing dawn’s left hand fingering the eastern sky — a warning, a steel-grey threat seeping over the low hump of the missile store and other less recent construction beyond it — an accommodation block, workshops, hangars, fuel-storage compound with its own safety fence around it. The napalm storage might be in that enclosure too: it was a point to check on later. Lights threw irregular pools and lanes of brightness among the other buildings, but the missile compound was the only area that was more or less comprehensively illuminated. Fortunately, not quite comprehensively.

  The generator with its unceasing racket was a gift. It was going to help in another way too, in the nights ahead. He heard Beale mutter, ‘OK, roof…’ It was a relief to hear it. Beale had been alone, working on this hide, until Cloudsley and Hosegood had finished the other. The actual breaking and digging had been completed some minutes ago, they’d only been clearing out the last of the loose soil. Excavated earth and stones had been disposed of at intervals, whenever the rubber sleeping mats had been piled with it they’d dragged them away from the hides and dispersed the stuff on the blind side from the target. In fact the set-up was ideal for soil disposal, because this area had had excavated debris, from the site of the missile compound, bulldozed across it.

  Roofing the hide now; Beale on one side and Hosegood on the other, pushing in spikes vertically a few inches back from the top edges. Then nylon mesh, taut between the hooks and with its strips overlapping. On top of that, where in a grassed area (such as other SBS teams had had on the slopes above the San Carlos beaches) you’d lay turf which you’d have cut before the digging started, they used the next best thing, surface soil with fibrous roots in it. Finally a scattering of loose soil and stones, and at this end camouflage netting would hang over the entrance.

  ‘String, Geoff.’ He’d pulled a few extra yards off the ball; he cut it and passed the severed end to Hosegood. All part of the drill, you didn’t need to talk much and you didn’t need light. Be light soon anyway… And one essential job not done yet. He crawled back to the OP, slid in feet-first through the small entrance and went to the end where he’d dumped most of the gear he’d been carrying in his pockets. He came back to the entrance with what looked like a pointed metal bar, and worked it up through the roofing of net and earth. Muck scattering down through the nylon mesh… Crouching in the entrance, with one hand inside to hold the thing in place, he reached with the other to locate its top on the outside and push the pierced rubber disc down over it, down to ground level. The rubber gripped the tube so it couldn’t slip back. Now he unscrewed the pointed metal cover which had allowed the little periscope to be rammed through several inches of rough, stony soil. It stood about eight inches above ground, camouflage-painted, invisible even in broad daylight from more than a couple of feet away. Inside again, Cloudsley had his eye to the monofocal lens, adjusting focus, when Hosegood arrived in the entrance. Cloudsley edged back to give him room, but movement ceased and he heard a whisper: ‘Hang about…’

  ‘What’s up?’

  Eye back at the periscope; seeing it for himself as Hosegood answered, ‘looking right at us…’

  The sentry was motionless, facing this way and with his head up, light from the compound on his left side and profile and the greenish-coloured helmet, and throwing a long shadow across the service road which divided the long stretch of buildings from the open expanse of airfield.

  ‘Still at it. Cheeky sod…’

  He’d whispered but he could have shouted, with the generator drowning any other sound. The generator was no more than twelve or fifteen yards from that sentry; you could have fired a gun here and he wouldn’t have heard it. But he was turning away now, slowly pivoting like some kind of robot: Cloudsley was watching him still, through the periscope with its fourfold magnification. The sentry once again immobile, apparently surveying the dark runways instead of this western skyline. Hosegood said, ‘Proper wally,’ and slid down into the hide. Before, when the sentry had been looking this way, the movement might have been enough to catch his eye. Cloudsley, making way for Hosegood without taking his eye from the lens, saw the sentry patrolling eastward, his back this way and his face to the dawn, starting another circuit. Cloudsley said, ‘He may have thought you were a guanaco.’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’ Hosegood suggested, ‘Test comms, shall I?’

  ‘Why not.’

  Communications with the other hide, he meant. You could pass any message at all by Morse, using short and long pulls on the string, but there was also a quicker, special code of signals for alarms or routine messages such as ‘join me’ or ‘I’m coming over’. Cloudsley had the ’scope focused on the sentry as he paced slowly along the wire — not looking around at all, apparently unconscious of any possible threat. He wasn’t a septuagenarian or a peasant lad — as Intelligence had suggested local recruits for guard duty might be — but he still wasn’t worth his rations.

  Out of sight now, at the far end of the compound. In a few minutes he’d reappear on the southern boundary, but he’d have to be more than halfway down that stretch of fencing before you’d see him. Until then the dark bulk of the hangar, the missile store, was in the way. Cloudsley was taking a long, hard look at the compound, imprinting in his memory the precise extents of areas of light and shadow. The northwest corner, the nearest one, was of greatest interest. The generator shed was there, and its fuel-tank on breezeblock pillars. About five yards separating them. They were close enough to the corner light to give a wide spread of shadow which extended – thanks to the height of that diesel-oil tank — most of the way to the near corner of the hangar. In which, please God, there’d be some unspecified number of AM39 missiles awaiting treatment.

  Vasectomy, some humorous boffin in British Aerospace had termed it.

  Studying the layout, brighter and darker areas and the distances between them, thinking over the moves and their timing, for the four-hundredth time… That shadowed area was the key to it. It was why he’d sited the hides here instead of at the rear, the south side, where in some ways they might have been more inconspicuous. Shadows reached not only to the
missile store’s corner — almost — but also to the back wall of the guardhouse on this side of the gates. There was no door or window in that wall. No reason there should have been: they’d placed the guardhouse to face the gates, at right-angles to them, not to look into its own securely fenced compound… The sentry was in sight again now: Cloudsley moved the periscope fractionally to take a glance at him, then turned it back to where he’d had it. The shadowed part existed because of the way they’d set up the arc-lamps on the corner uprights. The lights were single directional floods, shining only one way, so they’d angled each one to shine along one side of the compound. The near one, northwest corner, shone south, the lamp on the southwest corner shone east — and so on, anti-clockwise. They should have had wide-angle lamps, or set them in pairs back to back. The fact was they hadn’t, and this should make it possible to do the job without having to take out any sentries, which would have led to complications anyway, but you could say that the Argie shuffling along the line of that fence now might owe the continuance of his life to a design fault.

  But his routine was silly, too. It was regular, predictable. Of course, if he’d spent all his time at the gates you’d have gone in on the south side, well out of his sight, and then moved around the end into the shadows. But the Argies could very easily have made this a lot more difficult than Cloudsley thought it was going to be. Touch wood…

  The concrete of the service road had been extended in an apron through the double gates and right up to the sliding doors in the north side of the hangar. There were two small access doors in those big ones. These details had been known and taken into account in the planning, but it was still a relief to see confirmed on the ground what had been deduced from photographs in an office overlooking the Thames Embankment. There could easily have been changes made, between then and now. He’d half expected the area of concrete, the size of a tennis court and sloping from the hangar towards the road, to have been extended to cover the rest of the compound, for instance. It had looked as if that had been the intention, as if they might temporarily have run out of material. But there’d been no such change; it was still rough ground, unsurfaced.

  The sentry was close to the southwest corner, the light from that corner post on him as he approached it; but less bright now, a softer yellow because of the slow growth overhead of the new day. As he advanced he had the guard fence, four metres high, on his right, and twenty feet on his left an ordinary anti-sheep fence — low, with eight strands of taut wire ringing the whole base, airfield runways included. You’d need it, of course, in sheep country. They’d be more alert, he guessed, to the potential hazard of sheep on their airstrip than to any human intrusion around the missile store… He’d seen a flash of light: a reflection from the corner post as the sentry raised his head. He said, ‘This guy wears glasses, Geoff.’

  ‘They weren’t far wrong, then.’

  Hosegood was knocking accumulated dirt off the sleeping-mat he’d brought in with him. Two mats in the rear hide and one in this, although this was where two men would be spending their days. It wasn’t as crazy as it might have seemed: in this OP only one man would ever be asleep, the other watching at the periscope, but in the other hide the occupant would be taking a day off, and they’d foregather there from time to time for a brew-up of maté. The cooker with its hexamine fuel tablets gave out very little smoke, and such fumes as it did emit would be filtered out through several inches of earth roof which in any case wasn’t in sight from the airbase. The man in that hide could sleep all day, otherwise, with the end of the communication string tied to a finger. Hosegood was blowing into his frozen hands. ‘See much?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Except the sentry on his way up the near side of the compound. ‘Be light soon though.‘ He looked round at the Marine’s dark, hunched shape. ‘We’ll treat ourselves to a snack before you crash your swede. Maté to warm us up.’

  ‘That muck.’

  ‘By the time we’re through, Geoff, you’ll be hooked on it.’ Maté was a stimulant, of course. It was also local, part of the the fancy dress. Whatever else, it would be hot… He swerved the periscope again to pick up the sentry, guessing he’d be at the gates by this time.

  Two of them there.

  Thinking about it — wondering how he’d handle it if they did double-up the sentry duty — he heard aircraft engines drown-out the generator noise. Lights were moving out there on the ground; and the blazing lights of a saloon car turning off the service road scythed over six or eight Pucarás swinging into line, wingtip to wingtip… ‘Hey. Roberto’s boys must be keen…’

  *

  The new day’s light was strengthening when Andy slid down from the saddle to unlock Tom Strobie’s number six gate and lead his live horses through. He’d brought them down gently though, but they were steaming in the cold air. He’d taken it slowly partly to go easy on them after the hard ride northward, partly because there was no reason to hurry, and also because he’d wanted to have his eyes and ears open, avoiding any chance encounter. It wouldn’t have been easy to explain leading a string of saddled horses through the deserted paddocks in the middle of the night.

  Timing had been good, as it turned out — daylight now, and he was back on Tom’s land. He swung himself up on to the oscuro’s back, pressed his heels in and jerked at the head-ropes to get them going. Taking a route via number five gate, riding southward along the wire: three miles to that other gate, then he’d turn east and nobody who saw him — Pucará pilots for instance — could guess he’d come from the direction of the airbase.

  It had been Harry Cloudsley’s suggestion. Harry the belt-and-braces man… An owl, keeping late hours, whirred past his head, interrupting a mental picture of those three gone to ground by now, like foxes. He had his team moving at a brisk canter, the fence-posts of Tom’s boundary rushing up and then flicking away like telegraph-poles seen from a train window… Relaxing in the saddle, munching chocolate. The metal water-bottle flopping against his knee. Cloudsley hadn’t wanted to take metal bottles, which he’d said he’d known to split open when their contents froze. In Norway, above the Arctic Circle, he’d explained. He’d accepted them as necessary to the outfit, the disguise, but grumbled that plastic ones were better. Tony Beale had pointed out that it wasn’t freezing yet, and Cloudsley had told him, ‘Damn near to it… If it takes us a week up there, who knows?’ It was below freezing-point now, Andy thought. His and his horses’ breaths jetted like steam and the ground was as hard as stone under their hooves. The winter blizzards wouldn’t be long in coming.

  Five gate; he swung his troop left, on to the track that led to Tom’s estancia. Home and dry: nobody had seen him, no Pucará had defiled the wintry looking sky. In which there was definitely a threat of snow. He wondered how snow might affect Cloudsley’s plans. The job they were doing now might not be affected much, but the withdrawal afterwards — the way snow held tracks…

  Last time he’d approached from this direction the first thing he’d seen had been a light, one in Tom’s window. This time, in broad daylight now, he saw the poplars first and then the shearing sheds with the pens in front of them. His horse, scenting home, friends and water, had to be held in, restrained from breaking into a gallop. He waved to a group of riders passing at a distance: they’d turned to stare at him and his following of riderless animals, and he remembered Tom’s advice about not advertising his presence here. That might have been Anselmo, too, who’d raised a hand acknowledging his greeting… He rode through the gap in the trees, the open gateway; there was a gleam of water beyond them and more sheep-pens beyond that. He was heading for the horse-corral when he saw Torres talking with Félix — and Félix broke away from the mayordomo, came hurrying to meet him… ‘Don Andrés, if you please, I will take the horses!’

  ‘Well, thanks.’ He slid down, fondled the black’s nose, wondering why Félix seemed so nervous. ‘They’re in good shape, I think.’ Torres waddled up, wearing his smile but also anxious-looking; glancing to his right w
here at a distance a young man in a poncho, wide-brimmed hat and shiny boots was leaning against the rail of the corral. In working hours, that kind of lounging wasn’t usual. Torres said, ‘Good day, Don Andrés.’ Keeping his tone low. ‘The patrón asks, would you please go to him directly, in the house?’

  ‘Something wrong? Is he sick, or—’

  ‘Nothing — of that nature. Thanks be to God…’ Torres was clearly apprehensive, though. ‘Only — if you please, as the patrón desires—’

  ‘All right…’ Crossing the yard, he was conscious of the young man’s stare. He knocked on Strobie’s door, then pushed it open. ‘Tom—’

  ‘That you, Andy?’

  ‘Yeah… Some problem?’

  ‘Come on in, shut the door…’ Strobie craned round from his deep chair. ‘I just told Torres to ride out and head you off… Saw him, did you? More to the point, that young squirt see you?’

  ‘Guy in shiny boots?’

  ‘Damn…’

  ‘What is this, Tom?’

  ‘Huyez. Paco Huyez… Did he get a good look at you?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say so.’ But he couldn’t see that it mattered whether he had or hadn’t. There wasn’t a chance he’d have known him; any more than he, Andy, had known him… Paco Huyez had been just a child, five years ago, when he’d pulled out. Paco’s father Juan was mayordomo at La Madrugada. Robert’s right-hand man, hired by old Fiona. Hired ostensibly by her son Bruce but actually by the old woman when Bruce began to drink really seriously, after Juanita died. The name Huyez derived from the Welsh name Hughes: Fiona had taunted her son, ‘Ye’ve a fancy for mongrels, Brucie, now here’s a real ’un!’ Juan Huyez had reported to her, touching his hat occasionally to the drink-sodden man he called patrón and knowing damn well his own and his family’s future, if they had any, would lie in the hands of grandson Robert. In retrospect it was obvious that when the old woman had brought in Huyez she’d been hiring back-up to ensure the continuance of the MacEwan dynasty under Prince Robert — Bruce being a busted flush and Andy of no consequence.