"I have no doubt that this will deepen the crisis, but we shall be able to perform damage control. We can claim it was an accident of some nature, a communications breakdown. Possibly we can shift some of the blame onto the American vessel itself.
"Afterwards, we can issue a formal apology and an offer to make reparations. The important thing is that we will be able to get those supplies through to our garrisons and the Americans will be unable to stop us."
"And what if they do not accept this apology, Mr. President? What if reparations are not enough!"
"Even if this is the case, Aldo, the San Martin Peninsula will belong to us and the Antarctic winter will have locked and barred the gate. Even a superpower such as the United States will be unable to contest that."
"The winter will not protect Argentina itself, sir," Arco said quietly.
"No, General, but world opinion will. During our attempt to reclaim the Malvinas, Great Britain did not strike at our military installations on the mainland, even when it was to their military advantage to do so. They knew that such an escalation would turn the diplomatic tide against them.
"The North Americans know this as well. Those actions they can take, the trade and economic embargoes, possibly a blockade of our coasts, we have expected these things and we have already made preparations to deal with them."
Sparza looked around his circle of advisers. "Gentlemen, when we were forced to conceive of this venture, we knew that we would be taking grave risks. However, we also knew that if we did not, everything our nation has worked for and dreamed of in the Antarctic for sixty-five years would be lost. This situation has not changed. If any one of you has some new option to present, I will listen."
His advisers could offer only silence.
The Argentine President nodded. "Very well, then. We simply must dare a little more. Admiral Fouga, you will order the supply convoy and its escort to sail upon verification of the sinking of the American destroyer. General Arco, you will plan and execute the attack on this warship, the Cunningham, as soon as possible."
The conference concluded and its attendees dispersed. As the Chiefs of Staff of the Army and Air Force descended the main stairs of the Casa Rosada, Juan Orchal glanced across at his compatriot.
"You do not look happy, Marcello."
"I'm not. It's happening again, Juan. Just like in '82, we are doing it to ourselves again. First, we assume that everything will go just as we have planned, and it does not. Then we assume that we will not have a fight on our hands and we do."
"Yes, but it's still not quite the same. We have learned a few things since Port Stanley, my friend."
"Maybe. But there we were only tweaking the tail of the lion. Here, I suspect we may be biting an elephant in the ass."
"I know that you were never as ardent about Conquistador South as some of the rest of us, Marcello. But you agreed to the strike commit at the last planning session. What else can be done now?"
"Nothing, I suppose. Nothing but to live with it." As they reached the foot of the stairway, General Arco felt a sharp stab of pain across his lower back. He recognized the spasm as the flare-up of a spinal injury he had received many years ago, ejecting from a Rapier-blasted Skyhawk over San Carlos Bay. The Air Force officer grimly found himself wondering if its return might be an omen.
19
Some meteorologists theorize that the Antarctic continent doesn't have weather in the conventional sense. They believe that the prevailing South Polar climatic patterns are actually one titanic superstorm that has been raging continuously for the last ten thousand years-sometimes with greater intensity, sometimes with lesser, but perennially since the last ice age.
Occasionally, though, rents and eddies form within its structure, and for the moment the USS Cunningham cruised within one such patch of calm.
Corkscrewing easily through a steel-blue sea, the big destroyer ran beneath an open sky lightly streaked with frost-colored mare's tails. Twice that day, ice had been sighted to the south, great flattopped burgs riding low on the horizon, sea smoke of their own creation swirling mystically around them.
The winds carried the mark of the Pole as well. They were the katabatics, gusting in from the southwest, fresh off the Antarctic Plateau. Chill, pure, oxygen rich, and seemingly denser than common air, breathing them was comparable to breathing the outflow of some icy mountain spring.
Amanda Garrett relished the experience. Parka-clad, she had spent most of the morning out on the wings of the bridge, enjoying the sight of the snowy foam peeling away from the cutting edge of her ship's prow. However, the clear weather also brought with it a faint feeling of unease.
"Hey, Skipper," Ken Hiro's voice sounded in her headset. "Have you decided about diverting south under that next storm front yet?"
Amanda glanced up at the glowing sun and hesitated. They had been running under heavy weather for almost two continuous days, and certain maintenance tasks were best done on a stable deck. Besides, a rest would be good for all hands.
"Negative, Ken. Hold your course. We'll be socked in again soon enough."
Two hundred and forty miles to the northeast, over Isla Grande, the fair weather had already broken. Heavy cloud cover and turbulence were complicating an already difficult air-to-air refueling operation. Flying under total radio and radar silence, a flight of four Fuerza Aérea Rafales had located and made rendezvous with their C-130 Hercules tanker aircraft as it churned along just above the overcast.
The flight elements were armed alike. The leaders mounted a drop tank beneath each wing and a slender, cigar-shaped pod on their centerline. The wingmen carried a single larger tank beneath their belly and a pair of 1,000-pound laser-guided bombs on their inboard pylons.
The first element tucked in under the elderly Lockheed. Guided in by light signals from the pump boss's station amidships, the fighters skillfully coupled into the refueling drogues trailing aft from the tanker's wingtip pods.
As they did so, a second strike flight closed and joined up. Two dark blue and gray Aeronaval Tornadoes. Like pale remora clinging to a shark's belly, each carried a brace of Exocet antishipping missiles.
"Hey, Captain." This time, Hiro appeared in the bridge-wing hatchway. "I think you'd better come take a look at this."
"Sure, Ken, what have you got?"
She followed him back into the wheelhouse, flipping back the hood of her parka as she did. Inside, she found her exec and Vince Arkady intently studying the largest of the monitors mounted above the bridge windscreen.
"We've got Lieutenant Beltrain on the squawk box from CIC. He says he has a funny contact on the board."
"What's so amusing about it, Dix?" she inquired, raising her voice slightly to trip the sound-activated microphone of the com system.
"It's funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha, ma'am. Have a look at your bridge repeaters."
The flatscreen showed a computer stylization of the southernmost tip of South America and the Drake Passage environs, the Duke's position hack glowing blue in its center. Half a dozen other identified and innocuous surface contacts were scattered across the display, none of which were within a hundred miles of the destroyer. In the sky to the north, a Chilean passenger jet was descending toward Punta Arenas. To the northwest, "Pedro," the Argentine Atlantique shadower aircraft, circled repetitively. To the northeast, there was a third airborne target.
"It's that new slow mover, ma'am. The one coded Contact Charley. He came into our coverage area from the north, turned southwest at Isla Grande beacon, and aimed himself right at us. Since then, two separate flights of fast movers have overtaken and joined up with him. Radar cross-section variance indicates a lot of close-in maneuvering, probably an air-to-air refueling operation."