ARMAGEDDON'S SONG (Volume 3) 'Fight Through' (6 page)

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 their 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. 

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.”