David Monnery - Mission to Argentina

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.’

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