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

“Stand down and get into cover.”

The approaching light helicopter looked remarkably
similar to a French Aerospatiale AS355 Twin Ecureuil, the military version of
the ‘Squirrel’, but was in fact a Chinese copy, the Z-11.

Until a couple of weeks before, the main natural
hazard of operating helicopters in the region had been the dust and heat. The
aircraft were all equipped for those conditions, with dust filters for the
intakes and hot weather lubricants for the engines.  The snow and
plummeting temperatures had brought to a halt the increased patrolling that had
become the norm since the start of the war. The sub-zero temperatures turned
the lightweight lubricants into heavy treacle and the dust filters iced over,
starving the engines of oxygen.

The Z-11s pilot was not ecstatic about being a guinea
pig, flying the first sortie since the arrival of arctic standard lubricants.
The dust filters had been replaced and a crew chosen to carry out a test
flight, which proved to be the ones least in favour with their commander.

Two hundred feet up the face the commander of the SAS
Mountain Troop detachment pressed himself as close to the rock as he could. Lt
Shippey-Romhead could not see the Z-11; he had left the traverse to climb into
shadow around a corner of rock, away from the approaching helicopter. The only
holds here were widely spaced and his rope, tied off at the belay point below
did not allow him sufficient slack to accomplish it easily, it was pulling him
sideways. The young officer was spread eagled across the rock, uncomfortably
overstretched and silently urging the PLA aircraft to hurry up and bugger off.
The involuntary tremors began in his right leg, a
phenomenon known to climbers as ‘Elvis leg’, where tired or over-stressed leg
muscles display disquiet at the treatment demanded of them. The SAS officer
cursed the rope that was contributing to his discomfort and concentrated on
stilling the tremors in his limb, willing it to behave but his left leg came
out in sympathy, trembling in unison to the right limb. Removing his right hand
from its hold he eased it between his body and the rock, his fingers unscrewing
the locking carabiner at his waist and releasing the rope. Breathing a sigh of
relief he replaced his hand back into the fracture it had left, and noted with
satisfaction that the tremors were already abating. 

Corporal
Alladay
reached the shadow beneath the overhang and clipped himself onto a runner
before assuming an attitude of absolute stillness. The helicopter was almost
upon them, the beating of its rotors a physical thing that buffeted the senses.
The British and American troops held their breath lest the fog of their
breathing catch the eye of an alert crewman, but on board an aircraft never
equipped with heating the door gunners sat behind closed side doors, peering
disinterestedly through Perspex windows as they shivered in the cold and drafts
of freezing air that streamed through the joints of the side door.

A
clod of snow
struck Richard on the shoulder, loosened by the vibration of the helicopters
passing it fell down the chimney from the mass of wind-blown snow and ice that
overhung the face, a fore runner of the tons that were to follow. He had just
enough time to brace his arms and legs against the side of the chimney,
pressing his back against the opposite side with all his strength before he was
engulfed.

Garfield was following the helicopter with his eyes,
the beat of the blades drowned out all other sound but a white, fast moving
mass caught the corner of his eye. A falling wall of ice and snow blotted out
the rock face and he shouted an alarm to the men closest to the base of the
canyon wall where the bergens were stashed, but they were watching the PLA
machine and his shout was drowned out by the beating blades. Two men disappeared
before his very eyes, one moment they were there and the next they were buried
under tons of snow and ice.

During an avalanche or rock fall down a vertical face
the safest place to be is as tight against the rock face as possible. The
falling mass has achieved a degree of forward motion, which will carry
most
of
it outwards, not in towards the face.

Lt Shippey-Romhead had no warning at all until a
whiteout replaced the view he had had of the rock face across the canyon they
had descended earlier. Sucking in his stomach and expending the air in his
lungs he made himself as flat as possible but could still feel the wind of the
avalanche against his back. Just millimetres separated him from the down rush
of snow and he clung with desperation to his hand and toeholds. A lump of ice
about the size of a coconut struck the back of his helmet a glancing blow and
his head rebounded off the rock and into the downfall, which dragged his body
from its tentative perch.

Lambeth: London SE5

Situated as it is between Peckham and Brixton, two of
the more violent suburbs of the British capital, the
hospital that lay three quarters of the way up Denmark Hill have a staff with
vast experience and expertise in dealing with gunshot wounds and stabbings.
Those skills made Kings College Hospital an obvious choice for dealing with
many of the more serious cases arriving back in the UK from the fighting in
Europe. One such patient arrived under guard; the military policemen of his
escort being exceedingly closed mouthed about their charge.

That he was a soldier seemed obvious from the remnants
of camouflage cream that still adhered to his skin, clearly missed by the
medical staff in Germany. However, the RMPs would not reveal his identity or
the circumstances of his receiving his injuries.

A doctor in triage was beginning to get extremely
frustrated with the lack of forthcoming information, such as the date of the
injury, the dimensions of the blade and was it possible that any of the knife
or bayonet’s blade could have been broken off? Whether morphine had been
administered, and if so then how much and when? She couldn’t even get them to
admit that the casualty was a serviceman. A Warrant Officer was in command of
the escort but the doctor was being blanked in her attempts to do an accurate
assessment.

“Listen mister, you people only police the armed
forces so you must know something about this man…right?” 

The military policeman answered with a half-truth,
because he had been deliberately given the very minimum of information, and
then warned that severe repercussions would follow immediately should even that
small amount of knowledge be divulged.

“No doctor that is not right, we actually police the
armed forces
and
their dependants, but we are here only to provide a
guard for this prisoner until relieved by the civil authorities.”

The doctor resisted the urge to grind her teeth, and
tried one last time to stick with the logical approach.

“So where is his paperwork, you must have something to
hand over to whoever is relieving you?”

The Redcap shook his head.

“No doctor, perhaps our relief will know more.”

The doctor’s eyes hardened and she squared her
shoulders, but before she could launch into a verbal assault a slightly
flustered senior manager for the Hospital Trust arrived and thrust a scrap of
paper with hastily written details upon it.
The
length and width of the type of bayonet that had inflicted the wound, the
casualty’s blood group, and the details of his medication up to present time
were all included. The doctor noted however that although his date of birth was
shown, there was no mention of a name or next of kin for this man before her.

“Where did you get this?”

The manager was not about to reveal the identity of the
very important person from whom the information had apparently originated. The
patient, if he survived, was to be charged and prosecuted with a variety of
serious crimes including cowardice, mutiny and war crimes. The media must be
kept completely in the dark and as such the manager had been threatened with
prosecution himself for breaching the Official Secrets Act if word got out.
Such a prosecution, if successful, would of course void his pension rights he
was reminded.

“That information is confidential and of a need to
know nature. So, as you have all the details you need I suggest you get busy,
doctor?”

As she had worked with less she put the annoyance and
dislike of the National Health Services ‘Yes men’ behind her, and got on with
the job.    

The military policemen accompanied the unnamed
casualty up to theatre, and waited away the hours as patients came and went
from other OR’s. The afternoon became evening, and eventually their relief
arrived in the uniform of Her Majesty’s Prison Service, but the surgical
procedure dragged on.

The Yaghan Basin: 2122hrs.

There is a song about men joining navies to see the
sea and getting their wish, seeing an unromantic Atlantic and a less than
terrific Pacific but no mention is made of the wildest and stormiest of seas,
those of the great Southern Ocean.

There are no land masses to buffer nature’s energies
and the stormy seas percolate north to make life interesting at times for
sailor men in the southern Pacific and Atlantic.

On the edge of the Southern Ocean, at the Falklands
Islands in 1982, the Royal Navy Task Force had an unpleasant time of it in
ships built for the less aggressive Mediterranean and north Atlantic.

Currently, there were ninety eight seamen who could
not see the third ocean but who were of a similar opinion as the songsters
about the water above their heads at that time.

At 55°47'26.48"S - 64°24'51.40"W the
Admiral Potemkin’s
coxswains fought to keep their charge on an even keel
at a depth of one hundred feet as a floating antennae was streamed out behind
them, dragged behind on the surface as they checked for any messages left them
in the previous twenty four hours.  

At 33,800 tons submerged the
Admiral Potemkin
was something of a lumbering behemoth in fact as well as looks. She had
been laid down at the Rubin Design Bureau works at Arkhangelsk Oblast in 1993
designated as a
raketnyy podvodnyy
strategicheskogo nazhacheniya,
a
strategic missile cruiser, a
‘Boomer’
in western naval parlance and NATO called her a
Typhoon, but when the Berlin Wall came down because the arms race had
bankrupted the Soviet Union she was abandoned before her reactor or VLTs,
Vertical Launch Tubes, for her twenty ICBMs could be installed.

Her rescue had come during the long years of planning,
of placing human and materiel assets into the West and waiting for the
espionage to produce fruit. The blinding of the West’s satellites without them
realising had been an intelligence coup to cap them all, and also the signal to
proceed with the many and varied parts of the next stage.

Neither Russia nor the People’s Republic of China had
the infrastructure and resources to operate diesel submarines at sea over a
protracted period of time or indefinitely over great distances.  The
German Kriegsmarine in the last world war had perfected the refuelling and
victualling of submarines at sea and even undersea refuelling was possible,
given the right circumstances. However, there exists no method for victualing
another vessel beneath the waves, which therefore renders the covert refuelling
of another submerged submarine an operation of questionable worth. A fully
fuelled submarine crewed by a collection of starving individuals is of no use
to anybody.

When a submarine leaves for a long voyage every inch
of space is used for storage. Floor gratings are lifted and boxes packed
alongside one another before the gratings are replaced on top to prevent trips
and falls, whilst making life hazardous for the taller members of the crew.
Walking hunched over may not look particularly martial but it saved on painful
meetings between cranium, steam pipes and the like until the fresh food
was used up and the tinned goods at floor level
thinned out.

So the
Admiral
Potemkin
became a
Milchkühe,
a
milk cow which could carry out FAS and RAS, ‘Fassing’ and ‘Rassing’, fuelling
at sea and replenishing at sea, resupplying and rearming with conventional
weapons any submarine requiring such and any diesel electric boat in need of
refuelling.

Five of her six 21” torpedo tubes were removed and all
available space was incorporated into storage.  The vast void of her
launch tube chamber was split into three fuel bunkers for diesel fuel with each
connected by valves and it was these fuel bunkers which were the cause of the
crews unhappy state.

The original builders,
the excellent Rubin Design Bureau, had not been involved in her conversion and
were only consulted on limited matters such as the replacement of equipment
either rendered defunct due to the role change or due to corrosion as she sat
on the slips for years, her hull incomplete and exposed to the elements.

Had her bunkers been multi-layered cells and linked
via high pressure pumps whereby trim could be easily maintained there would
have been less of a problem, but the three bunkers were mounted lengthways,
pointing fore and aft and they could not discharge independently. For
practicality the bunkers were filled and discharged from the portside, either
by tankers or pumps on the quayside, or at sea from an oiler.