Ghost Force (37 page)

Diana’s heart missed about seven beats. She had seen on the twenty-four-hour Fox news channel that the British had surrendered, and all she could remember was that 1,500 men were dead.

“Jane, is there any suggestion the SAS men may have been killed?” she asked.

“Absolutely not. But I read they have lists of the men who have been taken POW, and from what I can gather, Douglas is not on those lists.”

“Well, where do they think he might be?” said Diana, whose voice was rising, panic beginning to well up inside her.

“They won’t tell me, Di. But they might tell you. They would not even confirm he was on the stupid islands. But it’s pretty obvious he was landed. There’s nowhere else to be down there in that awful place. I’m just hoping he was not still in one of the warships. I expect you saw the Royal Navy lost eight ships, including the aircraft carrier.”

“Is that where most of the fifteen hundred were—the ones who died?”

“Almost all of them. But I’ve read a lot of reports and no one mentions there were Special Forces aboard the ships. You know, they’re always the first ones off, first ones ashore. But I thought you might want to call and see if you can find out anything.”

Diana wrote down the number and sat at the desk to the right of the French doors, her heart pounding, half with fear, half with shock.
Douglas, her beloved Douglas, he couldn’t be dead, he couldn’t be…nothing could be that cruel
.

The call went through quickly. Diana announced herself as the sister, the nearest relative to Captain Douglas Jarvis, and she would like to speak to the commanding officer.

Two minutes later, Lt. Colonel Mike Weston was on the line. “Diana,” he said, “we met a couple of years ago, at Douglas’s birthday dinner at the Rutland Hotel in Newmarket…”

No one ever forgot meeting the vivacious whip-slim horsewoman from Suffolk, who rode with the maddest of the Irish foxhunters, and was rumored to have been pursued by at least three of the richest men in England.

“Of course I remember,” she half lied, recalling vaguely a couple of very attractive, cool-eyed SAS officers at the dinner, and guessing he must have been one of them.

“I was just inquiring about Douglas. I expect you guessed.”

“Well, of course I did. But Diana, you will understand this is a very highly-classified operation, and I am limited in what I can say. And I should state right away we do have an eight-man recce team, led by Captain Jarvis, which is currently listed as ‘missing in action.’”

“Oh my God! Does that mean you think he’s been killed?”

“No. Most certainly not. It means that team almost certainly went to ground after the surrender was announced. Their names simply do not appear anywhere on the casualty lists. That means dead or wounded. And they’re not on the POW lists sent to us by the Argentinian military.”

“Is that encouraging?”

“To the extent that none of their names appear anywhere. If they’d
been caught, and killed or captured, we would have a report to that effect. We have nothing.”

“If they are caught, will you be informed?”

“I cannot say that. It rather depends how badly the enemy wants them. But our soldiers are not usually captured by any enemy.”

“It’s just that god-awful island, isn’t it?” she said. “There’s no escape from it. I just can’t bear the thought of Douglas dying in such a terrible place without anyone knowing what’s happened to him.”

“Give me your number, Diana. I’ll call you the first moment I hear anything. And please, don’t fall apart. Douglas has some of our best men with him, and no one’s yet mentioned any of them might be dead.”

She gave the number of Hunter Valley Farms to the SAS chief, replaced the telephone, and raced upstairs to the bedroom with tears streaming down her cheeks.

She awakened Rick and blurted out, “Ricky, the most terrible thing’s happened. Douglas is trapped on the Falkland Islands. He’s the leader of an SAS recce team, and he’s listed as missing in action.”

Rick, who had never told her any details whatsoever of his own career in the U.S. Navy SEALs, opened one eye, and in his deep Kentucky drawl, murmured, “Well, that’s kinda bad luck on the Argentinians. Those SAS guys are tough. Real tough. Glad I’m not looking for those suckers.”

Diana, of course, had no idea that five years previous her husband had led one of the most daring, bloody operations ever mounted by U.S. Special Forces when he had smashed his way into a Chinese jail on a remote island off Hainan and liberated an entire U.S. submarine crew. And she certainly had no idea how closely he had worked with the British SAS on that one.

Rick Hunter knew all about the SAS, their skill, their brutal training, and the absolutely ruthless quality of their work. And he smiled up at his wife, hoping to see a ray of humor cross her very beautiful, very worried face. But there was no such reaction. She just collapsed into floods of tears and kept saying over and over, “He can’t be dead, he can’t be dead. Please, please tell me he can’t be dead.”

“Oh, I can tell you that okay. If Douglas was dead, Twenty-two SAS would know he was dead. They might not know if Douglas and
his guys had killed a couple dozen Argies, which is a lot more likely. But they’d know if one of their commanders was dead. Hot damn, you can’t kill those SAS guys, not if you don’t have an atomic bomb handy. You can trust me on that.”

Diana stopped crying, and said quietly, “I just hate the phrase ‘missing in action.’ It reminds me of all those poor guys who never came home from the Somme, World War One, just blown to pieces.”

Rick raised himself on one elbow and took her hand. “Listen,” he said, “you haven’t followed this war probably as close as I have. And so far the Brits have not admitted they even had Special Forces in the islands. Which means they had the guys in there real early, checking the place out, especially the enemy defenses.

“Ninety percent of the casualties were in the Royal Navy’s warships. The rest on the landing beach. Now we know Douglas was not in those ships. You don’t take Special Forces eight thousand miles and then leave ’em on some kind of a cruise. You get ’em in there, into the islands.

“And Douglas would not have been on the beaches. The Brits leave all that amphibious work to the Special Boat Service, not the SAS. So wherever Dougy was, he was not on the beach. It’s much more likely he and his guys are on the loose somewhere, and do not want to surrender, despite the political situation.

“But they’ll be armed to the teeth, and they’re trained to live off the land, and from what I read, there’s several million sheep there. If I had to guess, I’d say Captain Jarvis was right now sitting with his feet up, in some cave in the mountains, eating roast lamb and reading the
Penguin News
or whatever the hell they call their local paper.”

Diana smiled through her tears. She loved her brother dearly, but this six-feet-three-inch ex–U.S. Navy SEAL had completely taken over her life since the day she first met him, when he was casually leaning on a balustrade watching the yearlings being auctioned at one of the big sales in Kentucky.

At the time she was watching a superbly bred chestnut colt, sired by a local stallion, walking gingerly around the ring, tossing his head, trying to stop, glaring through an unmistakable white-rimmed eye, and displaying front legs which, if they ever got him to a racecourse, would represent an equine Miracle at Lourdes, or at least Charles Town, West Virginia.

After a few minutes, the colt was knocked down to an agent from the East Coast for $154,000. Diana shook her head, and the big man standing next to her muttered laconically, “Sold to the man with the white stick, guide dog, and very dark glasses.”

She could not help herself laughing. And she turned to the towering American and offered a cheerful conspiratorial glance, which racehorse people do when they have witnessed another practitioner of their craft make a blunder well on the absurd side of dumb.

“That was hard to believe,” said the master of Hunter Valley Farms quietly. “Sonofabitch could hardly walk, never mind run.”

“I suppose they thought he might straighten up and run a halfway decent mile for some trainer when he’s three or something,” said Diana. “He’s bred to run.”

“Since he won’t walk around the goddamned sales ring for his owner, beats me why anyone thinks he might run a mile for someone else. Still, guess he might make up into a useful nine-year-old…pulling a very light plow.”

Again, Diana Jarvis burst into laughter. And she stared up into the smiling face of the former Commander Rick Hunter, who grinned his lopsided grin and inquired, “English?”

“Yes,” she said, holding out her hand. “Diana Jarvis.”

“Any relation to the immortal Sir Jack?”

“He was my great-great-uncle,” she said. “But don’t think I’m important. I have about two thousand Jarvis relatives in Newmarket alone. We didn’t just breed horses, you know.”

Rick had chuckled, and said, “I’m just going out to take a look at a filly my dad likes. Well, he likes the pedigree. We had a couple of very nice broodmares from the same family. This filly’s by an English-raced stallion standing in Ireland, but the bottom line’s all American, same family as Alydar.”

“Yes,” said Diana, “I’d like to come—where’s she stabled…does your dad breed right here in Kentucky?”

“Oh, sorry,” he’d replied. “Kinda forgetting my manners…Rick Hunter, we own Hunter Valley Farms out along the Versailles Pike…”

“Hunter Valley! That’s your family’s place?”

“Sure is. My daddy’s really retired now. That’s why he’s not here.
I run the place with my good buddy Dan Headley, third-generation stallion man. We’re selling tomorrow, but we’re usually on the lookout for one new filly, good pedigree and might make a broodmare later.”

“Well, I’m very glad to meet you,” said Diana Jarvis. “Might even buy one of your yearlings for my French owner.”

“You mean he owns you…or a racehorse operation, or both?”

Diana laughed. “Not me, mostly because he’s seventy-six years old and has been married four times. But he has some very nice horses in training in Chantilly. And he’d like to start a breeding farm.”

“And he’s hired a very beautiful young Jarvis to carry him forward,” smiled Rick. “Come on, let’s go see that filly…”

And so they had strolled out to see the baby racehorse, and then gone for a cup of coffee, then, later, lunch, then much later, dinner. They talked on the phone and met at the autumn sales in England and Ireland.

They never did announce an engagement. They just decided to get married. Diana was thirty, Rick thirty-eight. And they were both completely in tune with the rhythms and the ebb and the flow of the thoroughbred racing season. They were students of the form book, experts on pedigrees, both with a keen eye for the conformation of both young and mature horses.

Rick Hunter could scarcely have wished for a more perfect wife. Diana was relatively wealthy, very beautiful, and vastly well-connected in Ireland, especially at the world’s most important racehorse breeding empire of Coolmore in County Tipperary, where her family had been sending mares for thirty years. In turn, as chatelaine of Hunter Valley Farms, no horsewoman could have filled that role better than Diana Jarvis.

Rick did not often see her upset. And he hated to see it now. But he understood how close she and Douglas had been, and he knew how unnerving it was to be uncertain whether a close relative was dead or alive.

He climbed out of bed, and took her in his arms. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll make a couple of calls and see what I can find out. I’m coming downstairs in a minute. Let’s have a cup of coffee…give me ten.”

When he reached the kitchen, he could see she was still hugely upset. She poured the coffee and managed to spill some of it on the table, just as Dan Headley poked his head around the door, saying, “Hi, Rick. That Storm Cat mare just foaled, thank Christ. Colt, dark bay, white blaze like his dad. He’s standing…hey, Di, what’s up? He been beating you up again?”

All three of them laughed at this. Rick, the iron-man gentle giant, who had been known to weep at the death of a favorite Labrador, said, “Di’s just a bit upset because her brother’s been posted missing in action in the Falklands. But no one’s saying he’s been killed or wounded, which normally means he hasn’t.”

“That’s Doug, right? The SAS Captain?”

“That’s him, Dan. Tell her he’s probably okay.”

“Well, Di, those Special Forces Regiments keep very strong tabs on their guys. I’d say if anything had happened they’d sure as hell know. How many guys are with him?”

“Seven troopers, all veterans. None of them on the POW lists, or the killed and wounded lists.”

“SAS?” said Dan Headley. “They’re on the run. And now that the Brits have surrendered, I wouldn’t worry yourself. Chances are the Argentinians won’t catch ’em anyway. Hey…remember that Special Forces helicopter that crashed on the Magellan Strait in the last Falklands War? There were six or eight SAS guys in there, and they all just vanished. But every one of ’em got back to Hereford. Christ knows how. I just read a book about it.”

Diana was marginally consoled, and she felt better speaking to these two former U.S. Navy warriors. But she still asked her husband to make a phone call to anyone who might be able to reach Douglas.

0830, SAME DAY
SPECWARCOM HQ
CORONADO, SAN DIEGO