Special Deliverance Read online

  Back door entrance, and a long flight ahead now. Andy settled back, shut his eyes and began to think about old Tom Strobie, whom he’d dragged into this tightrope-walk as ruthlessly as John Saddler had let him in for it. In fact more so — Saddler hadn’t knowingly put a man’s life in danger.

  *

  The SBS had asked him at that first meeting, in Whitehall, ‘Can you think of any family or individual within striking distance of this location who’d be likely to give us a hand?’

  ‘Oh, certainly.’ He hadn’t needed any time to ponder the question. ‘Man by the name of Strobie. His land’s to the west and southwest of ours.’

  Before this there’d been questions about his own family — which meant, in effect, about his brother, and he’d told them enough to put a stopper on that line of thought, their original idea which, understandably, had been to use the MacEwan estancia as their base. There was to be a longer session of probing into his personal background and connections later — by different people, not the SBS themselves — but at this stage the quest was for practicalities, for any way — if a way existed at all — they could make use of his local knowledge or associations. And Strobie’s name was the one and only answer to that question. Maybe very few of the sheep-farming families of Chubut, Comodoro Rivadavia and Santa Cruz would truly give a damn for the Falklands/Malvinas, no matter how many thousands of citizens screamed their heads off in the Plaza de Mayo in BA; but they’d toe the line, certainly wouldn’t stick their necks out now the thing had started. In any case, why should they? Patagonia had been their home for generations, the Argentine had provided them with their livelihoods and in good times made them rich, and their parents and their own children had been born there. Some were of kelper stock, Falklanders themselves or descendants of Falklanders who’d moved of their own volition to live under Argentine rule, so pragmatically they’d have no reason to regard the same rule as necessarily abhorrent to present Falklanders.

  Andy had explained, ‘The truth is, you see, I’m the maverick.‘

  And Tom Strobie was maverick to a high degree. He was also a more recent immigrant, his loyalty to the British Crown clear-cut and unequivocal, just as it had been all his life. The only doubt in Andy’s mind had been — still was, but the proof of that pudding would be seen pretty soon now — whether he’d be in shape to be of any practical help. Tom would be well into his later seventies by now, could even be touching eighty, and in a scrawled Christmas message eighteen months ago the words ‘bloody arthritis’ has been decipherable amongst others that were not.

  (Then some lines, a whole paragraph, that was entirely legible. Strobie had written — and Andy had re-read it so often that he still had it clearly in mind — You should never have given up so easy, lad. She wouldn’t have, if it had been you turning her down! You walked away like a bloody prima donna and my guess is you could have put up a fight and won. What’s more I’d guess she’s wishing you had, by now.)

  But the so-called ‘arthritis’: he’d known that the ailment might be arthritis or might be anything else that caused pain. The only thing unusual had been the fact of Tom mentioning such a thing in his letter: that seemed ominous. He’d suffered from aches and cramps as long as Andy had known him, which was all his life — he’d always had ‘bad days’ and ‘less bad days’, but he hadn’t been near a doctor since he’d removed himself from their hands in about 1949 or ’50. He’d been a Merchant Navy skipper, having run away to sea as a youngster before the first world war, and in the second he’d been awarded the George Medal for his conduct when the freighter he’d commanded — in a convoy to Malta, carrying ammunition in her holds and cased petrol on deck — had been bombed, set on fire and sunk in a series of explosions. Strobie had saved several lives, and come close to losing his own; in a sense it might be said he had lost it. He’d finally been dragged corpse-like — a mutilated corpse at that — from the burning sea, aviation spirit alight and flaming on its surface like brandy on a Christmas pudding; he’d been in it, under it and surfacing into it more than once to get others away. He’d had no hair or skin left on his head, hands, arms or torso, and in some areas he’d lost more than skin. Like one eyelid, and his lips. He’d survived, thanks partly to his own powerful constitution but also initially to the skill and determination of a destroyer’s young doctor, but with only one eye that worked properly and with the appearance of something Dr Frankenstein might have created. After the war he’d gone to live and farm in Patagonia because distant relatives — to whom he’d once referred, Andy remembered, as ‘those fucking old lesbians’ — who were well-off and lived in Buenos Aires, had inherited a sheep-station and offered their war-hero fourth cousin thrice removed the job of running it, and because he’d reckoned, rightly, that in that vast, thinly populated territory there’d be fewer strangers’ eyes to widen in shock at the sight of him — the start of horror, the quick turn away…

  Tom’s grating voice, in memory: ‘Used to get my bloody goat. Not as I’d blame ‘em, mind.’

  The SBS had asked him at that meeting, ‘Are you sure of this fellow? We wouldn’t want to be going out on a limb; and you see, there’s no way to check up on him, without risk. No time, either. Can you be certain?’

  He’d told them yes, he could. If Tom Strobie was still himself, hadn’t gone to pot — from old age, the effects of his injuries, and the state of isolation in which he’d lived for the past thirty years.

  ‘And if you convince him you’re on the level. A letter from me might be the best way to set about it. If there’s some way to get it to him.’

  There’d been a tentative suggestion then of sending in Andy himself to see Strobie and set it up, since he’d be accepted by Strobie without question. ‘A natural for him, isn’t it?’

  They’d been talking across him, as if he wasn’t there. And as if he’d already volunteered.

  ‘God’s sake, man — teach him all he’d need to know, in — what, a couple of weeks?’

  He’d seen the negative reactions to that and happily gone along with them, having no great desire to risk his neck. He knew next to nothing then about the SBS, but he’d gathered they were all Royal Marine volunteers — the pick of the volunteers — and that all Marines were fully fledged commandos even before any ‘higher education’. The one who’d put that rhetorical question — he was a major — added, ‘The only way in there reasonably quickly would be by HALO drop. Teach him that, for starters, by next week?’

  Then he’d softened it: ‘No offence, MacEwan. Point of fact I’d say you look like suitable material. But with the time factor we’re up against it’s really not on.’

  At a later stage it had been mooted that he might be taken in with them as a guide and interpreter only, and this seemed more realistic. Preparation for it hadn’t been quite as near child’s play as he’d intimated to John Saddler; there’d been plenty to learn, as well as the toughening-up. And during that time it was all still very much in the air, because their first two plans had to be scrapped. First when they were told there’d be no submarine available for a beach landing — because no SSK could get out there in the time available — and the second time when British Aerospace scientists came up with a solution to the problem of emasculating Exocet missiles — which earlier they’d said might be impossible — and the solution entailed taking in exceptionally heavy equipment. A third scheme therefore had to be devised, in lieu of the really desperate expedient of bombing from the air, which was rejected out of hand at a high level. And the new plan was based on facts Andy gave them, and his own suggestion — advanced very diffdently and with every expectation of having it laughed out of court — concerning, prosaically enough, the movement of sheep in Patagonia at this season of the year.

  The truth was, nobody was in any mood to laugh, most of them quite ready to clutch at straws. There’d been one explosive objection: ‘But Christ, what about the time angle! You‘re talking about crawling in!’

  ‘Remember the tortoise and the hare,
Joe?’

  The major who’d shot down the idea of sending Andy in alone to set things up with Strobie had pointed out that a lot of time had been wasted already, and it could be as long again before they could have this business on the move; time was a gamble now in any case, but at least you’d be in there finally, with a fighting chance.

  Connecting with the new scheme, it was decided that one SBS officer would go in by parachute well ahead of the main party, by HALO drop — the technique of high altitude, low opening — carrying a letter from Andy to Tom Strobie and asking for his cooperation. Which in fact was a basic essential, you couldn’t move far without it.

  ‘Drop on Strobie’s land?’

  ‘Too close, surely? Even for one guy on his own. We don’t know what kind of radar it is on the new base, but hell, they must have long-range radar at Comodoro Rivadavia — and even at Deseado, maybe — that’d pick up an over-flying Hercules. And that’d be enough to give us away, or could be.’

  It was the same major talking. ‘If Strobie’s land adjoins the a target area?’

  Andy told him no, it didn’t. That really would have been too much to hope for. But the distance would be only about thirty miles.

  ‘A lot too close. I’d say make the drop at least a hundred miles south, then yomp it. One man alone with nothing to carry except his rations — moving only by night — well, what the hell? Otherwise, we’d risk showing interest in the target area, and they’d deploy all those bloody things prontissimo.’

  He’d phrased his letter to the old man cautiously, only introducing the bearer and asking Tom to help him on his way. So no outsider getting hold of it — from a dead parachutist’s pocket, for instance — would learn anything of value.

  ‘Tom Strobie,’ he’d told Harry Cloudsley, who at about this stage had been named as leader of whatever team went in, ‘is a rock of a man. If he’s alive, free, and in his right mind, he’s exactly the guy you need.’

  Ugly as sin. Allowing no mirror in his house. He’d growled, ‘Scared meself a few times, before I chucked ‘em out. Beard don’t cover enough, worst luck!’

  But Francisca had faced him, without even blinking; Francisca of all people, who was so exceptionally easy to look at. Beauty facing the beast… Strobie having offered, a few days earlier, ‘All right. Bring her along. If you really want to put her through it, poor kid.’

  Andy had warned her, and she’d shrugged it off; then when the time came she didn‘t only face old Tom without showing even a hint of revulsion, she walked over to the chair from which he’d begun to hoist himself up, put her hands on his shoulders and pressed him back into it; then stooped, kissed his cheek. Straightening then, speaking quietly in her softly American-accented voice — her mother was American — ‘Sorry if I seem forward. But I heard so much about you’ – moving her dark head towards Andy — ‘from this guy MacEwan…’ Andy seeing the gleam in the old man’s eye, hearing his growl, ‘My word, boy. My bloody oath. I’d say you struck pure gold!’

  Francisca: seeing her in his memory as she’d been then — light-blue eyes, charcoal-black hair, skin with a sheen of that same gold on it. Wide, full-lipped mouth: when she smiled straight at you, he remembered, you felt weightless, gone. And since it had all folded — well, the memories didn’t fold, the image of her was indelible, coming between your eyes or your brain and any other—

  Lisa, for instance.

  *

  He pulled his thoughts back into the present. Noise, lurching, buffering wind as the helo thundered westward. Wondering what they’d do if when they got in there they found Strobie hadn’t reacted as they were counting on him to react, or if the HALO dropper hadn’t got to him. Strobie could be dead, or in hospital, or prison; or the parachutist — an SBS lieutenant by the name of ‘Monkey’ Start — could have been caught. Andy had asked Cloudsley what he’d do in a fix like that, and the big man had only stared at him as if he’d asked a question in some foreign language; then shrugged, muttered, ‘God knows…’

  The snag was, you couldn’t know until you did get in there — right in, in two days’ time. Use of radio had been ruled out, because the Argies weren’t to be allowed any hint of activity or interest in the area of their missile dump, not even within a hundred miles of it. So you’d only find out when you met up with the man who’d been dropped in from a high-flying Hercules C.130 on a dark night about a week ago. Or, as the case might be, when you did not meet up with him.

  *

  ‘Captain, sir. Surface contact…’

  Waking into the rush of emergency as the ship went to action stations. Middle of the night, part of a dream to start with, then reality — in the Ops Room, pulling on his headset over the white anti-flash hood, simultaneously scanning the big plot then moving to peer over a PO’s shoulder at a radar monitor, hearing semi-suppressed excitement in the control team’s voices — a target, a live one, some Argie ship trying to run the blockade.

  ‘White system closed up, cleared away.’

  White system being the gun, the twin-barrelled semi-automatic 4.5” on the foc’s’l, and that voice had come over the wires from the MRS 3 TS, a gunnery nerve-centre on 04 Deck, two levels down from this one. They had an item of wizardry in there called a Box 11 or Fire Control Box, from which the master gunner, Sub-Lieutenant Derek Cadell, would be getting target course, speed, inclination, range, and presently on the bright strip of a radar scan he’d see the splashes of his fall of shot. Saddler meanwhile assessed the position in more general terms, satisfying himself there could be no friendly ships in this sector, that it could only be an enemy heading either for Falkland Sound or to carry on around East Falkland and up to Port Stanley before daybreak. He told his officer of the watch over the Open Line, ‘Come to port to zero-five-zero.’ Shropshire was off Cape Meredith, the southernmost point of West Falkland. From the position where she’d flown-off the Sea King she’d come down on course 130 degrees, southeastward, then altered to 110 an hour ago, having established a safe clearance of the coastline — safe enough, a margin of safety compatible with the need for a fairly rapid eastward transit. Closer inshore there were several potential dangers that had to be borne in mind. One, navigational, was kelp, the masses of floating weed in which you could all too easily immobilise a ship’s propellers. Then shore guns: in some places the Argies had set up howitzers. Third, there’d been talk of shore-mounted Exocets, a rumour of MM38s, the shipborne variety, having been taken out of dockyard storage or even out of Argentine warships and set up for coast defence. The rumour might not have much truth in it but you couldn’t discount it, or ignore any such threat when you were eight thousand nautical miles from home with no dockyard facilities and precious few reserves; but here and now he was satisfied that he could safely turn and close the range because (a) there was no kelp off that headland: tidal streams of up to three knots and a heavy race that came with southerly winds guaranteed it would be kept clear; (b) even if they had an Exocet installation on that point it couldn’t be fired at Shropshire while the blockade-runner was still closer to it and would claim the missile’s attention; and (c) he had no intention of taking her in as close as fourteen thousand yards, which was the range of Argie howitzers.

  ‘Course zero-five-zero, sir.’

  He’d seen it, on the course indicator on the bulkhead. Wind and sea were on the beam, but the stabilisers were holding her reasonably steady.

  ‘Load the hoists with SAP.‘

  ‘White — salvoes!’

  ‘Salvoes’ was the order to load. There was a two-man crew with a supervising PO in the gunhouse, thirty men in the White system as a whole, many of them in the deep below-decks extension of the turret where shells and cartridges would now be lying in the hoists ready to start flowing upward when fire was opened.

  ‘Radar confirms surface target.’

  Dozens of factors went into the calculations, comprised the flow of data the computer-controlled system needed to digest. In the TS the master gunner reporting ‘Radar lo
cked on target’, watching a dot of blue light held on the centreline of a ship-shaped image of the target, while the patter of war cries linked compartment to compartment, circuit to circuit. The gun director, a chief PO at his own console a few yards from Saddler, presiding over radar monitors, banks of switches and panels of indicator lights, had passed the order ‘Surface — blind — joyball!’, using a forefinger on the ‘joyball’ control to mark the target’s radar image on his tote screen and thus keep it in the forefront of the ADAWS computer’s mind; with all the calculations made, White system lined up and primed for its first ever action against a real-life surface target, the final requirement now was Saddler’s authority to proceed.

  He said evenly into his microphone, ‘Command approved.’

  Fifty seconds ago he’d been fast asleep. In some dream that had had Anne in it.

  ‘Engage!’

  Cadell, master gunner, ordered ‘Shoot!’

  Distantly — thud … thud …

  Left gun. Right gun. Blue flashes in a control circuit as each fired. On the radar scan in the TS one splash showed up as short; a petty officer reported, ‘One hit, one short.’

  Seconds ago, there’d have been men asleep in the blockade-runner. Now there’d be none sleeping, might be some dead. With the guns in timed-alternate firing, a seaman’s toe depressing a pedal at the Tallboy to maintain the rhythmic flow of electronic pulses, twenty rounds per gun per minute and hitting steadily — by now there surely would be. The knowledge brought no satisfaction, none at all. Destruction of the target was essential, but the shedding of blood, the blasting apart of bodies, was as unappealing as it was unavoidable. Inside the gunhouse the two-man crew, in anti-flash gear and anti-static boots, worked like parts of the one machine, synchronising the servicing of the smoking breeches with the time-alternate pulses, and never missing one. Loader crashing a green-painted shell into the loading tray, gun captain dropping the cartridge in behind it and his right arm continuing in one smooth movement so that the back of his fist hit the pad to activate the loading ram, the ram whipping over to throw shell and cartridge into the breech, breech shutting as the ram withdrew, right gun catching the pulse, firing, running back as the left gun crashed, recoiled, motion fast and smooth, continuous, cordite reek thickening, the turret’s jerking quick and sudden as aim was kept constantly adjusted against the rolling of the ship; if you’d had the time to let yourself think about it, you could get sick in here.