Land of Fire Part 17

"Come on," I told her, dragging her up the slope.

"Where are we going?"

"To find Major Oliveras. Now hurry." It was just possible that Oliveras might have a key on him. I also had hopes of finding his pistol. With a weapon we might hold up a car and get a ride out of the country. The border was only an hour away.

We scrambled up the face of the ravine, clawing at the loose shale with our hands. We found Oliveras twenty-five metres up. He was not a pretty sight. He had been flung out of the Jeep and fallen a long way. His neck was broken, and I wondered if I had done that when I kicked him. If so, no regrets. I checked his pockets swiftly. There was the lighter, which I took, but no pistol it must have fallen out somewhere and no key to the handcuffs.

"We need to get out of here. That convoy will be coming across the bridge."

"I need a drink," she said.

"Later," I told her. "Unless you want to face your interrogators again."

Pulling her after me, I set off westwards along the riverbank. If we could reach the fir trees we would at least be out of sight.

The wreck had rolled in under the bridge; it might not be seen by following vehicles, in which case it was possible that Oliveras' disappearance might escape notice for some little while. Then they would have to search the road to find the Jeep. All that might take hours if we were lucky.

We had only gone a few paces when Concha let out a cry and pointed. She had spotted Oliveras' pistol lying in the dirt. This was a piece of luck. I stuffed it in my waistband and immediately felt better. At least now we had a weapon.

After ten minutes of hard scrambling we were inside the belt of trees. They were tall and gloomy, great timbers stretching to the sky, covering scant undergrowth. Our feet crunched on a carpet of pine cones and broken twigs. Occasionally we had to clamber over rows of trunks felled by the wind. There was no animal life, and we moved in silence broken only by the noise of our own footfalls and the sighing of the branches overhead.

We had been walking silently for around twenty minutes when we came to a stream running down towards the river, and stopped to drink and wash the dirt from our faces. It was icy cold but it washed the dust from our throats. I wiped some over my face and head and felt better.

I was trying to formulate a plan. In case of just this sort of emergency we had agreed with Seb a special rendezvous point, the RV, by the ruins of an old copper mine close to the railroad, about two kilometres north-east of the town. Anyone becoming lost or separated during the mission was supposed to make for this RV and wait there. Seb would check the place every day between six and seven pm.

Concha guessed I was deciding what to do. "I have friends still in the area," she suggested. "They would help us perhaps."

I thought about it and shook my head I didn't want to trust anyone I didn't know. If we could only reach the RV we would find food there and perhaps shelter. a.s.suming Seb was still able to move around freely, I was sure he would keep the rendezvous.

It was around ten o'clock in the morning there were at least six hours to go till dusk. The army would undoubtedly be out searching for us before long, and they had the advantages of helicopters and vehicles at the first sighting a stick of airborne commandos would be dropped in to round us up. At all costs, therefore, we had to stay out of sight. If I had been on my own I would have struck out for the border and trusted to my survival training to get me through, but shackled to this woman that was impossible.

I wasn't sure how far I could trust her anyway. However badly the marines had treated her, she plainly had no great love for the British. If she knew I was trying to frustrate an invasion of the Falklands she might try to turn me in along with herself.

Again I thought about running for the border. That was what the Argies would expect me to do, so it would be better to take the opposite direction back south, across the river and towards the town. If I could keep the rendezvous with Seb he should be able to get a message out to the islands warning them of the invasion plan.

I dragged Concha down the hill, back towards the river. We needed to find a way across. I searched along the bank until we came to a narrow bend, where I weighed the situation up. The river was about ten metres wide, fast flowing but not too deep. We could wade it, I decided.

"Collect sticks," I told her. "Hurry."

"Sticks? What for? Are you going to make a fire?"

"No, a raft," I said. "We're going to swim the river."

She gaped at me, then her gaze swung back to the water, racing between the high banks. "You are crazy. No one could get across there. We will drown."

"Not with me along you won't, girlie."

She glared at me, white with anger. "I am not your girlie," she said. "And I tell you we will drown."

Ignoring her, I went about gathering a bundle of dry wood and lashing the pieces together as best I could with bits of ivy and bark. When I judged I had enough, I marched Concha down to the bank. I sat her down, undid my boots and started peeling off my trousers. She stared at me, bug-eyed.

"Get your kit off," I told her.

"What?"

"Get undressed. We'll wrap up our clothes tight to keep the water out and put them on top of the raft."

A look of horror came over her face. "Take off my clothes? You are not serious!"

The water looked very cold and dangerous; I didn't blame her for being scared, but I hadn't time to argue. "Hurry," I told her. "Otherwise you won't have anything dry to put on when you reach the other side and you'll catch pneumonia."

"And if I refuse?" she said stiffly.

"If you refuse, I put you on the raft and carry you over. You'll get twice as wet and a lot madder but like it or not you are going across. We don't have time to f.u.c.k about."

She stared at me for a long moment. She must have seen I was deadly serious because finally she took a deep breath and sat down to unbuckle her boots. "This is how I am going to die -naked, drowned by a crude idiot of an English," she said bitterly. I liked the crude bit. It showed that I was getting to her.

It was impossible to undress completely linked together with handcuffs. The best we could do was to strip off our bottom halves and tug our jackets, shirts and underclothes down on to our shackled arms.

Naked, she was no longer the skinny teenager of the war years, but her figure had a litheness that would have taken my breath away if I hadn't been too intent on what we were doing. I shooed the image out of my head and concentrated on the task in hand.

I told her to put her boots back on to protect her feet from the stones in the river. I pulled my own kit off, and we wrapped the garments as well as we could, given that we couldn't get them over the handcuffs. Then we put everything on top of the raft.

"Just walk into the water steadily," I told her. "Don't fight the current. It will carry us across further down. If you get out of your depth, kick with your legs. Keep your head, hold on to me and I'll get us across."

She glanced down ruefully at the handcuffs linking us. "I have no choice," she said through chattering teeth.

Side by side we walked out into the river. It was bad, much worse than I had thought. Well before we reached the middle of the channel the water was up to my neck. It was freezing too I felt as if I had stepped into a solid block of ice and the cramp in my chest was terrifying. I remembered the time twenty years before when Andy had made us swim a river in the middle of the night. That had been rougher, but I had been part of a team then.

Concha was out of her depth already, paddling with her feet like a dog. The current was sweeping us along it in midstream, and I prayed a helicopter wasn't going to choose this moment to over-fly us. The other bank still seemed as far away as ever.

My feet were only just touching the bottom; this must have been the deepest part of the channel. Waves were swirling down on us, and I did my best to shield Concha with my body from the worst of them.

Just when I was beginning to think we would never make it, the riverbed began to shelve again we were nearing the far side. "Only a little further," I gasped.

But just then something huge and heavy struck me in the back. I lost my footing and the water closed over my head. Instinctively I opened my mouth to gasp for breath and felt icy water gushing into my throat. I fought to reach the surface with my free hand, but somehow I couldn't find it.

I could feel the strength ebbing from me. Darkness closed in on me from all sides. There was no pain, just a sensation of cold and numbness.

The next thing I knew, I was on my back and vomiting, and the vomit was gushing over my face and across my chest. I was lying in the mud on the sh.o.r.eline, and the woman Concha was kneeling on top of me, pumping my chest. Her body was blue with cold, and we were still handcuffed together, along with half our clothes.

"What the f.u.c.k happened?" I said weakly.

"A piece of wood, a log. It hit you on the back and you went under." Her breath was coming in gasps. She had been giving me mouth-to-mouth. For a woman of her size, hauling me out of the water must have taken some doing. She climbed off me and I hauled myself on to my knees. "Are you OK now?" she asked.

"Yeah, I'll be fine," I told her, even though I felt weak and ill. My back was sore too, I was freezing cold and my heart was beating ragged. But I was coming out of it.

"What happened to our kit?" I asked.

"Kit?"

"The raft? Did we lose it all in the river?"

"Oh no, when you fell under the water I kept hold and the current pushed us in to the sh.o.r.e."

I stood up and saw the raft with our trousers and stuff still on it, bobbing among the flotsam at the edge of the water. A keen wind was blowing and Concha was shivering. "Shake the water off yourself and jump around," I told her. "It'll warm you up."

I reached for the raft and pulled it ash.o.r.e. I was weak, but I had survived.

Concha was still standing shivering. I slapped her on the bottom to get her moving.

"Cabronl Don't you dare hit me!" she snarled, lashing out and catching me on the cheek with a bony fist.

At least I'd got her leaping about.

"Ahh!" she cried as the circulation began to return to her limbs. I told her the pain was a good sign. It meant she hadn't got frostbite. She said something savage in Spanish. "I was calling on G.o.d to strike you dead," she answered when I asked what it was.

"Get dressed," I said. "We've a lot of ground to cover and you can't do it naked. And if you want to take a p.i.s.s, now's the time because we're not going to be stopping for a while."

"Hijo de puta! I am not one of your stupid soldiers," she said. "Stop giving me orders."

Before I could think of a response we heard shouts from the woods on the other side of the river.

CHAPTER THIRTY.

I grabbed our clothes and pulled Concha towards the trees. Fifty metres in we found a hollow in the ground and flung ourselves down, out of sight. We dragged our clothes back on, yanking ill temperedly at one another as we struggled to b.u.t.ton ourselves up.

The enemy seemed to have got on to our trail even more quickly than I had feared. Maybe someone from the main convoy had noticed the gap in the railings where the Jeep went over.

I peered between the trunks of trees, but couldn't make out any figures on the far bank. It looked as if the pursuit had moved away to the north, the direction they would expect us to take.

Taking Concha by the arm, I hustled her up the slope to the top of the ravine.

Then we ran on, stumbling over tree roots and dead branches, the handcuffs biting into our wrists, till we came to the edge of the wooded area where we paused to get our breath back.

My body was warming up again after the river, but I was feeling deadbeat. I'd had no sleep for twenty-four hours and little food apart from a few chocolate bars wolfed down on the march. Concha looked in bad shape too. She leaned her back against a tree and closed her eyes.

It wasn't safe to remain this close to the crash.

Sooner or later someone might take it into their heads to search this side of the river. But attempting to move across country would expose us to the danger of being spotted from the air. Already I could hear the thud of helicopter blades in the distance.

I studied the landscape beyond the wood rolling pampas, tall gra.s.s and patches of scrub, with here and there a few isolated stands of crooked trees. The wind sighed in the long gra.s.s and made the stalks rattle. In the distance was what looked to be a fair-sized lake. Overhead the sky was darkening.

"There is a storm coming." Concha had opened her eyes again.

"Can you be sure?"

She jerked her chin at the sky. "You live down here, you recognise the signs. The clouds are full of snow."

That was good news if it was true. A blizzard would give us cover to move and keep the searchers off our backs.

"We'll wait here till the snow begins," I decided. "Then move out. So long as it's falling it'll cover our tracks."

She eyed me suspiciously. "Where are we making for?"

I hesitated I couldn't afford to give away too many details of my plan, such as it was. "If you fall in with enemy civilians," our escape-and-evasion instructor had emphasised, 'it's vital you establish immediate control." I had engineered our escape from the Jeep; I had swum us across the river it was necessary for me to demonstrate continuing leadership if I was to retain her allegiance. At the same time she knew the area far better than I did, and her help would be invaluable. That she was still talking about 'we' in this context was significant.

"We need to put ground between us and any pursuit," I told her. "The further we move out, the wider the search area becomes and the better our chances become."

"And then what? Do we just run until we drop dead from cold? This is the pampas in winter. How long do you think we can last outdoors?"

If we could survive till nightfall, I told her, then I had a friend who would help us.

She took this on board. "A friend. Someone who you have bought." Her lip curled in contempt. "Stupid English soldiers, what are you doing here? Don't we have enough troubles without you?"

This stung. "So you're with those marines back there who are preparing to start a war?"

"War," she sneered. "War is all you people care about. What do you English want with the Malvinas anyway? A few fragments of rock 12,000 kilometres away."

I was pretty much in agreement with her on that. All I said, though, was, "You were happy enough to do your bit then. A lot of British sailors died in the air attacks you helped guide in."

She glared at me. "A lot of Argentinians died too. My brother lost his life flying a bomber shot down by an American missile fired by an English pilot."

"My brother was killed too. Fifty miles from here, across the border in Chile. He thought he had made it out safely. I saw him die."

Her face twisted with bitterness. "Your brother, my brother ... I suppose you think that makes us equal. Well, it doesn't. It makes me hate you more than ever."

"As soon as it starts to snow," I told her. "We'll move out from here and head south."

The snow started a quarter of an hour later thin, bitter flakes falling fast, driven hard by the wind. We b.u.t.toned up our clothes and headed out from the wood, striking a course for the lake I had spotted. Concha still had her parka, but the Argies had taken my jacket and I was down to my camouflage fleece. The snow fell on our shoulders and swallowed our tracks swiftly.

At first the going was not too difficult. There seemed to be narrow paths, possibly worn by sheep in the past, winding across the pampas and threading in and out among the scrub bushes. Occasionally there were streams to leap across and once we had to wade a small river, but nothing as large as the one we had crossed earlier.

Concha followed me like a prisoner, wrapped in bitterness. When she spoke it was only to vent her hatred at me, the British, and soldiers in general. "We are pacifists," she told me fiercely, 'me and my friends." I did gather that the marine division had been deliberately stationed here to repress dissent. Concha's network was coordinating the southernmost resistance to the coup.

Her att.i.tude p.i.s.sed me off. Apparently it was OK for her group to interfere in the invasion plans, but not for the British. But to her, I presumed, I was just an ignorant soldier whose only purpose in life was killing people. Even if we could contact her supporters, there was no guarantee they wouldn't turn me in.

Twice we heard helicopters and burrowed into the gra.s.s till they had pa.s.sed but visibility was so poor there was little risk that we would be spotted. I could imagine the search parties cursing the weather.

With every hour that pa.s.sed they would have to widen their search area. Once we heard the wail of a locomotive. According to Concha the line ran just west of the road which suited us because we needed to find the emergency rendezvous, which was located close to the track.

The snow fell more thickly. The lake was further off than I had realised. Distances were hard to gauge in this flat landscape. I judged we had around two kilometres to go, and I worried about losing our direction. It's easy to become disorientated in snow when there are few reference points. We had to be able to navigate our way to the RV somehow, and that meant finding the railway track in the dark.