Lion Resurgent (51 page)

“A smooth highway, Sir? Here?” Again a ripple of laughter at the disbelief in Jones’s voice spread around the briefing room.

“All right, a smooth dirt track with occasional swamps, streams and rocky outcrops. But it will be garrisoned by us and that makes it as good as a smooth highway. By the way, reinforce the warning to all your men. Nobody drink the water here, it’s got liver flukes in it.”

There was a murmur of agreement. Strachan waited for a moment and then continued, “Karl, with your permission, I would like the honor of accompanying your Marines on their assault.”

“The honor would be ours, Sir.”

“Thank you. Any other questions?”

There was a long pause as the officers studied the maps showing the battle plan. They’d all had their own parts of it for some days but this was the first time everything had been put together for them. “I’ll say one thing. The Septics couldn’t even begin to pull this off.” Hill’s voice was loaded with satisfaction.

“They wouldn’t even try. They’d just drop a damned great nuke on the place and call it quits.” Jones sounded slightly derisive. “The last time they tried an opposed landing, the Caffs wiped the floor with them.”

“It was not quite that bad.” Hartmann felt compelled to defend his brother Marines even if they were Septics. They held the beach and blocked the way to where the rescue was carried out. Those were their orders, yes?”

“One other thing.” Brigadier Strachan rapped sharply on his podium. “I have just received word from HMS
Glorious.
Her fires are out and the flooding has been contained. She is now retiring to South Georgia, escorted by
Glowworm
and
Greyhound,
where she will make further repairs before heading home. Her surviving aircraft have been transferred to HMS
Furious.”
He paused, bringing his voice under control before the next part. “I regret to have to inform you that the body of Captain Wales has been located and recovered from the wreckage of the island. It appears that the Prince of Wales died in the finest traditions of the Navy, remaining at his station and doing his duty. He will, of course, be buried at sea along with the other casualties from
Glorious. 
Gentlemen, his funeral will be taking place while you are carrying out your assaults. Let us make very sure that our conduct honors the sacrifice he has made.”

Darwin Road, Port Stanley, Falkland Islands

Major Patricio Dowling was a very angry man that morning. For night after night, he had been woken up by a series of telephone calls at unspeakably early hours of the morning. Each call had been routine reports that were nothing to do with him. He had asked one caller why would anybody think he was interested in the number of sacks of garbage removed from the cookhouse? The caller had simply hung up. After the fifth call in a two and a half hour period, he had realized the calls were not intended for him at all. They were routine calls that had somehow become misdirected in the telephone exchange. By the time he had finally got back to sleep, the sun had been rising and it was too late for any rest that night. He had spent the first few hours of the new day having the telephone switchboard checked thoroughly. The problem hadn’t been there. The telephone engineers had suggested that water seeping into the lines from the bogs had caused short-circuits.

It was not as if the work here was going the way he had planned. He had expected this to be a relatively simple job. The garrison would be eliminated, the islanders rounded up and either deported or otherwise disposed of. He’d had files on all the local leaders. They would have been the first to disappear. Nothing had gone the way he has expected. The British garrison had been brutally mauled, but the Argentine Marines had made sure their prisoners had been safely delivered to Uruguay and the care of neutral powers. The surviving Royal Marines had been waging a steady war of attrition; nothing elaborate but a man shot by a sniper here, a mine placed in a roadway there. And always, the litany of stupid accidents that seemed to accompany the Argentine Army wherever it went. Fuelling accidents, trucks running off the road and into the swamp or over sharp drops. The list seemed endless. Minor, avoidable accidents all of them but each bringing its toll of dead and wounded.

Dowling had begun to think the Argentine Army on the Malvinas was cursed. There had been so many accidents. The number was so far above the norm for any reasonable kind of operation. As any good intelligence officer would do, Dowling had started to look at those accidents with growing suspicion. When losses from sheer stupidity reached those levels, they stopped being accidents and started to become sabotage. Dowling was becoming increasingly convinced that the Army was infiltrated by traitors. If he couldn’t bring them in for judgment, he was uneasily aware that he might be considered in league with them.

That thought made Dowling hit the accelerator hard as he came over the hill top and start the long descent down. He was on his way to the airbase at Stanley. There had been another accident. One of four Argentine Navy Crusaders making an emergency landing had been shot down by the air defenses. That was another uneasy thought. Dowling had heard there was a great naval battle going on offshore, but he had no idea how the battle was going. The Argentine communications network was being remarkably quiet about it, but the fact that four orphaned Navy aircraft had tried to make it back to Stanley did not bode well for the battle.

Half way down the slope, Dowling realized he was going too fast to make the turn at the bottom safely. One more annoyance to add to a day that was already one he would rather forget. He stabbed at the brake pedal with his foot but the mushy response told him there was something seriously wrong. The Landrover showed no sign of slowing down. Thoroughly frightened, Dowling yanked on the handbrake but that simply caused the vehicle to swing out of control. Dowling twisted the steering wheel with one hand, trying to stay on the road, while with the other he knocked the gear lever into neutral. By then it was too late, and he saw the white concrete cylinders that marked the end of the bridge railings looming in front of him.

A few minutes later, Dowling found himself returning to semi-consciousness. That was when he felt one hand take a firm grip on his neck while another grabbed his chin. He knew what was coming next. It was no surprise when he felt the rapid jerk and his body went numb as the bones in his neck separated. He remained alive just long enough to feel himself being dragged somewhere.

Blackburn Buccaneer S4H XT-279, Approaching Argentine Airbase, North East of Stanley

XT-279 was coming in light. The Highball equipment in her belly prevented her from carrying normal bombs in there so she was restricted to the four Martel anti-radar missiles carried under her wings. The six surviving Highball aircraft had been joined by the three remaining dedicated anti-radar aircraft. Together their barrage of missile devastated the anti-aircraft fire control radars and the airfield search systems. The nine aircraft turned away long before the guns ringing the airfield could engage them.

Mullback knew this mission was a milk-run. The Highball aircraft and the anti-radar birds were now too precious to waste on pounding airfields. That had been left to the eight bomb-carriers. They made their low-level runs over the airstrip. Each deposited eight thousand pound retarded bombs over the parking area and taxiways. Mullback saw the sky stained by the flak bursts from the 47mm guns and the eruption of primary and secondary explosions from the airfield area. There were also two columns of smoke rising away from the airfield, columns that Mullback recognized as graves of crashed Buccaneers. By the time the bombers had formed up again for the flight back to
Furious,
Mullback had done the maths. He came to the grim conclusion it was only a matter of time before the British fleet ran out of aircraft.

Control Room, HM Submarine “Saint Vincent”

“We’ve got another contact, Captain. Multiple screws, moving fast. Estimated speed 27 knots.”

“Up scope.” Captain Wiseart waited until the periscope tube was passing him on its way up, then grabbed the controls on either side and did a quick scan. “Down scope.”

The exposure had been less than 15 seconds, a tribute to much training and long practice. Wiseart was grinning broadly when he turned to his control room crew. “Welcome to my parlor said the spider to the fly. Five ships out there; a cruiser and at least four destroyers. The cruiser is one of those weird Argentine assault cruisers; the ones with eight inch guns forward and quarters for a marine landing force aft. She’s coming straight for us. Sonar, target data?”

“Course is one-oh-three, Sir; estimated speed still 27 knots. Range is 12,000 yards and closing quickly.”

“Prepare tubes one to four with Mark 2s. We’ll take the cruiser with tubes one to three, the nearest destroyer with tube four. Then we’ll make a quiet and dignified departure. Or, alternatively, run like hell depending on which seems most appropriate.”

“Course and speed constant, Sir.”

“Fire control solution?”

“Set and ready to go.”

“Fire all tubes. Then turn onto a reciprocal bearing and get us out of here.”

Saint Vincent
lurched as the heavy torpedoes fired in sequence from her bow tubes. The ticking of the clock seemed to slow down as the entire control room crew waited for the dull thunder of torpedoes striking home. Eventually, Wiseart had to admit at least one failure. “First torpedo missed.”

Anything else he might have said was interrupted by a long low rumble followed quickly by a second. Then, there was a long pause before a third explosion. The control room crew erupted into cheers.

“Up scope.” Wiseart repeated his scan. “We got her. Her bows are half-hanging off and her back is broken amidships. She’s burning like a torch. No way she is anything but a goner. We clobbered one of their old Gearings as well. She’s broken in two and is going down fast.”

“Go back for the other destroyers, Sir?”

Wiseart shook his head. “They’re closing in on the targets. Picking up survivors I think. We’ve neutered that group. Leave the rest to go home.”

Destroyer
Catamarca,
Standing by Argentine Assault Cruiser
La Argentina,
Falkland Islands

The blow had been swift, deadly and utterly destructive.
La Argentina
had been hit twice; once under the forward turrets, once just aft of her machinery spaces. The hit forward had blown her bows off. The whole bow assembly was twisted to one side and sinking fast. What had happened aft was far worse.
La Argentina
had been loaded with anti-aircraft missiles and guns in her hangar and on her flight deck, but she had been carrying drummed fuel in the living quarters for her Marines. The under-the-keel explosion of the Mark 2 torpedo vaporized that fuel and spread the explosive mixture through her hull. Then, that mixture had ignited and turned into a fuel-air explosion. The fireball raced through the ship, killing and burning everything in its path. The assault cruiser was an inferno. The survivors on board frantically jumped over the side to escape the ghastly alternatives of being burned alive by the fires or sucked down when the cruiser sank.

Captain Isaac Leonardi had already started to bring
Catamarca
in to assist the stricken ship when one of the other destroyers, the
Santissima Trinidad
was hit. The blast was dead amidships and the old destroyer was overwhelmed. She broke in half and was sinking so fast that few of her crew would escape. Leonardi had already seen the casualty figures from the carrier battle further north. More than fifteen hundred men had died on the
Veinticinco de Mayo.
The dead on board the three destroyers that had gone down added at least another five hundred to that total. Now, with
La Argentina
crammed with her own crew and the complements of the anti-aircraft systems she had on board, Leonardi guessed that more than a thousand more were in extreme danger.

And so, for the third time in barely more than a few weeks,
Catamarca
closed on a wrecked and burning ship and did what she could to succor the survivors. All the time, Leonardi was waiting for the slam under his feet that would tell him that another British torpedo had stuck home and that his own ship and crew were to be added to the horrifying butcher’s bill. But, the slam never came and he slowly relaxed. He guessed that the British captain was first of all a Seaman also and he would not fire on ships that were saving the lives of stricken mariners.

He looked down at his ship and saw the sights that had become all too familiar to him. Nets over the side of his ship; survivors being brought on board to be wrapped in blankets and rushed below. Even a few minutes exposure to the waters of the South Atlantic would be fatal. The Arctic Convoys had taught navies much about helping their crew survive in frigid waters but there was only so much they could do. A swift rescue was still the best way of saving survivors. He watched as men from his ship jumped into the water to pull the survivors too badly wounded or exhausted into safety. And so it was that
Catamarca
slowly filled with the survivors from the sinking cruiser.

By the time the wreckage of
La Argentina
had sunk, every spare space on
Catamarca
was filled. The missile destroyer
Entre Rios
had joined the rescue effort while the remaining Gearing class was picking up survivors from her sister.

“Our contribution to this war seems to be restricted to picking up survivors.” Lieutenant Brian Martin was also watching the rescue effort. He had to, his cabin was one of those that had been taken and filled with badly wounded men from the
La Argentina

“We started this remember, by sinking
Mermaid.”
Leonardi’s sadness was evidence in his voice. “Perhaps this is our penance for that act. We are to survive while the ships around us are sunk and be tasked with picking up those men from them whom God has in his mercy spared.”

He was interrupted by an officer from
La Argentina,
a young ensign whose hands had been burned and were bandaged as well as the desperately-overloaded medical team on
Catamarca
could manage. “Captain Leonardi, I wanted to thank you and your crew, on behalf of my men, for what you have done to rescue us. Truly
Catamarca
is a ship crewed by the angels of deliverance.”