Ghost Force (26 page)

At 1930, Captain Compton ordered the submarine to the surface, about one mile east of Race Point, tucked right behind the granite fortress of Fanning Head. They were still in a hundred feet of calm water, and the moonless night was already pitch-black. But this remained the most dangerous part of the operation.

Astute
’s deck crews were instantly into action, hauling the half-inflated Zodiacs out of the entrance at the base of the fin. A jury-rigged davit was raised above the companionway to haul up the four
250-horsepower outboard motors. The engineers were already out on the casing, ready to fit the engines onto the sterns of the two boats.

No SAS operation of this importance ever takes to enemy waters with only a single engine, just in case one of them cuts out. However, these particular engines had been given the best servicing any Royal Navy engine has ever had. Nothing was going to cut out.

Deck crews were loading the boats even as the electric pumps drove the final pressure pounds of air into the hull. A thick boarding net and two rope ladders were rolled down the submarine’s starboard-side casing for Captain Jarvis and his men to embark.

They trooped out of the fin, carrying their bergans and weapons, which were loaded into the boats at the last minute before they were lowered gently into the water. Unrecognizable now, because of the camouflage cream that coated their faces, they waited in the cold still of the night until Captain Compton gave the order to embark the Zodiacs. And then they moved swiftly down into the boats, just as they had practiced so many times during their week’s training at Faslane.

No one spoke during the deafening silence of the night exit, and the boats would run without lights, guided only by the big, softly lit Navy compass on the small dashboard around the wheel. The course was 185, almost due south, and the water would not be much deeper than ten feet all the way in, but the Zodiacs, at any speed, drew no more than eighteen inches.

The first two away were those of Captain Jarvis’s group, heading in toward Fanning Head. The second two, which would leave four minutes later, were for the group that had to walk forty-five miles across the mountains to the airfield. Sergeant Jack Clifton, twenty-nine, who was about eight months off promotion to Staff Sergeant, would lead the mission. Tonight, he hoped to be ashore by 2030 and knock off the first fifteen miles before dawn.

The navy helmsman ran the Zodiac slowly toward shore at around five knots. The big Yamaha outboard, which would cheerfully have shoved her along at forty knots, was barely idling at this slow speed, and the noise was negligible. Essentially you needed to trip over the Zodiacs in order to locate them.

The journey took less than fifteen minutes, but gradually as they approached the shore they made a slight increase in speed, hauled up
the engines on the automatic lift, and came scudding into the shallows and up the shingle beach.

The Navy seaman on the pointed bow thus jumped onto dry land, holding the thick painter and hauling against the very slight waves that lapped the stern of the boat. One by one the SAS men leapt ashore, with their big bergans now strapped onto their backs and holding their automatic rifles.

It was an awkward maneuver in the pitch dark, but they all hit the beach at a full run. And, more important, they all had dry feet for the two-week-long operation that lay before them.

The seaman holding the painter now shoved his full weight against the bow of the boat and, assisted by a rising tide, heaved the Zodiac until she floated. Then he clambered back onto the bow, his sea boots still dry on the inside, and cleared the small windshield to land back inboard.

“Good job, Charlie,” said the helmsman, increasing the revs. “Now let’s get the hell out of here.”

Douglas Jarvis heard them go, just a faint engine beat on the wind, but then he was trained to hear engine beats on the wind. A normal person would never have noticed.

He counted his seven companions, made sure everyone was ashore and ready to go, then checked his compass and began to move west, leading his team over the rocky, already rising ground in the foothills of the eastern side of Fanning Head, which jutted skyward some two and a half miles away.

Captain Jarvis considered it possible that an Argentine battery was already in place on the top of the mountain, and that the area was being patrolled from a small base established on the peak. The guns of HMS
Antrim
, commanded by Brian Young in 1982, had made the new Argentine operation easier, since the shells of 1982 had blasted a hollow on the summit that formed a natural area of cover.

Douglas planned to climb five hundred feet up the east face tonight and establish a hide around a hundred yards from the top, mostly downward, on ground that was nearly impossible for the Argentinians to patrol.

From there they could observe all troop and artillery movements, and, far below, any patrolling warships. The trick was to not get caught,
and when the British fleet arrived, Douglas Jarvis and his men would eliminate the entire Argentinian operation at the top of the mountain. When the island finally fell, as they were assured it must, the SAS team would wait to be airlifted off by helicopter back to one of the ships.

And so they half walked and half climbed up through the darkness that enveloped the silent mountain. And as they walked the terrain grew steeper, and even with their new night sight, established after thirty minutes in the pitch black, it was still difficult to see between the rocks, boulders, and crags that formed these lower reaches of the escarpment.

A huge cloud bank hung over the Falkland Islands. There was not a sliver of moon, and the stars were invisible. Also it was raining lightly, with a chill southerly wind. But they kept going, climbing steadily, until, just before 2230, they reached an unmistakable rock face, not quite sheer, but close.

Douglas, a former Team Leader with the Sandhurst Mountaineering Club, had once climbed Mont Blanc in the French Alps, and he knew about these matters. He worked his way along the rock face looking for a gully or an outcrop he could go for.

That took him about a half hour, and then he set off with his bodyguard, using crampons when necessary, hammering the little steel footholds into the rock as quietly as he could. It took him another forty minutes to reach a point some eighty feet above his team.

The bodyguard, carrying two hundred-foot climbing ropes, made them both fast to a jutting rock. One rope was for safety; each man would tie it around his waist and shoulders and would be hauled up by the Captain as he climbed.

The ropes dropped silently down the cliff face, and the operation took an hour, at the end of which Douglas Jarvis and his seven-man team were established on this thirty-five-yard-long, deep ledge, which at one point seemed to burrow back ten feet into the cliff.

The ledge faced the wind, which was bad, but it looked a lot easier to climb onward and upward, which was good. They would not need the ropes on the three-hundred-foot ascent to the summit. And Captain Jarvis whispered carefully that everyone should eat something, have some water, and rest until 0200, when four of them would continue up to the peak and check the place out.

By 0300 their guesswork was confirmed. There were four Argentine military tents inside the hollow, but, so far as Douglas could see, no one was awake. He and his men were facedown behind a clump of windswept bracken peering through night glasses. There were signs of a fire, but the place was quiet.

The SAS men strained their ears, listening for a sound, any sound, from a guard, a lookout, anyone. But there was nothing. The Argentine troops had decided, not unreasonably, their chances of being disturbed up here were zero. It had taken, after all, two helicopters to get up here in the first place, and it would take at least two more to airlift the guns, missile batteries, and radar installations into position later today.

There was, of course, no earthly point in Captain Jarvis and his men taking the place out at this stage. That would have caused an island-wide manhunt, which might have seen everyone shot or captured. And anyway, the men and missiles would immediately have been replaced, just as soon as the Argentinians had blasted to oblivion the SAS aerie on the cliff…probably with a couple of missiles from that frigate that patrolled the northern part of Falkland Sound.

No. Captain Jarvis and his boys had to sit tight and observe, and they already had critical information. The Argentine troops had established a position at the top of Fanning Head. And they would transmit that information one hour from now, direct to the
Ark Royal
, encrypted, from right here on their secret rain-swept ledge below the summit.

Meanwhile, Sergeant Clifton’s team was walking, with extreme caution. They carefully tramped away from the shoreline and down the valley behind Port San Carlos. Two hours after they had disembarked the Zodiac, they reached the narrow river that rushed from its source on the 2,000-foot-high Mount Usborne and was still rushing when they arrived on its banks.

Jack Clifton’s map showed a bridge a half mile downstream, and they crossed there, preferring the detour to getting soaked and frozen. They continued along the valley toward the distant peaks of Usborne and the Wickham Heights, the last of which they would have to cross, probably two days from now, in order to advance downward toward the Mount Pleasant Airfield. That way they could establish a hide from which they could see everything happening at this newest Argentinian air base.

For the same reasons that restricted Captain Jarvis, they were not allowed to blow it up. Which to any member of the Special Forces is tantamount to telling him breathing had just been forbidden.

Around the same time Sergeant Clifton and his troops crossed the river, Captain Hacking had concluded a long sweep around East Falkland and was feeling his way through thirty-five fathoms of rock-strewn inshore waters on the way in to Lafonia. There was a southern branch of the ninety-foot-deep channel that ran up to Choiseul Sound, and this would drive
Ambush
to the surface, since no submarine CO likes to have less than ten feet below the keel.

The third group, who would prepare the landing beaches, had selected a tiny inlet on the east side of Lively Sound, named presumably for the crashing waves that thundered in from the South Atlantic in winter.

Well, it was not quite winter yet, and the sheltered waters of Seal Cove looked inviting to the men of the Special Boat Service. The submarine came to the surface south of the headland, and the two Zodiacs proceeded to make a two-mile run around the shoreline and dropped the men off on the north shore of the cove. This avoided the problem of crossing the river.

It was very dark on the beach, and raining, and there was a large amount of equipment to unload. In addition, three inflatable dinghies had been towed behind, and a pile of heavy wooden paddles. Lt. Perry, who led the group, had determined back in England they would almost certainly have to cross Choiseul Sound alone, since it would be madness to land on the “Argentinian side” in the dead of night, possibly running into an armed patrol.

“We need light rowing boats to cross that channel in the dark,” he had said. “Because if we land blind, and run into a patrol, we may as well have not bothered.”

Thus they arrived in Seal Cove in the dead of night, certain in their minds they were safe here, and that recces to the far shore two and a half miles away should be carried out in light rowing boats. Just so long as the weather remained merely awful instead of highly dangerous.

They hauled the dinghies up on to the beach and dragged their equipment with them. The boats were light but made heavier by their firm wooden decking. However, they had no engines, and four canvas handles. Teams of four each carried one boat across the hard rocky
ground, searching for a sheltered spot for their hide, which must be established by dawn.

Twice during the first twenty minutes of their short journey they saw military aircraft coming in low over Lafonia heading northeast, which gave everyone a precise idea of the location of the airfield. Maps and charts are good. The real thing is always, somehow, better.

The land was flat here and there was little vegetation, but there were various outcrops of rocks at the landward end of the beach. One of these was not quite a cave, but there were four huge boulders that formed only a very narrow opening to the sky, eight feet above the ground.

It was not perfect because it was not big enough for the men and the boats, but it was a lot better than open ground. So they moved in with a couple of shovels, hauled out various scattered rocks and pebbles, unloaded waterproof ground sheets and sleeping bags, stacking the boats at the entrance with the third one turned upside down on top of the other two.

The dinghy’s gray underside blended in with the boulders. At least in Lt. Perry’s narrow-beam torchlight it did. And the young Team Leader decided they would risk lighting the Primus, brew some tea and soup, and conduct a patrol at 0100, to ensure their first ops area was deserted.

Their biggest problem was they had to operate in both directions, because they had to establish the first landing beach on the southern side of the five-mile-wide Lafonia Peninsula, somewhere in Low Bay, remote from Argentine defenses. And then establish a second beachhead across Choiseul Sound, much closer to the action, from where the British troops could launch their main attack on the airfield, Argentine garrison, and the harbor.