Soldier B: Heroes of the South Atlantic
Page 18
Back in the house, Gumboot mounted the machine-gun on its tripod, loaded a 200-round magazine, and sat patiently in that room filled with dead, waiting for the enemy. Their gun barrels appeared first, poking in through both smashed windows, and Gumboot pressed the trigger of the machine-gun even as the Argentinians’ gun barrels spat flame in his general direction, then blindly raked the room.
The machine-gun shook his body, pierced his flesh with countless spikes, then he realized that the shaking and the burning were part of his dying.
The hail of billets threw him backwards, made him gasp, killed all feeling, but he had a sudden glimpse of his wife at home in Devon, tending the garden, not particularly attractive and inclined to wander at times, but the only woman he’d ever cared about or felt the pain of love for.
She wasn’t bad at all, he thought as he died, and life could have been…
He was dead before the men who had shot him burst into the room.
Chapter 16
Ricketts and Danny zigzagged through the eruptions of mortar shells, glimpsing shadowy figures aiming at them through swirling smoke. Hearing gunshots, seeing the soil spitting around them, firing back as they ran, crouched low, they somehow managed to get away.
Escaping from the chaos, stumbling down a rocky, frost-covered gradient, Ricketts, followed by Danny, came to a halt in a gully filled with snow, offering a panoramic view of Port Stanley and the war being waged there.
Parkinson and Andrew were there, also, the trooper already on the radio, calling in grid references to the fleet and asking for aircraft support. The Sea Harriers were there in minutes, bombing the hell out of the hilltop, turning it into an inferno of flame and smoke before giving the all-clear.
‘Damn it,’ Parkinson said. ‘We can’t leave him there. He’s got to be taken all the way. Who’s going back with me?’
‘We’re all going,’ Ricketts said.
They clambered back up the hill and returned to a field of dead, the ground surrounding the house pock-marked by shell holes and littered with scorched, tattered bodies. The farmhouse, as Andrew had instructed, had been left intact.
‘I hate giving credit to the RAF,’ Andrew said; looking in admiration at the dreadful carnage around the untouched farmhouse, ‘but in this case I have to. The proof’s in the pudding, right?’
Hardened though they were, they had a problem with Gumboot. He had been shot so many times, by so many, he looked no more than a heap of tattered, dust-covered rags, buried in overturned, splintered furniture. Choking back their rage and grief, they dragged him out from where he lay, rolled him onto a makeshift stretcher of wood and Argentinian webbing, then proceeded to carry him down to Port Stanley.
Ricketts was silent, but his cheeks were stained with tears.
‘Oh, Lord, my man,’ Andrew said, ‘but this is one death we don’t need.’
Baby-faced Danny revealed little: out ahead, on point, leading them downhill, he never relaxed his guard for a moment, keeping his thoughts to himself.
Major Parkinson was more emotional, having to fight to control himself; he managed to do so by taking the radio from Andrew, getting in touch with HQ, and filling them in on events.
‘Just part of the damned job,’ Andrew was heard to mutter as they entered liberated Port Stanley. ‘We all pay our dues and take our chances, so no point thinking about it.’
‘One more fucking word,’ Ricketts said, ‘and I’ll tear your head off. Do you understand, Andrew?’
‘Yes, boss,’ Andrew said.
Ricketts smiled and placed his hand on Andrew’s shoulder, squeezing gently, affectionately. ‘Sorry, Trooper.’
‘No sweat, boss.’
Still carrying Gumboot on his improvised stretcher, they marched through the recaptured streets of Port Stanley, past wooden-framed houses miraculously untouched, damaged British ships still smouldering in the docks, 42 Commando Marines, the Red Berets of 2 Para, and dejected Argentinian prisoners huddled around open fires beside piles of discarded weapons and helmets. They also marched past traffic jams of Land Rovers, troop trucks, Panhard armoured cars and Mercedes jeeps; under a sky filled with Sea King, Lynx, Scout, Chinook and Wessex helicopters, as well as Sea Harriers and Vulcan bombers – marched resolutely to the one place where they knew that Gumboot, even dead, would wish to be on this great day of liberation.
Resting the stretcher that bore the body of their beloved friend on a couple of tables in the Upland Goose bar, Ricketts and his troopers, trying desperately not to cry, ordered drinks for everyone in the house.
They were not refused service.
Chapter 17
In Port Stanley, at 9.00pm local time on 14 June, 1982, Major General Mario Menéndez formally surrendered all the Argentinian Armed Forces in East and West Falkland to Major-General J.J. Moore. The British flag was raised again over Government House.
Throughout the next couple of days, while thousands of dejected Argentinian soldiers were rounded up by British forces and imprisoned near Stanley airport, before being shipped back to Argentina, the members of the various five-man SAS teams came marching into Port Stanley to be reunited with their friends, swap stories, and express their grief over the death of Gumboot, whose body had already been shipped back to Hereford.
During lively drinking sessions in the Upland Goose, when Ricketts, Danny, Andrew and Major Parkinson were trading experiences with their friends, it emerged that Captain Grenville had linked up with other SBS men, returned to the fleet, then taken part in the daring SBS raid designed to set fire to oil storage tanks in Stanley’s harbour installations, coming ashore from high-speed raiding craft and withdrawing without serious casualties. Also in the harbour at that time were Captain Hailsham, Corporal Paddy Clarke and Trooper Taff Burgess, who had actually managed to infiltrate enemy defences to hide in the hulk of a wrecked boat, keep a watch on the harbour, and report back to the fleet with daily details of Argentinian movements. Other groups had, like Parkinson and his men, simply foraged across the land, disrupting enemy communications, harassing their patrols and committing many invaluable acts of sabotage. SAS casualties, with the tragic exception of Trooper Gillis, had been minimal.
‘So here’s to Gumboot,’ Ricketts said.
They all touched glasses, saluting their dead friend, then drank to his memory.
A few days after the surrender of the Argentinian forces, when the harbour was secured and the cleaning-up process had begun, the media descended like wolves on Port Stanley, anxious to tell the ‘true’ story of the Battle for the Falklands.
Though the fighting had stopped, explosions were still taking place in the hills around Port Stanley as anti-personnel mines were located and set off by British sappers. Piles of abandoned weapons, equipment and other stores were being removed. On the runway of Stanley airport, damaged Pucaras were surrounded by strewn debris, stores, ammunition, flapping tents and the burnt-out skeletons of other vehicles. The walls of the terminal were scarred with bullet holes, when not completely destroyed by the explosions of shells from the fleet’s big guns. The wind that howled and blew sleet through the broken windows of the same building, also froze the thousands of dejected, mud-covered Argentinian prisoners who were huddled near the airstrip, wrapped in blankets and ponchos, waiting to be embarked on the Canberra and shipped home. In Port Stanley itself there was an acute water shortage because, though the wooden buildings remained untouched, the town’s sole filtration plant had been destroyed in the bombings.
As they investigated the area, interviewing victorious British troops and defeated Argentinians, the reporters gradually picked up a lot of seemingly fantastic stories about the SAS. Intrigued, they tried to track down some members of the legendary Regiment and ended up, perhaps inevitably, in the Upland Goose.
They could find no members of the SAS. The Squadron had packed up and gone, leaving no trace behind.
‘The SAS?’ a local said to one of the journalists. ‘That regiment’s just a myth, mate. You guys m
ust have invented it.’
That remark would have been hugely appreciated in the pubs of Hereford.
Discover other books in the SAS Series
Discover other books in the SAS Series published by Bloomsbury at
www.bloomsbury.com/SAS
Soldier A: Behind Iraqi Lines
Soldier B: Heroes of the South Atlantic
Soldier C: Secret War in Arabia
Soldier D: The Colombian Cocaine War
Soldier E: Sniper Fire in Belfast
Soldier F: Guerillas in the Jungle
Soldier G: The Desert Raiders
Soldier H: The Headhunters of Borneo
Soldier J: Counter Insurgency in Aden
Soldier K: Mission to Argentina
Soldier L: The Embassy Siege
Soldier M: Invisible Enemy in Kazakhstan
Soldier N: Gambian Bluff
Soldier O: The Bosnian Inferno
Soldier P: Night Fighters in France
Soldier Q: Kidnap the Emperor!
Soldier R: Death on Gibraltar
Soldier S: The Samarkand Hijack
Soldier T: War on the Streets
Soldier U: Bandit Country
Soldier V: Into Vietnam
Soldier W: Guatemala – Journey Into Evil
Soldier X: Operation Takeaway
Soldier Y: Days of the Dead
Soldier Z: For King and Country
This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
First published in Great Britain 1993 by Bloomsbury Publishing
Copyright © 1993 Bloomsbury Publishing
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eISBN: 9781408841525
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