Authors: Patrick Robinson
But Segal and Hunter were its masters. Rick ordered the helmsman to come off eight degrees from their due east, zero-nine-zero course…
Come left…little more, Ed…this way we’ll get a decent shove from the tide without being forced inshore all the time…now make your speed fifteen…no more for the next half hour…that’s for seven miles…then we better slow right down.
Hard astern the sky was still lit up by the burning ammunition store, but right ahead there was a heavy darkness, visibility not twenty feet, even with a bright western horizon. According to the softly lit GPS they were only 350 yards offshore, but the depth gauge showed a hundred feet of water.
This was surely the most dangerous part of the operation—exposed out here right off the north shore of West Falkland, easy prey for any Argentinian warship or helicopter. The slightest suspicion of the SEALs’ presence would have put the entire Argentinian Army, Navy, and Air Force into a collective war dance swearing vengeance. Rick Hunter shoved the thought to the back of his mind.
And Ed Segal and Ron Wallace kept going forward into the night, confident of the U.S. military intelligence, sure of their leader, and certain these seas were utterly deserted, as specified by SPECWARCOM in their last satellite communication.
The Argentine military had switched off here in the waters north of
the Falkland Islands. Their enemy had gone home, and so far as they could see, nothing else was threatening—except for a band of sheep-stealing brigands who appeared to have kidnapped a four-man patrol somewhere to the landward side of Port Sussex over on East Falkland, twenty miles away from Pebble.
The calm in these northern waters was, of course, a situation that would hold only for perhaps four or five more hours, until the Air Force ground staff established incontrovertible evidence that someone had blown the bombers on the Pebble Island air base. And then all hell might break loose. Nothing was more important for Rick Hunter than to get as far away from here as possible, and pray that SEAL Team Two would blow up Mare Harbor and everything in it sometime this morning and give his guys a bit of breathing room.
They pressed on along the coast, gaining some shelter from the offshore wind, which had now backed around to the southwest. But it was still freezing cold, and whoever had insisted the SEALs wear their wet suits for this entire operation deserved, in Commander Hunter’s opinion, some kind of a medal.
The maximum possible speed, without swamping the boat and jolting the hell out of everyone, was still fifteen knots. The Zodiacs were outstanding in a sea, once they were riding the stump of the Yamahas, driving smoothly along the wave tops, drawing less than a foot of water. The trick was to get the speed dead right—thirteen knots would have been choppier as the boat sagged into the water, but eighteen knots would have thrown them out of tune with the quartering sea. On second thought, Rick Hunter decided, both helmsmen, Ed and Ron, deserved medals.
Huddled behind the windshields, trying to keep down out of the cold, the U.S. Navy SEAL team took another half hour to make White Rock Point. They never saw a boat, never heard an aircraft, never even saw a light, neither onshore nor at sea.
They cut back the throttles at the sight of the flashing beacon on the point, and came trundling slowly over the shallow kelp beds with engines slightly raised, and into Falkland Sound. Rick Hunter ordered a course change to one-seven-zero to bring them back into the south-running channel, and at this speed, on much calmer waters, they made hardly a sound, even in the shattering silence of the night.
But they did make some sound, and an alert military surveillance system would have picked it up. Commander Hunter could only ascertain there was no one around, that the Argentinians had abandoned all forms of observation in the remote, scarcely populated northern waters of both West and East Falkland. Coronado, as usual, was correct.
After two miles, running at only eight knots, Commander Hunter ordered another change—“Two-two-five, Eddie…we want to head down the shore of West Falkland, slowly, for about eight miles. That’s when we turn away and find shelter…”
“You know where we do that, sir?” asked Ed Segal.
“Sure,” said the Commander. “We’ll head into Many Branch Harbor…that’s to our right, a landlocked bay with only one narrow entrance…”
“Wouldn’t want to get caught in there, would we?” said Mike Hook. “Not with only one way out.”
“It would be almost impossible to get caught in there,” said Rick. “It has probably six narrow bays within the bay, three of them a couple miles long. And there’s probably another three just as sheltered. Plus the place is surrounded by mountains, some high, some lower, but protective hills. We could hole up in there for a month and never be found.”
“Unless we got spotted by some goddamned shepherd, sir—isn’t this place supposed to be covered in sheep?”
“Not in Many Branch Bay, Mike. It doesn’t even figure on Coronado’s Falklands farming chart—and the words settlement or sheep station do not appear in a fifteen-mile radius of the harbor. These Royal Navy charts are excellent, and this doesn’t show even a dock, or a group of moorings.”
“Anyway, we land in the dark, and leave in the dark, right?” said Mike. “How long are we in there for?”
“If we get through to Foxtrot-three-four—we’ll be gone by 2030 tonight.”
0900, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 27
ARGENTINE MILITARY GARRISON
GOOSE GREEN, EAST FALKLAND
Goose Green—Mount Pleasant HQ. We have reports of a massive attack on the airfield at Pebble Island. All fighter aircraft destroyed, ammunition dump still blazing, everything destroyed. No casualties, but Pebble air base requests assistance for aerial surveillance. Proceed all three helicopters to Pebble Island immediately, with troops embarked. Repeat, proceed to Pebble Island. Runways and landing areas intact.
Will extra assistance fly up from Mount Pleasant?
Affirmative. Six helicopters and three fixed-wing aircraft, containing a detachment of seventy-five troops.
Do we have a warship in the area?
Negative. But destroyer scheduled to depart Mare Harbor at 1100 today.
We’re on our way, sir.
The problem with that final piece of Argentinian naval intelligence was that it would never happen. Even as the radio communications flashed between Mount Pleasant and Goose Green, U.S. Navy SEAL Lt. Commander Chuck Stafford and his underwater team were edging their way back to their base camp meeting point on the shores of East Cove.
They had been holed up for three days, with all their gear and two inflatables in a deep cave right on the shore, which had the inestimable advantage of flooding to a depth of almost two feet at high tide. This meant they kept everything in the boats, and jumped aboard, all twelve of them, when the cave floor started to submerge.
Their getaway was timed for the rising tide at 1900 this evening, when there would be just sufficient water in the cave to escape fast, approximately ninety minutes before the tide peaked at 2030.
More significant, however, was the fact that the veteran explosives expert Stafford and five of his crack underwater crew had attached limpet bombs to all four of the Argentine warships currently moored in Mare Harbor, two old Type-42 destroyers and two guided-missile Exocet frigates.
They were timed to detonate at 2230, which gave the fleeing SEALs ample time to make the three-mile journey back to their cave, over very rough ground, and then get well under cover for the blasting of Mare Harbor.
Right now, Lt. Commander Stafford and his team were cooking hot soup on their Primus. And no one south of Coronado, except for the crew of USS
Toledo
, had the slightest idea they were there.
Forty miles away to the northwest, Commander Hunter’s team were hunkered down in the long narrow landlocked bay that runs to a cul-de-sac, southwest out of the main harbor, following the line of the shore.
After a two-hour search they found this utterly desolate spot and chugged into a fifty-foot inlet surrounded by rocky cliffs perhaps fifteen feet high. Rick Hunter had taken one look at it and ordered Brian Harrison to jump out and see what he could see from the cliff top to the east.
The SEAL Petty Officer climbed the easy sloping rock face and was gone for fifteen minutes. When he returned, he told them, “There’s a line of low hills about two hundred yards from here. From the top I can see the Sound, way beyond the entrance to the harbor. Aside from that there’s nothing, not even a house, not even a shed. And no sheep.”
Rick Hunter had already dismissed the idea of any warship coming after them because the water through the harbor entrance was too shallow, maybe eight feet. Even a patrol boat would think twice.
Which essentially meant that the two teams of United States Navy Special Forces, the specialists from SPECWARCOM, were, for the moment, safely in their daytime quarters, unseen, and unknown to their enemy. Which was the way they liked it.
On the other hand, on the far distant shore, Captain Jarvis and his team were slightly the worse for wear. They had made their way to a lonely hillside above Egg Harbor, and positioned themselves in a gully from where they could see down to the waters of Falkland Sound. However, the damn place had little vegetation, and they’d used up much of it on the first night, when they cut the gorse and pulled up grass to give themselves shelter from aerial search.
They’d twice almost been caught moving across the narrow cause
way that passes Goose Green, both times by vehicle patrols, but each time they had gone to ground, flattened into the earth, machine guns primed in case they were seen. Both times happened in the late afternoon, and both times the patrols were moving too fast, but the second one passed less than twenty feet from where they were all prostrate, facedown in a ditch.
But the Argentinians did not see them, and when the night grew darker Captain Jarvis steered his men across the barren wasteland of East Falkland to the tiny harbor where he expected the American, Sunray, and his guys to show up.
The silence of Tuesday night, at least it was silent on East Falkland, was a major disappointment to the Captain. No radio communication had been received, and the SAS men were growing tired in their filthy, dirty clothes, totally without any form of washing kit, bereft of razors or shaving soap, no deodorant.
They had maintained fairly high standards of eating, and last night, against his better judgment, when it was clear Sunray had gone missing, Douglas authorized a new sheep raid, and at midnight they had all enjoyed excellent roast lamb and some kind of pressurized bars of spinach that tasted like cow shit. At least according to Trooper Wiggins they did.
But there was no injury or illness. Everyone felt fine, but disheveled. And up here in the hide above Egg Harbor they were nowhere near fresh water, and their supplies were running short. That night Troopers Goddard and Fermer went to sleep in the gully under the bushes with sheep’s blood on their hands.
As Jake Posgate had remarked, “It’s like a scene from
Dracula’s Revenge
up here.”
“Just so long as it’s not the revenge of Señor Alvarez, the Argentine monster, it’s okay with me,” said Peter Wiggins.
And so they slept, aware only faintly of the Argentine search going on for them, because it was being conducted in a thoroughly halfhearted way. Just the occasional helicopter flying north, and nothing overhead along the Egg Harbor shoreline. Douglas guessed, correctly, the Jeep that contained the bodies of the four Argentine soldiers had not yet been found.
But this morning, Wednesday, the skies suddenly resembled World
War III. It was now 0930 and three helicopters had taken off in quick succession from Goose Green headed due west, straight over the SAS hide at high speed, not slowing, heading up Falkland Sound.
Three fixed-wing military aircraft had also flown just to the north of them, heading the same way, at no more than 5,000 feet. In the distance they could hear more helicopters clattering, just west of Carlos Water, all apparently heading for the same objective.
“Jesus,” said Douglas, “they must have found the bodies.” He was as yet unaware of the devastation on Pebble Island, and an hour from now he would be too far away to comprehend the ensuing chaos in Mare Harbor. Right now he was merely counting off the hours to 2000 tonight, when he prayed he would hear again from the elusive Sunray.
Rick Hunter, too, and all of his team, watched the helos thumping through the leaden skies directly overhead. But they were not surprised, only thanking God they had risked the heavy seas and put ten miles between themselves and the Pebble Island airfield. It was crystal clear to them where all of that Argentinian military hardware was headed.
Rick was very contemplative, as they sat in the lee of the rocky overhang in their tiny bay, within the big long bay, which in turn was within the five-mile-wide Many Branch Harbor. He knew it would be impossible to see them from the air, and even from the south they must surely have been completely hidden.
To find SEAL Assault Team One, an Argentine search helicopter would need to be flying about fifty feet above the ground, very slowly, southwest of them, heading northeast. And even then it would be touch and go. The chances of a pilot finding exactly the right height, speed, and direction were, in Rick’s view, negligible. Unless, of course, someone had told him where they were.