Ghost Force (36 page)

The President came about as close as he had ever done to shooting a hot jet of Lapsang Souchong down his nose. He groped for his handkerchief, and looked up with a conspiratorial grin.

“Why, yes, Arnie. What a remarkably good idea. That was a very wicked thing it did, killing a thousand men. I think there should be a price for that. Do we tell the Brits?”

“Absolutely not. We tell no one. Ever. And if anyone inquires, we deny it. Just so long as the comrades suspect we know and disapprove of their goddamned antics. ’Specially that lying sonofabitch who runs their Navy.”

MIDNIGHT (LOCAL), SAME DAY
LONDON

Like most of the Western world’s newspapers, the British press has few, if any, morals. As in the USA, all of their newspapers and almost all of their television channels are thoroughly commercial operations, unconcerned with the public or national good, only with the sale of their product. And, generally speaking, the best way to take care of that is to frighten the living daylights out of the population whenever possible. Fear sells, right?

The only operation in the British media that is not, formally, a profit-seeking corporation is the BBC. But that is a fat, government-funded monolith stuffed with executives and journalists earning absurd salaries for what they really are, and running up mighty annual expense accounts.

Between them they represent an even more self-interested commercially minded block than those outside the Corporation, and like all government employees they don’t have the problem of their parent operation losing money.

When a big story breaks, the BBC often leads the way and cheerfully wades into the fray, embarrassing the government, humiliating the nation, or the military, as it thinks fit.

The day the Falkland Islands fell, Britain’s media collectively went bananas. Headlines unknown for decades leapt into the minds of the editors. Words like
Defeat
,
Humiliation
,
Catastrophe
, and
Disaster
crowded onto front pages and newscasts, all mixed in with
Royal Navy
,
warships
, and
surrender
.

And through it all, the press smelled an even bigger story—had the fleet put to sea inadequately armed, because of government cuts to the armed services?

The top brass of the Ministry of Defense and indeed the Army and Navy were of course sworn to silence. But an issue as topical as this
could scarcely be held in check. It seemed that all through that early evening in England, every retired officer in either service was quite prepared to bring up the matter of the retired Harrier FA2 fighter jets.

The BBC’s first words in their 10:00 p.m. newscast were: “Was this the war that should never have been fought?”

The early editions of the Sunday newspapers, traditionally on sale in London’s Leicester Square at 10:30 p.m., were absolutely lethal to the Prime Minister and his Cabinet.

The Sunday
Times
splashed over eight columns on its front page:

ROYAL NAVY BLAMES THE GOVERNMENT
FOR DISASTER IN THE SOUTH ATLANTIC
Falkland Islands fall to Argentina—
British warships “defenseless”

The source, or sources, for this scything statement of fact was in truth a succession of off-the-record conversations with a half dozen retired Admirals and Captains, three of whom had commanded ships in the first Falklands conflict.

Like everyone in a senior position in the Navy, they knew of the reductions in the Senior Service, the cuts to the fleet, the closures of dockyards, the lateness in the arrival of the new aircraft carriers, and above all the four-year gap in the production of a top-class guided-missile fighter jet to fly from the carrier’s decks.

And every last one of those sources had instantly said the same thing…
You can’t fight a state-of-the-art war at sea facing any threat against aircraft or missiles without fixed-wing air defense aircraft armed with a state-of-the-art medium-range air-to-air missiles system. Hit the archer, not the arrow.

Great Britain had gone to war 8,000 miles from home without the proper kit—and the British media sensed blood, and they were going to ride this “story” to the bitter end.

ROYAL NAVY SURRENDERS FALKLANDS
Can’t shoot, can’t fight,
Government Cuts Blamed
—Sunday Mirror
Falkland Islands fall in two-hour massacre at sea
ARGENTINA WIPES OUT
“
DEFENSELESS
”
NAVY
—Sunday Telegraph

ARK ROYAL SUNK
—
ROYAL NAVY
SURRENDERS
FALKLANDS
—News of the World

(This narrow headline ran alongside a huge picture of the British aircraft carrier in her death throes.)

The newspapers devoted pages and pages to interviews with Whitehall Press Officers, and were currently engaged in a relentless, ghoulish search for photographs of the dead. By midnight reporters were besieging naval towns like Portsmouth and Devonport, trying to contact families whose sons and husbands may have gone down with the
Ark Royal
.

By first light the press would have done its work, sowing the seeds of doubt and suspicion in the minds of the British people. Was this government as bad as many people think? Was it just a self-seeking bunch of incompetents, concerned only with their own jobs, and careless of their duty to the armed services?

That’s what it looked like as dawn broke over London. And, prophetically, an enormous black rain cloud hovered over Westminster and the Houses of Parliament. At least that’s how it seemed. But inside the debating chamber, that cloud seemed to hang over the Prime Minister alone.

He had taken his seat on the government front bench as, high above, Big Ben chimed midnight. He arrived, predictably in this Parliament, to thunderous roars from the Tory benches of,
“Resign!! Resign!! Resign!!”

And, at the invitation of the Speaker, he had begun the proceedings with a frequently interrupted speech, in which he had endeavored to explain away the obviously shattering defeat of the Royal Navy in the South Atlantic.

The fact was, no one was listening. The scale of the nightmare,
the reverberations of the consequences, were too great for any British government. And, with the aid of the media, the loss of those little islands four hundred miles off the coast of Argentina was rapidly being compared in the minds of MPs to the end of all life as they knew it.

When finally the PM did sit down, the Tory leader of the opposition stood up and demanded, “Well, I’m sure the House would like to join me in thanking you profusely for shedding a glaring light on the obvious…now perhaps you would tell the House what you plan to do about the recapture of the islands and the rebuilding of our armed forces?”

Another storm of derisive cheering broke out, and the Prime Minister’s Secretary of Defense, Peter Caulfield, climbed to his feet and revealed that in the opinion of his Ministry, it was far too early to make any such announcements, but that the Cabinet would be considering all of the facts later in the morning.

It may have been too early to ascertain the precise moment-to-moment ebb and flow of the short sea battle. It was not, however, too early to discuss the ramifications of the defeat and the surrender.

And the debate was now open to the floor. The first Member of Parliament on his feet was the Tory Alan Knell, who represented Portsmouth, and stated flatly, “The Right Honorable gentleman was warned a thousand times about the dangers of rendering the Royal Navy impotent by scrapping the Sea Harriers. Indeed he was warned by me on many occasions.

“Now his folly has been exposed, can there be any reason why the Right Honorable gentleman should not immediately offer his resignation to his party and to the House?”

Before Alan Knell had regained his seat on the green leather back benches, the Tory side had once more erupted with howls of “
Resign!! Resign!! Resign!!”

The Speaker stepped in and demanded
“Order!!…Order!!
” And now the Tory MP for Barrow-in-Furness, the Prime Minister’s old nemesis on issues of defense cuts, Richard Cawley, was on his feet, to remind the House of the many warnings he had personally issued about the sheer scale of slashes in the Navy and military budgets.

“I personally warned the Right Honorable gentleman about the loss of the Harriers—and what the lack of a beyond-visual-range fighter jet would mean. I told him over and over that without that look-down
shoot-down Blue Vixen radar in the Harriers the Navy was in shocking trouble.

“And now there are twelve hundred and fifty of this country’s finest men dead in the South Atlantic. And the blame can be laid at no other door than the one that opens into number ten, Downing Street, his home and that of his benighted government…”

The cheer from the Tory benches ripped into the great vaulted ceiling of the House. And again the Speaker stood up and demanded
Order
from the Members.

And so it went on. And five more times the echoing chimes of Big Ben tolled out the hour. Until eventually the Members staggered out into the morning air, the opposition congratulating themselves on a debate well won. Government ministers were wondering whether indeed their leader would have to resign in clear and obvious disgrace.

Throughout the night, they had been watching the glaring newspaper headlines, reading reports from the twenty-four-hour television news programs. The drift against the Prime Minister was becoming very plain. The outrage of the Admirals and Generals was apparent on every page of every newspaper.

The headline on the leader column of the Tory
Daily Mail
was darkly amusing, parodying one of Churchill’s most moving wartime speeches. It quoted the Tory party chairman, the droll and urbane Lord Ashampstead…

IF THIS PARLIAMENT SHOULD LAST
FOR ANOTHER WEEK
(
GOD FORBID
),
MEN WILL STILL SAY
, “
THIS
WAS THEIR DARKEST HOUR
”

In the dying moments of the debate, the Tories had pushed for a vote of no confidence in the PM. And this would take place later in the afternoon, after everyone had taken a couple of hours’ sleep. The PM did not enjoy a huge majority in the House, and many people thought it might well be his last day in office, since traditionally a Prime Minister who loses such a vote is obliged to resign.

The fallout from those Argentine bombs had rippled a long way
north in a very short time. And as the weary British Members of Parliament walked outside into the reality of the dawn, few of them risked a glance at the eight-foot-high statue of Sir Winston, glowering down with withering gaze from his granite plynth right opposite the outer wall of the chamber.

The gloomy heart of London could scarcely have differed more from the joyous heart of Buenos Aires at exactly that same time, midnight in the city on the wide estuary of the River Plate.

There were almost a half million people crammed into the Plaza de Mayo—eight different tango bands were trying to play in harmony with each other, the entire Boca Juniors soccer team, a symbol of national obsession and sometimes of unity, was assembled on a stage erected in the middle of the celebrating throng.

The President was on the balcony of the palace waving to the crowd in company with Admiral Moreno and General Kampf, whom he announced as the great architects of the Argentinian victory in the islands.

To the north side of the square stood the grand edifice of the Catedral Metropolitana, which houses the tomb of Argentina’s thus far greatest warrior hero, General Jose de San Martin, one of the early-nineteenth-century liberators of South America from Spanish rule.

It was as if the great man had suddenly risen up to lead them once more in their joy, as the enormous bells of the cathedral chimed out the midnight hour. And the rising anthem of the victors once more rang out over the square—in part a lament for brave men lost, and yet a ferocious roar of triumph, tuneful and rhythmic in its unanimous delivery…
M-a-a-a-l-v-i-n-a-s!!…M-a-a-a-l-v-i-n-a-s!!…M-a-a-a-l-v-i-n-a-s!!

1500 (LOCAL), SUNDAY, APRIL 17
NORTH OF THE SAN CARLOS SETTLEMENT
EAST FALKLAND

Under the cover of a cold mountain fog, Captain Douglas Jarvis and his seven troopers had moved almost six miles south of the western slopes of Fanning Head. As this Sunday afternoon grew increasingly gloomy, they found themselves north of the San Carlos River, which snakes across the rough, rock-hewn plain between the Usborne and Simon ranges.

The weather had palpably worsened since their arrival on the island nine days earlier. It was colder, wetter, windier, and the nights were closing in. Three weeks from now it would be winter, a vicious South Atlantic winter, with ice-cold gales and snow squalls sweeping up out of the south, where the Antarctic Peninsula comes lancing out of the Larsen Ice Shelf, only 750 miles from Port Stanley.

We have to get the hell out of here
was the only thought in the mind of Douglas Jarvis as they moved through the soaking landscape, the all-weather Gore-Tex smocks fastened tight around their hips, hoods pulled down, gloves and waterproof combat boots firm, heavy rucksacks weighing heavier by the hour.

At 1520, Captain Jarvis raised his right fist in a signal to halt. The troopers, walking carefully in pairs, stared ahead across the rough country. In the far distance, still north of the river, they could see the lights of a farmhouse. At least they hoped it was only a farmhouse.

Out to their left, beyond a line of gray jagged rocks, barely moving, they could just make out a large group of grayish, shadowy figures, woolly shadowy figures. “Thank Christ for that,” muttered Douglas. “A decent dinner. We’ve earned that.”

And, not for the first time, he appreciated the long evenings of detailed, meticulous training the SAS instructors instill into every last one of their personnel before anyone leaves on a mission.

Back in Hereford, they had undergone intense practice in survival for the Falkland Islands. And the one good lesson they had been taught was that around seven billion sheep regarded the Falklands as home, and had done so for more than a hundred years.

This was a land of ranchers, with huge flocks of sheep raised by the thousands for their wool. For more than a century sheep had been the principal commerce of the islands; almost all the seaports were founded for the export of wool. In recent years, fishing and then oil had crowded into the economy of the islands.

But there were still a zillion sheep grazing these rough but strangely fertile lands of damp grass and ever-flowing mountain rivers. Douglas Jarvis and his team had stumbled upon one of the historic areas of Falklands farming…north of the settlement on the San Carlos River, where sixth-generation shepherds patrolled the gently sloping land as it rose toward the hills.

In their rucksacks, the SAS men had knives and razor-sharp butcher’s axes. They had been given specific lessons on how to skin and swiftly cut the carcass. Douglas himself knew how to sever the two hind legs and cleave out the shoulders. They all knew how to slice out the rack of chops.

“Okay, Peter,” said Douglas. “Move up to that boulder over there and take out a couple of small ones. Remember Sergeant Jones told us they always taste best.”

All eight men knew how to live off the land. That was a basic requirement for any SAS man. And the total silence from their satellite transmissions now made it clear something had gone drastically wrong with the Royal Navy’s attack, and perhaps even the landing.

They therefore understood they might be there for a while before rescue, and it was no bloody good whatsoever being starving hungry in the kingdom of the roast leg of lamb.

Trooper Wiggins shrugged off his bergan and unzipped the SSG 69, the renowned Austrian-built bolt-action SAS sniper rifle, which in trained hands can achieve a shot-grouping of less than forty centimeters at a range of eight hundred meters. Peter Wiggins’s hands were well trained, and to quote his mate, Trooper Joe Pearson, he had “an eye like a shit-house rat.”

Of the 2,000 sheep quietly grazing in these windswept foothills, there were two that were essentially in real trouble.

Trooper Wiggins moved swiftly through the grass to the boulder, and selected his targets, both of them within fifty meters. Two single shots, fired only seconds apart, cracked out from the rifle, and two good-sized lambs dropped instantly from a 7.62mm-caliber bullet slammed into the center of their tiny brains.

Three more troopers raced out to help gather their quarry, and Douglas Jarvis pointed at a cluster of rocks and a few bushes farther north in the rapidly darkening hills. They moved fast, and no kitchen was ever set up faster.

Using their one shovel, they dug a hole three feet by three feet by two feet deep. The wet earth moved easily, and while Troopers Bob Goddard and Trevor Fermer skinned and butchered the lambs, Trooper Jake Posgate found round stones and dropped them into the hole.

Douglas lit a fire from brushwood, right on top of the stones, and they used their butcher’s axes to hack some bigger pieces of brush into slim but burnable logs. The entire operation took almost an hour, and when the fire began to die on top of the almost red-hot stones, they suspended two legs of lamb in the hole and spit-roasted them close to the stones for ninety minutes. The glow from the fire could not of course be seen from anywhere except directly over the hole…SAS survival manual, chapter three.

No group of Special Forces had ever been hungrier, and no leg of lamb ever tasted better, despite being a bit burned on the outside. When they finished their supper, they dumped everything into the hole, including the remains of the carcasses, and the wool, and filled it in, rolling a rock over the fresh earth. Only a very highly trained tracker would ever have suspected they had once been there.

By 2200 they were on their way, pushing through the darkness,
heading south, down toward Carlos Water, hoping to locate a boat that would get them to the probably unguarded shores of West Falkland. They still carried all their camping gear, rifles, submachine guns, and, wrapped in clear plastic bags, four shoulders of lamb, two legs, and thirty-two chops. But they no longer had explosives, and there was no need to carry water. The wilds of East Falkland were awash with it.

And every hour they fired up the comms system and tried to raise the command center in the Royal Navy ships and on the landing beaches, but it was only a cry in the night. There never had been a reply, and Douglas Jarvis understood there never would be.

He did not dare attempt a direct communication with command headquarters in Northwood, because that would certainly have been located and monitored by the Argentinians. The last thing they needed was a seriously determined search party trying to hunt them down, and picking up a radio fix.

They understood there was almost certainly a small, mildly serious Argentinian force looking for them already, but that was not a problem to eight of the most dangerous war-fighting soldiers on the planet…men who believed that odds of five to one against them in any combat was probably fair.

0900, MONDAY, APRIL 18
STIRLING LINES
HEREFORD, ENGLAND

Lt. Colonel Mike Weston, commanding officer 22 SAS, had been studying the POW lists from the Falkland Islands for three hours. They contained the names of all eight of the men who had conducted the airfield recce at Mount Pleasant under the command of Sergeant Jack Clifton, and all eight of them were in Argentinian custody, and now traveling by sea to the mainland.

Lt. Colonel Weston had twice spoken to his opposite number at the Royal Marine headquarters south of Plymouth, and it seemed all of the SBS men who had landed at Lafonia under Lt. Jim Perry were also safe, and were also traveling by sea to the mainland with the rest of
the landing force. The Argentine military had intimated they did not intend to detain them, although their weapons had been confiscated.

An Argentinian ship would land them one month from now at the great Uruguayan seaport of Montevideo on the north shore of the River Plate estuary. The Royal Navy was welcome to pick them up there, and transport them home. The assault ships
Albion
and
Largs Bay
, which had been hit and burned in Low Bay, were to be scrapped, while the
Ocean
had been confiscated, punishment for the destruction of the eight Argentinian fighter jets in battle. She would be renamed
Admiral Oscar Moreno
. Captain Farmer and his crew would be going to Montevideo.

But what was currently vexing Colonel Weston was the fate of Captain Douglas Jarvis and his assault group, which was last seen blowing the summit off Fanning Head. The Colonel knew that part of the mission had been accomplished, and he understood the impossibility of further contact since both SAS command centers at sea had been removed from the line of battle. He also doubted whether there was any form of communication between the various assault forces in the final hours before the surrender on the Lafonia landing beaches.

Which all left Captain Jarvis and his team in a very uneasy form of isolation. Colonel Weston did not like it. But he understood the danger a long-range communiqué from Hereford via satellite might pose to the men. If the Argentinians picked it up, Captain Jarvis would be in serious trouble.

Even the most highly trained SAS group could scarcely cope alone against a force of a thousand men in vehicles and helicopters, employing infrared search radars. Colonel Weston could not accurately assess the scale of Argentine anger about the destruction of their stronghold on Fanning Head, but he guessed they would not be overjoyed.

Thus he did not dare open up a line of voice-contact communication to young Douglas, but he did enter a coded satellite communication urging Douglas and his team to keep their heads well down, and that a rescue operation would be mounted. He also instructed them to open up their comms for one hour at 1800 each evening.

Which meant that, for the moment at least, the SAS team must survive as well as it possibly could. But this was an outstanding group, and Colonel Weston personally believed if anyone could stay alive in
such a hostile environment, it was probably his guys, the ones who just blew up Fanning Head.

The slight problem he had was if the Argentinians caught them, they might very well execute them and say nothing. That way Here ford would never know their fate. Although he did not believe them dead, Colonel Weston nevertheless listed Douglas Jarvis, and Troopers Syd Ferry, Trevor Fermer, Bob Goddard, Joe Pearson, Peter Wiggins, Jake Posgate, and the Welshman Dai Lewellwyn officially missing in action.

There had been several communications from SAS families in the hours after it was announced the British had surrendered to the Argentinians. And the regiment was prepared to confirm those men who were in the custody of the new owners of the Falkland Islands, which brought immense relief to all of those waiting at home for news.

“Missing in Action,” was, however, an entirely different problem, and no regiment likes to be drawn into these discussions. Thus the duty officers at Stirling Lines would say very little, except the regiment could confirm the surrender, confirm the SAS had knowledge of POWs, and were working to insure everyone returned home safely. For those for whom there was no information, dead or alive, they would confirm nothing, only stating they had no knowledge of the men losing their lives, and would try to keep everyone informed of future developments.

When Jane Jarvis of Newmarket called to inquire about her second cousin Douglas, they said, with regret, they were unable to confirm anything except to the next of kin. Then she rang Douglas’s elder brother Alan, who had heard nothing. So she rang her other cousin, Diana Hunter, out in the lush grassland of Lexington, Kentucky.

1100, MONDAY, APRIL 18
HUNTER VALLEY THOROUGHBRED FARMS

Mrs. Rick Hunter was reading the latest issue of the
Bloodhorse
, scouring the results pages for winning sons and daughters of the Hunter Valley stallions. Rick himself was in bed upstairs, having been up most of the night helping to foal a colossally expensive broodmare by the champion U.S. sire A.P. Indy.

The mare, who in her day had won five Grade One stakes races at Belmont Park, New York, and Saratoga, had tolerated a long and arduous labor, but at six a.m. had safely given birth to a dark bay colt by the superb Irish-based sire Choisir, a charging Australian-bred champion sprinter who had once heard the thunder of the crowd at Royal Ascot and Newmarket.

Diana had dressed and cooked Rick’s breakfast, taken a long walk through the paddocks inspecting the yearlings, and was now sitting in the high sunlit drawing room of the main house, with its views between the tall white Doric columns and out into the front paddocks, where several million dollars’ worth of broodmares and their foals grazed contentedly.

When the telephone rang, the former Diana Jarvis was delighted to hear from her cousin back home, and the two of them chatted companionably for a few minutes before Jane came to the point.

“Diana, I don’t want to worry you unnecessarily, but I think you know Douglas was sent to the Falkland Islands several weeks ago. Well, I expect you know all about the British surrender…but I just called SAS headquarters at Hereford and they refused to confirm one way or another whether Douglas was dead or alive.

“In a sense that was good, but in another sense I thought it sounded a bit gloomy. They wouldn’t tell me more because I’m not next of kin. But they’d probably tell you…and I was calling with the number.”