The Falklands Intercept (5 page)

‘Well, the Veuve Clicquot all those years ago helped. Yes, sometimes. Like you, it's mainly in the night. The screaming is what comes back but not so often now. Sometimes during the day it's the smell of paint. Do you remember all those ships smelled of paint? And blood and burning flesh. Sometimes I can even smell my hands burning all over again. But that's life. The only really difficult thing is confined spaces. I hate those small lifts more than anything else. They tell me therapy would help.'

Jones laughed. ‘Therapy my arse. I can't get into lifts. It's life. What was it the boys used to say when things went wrong or got tough? Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv.'

Jacot laughed too. ‘Yes it was the Welsh version of “C'est la vie”. A useful phrase. On really bad days some of them would say “Tel Af…ingviv.” Always good for morale that one.'

Jacot had one further question he should put to Jones. ‘Had you met Verney before?'

‘No I don't think so. It was getting dark. It is getting dark rather. I like that view of the Bridge of Sorrows just as it's getting dark. There is something about the water surging under the bridge all day every day that cheers me up.' He turned full towards Jacot his massive frame almost blocking out the setting sun. The glory and calm of a sharp January evening in Cambridge reasserted themselves. The raw sorrows and
resentments
of long ago were gone. ‘You are right. It's funny, over the years I had got over it. I am not nursing a grudge from thirty years ago. Mam may never have got over Bryn's death but to be honest I had forgotten him, except for every now and then. Life is for the living as they say. I had better go. The dons will be gathering in the Combination Room soon.' Jones smiled. ‘Thanks for the champagne. Let me know if there is anything you need. I'll bring it up myself or if I'm busy send one of my team.' His body was no longer shaking.

‘Hang on 74, what's that noise? It's as if I can hear voices in the room. Must be the champagne.'

‘Oh that. What staircase are we on now?' Jones listened. He could hear what sounded like the dispatcher of a taxi firm talking to one of his taxis. He smiled. ‘I think that's the baby alarm in the room above you on the staircase. Occasionally, very occasionally the radio frequencies of local taxi firms interfere with it. Sometimes it's stuff on other
electronic
equipment like films streaming onto a computer – something to do with the atmospheric conditions. It's probably coming from Hildegard Von Schoenberg's rooms, a German PhD student from Tubingen. Theology if I remember. Just here for the year. Her husband stayed behind in Germany and she brought her boy with her. Nearly one I think the little chap is and never makes much noise so you won't be disturbed. He's got a wonderful German name, Odo. Some evenings she goes to the library on the other side of the court and takes the other bit of the baby alarm with her.'

‘I must make sure I say hallo to Hildegard and Odo', said Jacot.

They touched shoulders again and Jones was gone. Jacot went to the window and looked out at the Bridge of Sorrows. There was indeed something solid and comforting about the bridge and the water flowing beneath it. It was sad about Bryn. He had been one of a small group of guardsmen who had been trapped behind a steel door that had warped in the heat. The door itself had saved them from the effects of the blast, in
particular
the searing flash burns caused by the initial detonation of military high
explosives
. They must have felt lucky for a few seconds, but the extreme heat jammed the steel door into its hinges. There was no other way out… Jones looked cheery enough, sounded cheery enough, but Jacot very much doubted if he had forgotten his much loved younger brother in the way he suggested. His eyes gave it away as he talked about
him – a kind of blankness and puzzlement that could only be a sign of fresh ongoing grief. And something he said about Verney could not be quite right…

Dinner at the St James' High Table was a supremely civilised experience, even in the aftermath of a sudden and unexplained death. A string quartet played light-hearted baroque music in the body of the hall. Jones made sure Jacot's glass was re-filled
frequently
with wine from the College's cellar of the type that Jacot could not usually afford. It was a relaxed and contented Colonel Jacot who returned to his rooms just after midnight. He had almost forgotten why he had been despatched to Cambridge. Round and round in his head went thoughts not of murder, but of a delightful dance tune that the student quartet had finished with. Maddeningly, he could not identify it although he was sure he had heard it before. Jones had left a half bottle of the college's addictive Calvados on top of the fireplace and Jacot thought he would finish off the evening with a large slug.

Opening the window he breathed in the cold January air. It was good to see Jones again. They had been close thirty years before. Jacot enjoyed being a platoon
commander
and Jones had been an excellent platoon sergeant. They had got on famously, mainly Jacot suspected, because he let Jones more or less run the platoon – which he did well. He hadn't thought much about the Falklands for a while, suppressing frightening and unpleasant memories. But the memories came back to him strongly as he gazed at the floodlit Bridge of Sorrows. It wasn't a nightmare like the ones he and others had experienced in hospital or like the ones that very occasionally revisited him with a vengeance in the night. It wasn't a daytime flashback that came unwished for and
inconveniently
– set off mainly these days by smells. It was a stream of memory of a
particular
episode in his life when he was young – grim but not all bad as his conversation with Jones earlier had reminded him. He sipped his Calvados. It was time to relax and remember thirty years on.

…They were right. Barbecuing pork. Human flesh cooking smells like barbecuing pork. The missionaries in the South Seas were right. Except it wasn't human flesh in a history book – it was his own flesh in the here and now. His hands were cooking. And like pork they were dripping warm fat. Jesus Christ, he was on fire. Flames and thick smoke were everywhere. For a second, only Jacot's sense of smell worked – nothing else. And all he could smell was his own flesh cooking. Then suddenly he could hear. The sound had come back on. And all he could hear was screaming. Desperate, animal screams from men in his regiment close by. Ten parts pain as exposed skin shrivelled and burnt. Ninety parts despair – they knew they were going to die. 

Minutes earlier Second Lieutenant Daniel Jacot of the Celtic Guards had been sitting on his backpack smoking yet another cigarette. Tense and angry at the repeated delays, he wanted to get out of the tank deck and off the ship taking his soldiers with him. ‘On the bus, off the bus' as the guardsmen repeated mantra-like, all the time rolling their eyes with a combination of irritation and mute acceptance. Clausewitz, the great philosopher of war, called it ‘friction' – how the simplest things in war become
immeasurably
hard because of both enemy action and the complexity of circumstances. That was why orders had to be obeyed unquestioningly and immediately. Any relaxation of rigid discipline, any chink in the system and chaos burst through. Yeah, right. But there was one problem, a really big problem that Clausewitz never really addressed. What if the people in charge were just useless?

Now at last they were about to ‘get off the bus' the loading ramp at the back of the ship was jammed tightly shut. There was nothing in Clausewitz about “Murphy's Law”. The more senior officers were starting to shout and swear, never a good sign. Stuff it, he would go up onto the open decks and see what was happening for himself. It had been light for some hours. Lifting the heavy bergan onto his back he started to climb the steep steel stairs.

‘I am just going up to check what is going on', he said to his platoon sergeant – a grizzled and ironic veteran of Aden and more tours of Northern Ireland than he cared to count.

‘Very good, sir. Shall I bring the men up on deck now? They could do with a breath of fresh air and we must be about to get off.' Sergeant Jones grinned hopefully.

‘No better stay down here for a few minutes otherwise there might be a scene, I think, with our superiors.'

The strange alchemy that allowed experienced Welsh soldiers to be led by
wet-behind
-the-ears English public schoolboys certainly worked between Jacot and Jones. Jacot's job was to read the map and represent the interests of his men up the chain of command. Whatever the system, and whoever was in charge, Jacot did not like the idea of his men sitting around on a lightly armed, unescorted ship.

He reached the top of the companionway and squeezed himself through the door onto the deck. There did not seem to be much going on. Leaning over the side he grabbed a big breath of fresh sea air. A large motorised float was taking on board ammunition and supplies. Better get back to his men before he got into trouble.

Come to think of it he did not even know the name of the ship. They had been on so many in the last few days. Most still had names that would have been familiar to Nelson's captains. But they had got on this one in a hurry, in the middle of a windy and rough night, and he hadn't quite caught the name. No one in his platoon had heard it either and he was too embarrassed to ask in case he got shouted at. Turning to go back to his men he saw a large diamond shaped shield in gold. It was beautiful and glistened in the sunlight. At its centre was a portrait, just the face, with a Latin motto underneath,
nothing else. A tough looking man in his early forties maybe, not handsome but certainly not hideous. The motto read
Pax Quaeritur Bello
– Peace is sought through war. Rather appropriate thought Jacot. Beneath it the name of the ship in gold lettering – Royal Fleet Auxiliary
Oliver Cromwell
. It was an odd name for a fleet auxiliary, ships mainly involved in supply and transportation rather than fighting.
Oliver Cromwell
would be a better name for a warship but it was hardly one the admiralty would choose. It was odd, thought Jacot, that there was a ship at all in the service of the crown that commemorated this great man. It was odd too that here he was in the middle of a war when just a couple of years before he had been a schoolboy.

He looked at the face again. There was something about the heraldic design that was unsettling. It wasn't derived from the famous “warts and all” portrait so the face itself was pleasing enough, but the way the thing had been painted brought to mind the dead Cromwell more than the living – the head looked as though it had been recently severed from the body. As indeed it had been after the Restoration, when Cromwell's body was disinterred and his head stuck on a spike above Westminster Hall. The head, if Jacot remembered rightly from his recent school history lessons, had fallen down in a storm a few years later eventually ending up, after many adventures, being buried at Cromwell's old Cambridge college sometime in the 1960s. Jacot shuddered. Suddenly he felt vulnerable and far from home.

He was sore in need of another cigarette already, and cheering up by Sergeant Jones whose pithy, apposite and obscene commentary on unfolding military events was invariably a refreshing tonic.

It was Jones' voice that somehow reached him in the midst of the smoke and the flames. ‘This way. This way lads. I am in the doorway. On me lads. Follow my voice.' He must have been shouting with all his might but the tone was even – it was a command not an outburst of panic. It was this voice faintly heard through the smoke that brought Jacot back from the brink of hysteria. He had assumed that staying calm in a crisis would come naturally, that he was born to lead. But he had not reckoned with being trapped on a burning ship – indeed he was burning himself. But then the voice was lost in the noise.

Jacot had to get up and get out. Thick black smoke meant he could see little. He could hear men screaming. Presumably they were cooking too. He tried to push himself up from the deck but something heavy and shaking was on top of him.

It was leaking blood and shouting, ‘My legs. My f…..g legs. Help me. Help me. For God's sake help me.'

Jacot pushed hard and the body rolled off him – shrieking face down on the steel deck. Every instinct, every message from the brain was telling him to get out. Get out. Get out. Get some air. Get off the ship before it blows sky high. But he could not go – not just yet. He turned the body over and reached for a morphine syrette hanging round his neck. If he could get the casualty to be still there would be a chance of carrying him
to safety. The body writhed and shuddered. Jacot tried to find a place to inject but as he pulled up the arm of the casualty's combat jacket a mixture of burned material and cooked skin started to come away in his hands. There hardly seemed to be man there at all just a bundle of smoking rags and wildly staring eyes with no lids. The young man was saying the word ‘Mam' over and over again. Jacot did not recognise the voice – and there was no face left and no eyelids. Just eyes staring with fear and puzzlement. And blood pumped from the shredded bottoms of combat trousers where the legs had been. Jacot found a patch of unburnt skin just below the neck and injected the morphine. The young guardsman shook and the burned head fell forward. Jacot at the top of his lungs shouted ‘Don't worry I'll get you out'. But it was too late. Jacot held the young man's shoulders and began to recite the Lord's Prayer. ‘Ein Tad yn y nefoedd, Our Father in Heaven.' A final shudder and the young guardsman was gone. He had taken the full force of the blast. Jacot pulled off the identity discs – chunks of neck-flesh came away too. Mortar ammunition, British ammunition – over a thousand rounds of it stacked at the other end of the tank deck was ‘cooking off' – exploding because of the heat. Jacot could hear the angry whizzing and whining of shrapnel doing its deadly work in a confined space – pinging and hissing as it hit the steel superstructure. Time for the rest of the Lord's Prayer later. He had to get out – fast.

His hands smarted. The skin on his hands had begun to peel off. The pain was starting. Not just his hands but his face and chest. His legs damp with blood did not feel so bad.

It all seemed so strange. One minute clear blue South Atlantic sky and the ship at anchor in a calm bay. The only sounds the breeze, the thuds, creaking and sometimes muttered cursing of over-laden soldiers climbing down rope ladders into landing craft. The occasional clang as a rifle hit the side. Invariably followed by the gruff admonishment of a non-commissioned officer. And then Jacot's radio operator had shouted, ‘It's Red. It's Red. Air Raid Warning Red, sir.'

It was a bit late. They appeared to have escalated from Air Raid extremely unlikely, or whatever the precise definition was, to Air Raid Warning Red meaning an air raid was imminent or under way, without any of the intermediate levels. Such was life. But there were no planes thank God. Maybe it was just a false alarm.

Still definitely time to get off the
Oliver Cromwell
. Jacot's heartbeat began to return to normal. And then it came. The radio operator screamed ‘Handbrake, Handbrake, Handbrake' – the single word most feared by the Task Force. It was the warning for an Exocet attack. Jesus no, thought Jacot. Then the massive concussion from the blasts threw him off his feet.

Jacot could not concentrate. His mind was wandering and the pain second by second was becoming unbearable. Above all he wanted to get out. Get into the open air. Live. But he could not think. He was tired. Maybe he was dying. Was this what it was like? An arm grabbed him from nowhere and dragged him through a door pushing him upstairs.
‘Keep going sir. We're nearly there.' It was his platoon sergeant. Where was the rest of the platoon? One final push and suddenly they were on the deck. Jacot collapsed. He wanted to cry.

‘Don't worry I've got you now sir.' Sergeant Jones turned Jacot over and injected morphine into his thigh. And the pain began to go away.

A Chinese crew member walked vacantly by – stunned by what had just happened to his ship.

‘Kung Hee Fat Choi'
, Jacot called out. It was the only Cantonese he knew, picked up while living in Hong Kong as a teenager with his parents. Happy New Year. They grinned at each other.

The sounds from the ship began to change. The dying were dead. Their screaming – the sounds of men trapped and burning to death – animal cries of claustrophobic anguish and agony – had stopped. And the wounded were calmer or sedated – many of the burnt faces bearing a single or double M in military crayon on the forehead to show that they had been given morphine. In the background the noisy hum of helicopters as the wounded were evacuated, the rotors biting into the air as the Sea King helicopters hovered over the deck. It was too dangerous to land. At the back of the boat a chopper hovered low over an inflated orange life raft using its powerful downdraft to push the raft and its occupants away from the burning ship. Nearby the shouted instructions of officers and non-commissioned officers and the grunting as men were lifted onto stretchers were oddly re-assuring. The panic and shambles of a few minutes ago was slowly being transformed bit by bit and thanks to deeply ingrained discipline into a military operation. And some protection was at hand. Jacot could hear the thud thud of the British half-inch machine guns in the bay as they put up a curtain of tracer to deter further attacks. They were firing ‘four bit' – every fourth round was tracer leaving a burning trail in the sky. It allowed the firer to see his fall of shot and deterred enemy pilots. But the Rapier anti-aircraft missiles which really could make a difference moved crazily around in their stands – pointing first at the sky and then straight at the ground – their radars could sense enemy aircraft but their gyroscopes, still not bedded in properly after a month at sea, were confused as to which direction was up and which down. It was too late anyway. The Mirage Super-Etendard bombers would have launched their missiles from many miles away.