Dai’s bow pointed directly at the dark shape.
Li raised the microphone.
“Fire one!”
The gunner dropped without a sound and a lookout screamed. Perhaps a dozen points on the north bank lit up with the muzzle flashes of the Legionnaire reservists determined to exact revenge.
Rounds struck the coaming, the mast cluster and the sides of the conning tower to produce a sound like pebbles flung on to a tin roof.
The 21” torpedo, set shallow, broached the surface on leaving the tube, porpoising but unswerving it struck the Fliterland amidships, exploding and flinging fiery debris every which way.
The tank farm blew in spectacular fashion, a great fireball climbing high into the sky.
The scene was now lit, the darkened field of battle not such an unknown now. The submarine in mid river bathed in the light of fire, picked out by the shadow her bulk cast on the jungle behind.
Li’s jaw dropped momentarily as he witnessed the spectacle, and then on seeing the reservists on the north bank likewise frozen in shock, weapons still trained on his vessel but heads turned, witnessing the destruction of freighter and fuel tanks.
Li’s jaw closed with a determined snap and his right hand dropped, fumbling under his oilskin coat and unbuttoning the flap on his webbing holster. Drawing the weapon, he dropped the microphone in order to pull back the slide, aim, pull the trigger and frown when nothing happened. The slide was still glaringly to the rear, and an empty magazine housing in the pistols butt the obvious cause.
He swore, hurriedly located the magazine in his trousers pocket, inserted it sharply and the slide sprang forward with a satisfying snap. Li pointed it shore wards once more only to find his targets had gone, slipped away back into the shadows.
A corpsman took the wounded gunner and lookout below and their replacements, heaving up a metal box of 23mm ammunition took post.
By now there was no sign at all of the Bao.
The Fliterland’s sterncastle was on fire, her hold a furnace. The freighter was listing to port and settling by the bow, the tops of her copper plated propeller blades reflecting the firelight from the tank farm.
With a shriek of tortured steel her aftermost derrick sagged forwards and toppled into the red maw of the hold sending a cloud of burning cinders aloft like emigrating fireflies.
No second torpedo would be required. She was now a major obstruction to any future use to this dock or to this jetty.
“Five degrees starboard…slow, back together.”
They edged away, back from the flickering firelight on the water, back into the dark of a river crowded in on two sides by the jungle at night.
Around the bend in the river a small area of the north bank still burned, the Chinooks grave marked by the upright rotor blade protruding from the water.
“Look sir!” announced a lookout, pointing into the trees on the south side.
Captain did not need his night glasses, the flames provided enough light.
“You don’t see that very often do you sir? A one legged pilot, sitting up a tree.”
The company’s silver wings caught the firelight and stood out in stark relief on the breast of the wet one-piece flight suit.
At the foot of the tree a caiman, possible eighteen feet in length was gnawing at a pilot’s helmet.
Li straightened and raised his hand in a formal salute.
Don Caldew shifted his grip to hold the branch with his left, extending his right with knuckles downwards toward the Chinese submariner and raised a single upright digit.
Forty eight miles south east a pair of Breguet Atlantiques taxied. One behind the other, Poseidon Zero Four and Poseidon One Eight followed the glistering wet taxiway as their operators established communications with all elements involved, on land, sea and in the air.
Bombing-up had taken place on the taxiway itself, five hundred metres from the nearest airport building without the blessing of the airport manager who had been overruled by the governor. By prior agreement this potentially hazardous procedure was to have taken place outside the perimeters chain link fence via a pair of extra-width security gates, gates that opened on to a hard standing where the airport fire brigade practiced its art on a prefabricated concrete aircraft facsimile. But it was late and no one knew who had the keys.
Both aircraft carried four depth charges apiece, Zero Four also held two Mk 46 torpedoes whereas One Eight carried only one, but beside it in the bomb bay was an MM40 Exocet anti-shipping missile.
Ordnance expenditure in the Atlantic had been high, as the three quarters empty bomb bays testified.
In addition to the low loadout of offensive weaponry the defensive variety was also thin on the ground with the appearance of the Soviet’s Launch-At-Depth anti-aircraft system. It produced an uncalculated psychological effect on air crews, despite the small number of hulls that had carried the device. The bad news spread fast.
NATO’s maritime patrol aircraft crews had quite understandably made rather prodigious use of counter-measures, exhausting many NATO members stocks of flares and chaff.
Parachute flares for illumination they had aplenty, but both aircraft were reduced to prayer, a box of cartridges and a crew member with a Very pistol by way of surface to air counter measures for heat seeking missiles.
Zero Four turned onto the end of the runway, lining up on the centreline, her twin Rolls Royce Tyne turbo prop engines ran up with the captain holding it on its brakes.
Something caught the captain’s attention, turning his head to look out of the left side window he could see an area of the cloud base above the horizon in the north that was glowing red.
The journey back to the ocean, stern first, seemed to Li to be taking an interminably long time, far longer than it had been to originally reach the ESA dock, and indeed it was, out of necessity.
A lookout was posted over the stern for deadfalls which would cause far more damage to the rudder and screws if they collided, than would a bow-on encounter.
Bao was visible ahead, engines stopped as crewmen hanging over the stern used brute force to manoeuvre one such hazard to the side.
“All stop.”
The chant of the diesels had a way of negating the fear of the unknown that this jungle held.
Rather than be reassured though, Li looked about him, peering at the banks, alert, aware that something was amiss.
“Go to electrical power.”
The throb of un-muffled diesels gave way to a drone, a murmur inhibited by a wind blowing in the wrong direction.
It came from up on high, above the lofty jungle canopy and above the cloud base.
“Bridge…ECM; we’ve been painted by radar Captain, airborne source bearing 120 degrees!”
“Stand to, air sentries!”
A green flare, not of the para-illumination variety, emerged from the clouds, falling rapidly, a red flare followed before harsh white magnesium produced light dropped swinging into view, the wind carrying it as it hung suspended on a small parachute.
Dai’s air sentries pivoted, the Strela launchers at their shoulders and eyes squinting down the open iron sights atop the launcher as they attempted to judge the position of the hidden aircraft. Fingers took up first pressure on the triggers to engage the missiles seeker head.
The ‘lock’ lights flickered and the tone was intermittent, confused by more coloured flares falling from the clouds, as they turned slowly from north to south.
Li too was peering upward at the sound of the Atlantique’s engines as a lookout called “Aircraft action, forward!”