The vast, and massively polluted industrial centre of Dzerzhinsk slid by, shrouded in soot and smoke, five miles off their left wing. The factories and chemical plants were visible, illuminated to cope with twenty four hour production and making a mockery of blackout regulations.
As Dzerzhinsk passed away behind them Caroline raised the nose and turned south to avoid the Oka River Bridge and its defences.
The Nighthawk skimmed above the wooded hills, nosing over into the next valley, now clear of known air defence zones and heading towards its target.
The glow out to sea evidenced the flames consuming the French corvette Premier-Maitre L'her, mortally wounded by the People’s Liberation Army Navy diesel electric submarine Bao, she stubbornly clung to the surface and once the flames had consumed her sundered superstructure they began to feed on the aluminium in her hull.
She still possessed a full magazine below the waterline and as she was not drifting shore wards and therefore not a danger to the town so she was given a very wide berth, abandoned to her inevitable fate.
Life rafts dotted the ocean to the north of the corvette where wind and tide took them, sweeping them towards the former penal colony isles off the coast, and of course the dense offshore minefield.
Pleasure boat owning civilians and Kourou’s few remaining fishermen where now being summoned from their beds, and directed to carry out search and rescue for survivors from the Premier-Maitre L'her as best they could.
The sister ship of the stricken warship, the Commandant Blaison, pennant number F793, had arrived but she was to seaward, conducting a hunt for the second Chinese submarine, the Dai.
The colony’s Governor had been made aware that the Dai had launched a single cruise missile and the significance of that event led to a panicked dusting off of contingency plans for protecting the colony in time of nuclear attack that had been written in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The Commandant Blaison was closed up to action stations and conducting NBC Warfare procedures as she sought to find and sink the Dai before she could launch a fresh attack.
The locating of the Dai would be one of immense difficulty given the means that remained at the disposal of the colony. Two specialist ASW maritime patrol aircraft and two ASW hulls would have had a better chance, but in the space of less than an hour that force had been reduced to half its original size.
Aboard the surviving Atlantique the trio of ASW operators had identified Dai’s type and therefore the type of weapon deployed. They could take a map and a set of compasses and draw a semi-circle off the coast which defined that weapons known/believed maximum range and that would give them the maximum area they not only needed to search but also to keep secure. The Dai of course had not had time to reach that pencil line so that left a smaller semi-circle, but one that was expanding exponentially by the moment.
If she was not found and sunk by the coming of dawn they would have an awful lot of ocean to search.
The colony’s pair of Breguet Atlantiques, Poseidon Zero Four and Poseidon One Eight had been hurriedly armed with the means to sink submarines earlier in the evening but not the wherewithal to find them remotely once submerged. The tail boom mounted magnetic anomaly detector requires the aircraft to directly overfly the unseen submarine in order to detect it. The sowing of lines of sonar buoys permitted a single aircraft to cover a vastly larger area, and it was akin to tying tin cans to a barbed wire fence.
The Atlantique could carry seventy two of the devices, thirty of which were pre-loaded into launch tubes offset on the left side of the belly, just aft of the cockpit. However, counter measures to submarine launched anti-aircraft missiles were not the only item used prolifically in recent weeks.
They did not have seventy two sonar buoys at Cayenne, they had seven.
Zero Four was still burning at the end of the runway at Cayenne when One Eight touched down and raised a welter of spray as it dashed through the puddles with both pilots applying the brakes and reversing the propellers, shortening the landing run-out well clear of the wreck of the other Atlantique. Once halted, they sat for several minutes watching the flames consume Poseidon Zero Four.
“Là, mais la grâce de Dieu vont I…there but for the grace of God go I” declared her captain with other crew members crowding into the cabin to crouch and peer through the windscreen at the conflagration, which until a short time before had been an identical aircraft to their own.
The crew of Zero Four stood over by the military end of the airfield, a fenced off cluster of huts and tarmac ramp. They had escaped death or injury but showed no outward sign of relief as they watched their aircraft’s death throes.
Zero Four lay on its starboard side, upon the ruined wing and collapsed landing gear. The port wingtip was visible in the light of the flames when the thick swirling smoke was not clinging to it like a shroud.
The best efforts of the Cayenne Airport fire service could never extinguish those flames given the equipment they had. A single tender, such as theirs, was judged sufficient to carry out a rescue of the passengers and the crew of an aircraft, but a minimum of three tenders would have been required to save the airframe and engines from further damage.
The raised port wingtip first sagged as the main spar buckled in the intense heat, and then launched upwards and outwards, cartwheeling into the jungle a hundred metres away as the port wing tank finally exploded in a spectacular display of petrochemical based violence that any Hollywood SFX technician would be proud of.
Bombing up Poseidon One Eight and hot refuelling the aircraft, the refilling of the fuel tanks without first shutting down the engines, took place even closer to the terminal than it had before. If the airport manager had any fresh objections to these further breaches of regulations he kept them to himself.
With six depth charges and four Mk-46 torpedoes in the bomb bay, virtually all the remaining available ordnance, plus two active and five passive sonar buoys in the belly launch tubes, One Eight taxied further down the tarmac, disappearing into the acrid black smoke before pivoting to face back up the runway.
The enshrouding smoke was whipped away by the twin Rolls Royce Tyne turboprop engines as they ran up.
Two hundred metres behind, the flames flared, fanned by the prop wash and sending myriad sparks gusting away.
With two hundred metres less runway to play with, full tanks and a full bomb bay, the brakes remained on until the Atlantiques nose dipped, like a bull pawing at the earth. The brakes were released and the Atlantique rolled forward, the engines temperature gauges right on the limit of tolerance but they could not reduce the rpm. One Eight stayed stubbornly reluctant to leave terra firma until well past the point of no return, committing them to the take-off and only then reluctantly, did the nosewheel become unglued.
Poseidon One Eight left the tarmac perilously close to the runway’s end and raised its undercarriage immediately, roaring just above the trees before banking left across sleeping Cayenne, and out over the Atlantic once more.