Land of Fire (15 page)

Food poisoning aboard a submarine is every naval officer's nightmare. There were the inevitable jokes about the filthy habits and hygiene standards of the Falkland Islanders, but we were all bloody glad that the sub's food had come out from England.

By noon we learned that the bug had spread to the army garrison as well. I thought of my poor Jenny with her head stuck down a lavatory bowl.

Shortly after midday there came a knock on the door of the cabin we had been allocated aft of the ops room on the main deck. Kiwi opened up and the ship's medical officer entered with an orderly bearing paper cups and a water container.

"What's this?" Jock demanded.

"Captain's orders," the MO told him. "All personnel to receive broad-spectrum antibiotics as a precaution against salmonella poisoning though the amount you people have probably been drinking no bugs would stand a chance in your stomachs." He started to pass out packets of bloody great capsules. "Take two now and two four times a day for the next six days."

"Fucking hell," Nobby said, looking at them. "These aren't for humans!"

"Get 'em down, you great twat," I told him. "I'm not sharing a hide with you crapping yourself all night."

A little later the sub's captain sent for Jock and made it clear that if salmonella struck aboard he would abort the mission immediately. He was not risking his ship inshore with a crew down with sickness.

Because there are just sixteen nuclear subs to command, an RN submarine commander is a very rare beast indeed. No other western nation is more exacting in its selection process for these officers. This results in extremely determined and aggressive skippers, willing to take risks when necessary. The question today assuming his crew remained fit was just how close in he was prepared to take us.

In part the answer would depend on the weather. The forecast for the next twenty-four hours indicated heavy seas and force-seven gales. High seas would make it harder to pick up a sub's conning tower on radar and hamper any sonar listening devices. Nuclear submarines are not silent machines; the pumps that circulate coolant around the reactor core give out a steady sound recognisable to a trained operator on another sub. In shallow water too, cavitation noise from the screw becomes a problem. Heavy waves would blanket these factors to some extent but they would also greatly complicate the process of launching the Gemini boats.

The fifty-metre-depth line ran approximately ten miles out from the shore. Fifty metres was the absolute minimum as far as Superb was concerned, so ten miles was as close in as we could go. The plan was for us to loiter out beyond the 200-metre line till dusk, then make a high-speed run in, float off the boats at around midnight, and dash out again at thirty knots to reach deep water by daylight.

The truth was that this was a mission ideally suited to a small diesel-powered boat, drawing much less water, that could slip in close to the coast using her battery-powered electric motors and remain almost undetectable. The same submersible could lie offshore until our mission was completed, then slide in again to take us off. But due to cutbacks in the defence budget, the Royal Navy had done away with its fleet of conventional boats, leaving it dependent on big noisy nukes.

The Argentine navy was known to possess two ultra-quiet German diesel submarines. If one of these came after Superb in inshore waters it would be at a considerable advantage. It would be able to hear the big ship coming and lurk invisibly in the shallows, while manoeuvring silently into a firing position. The first we would probably know would be the alarm cry, "Torpedo in the water!" And a torpedo fired by a diesel electric was every bit as deadly as one fired by a nuke.

No doubt there were plenty in the Argentine navy who still carried a grudge against the British for the sinking of the cruiser Belgmno during the Falklands campaign, and no doubt either that some of them would leap at the opportunity to nail a Royal Navy submarine close inshore.

So all day we loitered at around a hundred metres depth, streaming a massive array sonar from our stern, alert for any indication of hostile warships. Our listening devices could pick up moving vessels a hundred miles off. Mostly it was fishing boats and inshore traffic, occasionally bigger ships heading up for Drake Passage into the Pacific.

We passed our time in the cabin, organising our kit and making it watertight. Nuclear subs are huge, but they cram a lot in. The passageway floors were stacked with crates of tinned food, so we had to watch our heads wherever we went. Our cabin was small for six men and all their equipment, and the crew got used to stepping over some trooper lying out on the deck checking the sights of a GPMG, or seeing us casually handling missiles capable of blowing a hole in the hull.

The day passed slowly underwater. Some of the guys snatched a bit of kip while they could. Jock and I spent a lot of time studying charts and maps. The plan was that on going ashore we would meet up with a guide, aUK national attached to one of the oil companies prospecting in the region. He would take us to a safe lying-up point. A lot was going to depend on his reliability.

Meantime, Doug had woken up and was back to his old trick of needling other members of the team. First he had a go at me about Jenny.

"So what was she like, Mark? Gagging for it, was she?"

It made me mad to listen to him harping on about Jenny like she was some scrubber, but I'd learned that it made his day if he got a response, so I held my tongue.

Then he tried it on with Kiwi. "Reckon Stanley must be like home to you. All them farmers screwing their frigging sisters and mothers. Just like back in New Zealand, eh?"

But Kiwi just laughed amiably. "Yep," he said, 'that's farmers." Doug left it at that. Maybe he knew that Kiwi might thump him one.

So it was Josh's turn.

I guess he thought that because he was a new boy, Josh was fair game. As troop sergeant, Doug had authority over him that he proceeded to use mercilessly. He kept inventing little tasks for him. "Fetch me out the night sight, I want to check the batteries," he'd say. Josh would jump up and dig out the night sight and bring it over. "No, I didn't mean that, I meant the Spyglass." So Josh would go back to the mound of equipment and fetch that out. Then Doug would want something else. Or he would send Josh down to the ops room to synchronise his watch. This went on and on through the afternoon.

Like a lot of younger guys fresh out of training, Josh had all his kit together, everything in its right pouch. I remembered being like that, checking my kit over and over again when we'd flown out to the last mission.

Josh's face fell when casualties were mentioned. "So where does the rescue come from if we're compromised?" he asked at one point.

"There isn't going to be any rescue, you prick," Doug jeered. "If we're busted we fight our way out on foot. Same as we did last time, eh, Mark?"

"That's about the size of it," I acknowledged. "Well, if you guys can handle it, I guess I can," Josh said.

"The fuck you can! When we were slogging it across the pampas you hadn't even made it to primary school. College boys like you don't know they're born. You only passed selection because they needed to get the fucking numbers up. I know that 'cause your instructor asked me to keep an eye on you."

"Jesus, Doug, when are you going to give it a rest?" Nobby said wearily.

But Doug wouldn't give up. The numbers game by which SAS selection standards were being lowered was his pet hate. He went on needling Josh for his perceived lack of soldiering skills. And when he got bored of that, he started to get personal. "You got a sister, ain't you? What's her name then?"

"My sister's called Judy."

"Judy, eh? You think she'd go for me then?"

Josh shrugged unhappily.

Doug didn't let up. "You going to introduce us then, when we're back in the UK?"

"Leave it out, Doug," I said.

"Ha, what's this, the big brother act again? Just like you and Andy?"

The mention of my brother's name sent a hot wave of anger through me. I jumped up. "Leave his name out of this!"

Doug thrust his face in mine. "Not so easy without him to back you up, is it?" He was swaying about on the balls of his feet as he always did when he was about to swing a punch. He was a dirty fighter, fast on his feet and hard as nails. I could put him down, but if I didn't get the first punch in, he'd do some damage.

Luckily, at that moment Jock came in. "What gives?" he snapped, seeing the pair of us squaring up to one another. "We're on a mission, for Christ's sake!"

Doug snorted and turned away. I sat down again, the anger still burning in my gut.

"What was all that about?" Josh muttered.

"Nothing," I told him. "We go back a long way, that's all."

At a prearranged time just before five in the afternoon we came up to communications depth to receive messages from our trailed antenna. There were further reports about the salmonella outbreak, which had spread into the civilian population at Port Stanley, and advice on treatment. We discussed the possibility that it might be some kind of biological attack by the Argentines, targeted against the R.A.F. Jock agreed with me that, without fighter protection, the islands were left wide open.

Josh wondered how a bacterial agent might be introduced. "What do they do? Drop it in the water supply?"

"Doubtful," Jock said. He expected that public water supplies, even in Stanley, were filtered and chlorinated and treated with ultra-violet specifically to protect against hazards like salmonella. "Besides, the quantities are too great. To contaminate the drinking supply you'd need a road-tanker load of the bugs." Agents and materials needed to be prepared and handled correctly. He thought it likely that any salmonella would have to have been introduced directly into food, probably via the R.A.F mess. If it had been in today's breakfast, that would explain why we were OK we'd left before eating.

I was thinking that it must have been a highly potent strain, whatever it was, if a pilot could be feeling well enough to take off and yet half an hour later be too sick to land his plane.

I wondered how much Jock and the skipper really knew about the background to the current crisis. The government in London must have been very nervous to risk a nuclear submarine close inshore, and to authorise inserting an armed party into a country we were not officially at war with. I thought about my glib words to Jenny, that this was peacetime. For how much longer?

Around five-thirty we abandoned our holding pattern and headed westwards under cover of darkness. It had been a very long day. An hour later, our speed dropped to ten knots as we approached the 100-metre line. The commander explained that we were entering an undersea canyon, as much as five miles across and 500 feet deep at the entrance, that had been gouged during the last ice age. It wound back to within a few miles of the coast and would provide us with deeper water during the approach to our destination. Over the past two decades, British submarines had surveyed scores of similar natural features in the region, charting their twists and turns in the knowledge that, in war, possession of such undersea maps could mean the difference between destruction and survival.

The submarine's active and passive sonars, coupled with the echo-sounding fathometer and inertial navigation system, enabled her to plot a course accurate to within a metre. It was an eerie sensation even so, sliding along in the black water, 200 metres below the surface, knowing that sheer walls of rock loomed over the vessel on either side, and that the smallest miscalculation in handling could result in a catastrophic collision.

The atmosphere became noticeably more intense as the minutes ticked off. In spite of the air-conditioning our cabin smelt stale with the tang of cleaning oil from the weapons. With every mile that passed the depth above our tower lessened and the canyon narrowed. If we did detect an enemy we would have to come up to fifty metres in order to turn. We were like a big fish swimming up a tunnel. We had just thirty metres of water under our keel, and the upwards-looking high-frequency under-ice sonar registered the same to the surface.

An hour from our drop-off point we had begun donning our black emergency survival suits and packing our kit into dry bags, when there was an alert. The sonar teams had picked up a ship's screws ten miles dead ahead. High-speed turbines: very probably a patrol vessel. Immediately the skipper ordered Dead Slow and we settled gently towards the sea bed. We couldn't actually touch bottom without risking damage to our sonar dome but we rested about ten metres up and sat silent, hoping that the shallow-water clutter of the waves overhead would smother the sounds of our reactor pumps. Every small sound in the boat seemed suddenly magnified.

"Contact bearing 040 degrees. Course 190. Speed eighteen knots. Range 20,000 decreasing."

The enemy vessel was on our starboard bow headed towards us. At this rate she would acquire us within fifteen minutes. Given current weather conditions we could probably outrun her given enough start, but then her sonar would certainly pick up the sound of our engines. It would mean breaking cover. On the other hand if we stayed where we were much longer we risked a torpedo.

"Range 18,000 metres decreasing," the sonar operator called. "Speed seventeen knots." The ship's speed was dropping. It might be slowing down to turn away; alternatively it might have guessed there was a big sub out ahead and reduced speed to improve the capability of its own passive sonar.

"Like a man picking his way through a forest at night, who stops to listen," the skipper murmured to Jock. His coolness astonished me.

Three minutes of silence, then, "Range 16,400. Speed fifteen knots. Now bearing 045 degrees," came the operator's voice. The vessel was a little over eight miles off, slowing further and turning away from us, but not by much. She might be questing about, trying to locate us. We would know if her sonar started pinging us.

Another man on the sonar watch sang out. "Sonar trace conforms to signature of Foxtrot Alpha 3." The atmosphere of intense concentration among the crew continued unchanged.