noise as they flew in over the cold deserted landscape below. All of them wore thick, heavy-duty woolen hats, and all of them could feel the helicopter swaying in the gusting breeze as they came on down toward the Rio Grande River. This made it slightly awkward for their final gulps of hot cocoa from the specially provided flasks, but somehow they managed.
The chopper swayed to a halt, hovered and then touched down softly, the rotors now beating quietly, but the engine still making an unbelievable racket in the night air.
The observer climbed out first, and Rick Hunter jumped down, setting foot on Argentinian soil for the first time. Dallas and Doug were right behind him. Then Mike Hook, Smith, Harrison, Lt. Banfield, and Chief Bland, who had manhandled the machine gun and the communications system into the hands of the SEALs.
Then the observer jumped back on board, slammed the door tight, and all eight of Rick Hunter's team watched as the helicopter took off, keeping low as it edged its way west toward the border. From there it would head out over the strait back toward Punta Arenas.
The wind that was backing south gusted hard over the rough damp ground, and it whipped away the sounds of the retreating helicopter, leaving Rick's men alone in the silence of the South American wilderness. The dark was all-consuming, as more cloud, drifting in from the Atlantic, brought down a wet night mist, blotting out the stars.
Rick and Doug took a long careful look at their compasses, confirmed their route was due east, and set off on course zero-nine-zero. In the absence of a path or track of any kind, the rest just stayed on bearing and followed the firm marching of their leader out in front, going with the gradient, sometimes clambering over ridges, sometimes moving easily down thick grassy hills, but always moving forward.
Every fifteen minutes they all paused and strained their ears for any sound, perhaps a car, maybe even an aircraft, but there was nothing. Only the wind, which was now southeasterly.
Mike Hook heard it first, a dull rumble in the clouds to the north.
'Great,' snapped Rick. 'It'll give us a fix. Right now, everyone hit the deck…'
The eight men went down, secure in their heavy camouflaged jackets, trousers, and hats, facing due east, peeping up over the grass, watching for the aircraft. They could hear it way behind them, and then, suddenly, it was on them, howling down the flat plain, right above, possibly only a couple of hundred feet, its landing wheels outstretched for home.
They watched its lights all the way, even catching the slight bounce as it touched down bang in front of them, less than a mile away.
'Okay, guys,' said Rick. 'A few decisions have been made for us right here…the first one being we don't wanna be stuck directly under the flight path of every incoming jet. I just don't wanna get caught here — that's all. Because then we'd have to fight and kill, and if they did subsequently catch us…well, don't wanna think about that, right?'
Without further talk, they made their way left, to a point about a mile and a half off the outer perimeter of the airfield. They had some cover, and a fair view, between two huge rocks, of the takeoffs and landings. They would also have a chance to observe the guard patrols. So far as they could see, there were no guard posts out here in this most remote part of the field, which, according to Dallas, was assessed as 'good to totally fucking excellent.'
And so they sat the night out, watching through their field glasses, sleeping in turns, one man always at the machine gun. They started their little Primus stove, found some fresh water in a stream, and boiled up some powdered vegetable soup, which they ate with bread and cheese. They did not dare to try any sustained cooking, nor did they intend to do so until they were safely on their way out.
The next evening at 1930, with night now casting a pitch-black darkness over the air base, they stowed their camp, leaving Don Smith to clear their gear into exit mode, and then maintain guard with the radio active in case of an emergency. Rick's seven-man team moved off in light rain at 1945, toward the Rio Grande base, home of the Super-Etendard aircraft.
Rick and Doug had taken the view that the two checkpoint gates, one out on the right and one adjacent to the main buildings, would be heavily guarded, but they did not know the extent of the wire that certainly surrounded some of the field.
Rick led them forward, walking through the high grass into the teeth of the freezing wind. They all noted with satisfaction it did not penetrate their jackets, nor their waterproof camouflage trousers. And in some ways the wind was their friend, because their enemy was upwind of them, and the SEALs would hear everything as they approached the field.
Rick again ordered them to hit the deck, but this time with rifles in their hands. And they crawled through the thick ground cover, making the final two-hundred-yard approach on their bellies, almost in a canoeing action, just as Doug had been taught at Sandhurst, out on Barossa Common, thirteen years ago.
When they reached the outer border of the base they ran into a heavy wire fence. And they could not tell how far it stretched in any direction. 'No sense hanging around to find out either,' said Commander Hunter. 'Wire cutters, Bob…let's go straight through…then we'll take some kind of a mark inside, and this hole right here will be our way back to the rendezvous point…hit the hole and head due north on the compass for one mile and a half…that way we can't miss if we get separated.'
Bob Bland made short work of the fence, cutting a hole two feet high by four feet long, virtually unnoticeable in the grass, unless you were looking. Rick made a note of the GPS position at the hole, and radioed it back to Don Smith. One minute later the team was inside the perimeter fence, hurrying over to the main runway on which they had seen aircraft coming and going. Once there, they turned left down the blacktop and went in search of the Super-Es, which, according to Coronado, were four hundred yards down the main runway to the right.
They had traveled almost three hundred yards when they came to the first group of aircraft, out on the left, nearest the buildings. They counted eight of them, all identical, A4 Skyhawks, the single-seater American-built low-altitude bomber, distinctive by its high, curved top fuselage. And by the heavy clips for the thousand-pound bombs it could carry under its wings.
'That's not the ones,' said Dallas, who had spent much of the afternoon studying aircraft shapes.
And in the darkness, they moved on down the runway, to the next group — twelve sleek, black, strike fighter aircraft, a slight tilt to the nose cone, the tail fins set slightly higher than the aft fuselage.
Dallas and R. K. Banfield immediately moved in to check the location of the hatches that cover the engines. They were simple to find, and even simpler to open. Within two minutes, the SEALs had their extremely stable C-4 explosive ready to cut and shape like modeling clay, with two men assisting Dallas and two more helping R. K.
The two young officers placed the charges and inserted the fuse that would detonate the explosive. They then attached the detcord and ran it out to a position on the ground midway between four aircraft. Rick Hunter was waiting there to splice the four lengths of detcord into one pigtail, which he screwed into the timer and set for four hours. All four aircraft engines, and much of the fuselage, would be obliterated at precisely the same moment.
The entire four-aircraft project took the biggest part of one hour, each team sabotaging two aircraft. And then they repeated the operation twice more, ensuring that, barring a miracle, not one of Argentina's brand-new Super-Es would ever leave the ground again.
Only once did the SEALs need to hit the floor, when a big Hercules C-130 came in, and the lights at the end of the runway lit up half the field. The rest of the time they were more or less undisturbed, although they did notice a guard patrol, traversing the entire field in a couple of Jeeps at irregular intervals, once at 2030 and again at 2115. Rick thought they were going too fast to notice anything.
By 2300 they had completed their task. A pale moon now cast light on the secondary blacktop strip, which ran north-south at the far western end against the ocean. They could see it was a parking area for helicopters, five
