by FARMAN, ANDY
At only two hundred feet above the surface of the Atlantic Albatross Three bucked as it was lifted and buffeted violently by the blast of the Admiral Potemkin’s violent end. A heartbeat later both pilots ducked instinctively as the airframe was struck hard by more than one piece of shrapnel.
The port wing rose as the aircraft commander banked right as much as he judged it safe to do, avoiding the fireball but the airframe was now trembling, a harsh vibration shaking it spastically.
The master fire alarm sounded as the fire warning light for the port outer engine glowed an urgent crimson.
That engines misfires were clearly audible to all the crew, the loud reports sounding like random spaced gunshots, and it was coughing like a sixty a day nicotine slave.
There first appeared black, oily smoke, a precursor to the flickering tongues of flame which seconds later escaped from joints between inspection panels in the engine housing of a clearly damaged Allison turbo prop.
The pilots and flight engineer engaged the engines fire extinguisher, dumping a flame retardant compound onto the engine, shutting off the fuel supply and following the engine feathering procedure.
It was standard fuel management to patrol with one engine feathered anyway so the aircraft was not in danger of falling from the sky with the other three engines operating normally.
Just a single pass for damage assessment took place but no more flares were required as the burning fuel provided ample illumination.
With footage of the destruction for analysis Albatross Three reported both submarines sunk with no trace of survivors and turned west for Tierra del Fuego, trailing smoke as it headed home.
30.86 miles due north of Cayenne, South America
After three days awaiting the arrival of the Tuan, to rejoin with Dai and the Bao, the Juliett class missile submarine Dai sent a millisecond’s worth of burst transmission to Fleet and then her captain retired to his tiny cabin to give the impression of confidence and calm.
Captain Aiguo Li was the second senior officer of the small flotilla, commissioned a month and a day behind his long-term friend Chen Xinhua who commanded the Tuan, but it now seemed likely that some mishap, some accident, or incident was preventing Tuan from taking part in this operation.
He sat upon his bunk and raised his feet to rest up on the small folding writing table that acted as his ‘office’, before leaning back against the bulkhead, contemplating on the difficulties of fulfilling their mission with only two thirds of the necessary resources.
His musing was disturbed by a sharp rap on his door.
Lounging with his feet up was no way for an officer to be seen and he straightened up before barking a stern.
“Come!”
It was the Shui Bing, the ordinary sailor assigned as his steward, announcing a visitor.
“With respect Captain, Major Huaiqing awaits you.”
The ‘Major’ was actually a captain but a ship or submarine can have but one captain and for that reason Captain Huaiqing was given a ‘promotion’ for appearances sake and addressed as Major.
No salutes were exchanged below decks as the vessel was far too cramped for such martial niceties and Captain Li merely nodded an assent for the soldier to be admitted.
Their supercargo slept in tiered hammocks in the forward torpedo room where they managed to keep out of the way of his sailors going about their duties but those men represented eighteen pairs of lung and eighteen more stomachs than the boat had been built for.
A workable number in ideal situations, as the cooks just had an extra few mouths to feed, one hundred instead of eighty two. However, the air scrubbers had to work harder and that was just running close to the surface with the snorkel extended to run the diesels and keep the batteries fully charged.
Going deep and running on batteries and internal air supply was another matter entirely.
The week before, they had been pinged by an unknown maritime patrol aircraft when they were off Natal, Brazil, where it was a bit far off for the French Navy Atlantique IIs out of Cayenne. But it hardly mattered who they were, it had been the first brush with the enemy.
They had been snorkeling as they ran just under the surface with the ECM mast extended of course.
Now there are two dangers in that situation, the first time under fire, and only one is the enemy aircraft. The other is a panicked dive with the diesels still engaged because a torpedo may miss but a diesel will suck every breath of air out of the boat before the Diving Officer realises his error. It had happened to the ‘The Great Wall’ on a simple training exercise with students from the academy a few years before. She had been a Ming class, an ex-Soviet Romeo and someone probably ordered crash surface when they realised what was happening but a fishing boat found it drifting ten days later with all 70 students and crew dead from asphyxia.
Back to the Dai’s first time under fire, and the aircraft had been doing a MAD sweep, its magnetic anomaly detector had picked up the distortion in the earth’s magnetic field caused by the shallow running Dai’s metal hull
The executive officer had the watch and he had done it by the numbers as if it were a drill, shutting down the diesels and engaging the electric motor before diving.
Whichever nation’s aircraft it was, it had been known that either there was no friendly boat was in the area or they just did not care because they had immediately attacked with depth charges.
Luck had not deserted them entirely and the aircraft had departed, either low on fuel or suffering some fault but it obviously called for surface support because a half hour later a frigate, identified by the sonar as either the Brazilian Liberal or the Constitucao, had lobbed depth charges at them from its 375mm ASW mortar.
Sonar had first heard it thundering in at full speed from ten miles away and Captain Li had the two obvious choices, fight or flight. The first option was one he was confident he would win, but it would alert all the navies in the region that a submarine was in the area and that would hazard their mission. To run was not an attractive bet as more surface vessels and aircraft would join the hunt
A good look at the chart though had given him a third choice.
Captain Li settled the Dai into the mud close by the wreck of the U598, sunk seventy years before by US Liberator bombers, and there they waited out the depth charging.
There was doubtless an interesting exchange between aircraft commander and the ASW officer aboard the frigate as to the certainty of the aircraft’s contact, but they endured two hours’ worth of attention and twenty-three depth charges before the frigate departed. Fortunately, the aircraft did not return.
Quite apart from the terrifying experience everyone had endured, those extras bodies, the special forces troopers, had had a noticeably disagreeable effect on air quality. The carbon dioxide levels had been bordering the red line.
Today Captain Jie Huaiqing, second in command of the Zhōngguó tèzhǒng bùduì, the Special Forces Company, squeezed inside and once the steward had departed he sat upon the folding table’s stool. Both table and stool were spring loaded to fold up against the bulkhead. A functional design but the stool could be challenging as it would do so when not actually being sat on. It was another good reason why alcohol was not allowed on board.
In the full knowledge that the ordinary sailor was in reality a Lieutenant Commander in the Guójiā Ānquánbù, the Ministry of State Security’s naval division, the two officers exchanged formal pleasantries. On the captain asking him how he was filling his time the army officer produced a small book he had been reading from a map pocket. It was all about the life cycle of the genus Dermochelys coriacea, the Leatherback Sea Turtle, and he continued with the enthusiasm normally associated with train spotters rather than an officer in the Peoples Republics elite forces.
Outside the cabin the state appointed spy moved away back to his post in the small galley, satisfied that a regime toppling coup was not in the process of being hatched.
Indeed no insurrection was being planned,
but nobody likes an eavesdropper so this game was played frequently.
“What news of the Tuan, Captain?”
The naval officer shook his head.
“None at all sadly, and I have sent a refueling query to our friends the Admiral Potemkin but they have not responded.” He picked up a pencil and tapped it idly against his knee.
“I had hoped that on answering I would be able to learn from them when… if… they had fuelled Tuan near the cape.”
After a few moments contemplation he shrugged to himself and then stood, retrieving a key from a chain about his neck with which he opened his small safe to extract his copy of the mission planning pack.
“I await instructions from Fleet but I think it sensible to work on a new plan that will also keep the Russians happy by not raising the target to the ground.”
The Russians were fairly certain that had the launch facility been on UK or US soil no tit for tat nuclear response would follow as they were holding back from escalating the use of nuclear weapons beyond that of depth charges, a situation China and Russia were capitalising on, but the French were the atomic wild card in NATO’s pack.
The original plan called for thirty eight SF operatives to sink the freighter Fliterland beside the purpose built dock at Kourou where the Ariane and Vega components were delivered by sea, thus severely delaying further launches as the satellites arrived by sea from France and Germany. They were also to drop the nearby bridge into the Kourou River to prevent the components being brought overland from more distant port near Cayenne.
At the launch pads, the approach ramps were to be wrecked with cratering charges because the rockets were transported erect from the final assembly building on roads that could not be more than 10° out of true.
Any rockets already on the pad could not be damaged without the risk of a catastrophic explosion but the same was not true of the sensitive payload sat on top and costing tens of millions of Euros. These could be rendered useless with a hundred Yuan’s worth of machine gun rounds.
The key to the operation was that of speed and surprise as the opposition were jungle warfare specialist units, the 3rd Marine Regiment and the Foreign Legions 3e Régiment étranger d'infanterie. The Legion guarded the space centre and ran France’s jungle warfare school at Regina, 80 miles from the space centre and close to the border with Brazil. The marines themselves were all based along the borders with Brazil and Suriname.
The simplest of deception plans had ensured that the French regiments were being kept busy in the interior and along the border with Brazil two hundred miles from the Space Centre.
In time of war the price of gold goes up and an article planted in the popular Portuguese tabloid newspaper Correio da Manhã that told of a massive gold strike in French Guiana had been picked up by the Brazilian media and ensured that the always troublesome Garimpeiros, the illegal Brazilian miners, were considerably more numerous and more blatant in their trespassing than normal. This led to the Guiana Gendarmeries calling on the Legion and Marines for support as the miners were aggressive and often better armed than the policemen.
3e REI was effectively split in two by the Kourou River with its regimental headquarters near Cayenne airport and one of its two infantry companies at Regina, a few miles inland and in easy reach of the Brazilian border. These retained the regiment’s small air detachment of a Puma troop carrying helicopter and a small Gazelle for reconnaissance and communications (the Colonel’s taxi).
North of the Kourou, the legionnaires’ assault engineers and anti-aircraft detachments guarded the space centre with the remaining infantry company, although a militia-like reserve company made up of former Legionnaires had a platoon in Kourou and two more in Cayenne.
The marines were even more divided, working out of company and sometimes just platoon locations that were dotted along the border. They were completely independent and self-contained sub units though; they walked into the jungle and survived on what they carried on their backs and caches dropped by their own river patrol’s rigid raiders.
However, despite their abilities as jungle fighters, they were severely limited in their mobility having no air support and also a rivalry with the Legion that precluded their ever asking for assistance or support from that quarter.
The marines numbered five infantry companies, a Riverine Squadron and a heavy weapons company but they were not set up to quickly react to situations occurring outside their individual companies immediate areas of operations.
Between the small Chinese force and the shore were of course at least one suspected minefield and four surface threats in the form of a pair of D’Estienne D'Orves class ASW corvettes and two L'audacieuse offshore patrol boats which could make life interesting.
A flight of two Breguet Atlantique IIs had been stationed at Cayenne airport which would likewise serve to keep boredom at bay.
“My task of getting you close enough to launch your submersibles has changed little in real terms, but you are now light one third of the manpower and equipment required to complete your mission.” He looked at the soldier and smoothed out the map.
“You are the resident expert on anything that causes blistered feet Captain and I am but a humble squid, as the Americans say.” He tapped the map. “As I see it we have more targets than troops now, and for your information we have precisely three hundred miles worth of diesel fuel remaining so I am open to any suggestions you have on our completing the mission as well as a safe withdrawal that precludes walking as a means of escape and evasion.” He ended with a grin.
Captain Huaiqing smiled a little smugly.
“We foot sloggers think on our feet even when we are sitting on our arses…it is already done.” he removed from inside his shirts breast pocket a sheet of A4 sized paper with the brief outline of an alternative plan.
“It will, I promise you, require only that your delicate navy feet carry you up to your conning tower, and should you choose to stretch your legs on shore then that is up to you.”
Li’s eyebrows rose, intrigued, but he let the soldier continue.
“You will still endeavor to penetrate the minefields between the old French penal colony islands?”
Li nodded. “The ironically named Islands of Salvation; Royale, St Joseph and of course Devils Island…yes, it is impossible to mine the waters there. The tidal race would unseat mere weighted anchors even if it were deep enough to mine. But at high tide your submersibles have an hour’s window to get on the landward side of the islands where it is also unfriendly waters for mining operations.”
Li paused, glancing at the SF commander-by-default.
“Can you split your remaining forces and still complete all three primary goals?”
Jie Huaiqing shook his head.
“That would be highly unlikely, if not impossible.” He said emphatically.
“But, if Bao’s detachment attacks the Soyuz pad as planned and I take ten men to attack the Ariane and Vega pads and that leaves eight soldiers that the navy can carry into the mouth of the Kourou to the dock. They blow the bridge as planned and you torpedo the Fliterland and burgle the Paris Fire Brigade so we can all go home.”
Li coughed in surprise. “Paris?…what?”
“Health and Safety laws in the EEC decree that certain facilities be served by firefighting equipment and personnel of a very exacting standard. Those facilities are Class A international airports, fuel storage sites holding more than a quarter million cubic square feet of storage space for flammable gases and liquids, and…space ports.”
Li still had a blank expression on his face, clearly not getting the connection and wondering what in the hell Jie was jabbering about EEC regulations for?
“The Paris Fire Brigade was geographically the closest French firefighting unit to meet the strict requirements so they have a fire station at Kourou Space Port and a storage tank of high grade diesel fuel for their appliances at the docks because the local stuff cannot be relied upon.” He looked very smug as he conti
nued.
“You really can’t have rockets blowing up because the fire engine broke down on the way because of dodgy diesel.”
Li shook his head. “I bet you were bullied at school for being a swat, weren’t you?”
“It was in the intelligence briefing we had back in April.” said Huaiqing waving a well-thumbed notebook.
“That doesn’t mean you had to write it down.”
“I had to…the snoring from all the naval officers was making it too hard to memorise.”
All armies have to have a structured method of passing on orders in a way that gets the information across in a logical fashion. Everyone has to know the ‘What’, ‘When’, ‘Where’ and ‘How’, and who does what, and when, and how.
‘Why’ does feature, but far less than a career civilian would expect.
Jie had written headings in his notebook, the Chinese military’s equivalent of ‘Ground’, ‘Situation’, ‘Mission’, ‘Execution’, ‘Service Support’ and ‘Command & Signals’ with sub-headings to those headings along with sub-headings to the sub-headings. The British call this ‘a set of orders’ and the process of briefing troops from them is known as an ‘O’ Group. China trains its leaders to brief troops along fairly similar lines.
‘Execution’ is all about who does what, and when, and this is a fairly comprehensive section. It includes a sub heading entitled ‘Actions on:-‘ which is meant to cover all eventualities, all possible scenarios that may occur and endanger the successful execution of the mission.
A further hour put finer detail onto the plan and they both agreed that fueling the two submarines before withdrawing to a safe distance and putting a pair of shallow set torpedoes into the Fliterland was a long shot, but Dai had a good chance of getting the bridge demolition team ashore and sinking the freighter at its moorings.
Li pursed his lips, frowning and looking at the map, folded to show the coastline from Kourou to the border with Suriname. It had been far easier being second-in-command, he decided as he tried to think of alternatives.
