Lion Resurgent (29 page)

It was really a question of timing. Each of his three squads had a single man-portable anti-aircraft missile launcher and a pair of anti-tank rocket launchers. His weapon squad had an anti-tank missile launcher and two tripod-mounted machine guns. Now, if he could fit all of those together properly, he had a chance to inflict a serious hurt.
Enough to make them back off? Probably not, but it was a chance.

The helicopters came first. Three missiles streaked up from the rock fields that lined the bay, towards the Pumas. The reaction was immediate. The helos tried to maneuver out of their way, while spitting out flares and chaff. Hallam couldn’t quite understand why they were kicking out chaff. Everybody knew the British Kestrel SAM wasn’t radar homing. Perhaps the aircraft threat warning system was programmed to fire both regardless of the threat. For one of the helicopters, neither chaff nor flares were able to save the situation. The missile exploded under the tail boom and took out the tail rotor. Without its counteracting force, the Puma Span out of control and fell out of the sky. It crashed offshore in a spray of greenish-white. A second helicopter took a hit high up on its fuselage, right by its twin engines. It staggered in the air but kept flying, turning back to the assault cruiser offshore. The third missile missed completely. That left just two helicopters to dump their infantry behind the defensive line on the beach.

Out to sea, Hallam saw the orange-red cloud that marked the heavy cruiser firing. The shells screamed over his head and impacted on the hills behind the beach. The Argentines had got that broadside wrong; not by much but they had made a mistake. They didn’t repeat it. The second salvo of shells landed right on the beach itself. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the brilliant white line of an anti-tank missile heading across the water towards the amphibious carriers. It hit one. The orange-red flash of its warhead silhouetted the bulky shape of the carrier. The amphibious personnel carrier was hit hard. Hallam could see its bows rear up as it sank. He wondered if anybody inside had actually managed to escape from the sinking vehicle.

It didn’t really matter. Another carrier was hit by a rocket as it hauled itself out of the water. It stopped, burning, but the tail ramp dropped down and the infantry inside bailed out. They started to move towards the rocks that bordered the small strip of sand. Hallam’s men fired on them. Some of the Argentines fell, but the armored carriers used their machine guns to spray the defensive positions. His defenses had already been badly disrupted by the eight-inch shells from the cruiser and his platoon lost its cohesion. By the time the landing craft reached the shoreline and dropped their ramps, the situation for the defenders was already critical.

It was the tanks that made the difference. Each of the landing craft carried a single American-made M92 light tank armed with a 76mm semi-automatic gun. The combination of rate of fire with close range was a disaster for the defense. One tank took a pair of anti-tank rockets and burned. The other three hosed down the positions with cannon and machine gun fire. By this time, Hallam had more than enough of his own to do without trying to understand what was happening across the whole bay. His little command group was under direct attack by a dismounted squad of Argentine Marines who had their amtrack in support. In the darkness and confusion of the assault he managed to disengage and fall back towards the agreed rendezvous point. He was dreadfully aware that few of his men would be joining him there.

Back on the beach, the Argentine Marines who had lost their vehicles on the way in were mopping up the last instances of British resistance. The rest of the invasion force, the three light tanks and seven of the ten amtracks were already forming up and starting to move along the road to Stanley. They were the left-hand prong of a two-stage envelopment. The rest of the force was coming ashore at Yorke Bay.

ARA
Almirante Brown,
Yorke Bay, Falkland Islands

The eight-inch guns forward were firing steadily. The vibration from the shots caused the tightly-packed LVTP-7 amtracks in the
Almirante Brown’s
vehicle hangar to shudder. Major Facundo Caceres felt the shock through his commander’s seat in the lead LVTP. He didn’t object. To him, the more shells that were poured into the beach defenses the better. Word had already come in that the attack on Lake Cove had run into much heavier opposition that had been expected. It hadn’t helped matters that the assault here at Yorke Bay had been delayed by navigational problems. All the marker buoys had been removed and the ships had had to pick their way in very carefully. The delay had meant that the assault on Lake Cove had gone in first and the defenses would be thoroughly alerted.

“Prepare to land the landing force.” The time-honored order that had been a Navy standard since the days of the Spanish Armada echoed through the vehicle hangar. When the cruiser had first been built, decades ago, it had been a spacious aircraft hangar, supposedly capable of housing four seaplanes. In the early 1950s, the U.S. Navy had converted her to a missile cruiser. When better-designed conversions had become available, they’d stripped the missile systems out and sold what was left of the ship to Argentina. The stern half of the ship had been gutted when Argentina took delivery. So, the ship had been rebuilt as an assault cruiser, a hybrid ship that was heavy cruiser forward and amphibious landing ship aft. What had been the floatplane hangar had been extended to give capacity for ten LVTP-7s. A flight deck and helicopter hangar had been constructed where the aft eight-inch guns had once been. Davits amidships carried four LCTs, each capable of landing a single light tank. All-in-all, a useful ship; one the Argentine Navy was proud of.

The vehicle hangar shook again. This time the cause wasn’t gunfire; it was the aft doors opening. As they slid sideways, a ramp started to lower. It allowed the LVTPs to drive down from the hangar to the sea. It was a narrow ramp, wide enough for a single amtrack to use at a time. Caceres gave the order. His amtrack started to move forward, its bows dipped as it descended the ramp then levelled off as the vehicle entered the water. In front of him, the water started to pile up as his vehicle picked up speed. The swell was causing the amtrack to roll. Momentarily, he felt sorry for the troops in the back. The infantry compartment in the LVTP-7 was bad enough at the best of times; when full of seasick Marines, it was hideous.

Over to Caceres’s left, the destroyer
Entre Rios
was lobbing shells from her 5.3-inch guns towards Port Stanley Airfield. This was a carefully-planned exercise. The airfield was Caceres’s primary objective and the gunfire was calculated to suppress any defenses without destroying the facility completely. The Argentine Air Force was already preparing a squadron of its Ciclone attack aircraft for transfer to the airport. They would be a key part of the defense if the British actually tried to retake the islands. A key part that wouldn’t be there if the airport was destroyed by eight-inch gunfire.

The LVTP company Caceres commanded wasn’t the only part of the landing force coming ashore at Yorke Bay. The landing ship
Candido de Lasala
had her well deck flooded and more LVTPs were sailing out of the docking area and forming up before heading out The white sand of the beach that glittered so enticingly ahead of the invaders. Once ashore, they would be heading for Port Stanley itself, to join up with the column that was already ashore and advancing from Lake Cove.

Caceres watched the four helicopters from the
Almirante Brown
lumber overhead. Their job was to seize a bridge about a mile behind the landing beach. That bridge was also a key point. It would provide the armored column with access to Port Stanley. If it went down, the LVTP-7s could swim across, but the M92 light tanks would be stuck until a temporary replacement could be built. So, the platoon of infantry on the Pumas would seize the bridge, remove any demolition charges and hold it until they were relieved by the advancing armor. That part of the plan was already beginning to go wrong. As the Pumas crossed the coast, they were greeted by a barrage of gunfire and the streaks of surface-to-air missiles being fired.

The effects were catastrophic for the helicopters. One blew up in mid-air as it tried to cross the beach. The streak of light connecting it to the ground told Caceres that one of the British Kestrel missiles had claimed the kill. Another was in bad trouble. It was attempting to make a crash landing on the beach itself; probably in autorotation after its engines had been hit. It might have made it, but an anti-tank missile forestalled the landing and the helicopter slammed into the ground and burned. The remaining two helicopters were the victims of machine gun fire. Too slow and clumsy to evade the hail of fire, they staggered out of the ambush and tried to make it back to the
Almirante Brown.
One made it. The other made a forced landing in the sea half way between the beach and the cruiser.
It was not,
Caceres thought,
an auspicious start to the landing.

He had his own problems. Those facing the main body of the landing force were theirs to be concerned over. His own target was a small sub-bay to the north of Gypsy Cove; one flanked by rocky outcrops. They possibly barred the way to the inviting white sand. As his LVTP-7 plowed through the water towards the beach, he was waiting for the blast of gunfire and rockets that would mark his group being caught in a vicious crossfire. He stooped down in his turret; trying to gain some comfort from the armored protection, but also painfully aware that the armor was paper-thin and wouldn’t stop an armor-piercing bullet from a rifle. The expected hail of fire never came and Caceres felt the bow of his amtrack lift as the treads gripped sand instead of water.

Slightly surprised at his own survival, he glanced over to his right. The explanation for his good fortune was immediately apparent. The main body landing in Gypsy Cove was in chaos. Obviously, the British had expected that to be the main beach. After all, the good road to Stanley lay just behind it and the beach itself was near-perfect for a landing. He could see at least three amtracks and a M92 light tank burning on the water’s edge. The beach was being raked with gunfire from the headland that lay on its west and the small island that Caceres had passed on the way in. Grimly, he realized the troops there must have let him pass, waiting for the greater game to come. More fire was hosing the main body from inland, pinning the troops on the beach. The main body was almost surrounded. Caceres saw another red ball rise in the night sky as an Amtrack exploded just inshore from the water’s edge.

Behind him, the landing craft had dropped their ramps and the M92 tanks surged out, on to the white sand. Their odd shape made them look like beetles that had somehow found their way into this chaos. Caceres picked up the microphone of his radio and got himself patched through to his battalion commander. “Sir, Delfina group is ashore without casualties. Beach is quiet; say again beach is quiet.”

There was a crackle on the radio. He could hear the hammering of gunfire in the background. A lot of gunfire. “We are pinned down here, the beach is mined and there were at least two companies of English marines waiting for us.” The next words were drowned out by the roar of explosions. The cause was obvious. The two cruisers had moved closer inshore and were firing on the rocky outcrops that were allowing the defenders to fire into the Argentine rear. The mix of eight inch and five inch shells were drowning the rock piles in the orange-red balls of explosions. The firing from them ceased.

“Sir, we can swing west and take the defenses in the rear.”

“Negative, Delfina. Say again negative. We’ll look after ourselves here. You carry on with your assigned task. Seize that airfield. Jasmine out.”

Well, orders were orders and that had been made clear enough. Caceres switched from the battalion command net to his company net. “All Delfina units move out. Delfina-One will lead, four will follow, two and three will bring up the rear.” That put his own amtrack and the three of first platoon in the lead, then the platoon of four M92s and the two remaining platoons of infantry at the rear. As his LVTP-7 lurched forward, the driver carefully picked his way through the icy rock field. Caceres was studying his map. Just 300 meters in the road to the airfield should open up. Another 700 meters beyond that and he should be on the airfield itself. Behind him, the beach shook again as the two cruisers offshore hurled more shells into the British defenses at Gypsy Cove.

Headquarters Section, NP8901, Gypsy Cove, Falkland Islands

“Those bloody cruisers are chewing us up.” Sergeant Jordan was of the opinion that stating the obvious was never a bad idea when speaking to an officer. The damage being done by the two cruisers was very obvious. Their blanket of fire from eight-inch and five-inch guns had silenced both the outposts that had done so much damage to the Argentine force. They had sunk at least two LVTPs with rocket hits and their machine gun fire had raked the troops on the beach in a murderous crossfire. The Argentine Marines were trying to take cover using dips in the white sand. That was only a temporary relief. NP8901’s two 50mm mortars were already at work, dropping their bombs into the knots of trapped troops.

“We can write off second platoon.” Captain James Fitzhugh carefully kept the guilt out of his voice. He had known the chance of the platoon’s survival was virtually nil when he’d sent two of its three squads out to hold the two rocky points. The third squad was his reserve and was about to be committed. On the other hand, the chance of first platoon surviving wasn’t much higher. The reports from Lake Cove suggested that third platoon was already gone. This mission had always been a forlorn hope; the islands couldn’t support a large enough defense force to make an invasion impossible. NP8901 was a force small enough to be supported for an indefinite period, large enough to make any invasion force bleed badly so that sovereignty had been defended, small enough that its inevitable loss wouldn’t matter too much.
A fine balance,
Fitzhugh thought,
I
just wish that I wasn’t one of the elements being balanced.