Rick Hunter knew he would not hear the huge jet arriving eight miles above the earth's surface, but they might catch an echo of the engines as the aircraft rumbled on upwind, and out over the Atlantic.
At four minutes after midnight the laser marker suddenly started painting on the aircraft's receiver. Three minutes to release, and the final seconds were ticking by automatically on the computer.
Beneath the huge bulk of the B-52, the doors of the weapons bay in the central fuselage began to close behind the falling canister, as it hurtled through the darkness, straight down Rick Hunter's laser beam.
On the ground the SEALs were just beginning to gripe and moan about the Air Force lateness, when suddenly they heard the far-distant growl of eight mighty Pratt & Whitney turbofan jet engines.
'It's gotta be them,' snapped Rick. 'Look up and for Christ's sake keep your eyes open…this thing could kill you.'
They all peered into the darkness, and it was Dallas who spotted the flickering ghostly shape of the parachute. 'Right here, sir,' he yelled.
Twelve feet from where Rick stood the huge canister crashed onto the beach with a shuddering thump. Two SEALs rushed forward to grab the chute and stow it under the boats. The rest of them grabbed the long leather padded lifting bars on either side, and began to carry it back to their hide. It was heavy, but not as heavy as a Zodiac, and they manhandled it with some ease.
Inside was the required explosive for the destruction of the fighter aircraft. That took up two-thirds of the canister, but there were also two extra shovels, eight extra machine pistols, and wet suits for the short ocean crossing to Pebble. There were fuses and timers, plus wire and an extra radio transmitter. Best of all there was canned ham, baked beans, cheese, bread, cold cuts, coffee, and chocolate. Plus two Primus stoves with a couple of containers of fuel.
They immediately dug a large hole in which to bury the canister, which would not be found for a hundred years. And then they lit the Primus stoves and made themselves a midnight feast. The weather was growing worse by the hour, and they all wore their waterproof smocks before turning in for the night, against the rocks, hoping the weather would calm down before tomorrow evening's mission across the water.
The trouble was, the weather deteriorated. And five hours later, when dawn cast a grim light on the gray beach, every member of the SEAL team was shocked by the seascape. Great white-capped waves were rolling through the Tamar Pass and onto the shore. They were whipped by the howling wind. The clouds were high, but the sun was low and hidden. The prospect of pushing an inflatable out into this particular sea was nothing less than daunting. The only sound above the gale was the long sucking noise of shingle, followed by the thumping crash of long rolling waves.
'We could,' revealed Mike Hook, 'drown our fucking selves before we get five yards. There's no way we're going anywhere in this. Not if they really want that airfield blowing up. My guess is not tonight, guys.'
He was right, too. For hour after hour the gale never abated. The sea came raging in through the narrows that separated this rocky outpost of West Falkland from Pebble Island. The tide seemed to turn in the late afternoon, and the wind whipped the water into a frenzy as it surged out between the two headlands.
'Jesus Christ,' said Dallas, 'if you tried to row across there, you'd get sucked right out through the entrance into the open ocean…I know this mission is supposed to be urgent, but we couldn't survive out there. No way.'
The better news was that the entire landscape around them seemed bereft of human habitation. Or any other habitation for that matter. Not as much as a stray sheep or even a goat from the local hill came wandering their way. They had chosen a desolate spot, plainly safe from prying eyes, and in any event, with the machine gun rigged as it now was, they could hold off an army, tight against this rock, protected by solid granite on all sides except the front.
'What d'you think about the radio, Mike?' asked Don Smith. 'We safe to use it here?'
'Yeah, I'm sure we can. So long as we restrict ourselves to short bursts. It's darned tricky, tuning into someone else's messages, especially if they only broadcast for a few seconds. Anyway, even if the Args did hear us, it'd be damned near impossible to locate us from that, unless you had really sophisticated equipment, which I doubt they do out here. You wouldn't expect anyone to be here, would you? No one in their right mind anyway.'
'No one wants a postponement,' said Commander Hunter. 'But we'll have to bag it for another twenty-four hours because the journey has to be made at night. And we sure as hell can't do that. No one's gonna thank us for getting drowned.'
And so they waited it out for the day, and the sea remained far too dangerous. They fired in a message to Douglas Jarvis on Foxtrot-three-four to stay on hold for forty-eight hours, and once more waited out the night.
Not until noon, however, did the sea begin to die down, along with the wind. It was still very turbulent, even in the relative shelter of Pebble Sound, and the waves still hit the shore with a thumping crash, but it was not like the previous night, nothing like the gale that had been building when the canister first hit the beach.
A blanket of fog closed in over West Falkland by 1300, and it was no longer possible to see across the stretch of water that divided the mainland from Pebble. This was a blessing, because they could relax and use the Primus stoves to make soup and coffee with not the slightest chance of detection by the Argentinians. The South Americans, they hoped, were, anyway, not even looking, with their own enemy long departed.
By 1400, Commander Hunter assessed they could leave when the light began to fail at 1700, and then row as fast as possible across the channel. So far as he could tell, the sea would flow in from their port-side quarter, giving them some assistance, but they would need to keep steering left in order not to drift too far off the headland at which they aimed. The compass bearing would read three-zero-zero all the way. If they were lucky it might be possible to knock it off in two hours, but the wind, calmer now, was still out of the northwest, and it would gust right on their nose.
At 1500, he radioed a satellite signal back to Coronado…
They began changing into heavy-duty wet suits for the journey, right after 1600. Each man would have flippers and rifle clipped on, the idea being that if either or both inflatables capsized — a fifty-to-one chance at worst — they would be clipped on to the unsinkable hull and able to propel forward with the big flippers.
The engines were of course out of the question because of the noise, and rescue, so far away, ruled out the use of one-time survival suits. If the SEALs went into the sea, they would have to fight their own way back to shore. The waterproof radio was sealed tight and placed in the care of Mike Hook, who anticipated no accidents. The sea looked fierce, but navigable.
At 1700 precisely they carried the two inflatables down the beach and loaded in their equipment and the engines for the getaway.
Hoods up, tight rubber gloves on, Rick gave orders for the four men in the second boat to watch him mastermind the first launch and then follow. His plan was to push the raised bow out into the surf, wait for the wave to thump and pass, then shove, running the boat forward through the frothy shallows. Then they would all leap inboard, and paddle like hell to beat the next breaking wave. 'What you wanna avoid, guys, is to get caught under the wave, because it'll swamp the boat and then you'll have to start again.'
Rick, forward on starboard, moved into the water, keeping in step with his partner on the port side. They watched the next wave crash twenty feet in front of them, felt it swirl past, knee-deep. Then Rick yelled,
Behind them the second boat was obscured, but as the wave crashed onto the shore they could see Dallas MacPherson and his men charging into the shallows and then diving over the side into the boat. For a minute, Dallas thought the wave had them and would send them tumbling back onto the beach.
But suddenly the boat came barreling off the crest, driven essentially by brute force and ignorance, but staying more or less dry, and now free of the breakers, Dallas and his men rowing with frenzied clumsiness, but moving the boat forward.
