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…
CHAPTER NINE
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.
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
