Land of Fire (12 page)

As I came running down, Taffy stopped me. "Mark, I'm sorry. We did everything we could. It was a head shot. He never had a chance."

Tom was kneeling by the body, arranging a camo net over Andy's face. Another sniper round, I thought sickeningly. It must have hit him in the back of the head and taken off half his face. They didn't want me to see.

I knelt and took one of Andy's hands in mine. It was all I could do. The tears were streaming down my face and I couldn't find words. He had tried hard to keep me safe. We had rowed about it, because I couldn't get my head around the fact that to him I was always the little brother. Now he was gone.

Tom stood up. He had picked up the GPMG and slung it around his neck. "We can't stay out here," he said grimly. "The Argies may regroup."

I slung my rifle and took one side of Andy's poncho. I was damned if I was going to leave him here. Taffy was fixing a dressing on Doug's arm.

Together we started to carry Andy out. There weren't enough of us to carry Guy as well. We would have to leave him where he lay and come back for him.

On the way up the ridge we passed the hollow where I had killed the boy. I felt cold and drained of all feeling.

We saw nothing else of the enemy. We reached the village, and two hours later found ourselves in a small Chilean town. Hereford had been to work and the military attache from the

British embassy was waiting for us with transport. He took charge of everything and saw to the recovery of Guy's body.

I slept most of the next day, which was just as well. Then I tried to find out if Seb had got away or been caught, but they don't tell you things like that.

The Chileans were decent. They kept the press off us. The Argies imposed a complete blackout on news of the battle in their media too. I guess they were embarrassed that a bunch of half a dozen SAS on foot could fight their way fifty miles across the country and not be stopped.

After two days' rest we were flown up to Santiago and repatriated to the UK on a civilian flight.

Andy's and Guy's bodies were brought back for burial with military honours. I stood with Jemma and Andy's two little girls at the funeral, and the experience was almost as bad as seeing him dead.

The projected SAS assault on Rio Grande never went ahead. Argentine air attacks continued, and by the end of the fighting hardly a single British ship of the task force remained undamaged. The Argentine navy and air force lost over a hundred aircraft.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The news broadcast from London was short and to the point: "The political situation in Argentina has deteriorated further in recent days, and the danger of a takeover by nationalist elements in the armed forces grows. However, any threat to the Falkland Islands has been discounted."

There were no medals for the Rio Grande mission, not for the living nor the dead. It seemed that Whitehall and Buenos Aires both wanted it buried. The only memorial was a painting that a war artist completed privately for the Regiment of the "Battle of the Border', as it was known. The picture now hangs in the mess at Hereford. It shows the charge on the ridge held by the enemy with Guy, the lieutenant, being hit. Andy is still alive at that moment, visible firing his machine gun. It's a picture I like a lot because it represents my last memory of him. He went down fighting, which is how he would have wanted it.

I spent the next two decades in the Regiment. I fought terrorists in Ireland and drug lords in Colombia. There were wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and clandestine operations that I still can't talk about in other parts of the world. I married and divorced, saw my nieces, Andy's girls, grow up into fine young women.

It was twenty years before I returned to the South Atlantic.

This time I was thirty-nine, and a senior NCO with the mountain troop of D Squadron. There was an SAS exercise planned that included a night landing on South Georgia, and it was my troop that had been picked. We flew into Mount Pleasant, the big new airbase outside Port Stanley, on an R.A.F

Hercules from Ascension Island. Ascension is near the equator, and the twelve-hour flight to the Falklands was only possible with midair refuelling. We had a special forces crew, and the flight was part of their training package.

There were six of us making the trip. Major Jock Duggan, the Rupert commanding the expedition, was one of those small men who take on any challenge for the heck of it. He was a passionate outdoorsman and explorer, who had climbed Everest and trekked across the southern ice cap. Like me, he was approaching forty and had pretty much reached the end of the line as far as special operations were concerned. The two of us had been planning the South Georgia trip for a year. It was to be a last great yomp, a final test, measuring ourselves against the very worst that nature could throw at us.

South Georgia is a dependency of the Falkland Islands, separated from Stanley by 800 miles of hostile ocean. A bleak, glacier-encrusted island, riven with steep fjords, it resembles Antarctica more than South America. In 1982, an SAS patrol had been dispatched to South Georgia to expel a group of Argentines who had established a base on the island at the outset of the Falklands War. Set down high on the Fortuna glacier in atrocious weather, the advance party had struggled to drag their equipment through a nightmare landscape of savage crevasses, beset by continuous white outs and wind strengths exceeding 100 knots. After five hours, in which they progressed just 500 metres, a decision was taken to withdraw the patrol a rare case of the SAS admitting defeat. Two helicopters sent in to recover the patrol crashed on the glacier, and it was only heroic flying by the pilot of a third that completed the rescue. Since then South Georgia has come to be regarded as the ultimate test in human endurance.

With us in the party was Juan Dimitrikov, an American on secondment from the US Delta Force. A great, smiling bear of a man, Juan had been a close friend of mine ever since we fought together on a mission against the drug lords in Central America. Juan had trained extensively in Greenland and the Canadian Shield and was an expert in Arctic medicine. We counted ourselves fortunate to have him along.

The rest of the six-man team consisted of Nobby Clark, a cockney always ready with a joke or a bit of crack; my troop sergeant Kiwi Dave, from New Zealand, who stood six foot six in his socks, and was immensely strong and reliable; and Josh Brown, son of my old friend Nick, who'd died in the helicopter crash in the Falklands. Josh was now a twenty-something trooper who had only recently passed selection into the Regiment. I had chosen him for the trip at his own request. Although there had never been any proof, I was certain that his father had saved my life in the crash during the war, and I wanted to do what I could to further the boy's career. He was a bright lad, already qualified in Spanish, and would probably make officer before very long. All together we made good mates and a well-balanced team.

"Christ almighty!" Nobby exclaimed as we clambered out of the aircraft, dizzy from the ear-shattering noise of the trip. It was his first visit here. "Where is everybody?"

I saw what he meant. Mount Pleasant was enormous and empty. There were only a handful of aircraft stationed here: four Tornados, about the same number of helicopters and a couple of VC10 tankers. The vast runway looked as if it was built to handle an armada of aircraft as indeed it was. In an emergency the revetments and hangars would accommodate scores of fighters and strike planes flown out from England, and the runway would take the heavy transporters flying in reinforcements for the garrison.

A couple of R.A.F trucks trundled out to pick us up. We unloaded our berg ens and Lacon boxes full of weapons and ammunition and other equipment from the plane, checked all the items off on the manifest to make sure nothing was missing, and slung them in the back of the truck for the trip up to the barracks.

It was strange to be back again among the low, treeless hills and the settlements with their tin roofs. Ironically the Argentine invasion of twenty years before had sparked off an economic boom in the islands. Cruise liners disgorged 40,000 tourists a year on shore excursions to Stanley. Now, alongside the timbers and corrugated-iron cottages, there were expanding suburbs of new semi-detached homes for contract workers. But the streets were still full of Land Rovers and the weather remained the same: ceaseless, freezing wind and a dusting of snow on the heather and gorse.