Lion Resurgent (39 page)

Seer’s Home
Philotas,
Saranac River Valley, Adirondacks.

“You do realize that Sir Robert has a long history of chasing every female in sight don’t you?” The Seer sipped his whisky and sighed gently. He was reasonably certain this was not the sort of conversation a man was supposed to be having with his daughter.

“Of course. I just have to run not quite fast enough. Although I’ve as good as told him he’s going to catch me.” Igrat was sitting on the couch, freshly showered and wrapped in a thick cotton robe, her legs drawn up beside her. She’d caught a rotodyne out of Washington International and it had dropped her off at the airstrip attached to the house. What had once been a long drive up here was now a convenient ride on a puddle-hopper. She didn’t mind paying the extra fee for the additional stop. The views alone made it worthwhile and she needed the rest. The constant flights across the Atlantic were more wearing than most people realized.

The door to the living room entered and Raven entered, pushing a trolley loaded with plates. Igrat whinnied slightly with delight at the smell of rich stew. “Wild turkey, Raven?”

“Wild turkey.” Raven confirmed that and took quiet pride in Igrat’s open enjoyment. It had taken her some time to get used to Igrat’s ways, especially her wholehearted pursuit of life’s pleasures. Privately she had thought that those pursuits would have dropped her into a mass of trouble if she’d lived on a reservation. Angry wives would have been coming for her in the night, Raven was quite convinced of that. “Achillea shot it and it’s been hanging for just the right time. And, it really has been cooked according to an old Indian recipe.”

Igrat and her father both burst out laughing at the comment. Raven was pure-blooded Shoshone and a superb cook. She’d even published a book of Shoshone recipes, under an assumed name of course. It had sold well. One of many ways customs and culture from the Nations had become popularized after being neglected for far too long. She started spooning the stew out of its casserole into serving dishes, making sure that the Seer had his favorite pieces, before adding slabs of corn bread. Igrat took hers and quietly took a few mouthfuls. In Naamah’s absence, the job of food tasting fell to her. Nobody took it that seriously these days, but it was better to be safe than sorry. “Gods, Raven this is good. How do you get the turkey so soft? I keep expecting it to be like rubber.”

“Cook cool and slow.” Raven was smiling with happiness at the obviously sincere praise. “I put the chopped turkey into a dutch oven a whole day ago. So, how did you get along with Sir Robert Byrnes?”

“He dined me, wined me and made it very clear there were quite a few other things he wished to do to me. Some very naughty.” Igrat closed her eyes with sheer pleasure at the thick gravy mopped up with freshly-baked cornbread. “But he said nothing that even hinted at the Auxiliary Units. The official line is they don’t exist, never have existed and are just media speculation. Even mention them directly and I get the ‘pat on the head, silly little girl’ treatment. I thought Robbie might tell me something from the funding end, but not a word.”

“What do you think Iggie?” The Seer absorbed the information and mulled its implications.

“The Auxiliary Units? Oh they exist all right. They’ve overdone the ‘we don’t exist’ bit just a little too much. If they really didn’t exist, there would be a few loose ends knocking round. You know the sort of things, little mysteries that nobody can quite solve and which curious-minded people could construct into an obviously-absurd legend. But there aren’t. Somebody has gone around and carefully closed off all those loose ends, every conceivable one of them, and the only reason to do that is to hide something. The fact that there is so obviously no evidence at all is, in an odd way, the strongest evidence of all. Could I have some more stew please, Raven? I’m hungry.”

“Plate.” Raven served out some more stew and watched Igrat start to wolf it down. “How do you stay thin?”

“Lots of exercise.” Igrat looked innocently around, an appearance that deceived nobody. “After all, I’m a Royal Courier now. I’ve got to run around like a greyhound. Father, do you want me to keep sniffing around for hints about the Auxiliary Units?”

“Amongst our friends over there, sure. No need to take chances though. At the moment it’s just curiosity. But if the Auxiliary Units do exist, it would be nice to know about them.”

SBS Unit, Penguin River, South Georgia

To his dismay, he was now certain that the Argentine force was larger than the original sighting had suggested. More of the swimmer-commandos had appeared, working their way through the field of ice-covered rocks that led up to the Penguin River. There were at least 18 by now, and Marine “Tiny” Stroud was sure there were six more somewhere. Assuming there were 50 swimmer-commandos in the team that had occupied Grytviken, that meant at least half their force were up here. It was certainly more than the five SBS men were capable of handling.

Stroud had already picked his target. One of the swimmer commandos had moved into an overwatch position and was scanning the rocks with the telescopic sight mounted on his FAS rifle. Stroud assumed it was the FAS. The Argentine swimmer-commandos and Marines both used the Belgian-designed rifle while the Argentine Army used the much cheaper Russian-designed SVK. He was in no doubt about the scope though. He had seen light flash from the rising sun flash off its lens. Stroud was quietly confident he hadn’t been seen yet. Partly, that was because nobody was shooting at him but there were other reasons as well.

One of them was the rifle he was carrying. The original L1 had been equipped with the traditional wooden furniture. That had been replaced in the L1 A2 version with the lighter and stronger plastic stock and grips. At first, those had been made in black. At some point a great light of inspiration had engulfed somebody and it had been realized that the plastic furniture could easily be made in any color. So now, the L1A2 had a range of camouflaged components that could be switched over to make the weapon unobtrusive in any environment. The rifle itself was a bullpup design with the magazine behind the pistol grip and trigger. That had been a controversial decision and other rifle designers had ridiculed the resulting design. They had suggested it was best suited to inserting hot cartridge cases up the nose of anybody using it. Certainly it gave left-handers problems, but the layout had provided a compact weapon with an unusually long barrel for its overall size. The resulting accuracy was exploited by the provision of an optical sight, making the British Army the first to issue such sights as standard equipment.

Stroud was using that sight, confident that with the sun behind him he would not be betrayed by a reflection. He had placed the red dot just below the chin of the man he had chosen. A gentle squeeze of the trigger and a five round burst struck his target. That was another advantage of the bullpup configuration; the rifle recoiled straight backwards and it was very easy to prevent muzzle climb. A short burst put all the bullets where the shooter intended, not sent them skywards. His target slumped downwards. The red stains from the bullet wounds spread across the rocks and glistened in the sun. Stroud didn’t stay around to watch. By the time the 7mm bullets had struck, he was already beginning to move out of his firing position and shift to an alternative.

The speed of that move saved him. Despite the flash suppressor built into his rifle, there had been enough of a firing signature to tell the Argentine commandos where the shots had come from. Their return fire sent bullets all around his just-vacated position. The heavy 7.65mm bullets whined off the frozen ground or splattered against the rocks. The full-power 7.65x54mm had a lot more striking energy than the intermediate power 7x43mm used by the British rifle. It was enough to send rock fragments skittering around the impact area. One of those fragments sliced across Stroud’s cheek, leaving a long but shallow cut. He ignored it, knowing that soon he would have much more serious things to worry about.

Swimmer-Commando Team, Penguin River, South Georgia

The short burst had felled the overwatch sniper without warning. Lieutenant Marcos Rafa cursed as he saw the man’s body tumble from the rocks and sprawl on the frozen ground below. He had been relying on the sniper to pick off any British troops the Swimmer-Commando unit would run into while they closed on the observation point the British had positioned somewhere up here. Instead, the enemy had scored first blood and taken the man out. Rafa decided that he would make sure any prisoners his unit took paid for that. The thought was drowned out by the hammering of rifle and machine gun fire. It was one thing the Swimmer-Commando units had learned during their long fight against the guerillas who plagued the Argentine countryside. Ambushes had to be dominated by an immediate mass return of fire. It would pin the ambushers down and allow them to be isolated and picked off.

One regret Rafa did have was that his unit didn’t have any heavy weapons with it. A small detachment, they had left their 60mm mortars back with the main body of the unit in Grytviken. Those mortars would have been invaluable against the opposition they now faced. Still, even if they had wanted to bring them, the rough ground between their base and this position had precluded the option. This would have to be done the old way.

“How many are there, Sergeant?”

“Ten, perhaps fifteen?” Mateo Marcelo sounded confident, but he really had no idea of what the unit was up against. He wasn’t that interested in finding out either. He was much more in favor of gathering intelligence when he and his men were the only armed people around and he’d seen how surgically accurate the gunfire that had taken down one of his men had been. He didn’t really want to chance that.

Rafa had a shrewd idea that his Sergeant was more interested in saving his skin than carrying out the mission assigned to this patrol. That was an issue he would address later. At the moment, he had a more pressing concern. That was driving in the defenses of this observation post. First job would be to expand the front sideways and try to envelop the defenses ahead of them. “Marcelo, take three men and move off to the left. Find the edge of the British position and move around it.”
And try, for once at least, to act like a soldier.
“Everybody else, lay down grazing fire against the rocks up ahead. Pin the British down.”

SBS Unit, Penguin River, South Georgia

Sergeant “Dusty” Miller had an interesting problem on his mind.
Would the Argies move left or right?
After Stroud had taken down one of their men, they’d try and pull a flanker. He was sure of that. The question was, which flank? Right would take them to the camp more quickly; left would take them through easier terrain. Only, they weren’t sure that the camp was there, or if it was, exactly where it was located. Also, these were swimmer-commandos, not infantrymen. They weren’t used to fighting a killing match in bad ground.
They are more used to raids on hide-outs and that,
Miller guessed, is
what they think they are doing here.
He paused for a second, weighed up the balance and made his decision.
Left. They’ll extend to their left. Straight into my loving arms.

His thought train was interrupted by a blast of gunfire from the Argentine positions. The sounds told him a lot. He could count two light machine guns and at least six rifles. That meant, what, ten men holding the baseline to the front. Plus their officer and the man Stroud had killed. So, four men or six pulling the flanker. Either way, it wasn’t good. Miller was the only man positioned to block them. That underlined a simple fact. There just weren’t enough SBS men to defend this position properly.

Movement in the rocks caught his eye and he looked carefully through the optical sight on his rifle. Four men. The magnification of the eyepiece showed him one of them shouting at the others. Fair enough. He took a deep breath, steadied himself and fired a short burst at the shouting man. Miller saw him start to go down but he was already rolling away from his firing position and moving to an alternate. Ironically, that one would put him in a slightly better position. He heard bullets hit the rocks around his old post, then he was nicely set up in the new niche. In front of him, the man who had been shouting was down right enough, but he was trying to drag to the cover of some rocks. Miller guessed the burst had hit him in the legs. Shooting slightly downhill was always complicated and he’d probably over-compensated. The three other men were hidden in the rocks, firing wildly at the area he’d been in a few moments before. One of them was only partly in cover; his head and chest were shielded by the rocks. What he didn’t realize was that Miller’s change in position had left his lower back exposed.

Miller took careful aim and fired another short burst. He wouldn’t be able to kill his target from this angle, but the shots would shatter the man’s spine and leave him pinned down. Better still, with two wounded men on their hands, the ability of the Argies to move and fire against him would be seriously reduced. So far, so good. Curled up in the rock field, he patted his rifle and started to shift to a third position. There was one thing troubling him. Every time he and his men moved, they were falling back on the base camp and that was not the way the battle had to develop.

Across the Rockfield that led to the sea beyond the Penguin River, Private Keith “Jocko” Gillespie had worked his way into a comfortable firing position. From his vantage point he could take the likely lines of approach under what the manuals called ‘a brisk enfilading fire.’ To do so, he had the light machine gun version of the L1A2 rifle. The L3A2 had a longer, heavier barrel, a bipod and a much more powerful optical sight than the L1. It still had the 20-round magazine though. Many older soldiers still preferred the Bren Gun with its larger, top-mounted magazine. Some Army units actually had them but the SBS hadn’t had time to ‘acquire’ any. In any case, Gillespie wasn’t one of those who hankered after the weapons of the past. He liked his L3 and appreciated its virtues.