come from Ushuaia, which is a long way from Rio Gallegos. I might be recognized by someone – who knows? – but not by anyone who would question my presence in the area. I could say I was looking up an old college friend…’
‘Who is not there?’
‘I did not know she had moved, perhaps?’
‘Perhaps. Since you know the country and the people I will leave it to you, but I will give you one other suggestion: you are researching a travel book, perhaps in association with an American equivalent of that agency you work for, checking out hotels, local transport, things to see. It’s a good excuse for moving around.’
‘Perhaps.’ She admitted to herself that it sounded a good idea. ‘And what is my real motive for being there? The airbase, I suppose. You want to know which planes, what armaments, the pilots’ morale.’ She paused. ‘And you’d probably like to know each time they take off. Am I going to have to carry a radio set into Argentina?’
‘I doubt it,’ Bartley said, obviously taken by surprise. ‘How did you work all that out?’ he asked.
‘By reading the Observer. The British fleet was created to operate in the eastern Atlantic, within the defensive cover provided by shore-based aircraft, and the one thing that scares the Admirals is their vulnerability to air attack without such cover.’ She looked at him. ‘Is this the secret you were afraid I’d tell the Junta?’
Bartley at least had the good grace to blush. ‘We think the Super Etendards may be based at Rio Gallegos,’ he added, ‘and doubtless the Observer pointed out how concerned we are about the Exocets they carry.’
‘It did. But if advance warning is what you need, surely it has to be by radio?’
‘Perhaps. We have several weeks to worry about that, and if it becomes absolutely necessary then one can be brought across the border from Chile when the time comes. First, we need to get you bedded in.’
For the next few days she was given an in-depth briefing on military matters, at the end of which she could not only recognize a Super Etendard by its silhouette but also identify a wide range of military equipment which might conceivably be en route to the Malvinas from the Rio Gallegos airbase.
In the meantime her journey to Santiago – via New York and Los Angeles on three separate airlines – had been booked, her share of the rent on her flat paid six months in advance, and four fellow exiles had been given reason to wonder at the sudden beneficence of the Home Office in allowing them permanent residence status. Rowan and her other friends had been told that she had been given a three-month commission to update tourist information in Peru and Bolivia. They were all suitably jealous.
Michael was also angry. Why had she not consulted him? Did she think she could behave in a relationship as if she was a single person? Did she care about him at all?
The answer to the last was: not enough. She liked him, enjoyed talking with him, found sex with him occasionally pleasurable but mostly just harmless fun. It was not his fault, and she would have felt sorrier for him if she believed he really loved her, but as it was…The last night before her departure, as she watched her nipple harden in response to his brushing finger and kiss, the bizarre thought struck her that she was like a ship which had been struck below the waterline, and that her captain had ordered the sealing of all the internal bulkheads, the total compartmentalization of the vessel. The rooms were all still there but she could no longer move from one to another. There were no connections. In the torture chambers of the Naval Mechanical School she had lost the pattern of her being, which was probably just a fancy description of the soul.
Her plane landed in Santiago de Chile at five in the morning on 19 April. According to the newspapers, the Junta’s response to US Secretary of State Haig’s peace plan was being conveyed to London, but no one seemed too sanguine about the prospects. According to her own calculations, the British Task Force would be just over halfway to the Malvinas by this time. There was still between ten days and a fortnight before it came within range of the Argentinian Air Force.
The men in London had given her a new identity, albeit one very close to her own. She was now Isabel Rodriguez, a thirty-one-year-old Argentinian who had lived for several years in the United States, and who had never involved herself in the politics of her homeland. Later that evening, in her room at the Hotel San Miguel, she received the expected visitor from the British Embassy, a sallow, dark-haired man with wire-rimmed spectacles who looked distinctly un-English.
He introduced himself as Andrew Lawson. ‘I am British,’ he said apologetically, as if in the past doubts had been raised. ‘I just look like a South American. Probably because my mother was Spanish. I have brought you the money’ – he laid two piles of notes, one smaller Chilean, one larger Argentinian, on the bed – ‘and the car is in the underground car park. A black Renault 5, AY1253S, in space B14. Have you got that?’
She nodded.
‘I shall also be your contact in the south,’ Lawson went on, taking a map from his pocket and unfolding it on the bed. ‘See, this is Argentina…’
‘I know. I was born there,’ she said acidly. Maybe the Junta would win the war, after all.
‘Ah, I’m sorry, of course. You know the south well?’
‘I grew up in Ushuaia.’
‘Ah, right. Do you know this road here, between Rio Gallegos and Punta Arenas?’
‘I have travelled it many times, by car, by bus.’
‘Good. What we need is a dead-letter drop – you understand? Somewhere where we can leave each other messages for collection. It should be on the Argentinian side, because the fewer times you have to cross the border the better. A stretch of empty road, a bridge over a stream, something like that.’
‘It would be harder to find a stretch of road that isn’t empty,’ she said drily. ‘Why must I cross the border at all?’
‘A good question. And the simple answer is, I can’t think of a safer way for you to let me know the location you’ve chosen. If you can…’
She thought about it. ‘You can’t come to me?’
‘I could risk it, but let’s face it, I’d have trouble passing as a local at the border. I may look like a Latin American, but my Spanish isn’t good enough…’ He shrugged.
‘A go-between,’ she suggested.
‘The fewer people know who you are the better.’
That made sense. ‘OK, so I come into Chile…’
‘To Punta Arenas. Your cover is a tourist guide, right? So you have to check out the local museums. There are three in Punta Arenas: the Regional Magellanes, the Patagonian Institute and the Salesian College. I’ll be at the Salesian each Thursday morning from the 29th on.’
She looked at him. The whole business suddenly seemed completely insane. ‘Right,’ she said.
The road across the Andes was full of wonder and memories. Isabel had last driven it with Francisco in the early spring of 1973, when they had visited Chilean friends in Santiago, both of whom had perished a month or so later in the military coup. Then as now the towering peak of Aconcagua had shone like a beacon, sunlit snow against
