that Royal Navy Admiral was amazingly smart keeping it out of the way.
'The trouble was, Argentina had no effective submarine that could creep around, locate the carrier, and silently stay with it. They still don't have a ship good enough to do that. But we do.
'The Russian submarine can send a satellite communication to our friends in the Argentine air control rooms that will put their fighter jets bang on target with accurate readings. Either that, or slam a wire-guided torpedo straight into the hull of the carrier. Whichever's easiest. The Royal Navy carrier will be history on the first day. The British these days simply don't have the muscle to stop it.'
'You hit it underwater? Or we hit it from the air?' asked General Kampf.
'Oh, probably from the air,' said Vitaly. 'But possibly from underwater. Our submarine would need to close to perhaps seven thousand yards to get a hit, and the British destroyers and ASW frigates would probably find us and make life very hot. A couple of active homing torpedoes make a very great…er…hullabaloo in the water.
'But your Air Force can launch an armada, and the Royal Navy may hit some of them, but they won't hit them all. Most definitely not. Your guys will get bombs and missiles into that fleet, the carrier will explode, tons of jet fuel, many sailors will burn or drown. But that's war. That's defeat. And the British forces will have no alternative but to go home to England, while you throw a victory party in Port Stanley.
'I come, bring Red Army choir, and good Russian vodka. Celebrate for both our great countries. Ha ha ha! Then we both make huge profits, hah? Make stupid Americans pay top dollar for beautiful Argentina oil. Siberian traitors go fuck themselves. Ha ha ha!'
The Russian President looked sharply across at Rankov, as if warning him of the danger of that last statement. But it was clear the Argentina military men had neither noticed nor understood. And just then the door opened and the ebullient figure of Gregor Komoyedov came exuberantly through the rotunda's enormous wooden doors.
'My friends!' he cried. 'How are my friends from the
He bounded over to Admiral Moreno and gave him a mighty Russian bear hug and a kiss on both cheeks. Then he did the same to Eduardo Kampf. Then he stood back with a great beaming smile.
'Well,' he said, repeating the question, 'we partners, eh?'
The President looked very slightly perplexed, as if Gregor might be slightly rushing his fences.
But both General Kampf and Admiral Moreno stepped forward, and they took each one of the three Russians by the hand.
'Oh, yes,' said Admiral Moreno. 'We are most definitely partners.'
And the boss of all the Russians, smiling broadly, stood up and walked to the door to arrange the delivery, doubling up as the Kremlin butler, for the first and only time of his entire Presidency. He could have kissed Gregor Komoyedov, that old Moscow smoothie.
Back in Buenos Aires, at the highest level of government, nothing was quite as innocent as General Kampf and Admiral Moreno had made out to the Russians.
As Admiral Morgan might have put it, Bullshit. They'd thought about it, all right. In fact there was a group of Argentinian military officers who had thought of hardly anything else for a quarter of a century. They'd seethed over the sheer humiliation of the war in the South Atlantic in 1982, of 15,000 Argentinian troops and commandoes surrendering to a couple of hundred British paratroopers. They'd seethed all right. And not one of them had ever forgotten or forgiven their imperious, victorious former friends from Great Britain.
And curiously, the Florida Garden
The wide, bright cafe, with its bubbling fresh ground coffees, superb sweet pastries, and loud piped tango music was the meeting point of the civilian informants and the military top brass — the ones who really cared about their missing islands. They called themselves the
The British, of course, with a rush of good intentions after Margaret Thatcher's great triumph, maintained for some years a tri-Service force, with a joint headquarters, under the rotational command of a two-star officer. This remotest of garrisons of the British armed forces was meant to be a stern deterrent to the Argentinians not to try anything rash in the foreseeable future, and also to provide reassurance to the Falkland Islanders that Aunt Maggie's boys would come charging back at the drop of a tin hat.
For a start they built a new airfield, at Mount Pleasant, thirty-five miles west of the tiny capital city of Stanley, located at latitude 51.49.22 South, 58.25.50 West. It was laid out on high ground, at an elevation of 242 feet, with two runways, one 8,500 feet in length, over one and a half miles of flat blacktop. They also built a fine military complex, for their shore-based troops — with a gym, swimming pool, shops, messes, and club facilities. They even built a church.
But, as relations with Argentina began to improve, the threat of a renewed attack on the islands lessened. And Great Britain's government saw an opportunity for severe cuts in the military presence. They began to make significant force reductions, and as the years passed they cut back the little garrison in the Falklands, to the bone.
With pressures mounting for British military presence in parts of Africa, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and the Middle East, the Falklands very nearly slipped out of the equation altogether.
In Whitehall, the 'mandarins' who run the Civil Service would cheerfully have closed the entire thing down, but for the moral requirement to reassure the Falkland Islanders that Great Britain really did have an enduring interest in their future.
The other brake on outright British detachment from the islands and their inhabitants was the impressive structure of the Falkland Islands Memorial Chapel, at Pangbourne Nautical College, due north of Portsmouth Dockyard in the English County of Berkshire.
This church was built as the ultimate symbol of British naval and military skill, and courage, in a modern war. It stands as a reminder of the sacrifices made in the South Atlantic, and inside its portals, on two high granite walls, the name and rank of every man who died in the battle is carved into the stone—250 of them.
Even the most self-seeking political economist could scarcely recommend cutting all military ties with the islands, thus sending a message to every one of those families that it had all been in vain. The British didn't really mean it, or any longer need it. They all died for nothing. Names carved in granite for a cause made of gossamer.
And so, the garrison remained. Because the government reluctantly accepted it had to remain. They cut it back to near useless operational capabilities. And soon it was regarded, by all of those who served there, as the Forgotten Force, stranded in the South Atlantic for months at a time, vulnerable to an attack by just about anyone with a couple of spare missiles.
Even the discovery of oil, major oil, did not penetrate the minds of the bureaucrats and politicians. Safe in the ironclad security of their own jobs, they whiled away the years in Whitehall, preparing to claim their even more secure retirement pensions, while scowling even at the mention of the very expensive Falkland Islands. Even the Saudis understood the drastic need to protect their oil with a heavy armed presence. Not, however, Britain's Labour government.
Left largely to its own devices, operationally stripped to its bare minimum, the garrison was working for a government that believed Great Britain could not possibly be caught out again. Not so long as the new Mount Pleasant Airfield (MPA) was functional and capable of handling a rapid reinforcement force at the first sign of danger.
But the 2010 government appeared to have forgotten entirely that on May 21, the opening day of the 1982 war, it took about three minutes and one British thousand-pound bomb to render Argentinian takeoffs and landings from the Falklands virtually impossible for fast-jet aircraft, for the entire duration of the war.
Right now, in the autumn of 2010, there was just a company group of the Third Rifles, 140 men rotating
