Chapter 64
“We must leave here,” she said. “The police will come. Soon they will find the car and look for us. My friends will take you to Brazil from here. Tell your government – the junta invades South Georgia tomorrow. They must stop them. The British must declare war. The Americans will help them. Then, the generals will be finished. They will have no protection. And now, I must say goodbye.”
“I’ll tell them what I can.”
“Do not betray us.”
She spoke in Spanish to the gunmen and from what he could understand, she told them to go with him and direct him to the nearest border crossing into Brazil which was at Barra do Quarrai. There they left him and when his passport and visa were stamped, he drove for hours until he reached the city of Alegrete which was in the middle of nowhere.
There weren’t many hotels to choose from but after finding one, he told the manager he needed to book an urgent call to London.
“That is not easy here, Senor. The telephone lines do not always work. But we will try.”
After a couple of hours, the local exchange rang him. They would try and put his call through the next day. When he said it was urgent and that he’d pay an additional charge on his American credit card, they said it might be possible sometime later but they couldn’t guarantee it.
He took out the phone number Trowers had given him in Houston and read it out to them. Then he waited for them to ring him back. London was around three or four hours ahead of Rio so it was unlikely he would find anyone at their desk by the time the call was put through.
Trowers had said it was a secure line to Whitehall, to someone called ‘Malory’. Apart from that, he had no further information about who he was ringing.
After waiting several hours, it was by that time a quarter to three when the exchange rang back.
“We have a line for you Senor Ashby to London, we are ringing it....”
At the other end, he could distantly hear the familiar double ring in the UK. It kept ringing and ringing but no-one picked it up.
“There is no answer, Senor,” said the operator.
“Keep trying,” he said.
The London line kept ringing and ringing with no response.
“There is no answer, Senor, I’m sorry....”
“Please, try for a little bit longer....”
Just as the operator was about to hang up, the phone at the London end stopped ringing and a man said “Yes, who is it ? Hello ? Hello ?”
The operator could be heard speaking to him, that it was a call from Mr Robert Ashby and would he accept it ?
“Oh, alright then, put him through......Hello ?”
Whoever Malory was, he’d sounded annoyed at having to pick up the phone until he realised that Ashby was ringing him from South America and had something important to convey.
“I was given your number by Trowers in Houston. Unfortunately, I don’t have much time as the line is dodgy. Do you have a cassette recorder by any chance ?”
“Er, I may do. What for ?”
“I need to dictate something to you over the phone and it's quite long. You’ll need to switch your phone to conference call.”
“Just a moment,” after which some scrambling about could be heard with a delay of over a minute, after which the line at the London end developed an echo. “You’re now on a speaker and I have the recorder switched on so everything we’re saying is being recorded. Fire away.”
Malory sounded as if he was speaking from the moon through a long, reverberating tunnel.
“Right. This might take around five minutes or longer as I will be dictating to you the contents of a memorandum dated January this year but it's all in Spanish, I’m afraid. I haven’t had it translated. You must do that from your end. The point is that South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands are going to be taken over by the Argentine military in the next day or so. These are the contents of a memorandum in Spanish which was written for the Argentine Military Council and describes their plans for the invasion of the Falklands.”
“What ? Are you serious ?”
“Never mind – let me dictate the document to you. There may be some delays along the way as it's five pages long, single-spaced, all in Spanish. Whoever translates it, must make allowance for my poor pronunciation. Also, I’m relaying it entirely from memory. Right, here goes.”
The dictation took him considerably longer than five minutes and at the end of half an hour, he said, “That’s it – have you got it ?”
“Are you seriously telling me that you were able to remember all of that ? How on earth did you do it ?”
“Did you get it alright ?”
“I’m re-playing it now. Yes, I have it – word for word as you said it.”
“Tell the government – the show is really on this time, Argentine soldiers are on their way as I speak. I have it on the best authority.”
“Who told you that....” And then the line went dead. He decided it was useless trying to ring back as it would take too long ; by the time he’d gotten through again, everyone in London would have gone home.
After a further day’s drive through the limitless expanse of countryside, he headed east through Santa Maria, Santa Cruz do Sul and Novo Hamburgo until he reached Porto Alegre on the Atlantic coast. From there, he was able to pick up a charter flight to his next round of business meetings in Rio De Janeiro.
While he was checking into the Sheraton in Rio, he noticed the headlines of a newspaper. Although he couldn’t speak Portuguese, he could see from the photographs and the excitable reporting that South Georgia had been claimed by Argentinean marines. The Brazilian junta had predictably endorsed the Argentine take-over. The only question now was, which side would the Americans support ?
After a further two weeks travelling in Guyana and Venezuela, he decided to return to Houston. By that time, the hostilities had escalated between Britain and Argentina. Most of the countries in South America were backing Buenos Aires and it was still uncertain, at least from what the newspapers were saying, whether Washington would side with the British.
As soon as he was in Houston again, he went to see Chuck Fairweather to report on the new business he’d written during his travels. Texas Fire had doubled its premium income from South America.
“Great work, Robbie. We’ve got lots of new clients, thanks to you – for a while there, it looked like the Argentines were getting jumpy. Luckily, the Ambassador is a personal friend of mine.”
“I came very close to being in an Argentine prison for the past month. Things look like they’re getting worse down there. The British task force arrived off the Falklands today, so the fireworks shouldn’t be long.”
Later that day, he received a call from Trowers.
“I hear you were able to pass something on to London. Well done. There’s been a lot of diplomatic exchanges going on between London, Washington, Buenos Aires and the UN in New York. The Argentines are a stubborn lot and won’t withdraw their forces. Only to be expected.”
After a further month, Argentina had surrendered and the Falklands were back in British hands again. Within days, the junta in Buenos Aires had fallen.
These were the events which had happened a year earlier and which he recalled about ‘Malory’.