Fight Through

CHAPTER 2

It was curiously quiet in the forest, although Colin could hear the drone of outgoing shells passing far overhead and impacting in the distance.

Looking up through a gap in the foliage he could see the base of the clouds toward the horizon briefly illuminated by the flashes of the shells exploding but it was several seconds before the crump of their detonation reached his ears.

The flashes of light also served to illuminate the shapes of Russian paratroopers silently emerging from the trees across the fire break, the light flashing off the long bayonets attached to their assault rifles. AKs have their own folding bayonet but these were at least two feet in length with serrated edges.

None of his men were opening fire though!

“Enemy to the front…fifty metres…rapid… FIRE!”

No one fired a single round despite the Russians being all out of the trees now and clearly visible in the firebreak, and then he saw all his men were Corporal Bethers and their lower jaws were missing.

Their shoulders shook with mirth as they turned to stare at him, the only one of the fighting patrol not dead, the only one not disfigured.

He rose to meet the Russian’s bayonet charge and gripped his own rifle firmly, but he felt it crack and then crumble to dust in his grasp.

His men were still shaking in silent laughter and not attempting to help.

“Give me a rifle someone!”

If anything they found his predicament even more hilarious and some were rolling on the ground.

“Here sir, come and get mine!” the voice sounded from behind him.

Robertson stood there holding out his own rifle, his face missing.

“But you are dead, you died yesterday!”

Colin turned back and froze at the sight of a Russian paratrooper charging directly at him, an impossibly long bayonet pointing unwaveringly at his midsection.

Colin tried to move, to dodge out of the way but his legs moved in slow motion.

He screamed aloud as the sharp steel transfixed him, driving through to pin him against the tree behind.

“Nikoli…help me mate!” he called out to his friend who had appeared in front of him.

But Fanny M glared with hatred at the British soldier.

“You killed me Colin, and I was just doing my duty. I saved you and you killed me…”

A nurse leaned over the mumbling, sweating patient, feeling for a pulse on the wrist handcuffed to the metal bedframe in the ICU at King’s College Hospital in Lambeth.

Outside the sterile unit, two prison officers sat staring through a large glass window at the nurses’ ministrations to their charge.

She took his temperature, noting and updating his progress chart before she moved on, and the prison officers attention returned to the paperback book and Angry Birds that were helping to pass the time.

The Australian continent was not yet under threat of immediate air attack but blackouts were in force across the country so as not to assist the enemy photo-reconnaissance satellites when they passed overhead.

The F-14 Tomcat entered the circuit with its crew spending a moment to peer down at an earth that was darker than the sky.

A vehicle with hooded headlamps on what had to be the Great Northern Highway on the right and a long and dimly lit train on the left satisfied the pilot that runway ‘36 Right’ of Royal Australian Air Force Base Pearce was down there between them and the controller was not lying.

They were on finals and thirty seconds from the outer marker before the landing lights came on, and then they dimmed perceptibly the moment their wheels had touched the tarmac.

At the end of the aircraft’s rollout the runway lights were extinguished, leaving the Tomcat with its engines idling. It sat there in the darkness at the end of the runway until a vehicle drove in front and a ‘Follow Me’ sign illuminated. The vehicle led the aircraft off the runway and along taxiways at a rate of knots greater than that demanded by the speed limits posted at intervals along the route. To the sides they could vaguely make out the dark outlines of war planes of various nations occupying No.2 Flying Training School’s flight lines and dispersals that were meant for the PC-9 trainers. Those trainers were now off on one of the many Australian Air Force airfields that were otherwise occupied just by caretakers, who maintained the runways and limited facilities for times such as these.

Eventually the marshalling truck led the US Navy aircraft toward a track of temporary roadway panels to the open rear of a camouflaged netting hangar that faced back towards the runway.

Nikki Pelham shut down the engines prior to reaching the threshold before the ‘hangars’ interior, coasting inside and braking to a halt between blast walls created by old shipping containers filled with earth.

Filtered torchlight was the only illumination to assist her down from the cockpit, and she stretched and groaned at almost eight thousand miles worth of stiffness in her back and joints.

“So where’s the welcoming committee of hunky Aussie surfers?”

Nikki turned to smile at her RIO.

Lt (jg) Candice LaRue hailed from Alabama and this was her first time outside the States, having only graduated as a Radar Intercept Officer four days earlier.

Nikki and Candice had been paired off at Nellis AFB where the Boneyard airframes were being delivered following refurbishment and upgrades to weapons, navigation and avionics systems. The parking ramps at Nellis had been crammed with early model F-14, 15 and 16s, rubbing wingtips with dozens of previously retired A-10 Thunderbolts, A-6 Intruders, AV-8B Harriers and venerable B-17s, the ‘Buffs’, known affectionately to the crews as the Big Ugly Fuckers.

Here at RAAF Pearce, some nine thousand five hundred miles from Nellis, a dark shape with an Australian accent bid them collect their gear and step aside as other dark shapes with American accents closed in on their aircraft and began the business of preparing it for flight once more. The external fuel tanks were removed, leaving the aircraft ‘clean’ until the armourers arrived but the internal fuel tanks were refilled.

All they had carried had been three hundred rounds of 20mm cannon ammunition for their rotary barrelled Vulcan.

Being curious, they had a little wander around and found a bunch of other USN F-14s, which had already been armed up. None of those aircraft were Ds; four were model Bs, including Nikki’s, whilst the remainder were even older ‘A’ models with Pratt & Whitney turbo fans that produced less thrust than their own General Electric power plants. Beyond the F-14s they found the first Australian airframes, in the form of an RAAF Hawk with war shots on its hardpoint’s, and a pair of venerable Aussie F111C bombers that were fully bombed up for anti-shipping strikes.

The F111Cs were forty or so years old but upgraded and certainly not looking their years. Australia had supposedly phased them out and replaced them with F/A-18s, but this pair certainly had somehow avoided being buried ignominiously in landfill sites with the rest of Australia’s F111 fleet.

“Wow, ‘Varks…I thought these were all scrapped?” said Nikki.

A voice from the shadows made them jump.

“A consortium wanted them for air displays; one to fly and one for spares…but the end user certificates were a problem so we kept them mothballed while they sort it out in the courts.”

Beneath the port wing they made out two shapes on camp beds. One was snoring softly whilst the other arose.

“Gerry Rich.” He said, and right on queue the runway flights came on, illuminating rugged and tanned features along with a broad, raffish smile.

“Flight Lieutenant Gerry Rich, and twenty five percent of the newly reformed 15 Squadron, Royal Australian Air Force at your service…oh, and we call them ‘Pigs’, not Aardvarks’.” He jerked a thumb back over his shoulder at the snoring form. “That’s Macca, he’s me ‘Wizzo’, and he’s from over your way originally.”

“Oh really, where’s that then?” asked Nikki.

“Alberta.”

“That’s Canada, not the USA.” laughed Candice.

“Can you drive to the US from Alberta in a single day and without getting yer feet wet?” he queried.

“Sure, but…”

“Around here we’d class that as being next door neighbours.”

Candice laughed in a way that told Nikki she was batting her eyelids furiously.

“Does that Mick Dundee style ever get you anywhere?” Nikki asked.

He smiled at Candice but he positively beamed at her pilot.

“Shaving with a Bowie knife right about now would have been hazardous.”

Behind them a squeal of tyres and the roar of four Allison turboprops changing pitch to reverse signalled the flare path dimming to barely visible and then extinguishing as the Hercules finished its roll out.

“Lieutenant Commander Pelham, VFA 154, USS Nimitz.” Nikki said by way of introduction, very formally and not leaving an opening for him to be otherwise.

“Lieutenant Candice La Rue, but you can call me Candy if you want.” another voice wishfully added.

“Have you got a first name to go with that, Lieutenant Commander?”

“She’ll tell you that it’s Ma’am, but she’ll answer to Nikki.” said Candice.

The taxiing aircraft, a Royal New Zealand Air Force C130 drowned out what Nikki said to her RIO as it past and she firmly steered her away by the arm and back toward their Tomcat.

“You got to admit he’s cute?”

“Nah.” Said Nikki “Too much twisted steel and sex appeal.” But she looked back anyway.

When the ground crew were done they all crowded into the back of a truck for the journey to the base cookhouse, and this was open for business 24/7 according to the ground crews.

Australian steak and eggs tastes pretty much the same as American steak and eggs but the fries were called ‘chips’, not that it mattered as neither aviator had eaten since somewhere over the mid Pacific and then the sandwiches had been curling up at the edges in the hot sun that shone through the Perspex.

It wasn’t until the plates were empty that Nikki found her eyes drooping.

There were no comfortable barracks for the two tired aviators, and they were shown through a side door and along a short pathway to a small building, guided through the darkness by an armed RAAF corporal with a small torch. They were the only female crew there and as such shared a room which held nothing more than two canvas camp beds, plus pillows and blankets.

“Keep your flight gear handy, if you hear a siren it’s an air raid warning and also the order to scramble…reveille is at 0600 and breakfast is at 0630 at the building two down from here. The Dunny’s at the end of the hall…g’night.”

Once the door had been closed they had looked at one another and shrugged. Candice rolled into the blankets upon one of the camp beds and fell asleep almost immediately, but Nikki lay staring at the ceiling for a while.

When Nikki had arrived at Nellis she had been feeling pretty low, and not without cause. A weeks’ worth of tears and utter disbelief at losing her family in such a shocking manner was not nearly enough time to mourn and come to terms with it.

She had other commitments too and these kept her from wallowing in self-pity at the bottom of a bottle.

Arlington National Cemetery was too close to the Washington fall-out zone and had been closed until some future intensive clean up could be undertaken, so Chubby’s funeral had taken place at his hometown near Detroit.

Someone had tipped off the press that she would be present, so she had spared his family, and herself, the embarrassment by telling the cab driver to continue on past the cemetery and the assembled circus outside. She had telephoned her apologies to Chubby’s parents from the airport before catching a flight to her own hometown where she had avoided the media by laying a wreath on her father’s grave at night. There was not, as yet, any final resting place for her mother or younger brother whose bodies had yet to be recovered and identified.

The navy public relations department would dearly have loved to have paraded Nikki to the media as the female warrior who had downed four confirmed enemy aircraft and survived the destruction of the John F Kennedy battle group, but the circumstances surrounding the death of her father had made that impossible, even had she been willing.

Nikki had declined the navy’s offer of extended leave, choosing instead to return to active duty where she reasoned she would be too busy to dwell on her loss; however any ideas she had harboured about an immediate re-assignment had proved overly optimistic.

For several days Nikki had found herself kicking her heels in the B.O.Q at Nellis. The trouble with Bachelor Officers Quarters when you were in transit through a base was that they were basically four walls and a ceiling, a motel room without the TV. She had been assigned an aircraft but lacked both a RIO and a carrier to fly it to.

For the most part she had kept to herself, and either the vibes her mood projected or the unjustified suspicion that others regarded her as a Jonah served to deter company. Either way, the USAF pilot’s, Marine and Navy aviators who also awaited assignments kept their distance from the newly promoted Lieutenant Commander who wore a face like a week’s worth of wet Mondays.

Two nights previously in the Officers Club, she had been sat on her own and trying to ignore the conversation going on nearby. A quartet of reservists were trying to out bemoan one another on the woes of being plucked from the cockpits of 747s and finding themselves back in uniform.

From the far side of the club had come derisive laughter and the chant of ‘bullshit’, which had pulled her away from her own brooding thoughts. With some annoyance she had at first turned to see what the commotion was about and then had been drawn toward the large knot of men and women who had gone quiet again as they listened to whomever was sat in their midst.

“I’m telling you straight, every time one of the bastards got on my tail they overshot when I put the anchors on, and I shot them in the arse.”

“Five bandits?” asked one of the onlookers.

“In the same fight?” another asked

“Och aye, one after the other. Bang, bang, wallop, wallop, wallop!”

Nikki had eased through the throng and seen Sandy sat at a table with a dozen brews in front of him and a vivacious Afro-American honey sat on his lap. Clad in skin-tight jeans, denim shirt and cowboy boots she was the only one in the room not in uniform and Nikki assumed the Fleet Air Arm pilot had smuggled her on to the base.

“Hey, Sandy.”

Sandy looked at her smirking at him and rolled his eyes, his face dropping.

“Hey, Nikki.”

Nikki addressed Sandy’s audience.

“I had the misfortune to be stuck in a life raft for several days with this guy, and I was ready to feed myself to the sharks rather than hear that line another time…only back then it was two Mig-31s, not five.”

The beers sat in front of Sandy were obviously war beers, tokens of appreciation for his service and warrior status, and their donors reclaimed them swiftly from a protesting Highlander.

“Och, come on now guys…the heat of battle and all that…”

Even the beer in his hand was snatched away

Sandy’s audience departed, leaving him crestfallen.

“Well thank you very much indeed Nikki, and after I shared the warmth of my Gaelic heart to keep you alive too!”

She bent to plant a peck on the top of his head.

“Your liver will thank me when you’re in your fifties, Sandy.” She took a now vacant seat at the table and they caught up on events since arriving at Pearl.

Sandy had discovered that the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm currently had over twenty pilots apiece waiting to fly their dwindling inventory of Sea Harriers. So, as he was still shown as attached to the US Pacific Fleet he had offered his services to the Navy and would be ferrying an AV-8B out to the USS Essex very early the next day, via a stopover in Hawaii.

“So are you a ferry pilot or something?”

“No Nikki, I’m joining one of your VMA Harrier squadrons. I’ll be showing US Navy aviators how the Fleet Air Arm does it.”

“VMA doesn’t mean Navy Scotty, they’re Marines.”

“Oh, grief!” Sandy groaned.

“It’ll do you good.” Nikki had said. “Spending all of your off duty hours running around, and around, and around the flight deck with a pack on your back.”

Sandy looked crestfallen.

“Sounds just like our marine pilots, wasting time by training to walk to war when they’ve got perfectly good aircraft to carry them there at a fraction of the effort.”

She hadn’t seen or spoken Sandy since the Hood had docked, so she was gratified to learn that he at least had been at Chubby’s funeral.

Very little was said about her late RIO, she had done all her crying aboard the Hood, and she had learnt that the Brits deal with the death of a colleague in combat in a very stoical fashion. There are no group hugs; no tears spilt into one’s beer, and in fact little outward displays of grief. They raise a glass to toast their fallen friends’ memory and that is all until the war is over, when the business of proper mourning begins.

Sandy’s friend had re-seated herself on a chair and listened quietly while they talked, merely nodding a ‘hi’ to Nikki when Sandy had introduced her as

“And this is Candy, she’s delicious.”

Not until Sandy had excused himself to visit the john had the girl really spoken.

“So you’re Triple ‘A’ then?”

Nikki had been unsure what the she was talking about, but if Sandy’s line shooting had included herself in his scoring then she was going to do some facial rearranging once he got back.

“Excuse me?”

“Lt Cmdr. Nikki Pelham, four kills…Almost an Ace.”

Much relieved, she had allowed a laugh to escape.

“So Lt Cmdr. you know Sandy pretty well, huh?”

“I guess as well as you can after sharing a life raft, a sub full of sailors and a three birth sailing boat occupied by six.”

“Okay, then at least that part of his story isn’t total BS, but did he really disarm and capture a Chinese aviator?”

Nikki laughed again.

“Sorry but no, the guy had already surrendered to an elderly English couple before they picked us up. There was absolutely no hand-to-hand combat involved. The guy was just a kid really, not much different from one of us.”

She saw Sandy emerged from the door leading to the head and decided to find out what relationship he had with this snake-hips-in-denim civilian before he returned.

“So, are you and Sandy, good friends?”

“We only hooked up this afternoon, but if I see you at breakfast I’ll let you know.” Candice had added a wink for emphasis, so on the premise that two’s company and three’s a crowd, Nikki had left them to it and retired for an early night.

The phone in her room had woken her just after she’d dropped off to sleep; informing her that she had a RIO, one Lt (jg) LaRue. C and they were to be in the briefing room at 1000hrs. This was to be her last night at Nellis AFB.

Sandy hadn’t been at breakfast in the mess hall, he had flown out at five a.m. Nikki went easy on the coffee and ate only toast and jelly, natural bodily functions were no respecters of long range flights and she loathed the pee tube. Having taken the edge off her appetite, she picked up her small canvas bag of belongings and headed out.

The shock of finding Candice, now in flight suit and sipping coffee, had caused Nikki to pause half way through the briefing room door, and check that she had in fact found the right room.

On seeing Nikki, Candice put the cup down and stood to deliver a smart salute.

“Ma’am, Lieutenant LaRue. I have been assigned as your Radar Intercept Officer, Ma’am.”

She had looked over at the briefing officer who had given a wry smile, shooting his eyebrows up in confirmation that this was no joke.

They had been briefed on their route through the air defence zones, radio frequencies, IFF codes and the tanker plan, where Nikki had kept an eye on her RIO, ensuring she was getting every detail down correctly and being reassured that this girl whom she had suspected the previous evening of being some kind of aviator groupie, seemed to have the competence she would have hoped for.

It had not been until after they had disconnected from a tanker 500 miles off the West Coast and Nikki had set a course for the tanker they would meet several hours hence that they could relax.

“So tell me lieutenant, how did that hot date go?” There had been a few seconds before a reply had been forthcoming.

“Begging your pardon ma’am, but that friend of yours is one sick puppy.”

It had taken her back a bit.

“Say what?”

“My momma didn’t bring me up to get butt naked with no cross-dresser with a shiv.” Nikki had been lost for words until Candice had explained.

“We sneaked back to his room and he went into the bathroom, so I got comfortable, if you know what I mean?”

Nikki had a fair idea.

“You got naked?”

“Yes’m…and then he came out the bathroom in a skirt…”

The scene, or how it must have been, jumped into Nikki’s mind.

“A kilt.”

“Whatever ma’am, but he had some dead animal hanging off the front of it….”

“A Sporran.”

“Okay, it looked like road kill, but if you say it was a dead Sporran, then that’s what it was. He had a knife too, a shiv, stuck in the top of one of his socks.”

“It’s called a Dirk, Lieutenant…Sandy was wearing traditional Highland dress.”

“Well I don’t know why their women folks put up with it. A man should be a man and not go dressing up in women’s things!”

Nikki killed the intercom and sat there with her shoulders shaking in helpless laughter for several minutes.

When she had gotten it out of her system she’d flicked the intercom back on.

“Hey, LaRue?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“They call you Candy or Candice?”

“I prefer Candice, Ma’am.”

“Okay, so do I, so from now on unless there’s brass or unfamiliar company about, then I’m just Nikki, okay?”

She had decided that this RIO would do but she had ensured the intercom was switched off before saying a final goodbye to her previous RIO.

Across the room Candice murmured something in her sleep that snapped Nikki out of her reflective mood and then she too closed her eyes and slept.

Despite the pounding head, throbbing shoulder and broken ribs that made each breath painful, Ray Tessler felt like a fraud as he sat amongst more seriously wounded men and women who waited for the Royal Air Force Tri-Star air ambulance to begin loading. He reasoned it out for himself in his head, frequently, that with broken fingers he couldn’t handle a weapon so he would be a liability on the firing line, but having told himself that he took one look at a seriously burned corporal from the Royal Tank Regiment, hooked up to saline drips on a gurney nearby, and felt like a fraud all over again.

The hospitals nearest the fighting were shedding themselves of those already in the beds, in order to cater for those that would soon require them. Ray was going back to the UK on a civilian aircraft pressed into service to evacuate those wounded who didn’t need the air ambulance facilities, but they shared the embarkation area, a large hangar that the heaters struggled to warm.

A door opened at the back of the hangar to admit more evacuees, and Ray saw a friendly face, that of the driver of the Warrior he’d been in when he’d been injured. Ray raised an arm to wave, and immediately regretted it, but the Guardsman saw him and made his way over, one arm heavily bandaged and limping as he went.

Ray had come to the battalion as a battlefield replacement, vacating a desk job at RHQ to join the unit just before it was relieved at Magdeburg, for its advance to contact towards the Soviet airborne drop zones. The Warriors driver on the other hand, had been with the battalion for three years and had seen every fight it had been in since the start of the war.

“How you doing, sir?”

“Not bad. I feel like I’ve been stuffed into a washing machine and put through a fast spin cycle, but otherwise I’m okay…how’s yourself?”

“They dug a half dozen bits of metal out of me, but apparently the grenade that did it was far enough away it’ll just leave some interesting scars I can blag a few free beers off of in the pub back home.”

Ray nodded.

“You going to St George’s too?”

The young Guardsman looked at the label tied though the buttonhole of a breast pocket on his combat jacket.

“Yes sir, looks that way but the doctor thinks it shouldn’t be long before I get a few days leave.”

Ray had been told something similar, and there was nothing he was looking forward to more than holding his wife and kids again. St Georges’ hospital in south London was only a few miles from the family’s married quarters, and if for some reason the doctors there kept him in then his wife could easily find her way there.

The line for the seriously wounded began to move as RAF personnel wheeled the patients out to the waiting aircraft, and an hour later it was their turn.

Ray managed to get himself seated beside the other Coldstreamer, over the objections of an Airman with a list attached to a clipboard. Ray switched on his Sergeant Major persona and the airman hurried away, amending the written seating plan with a biro as he went.

The flight into Gatwick airport passed swiftly, but they found they still had to go through Customs when they got there. Ray and the Guardsman had only the dirty and rather ragged combat gear they wore, but they still had to go through the ‘Nothing to declare’ channel and submit to a body search to ensure they didn’t have some lethal souvenir from the battlefields concealed about them before they joined the queue being checked off at the exit to the Customs hall.

It wasn’t as if anyone could have gone missing between Germany and Gatwick, but Forces Movement Control has their way of doing things, and that includes head counts at every opportunity, checking the face and the photo on the individuals I.D card, the MOD Form 90, matched the details on the clipboards.

Ray didn’t pay any attention to the military policemen stood near the exit until his name was checked off the list by a Staff Sergeant with the cartwheel emblem of Movements worn on an armband. The man looked over his shoulder at the nearest RMP.

“Got another one here, corporal.”

He had not returned Ray’s I.D card, but had stuck it under the spring clip of his clipboard instead.

Two RMP lance corporals started towards him, and Ray asked the Staff Sergeant what he had meant by ‘another one’.

“Just go with them when they get here, sarn’t major, sir.” The Staff Sergeant put up a hand to rest on Ray’s chest, preventing him from passing the checkpoint.

Bringing his good hand up to the restraining hand on his chest, Ray curled his fingers around the Staff Sergeants thumb and bent it backwards, just enough to elicit an “Ow!” from its owner.

“I said, what do you mean by ‘another one’, Staff?” He kept a hold on the thumb, adding a touch more pressure.

“Coldstreamers…fuck sake sarn’t major, leggo of my hand!”

Ray let go of the thumb and the Movements NCO tucked the clipboard under one arm in order to massage the offended digit. “The RMP are picking up all members of 1CG when they come back to the UK…I don’t know why and I don’t think they do either.”

The RMP NCOs arrived and one stood by Ray without speaking whilst the other spoke to the Movements Staff Sergeant, discussing Ray as if he wasn’t present. He consulted a list of his own, and upon it were two columns, naming those who had been at Leipzig and those who had joined after that particular battle. Finally he took the I.D card from the Staff Sergeants clipboard.

The figure in the ragged combat jacket and trousers, stained with blood and ingrained with dirt did not look a lot like the picture on the I.D card.

The left side of Ray’s face was swollen and bruised black and blue, with shades of yellow thrown in. Somewhere between the makeshift mine going off under the Warrior and here, Ray’s solitary badge of rank, a smaller version of an RSMs coat of arms, had been torn from the front of his smock, but his rank was clearly displayed on the lists both the Staff Sergeant and the RMP carried.

“Is your regimental number, 27130087?”

Ray looked at the military policeman and felt his temper start to rise, but he didn’t reply.

“I said, is your number 27130087?”

The line of servicemen from the flight had come to a halt, and whilst some were impatient to get on there were others obviously curious about what was unfolding.

CSM Tessler felt embarrassed about being questioned in such a fashion by an arrogant junior NCO who’s own uniform was pressed and pristine, having been nowhere near a battlefield.

Ray’s companion on the flight, the young Guardsman, had now been stopped by the same staff sergeant, who again signalled to more of the waiting military policemen. However, having double-checked his identity another RMP lance corporal withdrew a pair of handcuffs from a pocket, and made to put them on the Guardsman’s wrists.

Confused at the turn of events the Guardsman resisted and a small scuffle broke out, during which the wounded soldier let out a cry of pain as his injured arm was grabbed.

This was too much for Ray who pushed past his own pair of RMPs, who were still waiting for an answer to their question, and placed himself between the Guardsmen and the RMP trying to cuff him.

“This man, unlike yourselves, has fought in every one of our brigades actions since day one of the war…so you will treat him with some fucking respect or I’m going to start back-squading teeth!”

This young NCO wasn’t used to having his authority questioned. He hadn’t managed to cuff the Guardsman either, who had managed to get free and now stood a half dozen paces away looking angry and not a little frightened. Another ragged form had placed itself in the way, obstructing him and he was now in no mood to mess about. Setting his feet, his hands started to close into fists.

Ray wasn’t exactly in his best fighting form, although as he saw the RMP prepare to take a swing he resolved to go down throwing punches and to hell with Queens Regulations, but he was reprieved when their audience began making angry noises at the treatment of wounded soldiers by the forces of military law and order. Surging forward they placed themselves in front of the wounded Guardsman, and Ray found himself flanked by men who like himself carried injuries from recent combat, but who were fully prepared to give the Red Caps a good kicking if they forced the issue.

Angry jeers brought a young lieutenant from a side office where he took in the tableau of impending mayhem, and cursed himself for not being present when the flight had arrived. His RMP detachment was made up of young men and women rushed through training at Chichester and then given their single stripe at its conclusion. The Corps more experienced soldiers were across the channel, keeping the MSRs in operation and even manning traffic points in the middle of air raids. His detachment lacked seasoning and experience; otherwise this confrontation would never have come to pass. As he viewed the servicemen facing off against his young military policemen he noticed the figure stood front and centre. Despite his appearance he had the air of command about him.

The RMP lieutenant pulled on his beret and he strode over to the exit.

“What’s going on here, and who are you?” He addressed the question to Ray, who gritted his teeth as he pulled his feet in as best he could, coming to attention and identifying himself, before explaining what had occurred.

The RMP officer let him finish before swivelling around to take in the junior NCO with the handcuffs, and then turning back.

“It seems that someone got a little ahead of themselves…however, we have orders to detain you for questioning about matters of which I have not been given the details.”

“Thank you sir.” Ray answered, impressed with the RMP officers calm disposition when a small riot had been in the offing just moments previously.

“Are we under arrest, sir?”

“Not to my knowledge, sarn’t major…but that may well change later once we’ve handed you over to SIB.” Looking levelly at Ray he went on.

“I really don’t know what this is about, but if I were you I would get legal representation before I spoke a word to anyone, if you get my drift?”

Ray looked into his eyes and could see written upon them that contrary to what had just been said, this lieutenant had a pretty damn good idea about what was going on.

Nodding his thanks Ray first turned to the lance corporal with the handcuffs.

“Put those things away before I stick ‘em where they’ll smell!” He then turned to the first pair of RMPs, snatching back his I.D card and pointing a stiff digit at his interrogator.

“And in future, Lance Corporal, whenever you address a Warrant Officer you’ll stick a ‘Sir’ somewhere in the sentence, or I’ll drop kick you into the nearest empty cell…understood?”

There were few civilians out and about at the airport, but those who were present were all maintenance workers, only Heathrow catered to those few who still needed to travel by air. They had seen returning soldiers being escorted by the military police on a number of occasions and it had lost its novelty value by now, so the sight of Ray and the Guardsman being driven away to Her Majesty’s Military Corrective Training Centre at Colchester attracted little interest.

Twenty two gallons of water is shipped daily aboard the Juliett class submarine Dai when in the tropics and all of it as a result of condensation even when she is submerged, mainly in the bow where the hull was coolest. Captain Li knew this as it was one of the myriad of statistics associated with being captain. It was flushed out of the bilge each day after being measured.

No doubt one day a discrepancy in that amount would be the first clue to some mechanical fault.

He made a mental note to check on how much was in the bilge tomorrow because the whole crew were hushed as they listened to the sound of propellers approaching from the starboard side.

With the memory of the depth charging by the Brazilian frigate still fresh, even the coolest calmest crew members were already breaking into a sweat.

Dai was at 200 feet and moving forward at a bare three knots with all ancillary equipment shut down to minimise their audible profile, or Silent Running to the picture house audiences.

The quiet within the vessel served to magnify the sound of the approaching enemy corvette. The water being thrashed by the blades driving it towards them, louder and louder with each revolution of its propellers, the audible thump of the bow smashing through the waves along with the higher pitched whine from the ships twin screws was causing a nervous gesture here and there.

Eyes fixed on the starboard bulkheads and traced the sound, heads raising as it drew closer and louder, and then they were staring straight upwards as the corvette was overhead, the whine of the screws now almost as shrill as a dentist drill, their whole bodies braced and ready to flinch, but no warning call of depth charges hitting the water came from the sonar shack. The heads continue to follow the sound to port as it forged away, diminishing in volume as well as in threat, leaving a hundred sets of gratefully relaxing shoulders clad in sweat darkened shirts.

Li had no doubt that there were nervous eyes watching Bao’s bulkheads also, even though they had yet to suffer the character building and brown adrenaline producing experience of a depth charge attack.

Bao was off their port quarter and in the process of moving into position a quarter mile behind them as Dai aimed for the gap that lay between the three islands that formed an unequally sided triangle off the coast of French Guiana.

The submersible was still riding piggy-back as they edged closer to the islands, seeking both traditionally chain anchored mines and bottom seated magnetic mines.

The Juliett carried shortwave ultra-low frequency sonar that was first devised by a clever man in a shed as a means of avoiding reversing ones car into walls or other cars when parking. The invention was then stolen by an even cleverer lady who adapted it as a tool for ships and submarines to find sea mines without being overheard at a distance by the people who had planted them. China called its own pirated version the Mouse Roar.

For thirty minutes they cautiously closed on the notorious islands.

“There isn’t such a thing as a stealth mine is there?” whispered Jie who was now clad in black wet suit, and with his hands and features painted for war, daubed dark green, grey and brown with greasy waterproof camouflage paint.

“Thank you so much for inserting that seed of doubt.” The captain murmured. “But no, there is not.”

There was a long pause as the soldier thought about that.

“But if there was, we wouldn’t know about it would we, because they are stealthy, right?”

The captain glared at him.

Jie shrugged. “Just saying.”

They crept on in silence, feeling their way closer to the land.

Just as Li was beginning to think the French were very lax with their security an urgent voice declared otherwise.

“Conn, sonar…stationary object, range zero six five, bearing two nine nine…classify as anchored sea mine…conn sonar, stationary object range zero nine nine…bearing three one five, classify as anchored sea mine…conn, sonar…stationary object…”

“Both engines back slow together…!”

Already barely making headway the Dai lost way almost instantly and backed off from danger. Behind her the Bao did likewise as its hydrophones tracked the Juliett and heard the brief flurry, knowing what it must mean.

…all stop, helmsmen hold this position.”

He and the Exec studied the chart with Jie Huaiqing close by.

“Well we knew they probably had one and indeed they have, off our starboard quarter…” Li carefully marked the mines discovered by the Mouse Roar sonar. Li suspected that going active with their main search sonar would reveal a dense minefield and possibly one that also contained magnetic proximity mines.

“Bring us slowly up to sixty feet…raise ECM.”

They remained there for ten minutes with the ECM sensors listening to localised radio and microwave transmissions as well as feeling for radar energy.

The ECM board warrant officer swivelled in his seat.

“Captain, four brief bursts of microwave transmissions, all from landward and all digitally encrypted, otherwise the board is clear, no radar energy seaward or landward at this time.”

Jie looked at the chronometer above the chart table; it was set to Beijing time. He did a quick mental sum and smiled to himself.

“Exactly 7pm local time, five digitally encrypted transmissions…” he muttered and then raised his voice enough to address the ECM operator.

“Range and bearings?…I’ll bet the first and fifth transmissions were from the same point inland and the other three are spread out along the shore, back in the undergrowth somewhere?”

The two naval officers were watching him quizzically.

“Encrypted microwave transmissions of short duration, that’ll be from man-portable battlefield radio sets.” He enlightened them. “Radio checks on the hour to observation posts or patrols watching the beach.”

“Major?” responded ECM. “Approximate ranges only, based on signal strength…” he rattled off four sets of ranges and bearings which the captain marked on the chart.

“I think you were right Captain.” said the Exec. “If he’d gone to my school I’d definitely have bullied the smug, swatty bastard.”

Jie grinned, and noted the approximated locations whilst the captain stepped over to the periscopes.

“Raise ‘Search’.” It slid smoothly up and he grasped the handles before pressing his face against the eye shield, switching to lo-lite TV and swinging the device around through 360°, ‘Dancing with the Grey lady’ as it is known, his hand cranking the prism elevation upwards as he looked for aircraft as well as surface craft. After several revolutions he was satisfied they were in no immediate danger and turned to study the land.

During their journey north along the Atlantic coast of South America Li had noted the twinkling lights on the shores of the neutral countries, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. In towns, cities and ports the lights blazed away, illuminating shipping to landward of the Dai, silhouetting them against that carefree absence of blackout regulations. It had been enough to make a grown predator weep, all that tonnage there for the sinking but being unable to do so without compromising the mission.

Here though, French Guiana was in total darkness, a sinister dark mass on the horizon.

He took a step backwards.

“Down ‘scope, lower the ECM, come left to two zero zero …port motor back slow, starboard motor ahead slow…now slow ahead together, helm amidships.”

Again they inched forward and Li stared hard at the chart as if trying to divine whether the French had also mined the deep water to seaward of the ancient volcano that Ile Diable and her two sisters sat atop of.

“I assume we know that there isn’t some kind of enemy position or listening post on those islands?” asked the Exec.

“It’s a bit late now to be worrying about that, but no, the islands are directly beneath the launch path of the rockets and were abandoned because of that…as our resident anorak on western health and safety laws can confirm?”

Captain Huaiqing’s blacked up face suddenly sprouted a set of pearly white teeth.

“Conn, sonar, sharp rise in the sea bed…six hundred feet… five fifty…five hundred….” The granite pinnacle arose steeply from the depths, its sides almost sheer in places.

“All stop.”

“Conn, sonar, Bao is matching us Captain.”

“Thank you” answered Li. “Raise the ECM… raise ‘Search’.”

Again the area was clear of detectable threats and as the periscope slid back down again Li looked at the chronometer.

“Half an hour to high tide Major, and there are no mines in the vicinity.” He turned and faced the soldier. “The French had a six hundred foot long cable car affair running from Royale to Devils Island as the tidal race is too fierce for boats in the channel so don’t hang about…and the very best of luck to you Major.” He held out his hand.

“Thank you for the excellent job of getting us here Captain, and whether or not we succeed I hope to see you on the dock in six hours.” The handshake was brief but firm and Li hoped it did not betray the guilt he felt.

If the troops failed to take the pads out of operation then he would not be seeing Jie or his men again. His orders on that count were precise, allowing no room for manoeuvre and were marked for his eyes only.

Four of the troopers entered the submersible through the after hatch and Jie Huaiqing with five men departed one at a time from the escape hatch just aft the conning tower to attach themselves to its outer hull.

The submersible’s batteries, motor and air supply had been tested regularly on their marathon journey from China, and its pilot ran through the start-up, instruments lighting up one at a time until the board was fully lit with green lights over ‘Air’, ‘Battery’, ‘Propulsion’ and ‘Manoeuvring’.

Jie rapped on the submersibles hull with his knifes hilt to signal they were all secured outside upon which the crew of the Dai heard the sound of the securing clamps releasing. The sound magnified by the water.

Once the Mouse Roar sonar showed the submersible was clear and entering the channel between the three small islands Dai remained in place knowing that Bao was launching her submersible too.

To their left, the south of the islands was almost certainly a continuance of the dense minefield but there was no need to seek it out now.

Li had been correct; the channel was the chink in the armour protecting the satellite launch facilities.

It took several minutes for the second special forces team to reach them and then pass into the channel also, after which the passive sonar told them Bao was moving back out to sea and Dai followed.

Major Huaiqing was attached to the casing of the small vessel by a rubberised carabiner and a firm grip on the foot and hand holds as he watched the submarine that had been ‘home’ for six weeks disappear into the ocean blackness. He gripped the regulator between his teeth, breathing calmly into his re-breather as he returned his gaze to the way ahead, where lay the channel between the small islands that had been more the gaoler of the prisoners incarcerated there than any gun totting prison guard. But surely he thought, they must have thought the risk worthwhile at such times as this when standing on the shore watching the maelstrom relent twice a day?

The submersibles spot lamps snapped on as the mouth of the channel approached to show rock walls covered by razor edged barnacles that would flay the living flesh from any unfortunate swimmer caught in the currents grip, and then he was startled by the black soulless eyes and evil, jagged fanged grin of a Tiger shark that entered the circle of light created by the spot lamps. It deferentially ignored the submersible that was larger than itself, and the Chinese troopers clinging to it like pilot fish.

That at least answered his question.

Beyond the channel his submersible ceased forward motion and held station awaiting the second submersible to emerge safely. It appeared after a little more than five minutes and turned north, to head parallel to the shoreline for fifteen miles.

The Captains submersible though came to a heading of 280° and continued for the shore.

An hour later the submersible settled to the bottom well short of the low water mark, its purpose fulfilled.

According to the ECM data they were now at worst about five hundred metres from a Foreign Legion O.P

Captain Huaiqing slipped out of the rebreather while still submerged but retained the weights belt about his waist for the moment to prevent bobbing to the surface. He partially emerged from the sea to lie in the surf with just passive night goggles and the muzzle of his French FAMAS assault rifle visible.

A downpour of tropical dimensions was pelting down from above raising a low lying haze of flying spray as the droplets burst upon impacting the sea and already sodden sand. It roared down, smiting the wide palm fronds like a constant drum roll. Even with PNGs, passive night goggles, the visibility was greatly reduced.

The beach was exactly as expected from both satellite photographs and tourists holiday snaps incorporated in the original briefing back in China.

Pale grey cadavers lay strewn and entangled upon the beach where storms had tossed them, their rigid bodies going brittle in the intense heat of the sun, in the seasons when it shone. These once proud trees did not hail from close hereabouts though. Overhanging the myriad rivers and waterways that drained the South American rainforest they had eventually succumbed to age or to undermining by flood waters, the rivers carried them away, out to sea eventually and thence to a timber cemetery such as this.

Once upon a time the shore had not been so crowded. Once it has been sun dried, the dead wood made excellent fuel for cooking fires at the many hamlets and fishing villages along the coast of French Guiana. The remains of the villages between Kourou and the border with Suriname were now as grey and lifeless as the trees on the beaches, the inhabitants moved on in the interests of un-burst eardrums, such was the thunder of the rocket launches.

Two men crawled slowly forwards, hesitating only once to peer at their commander.

Jie Huaiqing gave them a reassuring nod and they squirmed forwards through the sand, wasting no time looking for mines or trip wires. The scouts disappeared into the jungle lining the shore and separated, searching left and right for any waiting legionnaires manning OP’s or laying in ambush.

After a few minutes one returned to give the all clear and they all of them still in the shallows shed their weights belts, hoisted heavy, vacuum sealed bags and sprinted from the sea heedless of their footing.

Nobody with half a brain would waste mines on a beach where a few thousand heavy Leatherback turtles were going to be digging holes to lay their eggs.

Once in cover they stripped off the wet suits and opened the bags, pulling on boots, camouflage clothing, weighty bergen’s and combat equipment.

Captain Huaiqing took a fat barrelled 7.62 calibre handgun from the bag. The Norinco Type 64 was purpose built for silent dirty work at greater distances than a sound suppressed 9mm. He looped a lanyard through the trigger guard and hung it suspended around his neck, tucking it out of sight down the inside of his smock.

Next Jie pulled on a green beret, setting it just so. He had practiced this many times in the dark onboard the Dai during the voyage.

The last item out of the waterproof bag was his map case. A French military map of the area and a wildlife reference book were squeezed inside. Expertly forged orders authorising their presence within the security compound were tucked inside the pages of the book, fastidiously clean and uncrumpled. A legionnaire may drag himself out of the jungle in rags with six months’ worth of beard, too weak to salute and no one will think the less of him, but to produce an illegible Ordres écrits? Unforgiveable! It was part of what made the legion different. Romantics continue to seek out the recruiters, and grizzled recruiters continue to sort out the romantics.

“Fools fight for idéaux, professionals fight for Orders!”

P.C Wren has a lot to answer for.

The orders are everything to the legionnaire, the romantic ideals, simply nothing.

In the wet and dripping jungle near the ocean the professionals of another country’s army adopt a veneer of that which defines a legionnaire for the purposes of subterfuge.

“Remember, any civilians we meet we treat with polite disdain and any army, navy, air force or marines encountered will be ignored as if they are a sub species, comprendre?” It would be completely out of character for a legionnaire to so much as greet a member of any countries military with any level of civility.

“Oui, mon Chef!”

He paused for a moment to hold the PNG’s to his eyes, looking them over and checking the prized Béret vert on their heads was sat correctly as any true legionnaires would be.

It was not unusual of course for Orientals to be serving in the Legion, but possibly a whole squad could raise a curious comment. However there was nothing else for it but to trust in luck and a little bluff to get onto the site.

Tucking away the PNG’s he nodded approvingly and then lifted a heavy bergen onto his shoulders.

“Bonne.”

Their communications were a problem in a country this size with only ESA, the military and the gendarmeries having access to anything above cell phones. Any transmission made could come from a relatively small number of known sources, so secure encrypted transmissions were out. They would stand out like a sore thumb. Likewise plain speech, that would also register as being ‘off’ so no “Broadsword calling Danny Boy?” on the air waves and microwaves tonight.

Using the cellular system was too easily spiked by its being simply turned off once the French woke up to the fact they were under attack.

The solution was pre-arranged text in apparently accidental transmissions of seemingly innocuous material, the greatly annoying ‘open carrier’, ‘open channel’, or ‘Permanent Send’ momentarily, if you prefer. Jie’s chosen offering was a classic, of the musical variety, as he informed Senior Sergeant Yen, the unit’s warrant officer and the senior amongst the eight troops remaining with the Dai that they were ashore without incident and proceeding.

Jie sang softly to himself apparently absent minded and depressed the transmit button on his Thales tactical radio.

He certainly did not do Charles Trénet full justice but following a calculated pause a single flick of Senior Sergeant Yen’s radio transmit button acknowledged receipt of the message.

Jie turned directly away from the sea, heading towards the highway known as Route de l’Espace.

“Allons-y!”

It would be with extreme caution that Li approached Paracaibo Wharf, the European Space Agency dock sitting three and a half miles downriver from the coastal town of Kourou at the river’s northern lip.

No intelligence updates had been received for over a month. The last they had received merely stated that pair of Atlantiques was at that time believed to have been attached to the colony defences along with a pair of corvettes. There was nothing to indicate where the French naval flotilla was basing out of, either Kourou or the capital? The colony’s main port of Dégrad des Cannes, which had grown to become the southern suburb of Cayenne, housed a permanent detachment of marines in a barracks beside a jetty extending into the Mahury River estuary. It was easily deep enough for even a destroyer to dock there and the river was wide enough for it to turn even without the aid of tugs.

Their intelligence briefing included only that of an armed civilian security guard was present at the ESA dock in Kourou except when freighters carrying the rocket sections or satellites were due, or had docked and were still unloading. There was nothing in the way of warehousing at the ESA dock to interest a thief, that all took place at the colony’s main port. All the ESA dock boasted was a solid, modern jetty and a crane on the river. The quayside was little more than a car park, half covered to provide relief from the sun for waiting heavy duty transporter vehicles and their crews.

A small tank farm sat to one side in a jungle clearing, it was connected to the jetty by all the plumbing necessary to accept deliveries of petrol, Avgas and diesel fuel.

Tall security fences topped by razor wire surrounded the dock and tank farm. Motion sensors and CCTV provided a second layer of security, monitored from a guardhouse at the main gate.

Unlike the port at the capital, Kourou required the regular services of a dredger to keep the main channel deep enough for the freighters to navigate their way safely. When completely unloaded the freighters had to be towed stern first back to the sea by tugs.

As such neither Dai nor Bao could remain completely submerged for their eventual jaunt downriver.

Li did not imagine that storming the dockside facilities would be anything but counterproductive, and so the low key tactics Captain Huaiqing had suggested were being employed.

Having dropped off the submersible, Dai flooded two forward torpedo tubes and two rear tubes. He also opened the outer doors so as to be fully prepared for a surprise encounter with one of the warships, if in fact they were indeed operating out of the ESA dock.

Half of their YU-6 21” torpedoes were armed with the new sodium hydride warheads which released the sodium on impact, producing 2000 °C of heat as the compound reacted with the hydrogen in the seawater, or at least that is what it said on the tin.

Li had four forward tubes loaded with conventional warhead torpedoes because everything new has unforeseen bugs somewhere in the system. If he was going to be at knife fighting distance with the French flotilla then he wanted proven technology to hand. The last two forward tubes contained YJ-12 anti-ship missiles. Useless within the confines of the river but they would be ready for immediate use when they returned to the ocean. No time costly unloading and reloading of tubes to delay their immediate use.

The rear tubes were also loaded with conventionally tipped weapons but he only had four of the smaller, and aging, 16” torpedoes. There were four rear tubes in a torpedo room a third the size of the one forward as there was no storage for reloads, the stings-in-the-tail sat in their tubes ready for use during the entire duration of deployments.

All the torpedoes were set to run shallow.

Thus, suitably prepared for the worst, Dai moved along the coast to within five hundred metres of the town itself without encountering any further mines.

This part of the operation was lacking several ingredients from the rehearsed plan they had trained for in China. The loss of Tuan, her submersible, the special forces detachment and their explosives would mean some ingenuity and adaptability on the part of the much smaller force that was taking on their tasks.

Captain Li was reassured by the quality and enthusiasm of the men.

No cannon fodder, these.

He watched them prepare themselves and their equipment to knock off the Kourou police station and night duty personnel, to render useless any air assets on the small airstrip outside the town, blow a bridge and lock horns with a fearsome regiment of jungle fighters.

Each man would be carrying a FAMAS F1 5.56mm assault rifle, bayonet, three APAV40 rifle grenades, a bespoke detachable sound suppressor, smoke grenades, CS gas grenades, plastic explosives, detonators, an anti-armour mine they could adapt with electrical detonators or simple use as a mine, various ‘switches’ for booby traps, cheese wire garrottes, ropes and a host of other items that made the submariner feel fatigued just imagining having to carry it all.

Half a kilometre off Les Roche Point the eight remaining special forces troopers exited through the rear escape hatch and swam ashore.

Kourou was a very modern place given its moderate size. Thanks to the commerce and cash associated with the space centre it had good roads, street lighting and orderly housing. Microwave masts for the local cellular telephone system were visible, as were the satellite dishes that linked the residents to the motherland via the internet and satellite TV. Had it not been for the war the street lights would be lit, the bars neon signs ablaze and the populace would be enjoying themselves, but blackouts did not engender good nights out so most stayed home and only a lone police car had been visible on the streets through the search periscope’s lo-lite TV.

Li felt a little self-conscious as he had strode from his cabin with a webbing cartridge belt, holster on his hip and camouflage cream on his face. His men nodded respectfully but one unseen wag mimicked the sound of clinking spurs.

“Laugh it up boys.” He’d responded. “If it gets so that me and this gun are the only thing between success and swimming home, you’d better be wearing your water wings.” His expertise with small arms was limited to one day a year when he was required to demonstrate safe handling drills on a range. The ten rounds he fired during that process did not in any way count towards his annual requalification, which was fortunate for him.

Bao remained submerged beyond the river mouth with her Lo-Lite TV equipped search periscope raised along with the ECM and communications masts.

Dai entered the estuary at periscope depth; a bare twenty feet of water beneath her keel.

The control room was now illuminated with red lighting in order that the bridge crew and landing parties eyes would already be acclimatised to the dark.

Li was glued to the periscope until he saw a broad slipway off to their left. The road that served it was the remains of the original main highway to Cayenne.

“All stop.”

The slipway belonged to the old ferry service that had existed for centuries in progressively modern form, and profited at that spot since the Portuguese had first claimed the land. Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Spaniards and Englishmen had also fought over ownership of this country but the Kourou river ferry had survived and prospered despite them all. Only when a Swiss built a bridge downriver did the fat lady finally sing for the ferry. It sat abandoned now, a mere marker for a Chinaman at the point where the river started and the deeper estuary ended.

Dai slowly arose, her masts emerging from the waters like a clutch of Excaliburs.

Brown, silt laden, water flowed off the Juliett’s bridge and down the grey steel sides of the conning tower, but her bulk stayed hidden beneath the surface, giving them the radar profile of a small boat.

Li undogged the top lid and locked it in place as he emerged into the rain. Lookouts took post and four ratings strained to haul a 23mm cannon up the ladder from the control room and mounted it as quietly as possible, loading a belt of ammunition but not cocking the weapon as the harsh metallic sound would travel far across the water despite the rain.

It was a snug fit now in the conning tower with look-outs, the Strela air sentry, 23mm and Captain Li.

The Strela had a back blast area which limited its arcs of fire. The ideal was for two sentries on the casing, one forward and one aft of the conning tower. In heavy weather though, the best-of-a-bad-job position was aft of everyone on the conning tower, perched above them all and attached to the ECM mast by a safety harness. This position was of course not conducive to engaging targets approaching from the rear. Nevertheless, Li had his air sentry assisted up there to allow more freedom of movement on the bridge.

Captain Li squinted against the downpour and pulled up his collar to minimise the discomfort of having water running down the back of his neck. He had a hood but he preferred keep his hearing unhindered.

Raising night glasses to his eyes he picked out the channel marker. They remained on electrical power, draining the batteries precious charge but preserving the element of surprise as Li conned the vessel slowly forwards keeping diligently above the deepest part of the rivers dredged channel.

His nose wrinkled as the salt tang of the ocean became polluted by the scent of the jungle, the rotting vegetation and wet mud from the mangrove swamps that lay just outside the small towns influence.

The trees, the creepers and dense jungle undergrowth closed in on them, overhanging the river banks as soon as the town had slipped behind them in the darkness.

A nightscope picked out a wooden dugout canoe drawn up on the bank, the Stone Age existing just a stone’s throw from the twenty first century and all its internet broadband glory.

Their world became that of the tropical downpour and the ominous dark mass of the jungle, picked out by a fractionally lighter sky.

It was claustrophobic. They were out of their comfort zone, away from the deep waters they were designed to hunt in and this added to the diligence with which the bridge crew kept watch.

Li allowed himself to swing his glasses up and down river every so often, taking in the black and impenetrable gloom of the banks.

Amid the leaping strikes of raindrops upon the river two bright dots appeared beside the bank, he kept his glasses upon them as he tried to work out what they were, a surveillance device? He lowered the glasses and they disappeared, invisible to the naked eye in the darkness but with the glasses raised once more he immediately picked them out again as they were now moving towards his command, creating a faint V of a wake in the rivers surface. A seabird swam into his vision and into the path of the glowing dots, its own head pulled back into the protection its furled wings afforded against the rain.

There was a splash, a flurry of movement and both bird and dots disappeared with the swish of a caiman’s leathery tail, leaving only a few floating feathers. Li shivered despite himself at the suddenness with which death had visited this primeval place.

The river bent around to the right and Li leant over the side of the conning tower so as to more quickly sight the ESA jetty, glasses held to his eyes with one hand and the other clutching a microphone to his mouth, thumb just touching the transmit switch and the order to open fire ready on his lips. The rating on the 23mm cannon clutched the weapons cocking handle tightly, his knuckles white and bracing himself to ratchet the lever to the rear.

Below decks the tension was palpable. In engineering they were awaiting the call to throw the engines into full reverse for a fighting withdrawal back to the ocean under fire from surface warships. The torpedomen stood ready, and between them and the control room waited the armed ratings who would be their sentries along with the Fassing party in the central passageway. All were bathed in red light, clutching small arms with the awkwardness of the unfamiliar, but ready to carry out the fuelling procedures from the novelty of a rock steady surface for once.

The darkness of the jungle on the northern bank altered with the appearance of a silhouette that possessed straight lines. It separated from the unruly mass of the night time rain forest to sit stationary a hundred metres off the north bank. As it came into the view of the 23mm gunner he immediately took aim.

“Belay that!” Li commanded sharply. “It’s the Fliterland.”

Bulky, specialised derricks sat above the elongated ships hold where the Soyuz rocket sections and delicate payloads were stored but the freighter was riding high in the water, empty, her last cargo unloaded weeks before.

Rust streaked here and there, the freighters blue hull and white superstructure loomed over them as they slowly motored along her cliff-like port side.

The dock beyond the freighter was empty of warships too. Li was not as relieved as he might have been. He still did not know where the French corvettes and fast patrol boats were.

“All stop.”

The rain showed no sign of relenting as the Dai sat motionless in midstream. Li took up his glasses again, to peer downriver at the road bridge, and to look for any sign of sentries.

It was both a modern and no frills, functional, construction for carrying a two lane highway as well as an effective barrier preventing anything more substantial than a large motor launch from progressing downriver beyond that point.

Ten prefabricated concrete supports had been sunk into the riverbed to carry the highway. Li guessed that a minimum of three spans would need to be dropped for it to hinder a determined engineer beyond a week. Ideally those supports should be destroyed too but they were substantial and solidly built. It would require the services of a demolitions expert and more time and explosives than they possessed.

As for sentries, Li saw a shape midway across in a rain slick waterproof cape slowly pacing about; head down in the manner of the truly bored and thoroughly miserable. He looked slightly hunchbacked on account of his weapon hanging by its sling off one shoulder beneath the cape to keep it dry, the muzzle pointing downwards and of no immediate offensive use to man nor beast.

This was not what he expected of one of the vaunted legionnaire jungle fighters of 3e Régiment étranger d'infanterie. This must be either a student from the jungle warfare school or one of the local reservists

As Li watched the soldier suddenly leaned back against the guardrail and sat down heavily upon the bridges tarmac surface. He did not move again.

Two more figures appeared from the north end of the bridge, and in contrast to the sentry the butts of their weapons were in the shoulder and they were up in the aim. Bulky sound suppressors panned from side to side as they moved rapidly in that odd gait that keeps the upper body and shoulders level and stable, the knees seemingly joined together. They did not pause on drawing level with the slumped figure, they did not tarry to feel for a pulse or to offer aid, the nearest of his SF detachment briefly lowered his aim and Li saw two flashes at the muzzle as he double tapped his victim in the head, just to be certain.

They continued on across the bridge, walking rapidly and looking for further targets as they disappeared from his view.

Two minutes later they returned at the jog but this time they did stop at the supine figure. One stood guard as the other stooped, getting a good hold before straightening up with his arms under the sentry’s armpits and draping him over the guard rail. He bent again to grasp the ankles and upended the body into the river. The splash of it hitting the water was followed by others with the forms of eager caiman sliding down the southern bank. Long tails propelled them swiftly through the water in a race to claim their supper.

On the road bridge, the Chinese trooper peered over the side at his victim before looking up and into the darkness, directly at the otherwise invisible shape of the Juliett’s conning tower. He raised a hand to give a little cavalier salute to the submarine and then both jogged back the way they had come.

Li looked away from the bridge and what was about to be the disquieting sight of large reptiles feeding on a human corpse.

“Open main seawater valves… vent ballast, blow one and two.”

High pressure air displaced the water in her ballast tanks, forcing it out into the river and Dai’s casing rose up out of the muddy brown waters.

The sound of a car engine swiftly drew all eyes back to the dock in time to see a police car, ‘Gendarmerie’ emblazoned on its side, approach the jetty, flashing its headlights rapidly.

“Captain?” asked the rating on the 23mm cannon, again in the aim.

“It’s okay, just two of our supercargo arriving in borrowed transport.”

The car halted on the jetty beside the freighter. Two special forces troopers exited the vehicle.

Li depressed the transmit button on the microphone, updating his executive officer before getting busy putting the Dai alongside the jetty fuel valves, one of which was connected to a storage tank a high grade diesel.

“All back dead slow…get the sea duty and the security details topside.”

The Dai moved past the Fliterland again, with the sea duty linesmen taking post as Li skilfully backed them up against the jetty behind the freighter’s looming stern.

Lines were thrown to the two troopers who made the lines fast, securing the Dai to the side of the jetty.

An extending ladder was brought up from below and laid against the jetty’s side, and the dockside security party hurriedly climbed it and hustled away to form a perimeter.

The senior NCO commanding those SF troops re-boarded and reported that all was going to plan at their end. The dock was secure; the logging company’s Chinook at Kourou’s small airfield was being booby trapped even as they spoke and the other two detachments were ashore without incident and approaching their targets.

At the bridge, ropes were being tossed over the sides as a preliminary to wiring the road sections for demolition and the rain stopped as suddenly as if someone had turned off a tap.

“Fasser’s topside and begin fuelling operations…oh, and make to Bao, ‘Come and join the party’.”

As the fuelling crew appeared on the casing he shook his head in wonderment and spoke aloud to no one in particular.

“Damn me, but I think this could actually work.”

There is a road that runs from Brownsville USA, going south along the Atlantic coast all the way until it ends suddenly on the shore of the Beagle Channel at Tierra del Fuego. Pretty much as far as you can drive on continental America, clocking up thirteen thousand miles on that twisting and turning road from Texas. It follows the coastline for all but a twenty mile section where the original road runs straight through the cluster of rocket launch pads on the equator.

A newer section, a wide sweeping detour now cuts through the rainforest keeping traffic far away from the ESA and Soyuz sites. The no-longer-public section was renamed Route de l’Espace and came to represent the single most valuable item in the entire country.

Low lying and low profile reinforced concrete pill boxes at the side of the road command the approaches to the launch pads, each with five sets of twin thirty calibre machine guns spaced to provide 360° of overlapping coverage. The guns were set to fire at shin height, and anyone hit would then fall into the thirty calibre stream. It was a method first devised by the German Imperial Army way back in 1912 as the most effective method of despatching multiple attackers, rather than leaving some wounded, and still a threat.

At the southern entrance to the complex a rattrap gate allowed one vehicle at a time into a controlled search area with optical underside scanning built into the roadbed and ESA security staff checking for vehicle borne IEDs, weapons and stowaways. The exit gate could not open whilst the entry gate was closed.

Concrete lined drainage ditches had a dual anti-vehicle role, and outside the entry point a concrete blockhouse/Guardroom controlled access.

Captain Jie Huaiqing and his nine troopers moved along the roadway in Indian- file with its staggered spacing making fire from the flanks less likely to take out pairs of troops. It was basic fieldcraft.

They held to the roadway, not avoiding the occasional approaching vehicle. Trucks, cars and vans splashed past, adding a little more to their already soaked camouflage uniforms as the tropical deluge had not relented.

It suited Jie’s purpose, bad weather was better in his chosen line of work.

They moved with deliberateness and they moved as if they belonged, leaning forward slightly at the waist as that best allowed them to balance themselves under the burden of the 15 kilo cratering charges each carried.

After thirty minutes they saw stationary red tail lights ahead of them. After several minutes more Jie got the impression there was more than a single vehicle, the sound of idling engines confirmed that, but they were still well short of the ESA controlled area, now visible far ahead, its access point lit up.

Jie knew, in detail, the procedures that were in place here and a holding area was not included, that is to say one hadn’t been included six weeks before.

This was where fresh intelligence would have assisted.

A hundred yards on and he saw the lead vehicle in the queue move off slowly, continuing for the facility but the remainder sat there a quarter mile from the entrance and Jie left his squad in the undergrowth to recce ahead cautiously.

Half way along the column of trucks, vans and cars he was able to see that they were being held by two soldiers who were clearly not legionaries’ as one carried the shoulder flash of the 110^th Infantry and the other wore the maroon beret of the airborne forces.

The driver of the baker’s truck at the end of the queue was listening to a music CD and jumped as legionaries appeared at each window, faces blacked with camouflage cream.

“Autorisant passé!”

The night and the rain hid them from the legitimate articles at the head of the queue but they had to work quickly before a further vehicle arrived to silhouette them for possible discovery.

The driver handed over the pass and then left the vehicle to open the truck for inspection and the troopers kept him busy with queries about his load and his movements.

Alone by the cab Jie leant in and ejected the music CD to surf the channels until he found the local news station.

Delivery men worldwide consistently collect polystyrene coffee cups, polystyrene fast food containers, cigarette packets and newspapers with which to decorate the front dashboard.

Between the news channel stories and speed reading newspaper articles, ignoring the obvious tabloid favourites’ of who-is-screwing-who by identifying the cliché’ bylines’, Jie gleaned an insight into local events in French Guiana since they had departed from China.

The plan to tie up the troops chasing illegal gold miners from Brazil had worked well, much better than expected in fact.

A television news channel had persuaded the gendarmes to allow a news crew to embed with one of their jungle patrols to better cover this increase of the illegal mining problem. The presence of a young pretty reporter may possibly have had some bearing on the gendarmes becoming a little over eager to please in the execution of their duties.

They not only turned away would-be miners they encountered at the border, destroying their tools, but they also stopped and searched Garimpeiros crossing back into Brazil, seizing any gold they were carrying.

If the eight man patrol of gendarmes believed the Garimpeiros would meekly accept the loss of their earnings and would not seek retribution and restitution at gunpoint then they were at best optimistic. The gendarmes had soon reported the TV crew and themselves were surrounded by ten times their number somewhere near the Surinam, Brazil and Guiana borders. Nothing more had been heard of them in almost two weeks. Under pressure from the media and the ministry the governor had taken what action he could, bearing in mind that he had zero chance of reinforcement from Europe.

By replacing the jungle fighting expert legionnaires’ at the ESA and Soyuz sites with the as yet non jungle qualified, but conventionally trained soldiers undergoing courses at the jungle warfare school, he had two hundred more boots on the ground searching for the missing reporter, cameraman and policemen.

This was good news Jie decided, far less chance of an awkward ‘‘Who the hell are you?” moment from one of the genuine articles before they got inside.

Only here, out of all the locations in sight of the ocean was the blackout not in place.

The ESA perimeter was covered with pressure sensors, ultra-sonic movement alarms and lo-lite CCTV which required no illumination, but the checkpoint at the entrance was lit up as bright as day and it was towards this oasis of spot lights and 200 watt bulbs that Jie led his troopers.

The approaching squad were under observation as they approached, the barrels of a pair of ‘Thirties’ tracking them unerringly from the moment the holding area soldiers had informed the guardroom of armed ‘friendlies’ on the way.

Before them was a long stretch of straight, level road with the jungle and undergrowth cleared for twenty five metres at either side. That was a long way to go to reach any kind of cover from view if they should need to.

They were committed.

Three and a half miles beyond the entrance it was possible to make out the Italian Vega launch pad with a tall slim column in place and illuminated by floodlighting. The lighting was not for the benefit of the press, although it does make for eye catching footage and career defining photography, the primary purpose is simply to spot problems such as leaks and loose or missing inspection panels because at the end of the day even rocket scientists can screw up.

Unlit and invisible in the rain and night but only three quarters of a mile from Vega was the more substantial Ariane 5 pad. Accidents can happen so at no time was their dual activity taking place at both Vega and its relatively close-by neighbour.

Soyuz though, was six miles distant and an Ariane 5 rocket was in place there. Rain pelted its length, rattling off the casing of its fantastically expensive payload package with a sound identical to that which it was making on the rusted corrugated tin roofs of dilapidated and abandoned fishermen’s huts near the beach.

Two miles closer but half hidden behind jungle not yet cleared was the tall white final assembly building. The Ariane pads next customer was stood outside on a giant transporter that would deliver it at 3mph, slowly but surely once the Vega had lifted its package into orbit.

Jie and his men arrived at the illuminated entrance point just as the downpour came to a sudden end.

Once more ‘accidentally’ depressing the transmit switch of his radio Jie sang softly and tunelessly. “…voyez…Ces oiseaux blancs…Et ces maisons rouillées…” He waited for the acknowledging ‘click’ from the other end before he removed his bergen and left his men standing in a group, chatting quietly together in a non-threatening manner on the side of the roadway but studiously ignoring the French army regulars who were in evidence.

A junior NCO checking the driver’s documents of the vehicles that arrived and a second soldier ostentatiously covering him gave the newcomers an appraising look before ‘blanking’ them in return.

Captain Jie Huaiqing wore the rank of a ‘Sergent Chef’, a Colour Sergeant equivalent, owing to ninety percent of the legions officer corps being French regular army officers on secondment he would have been asking for trouble if he had posed as one of the ten percent raised from the ranks.

At the guardroom window though, he found not a senior army NCO in charge, but a marine lieutenant with a broken wing.

A fall during the descent of a slippery hillside on one of the jungle warfare courses cross country navigation exercises had put the marine out of action, but at these ‘all hands to the pumps moments’ even the walking wounded can be found a task within their limited abilities.

The officer nodded and pointed to his right arm in a sling by way of apology at not returning Jie’s salute.

“It’s always the one you can least afford to do without eh, sir?”

“The essential ‘W’ arm, Chief. Writing, waving and wanking.” The marine officer replied ruefully.

“And what brings you to these parts instead of seeking out beautiful reporters in distress over by the border?”

By way of reply Jie fished out the waterproof pouch from his map pocket at his thigh, withdrawing the book and thence the written orders from between its leaves.

Instead of opening the orders the officer turned the book, which Jie had placed on the sill and peered curiously at its cover, a picture of a sea turtle was self-explanatory as to the books purpose, the script being in Chinese logograms.

“You are a wildlife enthusiast, Chief?” he asked. “Plenty of that around here.”

Idly opening the front cover he looked at the stamps on the inside for the briefest of moments before turning to the colour glossy photographs in the centre.

Clearly not a fellow Herpetologist he closed the book.

“Well each to his own eh, Chief.” He said with a smile and returned it, opening the orders with a flick of his left wrist whereupon he held the creases flat with spread fingers against the writing shelf on his side of the window and began to read.

“Additional perimeter patrol, huh? I hope you are familiar with the ground so you know not to venture between the yellow markers and the fence?” he said glancing up from the orders.

Jie nodded in affirmation, emphasising it with a respectful “Yes, sir.”

“Or every damn alarm on the place will go off, again.” added the officer.

With a shrug the lieutenant handed the orders back.

“You need to book yourself and your men in, I can’t do it myself.” He added, nodding again at the limb in a sling.

“Not in that book!” he warned as Jie reach for an open binder nearby on the sill. “That’s for civilian cleaning staff…you need to unload your weapon and come inside. The binder is in the corner and a bit heavy for a one arm bandit to carry across.” He grinned. “I’ll buzz you through.”

Jie duly carried out an unload and looked across the road to his men, making a surreptitious thumbs up gesture out of sight of the marine officer at the window and the soldiers nearby as he placed the ejected magazine in a pouch and secured it.

A faint nod in reply came from Corporal Chui, his senior NCO.

On pushing open the door at the sound of the harsh electronic buzz he found himself in a guardroom typical of those anywhere in the world. Institutional light green paint from floor level, up to above average shoulder height and then cream up to and including the ceiling. A narrow rubber mat ran across a shiny floor and he knew without being told that to step off it onto the gleaming and highly buffed linoleum would not be met well. It smelled of floor polish, coffee and Gauloises cigarettes.

The marine officer had his ear to a telephone when Jie appeared.

“On the table in the corner, Chief.” he nodded to neatly arranged binders and logbooks on a shelf.

Jie however could see all manner of labelled registers and books identifying the contents as Fire Drills, Mileage Returns and archived Incident Logs, but he could see nothing to indicate a booking in and out register.

“Sir, I can’t seem to find it…?” he turned and the marine officer put down the telephone and smiled affably but ignored the question.

“So tell me Chief, how you come to have an April date stamp in a Shanghai library book when the war started in March?”

Time seemed to freeze, as it does at those times of discovery for the kid with his hand in the cookie jar, the burglar half inside the window when the light comes on, and the soldier with an empty rifle.

He froze for a heartbeat as realisation hit him. Somehow the French officer had been on to him from the start, and by allowing him inside he had both lulled Jie and his men into a false sense of security, and separated the leader from his men.

The sudden roar of the thirty calibre machine guns outside jarred him into action.

Jie drew back his arm to fling the weapon at the marine, to buy time to reach the Norinco inside his smock.

The marine officer had a Glock 17 held with confident ease in his left hand and shot Jie twice through the chest before the captain could complete the throw.

Jie’s legs folded beneath him, all strength leaving his limbs he found himself on his knees, too weak to reach the smocks zipper.

The marine officer crouched over him, the pistol in his left hand.

Jie stared at it.

“Ambidextrous…” Said the officer in a slightly apologetic tone “…and two years with the Embassy guard in Beijing, in case you were wondering.” He continued in good, but slightly accented Mandarin.

Jie felt the floor tremble and a thunderous sound announced the Vega rocket launching another replacement military communications satellite into orbit.

The roar muted that of the thirty calibre machine guns and its tail flames light even invaded the guardrooms interior noted Jie, but at its height, darkness came.

Locating the valve for the diesel storage tank took but a moment but getting power to the pump in order fuel the Dai took long minutes before the switches were found in an electrical cabinet in the gatehouse but before that happy event a more worrying one occurred.

Snatches of gunfire were heard on the wind just before a column of fire rose into the heavens with a rocket and satellite riding upon it.

Captain Li queried the SF detachments warrant officer, Senior Sergeant Yen who tried without success to raise the two other teams on their tactical radio, looking a little comical, armed to the teeth yet in a singing voice that would strip paint from the walls he canted his head to one side, over the Thales radio microphone on his left shoulder and gave voice to a lullaby.

“Frere Jacques, frere Jacques, dormez vous? Dormez vous?”

There was no response from Dai’s or Bao’s teams, no indication that they had entered the site or not though either.

Unbeknownst to the captain, the Soyuz team had been approaching the northern entrance to the site. There was no issue with new procedures as signposts directed anyone with business with ESA or Soyuz to follow the detour to Kourou and use the southern gate.

They had not heard gunfire as the wind was at their backs. The launching Vega had of course been a very spectacular last view.

A bare fifty metres lay between themselves and the guardroom when the Vega launch took place. Ten faces could not help but follow its fiery splendour upwards, its tail flame illuminating them rather conveniently for the thirty calibre crew at the north gate who were now stood-to and on the lookout for bogus legionnaires.

“Night ranges, sir? Local gun club perhaps?” the warrant officer suggested to Captain Li.

“At this time, when rockets are launching?” Li responded. “No, that is not very likely. The ‘big sky’ theory is frequently disproved by stray rounds and ricochets.” He shook his head. “It would be prudent to work on the assumption they are blown, and the brown stuff is about to hit, I think.”

The two troopers tasked with ensuring there was nothing on the small Kourou airstrip that could be used against them arrived back at a fast jog.

“Something is stirring in town, sir.” One reported.

“Quiet as the grave when we went through it the first time, but there’s people moving about and cars starting up now. Some fat bastard in pyjama bottoms and combat jacket nearly trod on me on the way to his car.” The troopers had been moving quickly and quietly along silent streets when they had been surprised by house lights coming on and the sound of car engines starting up. Dropping prone in someone’s flower bed and remaining motionless had been instinctive.

“Seven bellies he had.” Put in his mate. “Like a stack of jellies jogging, they were, and he farted at every other step!”

“What is it with you guys?” asked Captain Li, his face screwing up in distaste at the description.

“Is there some ‘Instilling graphic and unpleasant mental images, course’ you all attend or something?”

He gave consideration to what he had just been told. The out of shape resident in combat jacket hurrying out to his car was more than likely a member of the reserve platoon formed from retirees.

“Where were they headed?”

“North, sir.” The first trooper replied.

“So, good news for us here but not so good for the launch pad teams.” muttered Li. Not good news for the town either, he thought, knowing that the orders in his safe would have to be carried out regardless of his personal feelings.

The captain of Bao would have a sealed copy in his safe, to be opened on the death or incapacity of Li, the next senior officer in the flotillas chain of command.

His executive officer also knew, Li had briefed him of course. The only other member of the crew to be intimate with that part of the mission would of course be his own ‘steward’, who may even have received a briefing by the admiral himself before the orders had even been written.

However, there was still time, they did not know for certain that the launch pad teams had been compromised, and even if they had it did not automatically follow that they were prevented from completing their missions?

He had his fingers crossed for Jie and those nineteen men to show before the refuelling was done and the bridge dropped into the muddy Kourou.

Across at the bridge the demolition preparations were well under way. Two troopers stood watch, one for trouble approaching from Cayenne and one keeping an eye on the quartet of caiman in the river. The biggest and strongest had claimed the sentry’s corpse so the others were watching another pair of troopers hanging by ropes below the bridges roadbed, wiring it up.

An adult caiman’s tail can lift 80 % of its body vertically upwards, clear of the water for just long enough to snatch unwary birds and monkeys from the lower limbs of overhanging trees, and Li could imagine what was going through the minds of the hungry trio as they watched the troopers suspended below the bridge, working swiftly and methodically like temptingly dangling Piñatas.

The trooper watching the trio of reptiles obviously thought they were thinking the same thing as he suddenly fired a long burst, the spent cases hitting the tarmac road surface and making more noise than the fired rounds had. One of the beasts reared up, threshing and twisting…the other two immediately turned on it, sinking their teeth in and instinctively rolling their wounded brother, seeking to subdue it by drowning before tearing off chunks and devouring it.

“That’ll keep them busy until we’re done.” Senior Sergeant Yen observed aloud but broke off as an armed rating relayed a message from the front gate, shouting across that the telephone was ringing non-stop at the gatehouse.

“Well.” Said Captain Li. “If they answer it then whoever is on the other end will know something is wrong and they will come in force, or they can leave it and maybe just a few will come to see if anything’s wrong in which case you can thin out the opposition a bit…but it’s your call Senior Sergeant, you are the on-site authority on dry land combat.”

Twelve armed sailors and the four troopers who were not engaged at the bridge was hardly a substantial force.

Senior Sergeant Yen departed to arrange what he had called a greeting for the unwelcome with some of the Type 72 light anti-tank mines they had brought. Not as effective as bar mines they were good for wrecking a tanks tracks and a road wheel perhaps. They could temporarily incapacitate any current main battle tank and devastate soft skin vehicles. As the French in Guiana had none of the former and plenty of the latter the relatively small but powerful AT mines could prove useful.

As Dai’s fuel tanks reached absolute capacity the Bao arrived, holding station in midstream as Dai cast off, and again moved beyond the dark and silent Fliterland, still operating on battery power in the hope of keeping their presence a secret as long as possible.

The maw-like air intakes and even larger exhausts’ covers remained closed and hopefully would remain so until they were again back out to sea.

Perhaps the telephone call was the guard’s wife? Perhaps it was a wrong number or even his bookie…?

It arrived with a thunderous roar, its undercarriage just clearing the white painted roof of the covered parking area, overflying the Fliterland and the two Chinese submarines to disappear in a shock of noise and downwash beyond the jungle canopy of the southern bank.

Neither Dai’s or Bao’s air sentries fired, so suddenly had the big Chinook appeared and departed that only Bao’s 23mm and a trooper on the road bridge fired a shot. The 23mm cannons gunner failed to aim ahead of the aircraft before letting rip so naturally he missed by as much as four aircraft lengths, the tracer curving harmlessly behind it. The troopers lighter and sound suppressed rounds ‘lacked the legs’ as they say, falling short.

“I thought they booby trapped that bloody thing?” Li shouted across the warrant officer on the dock who had paused to duck and watch the big shape cross the river.

The sound of the big rotor blades drowned out the reply as the machine cleared the trees downriver, flaring as it crossed back over to the north side and obviously aiming for some open space four hundred or so yards away around the bend. Li could barely make it out in the dark.

It was impressive flying by a military or ex-military pilot with plenty of experience in heliborne assaults. Flying so low as to minimise the opportunity of effective ground fire.

Li realised that his own air sentry was unable to engage it with the Strela as the submarines bridge was in the back blast area of the weapon. It was his own fault for not repositioning the sentry on the casing when the opportunity arose and he cursed himself for a fool now.

Don Caldew had been flying for the ‘My T Oak’ logging and lumber company for over two years, since right after getting out of the service in fact, flying the companies surplus Boeing CH47 Chinook.

The pay cheques were fatter than the ones Uncle Sam had given him but the work was as dull as ditch water. He missed the excitement, the adrenalin rush of flying into a hot LZ, he missed the guys and he missed something else too, the mission purpose, the sense you were doing something important. He recognised that that was what had made him sign on the dotted line in the first place.

Don came from a little town in the American Midwest where he was born in the same hospital his folks had been born, went to the same High School his folks and their folks before them had attended, and was expected to get a job at the local plant, just as his parents and their parents had. They hadn’t even considered setting up a college fund for him. Why should he want or expect anything more? Don did want more, but he didn’t know quite what it was that was missing from the life plan his parents had presented him with. The answer, when he found it, had changed his life forever.

The army recruiter at the local county fair had seen a light appear in young Don’s eyes as he looked at the glossy photographs in the pamphlets and the poster with the ‘Be All You Can Be’ title. Most of the first questions the recruiter got from visitors to his stand were “What’s the pay like?” or “Did you ever shoot anyone, mister?” The first category, if they signed on, would wash out in 70 % of cases, the second would come back in ten years when they were old enough and ask the same question as the first category. But Don’s had been “Do you make a difference?”

With his level of education, Don joined the infantry as a rifleman and he loved the life, the camaraderie and the sense of doing something with a purpose.

Another life altering experience was his first flight in a helicopter, a Blackhawk. While his buddies were staring out at the ground Don had been craning his neck to watch the AC, the Aircraft Commander, and his co-pilot.

It had just been an air experience flight, an introduction to the drills required to get on and off without walking into a rotor blade or grabbing hold of something you shouldn’t in order to climb aboard when fully loaded down with weapons and equipment. They had a short cross country hop to a wide green meadow where the aircraft had landed and shut down while they all had lunch, army style of course, but Don had sought out the AC, asking him about what it took to be an army helicopter pilot. The answers had been a little sobering but Don was not one to be easily put off.

Back home at that time his friends were marrying high school sweethearts and making babies, although not always in that order, and buying houses on the same street where their parents and grandparents lived. Don went home on leave after passing basic, but apart from attending his sister’s wedding the following year that was it, he never went back again.

The army ran further education courses and Don applied himself with a will. His first tour in Iraq was as a rifleman, but his second was in the left hand seat of a CH47 Chinook.

A chunk of metal taking off Don’s right leg below the knee during a hot extraction in Helmand province ten years later was the only reason he had left, not because he wanted to but because the army was downsizing and younger, 100 % fit AC’s were preferred over the prosthetic limb owning variety.

Lifting tree trunks out of the woods kept his mind focussed but flying personnel and equipment from A to B was as interesting as watching traffic signals change, at least he was still flying though.

‘My T Oak’ won the ESA contract to clear the jungle from around the facility and other small jobs appeared in-country too, mainly at the behest of the Governor’s office to clear trees around the small marine bases on the Suriname and Brazil borders, and the legion camps of course. Being a Vet and having seen combat went a ways to establish a cordiality with the normally frosty legionnaire’s that led to a respect for his flying skills, so it was to him and not his boss, that they had come to request assistance with boarding the fleeing freighter Fliterland a hundred miles out in the Atlantic. Don’s ‘Pinnacle’ manoeuvre, keeping station on the moving vessel without making contact but close enough to drop off troops, had allowed fifteen Legionnaire’s to step off the lowered rear troop ramp and straight on to one of the bridge wings and seize the vessel.

Tonight, at the logging camps accommodation near the airstrip outside Kourou, Don had been dozing in front of the communal TV set with his prosthetic limb beside him, lightweight, strong alloy tubing instead of something pretending to be a living lower leg. The false leg sensibly allowed one handed operation in its attachment and removal as the designers realised the owner may not always be in a position to sit whilst performing those tasks. The free hand could prevent the owner from falling on his ass.

Don was called to the telephone in the office and told it was urgent, so having hopped one legged to the ‘phone Don attached it as he listened. On the other end was the legions operations centre and the duty watch keeper, a major, explained their Puma was still tied up on the border so could Don take the platoon of reservists from Kourou up to the Soyuz site as there had been an attempt to infiltrate all the launch pads. Once he had dropped them off he wanted Don to collect one of the Cayenne reservist platoons and deliver it to the ESA final assembly building.

Don was practically rubbing his hands together. All he needed was assurances that the company had been informed because they had torn him a fresh one after the Fliterland incident.

He roused his co-pilot and crew chief, a pair of French Canadians with attitude, that is to say they considered themselves more French than the French. It would be fair to say that Don’s enthusiasm for the evening’s unscheduled flying was not shared by them on any appreciable level.

Half a dozen members of the Kourou platoon were already at the airstrip when Don arrived, hobbling on his false leg but keen as mustard nonetheless.

The Chinook was only a half dozen years younger than Don but older than both his co-pilot and his countryman. He set them to carry out the pre-flight walkabout as he settled himself into the right hand seat.

Checking that nothing had fallen off since the aircraft had last been used was a job he had once carried out himself, religiously, but he was not that nimble anymore.

Don attached night vision goggles to his flight helmet; they were absolute essentials here in the equatorial tropics where day does not gradually become dark over a couple of hours, the transition will occur in scant minutes. Airfield lighting with a backup generator was also in short supply in these parts so that was another good reason to be able to see in the dark whenever necessary.

Cars were arriving all the time now, a pick-up truck with eight middle aged men crammed into the back was the last to arrive.

The platoon commander, a grossly overweight baker, and possibly his own best customer, was pulling on combat trousers over pyjama bottoms as the senior NCO got the men in three ranks and called the roll.

Don counted twenty three men in total, the Chinook seated fifteen but he would bend the rules under the circumstances and deliver them in one trip.

His co-pilot took his seat and buckled up as the crew chief finished seating ‘Pères Armée’ and stood outside the aircraft ready to spot any problem visually during the start-up.

Don spoke aloud as he ran through the ‘before engine start’ and start-up checklists because even under the circumstances he wasn’t about to bend the rules for that!

It was only thirteen miles to the Soyuz site, but forty five from there to Cayenne. He left the troop ramp down for the three minute hop to the launch pad.

No sooner had they left the ground when they were diverted south to check the jetty and bridge guard across the Kourou River. The four man guard of reservists were not answering their radio and there may be a problem at the gatehouse to the nearby ESA dock. The local gendarmerie patrol car was not answering its radio either or they would have sent that instead, he was told.

Don was enjoying himself. Not a problem, had been his response, he banked around and overflew the gatehouse and jetty.

“I found your police car…a bunch of armed men and two for-godamned-real submarines…we got ground fire from the bridge and the subs!” he reported a minute later.

“Far be it for me to tell you your job, but do you want me to put these guys on the ground at the clearing between the town and the jetty and then go fetch the rest from Cayenne?”

The Governor had been alerted to the Chinese troops in Foreign Legion garb and now on learning that there were two surfaced submarines at the jetty with more troops on the ground he could be forgiven for wondering, just briefly, if an invasion force had somehow been missed?

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.

The caiman rolled, it did so instinctively and suddenly Don was free as the artificial limbs retainers gave way.

Scrambling up the muddy slope until clear of the water he paused for the briefest moment to look back. The creature was not in sight; only turmoil on the surface gave any indication of where it was.

Turning back towards safety he saw sudden movement above him, smelled warm fetid breath and saw the layered teeth on the jaws that closed on his head.

Captain Li had raised his night glasses to peer downriver as he heard the change in the Chinooks engines pitch.

“Standby Strela… aim slightly above the trees, you may get a lock-on even if you can’t see the bastard!”

The sound seemed to roll towards them in waves as the power came on to lift the aircraft out of the clearing.

He caught a glimpse of the rear rotor, set above the fuselage and the forward assembly, but it then banked away out of sight for a second, reappearing over the river a few seconds later.

The flash made Li take an involuntary step backwards and there followed a thunderclap of sound that echoed across the jungle.

The helicopter came apart in mid-air, plunging into the river.

Li lowered his glasses and leaned over the conning tower to congratulate the air sentry but the man was looking back up at him with a don't-look-at-me expression and pointing to the tip of the launcher, where the surface-to-air missile was still very much attached.

“SIR!” called a voice from the dockside.

Sergeant Yen was cupping his hands to his mouth.

“As I was saying…they stuck a Type 72 in the engine compartment and wired it up electrically to the troop ramp locking mechanism…worked at treat, eh sir?”

Greasy smoke drifted down river on the breeze and the flicker of flame was still visible on the water, a reflection from around the rivers bend of the Chinook’s final resting place.

It had been quiet for almost twenty minutes, a lull but one that was obvious to all as the quiet bit that comes before the other thing.

Small arms fire broke out from the south side of the road bridge as the troopers finished their task of preparing it for demolition and climbed back over the guardrail. The muzzle flashes were visible from the bridge of both Dai and of Bao. One of the troopers was hit and started to topple backwards, but his mate grabbed him and in the act of pulling him over was himself hit, falling screaming to the roadway. Both vessels 23mm cannon opened fire, tearing up the area where the shots had been fired, ripping splintered chunks out of the trees and amputating branches that fell with a splash into the river, silencing the firing from that quarter.

The injured were dragged to safety under the cover of the automatic cannons fire.

“Cease fire! Cease fire!” Captain Li called out. “Only shoot at what you can see from now on.” They had only a limited amount of 23mm cannon ammunition. The Russian Admiral Potemkin had gone down with all the supplies.

He peered into the darkness but it was impossible to tell how effective the fire had been.

Shots next came from the opposite direction, from the eerily dark and foreboding jungle on their side of the river, it started with a single weapon, and rapidly increased into a vicious fire fight.

“How much longer?” he shouted to Bao’s bridge.

“Another hundred gallons give or take!”

The wounded troopers from the road bridge were taken aboard the Bao.

From downriver there came the sound of other helicopters rotor blades, growing louder by the moment but he caught no sight of them at all through the night glasses or weapons sight.

“Raise radar.”

Up it went, twenty eight feet above their heads.

“Go active…one sweep, no more.”

It was the equivalent of keeping phone calls short so the call could not be traced, in pre digital technological terms anyway. These days in the same way the callers ID is instantly displayed on screen so too is the radar type and location to within three metres on anti-radar weapons systems.

Modern weapons would target the origin of the source location even if the radar were to be turned off, or stooge around waiting for it to reappear.

How else though was Captain Li to see what the enemy were up to?

Just the two slow moving track of the helicopters showed, and no sign of the fixed wing threat yet.

“Double up the air sentries, I want one on the forward casing immediately.” He called down.

There had been nothing from Jie’s or the Soyuz team, no sounds of cratering charges, no nothing. No more lullabies were sung by the tone death senior sergeant. What had been a forty strong unit had first been cut to twenty eight with the sinking of the Tuan, and was now down to six effectives. The two other teams were dead or captured and the mission had well and truly lost the advantage of surprise.

An explosion beyond the fuel storage tanks brought a sudden end to the attack from that quarter, the versatile Type 72 anti-tank mine and white phosphorus smoke grenades turned into an anti-personnel claymore mine by Sergeant Yen incorporating a pile of hardcore left over from the laying of the car park. The screams of those caught in its blast provided all the judgement necessary on the mines effectiveness.

The firing slackened for several moments before redoubling in intensity as the wounded reservists mates extracted them using proven CASEVAC, casualty evacuation methods.

Under the cover of this weight of fire five pairs skirmished forwards. Nylon waterproof capes were tossed down, the three wounded casualty’s screams were ignored as they were quickly rolled onto the capes and dragged away far more swiftly than would otherwise have been possible, the smooth material of the cape providing minimal friction with the wet jungle floor. The dead were left where they lay to be retrieved after the fight.

Once back in cover the veterans with the middle aged spreads drew on the experience of years, from Kolwezi and a dozen bushfire wars in Africa, treating wounds from first aid packs stocked according to lessons learned on those battlefields. WP is small grains of phosphorus that burn in contact with the air to produce white smoke. It burns skin and bone too; in clumps it can burn clear through a limb. The best treatment is immediate immersion in water whilst the grains are removed with wooden implements. Metal tweezers will only increase the injury, rapidly heated by the same grains they picked at, glowing red hot within minutes, so the tools of choice are tiny wooden spoons, the type you can still get in some cinemas and movie theatres in small individual tubs of ice cream, suitably wetted before application of course. These were in the packs, so too was Colgate toothpaste, the original white paste but in the small sachets sold in third world supermarkets and shanty town shops. Spread thickly over the injury it took the heat out of the badly blistered surface burns, preventing further tissue damage and bringing relief from the pain.

Puncture wounds, the entry wounds, these were plugged with female sanitary tampons pushed into the entry wounds, swelling up and keeping the wound clean. Bacteria will complete a bullets job so the wounds needed to be kept clean from the outset particularly in germ rich environments such as a jungle.

Screaming men had rifle slings forced between their teeth to bite on as field first aid was applied.

When the mine had been fired by Yen he knew how the legionaries would react and made sure heads stayed down on the friendly side. He knew the reservists ammunition supply was just what they carried in their pouches, so what the hell, let them brass up the bushes as their mates were retrieved, wasting rounds and reducing their options regarding further offensive moves.

He had killed two and wounded another three, and those three would have at least six uninjured troops carrying them to the rear.

He did not know how many they faced from that direction, but he figured that it was more than the fifteen a Chinook could officially carry, but either way the reservists were now short eleven weapons and a bundle of brass they could not replace any time soon.

The road bridge suddenly blew with a flash and a boom that must have carried far further than the sound of the Chinooks demise.

The black and acrid by-products of high explosive, the smoke and stink of burnt almonds was carried away on the wind as two out of the three spans prepared for demolition fell into the river. The third just stayed stubbornly where it was, the explosives wedged into the joins between the span and the supports were visibly still intact.

Rubble fell back to earth, splashing into the river, onto the surviving sections, and into the jungle with a crash.

There was no obvious explanation as to why the third road span had not joined the other two but that was all academic now, thought Li.

They needed to be gone from here, and the arrival of a belt of two 81mm mortar roads just short of the road in front of the gatehouse added further emphasis.

“Back together both, dead slow.” Li ordered.

Two more rounds arrived, uncorrected, merely bedding in rounds to set the baseplates solidly, but in that the baseplate position for each barrel was good for only a half dozen rounds apiece as each round fired drove the mortar baseplate deeper into the sodden earth.

The legionnaires had been put down on the Route de l’Espace by the Puma and Gazelle, and set up their mini mortar line on the verge.

Had they a rifle platoon nearby the mortars would have been sited on the solid but unyielding tarmac with a riflemen acting as a shock absorber, fingers in ears and with both feet on the baseplate.

“Une prochaine!” would summons the next rifleman when the former rolled off the baseplate in pain with one or both ankles broken.

Riflemen were good for an average eight rounds, even on a bad day.

The Bao cast off whilst still fuelling; hungry for every drop of precious diesel they could get into the Kilo’s tanks.

The fuelling probe ejected itself, the hose at full stretch it sprang from the intake valve, clanged against the starboard main ballast tank and flopped into the river with a splash.

Slippery diesel made life interesting for the FAS party but they quickly secured the intake valve and riser.

Something struck the Fliterland’s hull, ricocheting away with a whine. The shooters from earlier on were back, lying prone on the southern side of the now wrecked road bridge, taking pot-shots at Dai. The Dai’s 23mm replied, its gunners first burst going ‘over’ through lack of practice, allowing the jungle warfare schools CO and RSM to make it into cover speckled with shredded leaf matter. Like an evergreen wedding party, plastered with matching confetti, crawling rapidly backwards heedless of gravel-rash on skinned knees and elbows, back beyond the roads camber as cannon shells diced and sliced the overhanging trees canopy. It is doubtful though that the wedding party analogy was befitting the language being issued by both thoroughly alarmed men, especially from the sarn’t major who had a far greater vocabulary along those lines from which to draw on than his colonel.

Aboard the Bao a linesman dropped with a cry, the muzzle flashes of a half dozen FAMAS assault rifles in the jungle on the north bank were temporarily extinguished by the joint efforts of Bao’s 23mm and several armed ratings on the casing.

Dai’s casing doors slid open, the forward pair sucking in oxygen and the after pair coughed, spluttered and gave vent to a throaty roar as her diesels kicked in.

Captain Li’s putting the Juliett alongside the jetty was not as neat and pretty as the first occasion. A screech of steel against concrete announced her arrival and the 23mm gave one last burst towards the bridge before swinging dockside to cover the withdrawal.

They fell back in bounds, working in pairs with one firing as his mate moved back to the next available cover, but harassed by fire from the jungle bordering the car park, and more seriously by an old sweat with the reservists tactical radio.

The still ringing telephone in the gatehouse was at last silenced as the building blew apart and began to burn. The next rounds sent the prefabricated roof sections of the covered car park sailing, only to fall spinning like lethal Frisbees’ amongst the armed ratings. Behind them Sergeant Yen and a trooper lay behind a low wall, liberally dusted in debris from the nearby gatehouse which now silhouetted them in its flames. Incoming fire cracked passed, just overhead or struck the brickwork to ricochet away whining, sending brick splinters flying. Yen cursed, a long cut down the length of one cheekbone from one such shard of red brick. They fired rifle grenades into the jungle shadows, attempting to silence the spotter but the next rounds were ‘on’ and the orderly withdrawal became a sprint to safety by the survivors.

Six of Dai’s crew members lay unmoving on the black tarmacadam, the neatly and precisely painted white lines defining the car parking spaces now marred by flecks of blood.

Crewmen stood on the casing helped their messmates down, dropping off the edge of the jetty where they were grabbed before they could topple into the water from the curving convex ballast tank.

Bao’s 23mm was still firing into the jungle but she had not slowed, the cannon’s fire becoming less effective with each turn of her screw.

Sergeant Yen and the trooper arrived last, Dai’s 23mm working over the darkened jungle as they threw smoke grenades into the undergrowth before running hell for leather down the sloping car park, shouting to cast off and that all who could were already aboard. They pounded along the jetty and arrived as the gulf between it and the submarines casing was widening, caught as it was now by the current. Not slowing as the seamen had but leaping long and high, risking broken bones but they made it and grimaced on sprained ankles as they were helped below.

Dai’s 23mm cannon fell silent, all ammunition expended.

Captain Li looked over at the fallen crew members as the Dai backed away from the jetty, illuminated in the flickering firelight from the burning gatehouse they were unmoving, the wind ruffling tattered and torn uniform clothing.

“All back slow…special sea duty men below!” he leant over the coaming to shout at two armed ratings and the air sentries standing upright on the after casing.

“Air sentries kneel behind the conning tower…you riflemen there, get down!”

The throb of Bao’s diesels reverberated as she too switched from her electric motors. She had reached the bend in the river, her 23mm silent too, either out of ammunition or out of effective range.

The next rounds arrived, fired from mortar barrels pointing up at a high angle, the baseplates now sunk almost two feet.

High angle equals greater flight time equals greater variation of error. One round struck the now empty jetty whilst the other landed well ‘off’ in the small tank farm to perforate several of the cylindrical containers.

“Standby tubes One and Two…helm, give me five degrees to port…’midships, steady, all stop!”

Dai’s stern pointed not safely mid-stream but angled toward the southern bank.

The Fliterland was now once more a darkened silhouette, sat silent and aloof from the mayhem.

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!”

The second aircraft also came in from the direction of the ocean, but a scant hundred feet above the trees, its wings tilting as it followed the lie of the river, the bomb bay doors gaping open.

The same parachute flare dropped by One Eight which had illuminated the submarines also revealed the pale grey shape of Poseidon Zero Four at the moment an object fell from out of the open belly, followed immediately by a second.

Bao’s air sentries were taken by as much surprise as were half of Dai’s.

The sound of the Rolls Royce engines passing above them and the roar of Bao’s and Dai’s 23mm automatic cannon’s made Li flinch but his eyes did not leave the two falling objects, blunt nosed depth charges, not tumbling but semi stabilised, oscillating at the finned tails as they fell at an angle towards their target.

Tracer chased the Atlantique, spent 23mm shell cases rattled and rang against the metal deck of the submarines bridge.

The first depth charge crashed into the trees near the south bank of the river some fifty metres beyond the stationary Bao but the second struck the Kilo’s forward casing.

It sounded a lot like two cars colliding, without the desperate last moment screech of brakes. Black acoustic tiles flew aloft like crows startled at the sound of a shotgun, and the depth charge bounced, spinning end over end now, the tail section stabilisers parting company in the impact, flying off into the darkness.

The dented casing grew larger in Li’s sight, like a dustbin flung by a petulant giant it arced up and towards the Juliett.

The air sentry on Dai’s bow fired, engulfing the conning tower in white exhaust gases as the slim missile left the launch tube. The smoke robbed Li of his view of the approached object.

The depth charge on the river bank blew with a blinding flash, its 200kg warhead felling two trees and sending wickedly barbed wooden splinters outwards in all directions, the detonation echoing for miles around.

The Strela’s success went almost unheard in comparison. It flew straight and true for the greatest heat source, striking the starboard engine exhaust. The effect of the small 1.7kg warhead and a secondary charge detonating the missiles remaining fuel was visual, rather than audible. A small flash followed by much smoke.

Poseidon Zero Four instantly lost altitude, the starboard wing dropped, the wingtip clipping a tree top and it seemed to be all over bar the shouting for the aircraft and crew.

The port engine roared as its throttle was pushed through the gate in an effort by the captain and co-pilot to compensate, to ward off a threatening departure from controlled flight.

They clawed for height, the tree tops so close, waiting snares to drag them from the air to a fiery end in the jungle but the prey won the battle as its remaining ordnance load was jettisoned. Zero Four bounded up and clear of the tree tops, disappearing into the night towards the west.

Li coughed and waved a hand ineffectually as if warding off unwanted cigarette smoke. He stood upright to peer through the missiles exhaust fumes, to see where the charge would land, and so the deluge of filthy brown river water, heavily laden with mud struck him from behind. Bouncing clear over the Dai the depth charge had plunged into the river beyond to lodge in the silted bottom where it went off.

Declaring an emergency Poseidon Zero Four shuddered in flight, a vibration increasing by the moment.

It was missing three feet off its starboard wingtip, and the propeller was continuing to spin despite the engine now being shut down and denied fuel. Refusing to be feathered, the rogue propeller spun on, and at a higher rate than that of the still functional port engine. The reduction gearbox had been damaged and the blades could not be turned into wind to reduce drag.

Fire retardant compound was pumped onto the engine but as the propellers RPM spun ever higher, the propeller nosecone glowed red, and the vibration worsened.

A flicker of flame necessitated the fire handle being pulled again and all the while the aircraft was in a gentle sweeping turn so as not to overstress the damaged wing.

The captain aimed to bring them back to Cayenne, it was after all the closest airport with a runway long enough to accommodate them.

Ten minutes on and the propeller was rotating at 120 % of the maximum recommended RPM, and again the fire handle had to be pulled to extinguish flames.

They were dumping fuel from the port wing and transferring fuel from the starboard. The risk of the flames reaching the fuel tanks in the damaged wing was very real indeed.

Over the ocean now and continuing their left turn, lining up for an approach to runway 26. The captain gave due consideration to the options available, to attempt a landing or to ditch?

By day the Cayenne fishing fleet could be seen at its moorings due to the scarcity of fish. There were no civilian boats abroad that could come to their assistance and the nearest navy vessel was laid up, the rest were rushing north to do battle.

A ditching rarely had a happy ending anyway, so he announced to the crew that he was committed to a landing at Cayenne. They buckled up and a few peered out and down at the dark ocean. However, it was too dark to see anything unaided. Obligingly the starboard engine provided some, and the flicker became a tail that could not be extinguished now, the fire retardant compound having been completely expended.

The second Atlantique, One Eight, could be heard stooging around up above the clouds, and the Legion’s two helicopters could be heard also, as they raced low towards the town of Kourou, dropping the two mortar teams at Pont Les Roches, the mouth of the estuary that the Chinese raiders must pass on their way back to the ocean.

The Bao and the Dai were underway again, backing down the river to the estuary where they could at last find room to turn and face their tormentors.

“Radar, one sweep only.”

Above them the Atlantiques threat warnings sounded as the Dai’s radar swept across them in return.

“Capitaine… I would advise chaff right about now…but.”

“But…we have no chaff…”

Unwrapping a stick of spearmint gum, popped it in his mouth the pilot unlatched the side window, ejecting the gums silver wrapper.

“That will have to do.” He muttered to himself, resigned to fate.

Severe vibration was shaking Zero Four, severe enough to throw off her captain’s voice, giving him an induced stammering which at another time would sound a little comical.

“Fifteen degrees flap…gear down.”

Had the circumstances been different he would have overflown the runway in order that the control tower confirm the right gear was fully down, but the nose and left gear had green lights.

The starboard engine was aflame, consuming itself, the flames streaming behind.

Ahead of them the tarmac was lit up, and emergency vehicles were sat off to one side, well clear of the runway but awaiting their arrival.

Zero Four crossed the outer marker, the approach lights whipped below them and suddenly there was the threshold.

He missed the touchdown zone, holding off as he allowed the left gear to touch first, sweeping along with the nosewheel and right gear just clear of the tarmac. There was no chance of going around again, no chance of reaching the ocean for a ditching now either, too late to change his mind. The right gear touched and the nose settled, he chopped the throttle and held the aircraft to the centre line. All there was to do now was stop the damn thing before they ran out of runway.

The wind was blowing the flames along the wing toward the fuselage but captain and co-pilot were busy standing on the brakes. One life threatening crisis at a time, s'il vous plaît.

At the far end of the runway the threshold markers were beneath the front wheel as he pivoted the aircraft left with the last bit of momentum, to buy a little more time before the flames reached fuel tanks that were still filled with vapour.

With brakes applied the captain pushed out the left side window as he unbuckled.

The cabin was filling with choking fumes but he had to check the crew.

Crewmembers were vacating the aircraft rapidly; the senior operator was last, coughing on toxic fumes. His co-pilot exited through the captains opened window and the captain himself followed the senior operator, dropping to the tarmac and running as fast as he could.

As the fire trucks arrived the open hatches were belching smoke. Fire could be seen inside the cabin as internal fittings caught alight. A thunderous bang sent flames and pieces of the starboard wing soaring as the vapour filled fuel tank gave way. A pair of less violent explosions announced the tyres of the right gear bursting.

The damaged wing sagged and the Atlantique leaned to the right, grey smoke pouring from the pilots open side window like a chimney, the fuselage completely engulfed in flame..

Cayenne airports fire crews had at least a proper subject to test their skills on now.

A signaller handed Li a message form, the Bao had sustained damage to her forward pressure hull where the depth charge had struck the casing. Submerging in that condition was possible but not advisable in ordinary circumstances. She had a double hull, but that pressure hull was not just there by idle design.

“Damn all we can do about that now, anyway.” He mused.

Bao was still on diesels but Dai remained on electrical power despite the chief engineer complaining the batteries were down to a 72 % charge.

He used the radar sparingly as that was a double edged weapon, but he could hear the approach of threats without the enemy using that against them.

A flash off in the jungle caught his attention and a fraction of a second later he heard the sound of mortar rounds detonating.

Those damn bloody French mortars again! He thought.

They had to be firing blind though, possibly alerted to their approach by the sound of Bao’s noisy diesel engines.

Two more rounds landed, well short, one on the bank and the other splashing into the river without going off. There was only mud and silt where that particular mortar round had landed, nothing solid enough to crush the soft nose cone and fire the fuse there.

Captain Li gave a moment’s thought to the weight of a mortar round. How many could those helicopters carry?

Jie would have known of course.

To be on the receiving end of a mortar attack was doubly hazardous as they made no sound, no advance warning to dive for cover, unlike the mournful drone he know heard!

Bao’s radar mast was fully extended and rotating.

A 100mm shell from a naval gun smashed into the bank between the two submarines, digging deep into the soft earth before exploding.

Li shouted down the open hatch.

“Make to Bao…they are ranging in on your radar energy, but at least we know there is a surface warship in gunfire range.”

The rotating radar ceased but three more rounds impacted in the vicinity, white hot steel fragments striking the Dai’s conning tower.

He raised his night glasses once more, looking back towards the river mouth. The river was widening now.

Dirty water sprayed over the conning tower from more mortar rounds landing in the river.

A round struck the bank beside Bao, the air sentry on the Kilo’s after casing screamed and fell, sliding down the curved steel pressure hull into the river. Bao did not heave-to, and the rating was floating face down as the Dai reached him. Li watched the corpse disappear behind them in the darkness.

“Engine room…switch to diesels once more. We need to run on the surface for a little once we regain the estuary.”

The mortar rounds continued to harass, raining down around them but the naval gunfire had curtailed with the cessation of the Bao’s radar sweeps.

A rating appeared at the top of the ladder looking a lot like a caricature of a Mexican bandit, draped across the shoulders with belted ammunition for the 23mm.

“This is the last cannon ammunition, sir.”

Li nodded in acknowledgement and instructed him to start throwing empty cases over the side once the new belt was attached to the end of the existing one.

If they had to run silent it would not do to have brass shell cases rolling around and knocking into each other and the steel sides at such times.

Bao chugged backwards past the old and abandoned Kourou ferry.

In the distance, highlighted against a black skyline, the sparks from the plastic augmenting charges that fitted about a mortar bombs ‘tail’ hung in the air like fireflies before dying. It was of no use to the gunner though as it is almost impossible to judge the distance to a light at night with the naked eye. What may appear to be the light from a farmhouse window on a hillside two miles away may in fact be a glowing cigarette end six feet off, and vice versa of course.

Coloured flares again reappeared, falling though the cloud to be followed by another parachute flare. They were trying to assist the mortar crews and whatever warship was out to sea but instead its light revealed on shore the tiny figures of the French Foreign Legionnaires serving the two mortar barrels at Pont Les Roches.

Bao’s quick eyed gunner had seen the sparks and now he was on it, the barrel aiming up at an angle of perhaps as much as forty degrees.

Dai’s 23mm joined in, working the stream of tracer left and right, wreaking a terrible revenge upon the mortarmen. Plunging fire dropped upon them wherever they crawled to seek cover, behind protrusions in the ground or the crudely crafted logs, laid out as park benches. The automatic cannons shredded the logs, reduced the protrusions in the earth and annihilated whatever was hidden behind.

No more mortar rounds came their way.

Bao’s helm came over as her captain sought to turn bow on to the ocean again, at long last.

Dai now motored past the old ferry slipway too and Li put his glasses to the southeast, looking for the French warship.

The captain of One Eight finished his flare run across the estuary without himself or any of the crew catching sight of any action on the ground.

It was the fast patrol boat, La Capricieuse, which informed the Atlantique that the enemy submarines were emerging from the river into the estuary.

As sophisticated as they were, the Atlantiques onboard systems were unable to separate the submarines from the ground clutter while they were on the river. They were built to seek out targets on the surface or peeking up from below.

The patrol boats greatest asset was her speed, but this came at the cost of armament and armour. Her plywood hull was light and tough enough to deal with stormy seas, and her weaponry would be devastating against drug and gold smugglers vessels, but they had limited value against other warships.

“’Poseidon One Eight’ this is La Capricieuse…enemy sighted!” Her commander was a young lieutenant not long out of the Brest naval academy.

“Attacking!” was the next message, the young man’s voice not disguising the underlying excitement.

Five miles beyond them was forging in the corvette Premier-Maitre L'her, the second corvette still another ten miles further off.

The patrol boat made a magnificent sight, turning in and racing towards the surfaced Kilo at 25 knots, a great white bow wave standing out in the darkness. She had two automatic cannon, a 40mm and a 20mm, along with two 12.7mm machine guns, all were firing, and throwing out arcing lines of tracer, but speed and accuracy are not the same thing.

Crashing through waves, La Capricieuse opened fire at eight hundred metres, the gunners aim being thrown off by the action of the waves. The slowly moving and steady Kilo’s single 23mm cannon remained silent, until the range had closed to three hundred. The patrol boat was obligingly bow-on and the cannon fire ripped through her from stem to stern. None of the patrol boats guns were firing as she tore past the Bao.

On the horizon there was a flash followed by a low moan overhead. A shell burst in the sea behind them.

Dai was some five hundred yards behind the Bao when she herself finished her turn.

The patrol boat La Capricieuse had been deliberately run aground on the shore at La Pont Roches and was settling low in the water but there was no sign of movement on board.

Bao fired again, but this time there was a geyser of water erupting from just forward of her bow as she launched on the fast approaching corvette, first one and then a second RPK-7 anti-ship missile was launched from her forward torpedo tubes.

“Full ahead together.” Li ordered. “Dismount the 23mm and get it below…bow air sentry to the bridge.”

The chugging growl of the big diesels increased apace.

There was another flash on the horizon but it was followed by a far larger emission, as the first anti-ship missile flew into chaff flung out by the corvette.

The first missile detonated in the chaff cloud and then the corvette exploded. It was initially a very visual, yet silent event, until the sound of the double explosions reached them.

There was cheering from the Bao, and then Bao blew up too.

A flash, smoke and a sound that made Li cringe, followed by wreckage falling all about and into the sea.

The air sentry was just appearing at the top of the ladder, he could not have seen the explosion but he did hear it and his eyes were as wide as saucers.

“Get below!” shouted Li to the man.

“Lookouts below… clear the bridge…sound the diving alarm!”

Poseidon One Eight’s onboard systems had tracked the Exocet all the way from their bomb bay to its terminal impact.

Wary of surface-to-air missiles the Atlantique banked hard to port so as not to overfly the second submarine and instead her captain headed for the now stopped and burning corvette.

“Ready the life rafts!”

Captain Li removed the outer clothing and the ridiculous gun belt as he reached the control room, holding them out for his steward.

“He’s gone captain.” His exec said. “He was one of the landing party who were caught by the mortars.”

Li faltered momentarily, not because he had any affection for the man, but because it may have a bearing on his future actions.

The launch pads had not been put out of action by conventional methods, which had been a complete failure as far as Li could tell.

His orders in the case of the special forces mission being a failure was to stand off and nuke the ESA site from the sea.

To fail to do that was a certain death sentence for himself and every member of the crew, including family members.

“Range to the Soyuz site?”

“Thirty point eight miles, captain.”

The French aircrew were currently engaged in aiding the stricken warships survivors, but that would not last.

They had a small window in which to act and still be able to clear datum.

“Bring the boat to launch condition one, please.”

Poseidon One Eight did not notice the launch of the single weapon. It burst from the depths with its protective cocoon falling away and its short stubby wings extending.

The cruise missiles ramjet propelled it at a respectable 467mph towards it target, the Soyuz launch pad, where the 320 kiloton warheads detonation would obliterate the Ariane and Vega sites in the same blast.

Such self-sacrifice, such effort by the inshore raiding flotilla.

Four submarines and three hundred and sixty one men had set off on this mission. One submarine and seventy four men remained now.

Far quicker, at 879mph, three Mistral high velocity surface-to-air missiles left the mobile launchers of the Legions air defence section and rendered all that effort null and void, obliterating the Dai’s cruise missile before it had even crossed the coast.