for the hills overlooking Port Howard on West Falkland, and none too pleased about it. ‘But all the fucking Argies are on East Falkland, boss,’ Trooper Kenny Laurel had observed, with all the mildness of an articulated lorry.
‘No, Hedge, they’re not,’ Brookes had explained, ‘just most of them. And that’s only as far as we know. The point of this exercise is to determine exactly where they are, every last one of them.’
‘And where they’re not,’ Trooper Davey Matthews had observed.
‘Thank you, Stanley. Besides which, someone had to draw the short straw, and it was us, OK?’
‘Yes, boss.’
Admittedly, Brookes thought as he clambered aboard the Wessex, the straw no longer seemed quite so short. There might not be many Argies on West Falkland, but there was likely to be more than four of them. This was hardly a picnic they were embarking on. At the best it would probably consist of lying in a damp hole for days on end, bored out of their minds. He tried to remember who had said that a soldier’s life was ninety-nine per cent boredom, one per cent pure terror. Was it Wellington? No, it was somebody else, but he could not remember who.
As they sat there waiting for the Wessex crew to appear – ‘Fucking Navy were even late for the Armada,’ someone observed – Brookes foolishly asked his seven co-travellers if any of them could remember.
‘Genghis Khan?’ a member of the other patrol offered.
‘Nah, he said it was ninety-nine per cent terror,’ someone corrected him.
‘Bruce Forsyth,’ Hedge suggested. ‘What do you think, Mozza?’
Trooper David Moseley emerged from his reverie with a start. ‘What?’ he said.
‘His mind’s on other things,’ Stanley said.
The little woman back home, I expect, Hedge thought. ‘It drains your strength, Mozza, even thinking about them.’
‘I was thinking about where we’re going,’ Mozza said, wondering guiltily whether not thinking about Lynsey at such a moment was something of a betrayal.
‘We’re all going to sunny West Falkland,’ Hedge told him, ‘where the beaches stretch golden into the distance and the hills are alive with the sound of sheep farting. We’re all going on a summer holiday,’ he sung, with a gusto Cliff Richard would have killed for.
So would their pilot, who had just arrived with the other two members of the crew. ‘If you don’t stop that horrible row Falkland Sound will be alive with your cries for help,’ he said trenchantly.
‘If you dropped him into Falkland Sound,’ one of the other patrol noted, examining Hedge’s undoubted bulk, ‘it would probably drain it.’
‘Then there’d only be one island to argue about,’ someone else realized.
Major Brookes listened to the banter with half his mind, knowing it for what it was, a giddy chorus of nerves and apprehension. He still could not remember the author of his quote, and as he checked through his memory, another, less amenable one came to mind. He had first heard it from the lips of a dying IRA terrorist the previous year. Lying there, blood flowing freely from a neck wound into sodden leaves in an Armagh lane, the man had looked at him, smiled and recited: ‘this is war, boys flung into a breach, like shovelled earth, and…’
He had died then, and it had taken Brookes many months to find the rest of the verse, and its source. Finally, the wife of an old friend had recognized it as a poem by the American Amy Lowell. He had looked it up and found the rest: ‘and old men, broken, driving rapidly before crowds of people, in a glitter of silly decorations, behind the boys and the old men, life weeps and shreds her garments, to the blowing winds’.
These are the boys, Brookes thought, looking round at them: Mozza with his fresh-faced innocence, ginger-haired Stanley with his sleazy grin, the overwhelming Hedge.
At that moment the lights went out, the rotor blades reached a pitch which made conversation impossible, and the Wessex lifted up from the aircraft carrier’s deck and started moving south-westwards, low across the South Atlantic swell.
Cecil Matheson poured himself a modest finger of malt whisky, took an appreciative sip and carried it across to the window. Through a gap between darkened buildings he could see light reflected on the Thames. In the street below he could see theatre and cinema-goers threading their way through the Saturday evening jam of taxis.
The buzzer sounded on his phone, and he took three quick strides across the room to his desk.
‘Mr Lubanski is on the line,’ his secretary told him.
‘Mr Lubanski,’ Matheson said jovially, wondering, not for the first time, why the American State Department seemed to employ more Poles than the Polish Foreign Ministry. He had met this particular one on his last official visit to Washington, and been more impressed than enamoured of him. The fact that Lubanski was known to privately support a neutral American position vis-à-vis the current dispute only made the coming conversation more fraught with difficulty.
The lack of liking seemed to be mutual. ‘Cecil,’ Lubanski replied, with more familiarity but rather less enthusiasm. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘I’m sorry to take up your time at the weekend,’ Matheson said with as much sincerity as he could muster at short notice. ‘It’s just a matter-of-clarification.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘The President’s speech on Friday…’
‘The “ice cold bunch of land down there” speech?’ Lubanski asked, a twist of malicious humour in his voice.
That was how Ronald Reagan had described the Falklands, and Matheson winced at the memory. ‘Yes, that one,’ he confirmed. ‘Of course, we don’t share the President’s opinion in that respect, but we are…’ He wanted to say ‘glad that the US Government has at last realized its responsibilities to a NATO ally’, but that would hardly be diplomatic.
‘Pleased that we’ve finally fallen off the fence on your side?’ Lubanski offered.
‘That’s certainly one way of putting it,’ Matheson agreed, ‘though I’d prefer to think you’d stepped down. In any case,’ he continued hurriedly, ‘we’re obviously gratified by the sanctions announced by your Government, and by the President’s promise of matériel aid. As regards the latter…’
‘You’d like to know what’s on offer.’
‘Of course, but I’m sure that question can be handled through the normal channels. I have something more specific in mind.’
‘Which is?’ For the first time, Lubanski sounded vaguely interested.
Time to bite the bullet, Matheson told himself. ‘AWACS,’ he said. ‘Airborne warning and control systems.’
‘I know what AWACS are,’ Lubanski said drily. ‘And without putting too fine a point on it, I think I can safely say the answer will be sorry, but no.’
Like hell he was sorry, Matheson thought. ‘Her Majesty’s Government would like to formally request the loan of just two AWACS,’
