Special Deliverance Read online

About 220 pounds of Royal Marine transferred itself to safety. Cloudsley was about the same age as MacEwan, but six-five, Saddler guessed, and broad in proportion. Black-haired, incongruously long black hair, for God’s sake — and unshaven over sunburn.

  A double-take on that; they were both tanned. Fresh out of England, in the month of May? He guessed at sun lamp treatment, for Argentine-type complexions, and recalled that the Special Boat Squadron’s motto was By Stealth, By Guile.

  Cloudsley asked him, ‘How’s it going generally, sir?’

  ‘If you mean this war, the answer is it isn’t.’

  ‘Because — one’s gathered — they won’t oblige by coming out where you can clobber them.’

  ‘Exactly. We’re supposed to win the air and sea battle before your fellow Bootnecks land, but all we’re doing so far is shadow boxing. They’re saving their strength, of course. You’ll have heard about Sheffield?’

  A nod. ‘Were you close, when she was hit?’

  ‘Close enough.’

  ‘If we could have gone in weeks ago, right off the bat, that thing might’ve been a damp squib.’ The big man shook his head. ‘Couldn’t have, of course. We needed the time we’ve had to get the show organised on the ground, put Andy here through his paces, and last but most important of all for the boffins to work out a technical modus operandi for us.’ He paused, and then changed the subject: ‘What’s your role in the Task Force, sir? You have Seaslug, don’t you…?’

  ‘Seaslug and Seacat. Both outdated. We’re also twenty years old, and frankly not a hell of a lot of use. All right for jobs like this one, of course, but otherwise you could say our role is almost entirely NGS.’ He interpreted for Andy MacEwan’s benefit, ‘Naval gunfire support. Hitting shore targets, very often in support of Special Forces teams, SAS and SBS.‘ He looked back at Cloudsley. ‘You said — a “technical modus operandi”?’

  ‘Right.’ The SBS man nodded. ‘How to screw up an AM39 missile so it won’t fly. Or won’t fly straight, or explode, or whatever. They had an open brief — misdirection, malfunction, anything that would effectively castrate the thing. By no means an easy problem to solve. Certainly wasn’t, in fact after a couple of days they came back and told us it was impossible. At that stage they were concentrating on buggering up the radar guidance, the homing head. As you can imagine, there was a lot of gloom around, for a while.’

  ‘But’ — Saddler was puzzled — ‘what’s wrong with the old 1940s SBS tradition, a lump of plastic and a pencil fuse?’

  ‘Ah. If only… ‘ Cloudsley sighed. ‘Unfortunately’ — he jerked a thumb vaguely towards Whitehall, eight thousand miles away — ‘orders from on high, policy decision.’

  He cocked an eyebrow. ‘She who must be obeyed? Well, God bless her. But we’re not to do anything that might be seen as spreading the war to the mainland, thereby upsetting people and losing world support. Nothing noisy or violent — no bangs, and no avoidable harm to Argie personnel on their own ground. Bit tricky, really.’

  ‘I’d imagine very tricky.’ Saddler added, ‘And what puzzles me in particular is how you can hope to cover all the ground — three of you, or four’ — he glanced at Andy, back at Cloudsley — ‘with Río Gallegos, Río Grande and Comodoro Rivadavia — they could all have Exocets deployed on them by now — such huge distances apart. Gallegos is more than just one airfield anyway, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, sir.’ Cloudsley frowned. ‘The answer’s probably not entirely to your liking — or ours, for that matter. The fact is, missiles already deployed to the operational bases are out of our reach. Our target’s just one place which the Argies don’t know we know about. A new airbase and missile store, not all that far from the MacEwan mutton factory. Not next door, exactly — and unfortunately we can’t use his place anyway—’

  ‘By Patagonian standards of distance,’ Andy interrupted, ‘it’s almost next door.’

  ‘Right,’ Cloudsley said. ‘Enormous distances — as you said, sir. They have farms the size of English counties, I gather. But anyway, American satellite intelligence watched this place being built. An airfield of sorts — pilot-training in Pucarás, it seems — but the interesting bit is one large hangar with its own perimeter fence and guardhouse. It was being thrown up in a hurry, the Yanks were keeping an eye on it, and just recently some AM39s have been arriving. In ones and twos, flown in by helos — heaven knows where from originally. We knew they were shopping around, and there’ve been hints of potential suppliers — Libya for one, and Israel, South Africa’s been mentioned — and a Peruvian naval transport tried to collect a consignment from Le Havre a week ago, but the French turned it away… Anyway, they’ve now found a supplier, the things are arriving and that’s where they’re putting them, presumably until the missiles already deployed have been expended. They may believe they’re safer there than on the operational bases. The location’s well insulated, you see, by wide-open spaces, mile upon mile of damn-all in every direction, and some distance from either the coast or the Chilean border.’ Saddler crossed two fingers, to keep a question in mind while the SBS man added, ‘It’s also conveniently placed as a distribution centre for those three main bases. So it makes sense, from the Argies’ point of view. It’s also possible — not certain, but we’re told it’s on the cards — they may have some tame Frogs there, for maintenance or pre-flight checks, whatever. There’s an accommodation block beside the airstrip. It wouldn’t mean the French would necessarily know about the new deliveries, they could have been diverted from some other consignee, and it’s thought the technicians were there already, you see?’

  Saddler nodded. ‘And you do have some way to — er — screw them up?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ A smile. ‘Missiles, or Frogs. Missiles will be a little difficult, but—’

  ‘Hang on.’ The telephone buzzed. joking apart, he thought, how the hell you’d do it, sabotage an AM39 without blowing it up — even if you could get that close to it in the first place. He was on his feet, at the telephone, dealing with a query from the officer of the watch; then, while he was at the desk, putting a call through to Hank Vaughan the commander (WE), which stood for Weapons Electrical, about a defect his people were working on, a breakdown on the port Seacat director. Vaughan reported progress to the extent that they’d identified the trouble. The incidence of defects — in Vaughan’s own language, of equipment ‘throwing wobblies’ — was increasing daily. Hardly surprising, admittedly, in a twenty-year-old ship that had been at sea now for a solid month, most of that time in lousy weather. Saddler told him, ‘Let me know as soon as it’s operational,’ and put the phone down. Seacat was obsolescent, but for close-range anti-missile defence it was all this ship had, apart from a pair of Oerlikons, WW2 weapons, up on top. He came back to his visitors, remembering he’d crossed his fingers as an aide mémoire to a question he wanted to ask — he put it to Cloudsley now.

  ‘Couldn’t you have gone in by parachute? With the MacEwan place so handy, and time rather vital?’

  ‘Yes.’ Cloudsley drew a breath like a sigh. ‘We need to be in there now, you’re right, sir. We did aim to go in by HALO drop, too. But — well, several factors, here. One, when the scientists worked out how we might nobble the missiles, we saw we were going to need a certain weight of extra gear. The weight’s mostly batteries, actually. Two, the new base has a radar installation, and maybe ground and air patrols. We have to be bloody secretive about it, not only because we don’t want to be caught but because if they knew we knew anything at all about this place they’d deploy all the missiles right away. Which wouldn’t help you much, sir. Then again, we can’t drop close to the target without the overflying aircraft being detected, and if we landed far enough away to avoid it it’d be next to impossible to do a yomp there, with that weight of equipment and over ground which provides no cover whatsoever — so we’d only be able to move at night, and short hauls, too… Tell you the truth, we just about gave up, at one stage. Someone suggested bombing the place instead. Of cour
se that wasn’t to be allowed. Then’ — he pointed at Andy MacEwan — ‘genius here came up with some answers.’

  ‘Some quite ordinary things I told them turned out to be useful, that’s all.‘

  ‘Still leaving the time factor as a major worry, I admit.’ Cloudsley added, ‘But even if we get there in time to nobble two or three of them — when you think of the lives and damage just one can—’

  ‘Right. Absolutely.’ Saddler nodded. He’d seen it, still saw it, in his mind’s eye. He said, ‘I have another question for you. If you’re allowed to answer it. You’re Special Boat Squadron, and there must be a hell of a lot of Patagonian coast you could land on, so why not go in by sea? Alternatively, why the SBS and not the SAS?’

  ‘Ah, well,’ Cloudsley began, with a straight face, ‘they wanted men with brains, you see—’

  ‘Come on, now…’

  ‘Sir. Well, the answer to the last bit is that the idea was so to speak born — here in your ship, I was told — with one of our chaps present, and so it became the squadron’s baby because it was ours from birth, sort of thing. Then when the planning got under way, the idea was certainly to have gone in by sea — by submarine, of course. But the fact is — as was then pointed out — there’s no SSK down here yet.’

  Saddler took the point. An SSK being a patrol submarine, conventionally powered, small enough to be able to operate in coastal waters, whereas the nukes, SSNs which were on station now, were too big to get in close enough — on that coast — for beach landings. Nukes didn’t much like to surface, anyway, in close proximity to their enemies. Cloudsley added, ‘If all goes according to plan, we’ll be taken out by submarine, when the job’s done.’ He reached sideways to the table, to touch wood.

  *

  At 1620 the carrier group was thirty miles to the south, still on what had become known as its ‘racetrack’ daylight patrol on this east side of the islands, but steering southwestward, beginning to close in for whatever night operations had been ordered. Bombardments, anti-shipping sweeps, or insertions or extractions of Special Forces teams. It had been a quiet day for the Task Force so far: Harriers had splashed one Mirage, and that had been the sum of the day’s action. Boredom was the enemy, at such times, and John Saddler could see it in many of the young faces around him. He was in the Ops Room, on his chair and wearing the communications headset which gave him the Command Open Line in one ear and, in the other, occasional laconic exchanges between the CAP — combat air patrol, Harriers from the flagship Hermes — and their fighter control ship, which this afternoon was the Type 42 destroyer Glasgow.

  Now his own ship’s broadcast: ‘Hands to flying stations!’

  It was the slow way to get the helo into the air. If you wanted to do it in a hurry, the order would have been ‘Action helo!’ His eyes moved around the weirdly lit cavern of the Ops Room, thinking that to a newcomer it might have resembled a scene from some sci-fi drama. Hum of machinery and fans: light bleeding orange from radar monitors, filtering silver over the big plot where everything that moved on, under or over the sea and in range of the ship’s electronic sensors was plotted and its movements constantly updated by the radarmen clustered round it. So young looking, some of them, they might still have been at school: boys with men’s jobs, while his own was not only to direct and control their joint efforts but also, please God, to keep them alive, eventually get them home to mothers, fathers, wives, girls…

  Saddler pulled off the headset, replaced it with his gold-peaked cap. He told Joe Nicholson, a lieutenant-commander and Anti Air Warfare Officer, ‘I’ll be on the bridge.’

  Leaving the Ops Room, passing the little hole that was his sea cabin, he stepped into the one-man lift, jerked its gates shut and thumbed the button. It leapt upwards — a whooshing noise and a rocket-like ascent — and jerked to a slamming halt three decks higher. It provided a very fast means of transference from one command point to the other, its only snag being that in really bad weather the flexing of the ship’s hull could jam the cage in its shaft, which for the commanding officer of a ship in action might be something of a nightmare. It had never happened to Saddler yet, but in rough seas he was always glad to get out of it. He turned right — for’ard—– then right again into a passage that ran athwartships behind the bridge, and thence into the bridge itself, to his high chair in the front of it. Holt, the Australian lieutenant who was officer of the watch, asked him, ‘Permission to fly, sir?’ and he nodded as he reached for binoculars, thinking for the thousandth time that the routine question almost demanded a silly answer. Shropshire was altering course through whitened sea, changing to a new leg of the anti-submarine zigzag. Alpe, a sub-lieutenant who was second officer of the watch, pressed a switch in the helo-operating console: lights would glow green now, back aft on the flight deck, authorising take-off. It was simpler to send the Wessex away for a few hours, making room here for the visiting Sea King, than to manhandle it into its hangar, which this much movement on the sea made tricky.

  The Sea King from Hermes would be refuelling during its stay on board Shropshire; it had been fitted with extra tanks, apparently, and would be landing-on with them empty. And Cloudsley and his team — which consisted of Colour Sergeant Beale and Marines Hosegood and West, and of course Andy MacEwan — would have their heads down now in the cabins temporarily allocated to them. They’d had some work to do first, sorting and re-packing gear, but by this time if they had any sense they’d be enjoying the last comfortable sleep they’d be likely to get for quite a while.

  Holt had pulled down the mike on its hinged deckhead bracket and was admonishing the quartermaster, for using too much wheel — or not enough — in making the last zigzag alteration. Shropshire smashing through the waves, sea exploding back in sheets and streamers across the wet, shiny-green fo’c’sl. Only some horizontal surfaces were green now, everything else having become dull grey; white paintwork and black had been over-painted before they’d left Ascension Island. Saddler pulled on his jacket and moved out into the bridge wing, opening the side door easily but then needing all his weight to force it shut again, squinting up against wind and spray to see the Wessex claw its way up above the ship and then swing away on course to join the carrier group. Its cruising speed of ninety knots, boosted by a tail wind, would see it down on the flagship’s deck in less than twenty minutes.

  2

  A Sea King’s standard load was twenty men, and on this trip there were only five plus its crew of three. It left a lot of empty cabin space. Andy MacEwan, in a rear seat with Geoff Hosegood on his left, was strapped in now — feeling fairly rotten — with the others’ broad backs in front darkening the space between him and the faint radiance leaking from the cockpit. Outside, Shropshire’s highly unstable flight deck rose and fell and tilted, the white of wave-crests visible in nauseating close up when she rolled this side downward; then as she swung back, stern rearing, you saw only the spill of light from the flight-deck officer’s caboosh.

  If it went on much longer, he’d be sick. Motion violent, noise ear-bruising, vibration bone-rattling. How in hell they’d even get the heavy machine off the gyrating deck in these conditions he couldn’t imagine. But outside, they’d removed the rotor cuffs and were crouching ready to knock off the securing chains.

  The Sea King had landed-on at 1700. Andy, who hadn’t felt inclined to sleep, had been up there in the bridge wing to watch it clatter down out of the sky; and later, after the ship had been called to dusk action stations and eventually relaxed again into two watches, John Saddler had invited Cloudsley to bring the SBS team up to the chartroom for a rundown on the navigational angles; he’d shown them the ship’s position, track and rate of advance to the fly-off point, which she’d been due to reach at 0430.

  Had reached, now. He checked the time: his watch showed 0428. Geoff Hosegood saw him doing it, shouted, ‘OK, Andy?’ White teeth gleamed under the black, droopy moustache which he’d cultivated in the past fortnight. Hosegood came from Chatham in Kent, but
with that moustache he’d easily pass for a Latin — for an Argentine. Brown eyes to match: the eyes of a quiet and thoughtful man. Andy raised a thumb — in somewhat less than truthful answer — and shouted, ‘fine.’ He wasn’t feeling anything like fine at this moment, and Hosegood had seen it, had intended the question as an encouragement and wasn’t fooled now either. Geoff was married, with a baby daughter and a pretty wife; he had snapshots of them and never took much persuading to bring them out and show them round, although he wouldn’t be carrying any such things as photos now. Sitting back, grasping the arms of the metal-framed webbing seat, feeling the upward lurch as noise expanded and its quality changed, his gut perversely trying to stay down there as the helo lifted. The whites of Harry Cloudsley’s eyes showed through semi-darkness as he swung round, glancing back; Tony Beale too, Colour Sergeant Beale’s large-nosed, long-chinned face with a similar enquiry in it; and Andy raising the same thumb — with some degree of honesty this time, relief already noticeable. But in any case he didn’t want them nursemaiding him, treating him as a softie who might be in need of support and might therefore be a liability to them; and Geoff Hosegood reading this, too, turning away, deliberately leaving him to himself as the big helo hoisted itself thunderously into the dark night sky, the five-thousand-ton destroyer already a small and diminishing disturbance in black, white-streaked sea. Shropshire would be turning now, not quite reversing her course but making a hairpin turn to head back south of the islands, having passed north of them to reach this position on the western edge of the Exclusion Zone. Cape Virgin bearing 250 degrees, 180 miles; visualising John Saddler’s chart, Cabo Vírgenes being the headland at the entrance to the Magellan Strait. The Sea King’s course-made-good (course adjusted for drift, effect of wind) would actually be 246 degrees, to leave that cape to starboard and pass inland up the middle of the strait, entering not Argentine territory but Chilean and then after a while edging round on to a northerly course up the Chilean side of the Andes mountains.