Stand By, Stand By

FIFTEEN

Even by their own swift standards, the Boat Troop had made a fast getaway. The ops officer put out a call at 1715 on Saturday evening, when most of the guys were at home or around the town. The commander, Staff Sergeant Merv Mason, an Aussie famous for his walrus moustache, was in his local Tesco when the bleeper went off in his pocket. Hearing the summons, he cut short his shopping, made a dash for the rapid check-out, and hurtled home to pick up his kit on his way into camp. In under two hours of frantic activity his team had got itself together and lined up the stores and equipment they would need for a drop into the sea and an assault on the Santa Maria.

In the background, Merv knew, urgent talks were in progress. The boss was negotiating to get the party aboard an RAF TriStar which was leaving Lyneham that evening. The basic need was to lift the team to Belize with the minimum delay, and have them there ready to deploy as things developed. A Herc plodding round the northern route would be far too slow. After pressure from the Director of the SAS in London, the wing commander in charge of air movements at Lyneham had been prevailed upon to hold the TriStar for two hours, and to throw off a dozen less urgent passengers. In the end a Chinook lifted the team from Hereford to Lyneham, together with their kit, and they flew out at 2200.

Eight hours later, at 0100 local time, they landed in the hot darkness at Airport Camp, Belize. Three four-ton trucks drove out to the aircraft to collect them; leaving the plane before anyone else, they and their kit were whisked away to a holding area in one of the warehouses, where Keith Marshall, their liaison officer, had set up a standby ops room. The rest of the guys got their heads down in transit accommodation, but he was up for the rest of the night, fielding the messages that came in by secure fax from Hereford and Regimental Headquarters in London.

From the faxes Keith could see that diplomatic negotiations had been going on at the highest level. No matter that in North America it was the early hours of Sunday morning; it was Prime-Minister-to-President stuff as Whitehall urgently requested assistance in lifting the Boat Troop to within striking distance of their objective, wherever that might turn out to be.

When the Santa Maria sailed from Cartagena at 0830 local time — 1330 in London — an emergency meeting was called at the COBR, the Cabinet Office Briefing Room, underground in Whitehall, which was opened up and manned to act as the control centre. There the SAS Director met senior officials from the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office and a representative from the United States Embassy. After an initial conference, as satellite surveillance showed the ship heading north, they stood down the meeting until her destination could be established. When she put into Desierto at 2000 local (0100 in London), the senior officers were routed out of bed by telephone calls, and sleepily reassembled. Later that morning, at the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, the American Defence Attache called the duty officer in the Operations Center at the Pentagon and confirmed that help was going to be needed again, this time in the form of a warship to put the Boat Troop within range of their target. ‘The British Prime Minister’s been talking with the President,’ he confirmed. ‘The orders are to give every possible assistance.’

None of this background activity concerned Merv Mason and his men in Belize. All they knew was that they had to prepare for Operation Gannet. By midday on Sunday they were ready to parachute into the sea, with their two twenty-five-foot Geminis fully inflated and secured on platforms with all their gear inside them, including the forty-horsepower Mariner engines. The stream of secure faxes, which continued all morning, told them that the Pentagon had agreed to divert a nuclear attack submarine, the USS Endeavor, from its exercise in the Caribbean so that it could pick them up and take them covertly into the target area. The planners assumed that the Santa Maria, although by no means new, must have effective radar; and this meant that the approach of any large surface vessel or unidentified aircraft would warn the narcos of an impending attack. A submarine was therefore by far the safest option.

Shortly after 2000 on Sunday evening, messages reaching the standby ops room in Belize began to give information about Desierto. The northernmost of a group of small islands which were the tops of extinct volcanoes, it had never been permanently inhabited. Although the others supported small communities of fishermen, Desierto was deserted because it had no reliable fresh water supply. Intelligence routed from the United States Drug Enforcement Agency revealed that in the 1960s a bauxite mining company had built a quay on the shore of a creek on the western side of the island, but that the venture had gone bankrupt and the port had been abandoned. Recently big-time drug-runners had begun to use it again as a safe haven and transit base, cross-decking consignments from one ship to another, and flying small planeloads into Mexico.

In the old days the team commander and signaller at Belize would have spent an anxious hour working out latitudes, longitudes, distances and courses to create a rendezvous between aircraft and submarine in the middle of the Caribbean. Now computers made the calculations in seconds, and then did them again, so that their human operators could feel confident they were right. The upshot was that the Boat Troop boarded a Hercules at 2100 on Sunday evening, for a flight of two hours forty minutes on a bearing of 112 degrees for a rendezvous with USS Endeavor thirty miles off the west coast of Desierto.

As the plane droned through the night, Merv looked round his nine men. All were asleep, or nearly so, and certainly none looked worried. A night jump into the sea was routine for them. Gannet was exactly the kind of operation they had spent years training for. Far from being scared, they were positively looking forward to some action. Merv, at thirty-two, was the oldest in the party — although with his short, curly fair hair and pockmarked face he didn’t look it. He eased a finger inside the collar of his black wetsuit and settled himself into a more comfortable position.

Once, at about 2230, he went up to the flight-deck for a chat with the captain and a last check of the coordinates. As everyone seemed happy, he moved back down and concentrated his mind on the task ahead. The rendezvous with the sub should be routine; it was the landing on the island which would demand quick assessment and positive decisions. Maps faxed across during the day had given him an idea of the shape of the coast around the creek, but there hadn’t been time to send photographs, so a lot would depend on the nature of the shore where they landed.

At 2300 the captain began a gentle descent, easing down from 20,000 feet. Merv plugged in one of the headsets hanging along the sides of the hold and listened in. At 2330 an American voice suddenly came up on the compatible radio channel. ‘Alpha Two to X-ray One. How do you read me? Over.’

‘X-ray One, loud and clear. Running in on one-one-two. Estimate nine minutes to DZ overhead.’

‘Roger. We’ll give you a white light buoy on our starboard side, your port.’

‘X-ray One. Thanks.’

‘Alpha Two. Happy landings, and please not to drop your goddamn boats on top of us.’

Merv knew that to have comms with the aircraft, the sub must have her periscope above the surface. By the time they reached her, she would have surfaced.

‘Four minutes to DZ overhead,’ the pilot called. ‘Stand by.’

The head-loadie held up four fingers. The Herc had levelled off and was flying steadily at 1200 feet. All round the hold guys were adjusting and checking their harnesses. The rest of the hold crew were snapping off the fastenings and removing the nets that had held the boats down. At D minus two the head-loadie hit the button to lower the tailgate ramp. Warm, fresh air rushed in as the broad platform descended and the back of the plane yawned open to reveal black water glittering below.

The head-loadie held up one finger. Merv counted down the sixty seconds to himself. Then they were into the familiar sequence: ‘Red on. Green on. GO!’

First out were the boats. One big shove, and their platforms slid quickly backwards over the steel rollers in the deck until they toppled clear. The team immediately followed, in two sticks of five.

As his chute snapped out, Merv saw the brilliant light shining up out of the sea, and beyond it he made out the long, dark shape of the sub’s upper hull. Then he steered for the boats, which were hitting the water with a big double splash three hundred yards away to the east.

Ten minutes later each team was clustered round its boat, still trussed on the platform. Cutting the tie-cords was a dicey business, because if anyone got entangled he could easily go down deep six when the platform fell away. With most of the cords severed, all but two men backed off, and they severed the final bonds in unison.

With both Geminis fully operational, they motored gently towards the long, low hulk of the sub. The crew had already opened up the main hatch above the forward torpedo room — a huge, empty space on the front of the ship — and all the gear went into that; the boats were deflated, rolled up and packed into valises, the engines sealed inside waterproof bags. The guys changed into dry gear and went down into the heart of the ship. The hatches were sealed, buzzers sounded and the crew prepared to dive.

Merv introduced himself as the commander, and met the officer of the watch. He’d been in submarines before, but they had all been small and cramped. This one was mega, with four decks, passages running for a hundred feet or more, and a luxurious amount of space. The whole ship was very quiet, and only the faintest hum of air-conditioning was detectable. It was also spotlessly clean, with fresh pastel colours on the bulkheads. The temperature was a comfortable 68 degrees, the air fresh, and the crew were in shirt-sleeves. The facilities in the enlisted men’s mess included a TV screen, a whole library of videos, and a bar at which the visitors were encouraged to make themselves tea and coffee. Their American hosts must have been curious about their mission, but they showed professional restraint. Apart from a few cracks such as, ‘What’s it like out there?’ they asked no questions.

In any case, the visitors were going to be on board for no more than a couple of hours. While the rest of the team relaxed, Merv went along to the CIC, or Combat Information Center, beneath the conning tower, to check details of their approach to Desierto. The island was only thirty miles off, and the sub was closing on it at twelve knots.

For a layman, the CIC was an eerie sight: a circular room, almost dark, full of men monitoring low-lit dials with dark-red figures flickering on them. Since the whole principle of a submarine is that it does not advertise its presence, the Endeavor was operating on passive sonar only, sending out no emissions that other vessels could detect. At a bank of complex arrays five men were listening for transmissions at different ranges — distant, medium and close.

‘Don’t think me a prick,’ said Merv to the cheerful first duty officer, ‘but if you don’t use radar, how do you know where you are?’

‘We have very precise inertial navigation systems,’ was the answer. ‘Gyroscopes — yes? Right now, I can tell you where we are to within a few feet. If we have to, we can put up an aerial now and then to get a fix off a satellite, but most times we’re happy to stay down. We can hear a lot, too. Listen in.’

The officer handed Merv a pair of headphones, and he found they were full of mysterious swishing, booming noises.

‘Hear that?’ said his companion. ‘That’s a shoal of barracuda giving us the time of day. When we close on this island of yours, we’re gonna be hearing the surf on the shore from about four miles out. Now, you call the shots. Just say where you want to go, and we’ll squirt you out.’

‘Can you give us a sub-surface release?’

‘Sure can. In fact, that’s all the better for us. If we don’t break the surface, we don’t break international law. Until we break the surface, we don’t become a ship.’

By 0345 they could hear the surf ahead of them. The sub came up to periscope depth and sat there, moving gently forward, five ks off the coast. In the cavernous forward torpedo room the team pulled on their full diving kit and checked each other methodically, then went two at a time into the escape hatch. Merv always found that an unnerving moment: once you’re sealed in the hatch in total blackness and the chamber is filling with water, there’s no turning back. If anything goes wrong then, you could be written off.

Having released a float with a steel hawser attached, the first pair swam up the cable, popped the air-bottle to inflate the No. 1 boat, and scrambled aboard. Humping the 175-lb engine out of the water and on to the back of the boat was no picnic, but they managed it, and moved away from the buoy. Up came the second team and the second boat. Last to the surface were their bergens full of kit, their weapons and explosives, all done up in Ellison bags. With everyone and everything on board, Merv counted heads, made the total ten, and with a torch flashed a clearing signal to the officer observing them through the periscope.

The time was 0405. The moon had set, leaving the night very dark, and only a gentle wind was blowing from the west, so the sea was calm. The sub had put the boats out west of their target, and they set off on a course of ninety degrees, due eastwards, cruising easily downwind at eight knots.

Soon the coast of the island was showing as a dark line on the horizon ahead. The coxswains reduced speed and continued until, one kilometre out, Merv signalled a halt. With the boats hove to, he and another swimmer slipped over the side and went in alone for a beach reconnaissance. Thirty minutes later they were bobbing in the swell and touching bottom, a few yards offshore, only to find that their navigation had been almost too precise. No more than 300 metres in front of them, a big cargo vessel was moored alongside a jetty, her upperworks showing white in the starlight.

‘Too fucking close,’ said Merv. ‘Let’s get round the corner.’

The Int guys at Hereford had faxed him a map of the island. It was only a photocopy, but it gave a reasonable idea of the layout round the port, and Merv had memorized the details. He remembered that the jetty lay along the inner edge of a small bay, and that the bay was sheltered by a hook of headland. He also remembered that the airstrip was inland to the south — about one k away to their right as they faced in from the sea.

Pushing off again, they swam to their right for twelve minutes until they rounded the headland and discovered a second, much smaller bay backed by low cliffs. Coming ashore, they landed on a steep little sandy beach, no more than thirty yards from front to rear. At the back was an overhang of cliff, and centuries of rock-falls had divided up the beach with a series of natural partitions. As a lying-up point, it was ideal. Even in the dark they could tell that it must be out of sight of the jetty, and the combination of overhang and rock-falls would help conceal the boats from any aircraft that might come in. Furthermore, the carry from water to cache-point, was the shortest they were ever likely to get.

Over his covert radio Merv sent the message: ‘OK. We’ve moved 400 metres to the right of our original approach line. Beach clear.’ Then he cracked out a cyalume chemical light, placed it in an empty tin can, brought for the purpose, and laid the can horizontally on a rock so that the green glow could be seen by the crews but by nobody on land.

A few minutes later, the boats purred in out of the night. The cache was so close to the water that there was scarcely any need to post sentries to secure their landing-point, but the team went through the drill anyway. They carried the boats the few yards to the base of the cliff, dismantled them under the overhang, and pitched scrim nets over them. Finally they changed out of their diving gear into DPMs and got a brew on.

‘Watch the water, guys,’ Roger Alton, the second-in-command, warned them. ‘It’s going to be bloody hot later on, and if anything goes wrong in the jungle we may have to hang around here for a couple of days. So we’ll need all we’ve got. The other thing’s sunburn. For Christ’s sake keep your heads and arms covered.’

The tide was coming in, and would soon cover the beach. But Roger was taking no chances. He went back to the edge of the water and, working backwards, scuffed away their tracks with a paddle.

‘It’s like Robinson fucking Crusoe,’ he exclaimed. ‘I don’t reckon anybody’s ever landed here before.’

Leaving two sentries to guard the base, the rest climbed warily to the ridge above them. They could see the odd palm tree outlined against the stars, but on the ground there was little vegetation, apart from tussocks of grass.

Everything seemed to be in miniature. The whole island was only about three ks in diameter, and the top level of the headland was no more than thirty metres above sea level. It was still dark when they reached it, but against the paling sky they saw the outline of Mount Desierto, rising to a short, blunt peak ahead of them. The upperworks of the ship showed white against the land opposite; she was moored with her bows to their right, and three or four hundred metres ahead of her, on the inland end of the quay, they could make out a huddle of pale-coloured buildings.

As they lay on the ridge, Merv checked off features he remembered from the map. ‘It’s a dry creek,’ he said, pointing down to the right. ‘Comes to a point just below us here. No river. The airstrip’s down there, round the corner, and the old bauxite workings are at the back of it. There’s a road from the port to the strip, but that’s the only one. No other habitation. What we need is cover for an OP.’

Moving along the ridge to their left, they soon found some. A palm-tree had blown over in a gale, bringing up a big plate of earth on its roots, but it was still alive, and its tumble of branches offered excellent shelter, not only from aircraft but also from the sun. When dawn broke they realized that their OP had one bad feature: the sun came up just to the right of the mountain, in their faces, and they were looking straight into the light. Otherwise, they were ideally placed, not least because the seaward flank of their headland, behind them, was out of sight of the port, and guys could move up and down between OP and base quite freely.

At 0645, as soon as they’d established that the ship was the Santa Maria, they got through to Tony in Bogotá on the satcom.

‘Blue Team on location,’ Merv reported. ‘The target’s here.’

‘Roger. Have you identified the hostage?’

‘Not yet. The locals are only just starting to move.’

‘OK. Keep me informed. And well done. The Red Team’s ready when you are.’

‘Roger. We’ll let you know.’

Merv established a rota of two men on stag at the top, two at the bottom, and the rest crashed out, cooking or whatever. He and Roger took the first stag, to gauge the strength of the opposition and work out a plan.

One of the first things they realized was that the buildings at the end of the quay were inhabited. Doors started opening while it was still half light, and people went in and out. The watchers saw that a good deal of work had recently been done, both to the buildings and to the quay. Patches of fresh-looking cement showed up on the dock wall, and some of the buildings had had a new coat of paint or whitewash.

Soon the narcos’ plan of action was apparent. Machinery started up on board the ship, and the derricks began lifting nets full of bales ashore. The cranes landed each load in the open back of a decrepit four-ton truck, which drove off down the airstrip road, disappearing round the bend of the hill to the OP’s right.

‘They must have an air-lift going to the mainland,’ said Roger — and soon his assessment was proved right by the arrival of a twin-engined Cessna, which came in from the north-west, over their left shoulders, took one sweep to the south, turned back towards them, into the wind, sank out of sight and landed. Half an hour later they heard its engine wind up again for take off, and got themselves well tucked down among the palm leaves, knowing that it would come low overhead. Sure enough, it cleared them by no more than a couple of hundred feet, struggling for height under a heavy load.

‘Easy enough to make sure the ship never leaves,’ said Roger.

‘Swim out and put a charge on the props?’

‘Exactly. The trouble is, they’d still have plenty of time to top the Rupert. Somehow, we’ve got to cut him out first. If that poor bastard’s in one of those cabins, he’s going to bloody bake when the sun gets up. The ship looks that crappy I bet she hasn’t got air-conditioning.’

Two more flights came and left. By then another team had taken over the OP. As Steve was scanning through binoculars, he suddenly said, ‘Jesus! There he is!’

Jerry, his companion, whipped up his own pair of glasses and watched as Black emerged from the building they’d christened No. 2, with his hands cuffed together in front of him, followed by a guard wearing DPM fatigues and armed with an MP 5. He’d been ashore all the time. He was wearing a white shirt and dark trousers, but he looked in bad shape: his clothes were filthy, and his face had a dark, puffy appearance.

Steve gave a double tug on the communication cord which ran down to the base of the cliff, and Roger came scrambling up. ‘That’s him, isn’t it?’

Roger, who’d never worked with Black, but had seen him often about the camp at Hereford, gave an exclamation of disgust. ‘It’s him, all right. But they’ve been hitting him about. Bastards.’

Black and his escort walked a couple of hundred yards along the airport road, then turned and came back. Exercise, time. They went out and back three times, Black walking slowly and awkwardly because of his handcuffs. Then for a few minutes both prisoner and gaoler sat in the sun on a low wall. Two more guards appeared and sat with them. Then all four disappeared into the building.

‘OK,’ said Roger. ‘We know where he is. But why have they got him there, I wonder?’

‘The heat, probably,’ said Steve. ‘In such a sheltered position, the ship must be like an oven.’

‘He must have spent the night there — otherwise we’d have seen him come ashore. If they’re going to keep him in the same place tonight as well, all the better. Much easier to grab him from there than on board.’

By sundown they had their plan. The prisoner was still inside building No. 2. During the afternoon, guards had come in and out, but Black had stayed put. Everything pointed to a night hit — and there would be no better time than 0300, when everybody concerned should be in the deepest trough of sleep.

At 0130 two men would swim out and place a charge of explosive on one of the ship’s propellers, with a timer set to detonate at 0300. At 0230 four men would work their way round right-handed, overland, to cross the road and come in on the buildings, taking with them a couple of made-up door charges in case they had to blast their way into the gaol-house. By 0255 they’d be in position for an assault on the building, but they’d wait for the ship to go up, and then give it a few seconds to see if the explosion would flush anybody from the buildings. If anyone ran out, they’d drop them, and then go in. Having lifted their quarry, they’d make their way back to the boat cache, but one of them would create a diversion by running off along the airfield road and putting down some rounds towards the strip, as if the rescue party were fighting a battle in that direction. Then, with most of the locals distracted by the fire on shipboard, they’d slip out to sea in the Geminis for a rendezvous with the Endeavor at pre-arranged coordinates.

At 1730 Merv called Tony on the satcom.

‘All set,’ he reported. ‘We’ve got it hacked. We’ll go in at zero-three-zero-zero local, if that suits.’

‘That’ll suit just fine,’ Tony answered. ‘I’ll pass the word along.’

‘Thanks. And maybe you can ask our cabbies to be at the rendezvous by zero-four-three-zero.’

‘Your cabbies?’

‘Our cab-drivers.’

‘OK. They’ll be there. Happy landings.’