Land of Fire Part 8

"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 b.a.l.l.s 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 quant.i.ties 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 insh.o.r.e, 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 pa.s.sive 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sive 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.

"Argentine naval rescue craft," the skipper explained for our benefit. "Built by our own Vosper-Thorneycroft for the Dutch navy and sold by them to Argentina. Dual-use capability that's to say, sonar-equipped for insh.o.r.e ASW. We've tracked her before. Probably out after a fishing boat in trouble. Let's hope she wraps it up smartly."

An air-sea rescue boat could be a threat to us if it came close enough, though, and this one was fitted out for anti-submarine warfare. And if there was a rescue launch out, there was a possibility that it was backed up by a helicopter overhead. Even if that weren't the case, it would be a simple matter for her to fix us with her sonar while radioing Rio Grande for aircraft with depth charges and torpedoes.

And then abruptly, without warning, somewhere in the boat an alarm pealed.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

The noise was so loud we almost leapt out of our skins. It seemed incredible that it would not be audible out on the patrol boat.

"Bridge," the captain snapped into a microphone. "What's the problem?"

"Forward turbine room reports smoke, sir. Lots of it."

"Shut watertight doors. Fire party close up."

"Aye, aye, sir. Shutting all watertight doors and hatches. Fire party close up," the officer of the watch repeated.

All of us on the team had been through this drill before in the course of exercises. Fire is a constant and deadly hazard underwater. Modern subs are stuffed full of electric cabling and plastic insulation that if heated can generate deadly toxic fumes.

Heavy steel hatches slammed shut, clunking home like safe doors, isolating the upper deck from the bridge area. A seaman appeared in the door and tossed smoke masks into our laps and told us to be ready to put them on if ordered.

We were trapped in a narrow undersea canyon in shallow water on a hostile coast with a patrol vessel bearing down on us, and now the boat was on fire. In short, the situation was f.u.c.ked up. I was willing to bet, though, that the captain would be as calm and collected as if he were tied to a pier at Devonport dock. He couldn't fight the fire personally; other people would do that. They were well trained and could be relied upon to do their job in a speedy and efficient manner.

In the event of a fire, then the water- and smoke tight doors would confine it to a single compartment on the lower deck. Water sprays would dowse the flames, while a fire party equipped with breathing equipment and extinguishers tackled the source of the blaze. If necessary, and should the flames prove too fierce, then the captain would give the order "Execute CO2 drench' to flood the compartment with carbon dioxide gas, stifling the oxygen from the fire. It would be bad news for anyone in the compartment without breathing equipment, but that was why he was commanding a nuclear submarine and why the men trusted him because he had the guts to do it.

The alarm was still shrilling. Why didn't someone switch the b.a.s.t.a.r.d thing off? There was a pounding on the locked hatch in the pa.s.sage; a brief exchange over the intercom and the hatch was opened to allow a party of seamen through with tools and extinguishers. They went aft through the bridge area and clattered down the ladder to help fight the flames on the lower deck. Briefly through the open hatch I saw the operations centre functioning as before. The sonar operators' attention would still be fixed on their job of tracking the patrol vessel.

Josh glanced at me, a bit pale. If there's one thing we hate in the SAS it's having to sit on our hands in a crisis. "What d'you reckon?" he said. "An overheated bearing?"

"More likely an electrical fault," Jock told him casually. "A bundle of wires heat up, reach flashpoint and bing! Smoke alarm."

"Yeah, that's what I figured," said Josh.

I smiled inwardly. He reminded me of myself at his age fresh-faced, eager, but a bit apprehensive. This was his first time on a real combat mission. Now things were starting to go wrong he was trying to keep the nervousness out of his voice. I wanted to rea.s.sure him, then I remembered how angry it used to make me when Andy tried to do the same to me all those years ago. I was beginning to understand what it meant to feel like an older brother.

The alarm bell cut out suddenly. Over the intercom we could hear the operators calling down the range to the patrol boat. The distance was opening up again as the boat turned. Had it overrun the mouth of the canyon and put its helm over to circle round and pick up the scent again? I tried to picture where the forward turbine room was in relation to the reactor. I've never trusted that radioactive stuff. They had given us little radiation badges to wear, but all they did was measure the size of the dose that killed you. Interesting to the scientists, but not a f.u.c.k of a lot of help otherwise.

"If that fire spreads to the reactor room then we're in mega-trouble," n.o.bby observed, as if reading my thoughts.

"Us and all this end of South America," said Doug.

Surely someone would be able to shut down the reactor before we all blew up or melted or whatever it was a runaway nuclear reactor did. But if we did manage a controlled shutdown, that would still leave us lying on the bottom of the canyon without power. At a rough estimate we currently had just under 200 feet of water over our heads.

Departing a submarine via the escape hatch is something I have had to do as part of my SAS training. It is not a method recommended for the claustrophobic. There are two escape hatches, one either end of the boat. In our case we would have to use the forward hatch located in the torpedo storage area. It consists of a steel tube just wide enough for one man to crawl up into, with a watertight hatch at each end. You open the bottom hatch and climb in with an emergency air breathing set. The lower hatch is then closed and the tube flooded. It's pitch black inside, and the experience is like being buried alive and drowned simultaneously. If all goes well the pressure within the tube equals the water pressure outside and the top hatch can be opened. You climb out, pull the inflation cord on your life jacket and swim up to the surface.

That's the theory. There are a number of things that can f.u.c.k up, most of which involve getting stuck in the tube and running out of air. The procedure is so dangerous even submariners rarely practise it. It's better than drowning or suffocating in a disabled submarine but not much.

Even if we made it to the surface, it wasn't as though our troubles would be over. We were still ten miles out from the sh.o.r.e at night in near-polar waters, without boats in a force-seven gale. Our survival suits would give us only limited warmth. I envisaged the winds blowing our bodies ash.o.r.e after we had died of hypothermia.

I was wondering if the fire was accidental. If the salmonella outbreak at Stanley could be part of a biological attack, then it would certainly be one h.e.l.l of a coincidence for the one submarine present at the time to catch fire. On the other hand, why plant an incendiary when a high explosive would do the job better? None of it made sense.

We went back to our cabin. There was nothing we could do to help and we'd only get in the way. n.o.bby Clark cracked a joke about being roasted or boiled. Jock grinned at him and went on studying his map. Kiwi was reading a paperback; he seemed completely unconcerned. The rest of us lay on our bunks or fiddled with our equipment.

There was the ominous thud of a small explosion from somewhere down below.

"Air bottle going up," said Doug.

"Steam pipe fracture more like," said someone else.

The alarm bell resumed and was joined by another with an alternating note. The Argies would have to be deaf not to hear the racket. Jock yawned with elaborate unconcern and looked at his watch. "Seven o'clock. Another two hours to go. Well, I hope the Navy get things under control in time for us to go ash.o.r.e on schedule."

The hatch outside was unlatched again and more people could be heard coming through. A waft of smoke reached us. Doug said that this showed they had the fire under control and were reopening the hatches. "Or else," n.o.bby suggested brightly, 'the back end of the boat is burning and the mate lots are jumping ship."

The bells and sirens continued to sound intermittently. We could hear equipment being dragged about and sailors shouting to one another. There was no sign of panic that I could make out. Kiwi laid down his book and glanced across at Jock, one eyebrow raised. I saw Jock shake his head slightly. All we could do was wait.

The door to the pa.s.sage opened and a young officer stuck his head in. "Don't want to cause alarm, but the captain just wanted to check that you chaps are all familiar with our escape drill."

"You mean underwater escape? "Jock said. "Everyone here has done the course. Some of us," he nodded in the direction of Doug and myself, 'have more experience than others."

"Excellent. If it does become necessary, your departure station will be in the torpedo room forward. Just a precaution, you understand, so you know where to go if you have to." He cast an eye at our berg ens "I should try to take as little as possible if I were you."

I told myself that this was just procedure. If the situation got that bad we would still have residual power left in the stand-by batteries sufficient to blow the tanks and bring us to the surface. But that would effectively mean surrendering the ship to the Argentines. The captain would rather die.

It was getting hotter in the cabin and the air quality was noticeably deteriorating. The captain must have switched off the air conditioners to prevent smoke from circulating through the rest of the boat. On a submarine fumes can kill quickly. Battery compartments and electrical wiring release toxic vapours when they burn and portable oxygen sets provide only a few minutes' breathable air.

n.o.bby cracked open the door to our cabin. "What's happening, mate?" he called cheerily to a seaman. "Are we sunk yet?"

"Nah," came the reply. "Just the f.u.c.king engineers set their grots alight." The fire, the mate lot told us, had begun in a storeroom on the engine deck, next to the turbines. Lagging on a lubricant feed pipe had suddenly caught ablaze. No one knew how it happened. There was no flame source nearby. Equally inexplicably the sprinklers in the compartment failed to function. Flames spread through air vents into the turbine room. Huge volumes of smoke made it difficult to isolate the source of the blaze. At one point the heat was so intense it had cracked a steam pipe. Fortunately a courageous rating turned off the valve before major damage was done. At one point it had looked as if the blaze might go critical. Luckily the rear bulkheads held and sprinklers in neighbouring compartments kept the heat down and prevented a flashover.

The lights went out, leaving only an orange emergency bulb in the ceiling. From time to time the hatch nearby would clang open, letting in fresh draughts of smoke. We could hear more feet on the ladders, calls over the intercom for a medical team, and the sounds of an injured man being removed to the sick bay.

Meanwhile we still had the patrol vessel to worry about. We had heard over the intercom that the sonar trace was continuing on the same heading. The range was now down to 8000 yards, four nautical miles but after an anxious few minutes it started to open up again. Evidently while the soot-blackened fire parties fought to bring the blaze under control, the sonar operators had continued calmly at their posts, listening to the engine sounds and computing the track.

If the patrol boat was conducting her own sonar search, she must have picked us up by now. We were making enough noise to be heard at twice the range. Maybe the walls of the canyon were confusing the return signal. Or maybe she was hanging back, waiting for an armed helicopter to join the hunt. If we came to periscope depth and stuck up an air mast for ventilation they would spot it on radar.

I was sweating in my survival suit but couldn't take it off. I might need it in a hurry. The lights came back on, which cheered us, but although someone had restored the circuits the ventilation stayed shut down. After a while the air quality became even worse as the hatches below were opened up again. But it was a sign the flames must be finally out. A nauseating c.o.c.ktail of fumes eddied through the boat until the captain at last gave the order for the air conditioning to be switched on to scrub the atmosphere.

n.o.bby went out to see what was happening. The submarine was in a filthy state. The lower deck was running with water and foam and powder residue. There were ash and smoke stains on bulkheads and overhead panels. Half a dozen men had been injured, two with serious burns. We had full power available on the turbines again so if necessary we could come up to periscope depth, find room to turn around and make a run for the open sea. At least we weren't going to be frazzled by radiation or poisoned by smoke or drowned!

The launch didn't come any nearer, though. A few minutes later sonar announced that she had broken off the search and was heading away south along the sh.o.r.e in the direction of Rio Grande. Either she had found what she was looking for or else had given up.

Even so the skipper didn't move. For the next two hours we stayed just where we were. His patience was immense. He set his men to work cleaning up the ship, and while they did he waited. For us it was intensely frustrating. All we could do was wait, with nothing to do but speculate over whether the mission was blown. Doug, of course, took out his boredom on the rest of us. Even Kiwi got scratchy, telling him to b.u.t.ton his mouth before he got it shut for him permanently.

At nine-thirty half an hour after our planned drop-off time with no sound detected by the sonar, the skipper ordered the tanks blown gently to bring us up to periscope depth. Briefly we stuck an ESM aerial up to check for radar emissions. If there was a helicopter up there still searching we wanted to know about it.

A few minutes later a message came down for Jock saying he was wanted in the operations centre. He was gone some minutes. When he returned he was grim. He shut the door of the cabin.

"This is the position," he said. "The patrol boat has gone. The fire is out. The skipper says his people can't be certain but it looks very like sabotage. An incendiary device inserted behind the lagging of a pipe in the machinery area. Nothing else could explain a fire of such intensity at that location." Every inch of the sub was being searched now for further firebombs, he added.

"How does the captain think it was brought aboard, this device?" I asked.

"During replenishment back in the UK most probably. There aren't many other moments when an outsider gets access to a sub. That's a matter for the security people. It was probably just luck that it detonated when it did. The point is the damage is serious but not critical. The reactor is unaffected but power is reduced. We can still make it back to the Falklands."

"And the mission?" Doug said. "Do we abort?"

"That's up to us. We are a mile from the drop-off point now. The captain is prepared to surface to let us off but he says he can't promise to remain on station indefinitely to bring us out again. The possibility of damage to the steam plant means he must return home for repairs. He can't hang about here waiting for us. If we choose to go ahead, we'll be on our own. No backup, no exfiltration."

I looked at Doug. "In short, it means a walk-out like last time."

We could talk and vote on this but it was Jock's decision. The SAS is more democratic than most units in the army but at the end of the day it is a fighting force. We obey orders. If the damage to the submarine was deliberate, that made it all the more urgent to put a recon party ash.o.r.e to find out what the Argentines were preparing.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

I could hear compressed air hissing into the tanks, indicating that Superb's black conning tower was rising out of the waves. The submarine continued to surface, pumping water ballast out. A seaman opened a hatch in the base of the tower and clipped it back, and a sudden draught of cold air struck my face. The sub's casing diver stepped out on to the deck and beckoned to me to follow. He wore a dry suit with a tiny LED torch strapped to his head with a red filter so as not to destroy our night vision. It was his job to prepare the Gemini inflatables for release and guide us into them.

The lighting was almost invisible a few metres away. With all the spray and water in the air we were pretty much undetectable. Our sonar wasn't picking up any noise, but there could be a boat lurking out there with its engines off. We didn't dare turn on our radars for a sweep for fear of alerting the Argentines. That was why the captain was keen to float us off quickly and get the h.e.l.l out of here.

I trod out carefully on to the casing. Waves were slapping up against the submarine's smooth hull, flinging up sheets of spray that drenched us instantly. It felt b.l.o.o.d.y freezing and I was thankful for my survival suit. The crew had rigged rails to help us, with safety lines clipped to stanchions in case anyone fell overboard. The lines were a mixed blessing: if, say, a helicopter materialised out of the night, then the sub would have to crash dive, and anyone who didn't have time to cast off his line would be dragged down with it.

The two Gemini boats were stored in wells in the submarine's deck casing, their engines encased in dry-bags. The engines were silenced the exhausts ran out underwater which reduced speed but cut noise by a h.e.l.l of a lot. Running silent we could sneak up on a beach at night and not be heard by anyone a hundred yards off.

It was a complex procedure extracting the boats from the deck wells in the darkness. The casing diver opened the gas-bottles that automatically inflated the air cells, then stripped the dry-bags from the engines, fitted them on and screwed them down. Next our kit was loaded in and strapped down, with important items like guns and paddles secured by lines. Then the boats were slid off one at a time and the engines started. An officer leant down to give us a last-minute weather report. Sea conditions were deteriorating. The sooner we got started the better. Jock was checking the GPS heading. On a night with no stars and heavy seas it was vital to get properly orientated at the start. In this case we were being advised to offset to the north by a few degrees to avoid finding ourselves carried down into Rio Grande by wind and currents.

It was lucky we had Kiwi on the team. His parent unit was the Royal Marines and he had originally qualified with their Special Boat Service. The SBS train off the west coast of Scotland in all weathers, practising exit and recovery from submarines in deep water or parachuting with canoes into open sea and paddling in to the sh.o.r.e. They think nothing of thirty-mile non-stop paddles. Tonight's operation would be a piece of cake to Kiwi. The incredible thing about him was that he'd been the runt of the litter; he had three brothers all bigger than him. What a family. Dave was twenty-four and the nicest guy you could meet. Was it the Maori blood in him that made him simply indestructible?

The GPS fix put us about eleven miles out. GPS has made life a lot easier for special forces it showed us our position down to the nearest metre. The captain had brought us closer in than he had promised, which was decent of him. That meant a total distance to the sh.o.r.e of around thirteen miles, allowing for tide effect. I doubted we'd be able to average more than about eight knots, so we could reckon on being in the water for an hour and a half to two hours. We were aiming for a landfall in a sheltered lagoon protected by a sand bar across the entrance. From there, if all went according to plan, we would strike inland to rendezvous with the agent sent to meet us about three kilometres behind the beach.

It was a chilly few minutes, getting ourselves sorted out, making sure our weapons were secure. The waves slamming against the sub's hull were kicking us up and down through four and five metres. Josh clambered into the lead boat with me and Kiwi. n.o.bby Clark and Doug were following behind with Jock. Finally we got the signal from Jock in the second boat to say they were all set. I had a torch with a green filter and flashed back acknowledgement, then cast off the warp holding us to Superb's side. Kiwi let the engine have some juice and we pulled out from the lee of the hull into open water. We were on our way.

It was a wild trip. We were riding waves the size of houses. The official definition offeree seven on the Beaufort scale is for wind speeds up to thirty-four knots, with heaped seas and white foam from breaking waves blowing in streaks. Four metres is the average wave height. The extreme peaks can spike the graph at anything from fifty to a hundred per cent higher. In fact, wave-height depends on the fetch that is, the distance over which the wind has travelled. Distances in the South Atlantic are vast. Antarctic storms can generate swells that measure half a mile or more between crests and reach thirty knots. They hit the Falkland Islands as breakers fifteen metres high.

The skipper had told us that he would wait at the departure point for two hours exactly. If we got into trouble on the run-in and had to abort before reaching sh.o.r.e, then we could turn around and signal for him to pick us up. It was immediately evident however that putting about in these seas was a complete impossibility. If we turned broadside on to one of these waves, we would broach and be flipped end-over-end, buried and broken. We had no choice but to keep on going.

We were all wearing heavy-duty survival gear. And we were frozen. The cold numbed my limbs so it was all I could do to hang on in the boat. Josh was a hooded silhouette barely discernible across the thwart in the darkness and spray. I was thankful we had an SBS man along. Kiwi was gripping the tiller bar and peering through the spray into the waves. G.o.d knows how he could see in the darkness, but he steered us effortlessly up the rollers and down the other side. The only way you get through the SBS selection course is if you enjoy this kind of life. Kiwi had told me that the R.A.F helicopter rescue hate the SBS, because they are always getting called out by civilians who've seen some mad swimmers miles out at sea in a storm and when they get there it's the SBS who wave them away and carry on happily with their exercise.