ARMAGEDDON'S SONG (Volume 3) 'Fight Through' (4 page)

Much juggling of valves was required to prevent a list
developing as the portside bunker filled and its contents gradually shared with
the centreline and starboard bunkers via a main transfer valve and a secondary,
neither of which were as fast as they could have been.

When the bunkers were filled she sat low in the water
but her handling characteristics were little different to those originally
intended.

As soon as she began servicing the small flotilla
engaged on what was named as Operation ‘
Early
Dawn’
those characteristics altered.

Once the Typhoon was no longer on an even keel it
adversely effected the steering, making the tasking of holding a course
difficult, and if the equilibrium within the tanks was not restored swiftly
then over steering would follow until the bulky vessel began a noticeable
zigzag course much to the annoyance of her captain and Lt
Wei Wuhan of the Chinese navy.

They had taken the Chinese officer onboard soon after
the modified Typhoon had been launched, and that was before the Chinese
People’s Republic’s Politburo had even heard the sales pitch by Peridenko and
Alontov.

Lieutenant Wuhan was the ship’s interpreter and
dedicated OCE, Officer Conducting Exercise, for Underway Replenishment.

Quite apart from adversely affecting the steering it
also caused problems with the equilibrium of the vessel when dived.

Even a vessel the size of
Admiral Potemkin
can be effected by violent seas when submerged, unless at great
depth. 

The best cure for sea sickness is to step outside and look
at the horizon but that was not an option, so with no fixed horizon to
stabilise the brain the inner ear slipped in and out of synchronisation. In
particular for those crew members navigating a passage from fore and aft, or
vice versa, it could be an uncomfortable experience when the Typhoon was
running relatively shallow.

Admiral Potemkin
was 577.7 feet in length so the boat was 4702.3 feet short of the
title, but when under the influence of the waves above that journey still
became known as
Zhelchi Milyu
, ‘The Bile
Mile’.                                                                                                 

Her primary role was originally to be that of
supporting the inshore raiding flotilla in hit and run attacks on the Hawaiian Islands,
before eventually heading to Australia for the fuelling and resupplying of
forces seizing Port Kembla, south of Sydney, in the hours before China’s
invasion of Australia.

The industrial port had deep water for the troopships
and freighters to unload, and ferry docks for the Ro-Ro transports to land two
armoured and two mechanised divisions of the 1
^st
Corps of the
PLAN’s 3
^rd
Army. Its 2
^nd
Corps was already loading back in Shanghai, whilst
the 3
^rd
Corps, largely reservists with second class equipment,
was scheduled to use the shipping that was currently carrying 1
^st
Corps with the Sino Russian fleet.

             
However, the planned raids on Hawaii had
been shelved as impractical once major units of the US 2
^nd
Army had moved into defend likely targets.

The 2
^nd
Army’s presence was not something that had been
foreseen in the planning, but then there is one law of planning which never
changes and that is ‘No plan survives first contact with the enemy’.

Only in B movies are the other people completely predictable.

Various factors had altered the original plan. Ninety
nine cities and military bases around the world that were supposed to have been
destroyed were in fact untouched. The destruction of Pusan and the 2
^nd
Army headquarters were expected to leave the US Forces in South Korea stranded
and disorganised, left to wither on the vine and be easy pickings for later in
the war.

The Hawaiian Islands and key points in Australia and
New Zealand were now effectively hardened and no longer practical targets for
small scale commando raids, which left
Admiral
Potemkin
and the inshore raiders
twiddling their thumbs in the wings awaiting a suitable specialist role to play
in the war once the original missions were scrubbed or put on hold.

The French had also not behaved as predicted.
Historically the greater good had only been a factor when the going was good,
i.e., a benefit to the national good. Russia’s Premier confidently expected the
French to declare neutrality and withdraw completely from NATO once the new Red
Army began rolling westwards. Indeed they had in 1966 separated themselves from
the command structure, if not the organisation, following differences arising
during the Cuban Crisis.
But after the
opening battles the French had not scurried off home, they had dug in a fought
as fiercely as the other armies in the alliance.

The French had proven themselves to be unpredictable
in the Premier’s eyes and they also had a nuclear arsenal completely
independent of NATO control along with the means to deliver those weapons,
despite retiring and deactivating her land based tactical nuclear weapons.
The army’s battlefield
Pluton
and
Hadès
mobile missile systems, and three IRBMs, Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles,
in silos at the airbase at Saint-Christol were scrapped and their warheads
recycled into nuclear fuel rods.

President Charles de Gaulle himself had been speaking
directly, for he was always very direct, at the Russian people when he had
famously said, with a Gallic shrug of the shoulders of course

“Within ten years, we shall have the means to kill
eighty million Russians. I truly believe that one does not light-heartedly
attack
people who are able to kill eighty million Russians,
even if one can kill eight hundred million French, that is
if there were
eight hundred million French.”

The French navy’s
Force
Océanique Stratégique
comprising the
SSBNs
Le Terrible
,
Le
Triomphant
and
Le Téméraire
were all at sea and
Le Vigilant,
which had been undergoing a lengthy refit within the
covered dry dock at Brest, had with much ceremony for the worlds press, been
re-floated and towed to the old reinforced concrete U Boat pens to be moored in
the open where her sixteen M45 ballistic missiles could be launched at both
Russia and China if necessary.   

The Premier believed that whereas the US President and
the British would baulk at ‘going ballistic’ until the last moment, the French
were an unknown quantity.

What was known though was her current ability to put
up military satellites to replace those that Russia and China were destroying
on an almost daily basis from their South American facility on the equator at
French Guiana.

Both the
Ariane
, Italian
Vega
and now also, to add insult, the neighbouring
Soyuz
built launch facilities were being used solely for the launching of military
payloads.

The French legionnaires guarding all three at the
outbreak of the war had not only seized the
Soyuz
site and personnel not yet evacuated, but had also
mounted an ad hoc resource denial operation. Augmenting their own tiny helicopter
force of a Gazelle and Puma with a logging company’s Chinook they had boarded
the freighter
Fliterland
on the open sea as she attempted to carry ten
Soyuz-ST
rockets and boosters back to St Petersburg, denying Russia the use of ten
valuable launch vehicles whilst themselves benefiting .

The
Vega
’s carried smaller communications satellites aloft and
the
Soyuz
, while they lasted, and
Ariane
rockets hoisted the RORSATs up into the desired orbits.

Taking down the launch facility would leave the West
with only Canaveral, Kennedy and Vandenberg, as fear of China’s lack of
inhibition in using nuclear weapons would deny them Asia’s launch sites.

All the Premier had to do was advise his partners to
exercise restraint when dealing with French Guiana, at least until NATO was
broken in Europe.

So Operation
Early
Dawn
was devised.

The Russian
Admiral
Potemkin
and the Chinese diesel boats
of the
Inshore Raiding Flotilla were off the south China coast near Zhuhai practicing
replenishment and fuelling at sea, along with other more warlike drills as they
awaited deployment.

They exercised initially by day in the full knowledge
that the NSA had been penetrated and for a time the Americans could not trust
what their satellites saw.

The drilling in daylight progressed on to working at
night, at first under illumination until they had built up skills and
confidence.

Finally the lights had been switched off and from then
on refuelling and resupply was carried out under operational conditions.

Crewmen on the blacked out casing wearing passive
night goggles and safety lines attached king posts to the fore and aft ends of
the conning towers to hold STREAM rigs, or the ‘
Standard Tensioned Replenishment Alongside Method’
because the navy loves an acronym that sounds cool
until first explained. This complex mechanism was assembled to supply food
using pulleys and loadbearing cables under tension for the transfers, and also
to feed across the fuelling hose, clear of the waves, to the receiving submarine’s
female receptor attached to her own conning tower.

Both vessels would have to exercise superb seamanship
with expert hands on the helms as they ran parallel at thirty yards distant.
Only the best coxswains’ hands will be steering each boat because a
t 12 knots a 1 degree variation in heading produces a
lateral speed of 20 feet per minute initially, and that is before hydrodynamics
is factored in, the suction caused by two masses in close proximity,
particularly if at least one of them or the ocean is in motion. The suction
increases exponentially and a collision may be unavoidable if that happens, as
the captain of a luxury cruise ship recently found to his cost sailing too
close to a small Mediterranean island.

Ram Tensioners and a series of saddle winches kept the
cable taut and also allowed some leeway before the cable parted due to an error
of diverging courses, but seamanship of a high standard made it work. Senior
Lieutenant Wuhan
of the People’s
Liberation Army Navy
would have the fate
of the entire mission riding on his cool head and language skills on each
occasion. No radios could be used without compromising the mission and so all
instructions would have to be passed by voice, via megaphone until a shot line
was fired over to the receiving vessel, and that is attached to a cable for a
sound powered telephone. The telephone cable is itself attached to a heavier
‘Span Wire’ which is heaved over and clamped onto the receiving kingpost, and
with that secure the ‘saddles’ bearing stores and the fuelling hose are strung
beneath it and pulled over.

With Strela surface to air missiles at the ready
they simulated coming under attack whilst coupled and joined by the fuelling
hose, they simulated man-overboard drills whilst coupled and joined together
and even buddy-buddy fire fighting drills whilst coupled together because there
is really no such thing as an ‘Emergency breakaway’, instead the ‘Rasser’s’ and
‘Fasser’s’, the replenishment  and fuelling parties, just have to get a
hustle on to de-rig the complex apparatus that much faster than they normally
would.

That the issue with steering and trim was one that
only a refit would solve was quickly realised. Earlier on they also discovered
that the spanwire visibly vibrated when taut, but it ceased vibrating completely
when the helmsmen got it wrong and the courses began to diverge. When that
happened you knew the 2500 lb. breaking strain was all but upon you! It became
the job of one of the leading hands to do nothing except watch the spanwire and
shout a warning when that vibration could no longer be seen.

They were relearning old lessons and they learned
well. Some procedures they simply made up as they went along, and if it worked
then that became the SOP, the standard operating procedure for fuelling and resupplying
submarines from another submarine, something not practiced in over sixty years.

The technically much trickier replenishment at sea of
torpedoes and torpedo tube launched anti-shipping missiles was practiced at
anchor in a sheltered bay, and with oil being pumped out into the sea by both
vessels for the purpose of water calming. Bow to bow and separated by heavy
duty inflated bladders the submarines were made fast to each other as torpedoes
were manually fed tail-first from the Typhoon’s torpedo tube and into the
Chinese boat’s torpedo tubes.
Finding such a handy spot to carry out the task
would not be an easy matter and both vessels would be open to attack, so quite
aside from the back breaking toil involved it was an unpopular undertaking,
made more unpleasant by the cleaning of the bladders, which was a filthy but
necessary job as the oil would eat into them and perish the material within
days otherwise.