Going deep and running on batteries and internal air supply was another matter entirely.
The week before, they had been pinged by an unknown maritime patrol aircraft when they were off Natal, Brazil, where it was a bit far off for the French Navy Atlantique IIs out of Cayenne. But it hardly mattered who they were, it had been the first brush with the enemy.
They had been snorkeling as they ran just under the surface with the ECM mast extended of course.
Now there are two dangers in that situation, the first time under fire, and only one is the enemy aircraft. The other is a panicked dive with the diesels still engaged because a torpedo may miss but a diesel will suck every breath of air out of the boat before the Diving Officer realises his error. It had happened to the ‘The Great Wall’ on a simple training exercise with students from the academy a few years before. She had been a Ming class, an ex-Soviet Romeo and someone probably ordered crash surface when they realised what was happening but a fishing boat found it drifting ten days later with all 70 students and crew dead from asphyxia.
Back to the Dai’s first time under fire, and the aircraft had been doing a MAD sweep, its magnetic anomaly detector had picked up the distortion in the earth’s magnetic field caused by the shallow running Dai’s metal hull
The executive officer had the watch and he had done it by the numbers as if it were a drill, shutting down the diesels and engaging the electric motor before diving.
Whichever nation’s aircraft it was, it had been known that either there was no friendly boat was in the area or they just did not care because they had immediately attacked with depth charges.
Luck had not deserted them entirely and the aircraft had departed, either low on fuel or suffering some fault but it obviously called for surface support because a half hour later a frigate, identified by the sonar as either the Brazilian Liberal or the Constitucao, had lobbed depth charges at them from its 375mm ASW mortar.
Sonar had first heard it thundering in at full speed from ten miles away and Captain Li had the two obvious choices, fight or flight. The first option was one he was confident he would win, but it would alert all the navies in the region that a submarine was in the area and that would hazard their mission. To run was not an attractive bet as more surface vessels and aircraft would join the hunt
A good look at the chart though had given him a third choice.
Captain Li settled the Dai into the mud close by the wreck of the U598, sunk seventy years before by US Liberator bombers, and there they waited out the depth charging.
There was doubtless an interesting exchange between aircraft commander and the ASW officer aboard the frigate as to the certainty of the aircraft’s contact, but they endured two hours’ worth of attention and twenty-three depth charges before the frigate departed. Fortunately, the aircraft did not return.
Quite apart from the terrifying experience everyone had endured, those extras bodies, the special forces troopers, had had a noticeably disagreeable effect on air quality. The carbon dioxide levels had been bordering the red line.
Today Captain Jie Huaiqing, second in command of the Zhōngguó tèzhǒng bùduì, the Special Forces Company, squeezed inside and once the steward had departed he sat upon the folding table’s stool. Both table and stool were spring loaded to fold up against the bulkhead. A functional design but the stool could be challenging as it would do so when not actually being sat on. It was another good reason why alcohol was not allowed on board.
In the full knowledge that the ordinary sailor was in reality a Lieutenant Commander in the Guójiā Ānquánbù, the Ministry of State Security’s naval division, the two officers exchanged formal pleasantries. On the captain asking him how he was filling his time the army officer produced a small book he had been reading from a map pocket. It was all about the life cycle of the genus Dermochelys coriacea, the Leatherback Sea Turtle, and he continued with the enthusiasm normally associated with train spotters rather than an officer in the Peoples Republics elite forces.
Outside the cabin the state appointed spy moved away back to his post in the small galley, satisfied that a regime toppling coup was not in the process of being hatched.
Indeed no insurrection was being planned, but nobody likes an eavesdropper so this game was played frequently.
“What news of the Tuan, Captain?”
The naval officer shook his head.
“None at all sadly, and I have sent a refueling query to our friends the Admiral Potemkin but they have not responded.” He picked up a pencil and tapped it idly against his knee.
“I had hoped that on answering I would be able to learn from them when… if… they had fuelled Tuan near the cape.”
After a few moments contemplation he shrugged to himself and then stood, retrieving a key from a chain about his neck with which he opened his small safe to extract his copy of the mission planning pack.
“I await instructions from Fleet but I think it sensible to work on a new plan that will also keep the Russians happy by not raising the target to the ground.”
The Russians were fairly certain that had the launch facility been on UK or US soil no tit for tat nuclear response would follow as they were holding back from escalating the use of nuclear weapons beyond that of depth charges, a situation China and Russia were capitalising on, but the French were the atomic wild card in NATO’s pack.
The original plan called for thirty eight SF operatives to sink the freighter Fliterland beside the purpose built dock at Kourou where the Ariane and Vega components were delivered by sea, thus severely delaying further launches as the satellites arrived by sea from France and Germany. They were also to drop the nearby bridge into the Kourou River to prevent the components being brought overland from more distant port near Cayenne.
At the launch pads, the approach ramps were to be wrecked with cratering charges because the rockets were transported erect from the final assembly building on roads that could not be more than 10° out of true.
Any rockets already on the pad could not be damaged without the risk of a catastrophic explosion but the same was not true of the sensitive payload sat on top and costing tens of millions of Euros. These could be rendered useless with a hundred Yuan’s worth of machine gun rounds.
The key to the operation was that of speed and surprise as the opposition were jungle warfare specialist units, the 3rd Marine Regiment and the Foreign Legions 3e Régiment étranger d'infanterie. The Legion guarded the space centre and ran France’s jungle warfare school at Regina, 80 miles from the space centre and close to the border with Brazil. The marines themselves were all based along the borders with Brazil and Suriname.
The simplest of deception plans had ensured that the French regiments were being kept busy in the interior and along the border with Brazil two hundred miles from the Space Centre.
In time of war the price of gold goes up and an article planted in the popular Portuguese tabloid newspaper Correio da Manhã that told of a massive gold strike in French Guiana had been picked up by the Brazilian media and ensured that the always troublesome Garimpeiros, the illegal Brazilian miners, were considerably more numerous and more blatant in their trespassing than normal. This led to the Guiana Gendarmeries calling on the Legion and Marines for support as the miners were aggressive and often better armed than the policemen.