by FARMAN, ANDY
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 f
resh 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.
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 1st Corps of the PLAN’s 3rd Army. Its 2nd Corps was already loading back in Shanghai, whilst the 3rd Corps, largely reservists with second class equipment, was scheduled to use the shipping that was currently carrying 1st Corps with the Sino Russian fleet.
However, the planned raids on Hawaii had been shelved as impractical once major units of the US 2nd Army had moved into defend likely targets.
The 2nd 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 2nd 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 Pete
rsburg, 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.