ARMAGEDDON'S SONG (Volume 3) 'Fight Through' (18 page)

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.

Six of
Dai’s
crew members lay
unmoving on the black tarmacadam, the neatly and precisely painted white lines
defining the car parking spaces now marred by flecks of blood.

Crewmen stood on the casing helped their
messmates down, dropping off the edge of the jetty where they were grabbed
before they could topple into the water from the curving convex ballast tank.

Bao
’s 23mm was still firing into the jungle but she had not slowed, the
cannon’s fire becoming less effective with each turn of her screw.

Sergeant Yen and the trooper arrived
last, 
Dai’s
23mm working over the darkened jungle as they threw
smoke grenades into the undergrowth before running hell for leather down the
sloping car park, shouting to cast off and that all who could were already
aboard. They pounded along the jetty and arrived as the gulf between it and the
submarines casing was widening, caught as it was now by the current. Not
slowing as the seamen had but leaping long and high, risking broken bones but
they made it and grimaced on sprained ankles as they were helped below.

Dai’s
23mm cannon fell silent, all ammunition expended.

Captain Li looked over at the fallen crew
members as the
Dai
backed away from the jetty, illuminated in the
flickering firelight from the burning gatehouse they were unmoving, the wind
ruffling tattered and torn uniform clothing.

“All back slow…special sea duty men
below!” he leant over the coaming to shout at two armed ratings and the air
sentries standing upright on the after casing.

“Air sentries kneel behind the conning
tower…you riflemen there,
get down
!”

The throb of
Bao’s
diesels
reverberated as she too switched from her electric motors. She had reached the
bend in the river, her 23mm silent too, either out of ammunition or out of
effective range.

The next rounds arrived, fired from
mortar barrels pointing up at a high angle, the baseplates now sunk almost two
feet.

High angle equals greater flight time
equals greater variation of error. One round struck the now empty jetty whilst
the other landed well ‘off’ in the small tank farm to perforate several of the
cylindrical containers.

“Standby tubes One and Two…helm, give me
five degrees to port…’midships, steady, all stop!”

Dai’s stern pointed not safely mid-stream
but angled toward the southern bank.

The
Fliterland
was now once more a
darkened silhouette, sat silent and aloof from the mayhem.

Dai’s
bow pointed directly at the dark shape.

Li raised the microphone.

“Fire one!”

The gunner dropped without a sound and a
lookout screamed. Perhaps a dozen points on the north bank lit up with the
muzzle flashes of the Legionnaire reservists determined to exact revenge. 

Rounds struck the coaming, the mast
cluster and the sides of the conning tower to produce a sound like pebbles
flung on to a tin roof.

The 21” torpedo, set shallow, broached
the surface on leaving the tube, porpoising but unswerving it struck the
Fliterland
amidships, exploding and flinging fiery debris every which way.

The tank farm blew in spectacular
fashion, a great fireball climbing high into the sky.

The scene was now lit, the darkened field
of battle not such an unknown now. The submarine in mid river bathed in the
light of fire, picked out by the shadow her bulk cast on the jungle behind.

Li’s jaw dropped momentarily as he
witnessed the spectacle, and then on seeing the reservists on the north bank
likewise frozen in shock, weapons still trained on his vessel but heads turned,
witnessing the destruction of freighter and fuel tanks.

Li’s jaw closed with a determined snap
and his right hand dropped, fumbling under his oilskin coat and unbuttoning the
flap on his webbing holster. Drawing the weapon, he dropped the microphone in
order to pull back the slide, aim, pull the trigger and frown when nothing
happened.  The slide was still glaringly to the rear, and an empty
magazine housing in the pistols butt the obvious cause.

He swore, hurriedly located the magazine
in his trousers pocket, inserted it sharply and the slide sprang forward with a
satisfying snap. Li pointed it shore wards once more only to find his targets
had gone, slipped away back into the shadows. 

A corpsman took the wounded gunner and
lookout below and their replacements, heaving up a metal box of 23mm ammunition
took post.

By now there was no sign at all of the
Bao
.

The
Fliterland’s
sterncastle was on fire, her hold a
furnace. The freighter was listing to port and settling by the bow, the tops of
her copper plated propeller blades reflecting the firelight from the tank farm.

With a shriek of tortured steel her
aftermost derrick sagged forwards and toppled into the red maw of the hold
sending a cloud of burning cinders aloft like emigrating fireflies.

No second torpedo would be required. She
was now a major obstruction to any future use to this dock or to this jetty.

“Five degrees starboard…slow, back
together.”

They edged away, back from the flickering
firelight on the water, back into the dark of a river crowded in on two sides
by the jungle at night.

Around the bend in the river a small area
of the north bank still burned, the Chinooks grave marked by the upright rotor
blade protruding from the water.

“Look sir!” announced a lookout, pointing
into the trees on the south side.

Captain did not need his night glasses,
the flames provided enough light.

“You don’t see that very often do you
sir? A one legged pilot, sitting up a tree.”

The company’s silver wings caught the
firelight and stood out in stark relief on the breast of the wet one-piece
flight suit.

At the foot of the tree a caiman,
possible eighteen feet in length was gnawing at a pilot’s helmet.

Li straightened and raised his hand in a
formal salute.

Don Caldew shifted his grip to hold the
branch with his left, extending his right with knuckles downwards toward the
Chinese submariner and raised a single upright digit.

Forty eight miles south east a pair of
Breguet Atlantiques taxied. One behind the other,
Poseidon Zero Four
and
Poseidon
One Eight
followed the glistering wet
taxiway as their operators established communications with all elements
involved, on land, sea and in the air.

Bombing-up had taken place on the taxiway
itself, five hundred metres from the nearest airport building without the
blessing of the airport manager who had been overruled by the governor. By
prior agreement this potentially hazardous procedure was to have taken place
outside the perimeters chain link fence via a pair of extra-width security
gates, gates that opened on to a hard standing where the airport fire brigade practiced
its art on a prefabricated concrete aircraft facsimile. But it was late and no
one knew who had the keys.

Both aircraft carried four depth charges
apiece,
Zero Four
also held two Mk 46 torpedoes whereas
One Eight
carried only one, but beside it in the bomb bay was an MM40 Exocet
anti-shipping missile. 

Ordnance expenditure in the Atlantic had
been high, as the three quarters empty bomb bays testified.

In addition to the low loadout of offensive
weaponry the defensive variety was also thin on the ground with the appearance
of the Soviet’s Launch-At-Depth anti-aircraft system. It produced an
uncalculated psychological effect on air crews, despite the small number of
hulls that had carried the device. The bad news spread fast.

NATO’s maritime patrol aircraft crews had
quite understandably made rather prodigious use of counter-measures, exhausting
many NATO members stocks of flares and chaff.

Parachute flares for illumination they
had aplenty, but both aircraft were reduced to prayer, a box of cartridges and
a crew member with a Very pistol by way of surface to air counter measures for
heat seeking missiles.

Zero Four
turned onto the end of the runway, lining up on the
centreline, her twin Rolls Royce Tyne turbo prop engines ran up with the
captain holding it on its brakes.

  Something caught the captain’s
attention, turning his head to look out of the left side window he could see an
area of the cloud base above the horizon in the north that was glowing
red.   

The journey back to the ocean, stern
first, seemed to Li to be taking an interminably long time, far longer than it
had been to originally reach the ESA dock, and indeed it was, out of necessity.

A lookout was posted over the stern for
deadfalls which would cause far more damage to the rudder and screws if they
collided, than would a bow-on encounter.

Bao
was visible ahead, engines stopped as crewmen hanging over the stern
used brute force to manoeuvre one such hazard to the side.

“All stop.”

The chant of the diesels had a way of
negating the fear of the unknown that this jungle held.

Rather than be reassured though, Li
looked about him, peering at the banks, alert, aware that something was amiss.

“Go to electrical power.”

The throb of un-muffled diesels gave way
to a drone, a murmur inhibited by a wind blowing in the wrong direction.

It came from up on high, above the lofty
jungle canopy and above the cloud base.

“Bridge…ECM; we’ve been painted by
radar Captain, airborne source bearing 120 degrees!”

“Stand to, air sentries!”

A green flare, not of the
para-illumination variety, emerged from the clouds, falling rapidly, a red
flare followed before harsh white magnesium produced light dropped swinging
into view, the wind carrying it as it hung suspended on a small parachute.

Dai’s
air sentries pivoted, the Strela launchers at their
shoulders and eyes squinting down the open iron sights atop the launcher as
they attempted to judge the position of the hidden aircraft. Fingers took up
first pressure on the triggers to engage the missiles seeker head.
The ‘lock’ lights flickered and the tone was
intermittent, confused by more coloured flares falling from the clouds, as they
turned slowly from north to south.

Li too was peering upward at the sound of
the Atlantique’s engines as a lookout called “Aircraft action,
forward
!”

The second aircraft also came in from the
direction of the ocean, but a scant hundred feet above the trees, its wings
tilting as it followed the lie of the river, the bomb bay doors gaping open.

The same parachute flare dropped by
One Eight
which had illuminated the submarines also revealed the pale grey shape of
Poseidon Zero Four
at the moment an object fell from out of the open
belly, followed immediately by a second.

Bao’s
air sentries were taken by as much surprise as were
half of
Dai’s
.