There were troops guarding the launch pads and they had destroyed two groups attempting to infiltrate. They were stood to and that was the best he could hope for under the circumstances. This ‘new’ force though, for that is how he thought of them, needed to be engaged, to spoil whatever they intended or delay them until regular forces could be brought to bear.
The nearest regular troops to the Kourou river bridge and the ESA Jetty were the commandant of the jungle warfare school who was in a little Peugeot P4 utility vehicle, the French ‘Jeep’, enroute to check up on his students. However, he had only the schools sergeant major and his driver with him.
The legions commanding officer was ordered to start moving troops to the ESA launch facility, and his Puma and small Gazelle were the obvious means but the process would take over an hour before the first men arrived.
One corvette was at sea and had been turned about, its sister ship was preparing to sail.
The corvettes were on detached duty from Toulon and their crews enjoyed the Cayenne nightlife when on a stand down. The gendarmeries visited the bars with commandeered taxi cabs in convoy behind the police cars, spreading the word, rounding the crew up and filling the cabs.
The patrol boats were based at Cayenne though; the crews had homes in many cases and were summoned by a telephone call. One boat readying to leave, the second patrol boat was on the slips having a shaft replaced as the old one had been struck by a hidden deadfall whilst manoeuvring in the Mahury estuary. It was a constant hazard, colliding with the dead falls, the trees that had toppled into the river to be washed out to sea. The most dangerous were those waterlogged trunks that were not yet so saturated as to settle to the bottom, but instead sailed just below the surface, invisible in the muddy brown river water, mother nature’s own malicious timber torpedoes.
She wasn’t going anywhere for a few days.
Both Atlantiques had only returned two days before. Losses to the NATO maritime patrol fleet had seen them called away to assist with fighting the convoy’s through the waiting wolf packs. Staging out of Shannon airport in the Republic of Ireland they had flown around the clock.
Since their return the crew’s had been on a maintenance stand-down as both hard working aircraft and crew members received essential TLC.
Now of course panels were being secured, and pre-flights already underway before the ground crews had even finished securing engine covers back in place.
So Don was told to put his load on the ground at the clearing where the reservists would receive radio orders. He was then to lose no time in bringing the other reserve platoon, currently mustering on a football pitch at Cayenne, to join with the first load of reservists.
“This is what makes life worth living!” he whooped, and laughed at the expression on his co-pilots face.
The sound of the Chinooks twin engines echoed through the jungle and along the river. It was a typical moonless tropical night, the jungle seeming to suck every iota of light out of the universe.
It was on the ground now, that much was certain, but what was it doing?
Unloading troops was a safe bet, and probably the Kourou reservists, but although they were potentially less of a threat than they probably had been twenty years before when the men were in their prime, Li would have been a lot happier if whatever his two troopers had done to the helicopter had worked.
Neither of the Strela operators was in position yet. But the helicopter would not be likely to turn back towards the jetty on take-off, not unless the pilot was an idiot. It was a case of stable doors and horses already bolted.
As soon as the reserve platoon had disappeared down the troop ramp and into the trees Don applied power and pulled gently on the collective, lifting the machine straight up until he saw the rotor blades were clear of the tree tops whereupon he eased the cyclic forward and slightly right.
Down through the chin windows at his feet the jungle canopy was all varieties and shades of green in his night vision goggles, the dense jungle slipped just beneath the Chinook as he banked it carefully around, away from the guns at the jetty and as the trees gave way to the surface of the river below them he raised the troop ramp, aiming to make as fast a run as possible to Cayenne and back.
A blast of heat and a shockwave threw him violently forwards against his harness and suddenly he was starring vertically downwards at the river rushing up at him.
The impact was indescribable, his co-pilot screamed all the way down and then the river burst in.
Don was on automatic pilot, carrying out ditching drills he had never before had to perform for real but which he had undertaken many a time in dunker training at Fort Rucker, Alabama. What made this different though was that the disorientation was complete. The bone jarring contact with the river, the shock, the absolute blackness as the silt heavy water engulfed them and the voice at the back of his head which whispered. “No safety divers this time!”
He released his straps and felt to his right for the door release but the door was gone, ripped off in the impact and his hands instead met the uneven and slippery surface of a deadfall tree trunk, covered in weed and algae, barring the way. He groped straight ahead, where the front canopy screen had been and again he touched slimy bark. To his left was a body, his co-pilot still strapped in and so with panic threatening he pulled himself back into the troop compartment, or at least where the rest of the fuselage used to be.
The cockpit was upside down at the bottom of the river, facing back the way it had come, the heavy front rotor assembly having obeyed the laws of gravity and had turned turtle the front half of the aircraft.
The rest of the aircraft, the troop compartment, simply was not attached any more.
Air trapped inside Don’s helmet showed him the true way up and he broke the surface coughing and sputtering.
The night vision goggles had been ripped off in the crash but there was some light, the flickering of flames and he turned to face the north bank, wreckage only recognisable by a broad rotor blade standing straight up out of the river like a grave marker.
The crackle of flames from aviation fuel doused jungle growth and black, oily smoke gave no clue as to what had brought them down, but then Don spotted something moving in the river, something which had already spotted him.
His artificial limb was not designed as a swimming aid but primal fear, the dread of being eaten alive spurred him on, desperately making for the south bank with the damn thing acting like an anchor.
The jungle overhung the banks, jagged branches seeming to seek to both impale him and also to fend him off like medieval pikes thrusting at unwelcome horsemen. Beneath these was a steep bank, perhaps three feet high, its lip beyond his grasp even if he could reach the damn thing.
In the flames light he saw a dark gap in the cover and made for it, seeing an unobstructed path to a sloping but muddy route out of the river and away from the closing caiman.
Don’s good foot touched the semi-solid riverbed at the shallows and he sobbed with relief but he knew he was far from being out of danger yet. He stood; leaning forwards, wading towards safety, his arms outstretched and his right hand grasped a thick protruding tree root when the caiman’s jaws snapped closed.
He screamed aloud and got his left hand on the root also as the creature tugged, hard.
It then occurred to Don that he should be in agony right now, but he was not. The caiman had a firm grip on the boot laced onto the prosthetic limbs ‘foot’.
He was hanging on for dear life with both hands and if the beast had continued to pull back towards the deep water then it would have eventually won the tug-o-war.