ARMAGEDDON'S SONG (Volume 3) 'Fight Through' (5 page)

Once their orders arrived the
Admiral Potemkin
slipped away south and avoided the main shipping lanes.

The Chinese boats continued their own role specific
tasks for four more days of rehearsals near the uninhabited, sub-tropical
Damang Island before topping off their tanks and following on initially diverse
courses.

The converted Typhoon was waiting for them at the
first refuelling spot, some six hundred miles south west of a tiny coral atoll.

That atoll was a circular ring of rock and sand that
enclosed a freshwater lagoon, and a stagnant freshwater lagoon at that.
Populated as it was by a quarter million bad tempered sea birds and one million
inedible crabs only the most optimistic romantic, or a Frenchman, could have
named it
Ile de la Passion.

The trio of Chinese diesel submarines had almost dry
tanks and the giant of a Russian must have been a welcome sight for each of
them but they were barely one third of the way to their ultimate destination.

Again the quartet parted with the Typhoon running deep
through the empty vastness of the Pacific to arrive ahead of them at the next
scheduled rendevous.

The crew of the
converted Typhoon arrived at their next assigned position 65 miles south of
Isla del los Estados near the very southernmost tip of South America and
settled down for a long and uncomfortable wait.

Bao
was
the first vessel to arrive, its bona fides established by Senior Lieutenant
Wuhan on a dark night with a thankfully moderate sea. The transfer of rations
as well as fuel went without hitch, but how they enjoyed the Russian rations
was questionable. Tinned pork, tinned sausage and tinned fish were going to be
pretty monotonous and peacetime rules in the Russian navy forbade continuous
use of its tinned rations without added fresh produce in meals beyond eighteen
days. The Russian tinned rations lacked the added protein edition of the western
armies’ varieties.

The second customer arriving two days later was the
curio of the Chinese flotilla, a type paid off from the Russian fleet decades
before but her Chinese owners had maintained her well and added upgrades not
available in her classes’ heyday such as western acoustic dampening tiles and
the propellers of an Improved Kilo, the quietest and most efficient that
technology could build.

Dai
was
an elderly
Juliett, a diesel electric cruise missile boat built
to be quiet enough to get in close to carrier combat groups and sink those
carriers, but she was built small as well as quiet in a time when missile
defence left something to be desired. She only carried a maximum of four cruise
missiles in VTLs, vertical launch tubes, forward of the conning tower.

That operation had been far more difficult as the
weather had been back to its usual wild self. They had eventually relocated a
hundred miles north with the rocky expanses of the Isla del los Estados acting
as a windbreak.

With nuclear detonations up north evaporating vast
quantities of sea water to condense in the cold upper atmosphere, blinding
photo reconnaissance satellites and reducing visibility it had become a more
manageable risk remaining in the lee of the island for the third and final
northbound customer of ‘Grigory’s Gas & Drive-Thru Mart’ as the crew
referred to themselves.
The third submarine in the flotilla,
Tuan,
was early, only a day and a half behind the
Dai
and she had been in the area several hours before the
Admiral Potemkin
had risen up from the depths to check her messages.

The weather was far from
placid and becoming progressively worse. The sun was
an hour below the horizon before the submarines made contact and the complex
ballet of matching course and speed could begin. No transfer of food and fuel
were possible until Lt Wuhan was satisfied the helmsmen were ‘in sync’.

Tuan
was
one of the original Kilo’s, an elderly boat as were all of the submarines in
the flotilla, but they were very well maintained. The life expectancy of a
submarine working inshore and delivering the special forces to their targets
was rather less than that of their conventionally employed sisters. China was
not about to use more modern and less replaceable hulls whilst she still had a
goodly number of the other variety on the lists.

Tuan
she
carried a small submersible piggyback upon her casing, as did the flotilla’s
other two vessels, and anchor points on the submersibles casings were for the
special forces
troops of China’s army navy to be towed along
clinging to the outer hull.

Both Typhoon and Kilo had their ECM, the electronic
counter measure masts, and communications masts fully extended but EMCON was in
force, no electronic emissions were permitted, all systems were set to
passive/standby mode with the sensor arrays sniffing at the electronic airwaves.

The vessel’s towed sonar arrays were reeled in and
housed for the duration of this surface activity as a precaution against being
damaged, or even lost by becoming entangled, ‘run over’ or sucked in to the
other boats screws. Only those sonar sensors incorporated into the hull design
were deployed but all they were hearing was the thrashing of the other boats
propeller and the racket of localised surface noise.

Admiral Potemkin
and
Tuan
had ploughed into heavy seas at 12 knots holding
station on one another despite twice almost losing the fuelling hose to giant
rollers. The RAS and FAS procedures were taking longer than they had for either
the
Bao
or the
Dai.
The weather gods were most definitely not with them
this night.

In the Typhoon’s radio shack a blinking red light
announced incoming flash traffic and the captain was immediately informed, but
what could he do at that particular moment whilst dealing with the fuelling,
break off until the transmission was complete? As per SOP’s the radar was
switched from
‘Standby’
to ‘
Off’
lest it interfere with the incoming signal which
would also of course register on the ECM for ten seconds or ten minutes,
however long the message may be.

In the warmth and dry of the Admiral
Potemkin
the engineers were juggling the flow between the three long bunkers of diesel
fuel in order to stay as near to an even keel as possible, as the rolling of
the vessel was having undue influence on their efforts to fuel the Chinese
Kilo.

Up top
, the rain
was hammering in almost horizontally with each icy gust of wind onto the
lookouts, Strela operator, captain and Lieutenant Wuhan, who was still
directing the FAS and
RAS
parties of both vessels by
megaphone until they had ship to ship telephone communication.

On the submarines’ casings the FAS and RAS parties
looked like ‘Dr Who’ poor man’s aliens in their passive night goggles and
Day-Glo orange immersion suits, but each man was securely tethered to safety
lines.

Forward of the conning towers the RAS parties had it
the worst as they were unprotected from the elements.  Freak waves tried
to snatch them away and only the safety lines saved them but their task was
completed well before the fuelling, and their rig unbolted and stored below in
under twenty minutes, such was their competence even on such an evil night.

Of the three PLAN diesels only
Tuan
had
expended any munitions, sinking a New Zealand flagged bulk grain carrier that
had been unwisely relying on speed rather than an escorted, but slower, convoy.
However the replacement of those two torpedoes was neither requested nor
suggested on a night like they were then experiencing.

   Wind, spray and the rain were reducing
visibility to zero for those without passive night goggles. They were also
being deafened by the combined harsh roaring of the Kilo’s diesel exhausts, the
crashing of the waves and the impact of a million raindrops on the boats
casings and the surface of the ocean.

But someone still noticed the dark winged shape that
emerged from the rain heavy cloud before it actually overflew them.

“Preduprezhdeniye…vrazheskiy
samolet!”
  

Lieutenant
Wei
Wuhan repeated the warning to
Tuan
over the loudhailer but no sooner had he shouted
“Enemy aircraft!” when their cloak of darkness was stripped away.

The P3 Orion of the Argentinian Navy had been
performing a grid square search for the missing
‘Maria III’
when they had
picked up a radar return and had naturally dropped flares to identify the
vessel.

Had the Typhoon not been receiving
flash traffic that was interfering with both
submarine’s ECM threat detectors then the Orion’s crew would have found only an
empty ocean illuminated by the
flares.             

The PNGs were now an unexpected hindrance and upon
removing them the crewmen shouldering the Strela missiles took long moments to
blink in the glare of the flare’s white light before acquiring the Orion.

Alarms screeched aboard the aircraft which went a fair
way to dispelling the shock the Argentinian crew had experienced.

“
Conqueror
….it’s that murdering bastard Anglo,
Conqueror
!” 
a
crew member shouted as the automated counter measure
pods discharged more flares. The 1982 sinking of the cruiser Belgrano, though
justified, was burned into the Argentine naval psyche, if not the nation’s.

The mis-identification of the submarines was not
challenged by the pilots who relied upon the recognition skills of the
observers in the rear, but the co-pilot reached for the intercom switch to ask
that the identification be checked by replaying the images being recorded by
the Orion’s video cameras in the belly and tail. But any thoughts of double
checking and confirming the observers I.D of the surfaced submarines was
forgotten by what happened next.

“Missile launch!”
the observer at the rear shouted on seeing a flash as a Strela’s
rocket motor ignited followed by a bright and fiery tail light.

“The Anglo’s are shooting at us!”

The missile, loosed by the
Tuan
,
chased a flare and detonated harmlessly but on the
Admiral Potemkin
the Russian air sentry was still calmly awaiting a solid lock-on tone.

The cloud base beckoned just two hundred feet above
but the pilot banked left, coming around and sending his contact report.

“Chato, Chato…Albatross Three… contact, contact,
contact…53°44'22.97"south… 64°26'33.81"west… two British submarines
on the surface…we are under attack by surface to air missiles….engaging with
Harpoon and MK50!”

Argentina had declared neutrality at the start of
hostilities but all the maritime patrol aircraft carried
war shots as standard operating procedure on the
underwing pylons in the form of a pair of AGM 84 Harpoons and MK50 torpedoes in
the bomb bay.

“
Cease pumping
…close and secure master fuel pump valve!” Lieutenant
Wuhan saw that the
Tuan
’s FAS party had jumped the gun, ejecting the fuelling
probe before the flow had halted so that it was violently spewing greasy diesel
onto an already slick and slippery casing as it left the receiver at their end.

“Haul back on the messenger return line…lively there;
get that hose back aboa……” The firing of the Strela from
Tuan
’s
conning tower drowned out his words and caused him to duck momentarily. He
straightened up and leant over the conning tower’s coaming.

“Standby to haul in the master messenger once they
strike free the spanwire or it’ll foul the screws.” he kept his voice level as
he called down to their own men but then noticed the leading seaman whose job
it was to watch the spanwire was instead lending a hand hauling in the fuelling
hose, obviously as desperate as any of them to get below the surface and away
from danger.
Wei looked in alarm at the
spanwire to see it was rock steady.

With a report like a gunshot the cable parted where it
was clamped into the
Tuan
’s kingpost, whiplashing across the gap between the
vessels, cutting in two the Strela operator as he was about to fire and
decapitating Lieutenant Wuhan who was still leaning over the side.

With the supporting spanwire gone the hose and probe
dropped into the churning water between both vessels where the wake swept it
back into the Typhoons port propeller which tore the hose and messenger lines
away. The fuelling
hose was shredded and
dispersing harmlessly in their wake but the messenger line was sucked in and
wrapped itself around the spinning screw, a later job for the Typhoons diver,
if
they
survived.