Mission to Argentina. David Monnery

       3

      Shortly before ten a.m. on Tuesday 4 May 1982, in the operations room of the Type 42 destroyer Sheffield, a blip appeared on the radar screen. Whatever it was seemed headed their way, and fast. Less than three minutes later, on the ship’s bridge, the officer of the watch and the ship’s Lynx helicopter pilot made visual identification. ‘My God, it’s a missile,’ they exclaimed simultaneously.

      A few seconds later the Exocet ripped through the ship’s side, starting fires that proved impossible to control, causing the deaths of twenty-one men, and ultimately dooming the vessel to a South Atlantic grave. For the Task Force as a whole, the war had suddenly become real.

      News of the catastrophe reached the British people seven hours later, at nine p.m. Greenwich Mean Time. Even the Ministry of Defence spokesman, who always looked and sounded as if he had been preserved in a cryogenic chamber since 1945, could not flatten the emotional charge of such news.

      All those refrains of ‘Britannia rules the waves’ which had accompanied the Task Force’s departure now came back to haunt the cheerleaders. Plainly the Royal Navy was in less than complete control of this particular stretch of ocean. The mindless glorification of slaughter which had accompanied the sinking of the General Belgrano two days earlier took on an even hollower ring. Were tabloid typesetters in Buenos Aires now arranging the Spanish equivalent of ‘Gotcha!’ for the next morning’s front page?

      More insidious still, for the first time the dread possibility of failure seemed to hover in the British air.

      James Docherty watched the announcement on a pub TV somewhere in the middle of Glasgow, and felt for a few minutes as if someone had thrown a bucket of cold water over him. When it was over, when the news had been given, the analysis offered – all the usual crap – Docherty sat at the bar, beer and chaser barely touched, head in hands.

      For four weeks now he had been floating in a drunken ocean of self-pity, anger and hopelessness. He was ‘heading on down’ he had told any stranger who cared to listen, ‘just like the Task Force’, floating further and further away from all those problems which could not be resolved by the heady mixture of modern technology and judicious violence.

      Now, three hours into another magical mystery tour of Glasgow’s bars, he took the destruction of the Sheffield very personally. That fucking Exocet had hit him too, he realized, ridiculous as it seemed. But it wouldn’t sink him, oh no. In fact, it would wake him up. Or something.

      He gingerly eased himself off the stool, wondering if his body had been as sobered by the news as his mind. It had not, but after an endless piss, his head leaning against the tiled wall of the Gents, he felt ready to face the night.

      A chill breeze was blowing down Sauchiehall Street from the east. Docherty leant up against a shop window and let the cold blast revive him.

      After the death of his father he had asked for extended compassionate leave. They did not want him for the war, so what was the point of hanging out in Hereford listening to all the others bellyaching? In any case, he was not at all sure he had any desire to go back. And if the bosses could see him now, he thought, the feeling would be mutual. A faint grin flickered across his unshaven face, the first for a while.

      Two men walked past, talking about the Sheffield, and brought it all back. Enough, Docherty told himself. This is as far down as you’re going. Anything more would be fucking self-indulgence. In fact it already was.

      ‘Who knows?’, he asked himself out loud, as he walked back towards the dump he had been staying in, ‘if things get bad down there, then maybe they’ll need more of us.’ It was not exactly likely, but if the call did come he wanted to be in some state to receive it.

      Four hundred miles to the south the Prime Minister arrived back at Number 10 from the House of Commons. In the chamber she had sat there looking stunned as John Nott announced the ship’s loss, but earlier that day, in the relative privacy of Number 10, tears had been more in evidence. Now she was entering the third phase of her reaction – anger.

      ‘I want someone from Northwood – preferably Harringham – and Cecil Matheson,’ she told her private secretary.

      ‘You have the full Cabinet in the morning, Prime Minister.’

      ‘I’m aware of that, Richard. I want Harringham and Matheson here now.’ She started up the stairs, throwing ‘please tell me when they arrive’ back over her shoulder.

      Matheson was still working at the Foreign Office, but Brigadier Harringham had to be pulled out of his bath and shuttled across from Northwood by helicopter. By the time of his arrival he had conquered his irritation – he could guess what kind of a day the PM had endured.

      Once the three of them were gathered around one end of the huge Cabinet table she lost no time in coming to the point. ‘Two days ago, Brigadier, you said, and I quote, that you were “yet to be convinced that the enemy air force poses much more than a theoretical threat to the Task Force”. I take it the events of the day have changed your mind?’

      ‘Sadly, yes,’ Harringham said quietly.

      ‘If it had been one of the carriers instead of the Sheffield we would now be in severe difficulties, would we not?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Prime Minister,’ Matheson interjected, ‘obviously I do not want to minimize the potential dangers here, but I feel I must point out that the best intelligence we have suggests that the enemy only possesses five more of these missiles, and has next to no hope of procuring any more.’