Heroes of the South Atlantic. Shaun Clarke

      

      Heroes of the South Atlantic

      SHAUN CLARKE

      Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by 22 Books/Bloomsbury Publishing plc 1993

      Copyright © Bloomsbury Publishing plc 1993

      Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016

      Cover photographs © Jim Gibson/Alamy (helicopter); Shutterstock.com (textures)

      Shaun Clarke asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008154851

      Ebook Edition © November 2015 ISBN: 9780008154868

      Version: 2015-10-15

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

       Prelude

       Chapter 1

       Chapter 2

       Chapter 3

       Chapter 4

       Chapter 5

       Chapter 6

       Chapter 7

      

       Chapter 8

      

       Chapter 9

      

       Chapter 10

      

       Chapter 11

      

       Chapter 12

      

       Chapter 13

      

       Chapter 14

      

       Chapter 15

      

       Chapter 16

      

       Chapter 17

      

       OTHER TITLES IN THE SAS OPERATION SERIES

      

       About the Publisher

       Prelude

      Phil Ricketts was having another nightmare based on fact. He was reliving with dreadful clarity that moment the previous year when, in a shit-hole of a housing estate in Andersonstown, West Belfast, Lampton had made his mistake and copped it.

      They had moved out at dawn for a carefully planned house assault after being informed by the ‘green slime’, the Intelligence Corps, that a couple of IRA men were being hidden in the estate and preparing to snipe at a British Army foot patrol. As Ricketts sat between his mates in the cramped rear of the armoured ‘pig’ taking them along the Falls Road, secure in his assault waistcoat, checking his Heckler & Koch MP5 and adjusting his gas mask, he glanced out the back and was reminded again of just how much he detested being in Northern Ireland. This wasn’t a real war with an enemy to respect, but rather, a dirty game of hide and seek, a demeaning police action, a bloody skirmish against faceless killers, mean-faced adolescents, hate-filled children and contemptuous housewives. Christ, Ricketts loathed it.

      He was filled with this loathing as the pig took him through the mean streets of Belfast in dawn’s grey light – past terraced houses with doors and windows bricked up, pubs barricaded with concrete blocks, even off-licences and other shops protected by coils of barbed wire – but he managed to swallow his bile when the pig neared the estate and Sergeant Lampton, Ricketts’s best friend, started counting off the distance to the leap: ‘Two hundred metres…one hundred…fifty metres…Go! Go! Go!’

      The armoured vehicle screeched to a halt, its rear doors burst open, and the men leapt out one by one, carrying their weapons in the ‘Belfast cradle’, then raced across the debris-strewn lawns in front of the bleak rows of flats, still wreathed in the early-morning mist.

      Such actions were so fast, they were over before you knew it. Ricketts raced ahead with Lampton, across the grass, into the block and along the litter-strewn walkway as someone shouted a warning – a child’s voice, loud and high-pitched – and a door slammed shut just above. Up a spiral of steps, along a covered balcony, boots clattering on the concrete, making a hell of a racket, then Lampton was at the door in front of Ricketts, taking aim with the Remington 870 pump-action shotgun. The noise was ear-splitting, echoing under the walkway’s low roof, as the wood around the Yale lock exploded and the door was kicked open.