By midnight I was back in our OP at the top of the rampart. Sparky had got no joy out of his 319; he’d run an aerial up, but probably it needed to go higher. It wasn’t on to go tree-climbing in the dark, so I told him to wait for first light. In the meantime, we needed to get our heads down.
Slinging hammocks at midnight in the jungle was something at which we had had a good deal of practice. If you sleep on the ground, you not only put yourself at the mercy of all the creepy-crawlies on the forest floor; you also advertise your presence by leaving signs — impressions in the earth and dead leaves. The correct procedure is to wrap a length of hessian round the trunk of a tree, so that your support rope doesn’t mark the bark, and then lash on.
Soon two of us were swinging gently under our mozzie nets, while the third stayed on stag. I don’t think any of us slept.
FIFTEEN
Even by their own swift standards, the Boat Troop had made a fast getaway. The ops officer put out a call at 1715 on Saturday evening, when most of the guys were at home or around the town. The commander, Staff Sergeant Merv Mason, an Aussie famous for his walrus moustache, was in his local Tesco when the bleeper went off in his pocket. Hearing the summons, he cut short his shopping, made a dash for the rapid check-out, and hurtled home to pick up his kit on his way into camp. In under two hours of frantic activity his team had got itself together and lined up the stores and equipment they would need for a drop into the sea and an assault on the Santa Maria.
In the background, Merv knew, urgent talks were in progress. The boss was negotiating to get the party aboard an RAF TriStar which was leaving Lyneham that evening. The basic need was to lift the team to Belize with the minimum delay, and have them there ready to deploy as things developed. A Herc plodding round the northern route would be far too slow. After pressure from the Director of the SAS in London, the wing commander in charge of air movements at Lyneham had been prevailed upon to hold the TriStar for two hours, and to throw off a dozen less urgent passengers. In the end a Chinook lifted the team from Hereford to Lyneham, together with their kit, and they flew out at 2200.
Eight hours later, at 0100 local time, they landed in the hot darkness at Airport Camp, Belize. Three four-ton trucks drove out to the aircraft to collect them; leaving the plane before anyone else, they and their kit were whisked away to a holding area in one of the warehouses, where Keith Marshall, their liaison officer, had set up a standby ops room. The rest of the guys got their heads down in transit accommodation, but he was up for the rest of the night, fielding the messages that came in by secure fax from Hereford and Regimental Headquarters in London.
From the faxes Keith could see that diplomatic negotiations had been going on at the highest level. No matter that in North America it was the early hours of Sunday morning; it was Prime-Minister-to-President stuff as Whitehall urgently requested assistance in lifting the Boat Troop to within striking distance of their objective, wherever that might turn out to be.
When the Santa Maria sailed from Cartagena at 0830 local time — 1330 in London — an emergency meeting was called at the COBR, the Cabinet Office Briefing Room, underground in Whitehall, which was opened up and manned to act as the control centre. There the SAS Director met senior officials from the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office and a representative from the United States Embassy. After an initial conference, as satellite surveillance showed the ship heading north, they stood down the meeting until her destination could be established. When she put into Desierto at 2000 local (0100 in London), the senior officers were routed out of bed by telephone calls, and sleepily reassembled. Later that morning, at the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, the American Defence Attache called the duty officer in the Operations Center at the Pentagon and confirmed that help was going to be needed again, this time in the form of a warship to put the Boat Troop within range of their target. ‘The British Prime Minister’s been talking with the President,’ he confirmed. ‘The orders are to give every possible assistance.’
None of this background activity concerned Merv Mason and his men in Belize. All they knew was that they had to prepare for Operation Gannet. By midday on Sunday they were ready to parachute into the sea, with their two twenty-five-foot Geminis fully inflated and secured on platforms with all their gear inside them, including the forty-horsepower Mariner engines. The stream of secure faxes, which continued all morning, told them that the Pentagon had agreed to divert a nuclear attack submarine, the USS Endeavor, from its exercise in the Caribbean so that it could pick them up and take them covertly into the target area. The planners assumed that the Santa Maria, although by no means new, must have effective radar; and this meant that the approach of any large surface vessel or unidentified aircraft would warn the narcos of an impending attack. A submarine was therefore by far the safest option.
Shortly after 2000 on Sunday evening, messages reaching the standby ops room in Belize began to give information about Desierto. The northernmost of a group of small islands which were the tops of extinct volcanoes, it had never been permanently inhabited. Although the others supported small communities of fishermen, Desierto was deserted because it had no reliable fresh water supply. Intelligence routed from the United States Drug Enforcement Agency revealed that in the 1960s a bauxite mining company had built a quay on the shore of a creek on the western side of the island, but that the venture had gone bankrupt and the port had been abandoned. Recently big-time drug-runners had begun to use it again as a safe haven and transit base, cross-decking consignments from one ship to another, and flying small planeloads into Mexico.
In the old days the team commander and signaller at Belize would have spent an anxious hour working out latitudes, longitudes, distances and courses to create a rendezvous between aircraft and submarine in the middle of the Caribbean. Now computers made the calculations in seconds, and then did them again, so that their human operators could feel confident they were right. The upshot was that the Boat Troop boarded a Hercules at 2100 on Sunday evening, for a flight of two hours forty minutes on a bearing of 112 degrees for a rendezvous with USS Endeavor thirty miles off the west coast of Desierto.
As the plane droned through the night, Merv looked round his nine men. All were asleep, or nearly so, and certainly none looked worried. A night jump into the sea was routine for them. Gannet was exactly the kind of operation they had spent years training for. Far from being scared, they were positively looking forward to some action. Merv, at thirty-two, was the oldest in the party — although with his short, curly fair hair and pockmarked face he didn’t look it. He eased a finger inside the collar of his black wetsuit and settled himself into a more comfortable position.
Once, at about 2230, he went up to the flight-deck for a chat with the captain and a last check of the coordinates. As everyone seemed happy, he moved back down and concentrated his mind on the task ahead. The rendezvous with the sub should be routine; it was the landing on the island which would demand quick assessment and positive decisions. Maps faxed across during the day had given him an idea of the shape of the coast around the creek, but there hadn’t been time to send photographs, so a lot would depend on the nature of the shore where they landed.
At 2300 the captain began a gentle descent, easing down from 20,000 feet. Merv plugged in one of the headsets hanging along the sides of the hold and listened in. At 2330 an American voice suddenly came up on the compatible radio channel. ‘Alpha Two to X-ray One. How do you read me? Over.’