by FARMAN, ANDY
She wasn’t going anywhere for a few days.
Both Atlantiques had only returned two days before. Losses to the NATO maritime patrol fleet had seen them called away to assist with fighting the convoy’s through the waiting wolf packs. Staging out of Shannon airport in the Republic of Ireland they had flown around the clock.
Since their return the crew’s had been on a maintenance stand-down as both hard working aircraft and crew members received essential TLC.
Now of course panels were being secured, and pre-flights already underway before the ground crews had even finished securing engine covers back in place.
So Don was told to put his load on the ground at the clearing where the reservists would receive radio orders. He was then to lose no time in bringing the other reserve platoon, currently mustering on a football pitch at Cayenne, to join with the first load of reservists.
“This is what makes life worth living!” he whooped, and laughed at the expression on his co-pilots face.
The sound of the Chinooks twin engines echoed through the jungle and along the river. It was a typical moonless tropical night, the jungle seeming to suck every iota of light out of the universe.
It was on the ground now, that much was certain, but what was it doing?
Unloading troops was a safe bet, and probably the Kourou reservists, but although they were potentially less of a threat than they probably had been twenty years before when the men were in their prime, Li would have been a lot happier if whatever his two troopers had done to the helicopter had worked.
Neither of the Strela operators was in position yet. But the helicopter would not be likely to turn back towards the jetty on take-off, not unless the pilot was an idiot. It was a case of stable doors and horses already bolted.
As soon as the reserve platoon had disappeared down the troop ramp and into the trees Don applied power and pulled gently on the collective, lifting the machine straight up until he saw the rotor blades were clear of the tree tops whereupon he eased the cyclic forward and slightly right.
Down through the chin windows at his feet the jungle canopy was all varieties and shades of green in his night vision goggles, the dense jungle slipped just beneath the Chinook as he banked it carefully around, away from the guns at the jetty and as the trees gave way to the surface of the river below them he raised the troop ramp, aiming to make as fast a run as possible to Cayenne and back.
A blast of heat and a shockwave threw him violently forwards against his harness and suddenly he was starring vertically downwards at the river rushing up at him.
The impact was indescribable, his co-pilot screamed all the way down and then the river burst in.
Don was on automatic pilot, carrying out ditching drills he had never before had to perform for real but which he had undertaken many a time in dunker training at Fort Rucker, Alabama. What made this different though was that the disorientation was complete. The bone jarring contact with the river, the shock, the absolute blackness as the silt heavy water engulfed them and the voice at the back of his head which whispered. “No safety divers this time!”
He released his straps and felt to his right for the door release but the door was gone, ripped off in the impact and his hands instead met the uneven and slippery surface of a deadfall tree trunk, covered in weed and algae, barring the way. He groped straight ahead, where the front canopy screen had been and again he touched slimy bark. To his left was a body, his co-pilot still strapped in and so with panic threatening he pulled himself back into the troop compartment, or at least where the rest of the fuselage used to be.
The cockpit was upside down at the bottom of the river, facing back the way it had come, the heavy front rotor assembly having obeyed the laws of gravity and had turned turtle the front half of the aircraft.
The rest of the aircraft, the troop compartment, simply was not attached any more.
Air trapped inside Don’s helmet showed him the true way up and he broke the surface coughing and sputtering.
The night vision goggles had been ripped off in the crash but there was some light, the flickering of flames and he turned to face the north bank, wreckage only recognisable by a broad rotor blade standing straight up out of the river like a grave marker.
The crackle of flames from aviation fuel doused jungle growth and black, oily smoke gave no clue as to what had brought them down, but then Don spotted something moving in the river, something which had already spotted him.
His artificial limb was not designed as a swimming aid but primal fear, the dread of being eaten alive spurred him on, desperately making for the south bank with the damn thing acting like an anchor.
The jungle overhung the banks, jagged branches seeming to seek to both impale him and also to fend him off like medieval pikes thrusting at unwelcome horsemen. Beneath these was a steep bank, perhaps three feet high, its lip beyond his grasp even if he could reach the damn thing.
In the flames light he saw a dark gap in the cover and made for it, seeing an unobstructed path to a sloping but muddy route out of the river and away from the closing caiman.
Don’s good foot touched the semi-solid riverbed at the shallows and he sobbed with relief but he knew he was far from being out of danger yet. He stood; leaning forwards, wading towards safety, his arms outstretched and his right hand grasped a thick protruding tree root when the caiman’s jaws snapped closed.
He screamed aloud and got his left hand on the root also as the creature tugged, hard.
It then occurred to Don that he should be in agony right now, but he was not. The caiman had a firm grip on the boot laced onto the prosthetic limbs ‘foot’.
He was hanging on for dear life with both hands and if the beast had continued to pull back towards the deep water then it would have eventually won the tug-o-war.
The caiman rolled, it did so instinctively and suddenly Don was free as the artificial limbs retainers gave way.
Scrambling up the muddy slope until clear of the water he paused for the briefest moment to look back. The creature was not in sight; only turmoil on the surface gave any indication of where it was.
Turning back towards safety he saw sudden movement above him, smelled warm fetid breath and saw the layered teeth on the jaws that closed on his head.
Captain Li had raised his night glasses to peer downriver as he heard the change in the Chinooks engines pitch.
“Standby Strela... aim slightly above the trees, you may get a lock-on even if you can’t see the bastard!”
The sound seemed to roll towards them in waves as the power came on to lift the aircraft out of the clearing.
He caught a glimpse of the rear rotor, set above the fuselage and the forward assembly, but it then banked away out of sight for a second, reappearing over the river a few seconds later.
The flash made Li take an involuntary step backwards and there followed a thunderclap of sound that echoed across the jungle.
The helicopter came apart in mid-air, plunging into the river.
Li lowered his glasses and leaned over the conning tower to congratulate the air sentry but the man was looking back up at him with a don't-look-at-me expression and pointing to the tip of the launcher, where the surface-to-air missile was still very much attached.
“SIR!” called a voice from the dockside.
Sergeant Yen was cupping his hands to his mouth.
“As I was saying…they stuck a Type 72 in the engine compartment and wired it up electrically to the troop ramp locking mechanism…worked at treat, eh sir?”
ESA Jetty, Kourou, French Guiana.
Greasy smoke drifted down river on the breeze and the flicker of flame was still visible on the water, a reflection from around the rivers bend of the Chinook’s final resting place.
It had been quiet for almost twenty minutes, a lull but one that was obvious to all as the quiet bit that comes before the other thing.
Small arms fire broke out from the south side of the road bridge as the troopers finishe
d their task of preparing it for demolition and climbed back over the guardrail. The muzzle flashes were visible from the bridge of both Dai and of Bao. One of the troopers was hit and started to topple backwards, but his mate grabbed him and in the act of pulling him over was himself hit, falling screaming to the roadway. Both vessels 23mm cannon opened fire, tearing up the area where the shots had been fired, ripping splintered chunks out of the trees and amputating branches that fell with a splash into the river, silencing the firing from that quarter.
The injured were dragged to safety under the cover of the automatic cannons fire.
“Cease fire! Cease fire!” Captain Li called out. “Only shoot at what you can see from now on.” They had only a limited amount of 23mm cannon ammunition. The Russian Admiral Potemkin had gone down with all the supplies.
He peered into the darkness but it was impossible to tell how effective the fire had been.
Shots next came from the opposite direction, from the eerily dark and foreboding jungle on their side of the river, it started with a single weapon, and rapidly increased into a vicious fire fight.
“How much longer?” he shouted to Bao’s bridge.
“Another hundred gallons give or take!”
The wounded troopers from the road bridge were taken aboard the Bao.
From downriver there came the sound of other helicopters rotor blades, growing louder by the moment but he caught no sight of them at all through the night glasses or weapons sight.
“Raise radar.”
Up it went, twenty eight feet above their heads.
“Go active…one sweep, no more.”
It was the equivalent of keeping phone calls short so the call could not be traced, in pre digital technological terms anyway. These days in the same way the callers ID is instantly displayed on screen so too is the radar type and location to within three metres on anti-radar weapons systems.
Modern weapons would target the origin of the source location even if the radar were to be turned off, or stooge around waiting for it to reappear.
How else though was Captain Li to see what the enemy were up to?
Just the two slow moving track of the helicopters showed, and no sign of the fixed wing threat yet.
“Double up the air sentries, I want one on the forward casing immediately.” He called down.
There had been nothing from Jie’s or the Soyuz team, no sounds of cratering charges, no nothing. No more lullabies were sung by the tone death senior sergeant. What had been a forty strong unit had first been cut to twenty eight with the sinking of the Tuan, and was now down to six effectives. The two other teams were dead or captured and the mission had well and truly lost the advantage of surprise.
An explosion beyond the fuel storage tanks brought a sudden end to the attack from that quarter, the versatile Type 72 anti-tank mine and white phosphorus smoke grenades turned into an anti-personnel claymore mine by Sergeant Yen incorporating a pile of hardcore left over from the laying of the car park. The screams of those caught in its blast provided all the judgement necessary on the mines effectiveness.
The firing slackened for several moments before redoubling in intensity as the wounded reservists mates extracted them using proven CASEVAC, casualty evacuation methods.
Under the cover of this weight of fire five pairs skirmished forwards. Nylon waterproof capes were tossed down, the three wounded casualty’s screams were ignored as they were quickly rolled onto the capes and dragged away far more swiftly than would otherwise have been possible, the smooth material of the cape providing minimal friction with the wet jungle floor. The dead were left where they lay to be retrieved after the fight.
Once back in cover the veterans with the middle aged spreads drew on the experience of years, from Kolwezi and a dozen bushfire wars in Africa, treating wounds from first aid packs stocked according to lessons learned on those battlefields. WP is small grains of phosphorus that burn in contact with the air to produce white smoke. It burns skin and bone too; in clumps it can burn clear through a limb. The best treatment is immediate immersion in water whilst the grains are removed with wooden implements. Metal tweezers will only increase the injury, rapidly heated by the same grains they picked at, glowing red hot within minutes, so the tools of choice are tiny wooden spoons, the type you can still get in some cinemas and movie theatres in small individual tubs of ice cream, suitably wetted before application of course. These were in the packs, so too was Colgate toothpaste, the original white paste but in the small sachets sold in third world supermarkets and shanty town shops. Spread thickly over the injury it took the heat out of the badly blistered surface burns, preventing further tissue damage and bringing relief from the pain.
Puncture wounds, the entry wounds, these were plugged with female sanitary tampons pushed into the entry wounds, swelling up and keeping the wound clean. Bacteria will complete a bullets job so the wounds needed to be kept clean from the outset particularly in germ rich environments such as a jungle.
Screaming men had rifle slings forced between their teeth to bite on as field first aid was applied.
When the mine had been fired by Yen he knew how the legionaries would react and made sure heads stayed down on the friendly side. He knew the reservists ammunition supply was just what they carried in their pouches, so what the hell, let them brass up the bushes as their mates were retrieved, wasting rounds and reducing their options regarding further offensive moves.
He had killed two and wounded another three, and those three would have at least six uninjured troops carrying them to the rear.
He did not know how many they faced from that direction, but he figured that it was more than the fifteen a Chinook could officially carry, but either way the reservists were now short eleven weapons and a bundle of brass they could not replace any time soon.
The road bridge suddenly blew with a flash and a boom that must have carried far further than the sound of the Chinooks demise.
The black and acrid by-products of high explosive, the smoke and stink of burnt almonds was carried away on the wind as two out of the three spans prepared for demolition fell into the river. The third just stayed stubbornly where it was, the explosives wedged into the joins between the span and the supports were visibly still intact.
Rubble fell back to earth, splashing into the river, onto the surviving sections, and into the jungle with a crash.
There was no obvious explanation as to why the third road span had not joined the other two but that was all academic now, thought Li.
They needed to be gone from here, and the arrival of a belt of two 81mm mortar roads just short of the road in front of the gatehouse added further emphasis.
“Back together both, dead slow.” Li ordered.
two more rounds arrived, uncorrected, merely bedding in rounds to set the baseplates solidly, but in that the baseplate position for each barrel was good for only a half dozen rounds apiece as each round fired drove the mortar baseplate deeper into the sodden earth.
The legionnaires had been put down on the Route de l’Espace by the Puma and Gazelle, and set up their mini mortar line on the verge.
Had they a rifle platoon nearby the mortars would have been sited on the solid but unyielding tarmac with a riflemen acting as a shock absorber, fingers in ears and with both feet on the baseplate.
“Une prochaine!” would summons the next rifleman when the former rolled off the baseplate in pain with one or both ankles broken.
Riflemen were good for an average eight rounds, even on a bad day.
The Bao cast off whilst still fuelling; hungry for every drop of precious diesel they could get into the Kilo’s tanks.
The fuelling probe ejected itself, the hose at full stretch it sprang from the intake valve, clanged against the starboard main ballast tank and flopped into the river with a splash.
Slippery diesel made life interesting for the FAS party but they quickly secured the intake valve and riser.
Something struck the Fliterlan
d’s hull, ricocheting away with a whine. The shooters from earlier on were back, lying prone on the southern side of the now wrecked road bridge, taking pot-shots at Dai. The Dai’s 23mm replied, its gunners first burst going ‘over’ through lack of practice, allowing the jungle warfare schools CO and RSM to make it into cover speckled with shredded leaf matter. Like an evergreen wedding party, plastered with matching confetti, crawling rapidly backwards heedless of gravel-rash on skinned knees and elbows, back beyond the roads camber as cannon shells diced and sliced the overhanging trees canopy. It is doubtful though that the wedding party analogy was befitting the language being issued by both thoroughly alarmed men, especially from the sarn’t major who had a far greater vocabulary along those lines from which to draw on than his colonel.
Aboard the Bao a linesman dropped with a cry, the muzzle flashes of a half dozen FAMAS assault rifles in the jungle on the north bank were temporarily extinguished by the joint efforts of Bao’s 23mm and several armed ratings on the casing.
Dai’s casing doors slid open, the forward pair sucking in oxygen and the after pair coughed, spluttered and gave vent to a throaty roar as her diesels kicked in.
Captain Li’s putting the Juliett alongside the jetty was not as neat and pretty as the first occasion. A screech of steel against concrete announced her arrival and the 23mm gave one last burst towards the bridge before swinging dockside to cover the withdrawal.
They fell back in bounds, working in pairs with one firing as his mate moved back to the next available cover, but harassed by fire from the jungle bordering the car park, and more seriously by an old sweat with the reservists tactical radio.
The still ringing telephone in the gatehouse was at last silenced as the building blew apart and began to burn. The next rounds sent the prefabricated roof sections of the covered car park sailing, only to fall spinning like lethal Frisbees’ amongst the armed ratings. Behind them Sergeant Yen and a trooper lay behind a low wall, liberally dusted in debris from the nearby gatehouse which now silhouetted them in its flames. Incoming fire cracked passed, just overhead or struck the brickwork to ricochet away whining, sending brick splinters flying. Yen cursed, a long cut down the length of one cheekbone from one such shard of red brick. They fired rifle grenades into the jungle shadows, attempting to silence the spotter but the next rounds were ‘on’ and the orderly withdrawal became a sprint to safety by the survivors.
