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.
Both vessels would have to exercise superb seamanship with expert hands on the helms as they ran parallel at thirty yards distant. Only the best coxswains’ hands will be steering each boat because at 12 knots a 1 degree variation in heading produces a lateral speed of 20 feet per minute initially, and that is before hydrodynamics is factored in, the suction caused by two masses in close proximity, particularly if at least one of them or the ocean is in motion. The suction increases exponentially and a collision may be unavoidable if that happens, as the captain of a luxury cruise ship recently found to his cost sailing too close to a small Mediterranean island.
Ram Tensioners and a series of saddle winches kept the cable taut and also allowed some leeway before the cable parted due to an error of diverging courses, but seamanship of a high standard made it work. Senior Lieutenant Wuhan of the People’s Liberation Army Navy would have the fate of the entire mission riding on his cool head and language skills on each occasion. No radios could be used without compromising the mission and so all instructions would have to be passed by voice, via megaphone until a shot line was fired over to the receiving vessel, and that is attached to a cable for a sound powered telephone. The telephone cable is itself attached to a heavier ‘Span Wire’ which is heaved over and clamped onto the receiving kingpost, and with that secure the ‘saddles’ bearing stores and the fuelling hose are strung beneath it and pulled over.
With Strela surface to air missiles at the ready they simulated coming under attack whilst coupled and joined by the fuelling hose, they simulated man-overboard drills whilst coupled and joined together and even buddy-buddy fire fighting drills whilst coupled together because there is really no such thing as an ‘Emergency breakaway’, instead the ‘Rasser’s’ and ‘Fasser’s’, the replenishment and fuelling parties, just have to get a hustle on to de-rig the complex apparatus that much faster than they normally would.
That the issue with steering and trim was one that only a refit would solve was quickly realised. Earlier on they also discovered that the spanwire visibly vibrated when taut, but it ceased vibrating completely when the helmsmen got it wrong and the courses began to diverge. When that happened you knew the 2500 lb. breaking strain was all but upon you! It became the job of one of the leading hands to do nothing except watch the spanwire and shout a warning when that vibration could no longer be seen.
They were relearning old lessons and they learned well. Some procedures they simply made up as they went along, and if it worked then that became the SOP, the standard operating procedure for fuelling and resupplying submarines from another submarine, something not practiced in over sixty years.
The technically much trickier replenishment at sea of torpedoes and torpedo tube launched anti-shipping missiles was practiced at anchor in a sheltered bay, and with oil being pumped out into the sea by both vessels for the purpose of water calming. Bow to bow and separated by heavy duty inflated bladders the submarines were made fast to each other as torpedoes were manually fed tail-first from the Typhoon’s torpedo tube and into the Chinese boat’s torpedo tubes.
Finding such a handy spot to carry out the task would not be an easy matter and both vessels would be open to attack, so quite aside from the back breaking toil involved it was an unpopular undertaking, made more unpleasant by the cleaning of the bladders, which was a filthy but necessary job as the oil would eat into them and perish the material within days otherwise.
Once their orders arrived the Admiral Potemkin slipped away south and avoided the main shipping lanes.
The Chinese boats continued their own role specific tasks for four more days of rehearsals near the uninhabited, sub-tropical Damang Island before topping off their tanks and following on initially diverse courses.
The converted Typhoon was waiting for them at the first refuelling spot, some six hundred miles south west of a tiny coral atoll.
That atoll was a circular ring of rock and sand that enclosed a freshwater lagoon, and a stagnant freshwater lagoon at that. Populated as it was by a quarter million bad tempered sea birds and one million inedible crabs only the most optimistic romantic, or a Frenchman, could have named it Ile de la Passion.
The trio of Chinese diesel submarines had almost dry tanks and the giant of a Russian must have been a welcome sight for each of them but they were barely one third of the way to their ultimate destination.
Again the quartet parted with the Typhoon running deep through the empty vastness of the Pacific to arrive ahead of them at the next scheduled rendevous.
The crew of the converted Typhoon arrived at their next assigned position 65 miles south of Isla del los Estados near the very southernmost tip of South America and settled down for a long and uncomfortable wait.
Bao was the first vessel to arrive, its bona fides established by Senior Lieutenant Wuhan on a dark night with a thankfully moderate sea. The transfer of rations as well as fuel went without hitch, but how they enjoyed the Russian rations was questionable. Tinned pork, tinned sausage and tinned fish were going to be pretty monotonous and peacetime rules in the Russian navy forbade continuous use of its tinned rations without added fresh produce in meals beyond eighteen days. The Russian tinned rations lacked the added protein edition of the western armies’ varieties.
The second customer arriving two days later was the curio of the Chinese flotilla, a type paid off from the Russian fleet decades before but her Chinese owners had maintained her well and added upgrades not available in her classes’ heyday such as western acoustic dampening tiles and the propellers of an Improved Kilo, the quietest and most efficient that technology could build.
Dai was an elderly Juliett, a diesel electric cruise missile boat built to be quiet enough to get in close to carrier combat groups and sink those carriers, but she was built small as well as quiet in a time when missile defence left something to be desired. She only carried a maximum of four cruise missiles in VTLs, vertical launch tubes, forward of the conning tower.
That operation had been far more difficult as the weather had been back to its usual wild self. They had eventually relocated a hundred miles north with the rocky expanses of the Isla del los Estados acting as a windbreak.
With nuclear detonations up north evaporating vast quantities of sea water to condense in the cold upper atmosphere, blinding photo reconnaissance satellites and reducing visibility it had become a more manageable risk remaining in the lee of the island for the third and final northbound customer of ‘Grigory’s Gas & Drive-Thru Mart’ as the crew referred to themselves.
The third submarine in the flotilla, Tuan, was early, only a day and a half behind the Dai and she had been in the area several hours before the Admiral Potemkin had risen up from the depths to check her messages.
The weather was far from placid and becoming progressively worse. The sun was an hour below the horizon before the submarines made contact and the complex ballet of matching course and speed could begin. No transfer of food and fuel were possible until Lt Wuhan was satisfied the helmsmen were ‘in sync’.