Ghost Force

thinking. This Falklands bullshit gets to be more of a goddamned problem by the day.'

'If my wife catches me eating roast beef sandwiches with mayonnaise she'll have a heart attack,' grinned the President.

'Then I guess we'd better be good boys, and have two nice little grilled steaks with grass and fucking dandelions,' confirmed Arnold.

'But what we really need to do is think. Because the day's not far away when some comedian walks through that door and says the Brits just conceded defeat and left the Falkland Islands, which remain in Argentinian hands. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs wants to know where we stand, and the Chairman of ExxonMobil is fit to be tied.'

'That,' added Admiral Morgan, 'would be a darned awkward moment.'

'You said that right,' said the President. 'Let's take a stroll along to the dining room, clear our heads and make a few decisions.'

'We may as well,' replied the Admiral. 'Because when this happens, it'll happen real quick and the lines will be very clearly drawn. Do we or do we not help the Brits? And the answer to that one must always be yes. The question is, what do we do?'

The two men stood up and pulled on their jackets. They left the Oval Office and walked along the West Wing corridor to the President's small private dining room. The butler met them, and poured them each a glass of sparkling water, knowing that neither man ever touched alcohol during the day.

'Well, Oh Great Oracle,' said the President, 'what will we do?'

'Dunno,' said Arnold, unhelpfully.

'You mean I sent the most expensive jet aircraft in the country halfway across the world to some goddamned Caribbean paradise to drag you off the beach with that goddess who married you, and at the end of it I get ‘Dunno.' Jesus Christ.'

Arnold chuckled. 'And the really bad news is I've just spent three weeks thinking about nothing else, night and day, and it's still ‘Dunno.'

'However,' he added, uttering the one single word the President was waiting to hear, 'I know what we cannot do, under any circumstances. And that's rustle up fifty thousand troops and somehow storm the place, with all guns firing, air, sea, and land.'

'Why not?' said the President, with synthetic innocence.

'Because we don't even own the goddamned islands, and we would be universally accused of going to war over that oil and gas, which is a charge we've heard quite enough of for one century.'

'True,' said the President. 'Well, what's left?'

'Dunno,' said Arnold.

'Jesus Christ,' added the President.

'Tell you the truth,' replied the Admiral, 'I'd really like time to think about this, and I'd like to have a talk with some of the Pentagon guys, in particular the Special Forces officers.

'Meanwhile, there is something that concerns me. And I've been trying not to dwell on it…but in the last few months we have been exercised by two substantial events.

'The first was the murder in the White House of old Mikhallo whatsisname, the Siberian. And that was also a part of what the CIA believes was a massacre of Siberian oilmen and politicians in Yekaterinburg.

'From that we must deduce that somehow Moscow is hugely concerned to the point of neurosis about developments in Siberia, and the possibility that in the end they may prefer to sell their oil not to Moscow but to their good and wealthy southern neighbors in China.

'The second great event was the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands, conducted with scarcely a warning, with massive confidence, and total disregard for the possibility of a vicious counterattack by the Brits.

'Both of those drastic scenarios were conducted within weeks of each other. They were brutal, ruthless, and betrayed no apparent fear of consequences. And both of them were about oil and gas — the West Siberian reserves, which Moscow wants but may not keep. And the Falkland and South Georgia reserves, which Argentina has grabbed.

'I'd sure hate to think that somehow those two events were in any way connected. Because that would sure as hell be bigger trouble than either you or I, or anyone else, could ever have imagined.'

The Admiral's global view invariably astounded President Bedford. And the two naturally garrulous men slowly ate their steaks and 'fucking dandelions' in somber, uncharacteristic contemplation.

CHAPTER SIX

HMS Ark Royal crossed the fifty-degree line of latitude in the western reaches of the English Channel, twenty miles south of the ancient Royal Navy city of Plymouth. The weather was foul, blowing a force-eight gale, and the carrier pitched through ten-foot waves, the crests of which were beginning to topple, with dense streaks of foam marking the direction of the wind.

Rain that had swept up the Atlantic in the approaching depression was light but squally, sweeping across the deck in lashing bursts against the base of the carrier's island. The two Type-45s Daring and Dauntless ran a half mile off the carrier's port and starboard bow.

Two miles astern of the Ark Royal there were three of the frigate squadron, Grafton, Iron Duke, and Richmond, in company with a massive fleet oiler. Captain Farmer had the Ocean positioned three miles off the carrier's port quarter, with Jonathon Jempson's Albion a mile astern, all of them making twenty knots.

Several hundred miles out in front were two 6,500-ton nuclear submarines, Astute and Ambush, both recently built in Barrow-in-Furness, as the newest, state-of-the-art improvements on the old Trafalgar class.

Single-shafters with two turbines apiece, they each carried submerged-launch Tomahawk cruise missiles and thirty Spearfish torpedoes. They were equipped with the outstanding Thompson Marconi 2076 sonars, with towed array, and were probably the quietest attack submarines in the deep, quieter even than Viper K- 157, which right now was still fighting its way down the coast of Norway.

The Astute was commanded by Captain Simon Compton, and the Ambush by Commander Robert Hacking, both men experts in navigation and weaponry.

The surface Battle Group pushed on down the English Channel toward the Atlantic, through the now driving rain and plainly worsening weather. It was not yet storm force, but up ahead to the southwest the skies were darker, and the clouds seemed lower, and the warships seemed to brace for the rough seas before them.

Admiral Holbrook had planned to visit the ships one by one and address the crews, but he elected to wait until the weather improved before making a succession of windswept helicopter landings on the flight decks of his various escorts.

They were in open water now, and the waves were beginning to break over the bows of the frigates, but the forecast was pretty good, and the Admiral reckoned they'd be clear of the stormy conditions within twelve hours.

With the coast of England finally slipping away behind them, the little fleet suffered its first equipment problem. Captain Yates's destroyer, the Daring, developed a minor rattle in her gearbox, which was disconcerting though not life-threatening.

The Daring's engineering team thought it was minor, and they elected to keep going until they reached calmer waters, where they were certain they could conduct the repair. All of the ships carried some spare parts for the routine running of a warship in rough seas at moderate to high speeds. The engineers would not, however, wish to cope with anything much worse while so far from a dockyard.

One day later, on Saturday morning, March 19, they steamed out of the rain and gloom into much calmer waters and blue skies that would, with luck, hold fair for the thousand-mile run down to the Azores, which rise up from the seabed only just short of the thirty-degree line of longitude, the halfway point across the North