They had taken the Chinese officer onboard soon after the modified Typhoon had been launched, and that was before the Chinese People’s Republic’s Politburo had even heard the sales pitch by Peridenko and Alontov.
Lieutenant Wuhan was the ship’s interpreter and dedicated OCE, Officer Conducting Exercise, for Underway Replenishment.
Quite apart from adversely affecting the steering it also caused problems with the equilibrium of the vessel when dived.
Even a vessel the size of Admiral Potemkin can be effected by violent seas when submerged, unless at great depth.
The best cure for sea sickness is to step outside and look at the horizon but that was not an option, so with no fixed horizon to stabilise the brain the inner ear slipped in and out of synchronisation. In particular for those crew members navigating a passage from fore and aft, or vice versa, it could be an uncomfortable experience when the Typhoon was running relatively shallow.
Admiral Potemkin was 577.7 feet in length so the boat was 4702.3 feet short of the title, but when under the influence of the waves above that journey still became known as Zhelchi Milyu, ‘The Bile Mile’.
Her primary role was originally to be that of supporting the inshore raiding flotilla in hit and run attacks on the Hawaiian Islands, before eventually heading to Australia for the fuelling and resupplying of forces seizing Port Kembla, south of Sydney, in the hours before China’s invasion of Australia.
The industrial port had deep water for the troopships and freighters to unload, and ferry docks for the Ro-Ro transports to land two armoured and two mechanised divisions of the 1st Corps of the PLAN’s 3rd Army. Its 2nd Corps was already loading back in Shanghai, whilst the 3rd Corps, largely reservists with second class equipment, was scheduled to use the shipping that was currently carrying 1st Corps with the Sino Russian fleet.
However, the planned raids on Hawaii had been shelved as impractical once major units of the US 2nd Army had moved into defend likely targets.
The 2nd Army’s presence was not something that had been foreseen in the planning, but then there is one law of planning which never changes and that is ‘No plan survives first contact with the enemy’.
Only in B movies are the other people completely predictable.
Various factors had altered the original plan. Ninety nine cities and military bases around the world that were supposed to have been destroyed were in fact untouched. The destruction of Pusan and the 2nd Army headquarters were expected to leave the US Forces in South Korea stranded and disorganised, left to wither on the vine and be easy pickings for later in the war.
The Hawaiian Islands and key points in Australia and New Zealand were now effectively hardened and no longer practical targets for small scale commando raids, which left Admiral Potemkin and the inshore raiders twiddling their thumbs in the wings awaiting a suitable specialist role to play in the war once the original missions were scrubbed or put on hold.
The French had also not behaved as predicted. Historically the greater good had only been a factor when the going was good, i.e., a benefit to the national good. Russia’s Premier confidently expected the French to declare neutrality and withdraw completely from NATO once the new Red Army began rolling westwards. Indeed they had in 1966 separated themselves from the command structure, if not the organisation, following differences arising during the Cuban Crisis. But after the opening battles the French had not scurried off home, they had dug in a fought as fiercely as the other armies in the alliance.
The French had proven themselves to be unpredictable in the Premier’s eyes and they also had a nuclear arsenal completely independent of NATO control along with the means to deliver those weapons, despite retiring and deactivating her land based tactical nuclear weapons. The army’s battlefield Pluton and Hadès mobile missile systems, and three IRBMs, Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles, in silos at the airbase at Saint-Christol were scrapped and their warheads recycled into nuclear fuel rods.
President Charles de Gaulle himself had been speaking directly, for he was always very direct, at the Russian people when he had famously said, with a Gallic shrug of the shoulders of course
“Within ten years, we shall have the means to kill eighty million Russians. I truly believe that one does not light-heartedly attack people who are able to kill eighty million Russians, even if one can kill eight hundred million French, that is if there were eight hundred million French.”
The French navy’s Force Océanique Stratégique comprising the SSBNs Le Terrible, Le Triomphant and Le Téméraire were all at sea and Le Vigilant, which had been undergoing a lengthy refit within the covered dry dock at Brest, had with much ceremony for the worlds press, been re-floated and towed to the old reinforced concrete U Boat pens to be moored in the open where her sixteen M45 ballistic missiles could be launched at both Russia and China if necessary.
The Premier believed that whereas the US President and the British would baulk at ‘going ballistic’ until the last moment, the French were an unknown quantity.
What was known though was her current ability to put up military satellites to replace those that Russia and China were destroying on an almost daily basis from their South American facility on the equator at French Guiana.
Both the Ariane, Italian Vega and now also, to add insult, the neighbouring Soyuz built launch facilities were being used solely for the launching of military payloads.
The French legionnaires guarding all three at the outbreak of the war had not only seized the Soyuz site and personnel not yet evacuated, but had also mounted an ad hoc resource denial operation. Augmenting their own tiny helicopter force of a Gazelle and Puma with a logging company’s Chinook they had boarded the freighter Fliterland on the open sea as she attempted to carry ten Soyuz-ST rockets and boosters back to St Petersburg, denying Russia the use of ten valuable launch vehicles whilst themselves benefiting.
The Vega’s carried smaller communications satellites aloft and the Soyuz, while they lasted, and Ariane rockets hoisted the RORSATs up into the desired orbits.
Taking down the launch facility would leave the West with only Canaveral, Kennedy and Vandenberg, as fear of China’s lack of inhibition in using nuclear weapons would deny them Asia’s launch sites.
All the Premier had to do was advise his partners to exercise restraint when dealing with French Guiana, at least until NATO was broken in Europe.
So Operation Early Dawn was devised.
The Russian Admiral Potemkin and the Chinese diesel boats of the Inshore Raiding Flotilla were off the south China coast near Zhuhai practicing replenishment and fuelling at sea, along with other more warlike drills as they awaited deployment.
They exercised initially by day in the full knowledge that the NSA had been penetrated and for a time the Americans could not trust what their satellites saw.
The drilling in daylight progressed on to working at night, at first under illumination until they had built up skills and confidence.