Autumn in the South Atlantic. 3.32pm on 25
May, a bright, cold afternoon in the narrow inlet of San Carlos Water, East
Falkland. The alarm call sent a shiver through the British fleet - and my war
turned bloody.
This was Argentina's national day. In enemy
sorties before lunch, missiles from HMS Coventry had shot down two A4 Skyhawk
bombers over the sound, with a third destroyed by small-arms fire. But an hour
later the bombers had returned to exact revenge, damaging Broadsword and
hitting Coventry with three bombs, capsizing her and killing nineteen men.
Now the bombers were back again.
This new message meant that the long-range
radar of a ship on the forward picket line had detected hostile aircraft in
descent towards the island on a strike mission profile.
Minutes earlier a Sea King helicopter from
HMS Invincible had set me down on the main deck of the SS Northland, a 15,000-
ton roll-on roll-off container ship. There were four of us there from D
Squadron SAS, under the orders of my brother, Troop Sergeant Andy Black. The
other two were Tom - one of my great mates, a huge and unflappable Fijian
corporal - and Doug Easton, the troop troublemaker, who had just made
selection. Doug was a bullet-headed tearaway from east London, violently
aggressive and forever forcing his opinions on people. He and I had never hit
it off.
The squadron was scheduled to undertake a
major operation in the next couple of days, and now we were hunting for a
1.missing container of stores. Some clerk in Portsmouth had screwed up on the
cargo manifest and our vital laser target designators had ended up on the wrong
ship. I was twenty years old, and the operation would be my first time under
fire in a real war; so I was quite nervous about how I would perform in a major
action.
A stench of diesel and avgas. The cavernous
main hold was jammed with giant helicopters and massive crates holding spare
engines for Harrier jump jets. Teams of RAF technicians - 'crabs' in our
language - were labouring to bolt the rotors into place on a twin-engine
Chinook. Andy sent Tom and Doug forward, and took me aft with him to check the
lower vehicle deck. He purposely wanted to keep me apart from Tom - when the
order to leave for the Falklands came through, Tom and I had been out drinking.
We had ended up pissed in some stinker's house and missed the flight out to
Ascension Island with the rest of the squadron, and had to catch a later plane
- Andy hadn't forgiven me yet. A veteran of the Oman campaign, he sported the
droopy tash and long hair of a seasoned SAS operator, and took no nonsense from
anyone, officer or ranker.
As we searched for a stairwell we met a
couple of airmen coming forward. 'How do we get down from here?' Andy asked.
One of the men jerked a thumb over his shoulder and hurried on without
stopping.
'Fucking crab,' Andy grunted. 'Shitting
himself in case the Argy planes come back.'
You couldn't exactly blame him, though. It
was bad enough being on a troop ship, but with holds full of fuel and
ammunition these guys were sitting on a bomb - literally.
The war at this point was becoming very
real. I had seen enemy aircraft blown out of the sky over the anchorage, and
ships burning from missile hits.
We clattered down into the bowels of the
ship. The lower deck was shadowy, crammed with long lines of all-terrain
vehicles, Land Rovers and eight-ton medium trucks packed to the roof with
stores and chained to the deck by their axles.
'Take fucking hours to search this lot,'
Andy said. 'We'll need more light. Hang on here, Mark, while I go back for a
couple of torches. And keep your eyes open for anything worth nicking - if the
crabs haven't got there first, that is.'
Hampered by my bulky life vest, I squeezed
past a rank of bucket loaders belonging to the Royal Engineers and a grim
contingent of battlefield ambulances. From up above came the sounds of a Tannoy
blaring: probably another aircraft warning - the Argies were throwing their
full weight against the landings.
Andy returned with torches, and we set to
work. As we moved along the lines I was quizzing him about the forthcoming
mission. Rumour had it the squadron was to send a patrol into the Argentine
mainland. If true, it would be a major escalation of the war. I knew Andy was
bothered by it because it was a four-man patrol, and I was listed number six in
reserve - which meant I was unlikely to be picked, a fact that was pissing me
off a lot.
I made out four of the squadron's trucks
among a fleet of BV lightweight tracked vehicles - the kind that can go across
the ice cap if you need to. The first contained bivvy bags and groundsheets, as
listed. I counted the bundles as best I could in the semi-dark. The canvas flap
at the back of the second truck was partly unsecured, and I squirmed underneath
to take a dekko inside. Jesus, I thought disgustedly as I played the torch
around. The neat packs of arctic clothing and spare sleeping bags had been
hollowed out in the middle to make a hiding place, and some pisser was kipping
down in there. I pulled the canvas back for a better look. Whoever it was had
dug out a sleeping bag and there was a torch ready to hand, an army-issue water
bottle and the remains of a meal from a ration pack. Fucking crabs, I thought,
they get better fed than we do, and still they nick our grub.
Feeling around among the bundles, I turned
up a camera and a miniature tape recorder, quality-looking items both. Along
with them was a piece of electronic kit I didn't recognise, a flat grey plastic
box around six inches long by two-and-a-half wide, with an extendable aerial
like a transistor radio but no tuning dial, only a tiny red button that glowed
to show it was switched on. I was about to go back and show Andy what I'd found
when there was a rustling noise from the front of the truck. A rat after the
remains of the food? But it seemed like too much noise for a rat. A man - and
whoever had been living here was still around, by the sound of it.
Right, I'll have you, I thought, and
launched myself across the piled stores. There was a frantic scuffling as a
body tried to get away. I got a hand around a limb in the darkness - arm or leg
I couldn't tell.
'Come on, get the fuck out of there,' I
said, heaving.
A foot came out of the blackness and
connected with my face with a force that rocked my head back against the steel
frame of the roof. The torch went flying and the crack I'd taken felt as if it
had broken my jaw. My head was singing and I could taste blood in my mouth. I
was angry now.
OK, I said to myself, if that's how you
want to play it, fine. I let fly a punch with all my twelve stone behind it. My
fist connected with something solid. There was a gasp and a whimper and the
struggles ceased. This was better.
Locating a foot, I dragged my opponent into
the half-light near the truck tail to take a look at him. The guy was wearing
army combat fatigues. I'd been expecting a crab or a sailor - maybe he'd nicked
the gear too. He was so slight he looked more like a boy than a man. 'Who the
fuck are you?' I demanded.
The little bastard struggled violently and
tried to knee me in the groin, unsuccessfully. I figured he had to be some kind
of cabin boy, someone from the crew - probably scared to death by the bombing,
hiding down here when he should be topsides.
He twisted like a snake, diving under my
arm to reach the roof flap. I was ready for him, though. Flinging myself after,
I dragged him back, rolling him over and pinning him down. He fought and
squirmed; it was a while since I'd fought with a kid his size, and it didn't
feel right somehow. I was worrying I'd break a bone or something. Eventually,
though, I got him pinned down by sheer weight. I straddled him between my knees
and laced his hands across his chest so he couldn't move, though he continued
to snarl and wriggle like a wildcat.
'What's your name then, arsehole?'
His response was to spit in my face. I
cuffed him a couple of times across the mouth to teach him manners, and he shut
up. His wrists were so thin I could hold them together one-handed while I searched
his tunic for ID.
It was while I was patting him down that I
realised something was wrong - and not in the way I had been thinking before.
In addition to a combat jacket several sizes too large, he had on a roll-neck
sweater with a T-shirt underneath. Ignoring his squirmings I pulled these up -
to reveal a narrow ribcage and a flesh-coloured sports bra hiding a pair of
adolescent tits.
My cabin boy was a girl.
I let go her hands and sat up. The torch
was lying nearby and I snapped it on - definitely a girl. The dark hair was
ragged and plastered to her grimy face, she was unkempt and pale - but the
dishevelled appearance and dirt could not disguise the fineness of the features
or burning intensity of the eyes. A bit younger than me; seventeen or eighteen
at a guess.
There was a reddening mark on one cheek
where I had hit her. I reached down to touch the place. Her eyes flashed
hatred. A hand swept out of the gloom, fingers curled like talons to rake my
face, but I knocked the hand aside. 'I didn't mean to hit you!' Well, I hadn't
- I'd thought she was a bloke. 'What are you doing down here anyway?'
'Bastardo!'
A girl, I was thinking. How she had got
here I couldn't imagine - unless maybe she was some crab's bit of fluff
smuggled aboard at Portsmouth. I hadn't seen a girl in six weeks. We'd heard
rumours that a few were serving on the Canberra, but we'd never got near enough
to find out. Or could she be a journalist stowed away on board to get a scoop
on the campaign . . .?
Then it dawned on me that she'd spoken in
Spanish. I ran my gaze around the nest in which she had been lying up, taking
in the items I'd found - the camera, the tape recorder, the radio-type device.
And it hit me. Jesus, I thought, the bitch
is a spy. She's down here vectoring the bombers in on us.
That moment she flew at me again.
I called Andy over. Even against the two of
us she continued to put up a fight; she could kick and punch like a
bantamweight. My teeth were aching and Andy took a poke in the eye that left
him gasping, but eventually we got her tied down with some straps off a
vehicle, and Andy told me to watch her while he went off to find the ship's ops
officer.
After that, everything started to go
ratshit. The ship's captain and the ops officer took one look at the girl -
still spitting and snarling - and the kit she had with her, and told Andy and
me that on no account should we talk to anyone. I described to them the scene
in the back of the truck, how I'd guessed she had a homing device - which was what
it seemed the thing was - and there were long faces as the officers tried to
figure out how an enemy agent had managed to breach their 'impenetrable'
security cordon. No one knew how she had got on, or whether it was at
Portsmouth or Ascension Island where the ship had stopped en route. Small
wonder we had been taking such losses to air attack.
By this time they had brought a couple of
seamen down and told them to get the kit off her. These boys set to work
grinning. The prisoner fought and kicked, but it didn't do her any good. In a
trice she was shackled to a bulkhead and every shred of clothing was ripped
away. It was freezing cold down below decks, but in the overhead light her
olive skin was beaded with sweat.
Front on, she looked pathetically young and
emaciated. I felt no anger now, only pity and disgust. I wondered what they
were going to do with her. This was war, and in war spies are shot. I knew the
procedure. I'd been through it myself on an escape-and-evasion exercise during
the SAS initiation test in the Brecon Beacons before the war. Next she'd have
the full treatment: the body cavity searches, the physical and verbal abuse,
the threats, the hooding, and banging on the walls and door to induce
disorientation. I could have told them they were wasting their time; she was
never going to talk - but it wouldn't have done any good.
The two seamen stayed in attendance to see
that she didn't kill herself. Though God knows how she was going to manage
that, the way they had her trussed up.
I felt sick as we climbed back topside, the
captain explaining that we weren't to talk about this, not to anyone. It was
all top secret. In other words, a cover-up was in force. We were to forget the
girl, forget the homing device - none of it had ever happened. But I couldn't
get the image of her spread-eagled against that bulkhead out of my mind.
Tom and Doug were waiting on deck. The ops
officer told us to get our kit together before our regimental helicopter flew
us back to rejoin the unit.
That was when all hell broke loose.
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