Land of Fire (29 page)

As soon as they had gone I held a quick briefing. According to the GPS we now had less than 1000 metres to go to the RV point. "While the fog holds we'll risk it and push on," I told the others. There was no dissent, even from Doug. We were all anxious to reach a place where we could lie up.

I made another attempt to contact Seb, but he still wasn't answering. I was getting pissed off. First his key didn't work, and now he wasn't picking up his messages. That was the trouble working with intelligence types; they were unaccountable. We needed him to arrange our route over the border, and to take over the woman if possible.

Five hundred metres from the RV we executed another ambush check to the rear. The sun was coming up fast now, and starting to burn off the mist. We only had another few minutes in which to establish ourselves in a fresh LUP for the day. According to the GPS the sheep-hide we were supposed to rendezvous at lay just over the neighbouring ridge. We halted under some stunted trees in a small gully, and I sent Doug forward to scout the route. He had hardly gone when there was an urgent message from Josh to the rear.

"Four men moving up the trail in our direction. Armed."

"Ambush positions!" I snapped to the others, grabbing the woman as I spoke. Instantly we dispersed ourselves in a ring facing back the way we had come. Kiwi had the big GPMG deployed to enfilade the gap in the gorse through which the enemy would approach, the rest of us had rounds chambered. "Doug, watch our front!" I said into the radio.

"Roger," was his reply.

"Stay under cover everyone. Don't shoot unless they fire first." A battle now, so close to the RV point in breaking daylight, would be disastrous.

Josh came scuttling back to join us. I pushed the woman down into the grass beside me. "If shooting starts, keep your head down and play dead," I hissed. "Don't look up and don't run. Understand?"

She nodded. Her face was pale. It was the first time I had been able to take a really good look at her in the light. A strong face, fine featured, very dark eyes smudged with tiredness, and older than I'd first guessed.

She clutched my arm. "These men, they may be friends of mine."

I stared at her, trying to work out whether I was imagining that I'd seen her before. Before I could think any further the first of the group stepped out from a bank of gorse into the gully. He was a young man, in his mid-twenties at a guess, thin and drawn looking. He was dressed like a hunter in khaki trousers and a loose-fitting camo jacket, and he carried a hunting rifle with a telescopic sight on a sling over his shoulder. The man who followed him was older; he wore a woollen hat pulled down over his ears, and carried a pump-action shotgun with a bandolier of cartridges across his chest. Behind them were two more men, also civilians by the look of them, armed in the same way with sporting weapons.

They moved cautiously in our direction. I had already figured that whoever they were, the best thing would be to let them pass, hoping they didn't spot us. If we could avoid a contact we would save ourselves a lot of grief.

The woman, however, had other ideas. Ignoring my orders she jumped up. "Julian!" she screamed.

Instantly the men swung to face her. The man with the shotgun had his weapon up. He was three metres away. If he fired at that range he would cut us both in half. I rose slowly to my feet. My rifle was centred on his chest and my finger was on the trigger. The rest of the team rose from their positions to cover me. I saw the newcomers' eyes widen as they took in the grenade launchers and the yawning muzzle of the GPMG clutched in Kiwi's great paws.

For a long moment we stared, guns trained on each other. Alerted by the scream, Doug came running back along the gully. He took in the scene in a glance and dropped to one knee, his rifle pointed at the guy with the shotgun.

"Doug," I told him. "Cut round the rear and check there aren't any more behind."

"Gotcha, boss." He jumped up and took off, skirting the group and keeping his weapon trained on them all the time.

The leader of the Argentines seemed to come out of shock. He shouted something in Spanish at the woman. Then the others started calling out too.

The situation was rapidly slipping out of control. The four men were in a highly nervous state. The one in front was unslinging his rifle and yelling to the woman, and the other men were waving their guns in my direction. Any moment now someone was going to let off a shot and we'd have a load of corpses on our hands.

"Tell them to put down their guns!" I shouted to the woman.

"It is OK," she yelled back. "They are my friends. They mean no harm."

"Fuck that! Tell them to throw down their weapons or we'll shoot!"

She could see from my manner I wasn't kidding. One look at Kiwi and the others must have confirmed it. But her friends were growing increasingly agitated. They had seen Doug move in behind them and knew their escape was cut off, and they were all shouting.

"Josh!" I shouted. "Tell the bastards to throw down their weapons or we'll drop them!"

Josh stepped forward. "Put down the guns! Now, or we will shoot!" he said in Spanish.

The men gaped at him. Either they hadn't understood his accent or were astonished at being addressed in their own language. The woman stepped forward, repeating what Josh had just said. She spoke quietly but firmly, adding something that sounded like "English soldiers'.

English soldiers the four clearly got that much. They gaped at us blankly, and we stood our ground. They were bunched together with their guns held defensively in front of them. I studied them carefully. Educated men by the looks of them, ranging in age from early twenties to fifty. They were confused and frightened and there was a woman at stake. They might do anything.

"Put down the guns," the woman said, speaking in English for our benefit this time. "I am OK. They have not hurt me. They helped me escape from the base."

There was a long pause. The young man she had called Julian spoke to the others, evidently translating what she had just said. None of us made any move. "Please, Julian," the woman said quietly. "Please, no shooting for my sake."

Slowly, reluctantly, the young man lowered his rifle to point at the ground. After a moment his companions followed suit.

"Nobby," I said, 'get the weapons."

Nobby went forward. Firmly but not roughly he took the guns off them and moved away out of the line of fire. The men stood with their hands by their sides. They looked angry still, as if they had been forced into something shameful. The woman spoke softly to them in Spanish. She turned to me. "What are you going to do with us?"

"Let you all go as soon as we can," I told her. "We are on our way out of here and the last thing we need is a lot of prisoners."

"Then why not let us go now?" demanded the young man whose name was Julian. "With her too," he added fiercely.

"First tell me what you are all doing," I replied.

He looked at the woman. I caught her shaking her head in a quick negative. "That is our business," he said sullenly. "We are Argentians. This is our country."

"You are fighting the marines. We are against them too," added one of the older men, who looked like a doctor or a lawyer in his forties, and who evidently also had some English. It sounded as though they were part of some kind of resistance group. There had been nothing said in our briefings about any such organisation, though I knew that there was a great deal of opposition to the government. That didn't necessarily make them pro-British, though.

"You cannot take us with you. Let us go, all of us. Her included, "Julian said reasonably. "We will promise not to tell the military you are here."

"We'll fucking shoot you too and all," growled Doug. He hated foreigners on principle.

Our problem was this: we now had five prisoners who needed at least three of us to watch them. That left barely enough to do a proper recon of the RV point. If we were attacked we would have to leave the prisoners and leg it. I decided to hand them over to Seb to deal with.

We threw their weapons into a patch of bog. They were unhappy about it; a couple of the guns looked valuable. We didn't need them though they were so much extra weight to carry. We had to crack on now. I was worried these people might be followed and be leading the military on to us. All in all, the sooner we handed them over to Seb the better.

I crawled up to the top of the ridge with Doug for a squint at the RV. Three hundred metres away across open grass, a cluster of broken stone sheds huddled under another low rise. Seb had told us it was once a refuge where shepherds brought their sheep on harsh nights. Now the bottom had long since dropped out of the sheep market and such buildings were gone to ruin. I studied the place through my binoculars. No sign of activity or human occupation.

I took a 360-degree check around. The area seemed long abandoned; there was no sign of any activity. The mist was lifting away fast and patches of grey sky were showing through. "If we don't get a move on soon we'll never make it across with this lot without being spotted," Doug said. I agreed. Once among the buildings we could hunker down with the prisoners out of sight and await Seb.

"Let's do it," I said.

I sent Kiwi and Nobby on ahead to scout the buildings. Together with Josh, Doug and I prodded the reluctant prisoners to their feet. "Hurry it up," I snapped. Any moment, I thought, the bloody helicopters will come back.

Kiwi came on the radio. "Looks all clear up here."

"Right," I said to the others, 'get 'em moving."

With our packs bumping on our shoulders, we ran the prisoners across the grass and up the slope. We were about fifty metres from the buildings when I heard the sound I dreaded.

"Helicopters!" I shouted. "Everybody down!" I grabbed the nearest Argentine and hurled him bodily to the ground.

The engine noise swelled and grew louder and nearer, coming directly for us. It was plain that we had been seen. We would have to make a fight for it. Our anti-aircraft missiles had been lost on the boat but we still had our personal weapons. Rolling over, I raised my rifle.

A burst of automatic fire crackled overhead. Bullets zipped and pinged all around our position. More guns opened up from the flanks. The fire was coming from both sides and ahead. From behind the tops of the buildings and from the flanks to either side the helmeted heads of combat troops were aiming heavy calibre weapons at us. I estimated a company of infantry with light automatic weapons, firing from fifty to a hundred metres' range. Now the helicopters were sweeping in beneath the overcast, stooping low for the kill. A machine-gun mounted in the side hatch of the lead aircraft winked at us like a red eye, and more bullets thudded into the ground nearby. The troops must have been lying in wait on the other side of the hill. They had called in the air power the moment they saw us start to move. We had walked straight into an ambush. Perhaps the prisoners had led them to us.

"Pull back!" I shouted, but before we could move, from the direction of the road came a rumble of diesel engines. A troop of infantry fighting vehicles had broken cover and was closing in, the muzzles of their cannons swivelling towards us. Any moment now we would have 30mm shells bursting around our ears. A patch of gorse burst into flames as incendiary bullets zipped through. We were pinned down and surrounded, under attack from air and ground.

Josh was carrying the light anti-armour weapon, a 94mm anti-tank missile in a single-shot tube capable of taking out a main battle tank at 500 metres. Ignoring the bullets whipping past, he ripped the launcher off his back, snapped the tube out to its full extent and crouched, aiming at the nearest IFV. A huge smoke plume belched from the rear of the tube and there was a swoosh as the missile ignited. The rocket scorched across the ground, arrowing towards the lead vehicle. It impacted against the offside track near the front with a boom that echoed across the clearing. The vehicle swung round and stopped, rocking on its tracks, smoke pouring from its engine compartment.

The turrets of the two other machines barked angrily. Shells smacked into the earth among us, exploding with showers of dirt. Splinters of steel sang viciously overhead and the air was filled with the stench of cordite.

"Fucking great shot," Doug was yelling. But next moment there came an ominous double thud and the whine of 81mm mortar bombs descending. More explosions fountained up as bombs and shells searched the hillside.

We had shot off our only missile, and the enemy had us at their mercy. They could sit back and blast us to pieces at their leisure.

The marines had been waiting. We had fallen into the hands of the enemy.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The shelling stopped. The machine-gun fire slackened off. An officer's voice crackled over a loud-hailer. "British soldiers. Put down your guns and raise your hands. If you attempt to escape you will be shot."

The guys were looking at me for guidance.

"Sod the bastards. Let's make a run for it," Doug growled. "Some of us should make it."

I looked around. The prisoners had scattered and were lying shaking on the ground. They seemed unhurt. The Argy armour had paused on the track leading down from the road, and squads of infantry were dismounting to move across country and surround us from the rear. The helicopters were beating the air overhead. "No," I told Doug. "Sorry, but it's a bust."

"Fuck them!" Doug snarled. "The fuck I'm going to surrender to fucking Argy cunts!" He jumped up, clutching his C-5, and instantly a machine-gun opened up from one of the vehicles, sending a stream of tracer winging towards him. The rounds, clearly visible, seemed to start slowly then speed up with a sudden rush as they got closer. The stream of bullets reached Doug, there was a terrific smacking sound, and he was knocked flying off his feet and on to his back.

He lay there, seemingly stunned. "Doug!" I shouted. I crawled over to him, keeping my head against the ground as more rounds went screaming overhead like angry wasps. There was blood on his hands and face but I couldn't see exactly where he had been hit. I ripped open his jacket to check for chest wounds, but couldn't see any. His rifle was lying nearby, almost split in two across the middle. It looked as though Doug's gun had taken the main impact.