“Listen mister, you people only police the armed forces so you must know something about this man…right?”
The military policeman answered with a half-truth, because he had been deliberately given the very minimum of information, and then warned that severe repercussions would follow immediately should even that small amount of knowledge be divulged.
“No doctor that is not right, we actually police the armed forces and their dependants, but we are here only to provide a guard for this prisoner until relieved by the civil authorities.”
The doctor resisted the urge to grind her teeth, and tried one last time to stick with the logical approach.
“So where is his paperwork, you must have something to hand over to whoever is relieving you?”
The Redcap shook his head.
“No doctor, perhaps our relief will know more.”
The doctor’s eyes hardened and she squared her shoulders, but before she could launch into a verbal assault a slightly flustered senior manager for the Hospital Trust arrived and thrust a scrap of paper with hastily written details upon it. The length and width of the type of bayonet that had inflicted the wound, the casualty’s blood group, and the details of his medication up to present time were all included. The doctor noted however that although his date of birth was shown, there was no mention of a name or next of kin for this man before her.
“Where did you get this?”
The manager was not about to reveal the identity of the very important person from whom the information had apparently originated. The patient, if he survived, was to be charged and prosecuted with a variety of serious crimes including cowardice, mutiny and war crimes. The media must be kept completely in the dark and as such the manager had been threatened with prosecution himself for breaching the Official Secrets Act if word got out. Such a prosecution, if successful, would of course void his pension rights he was reminded.
“That information is confidential and of a need to know nature. So, as you have all the details you need I suggest you get busy, doctor?”
As she had worked with less she put the annoyance and dislike of the National Health Services ‘Yes men’ behind her, and got on with the job.
The military policemen accompanied the unnamed casualty up to theatre, and waited away the hours as patients came and went from other OR’s. The afternoon became evening, and eventually their relief arrived in the uniform of Her Majesty’s Prison Service, but the surgical procedure dragged on.
There is a song about men joining navies to see the sea and getting their wish, seeing an unromantic Atlantic and a less than terrific Pacific but no mention is made of the wildest and stormiest of seas, those of the great Southern Ocean.
There are no land masses to buffer nature’s energies and the stormy seas percolate north to make life interesting at times for sailor men in the southern Pacific and Atlantic.
On the edge of the Southern Ocean, at the Falklands Islands in 1982, the Royal Navy Task Force had an unpleasant time of it in ships built for the less aggressive Mediterranean and north Atlantic.
Currently, there were ninety eight seamen who could not see the third ocean but who were of a similar opinion as the songsters about the water above their heads at that time.
At 55°47′26.48"S — 64°24′51.40"W the Admiral Potemkin’s coxswains fought to keep their charge on an even keel at a depth of one hundred feet as a floating antennae was streamed out behind them, dragged behind on the surface as they checked for any messages left them in the previous twenty four hours.
At 33,800 tons submerged the Admiral Potemkin was something of a lumbering behemoth in fact as well as looks. She had been laid down at the Rubin Design Bureau works at Arkhangelsk Oblast in 1993 designated as a raketnyy podvodnyy strategicheskogo nazhacheniya, a strategic missile cruiser, a ‘Boomer’ in western naval parlance and NATO called her a Typhoon, but when the Berlin Wall came down because the arms race had bankrupted the Soviet Union she was abandoned before her reactor or VLTs, Vertical Launch Tubes, for her twenty ICBMs could be installed.
Her rescue had come during the long years of planning, of placing human and materiel assets into the West and waiting for the espionage to produce fruit. The blinding of the West’s satellites without them realising had been an intelligence coup to cap them all, and also the signal to proceed with the many and varied parts of the next stage.
Neither Russia nor the People’s Republic of China had the infrastructure and resources to operate diesel submarines at sea over a protracted period of time or indefinitely over great distances. The German Kriegsmarine in the last world war had perfected the refuelling and victualling of submarines at sea and even undersea refuelling was possible, given the right circumstances. However, there exists no method for victualing another vessel beneath the waves, which therefore renders the covert refuelling of another submerged submarine an operation of questionable worth. A fully fuelled submarine crewed by a collection of starving individuals is of no use to anybody.
When a submarine leaves for a long voyage every inch of space is used for storage. Floor gratings are lifted and boxes packed alongside one another before the gratings are replaced on top to prevent trips and falls, whilst making life hazardous for the taller members of the crew. Walking hunched over may not look particularly martial but it saved on painful meetings between cranium, steam pipes and the like until the fresh food was used up and the tinned goods at floor level thinned out.
So the Admiral Potemkin became a Milchkühe, a milk cow which could carry out FAS and RAS, ‘Fassing’ and ‘Rassing’, fuelling at sea and replenishing at sea, resupplying and rearming with conventional weapons any submarine requiring such and any diesel electric boat in need of refuelling.
Five of her six 21” torpedo tubes were removed and all available space was incorporated into storage. The vast void of her launch tube chamber was split into three fuel bunkers for diesel fuel with each connected by valves and it was these fuel bunkers which were the cause of the crews unhappy state.
The original builders, the excellent Rubin Design Bureau, had not been involved in her conversion and were only consulted on limited matters such as the replacement of equipment either rendered defunct due to the role change or due to corrosion as she sat on the slips for years, her hull incomplete and exposed to the elements.
Had her bunkers been multi-layered cells and linked via high pressure pumps whereby trim could be easily maintained there would have been less of a problem, but the three bunkers were mounted lengthways, pointing fore and aft and they could not discharge independently. For practicality the bunkers were filled and discharged from the portside, either by tankers or pumps on the quayside, or at sea from an oiler.
Much juggling of valves was required to prevent a list developing as the portside bunker filled and its contents gradually shared with the centreline and starboard bunkers via a main transfer valve and a secondary, neither of which were as fast as they could have been.
When the bunkers were filled she sat low in the water but her handling characteristics were little different to those originally intended.
As soon as she began servicing the small flotilla engaged on what was named as Operation ‘Early Dawn’ those characteristics altered.
Once the Typhoon was no longer on an even keel it adversely effected the steering, making the tasking of holding a course difficult, and if the equilibrium within the tanks was not restored swiftly then over steering would follow until the bulky vessel began a noticeable zigzag course much to the annoyance of her captain and Lt Wei Wuhan of the Chinese navy.