by FARMAN, ANDY
Both vessels would have to exercise superb seamanship with expert hands on the helms as they ran parallel at thirty yards distant. Only the best coxswains’ hands will be steering each boat because at 12 knots a 1 degree variation in heading produces a lateral speed of 20 feet per minute initially, and that is before hydrodynamics is factored in, the suction caused by two masses in close proximity, particularly if at least one of them or the ocean is in motion. The suction increases exponentially and a collision may be unavoidable if that happens, as the captain of a luxury cruise ship recently found to his cost sailing too close to a small Mediterranean island.
Ram Tensioners and a series of saddle winches kept the cable taut and also allowed some leeway before the cable parted due to an error of diverging courses, but seamanship of a high standard made it work. Senior Lieutenant Wuhan of the People’s Liberation Army Navy would have the fate of the entire mission riding on his cool head and language skills on each occasion. No radios could be used without compromising the mission and so all instructions would have to be passed by voice, via megaphone until a shot line was fired over to the receiving vessel, and that is attached to a cable for a sound powered telephone. The telephone cable is itself attached to a heavier ‘Span Wire’ which is heaved over and clamped onto the receiving kingpost, and with that secure the ‘saddles’ bearing stores and the fuelling hose are strung beneath it and pulled over.
With Strela surface to air missiles at the ready they simulated coming under attack whilst coupled and joined by the fuelling hose, they simulated man-overboard drills whilst coupled and joined together and even buddy-buddy fire fighting drills whilst coupled together because there is really no such thing as an ‘Emergency breakaway’, instead the ‘Rasser’s’ and ‘Fasser’s’, the replenishment and fuelling parties, just have to get a hustle on to de-rig the complex apparatus that much faster than they normally would.
That the issue with steering and trim was one that only a refit would solve was quickly realised. Earlier on they also discovered that the spanwire visibly vibrated when taut, but it ceased vibrating completely when the helmsmen got it wrong and the courses began to diverge. When that happened you knew the 2500 lb. breaking strain was all but upon you! It became the job of one of the leading hands to do nothing except watch the spanwire and shout a warning when that vibration could no longer be seen.
They were relearning old lessons and they learned well. Some procedures they simply made up as they went along, and if it worked then that became the SOP, the standard operating procedure for fuelling and resupplying submarines from another submarine, something not practiced in over sixty years.
The technically much trickier replenishment at sea of torpedoes and torpedo tube launched anti-shipping missiles was practiced at anchor in a sheltered bay, and with oil being pumped out into the sea by both vessels for the purpose of water calming. Bow to bow and separated by heavy duty inflated bladders the submarines were made fast to each other as torpedoes were manually fed tail-first from the Typhoon’s torpedo tube and into the Chinese boat’s torpedo tubes.
Finding such a handy spot to carry out the task would not be an easy matter and both vessels would be open to attack, so quite aside from the back breaking toil involved it was an unpopular undertaking, made more unpleasant by the cleaning of the bladders, which was a filthy but necessary job as the oil would eat into them and perish the material within days otherwise.
Once their orders arrived the Admiral Potemkin slipped away south and avoided the main shipping lanes.
The Chinese boats continued their own role specific tasks for four more days of rehearsals near the uninhabited, sub-tropical Damang Island before topping off their tanks and following on initially diverse courses.
The converted Typhoon was waiting for them at the first refuelling spot, some six hundred miles south west of a tiny coral atoll.
That atoll was a circular ring of rock and sand that enclosed a freshwater lagoon, and a stagnant freshwater lagoon at that. Populated as it was by a quarter million bad tempered sea birds and one million inedible crabs only the most optimistic romantic, or a Frenchman, could have named it Ile de la Passion.
The trio of Chinese diesel submarines had almost dry tanks and the giant of a Russian must have been a welcome sight for each of them but they were barely one third of the way to their ultimate destination.
Again the quartet parted with the Typhoon running deep through the empty vastness of the Pacific to arrive ahead of them at the next scheduled rendevous.
The crew of the converted Typhoon arrived at their next assigned position 65 miles south of Isla del los Estados near the very southernmost tip of South America and settled down for a long and uncomfortable wait.
Bao was the first vessel to arrive, its bona fides established by Senior Lieutenant Wuhan on a dark night with a thankfully moderate sea. The transfer of rations as well as fuel went without hitch, but how they enjoyed the Russian rations was questionable. Tinned pork, tinned sausage and tinned fish were going to be pretty monotonous and peacetime rules in the Russian navy forbade continuous use of its tinned rations without added fresh produce in meals beyond eighteen days. The Russian tinned rations lacked the added protein edition of the western armies’ varieties.
The second customer arriving two days later was the curio of the Chinese flotilla, a type paid off from the Russian fleet decades before but her Chinese owners had maintained her well and added upgrades not available in her classes’ heyday such as western acoustic dampening tiles and the propellers of an Improved Kilo, the quietest and most efficient that technology could build.
Dai was an elderly Juliett, a diesel electric cruise missile boat built to be quiet enough to get in close to carrier combat groups and sink those carriers, but she was built small as well as quiet in a time when missile defence left something to be desired. She only carried a maximum of four cruise missiles in VTLs, vertical launch tubes, forward of the conning tower.
That operation had been far more difficult as the weather had been back to its usual wild self. They had eventually relocated a hundred miles north with the rocky expanses of the Isla del los Estados acting as a windbreak.
With nuclear detonations up north evaporating vast quantities of sea water to condense in the cold upper atmosphere, blinding photo reconnaissance satellites and reducing visibility it had become a more manageable risk remaining in the lee of the island for the third and final northbound customer of ‘Grigory’s Gas & Drive-Thru Mart’ as the crew referred to themselves.
The third submarine in the flotilla, Tuan, was early, only a day and a half behind the Dai and she had been in the area several hours before the Admiral Potemkin had risen up from the depths to check her messages.
The weather was far from placid and becoming progressively worse. The sun was an hour below the horizon before the submarines made contact and the complex ballet of matching course and speed could begin. No transfer of food and fuel were possible until Lt Wuhan was satisfied the helmsmen were ‘in sync’.
Tuan was one of the original Kilo’s, an elderly boat as were all of the submarines in the flotilla, but they were very well maintained. The life expectancy of a submarine working inshore and delivering the special forces to their targets was rather less than that of their conventionally employed sisters. China was not about to use more modern and less replaceable hulls whilst she still had a goodly number of the other variety on the lists.
Tuan she carried a small submersible piggyback upon her casing, as did the flotilla’s other two vessels, and anchor points on the submersibles casings were for the special forces troops of China’s army navy to be towed along clinging to the outer hull.
Both Typhoon and Kilo had their ECM, the electronic counter measure masts, and communications masts fully extended but EMCON was in force, no electronic emissions were permitted, all systems were set to passive/standby mode with the sensor arrays sniffing at the electronic airwaves.
The vessel’s towed sonar ar
rays were reeled in and housed for the duration of this surface activity as a precaution against being damaged, or even lost by becoming entangled, ‘run over’ or sucked in to the other boats screws. Only those sonar sensors incorporated into the hull design were deployed but all they were hearing was the thrashing of the other boats propeller and the racket of localised surface noise.
Admiral Potemkin and Tuan had ploughed into heavy seas at 12 knots holding station on one another despite twice almost losing the fuelling hose to giant rollers. The RAS and FAS procedures were taking longer than they had for either the Bao or the Dai. The weather gods were most definitely not with them this night.
In the Typhoon’s radio shack a blinking red light announced incoming flash traffic and the captain was immediately informed, but what could he do at that particular moment whilst dealing with the fuelling, break off until the transmission was complete? As per SOP’s the radar was switched from ‘Standby’ to ‘Off’ lest it interfere with the incoming signal which would also of course register on the ECM for ten seconds or ten minutes, however long the message may be.
In the warmth and dry of the Admiral Potemkin the engineers were juggling the flow between the three long bunkers of diesel fuel in order to stay as near to an even keel as possible, as the rolling of the vessel was having undue influence on their efforts to fuel the Chinese Kilo.
Up top, the rain was hammering in almost horizontally with each icy gust of wind onto the lookouts, Strela operator, captain and Lieutenant Wuhan, who was still directing the FAS and RAS parties of both vessels by megaphone until they had ship to ship telephone communication.
On the submarines’ casings the FAS and RAS parties looked like ‘Dr Who’ poor man’s aliens in their passive night goggles and Day-Glo orange immersion suits, but each man was securely tethered to safety lines.
Forward of the conning towers the RAS parties had it the worst as they were unprotected from the elements. Freak waves tried to snatch them away and only the safety lines saved them but their task was completed well before the fuelling, and their rig unbolted and stored below in under twenty minutes, such was their competence even on such an evil night.
Of the three PLAN diesels only Tuan had expended any munitions, sinking a New Zealand flagged bulk grain carrier that had been unwisely relying on speed rather than an escorted, but slower, convoy. However the replacement of those two torpedoes was neither requested nor suggested on a night like they were then experiencing.
Wind, spray and the rain were reducing visibility to zero for those without passive night goggles. They were also being deafened by the combined harsh roaring of the Kilo’s diesel exhausts, the crashing of the waves and the impact of a million raindrops on the boats casings and the surface of the ocean.
But someone still noticed the dark winged shape that emerged from the rain heavy cloud before it actually overflew them.
“Preduprezhdeniye…vrazheskiy samolet!”
Lieutenant Wei Wuhan repeated the warning to Tuan over the loudhailer but no sooner had he shouted “Enemy aircraft!” when their cloak of darkness was stripped away.
The P3 Orion of the Argentinian Navy had been performing a grid square search for the missing ‘Maria III’ when they had picked up a radar return and had naturally dropped flares to identify the vessel.
Had the Typhoon not been receiving flash traffic that was interfering with both submarine’s ECM threat detectors then the Orion’s crew would have found only an empty ocean illuminated by the flares.
The PNGs were now an unexpected hindrance and upon removing them the crewmen shouldering the Strela missiles took long moments to blink in the glare of the flare’s white light before acquiring the Orion.
Alarms screeched aboard the aircraft which went a fair way to dispelling the shock the Argentinian crew had experienced.
“Conqueror….it’s that murdering bastard Anglo, Conqueror!” a crew member shouted as the automated counter measure pods discharged more flares. The 1982 sinking of the cruiser Belgrano, though justified, was burned into the Argentine naval psyche, if not the nation’s.
The mis-identification of the submarines was not challenged by the pilots who relied upon the recognition skills of the observers in the rear, but the co-pilot reached for the intercom switch to ask that the identification be checked by replaying the images being recorded by the Orion’s video cameras in the belly and tail. But any thoughts of double checking and confirming the observers I.D of the surfaced submarines was forgotten by what happened next.
“Missile launch!” the observer at the rear shouted on seeing a flash as a Strela’s rocket motor ignited followed by a bright and fiery tail light.
“The Anglo’s are shooting at us!”
The missile, loosed by the Tuan, chased a flare and detonated harmlessly but on the Admiral Potemkin the Russian air sentry was still calmly awaiting a solid lock-on tone.
The cloud base beckoned just two hundred feet above but the pilot banked left, coming around and sending his contact report.
“Chato, Chato…Albatross Three… contact, contact, contact…53°44'22.97"south… 64°26'33.81"west… two British submarines on the surface…we are under attack by surface to air missiles….engaging with Harpoon and MK50!”
Argentina had declared neutrality at the start of hostilities but all the maritime patrol aircraft carried war shots as standard operating procedure on the underwing pylons in the form of a pair of AGM 84 Harpoons and MK50 torpedoes in the bomb bay.
“Cease pumping…close and secure master fuel pump valve!” Lieutenant Wuhan saw that the Tuan’s FAS party had jumped the gun, ejecting the fuelling probe before the flow had halted so that it was violently spewing greasy diesel onto an already slick and slippery casing as it left the receiver at their end.
“Haul back on the messenger return line…lively there; get that hose back aboa……” The firing of the Strela from Tuan’s conning tower drowned out his words and caused him to duck momentarily. He straightened up and leant over the conning tower’s coaming.
“Standby to haul in the master messenger once they strike free the spanwire or it’ll foul the screws.” he kept his voice level as he called down to their own men but then noticed the leading seaman whose job it was to watch the spanwire was instead lending a hand hauling in the fuelling hose, obviously as desperate as any of them to get below the surface and away from danger. Wei looked in alarm at the spanwire to see it was rock steady.
With a report like a gunshot the cable parted where it was clamped into the Tuan’s kingpost, whiplashing across the gap between the vessels, cutting in two the Strela operator as he was about to fire and decapitating Lieutenant Wuhan who was still leaning over the side.
With the supporting spanwire gone the hose and probe dropped into the churning water between both vessels where the wake swept it back into the Typhoons port propeller which tore the hose and messenger lines away. The fuelling hose was shredded and dispersing harmlessly in their wake but the messenger line was sucked in and wrapped itself around the spinning screw, a later job for the Typhoons diver, if they survived.
With nothing left to impede the two submarines they steered sharply diverging courses. FAS parties on both submarines casings hung desperately onto safety lines and clawed their way towards the hatches as the boats heeled over and diving alarms sounded.
The bodies of both Wei Wuhan and the Strela operator were abandoned as the bridge of the Admiral Potemkin was cleared. Both men were obviously very dead, no physician was required to tell the bridge party that.
The Strela launcher carried an armed and primed missile and was dumped over the side out of expediency and safety by the captain.
He slipped after he threw it, losing his footing in the blood to land heavily with an oath but gaining the hatch and pulling himself through despite a dislocated elbow, adrenaline providing the necessary anaesthetic.
The Orion lost height dangerously during its turn but as the wings came level the warbling tone in th
eir headsets told them that despite being in relatively close proximity to their targets the Harpoons seeker head had acquired a radar lock-on to the largest vessel.
Both pilots closed one eye as the missile left its pylon to preserve their night vision.
They were now closing fast on the submarines and inside the minimum engagement range for the second Harpoon so two MK50s dropped from the Orion’s bomb bay with small drogue chutes deploying to give them controlled entry into the water. They were designed to destroy fast, deep diving submarines using a small shaped charge normally associated with anti-armour rounds, the sea water entering small apertures in the casings turned to fast expanding steam by a chemical reaction that produced a 40 knot speed which no conventionally powered torpedo could match at great depth.
The two submarines were less than a football field apart and still on the surface when the Harpoon released by Albatross Three penetrated the f casing of Admiral Potemkin and exploded in the diesel fuel bunkers. The Typhoon still carried 150,000 litres of diesel plus her entire inventory of reloads of 21 inch torpedoes and YJ-8 anti-shipping missiles.
Admiral Potemkin detonated like a grenade.
Titanium and steel burst apart, shards flying in all directions to pierce the Tuan’s pressure hull, starboard ballast tank and also the special forces submersible sat on the after casing. Her conning tower was peppered with shrapnel, seriously wounding the captain who was still half in and half out of the hatch being the last one to clear the bridge.
Roiling, angry reds and oranges of the fireball rose over three hundred feet, dumping blazing fuel over an equal area of the ocean surrounding it, engulfing the Tuan in fire.
Even had her hatches been shut, which they were not, she was mortally wounded and the arrival of both high speed MK 50 torpedoes merely accelerated her demise.
