There was a knock at the chamber door. A muffled voice asked Albert if he was okay. It was Linda. She knocked again, and pushed the door open.
EPILOGUE: GRITTED TEETH
"The British won't fight.”
Comodoro Rivadavia Military Air Base was abuzz with activity. Fighters — Fighting Hawks, Mirages, and Pampas — flew south to form combat air patrols over Las Islas Malvinas. Transports, too, moved supplies and troops there. Dr. Amsel and President Valeria Moreno awaited the arrival of the jet bearing the body of Vargas and other casualties of the invasion and initial occupation.
Amsel nudged the wheels of his chair to better view the preparations of the honor guard and band. He closed his eyes and thought back on all the men he had witnessed marching proud and clicking heels. As passionate as they had been, their passion did not always win wars. Valeria adjusted her dress and shifted her high-heeled stance. She had wanted to be a veterinarian, to care for the animals she had loved so, but her father had clipped the wings of such thoughts, and pushed her to his world. Amsel felt momentarily sad for his little leibchen, however, his narcissistic mind would not allow such compassion to linger for long. There, on the wind-swept tarmac, Amsel decided he would do anything — anything — this time around for victory. He spotted the approach of the Fokker F28 Fellowship utility transport.
The F28’s twin engines, mounted either side of its T-tail, whined as the jet nosed up and prepped for landing. The aircraft had Fuerza Aérea Argentina painted atop the short row of windows that lined its fuselage. Coffin after coffin filled the F28’s cylindrical cabin. Each was flag-draped, and each awaited family to cry over them, and for their nation to welcome them home. Inside one of the plain, wooden boxes rested Major Ezequiel Vargas. The F28 settled onto the runway with a puff of smoke from its wheels.
As he watched the small transport jet roll out, Dr. Amsel swore: Prince Albert, his family, and his country would soon all pay dearly.
His Majesty’s Ship Queen Elizabeth—the lead in a new class of British aircraft carriers — took shape in the dry dock of Scotstoun shipyard on Glasgow’s River Clyde.
Queen Elizabeth was a multi-colored montage of individual superblocks, a Lego kit of individual pieces that comprised compartments, pipes, wires, and purposes, and that would become the United Kingdom’s largest warship. Over 70,000 tons when afloat, Queen Elizabeth stretched longer than the Houses of Parliament, used more steel than Wembley Stadium, and sported towering islands both fore and aft of her immense flightdeck. Two men — both old friends — strolled along a steel walkway overlooking the docks, quays, and workshops of the shipyard that was building these new goliaths.
Admiral Sir Reginald Nemeth was the Royal Navy’s First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff. In uniform, he was, despite his age, in obvious good shape, the product of daily workouts and morning runs. Sir Reginald was also very angry; angry at the bean-counting bureaucrats that left Britain with a gap in carrier power. Despite this gap, Admiral Nemeth swore that Argentina would regret her decision; a decision made with more heart than mind. He would lean the full weight of an old first-world power against an enthusiastic, if misguided, second-world one. The other man, the one strolling beside Nemeth, sashayed with his hands clasped behind a crooked back. He, too, embodied anger.
Although a shadow of his former warrior-self, he, too, would fight. He was many gin bottles away from the youth he had been, and — despite the condition of the flesh downstairs — the membrane upstairs was as formidable as it had ever been. Having traded his Royal Navy uniform for a herringbone Armani suit and big paychecks, he was director of British Aerospace’s Systems Surface Fleet Solutions, the division of the company that built aircraft, munitions, and defense systems; a company that was one of the principal providers of hulls for the Royal Navy. Today, however, his suit hung in a locker, and instead, he had clothed himself in blue coveralls. Despite the downgrade of his physicality, this man stood as strong a patriot as ever, perhaps even more so. He focused on one goaclass="underline" the recapture of the Falkland Islands. Both men wore white hard hats, more symbols of safety than a desire to be safe. After all, times were desperate and thus required desperate measures. Despite superficial differences, both men called themselves mates. They had known each other since the Second World War, when both were young engineers working on ‘Q-ships,’ heavily armed merchant vessels that, with weapons concealed, would lure German submarines into making surface attacks. These wolves-in-sheep’s-clothing then opened fire. Having faced impossible odds before, these men took stock of their current position.
A former adversary had recaptured a far land that had been fought over before, a land that had taken blood and treasure to keep in the fold. However, they were both certain of one thing: this land was worth both these things again — the fight and the treasure — and the loyal citizens that tilled its soil and fished its seas deserved even more so. The two men paused on the high steel of a walkway. They surveyed Scotstoun shipyard. Beneath their perch was the 229-foot cargo ship Moon Breeze.
The dry-docked ship was a beehive of activity. Her black freeboard and white superstructure were being painted haze grey, her white waterline and red bottom: black. Gantries traversed the ship’s beam, slinging plates of steel to be welded to a trussed frame that stood proud of her decks. Branched black towers were being mounted atop her bridge. They held domed and flat arrays, each with tendrils of wires waiting to be connected. While this occurred, old familiar allies were mustering too, and their support was in transit.
USNS Fred W. Stockham plied the waves of an Atlantic squall. She dove into troughs and climbed the wave faces to the crests, crashed back down and plunged into the seas, a wash of milk-white foam rushing off her bow.
An American container & roll-on/roll-off support vessel, Stockham made way as fast as the sea-state permitted, pushing on toward the sunrise. Black like the deep ocean water, and covered with cranes and hoists, her 900-foot length rode up and over the latest pile of water. She slammed back down. Stockham’s hull creaked as her bow plowed in and parted the water. Her steel ribs vibrated under the torment.
Activity in the ship’s hold hummed as the hull’s steel frame quivered like a tuning fork. Within the cavernous space were row upon row of shrink-wrapped aircraft. Toward the ship’s stern, sailors braced themselves against the roll of the ship’s hull. They peeled back the cover from one of many airplanes that were aboard.
With canted tails that jutted from either side of a single engine’s gaping maw, the sleek jet sported a golden canopy above forward-leaning engine inlets, diamond-shaped wings, and a sharp faceted beak. Any opening in the fuselage — the vent for its lift fan, the doors for its landing gear, or the windows for its myriad sensors — was accentuated by saw-toothed, radar deceiving lines. This F-35 Lightning II ‘Bravo,’ a short take-off and vertical landing version of the new fifth-generation multirole fighter, had been built for the United States Marine Corps. However, at this time, the airplane was needed elsewhere, needed by an age-old friend, and had gladly been shifted from inventory.