guns.
So far as Douglas was concerned, anything was preferable to a fight. But if they had one, they had two tasks, to kill every man in that Jeep, and then make sure no one found it. The first was easy, the second damn near impossible.
And there was a dull ache of anticipation in the stomach of Douglas Jarvis when he heard the Jeep's engine kick over and begin to rumble toward them. Worse yet, he could hear the clatter of machine guns, as the Argentinian patrol raked every bush and rocky outcrop with real live bullets.
'Fuck,' hissed Douglas. 'Peter, Bob, take the guys on the left side of the vehicle coming toward us. I'll take the driver, Jake takes the backseat on the right.'
No one spoke, but each man wriggled and crawled into position, spreading out, ready to open fire in an instant. Suddenly the Argentinians went quiet, then the searchlight went on again, and swept the copse where they had been sleeping, two hundred yards from the edge of the pasture.
The Jeep roared forward again, and a burst of machine-gun fire ripped into the very spot the SAS team had lately vacated.
'Okay, fuck it, that's it,' snapped Douglas, 'Take 'em
His own Enfield L85A1 assault rifle spat fire at fifty yards' range, the heavy SS109 steel-core rounds ripping through the head and neck of the driver and the front passenger. Troopers Wiggins and Goddard put two savage bursts into the rear seat from the left, Jake Posgate slammed ten rounds into the backseat from the right.
Doug Jarvis ran in, now from the rear of the vehicle, and fired another burst. But there was no movement from inside the Jeep. Four men lay slumped in their seats, dead or very quickly dying.
'Okay, guys,' said Douglas. 'You see the nearest hillside over there — probably about a mile if this damn flashlight is any good. I'm gonna drive over there, and I'll drop off a trooper every four hundred yards. That way we'll all meet when I find a spot.
'Then we're going to hide this bastard and its passengers. It won't stay hidden forever. But it'll stay hidden for possibly a week 'til someone finds it. By then we'll be long gone. You all know I did not want to do this, but I was just beginning to feel it was us or them, and this way's best.'
They manhandled the dead men into the rear seat and then clambered all over the vehicle as it set off toward the distant slopes of Mount Usborne. It took a half hour to find a really secluded gully, and they shoved the Jeep down into it, about six feet below the track they were on. Douglas went in and personally severed the wires that powered the vehicle's radio.
One hour later they had about a half ton of gorse and tall grass piled all over it. You could have walked past it twenty times and never seen the Jeep in the man-made copse.
'That's it for us,' said the Captain. 'Those guys won't be reported missing for several more hours. Meantime we'll head back to the coast for the next three hours. When it's light, we'll hide up somewhere and try to get past Port Darwin this evening. But we have to stay right next to the seashore. It's our only way out.'
Commander Rick Hunter, in company with Lt. Commander Dallas MacPherson, Chief Mike Hook, and the rest emerged from the final briefing room dressed in full combat gear. Their rucksacks were already loaded. They were armed and ready, and they carried with them the special heavy-duty, hooded wet suits with flippers that would prevent them from sinking and freezing to death in the South Atlantic.
The parachutes and the reserves were already loaded. These would unclip and release the moment the men hit the water. The rest would be up to Captain Hugh Fraser's highly skilled submariners from USS
Rick Hunter walked out to the edge of the runway where the Lockheed C-130 stretched Hercules was already fully boarded and running its engines. He walked to the steps of the aircraft, followed by Dallas and Mike Hook. But before he began the climb toward the cabin, he paused for a few moments to chat with Admiral Bergstrom, who had materialized from nowhere.
'Sir, one favor…?'
'Of course.'
Rick handed him a piece of paper with a phone number in faraway Kentucky. 'Could you please call Di…just tell her I'm fine?'
They all heard the Colonel call out, 'I'll do it this morning…and, Rick…good luck.'
Dallas stood grinning cheerfully as the officer from the Blue Grass walked firmly up the steps.
Inside the aircraft, the crew was waiting at the door. As Rick walked in, one of them said, 'Okay, sir?'
'Let's go,' said the Commander, walking back and strapping himself into his reserved seat. And he felt the great aircraft shudder as it made its way to the end of the runway, swerved around and rumbled forward, its speed building, the noise shattering.
No one spoke until the fuel-laden Hercules had fought its way off the ground, hard into the southwest breeze gusting in off the Pacific. They all felt it gain altitude, and then bank left onto its course of 150 degrees, bound for the cold south, and the windswept craggy moonscape of the Falkland Islands.
They climbed into the warm spring skies. The Hercules, always a lumbering giant, seemed noisy this morning thanks to the giant echoey gas tank set in the middle of the main cargo area. Right now they were flying through sunny clear skies. By the early hours of tomorrow morning, they would be close to the Antarctic convergence, flying in temperatures probably eighty below freezing.
No one spoke for a half hour, at which point Dallas turned to Commander Hunter and said, 'Sir, do you think we're supposed to be scared?'
'Us? No, not us. We're invincible.'
'No, sir. I'm serious. Is this really dangerous, or are we just dealing with a bunch of jokers?'
'I don't think anyone knows that, Dallas. But we have been tasked to find the lost Brits and slam the fighter aircraft.'
'Shit, when you think about it, kinda sounds a bit tricky, eh?'
'A bit. Nothing you and I can't deal with.'
'Yeah, but hold on a minute, sir. Let's say they send a chopper up after us and start blasting away. What happens then?'
'Dallas, we are about to conduct a standard, classic SEAL operation, infiltration of enemy territory. If they are mad enough to come after us, we'll blow their fucking helicopter right out of the sky with the Stinger, right? Get your mind straight, kid. We're the U.S. Navy SEALs and we're going in. Anyone gets in the way of our mission dies, right?'
'Yessir.'
Dallas fell silent, and the Hercules, guzzling fuel by the gallon every few seconds, kept rumbling south at 42,000 feet. They would refuel in Santiago, the capital city of Chile. Tom noticed the veteran Mike Hook was sound asleep. Chief Ed Segal was lying back in his seat, his eyes wide open, his mind on the cold south.
The crew served them coffee at 1900, with hot soup and sandwiches at 2200, and most of them slept through the night until 0330, when they landed in Santiago. The refuel took just thirty minutes, and everyone seemed to awaken, but no one had much to say.
At 0600 Rick Hunter and his team began to change. Their gear and weapons were already secured in the four big waterproof containers they would take with them on the drop. They pulled their heavy-duty, hooded wet suits over the special deepwater Gore-Tex body vests and tight-fitting trousers they would wear for the jump into the freezing South Atlantic. The last task before fitting the parachutes was to pull on their life jackets.
Two hundred and fifty miles farther on, the staff of the submarine USS
Captain Fraser's crew were already lowering two diesel-powered inflatables into the water. It had taken a small crane to haul the deflated boats up onto the casing, and then the engines separately. And even out on the deck it was more trouble than usual because of a heavy Atlantic swell, but Captain Fraser had preferred the boats to a Chilean helicopter, which was apt to be both noisy and slow. And he realized the importance of scooping the
