ARMAGEDDON'S SONG (Volume 3) 'Fight Through' (17 page)

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?”

ESA Jetty, Kourou, French Guiana.

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.