The next screen (I didn’t even bother to pee, I was so into it) would make Verraco the Commander of the Belgrano, a 10,650-tonne cruiser equipped with Sea Cat missiles and fifteen 15.6˝ cannon with a range of thirteen miles, and a crew of 1,093 men, escorted by two destroyers, the Piedra Blanca and the Hipólito Bouchard, both equipped with Exocet surface-to-air missiles with a range of twenty miles. For all three I used American ships from WWII, only switching flags and names (the cruiser had in fact fought the Japanese under the name ‘Phœnix’). At the first levels of the game Verraco would need only one or two flicks of the joystick executed with the reflexes of someone who’d just rolled up after a Sunday barbecue and a flagon of red in order to dodge the Mark 8 torpedoes that the 4,900-tonne, 103-crew English nuclear submarine Conqueror was firing at him. Then all three ships sprayed it with Hedgehog depth charges (so many that on-screen it looked like a peppered sausage) and I imported a little mushroom cloud from Global Nuclear Apocalypse to mark the moment when Conqueror exploded like a toad. Once I’ve finished with all this, I thought contentedly, I’ll have to make copies and send them to my friends. This one of the Belgrano, for example, would cause a sensation: I knew at least two or three survivors willing to sell their wife and kids for the chance to get their own back on the English sub. And, while I was at it, I threw in a gun-slinging torpedo duel between the San Luis and some English submarine or other, to give the only Argentinian sub a chance it never had in the war.
When you’re plugged into the computer, you sometimes hope you can match their staying power: computers never lose their glow, their reflexes or their operating speed, never start making mistakes. But, sooner or later, we biological organisms need to rest. We run down so fast … I’d started four hours earlier and I could already feel the first waves of fatigue behind my eyes, and my skull was beginning to reverberate like the inside of a bell. I tried not to take any notice and to concentrate on all I still had to do: I’d only just completed the first days of the war.
The third screen ought to have been a doddle, as I hardly had to alter any of the original outcomes; but I always find it easier to invent than to copy, maybe because the unpredictability of the video game is better suited to random outcomes and the open possibilities of the imagination than to reproducing the frozen past. Or maybe it’s just me. That 4th May Verraco had to sink the 4,100-tonne, 268-crew destroyer HMS Sheffield, equipped with Sea Dart missiles with a range of forty miles, sailing peacefully south-east of the Islands accompanied by the destroyers Coventry and Glasgow, unaware that a Neptune reconnaissance plane had spotted them and was transmitting the information to the Río Grande base, from where two of the Argentinian Air Force’s five Dassault-Breguet Super Étendard strike fighters would eventually take off. Flying at a speed of 1,200 kph, with a range of 600 km (they had to be refuelled in mid-air via a Lockheed C-130 Hercules), they remained within the radars’ dead zone before releasing the Exocet AM39 air-launched missiles they were carrying. I gave the Sheffield no chance to save itself; do what it might, one of the missiles would inevitably snap it in two like a baguette and send it to the bottom. I couldn’t run the risk of the most optimistic day of the war being ruined by a piece of clumsiness from Verraco (he, of course, would put it down to his innate skilclass="underline" ‘Look, look, I never cock it up, I sink it every time — Yes!’). I completed that day made to the measure of our dreams with an attack by Sea Harriers on the airbase at Goose Green, from which, aiming the 35mm Œrlikon anti-aircraft batteries with average accuracy, it was possible to shoot them down in threes with zero risk, and for the rest of the screen I simply reproduced the outstanding action of the next two weeks, while giving Verraco enough leeway to improve on the results: so the Narwhal manages to down the two Sea Harriers and the marine-packed Sea King helicopter that attack it; the eighteen Skyhawks that leave San Julián manage to sink the Broadsword and the Coventry; in the only naval surface battle of the whole war, in the San Carlos Strait, the freighter Isla de los Estados sinks the 3,250-tonne frigate Alacrity, equipped with MM38 Exocet and SAM Sea Cat missiles, torpedo launchers, a 115mm cannon and a Sea Lynx helicopter; squadron after squadron of Skyhawks attack the destroyers Glasgow and Brilliant, putting them out of action …