Maybe he was just lucky, he thought. He had often thought it. Maybe most people would not have wanted to grow up in Hulme but he would not have changed places with anyone. He supposed his family was poor by British standards, but only when it came to things, and even then, well, they had always had a TV. He had three sisters and two brothers, which had felt a bit too much at times, but they all got on, and being a bit cramped in the flat was probably what had started off the family tradition of spending each Sunday out in the country. That and the fact that his dad’s job with British Rail got them a good discount on rail tickets.
And it had made him self-sufficient. It seemed strange maybe, but Mozza had thought a lot about this, about his ability to be alone in a crowd, to ‘make his own space’ as Lynsey put it, and he reckoned it was just something you had to learn as part of a big family in a small flat.
He thought about Lynsey. She was two years older than him, and had a kid already from her marriage to Jake. Mozza did not mind that at all: Hannah was a lovely kid and she seemed to like him. Jake had disappeared into thin air about two years ago, so it was hardly as if he was competing with anyone for the father role. And Lynsey…well, she was just perfect. She was kind, she was bright, she was gorgeous. And, after almost three months of intermittent courtship, she seemed to love him. He was a lucky man, all right.
The fourth man in the patrol was feeling rather less fortunate. Hedge – a nickname grounded in both his surname and the unruly tangle of wiry hair which graced his scalp – was suffering from periodic stomach cramps, and wondering what he had done to deserve them. Eaten navy food, probably. He hoped they were a passing phenomenon, so to speak, because in thirty hours or so they would all be sharing a small hide, and if he was still farting like this the others would probably insist on him giving himself up to the Argies.
He grinned in the dark and turned a full circle, peering into the gloom. There was nothing out there but wet grass and sheep, he thought. Life in the fast lane.
Maybe his stomach was feeling better. Maybe it was just nerves. Hedge had seen enough action in Northern Ireland not to feel like a combat virgin, but he supposed being behind enemy lines was a reasonable enough place to feel nervous no matter how often you visited. Crossmaglen was bad enough, although you knew help was in calling distance. But this felt like being out on a limb.
People said the Argies would be poor soldiers, but he had seen their football team play, and they took no fucking prisoners, so fuck only knew how their Army would behave. Hedge was not keen to find out, not just yet. A day or so of acclimatization, that was what he needed, and a digestive system more at peace with itself. Then they could start throwing the bastards his way.
As often at times like this, he thought about his father, killed in a steelworks accident when Hedge was only fourteen. Although he knew it was stupid, he always wished his father could see him in this sort of situation, all grown up, doing something necessary and doing it well. His father had been a Labour man through and through, but he had also been a real patriot, and Hedge knew he would have felt really proud of England these last few weeks. And of his son.
What his father would have felt about an army career, Hedge was less sure, though from what he could remember getting out of the house and away from his wife and two daughters had been one of his dad’s main aims in life. Joining the army had achieved a similar result for Hedge, and once he was in he had quickly found more positive reasons for staying a soldier. There had always been new challenges to drive him forward, right up to the ultimate goal of making it into the SAS. It had been a close-run thing on the Brecon Beacons – he had damn near given up – but the voice inside his head whispering ‘I’ll be so proud of you’ had somehow pulled him through.
They marched on through the night, making frequent short stops to check their position and a couple of long ones to evade what turned out to be imaginary enemy patrols. About two hours before dawn Brookes decided it was time to dig in for the day. They had covered over two-thirds of the distance required, but the final quarter would bring them close to known enemy positions and called for a much more cautious approach. There was certainly no chance of completing the journey that night.
As it was, they were almost too tired to dig out the lying-up positions for use through the coming day. Brookes chose the western slope of a gentle ridge for their camp, and each man had the duty of digging out a large enough ‘scrape’ for himself, and making a roof for it with wire and turf. The excavated earth, which would be clearly visible to Argentinian pilots, then had to be removed from sight. Fortunately, a shallow stream ran down beyond the next ridge, and the soil could simply be spread along its banks.
As the first hint of dawn began to appear in the eastern sky all four of them were entrenched under their own camouflage roof, too tired to worry about the damp seeping out through the earthen floor of the scrapes. Brookes’s last thought was ‘so far, so good’, while Hedge was thinking about the explosive properties of methane and Stanley was remembering his first time with Sharon.
Mozza was using the patrol’s telescope through a hole in his netting to watch the stars fade away in the east, and wondering how the hell he was going to stay awake for his two-hour watch.
Bryan Weighell, or ‘Wheelie’ as he had been known in younger days, briskly made his way through the various checkpoints separating the car park from his destination in the bowels of Whitehall. It was a sharp spring Sunday, sunny but far from warm, and he was still wondering what the hell he was needed for. It could not be anything to do with the teams inserted into East and West Falkland the previous night; all that was being handled through the usual channels. Starting in the ladies’ lavatory aboard Resource, he reminded himself with a grin. He could still imagine Mike Phillips’s face when the Navy told him that this was the SAS’s floating HQ for the duration.
He wished he was there in person. They also serve who sit around and drink Guinness, he told himself. But it did not feel the same, not at a time like this.
In Conference Room B only one empty seat remained. The Prime Minister, whom rumour claimed had been known to punish unpunctuality with exile to one of the caring ministries, actually greeted him with a smile. What does she want, Weighell wondered.
‘Lieutenant-Colonel Weighell, Officer Commanding 22 SAS Regiment,’ she introduced him.
He acknowledged the various nods and half-smiles.
‘Perhaps I should go round the table,’ the PM decided. ‘Cecil Matheson,’ she began, smiling at the tall, patrician-looking individual on her left, ‘Deputy Head of the Foreign Office and Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee.’ On his left was Reginald Copley, a thin, grey-haired man who was apparently head of the Foreign Office’s Latin American Desk. Last in line was the moustached Air Marshal Sir George Railton, Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff.
At the end of the table an arrogant-looking young man in a plain dark suit represented MI6. His name, hard though Weighell found it to credit, was Anthony Sharp. On the PM’s right, between her and Weighell, sat Brigadier Mark Harringham, representing Fleet HQ at Northwood, and the imposing bulk of Dennis Eckersley, the Number 2 at the Ministry of Defence.
Seven men and one woman, Weighell thought. Seven professionals and one politician. Seven smelling of Old Spice and one of gardenia. He remembered a particularly disgusting joke about Snow White and her favourite Seven-Up. He told himself to snap out of it.
‘We have a problem,’ the PM began. ‘Cecil?’
Matheson recounted the gist of his telephone conversation with the American State Department the previous evening, and though he made no overt criticism of the American decision to deny the Task Force AWACS assistance, he left little doubt in the minds of his audience what he thought of it.
The Prime Minister’s stony face suggested to Weighell that she shared Matheson’s irritation but had had enough time to suppress her natural instinct to express it. Maybe there was an inflatable model of Reagan hidden