“Hello?”
“Hello, Jay,” he said.
“I think you must have a wrong number.”
“Oh?”
There was a long pause at the other end. Reeve watched the units on his card click away. The voice came back on.
“Hey, Philosopher, is that you?”
“Yes.”
“What’s new, pal?”
Like they’d spoken only last week and had parted the best of friends. Like Jay wasn’t in charge of a band of mercenaries with orders to hunt Reeve down and terminate him. Like they were having a conversation.
“I thought you were dead,” Reeve stated.
“You mean you wish I was.”
“Every day,” Reeve said quietly.
Jay laughed. “Where are you, pal?”
“I’m at Orly.”
“Yeah? Then you must have met Mickey.”
“He gave me your number.”
“I hope he charged you for it.”
“No, I charged him.”
“Well, I knew you’d be tough, Gordon.”
“You don’t know how tough. Tell your paymasters that. Tell them I’m taking this personally. Not a job, not a mission, just personal.”
“Gordon, you’re not really at Orly are you? Don’t make me run all the way out there.”
“Maybe we’ll talk again.”
“I don’t think so, Philosopher.”
And Jay put the phone down first.
Reeve took the Tube into central London.
He thought about Jay. Paddling ashore with him in darkness, hitting the coast just south of Viamonte. Their target, Rio Grande, was twenty miles to the north. They were on the Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, the western half of which belonged to Chile. If their escape route back to Viamonte was compromised, their best bet was to head west. A forty-mile walk from Rio Grande would take them into Chile.
Jay was carrying the transmitter, Reeve most of the rest of their kit. It was a 100-pound load. Additionally, he carried his M16 rifle and 200 rounds. The M16 came fitted with an M203 grenade launcher. The other armaments consisted of a 66mm antitank missile, fifteen HE grenades, a 9mm Browning, and an assortment of SAS flash-bangs, more for cover than anything else.
He carried binoculars, a night-sight and tripod-mounted 60x telescope, a sleeping bag and quilted trousers, a change of clothing, Arctic dried rations and compo rations, plus a hexamine stove for cooking the latter.
And the song Jay had been singing had somehow stuck in his head, so he couldn’t think straight.
They’d begun their march under cover of darkness, aiming to complete it before dawn. That first night, they knew they probably wouldn’t reach a good spot for an OP. They’d just find a good hiding place, maybe making a scrape and lying doggo all the next day under their netting and camouflage. And that was what they did. They maintained radio silence throughout. If only Jay was as easy to shut up…
“Fucking Argies better not expect me to eat their scummy corned beef again. You know how they make that stuff? I read about it in the Sun or somewhere. Makes sausages look like best fillet steak, I swear to God, Philosopher.”
He was a good-looking man, a bit heavy in the face, but with short fair hair and greeny-blue eyes. His looks were his best feature. Reeve didn’t like him and didn’t know too many men who did. He was a braggart, cruel and bullying; he followed orders, but always with his own agenda hidden in there somewhere. Reeve didn’t know if he was a good soldier or not; he just knew he didn’t like him.
But there was something else about Jay. Early on in the conflict, he’d been part of a team dropped by Wessex helicopter onto the Fortuna Glacier. It was an important reconnaissance mission. They landed in near-whiteout conditions and sixty-mile-per-hour winds. Snow turned their guns to ice. They somehow had to cross the glacier. In the first five hours they progressed less than half a mile. To save them from freezing to death, they erected tents, but these blew away. Finally, the order came to abandon the mission. A helicopter sent in to lift the men out crashed in the blizzard conditions, killing three. A second chopper eventually succeeded in getting everyone out. Most of the survivors were suffering from exposure and frostbite. Jay’s cheek had been slashed in the crash and required seven stitches.
He should have been out of action for days, weeks even, but insisted he wanted straight back in. The command applauded his readiness, and a psychologist could see no aftereffects from the ordeal. But Jay wasn’t the same. His mind was on revenge, on killing Argentines. You could see it behind his eyes.
“You know, Philosopher,” Jay said in the scrape that first night, “you may not be the most popular man in the regiment, but I think you’re all right. Yes, you’ll do me.”
Reeve bit off a question. He’s just trying to wind me up, he thought. That’s all. Let it go. The mission’s all that counts.
Jay seemed to read his thoughts. There was a roaring in the sky east of them. “Rio Grande’s getting plenty of action tonight. Wasn’t that a film, Rio Grande? John Wayne and Dean Martin.”
“Just John Wayne,” Reeve told him.
“Now Dean Martin, there’s an actor for you.”
“Yes, a fucking awful one.”
“You’re wrong. Ever see Matt Helm? Or those comedies he did? Great actor.”
Reeve just shook his head.
“Don’t shake your head, I’m serious. You can’t let anybody else have a say, can you? That’s why you’re not popular. I’m only telling you for your own good.”
“Fuck off, Jay.” He liked to be called Jay. Most of the Regiment were known by their first names, but not Jay. He liked people to use his surname. Nobody knew why. He called Reeve the Philosopher after finding him reading Nietzsche. The nickname had stuck, though Reeve hated it.
The second evening, they set up the OP properly with a half-decent view of the airfield. That night, they sent out their first signals, then moved again double-quick, an eight-man Argentinian patrol heading in their direction.
“They were fast,” Jay conceded, carrying the half-packed transmitter.
“Weren’t they though,” said Reeve, almost slipping under the weight of his rucksack. They must have picked up the transmission straight off. It had been no more than a burst of a few seconds. Whatever direction-finding equipment they had down at the airport, it was earning its keep. Jay had sent a “burst transmission”: a coded message, its contents predetermined, which could be transmitted to sea in a split second. Prior to transmission, he’d keyed the scrambled message on a machine which looked like a small electronic typewriter. In theory, the Argentines shouldn’t have been able to use the direction finder on them given the brevity of the transmission. Theory was a wonderful thing, but fuck all use on the ground. The Argentines obviously had some new bit of kit, something they hadn’t been told about, something that Green Slime-the Intelligence Corps-had missed.
There was aircraft noise overhead as they moved. Skyhawks, Mirage jets. Earlier there had been Pucaras, too. The Argentine Air Force was keeping itself busy. Both men knew they should be noting the flights in and out, ready to send the information on. But they were too busy moving.
The main problem was the terrain. As with most airfields-and with good reason-there weren’t many hills around. Flat grassland and brush with some outcrops, this was their territory. Hard territory in which to remain undiscovered for any length of time. They shifted a couple of miles and scraped themselves another hide. They were farther away from the airfield, but still able to see what was flying out. Reeve stood guard-rather, lay guard-while Jay got some sleep. They didn’t dare brew up for fear of the steam being seen. Besides, you never knew what a heat-seeking device could find. So Reeve drank some cold water and ate raw rations. He was carrying out conversations in his head, all of them in Spanish. It might come in handy later. Maybe they could bluff… no, his Spanish wasn’t that good. But he could use it if they were caught alive. He could show willing. Not that he was obliged to, not under the Geneva Convention, but then Geneva was a long way from here…