Beyond the distraction, he relied upon his ability to keep the San Juan quiet to stay alive and allow him to interdict the British task force. A student of his nation’s naval history, he remembered how close an Argentine submarine came to thwarting Prime Minister Thatcher’s task force three and a half decades earlier.
His predecessor had evaded the Royal Navy and launched torpedoes at its warships, but a mistake in maintenance had made his weapons impotent. Instead of allowing the sloppiness that prevented the past submarine from protecting the Malvinas, Gutierrez trusted his iron grip of discipline. No man would dare fail him for fear of shame and reprimand.
One submarine. One torpedo. That’s all he needed to cripple the Royal Navy’s new aircraft carrier and prevent British air operations around the Malvinas. One act of patience to hide from his hunters as the task force approached, one act of seamanship to drive his way to the carrier, and one envenoming strike to give his nation and his president control of the air.
This would, in turn, give it and him the water, the land, and the surrounding offshore oil reserves. The final outcome would be his personal rise in power to command the strongest navy in his country’s modern history.
The upside of losing his sister ship to an Exocet missile, he decided, was that all honor and glory would be his. Martinez, the now-deceased bungler, couldn’t get in his way or send a lucky torpedo that would rob him of his glory.
He expected support from air-dropped mines in drifting fields that his nation’s aviators would lay behind him. But history wouldn’t remember pilots who dropped mines and flew home, no matter how many British ships perished by their deeds. It would, however, remember the submarine commander who risked his life to draw close to his prey and assure that his fangs found the high-value targets.
But he first needed his detour to his distraction near Port Stanley. To get there, he hoped that his slow transit speed would minimize the San Juan’s noise and hide him from the Ambush and Specter. He also knew that the bold move of approaching the Malvinas defied the expectations of his hunters. They would be searching for him elsewhere, and he expected to lay mines in relative solitude.
Confident he had outsmarted his adversaries in choosing to transit to the Malvinas, he let his mind drift to the larger picture.
He reassessed the promises of a distressed president. To protect Gomez’s power and to assure his future in the admiralty, Gutierrez needed to rally his country to war. The successful surprise air strike and the pending troop landing would serve as a temporary advantage, but the nation would rescind its support for Gomez if it believed in the inevitability of the British task force’s arrival to retake control.
But if just one submarine could challenge that task force, bolstered by a mine field behind it, hope would spring. To bridge the gap in time before the task force arrived and he could spring that hope, Gutierrez would offer his nation an attack on shipping at Port Stanley. He would show his people that Argentina had a navy, and that it had venom.
His head fell forward and then snapped upward as he fended off sleep. But he yielded to necessity, slithering into his rack and allowing himself to drift to sleep.
A knock on his door rousted him from a deep sleep, and he recoiled in his bed. His reckoning of time had distorted, and he felt disorientated. He heard the knock again.
“Enter!” he said.
A young sailor appeared.
“Sir, the executive officer reports battery level at twenty percent and requests permission to snorkel.”
“Tell him to line the ventilation system for snorkeling, to come shallow to forty meters, and to wait for me.”
After brushing his teeth and slipping into his jumpsuit, Gutierrez walked to the San Juan’s control room.
“Slow to four knots,” he said. “Raising the periscope.”
He pressed his face to the optics as the smooth cylinder glided upward. Walking the periscope clockwise, he took in the midafternoon’s sunlit brilliance. He then lowered the periscope to improve his stealth, and he made a mental note to raise it again every fifteen minutes for a scan of the water’s surface.
“Raise the radio mast,” he said. “Get me a download.”
Minutes later, Fernandez announced the receipt of transmissions sent from his home base.
“Lower the radio mast. Raise the snorkel mast.”
Fernandez handed him a clipboard and a printout. He flipped through pages to news about Gomez’s troops reaching the western shores of the Malvinas. Meeting no resistance, they had established a beachhead and controlled the western section of the region.
He muttered to himself.
“We’ve conquered the sheep of the western Malvinas. But at least the campaign is moving forward per plan.”
He flipped to another page and read about the British task force, which had been defined to the exact ships by name. As he had expected, the task force included eighty percent of the Royal Navy’s combatants.
The San Juan had deployed with eighteen torpedoes, and after his shots at the Ambush, he had sixteen remaining — enough to cripple the contingent of British warships that his navy’s intelligence pegged at arriving within his vicinity in twelve days. Unlike its predecessors, the modern Royal Navy had prepared a reaction plan to rally a task force for the invasion. It needed less than two weeks for the first installment of its ships to assemble and arrive.
“Commence snorkeling,” he said.
The diesel engines rumbled to life, and Gutierrez trusted the San Juan’s old but intelligent German engineering to capture enough of their groan and keep the electricity-generating machines’ cyclical chopping dissonance away from listening ears. But while his ship made noise, he chose this time to reload his tubes.
“Lieutenant Commander Fernandez,” he said. “Load tubes one through four with mines. Set a delay of twenty-four hours for each mine. Actually, pull out your pocket memo and take notes. We may as well conduct all our noise-making evolutions while reloading the tubes.”
The executive officer withdrew a pad and pencil.
“Yes, sir. I’m ready.”
“Have the cook prepare dinner and have the men use and flush all toilets for the next hour. Once that’s done, blow the content of all sanitary tanks overboard. Run the water still, and allow each man two minutes in the shower. If any man wishes to use the exercise equipment, he may do so until you’ve finished reloading tubes. I want each man recharged and refreshed. Now, read me back your list.”
Fernandez recited his notes, and Gutierrez dismissed him. Ninety minutes later, the clunking noises of chains and rigging gear — artifacts of an antiquated torpedo room — subsided, and Fernandez returned to the control room to report that the San Juan’s tubes held its mines and that the crew had completed all its other noisy activities.
A sailor stepped forward with a report of the specific gravity of the battery’s electrolyte that equated to sixty percent charge. Based upon his experience, he expected another two hours of snorkeling. He reminded himself to remain patient.
He made eye contact with Fernandez and curled his finger. When he appeared below him, Gutierrez leaned over the rail and waved his arm across the control room.
“Have them all rehearse the mine laying procedure. Include personnel in the torpedo room. I want it fresh in their minds.”
Fernandez scurried from sailor to sailor, ordering them to withdraw operations manuals from cubby holes. As men balanced books open on their laps and slid sound-powered phones over their heads, the executive officer exited the compartment to instruct sailors in the torpedo room to ready themselves for rehearsal.