by Gene Skellig
As the Marines became confident that the enemy had withdrawn, they became more and more dispersed across the small town, with four-man teams clearing individual houses and patrolling the streets.
Colonel Yip’s men had chosen their hiding places well, typically at the end of cul-de-sacs and off of the main streets, so as not to be among the first to be encountered by the Marines. And when the time came, they poured out of their hiding places in sections of ten or twelve, quickly overpowering the first widely dispersed teams of Marines they encountered.
In his temporary CP set up at the town’s hospital on the east side of town, Lieutenant Jarvis was immediately overwhelmed with radio reports and audible bursts of gunfire. His teams were under attack at a handful of locations, and his Observation Post on the highway reported a large enemy force approaching rapidly from the east.
Despite the best efforts of the Lieutenant to improvise a suitable rally point, the chaos that his men were facing, with large numbers of enemy soldiers cutting his teams off from one another, gathering his men together in one place proved impossible.
Within minutes, his men had taken cover wherever they were, and tried to hold on until a clear picture – and orders – were in hand.
It was a race, between the relieving Australian force and the much larger enemy force, and the enemy won.
Soon Jarvis’s OP was off the net and the town of Barcaldine was literally swarmed with enemy soldiers, with dozens of Chinese soldiers jumping out of trucks and moving with purpose to secure intersections, larger buildings and other key positions.
For a moment, Jarvis considered surrender, to save the lives of his men, but he knew that in this war the enemy would give no quarter. Especially after what his men had done to the 42nd Group Army at Cloncurry.
The Marines all knew it, and fought heroically. They conserved their ammunition, and acquitted themselves well against the superior force, but ultimately ran out of ammunition before they ran out of enemy targets.
For some of the Marines it was the first time they had seen the true effect of PLA urban warfare doctrine, that of a fast-moving swarm of infantry locking down the entire town, unconcerned that they were losing a great many of their men in the process. They had numbers on their side, and knew that the Marines would run out of ammunition. Their greatest concern was to deny the Marines the time to call in air support – had there been any available – or to buy time for the Australians to come to their aid. The PLA were willing to take very heavy losses if it meant handing the Marines a defeat and taking out a one of the MAGTFA’s limited number of irreplaceable recon platoons.
And that had been Colonel Yip’s objective. The town of Barcaldine itself was important, but of far greater importance was attacking the high morale and confidence caused by the nearly unbroken string of victories the Marines had brought the Australians in Queensland. By wiping out the more than an entire company of Marines from the MAGTFA, and taking a few surviving Marines to be tortured and paraded before his men, Colonel Yip was poking a hot stick into the American eye.
By the end of the battle, Lieutenant Jarvis had been killed, along with Master Gunnery Sergeant Gannon. Only eight Marines had been taken alive. The prisoners were immediately transported to Emerald, where Colonel Yip and the rest of the 372nd Division anticipated having a few Marines to look at in the flesh, and take out their anger upon.
By the time the Australians arrived on the western approaches to Barcaldine, the 1st of the 372nd was once again entrenched in the town, making any attempt for the Australians to try to re-take the town completely futile.
The cavalry had arrived too late. Eighty Marines lay dead in Barcaldine. Eight would die in Emerald in the days to follow.
When word of the battle had spread across Australia it had bolstered the confidence of the Chinese forces, as per Colonel Yip’s intention. However, on the Allied side, the mistreatment of the captured Marines, and the offense of the defeat, had failed to harm the morale of the MAGTFA. Plans were immediately drawn up to respond to Colonel Yip’s actions.
For Colonel Ferebee back in the CJOC in Katherine, Colonel Yip had made it personal. Colonel Yip, you are going to pay for this.
17
OSAKA TO OTTAWA
It had been three days since the convoy of ships had passed them. With almost zero wind and only the gentle rolling of the calm seas, the sixty foot long Grumpy Tortoise was making less than two knots on her own, even with her high clue aspect ratio sail. But it was westbound progress nonetheless, gradually making its way across the solitary expanse of the Indian Ocean.
Colonel Mike Latimer and his wife, Sarah, liked it that way. It was a hell of a lot better than the constant wariness and lack of sleep they had gone through in their journey from Osaka to Adelaide.
Things had been cramped enough when there were eleven of them, on the journey from Japan to Australia. But now, after having bid farewell to one crew member who had chosen to stay in Australia, their number had been increased to twelve with the addition of their prisoner and the specialist provided by the Americans. And with the safety of South Australia well behind them and the unimaginably long voyage to North America still ahead, the mood on the Tortoise was subdued to say the least.
“Any luck with the charts?” asked Sarah, drying her hair with a small towel after her latest swim. A strong swimmer, Sarah had kept pace with their unusual sailboat while Mike kept watch for sharks, jelly-fish and any other threat to his wife of thirty years.
Zipping up his data-disk case, Mike smiled and flicked on the navigation system. It took only a few seconds for it to be up and running, and for the main page to be displayed on the monitor which Mike had set up on the small table in the after-deck near the tiller, it’s umbilical tether snaking back into the main cabin to the navigation/communications panel.
Stepping down into the seating area to join her husband, Sarah recognized the turtle-icon at the center of the screen, representing their boat. The inch-wide swath of bathymetric data began to build out to the east on the computer screen as the Grumpy Tortoise plodded along to the west. Sarah knew that the gray-on-gray shades of the sea-floor data meant that the system still had not found itself; she also knew that it took hundreds of yards of data before tie-in could be achieved by the computer.
“Did you find a good chart?” she asked.
“Yup, but not a LIDAR one. Just one of the older deep-water series from NOAA.”
“How far does it go?”
“It’ll take us close enough to the Maldives and onward to the Seychelles, where we can use the next DTM card.”
Sarah let out a breath of relief. She knew that once their nav system tied in with one of the super-accurate Digital Terrain Model cards – a topographical map of the sea floor – they would know exactly where they were. As she recalled how Mike had explained it to her in Tokyo, when he had shown her his design for the navigation system he and Tony had come up with, she had been sceptical. How do you visually navigate a sail-boat, in the middle of the ocean? But after thinking about it, and Mike’s explanation that it was exactly the same as visual navigation that recreational pilots used, locating their position on a Visual Navigation Chart simply by finding an odd-shaped lake, an intersection of rail and road, distinctive topographic features or anything else that could be seen from an aircraft and found on the VNC, the underwater equivalent of map-reading made sense.
Of course, it all hinged on having a good sonar system that could bounce sound-waves off the sea floor and precisely measure the depth. You also needed a digital map of the sea floor and a computer program that could compare the tiny swath of data from the ship’s sonar against the sea-floor map. The data requirement was enormous, but the job was made easier by Mike’s ability to apply some of his skills as an Air Force navigator, using ‘dead reckoning’, combining what they knew of course and speed, sea current, drift, effects of wind and so on, which Mike plotted on a conventional sea chart. This helped him to narrow down the likely position
of the Grumpy Tortoise, and reduce the amount of data that the nav system had to analyze.
When they were in coastal areas, or on the former shipping lanes, they could simply stick in a DTM card, set the scale to minimum, and input Mike’s estimate of their current position and the nav computer would ‘tie-in’ their position, automatically finding a match between the sonar strip and the DTM data – a positional fix.
The problem was that for the vast, deep areas of the Indian Ocean, there were large areas where no Digital Terrain Model had been created – or if it existed it had not been acquired and added to Mike’s library of digital charts. In these cases, with no nav data, they risked going hundreds of miles off course.
Such an error could prove fatal if it took them into populated areas where they would encounter desperate people, or to destinations which they knew nothing about. Their practice of staying as far from populated areas as possible, despite the added weeks at sea for each leg of their voyage, had proven to be wise. Even so, they had still had several scrapes, with several attacks and a great many stand-offs.
A few rounds from Mike’s .50 calibre, splashing as warning shots ahead of the attacking craft, had discouraged many of the predators they had encountered, but in the relatively crowded waters off the Philippines and again passing the Indonesian archipelago, resulted in pitched battles.
Sarah’s part in the battles had always been the same: call out the radar contacts on the 360-degree plot in the relative safety of the ship’s main cabin, and keep an eye on the couple’s teenaged daughter, Julia. For her part, Julia kept an eye on the two younger children, one from the Porter family and one from the Nelsons. With the children safe in the most well-protected part of the boat, their parents could focus on their role in the collective defense.
Barbara Nielson’s task was to steer the ship, pull-in or extend the automated, telescopic mast or use the diesel motor to get the Grumpy Tortoise moving in whatever direction Mike called out during an encounter with hostiles.
Being a Naval Lieutenant with command experience on one of Canada’s smaller Marine Coastal Defense Vessels, MCVD, Lieutenant Nielson’s skills at the helm, and the rugged vessel’s surprising manoeuvrability at slow speeds, had made it very difficult for raiders to stay alongside long enough to board.
This allowed Colonel Mike Latimer and the four other men in the crew to pour on heavy fire from their firing points. Two of them men, while military, were not experienced soldiers. They could be relied upon to follow orders, and were trained in small arms, but were not marksmen. However, the other two, Roary and Clay, were from the Embassy’s security detachment and had served together before as members from Canada’s Joint Task Force Two, the elite Canadian special forces unit based in Ottawa.
They had also trained with the US Army Rangers at Ranger Training Brigade, and had deployed together with SOCOM units on joint operations which Canadian, British, American and other allied media would never hear of. Simply put, they were world-class veterans of the Special Forces world. That was why they had been selected for embassy security, where the enormous responsibility of providing security to diplomats and their families typically fell on the shoulders of just a small number of highly lethal professionals. They were not only experts with their weapons but also had a loose, confident way about them, seeming to anticipate each other’s actions as only men who had been in firefights together on numerous occasions, in their case in Afghanistan, had in common. Their aggressive and highly effective warrior talents had come in handy when it came time to clear an enemy vessel, or to repel boarders that had made it onto the deck of the Tortoise.
Typically, Mike would fire the first shots at extreme range with the .50 calibre rifle. The sudden splash ahead of the aggressor’s bow as they closed in on the unusual Canadian vessel had caused more than a few attackers to turn away and seek less well-armed prey. But for those who persisted, and closed in on the Tortoise, Mike would place at least one or two massive holes in their hulls at about the three hundred yard range.
The first few hits were part of the cost of doing business for some raiders, who were adept at repairing their vessels after a skirmish and had their crew ready to go with cloths and various sized wooden pegs to make temporary repairs to the inevitable bullet-holes they received when attacking their prey. It seemed that many attackers thought that once you engage in battle you are better off if you press the attack all the way until you capture the target, because it may end up being your only seaworthy transportation when all is said and done.
And with the high speed of the attacking vessels, Mike and the other men knew that the usefulness of the AR 50 was limited. Once the attackers closed to within a few hundred yards, the heavy weapon was no longer practical.
At this stage, they would open up with the Fabrique Nationale FNC1 assault rifles. These very old weapons taken from the armoury of the Canadian Embassy, along with several cases of 7.62mm rounds, gave the crew as much firepower as their attackers’ typical AK47’s, if not more.
With the advantage of good communications, a stable firing platform on the much heavier Grumpy Tortoise, and their military training meant that their attackers could rarely get within the five to ten yard range – where the attackers would normally be in a position to throw grappling hooks over the rails and board their victims ships.
With several pirates having been taken out by Mike and his men on the way in, the attacks had generally ended with the hostiles fleeing in disarray if not killed outright.
The few attackers who ever got aboard were momentarily thwarted by the triple line of razor-sharp concertina wire that paralleled the gangway that ran up and down the port and starboard of the ship. The few seconds it took to climb over the concertina wire kept them in the killing sights of the crew.
On one rare occasion, two raiders that had made it on board soon realized that the firing that was taking out so many of their men was coming from steel pill-boxes on the Port and Starboard wings of the ship. But when they closed in on the boxes they suddenly found themselves no-longer invisible. Small slits in the pill-boxes allowed the defenders to notice their approach. Suddenly orifices opened in the side panels, like the peep-and-shoot holes fitted to the door of Brinks armoured cars, and rounds erupted out of these holes.
The men went down to a few quick 9mm rounds fired by Clay and Roary inside two of the steel pill-boxes.
Other than that one very close call, the Grumpy Tortoise had easily thwarted the fast-boat equipped raiders.
The one time they had come up against a much larger vessel was an encounter with some sort of coastal defense vessel that had fallen into the hands of raiders. Facing vastly superior firepower of the armoured Naval vessel, Mike and his crew had reverted to a different tactic: that of holding off from firing, and attempting to communicate with the much larger vessel.
They never learned if the ship was indeed a warship of the Indonesian Navy, or a pirate ship, as they had used their one, terrible, weapon of last resort.
Mike called it their Armageddon weapon, as it was that terrible in effect.
When training the crew on what to do when facing imminent capture in a hopeless situation, Mike had gone to great depths to have them understand the moral implications of what they were being asked to do.
“You must understand, we are in a state of total war. We have been ordered to return to Canada by any means, and to take any measures necessary to avoid capture. Any means. And as you know, capture means torture and death – regardless of whether they are another nation or merely pretending to be officials. We are to treat all who come near as probable enemy. Our allies will have to prove themselves to be friendly, or have access to wartime codes to prove such. Therefore, if I ever give the order “Puff”, you will not hesitate. You will act as if your life depends upon it, because at that point, it will.” Mike had said, before showing the crew how Puff worked.
To the men operating the Indonesian warship, men who had for the most part at least some conn
ection to their former role in defending their nation with the very same vessel, life had become a routine of targeting and boarding any promising ship that entered their region and then enjoying the bounty of goods looted from the unfortunate travellers.
In most cases, the rations and other supplies they looted from the smaller vessel would last no more than a week for the twenty two men aboard KRI Sibarau.
But in the case of the unusual, fat boat they were coming alongside on this night, and going by the number of fat western-looking people visible on the boat’s deck, they were sure to find some goodies aboard.
“Heave to! Shut down your engines, and prepare to be boarded,” the Indonesian Captain ordered.
Mike and the others aboard the Tortoise had watched the old warship approaching, first with binoculars and ultimately with the naked eye. From their point of view, the ship was massive, with a beam of 20 feet, length of 107 feet, and about 120 tons displacement. But in reality it was just an old 1960’s era patrol boat. It had been sold to the Indonesian Navy by the Australians in the 1970s. Despite its age, the patrol boat was still capable of speeds up to 24 knots – much faster than the Tortoise could make under sail or engine power. But what really tipped the equation in favor of the Indonesians was the bow-mounted Bofors 40mm gun and the .50-calibre M2 Browning machine guns mounted on the deck. With heavy steel construction, even the AR50 was no match for the attack class patrol boat.
As the warship moved in on the Tortoise, Mike had given the order: “Prepare to Puff”, and the crew had each done their part.
So when Lieutenant Nielson finally cut the Tortoise’s diesel engine and luffed and then retracted the ships automated sails, the Tortoise was coasting along at four knots, just upwind of the Sibarau.