Chapter 6 Noon the next day
The Solstar was on the second try of the day, to pull the Smotryaschy off the sand. The first attempt had not worked, to no surprise of the captain and crew of the Solstar. He had just wanted to see how stuck it was on the ground, and to see if the wreck could take the strain. Much to his surprise, on the second try. The ship had moved almost a full meter, after two hours of pulling. That was why the spring was put out on one of the heavier anchor chains. This would give the small ship about a third more pulling power, at least for part of one good pull. Then the math was not so forgiving.
The Solstar was just about to start pulling again, when a warning was sent to the whole fleet. The SF team reported that over a dozen vessels were heading their way. The whole area went on high alert. That stopped any more trying to pull the ship out of the sand. The whole group kept getting reports on the movement of the small fleet of ships. It was clear by the flags flying, that it was not a friendly visit. It was just too bad that the destroyer covering their mission, had been checking out a radar return about 80 miles to the west. She was on her way back, but it would be some time before she would be returning to the island. The Solstar, Bluenose, and the Bonnyman were heading away from the island. They were to pull out and keep going until they were about two hours steaming away. The Captain of the Bonnyman had thought that his twin 57mm would be very useful, but they were ordered by Major Strain to stick to the plan.
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The fleet of The Islamic Sea Warriors made the turn on the east side of the island and was rewarded with a rare sight. Arai had not been expecting a Battleship. He was a little let down when he saw that it was “only” a smaller warship. Still, it would make him the king of these waters, well after the French and those damn Americans were taken care of.
The Russian designed Shershen class torpedo boat had been late of the Egyptian navy’s Red Sea squadron. She had been returned to service at the start of the African War. When that country had fallen into chaos after the Aswan damn had been breached, the vessel had been “lost”. Now it was the flagship of The Islamic Sea Warriors, and Arai Mahomed was at its helm as the point of the whole fleet. He had been a well healed businessman, before the war. He had even done the Hajj, before the latest round of wars had broken out.
His scanning of the grounded warship was interrupted, by a burst of cannon fire from the island. His eyes went wide as he saw the top of the bow mounted twin 30mm AK-230 get blown off. He reacted and the bow of the flagship turned for deeper water, at almost 40knots. When he was able to get his boat turned around again, so that he could see what was going on. He could see two lines of tracers reaching out and touching two vessels of his fleet.
Arai felt a well of pride. As all of his boats were returning fire from their many different machine guns and other automatic weapons. Then his heart sank faster than it had risen. The fire was coming from two tanks, and they soon were aided by 4 heavy machine guns from some small turrets on larger ugly boxes on tank tracks, and four 6x6 gun trucks. Their fire was not as accurate as the pair of wheeled tanks, but it was an impressive volume of fire.
The pirate fleet was still holding its own, and they were tacking to land almost 350 low skilled gunmen from their crews. He started giving orders to the few vessels, which still had working radios. His vessel was not designed for this kind of fight. Now that he had lost one of his twin gun turrets, his main firepower was the twin 21inch torpedoes. That and the three radios, his generators could keep powered. He was thinking about replacing the emptied two rear most torpedo tubes with a BM-21 launcher. He had seen where a vessel like this one had that set up, but it was underwater due to a 3 meter wide hole where it’s bow used to be. It was currently resting in only a few hundred feet of very clear water. He had still wanted to recover that vessel, but his group lacked the equipment, trained personnel or even enough expendable cannon fodder to do the job.
One thing Arai had learned early in his new career, was to keep a full 360 degree lookout. The gun fight on the beach was drawing many of the eyes on the boat, but not all of them. It still took some time, before he realized that his most experienced lookout was kicking him in the shoulder and pointing towards deeper water. He was screaming at the top of his lungs, but the pirate commander could not hear him over the three M-503A diesel engines running at high RPMs. Now he was wishing that the Pot Drum Radar was still working.
Arai could see the smudge on the horizon. It did not take long for the smudge to grow into an image that made his blood run cold. The demon ship Edwards was coming for him. After the first run in with this demon Jinn vessel. Arai had been planning on sending the Satan spawned ship to the bottom of the ocean. That was why he had spent so much time looking for and buying every Type 53-56 torpedo he could get his hands on. So far, he had only been able to find four of those high-tech weapons of war. But his people could only keep 2 of them working at any one time, and he was not going to waste time carrying broken weapons. One was a Russian made weapon, which he had paid top dollar for. And the other one was “just” a Chinese make KE version.
With a tap on his chest to touch the Koran in his pocket. He turned the ships wheel and went to go after his white whale. Soon the three engines were going as hard as they could. The vessel could not make its top speed, for a number of reasons. It still was faster than the old Forrest Sherman class destroyer. He had paid well to find out everything he could about this ship, over the last few years. He knew that this ship did not have a surface search radar, which could detect him at under 10km. If he could get that close, without being seen? He would be able to fire his homing weapons at the American sea demon.
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LCDR Moore was leaning forward in her command chair. She had been checking up on a reported submarine for the last day and a half. There had been a growing number of reports, of a pirate submarine working in this part of the Indian Ocean. She could not risk, not checking on a halfway decent report of this sneaky little bastard. That is until the report came in about the fleet of pirates approaching the location of her primary mission. Now she was burning as hard as she could to get back to that remote island. At least the SF team on the ridge could give her an order of battle list of this pirate fleet.
She was bringing all of the firepower at her command, like a hammer of the gods. Moore had been fighting her ship for years. She knew its strengths and her weaknesses, like missing a surface search radar. She had made sure that she had lookouts on both sides of the bridge wings, and another set up near the aft most of her smokestacks. Her vessel was launched in 1956, and her navy officers were of the 1990’s generation. Her commander had been used to having all of the nice toys, but that did not mean that she didn’t know how to work under today’s conditions.
When it was reported that a torpedo boat was racing out to meet her? She put on a grin, that a great white shark would have envied. When the Edwards was brought out of the museum to replace combat losses. The US Navy did not have enough time or resources to bring her all the way back up to being a top of the line warship. They were more worried about getting her guns and engines working. So, for her? They did not put in the Nixie system, much less the Prairie/Masker systems to defend against a torpedo attack. But that didn’t mean that this would stay this way. She had been at least modified, so that they could be added later. Hope springs eternal, until the Demon Murphy crushes it like a beer can under your boots.
When the Lockwood had been repaired, as much as they could. It was found that she would never sail the high seas again. The high-speed geared steam turbines on the Knox class ship, were just too complex to reproduce with a couple of old repair ships. That didn’t mean that she was not going to make one dandy of a very slow (even for her class) harbor defense ship, that is if they could get a few more very hard to find parts. Even being crippled she had been able to sink two terrorist boats, and she had stopped more than a dozen other attempts to attack the harbor. She just could not safely survive on the high seas. This had led to a few opportunities for USNAVAFRICOM, after they were sure she would not sink at the pier side. Any weapons she could not use were pulled off, so that she could both support the rest of the fleet and make room for the needed modifications to make her a more effective harbor defense ship. Some of those toys had found their way onto the Edwards.
Moore kept her eyes on the approaching PT boat and waited. She was betting on two things. One was that the bad guy knew that her ship did not have working a surface search radar. The second was that the bad guy had not been trained on how to use his boat effectively. When she saw the burst of smoke coming from each side of the PT boat, she let her teeth show.
“Hard to port!! Roll the Nixie on the starboard side!!” Moore held on, as her ship reacted like a racehorse.
The old destroyer escort made a hard turn, and one of the few torpedo decoy devices recovered from the Lockwood was released over the side. As the warship made her very sharp turn. The Nixie was left behind, until the line supplying power to the device went tight. Then the little device went from about 0 to 27knots with a hard tug, and she started to work the voodoo that she could do so well.
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Arai was saying words that the Koran would have frowned at him using. Both of the expensive weapons went out the forward pair of tubes, just as they were supposed to do. Then things had gone sideways. He had seen both weapons fly through the air and hit the water, in front of his hard charging boat. One had taken off at an even higher speed than his impressive command could turn. He had been very surprised about the speed of the weapons. He had been told, that they were faster than any boat Arai had ever seen by the weapons seller.
The second weapon had come out of his port side tube. It had been his very expensive Russian made weapon that had passed all the test that they had known how to do. That had been the weapon, which he had been least concerned with. That might have been why he did not see it make one final dive, and head for the ocean bottom. Arai had no idea that he had a double failure with that weapon. And that second failure had saved his life. The old Russian built weapon not only had a main engine failure of its kerosene-oxygen turbine. It also had a detonator failure of its warhead. When the torpedo hit the sand bottom, the 307kg of high explosive did not detonate on impact with the hard sea floor. That would have blasted the lightly built 170ton aluminum hulled PT boat into a bad memory.
Without any weapons to challenge a real warship. Arai turned from the battle as the first blue and white-water fountains erupted around them. Arai did not care if any of the other ships followed him, or not. He was more worried about his own skin, as it dawned on him that he was being fired at by many large caliber weapons. With quick turns of the wheel, and careful not to fall into a pattern his boat slide side to side. Soon the enemy was out of sight, and so was the Jinn infested island. As he looked around the local sea moving passed him at 40knots. He was thinking, that maybe, the hunting was better and safer higher up into the Red Sea.
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Back on the Richard S Edwards. Her commander was hanging on for dear life, as the great vessel makes the power turn. As soon as the vessel was on its new heading. She bolted out of her chair and ran for the nearest bridge wing. It was her job to deal with the torpedo in the water. Her XO would take care of the enemy PT boat. With the completion of the massive high-speed turn, it had unmasked two single 5inch cannons. This class of vessel was different than most other WW2 class ships. Instead of having your main guns in a pair of super firing turrets forward? They were mounted on the aft of the vessel.
Those two single mounted weapons were starting to throw shells toward the now retreating PT boat. With two fast and wildly evading ships? It was going to make it nearly impossible to score a hit, without guided weapons. The rapidly increasing range also was compounding against the hit probability. Each gun captain mentally selected to only fire 10 rounds without a hit, before calling off the firing. They knew that 127mm rounds were getting very hard to find back in Mombasa.
While the cannons were firing, the helm’s officer and the captain were still trying to save the ship. She had expected the enemy to fire the torpedoes right at her command. That was great, if you were watching a WW2 movie. That was not so great, when you were using guided weapons of a certain capability. The 54MPH weapon had to waste time and energy in a turn to pick up the wake of the target. She knew that the Russians like to use wake homing torpedoes in most of their small surface combatants, and Moore had used this knowledge to her advantage.
The weapon was almost twice as fast as the Edwards. But it could not just charge up her wake, after having to pass it to pick up her wake to track on it in the first place. After finding the target, it had to do a kind of S pattern to keep “seeing” the target vessel. This cut down on the closing rate that the weapon could generate. Seemingly at random Moore would call out a course change, as she watched the harbinger of death closing in on her and her ship. She was recalling all of her training; from the counter submarine training she had undergone in the Gulf of Mexico. Suddenly 300m off the stern of the speeding warship, a great fountain of water rose into the air. It was just far enough away from the stern of the destroyer, to not cause it any shock damage.
When Moore returned to the bridge? She had a big smile on her face. When she saw the look on her XO’s face. She gave him a slight shrug. “Fishing for Torpex. You have to love it, when you can finally reel a big one in.” Now with a straight face she addressed her XO. “Pull in the line and pull out the reserve Nixie. I’m just glad we didn’t have to run both out. That would have been a pain to keep both of the power lines from tangling, as we did our fishing.”
It took the Edwards half an hour to make it back to the grounded Russian warship. They were joined by the other three ships on this mission at almost the same time. The only other action the Edwards saw, was when the bow twin 3inch turret opened fire. It took only four sets of double rounds to send the last, largest, and retreating pirate ship to the bottom. It burned and quickly sunk three miles off the coast of the small island. The same island was covered in smoke made by many things that should not burn.
There was not any need for fire support from the warship. The ground battle was over, by the time she was in range to provide any covering fire. All that was left, was to take care of the wounded and the dead. While the ground teams were cleaning up the battlefield on the island. The Solstar tied up to her spring buoy only a few minutes after coming into the cove again. She gave it one more try, and she was rewarded by almost sinking. That attempt and recovery after the attempted pull, gave time for Moore and the ground teams to have a meeting.
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Just before midnight.
Moore was tired. She had just sent the Bluenose III back to Mombasa a few hours ago. She was carrying the first and smaller SF Team, along with the three surviving Frenchmen. They were very short of fuel, and just trying to keep fresh water for the larger number of crew and passengers would have finished emptying those tanks. Still, she would be a little faster getting home than the rest of her fleet, and that had its uses. She started to review the briefing from the ground team. It was not pretty, even after all of these years of war. She still was affected by death, but it affected her more if they were people under her command.
The ground battle had been bloody. They had one damage LAV-25, three non-operational AAVP’s, and all 4 of the gun trucks were shot to hell. They had grounded the LST again and used the only remaining LAV to help recover all of the damage vehicles. The SF HQ team had lost most of their heavy weapons team. The 57mm AA gun had a gun shield, but the shield had not stopped the 14.5mm API rounds that had been fired at it.
Those had not been the only losses for the ground units. The Jarheads had 8 dead and almost another two-dozen hurt. All of the dead and wounded had been transferred to the Edwards. She had the freezer space to keep the dead, until they could be handed over to Graves Registration back in Mombasa. She also had the best medical facilities to handle the wounded. They had even been able to collect a dozen living pirates. Those captives were staying over on the LST, it was not like she could just leave them in the water or for the crabs. They had a cabin, which could be used as a brig with very little effort needed to get it ready. The LST had not been overloaded on this mission, mainly because the USN was that short of support.
The large SF team, Marines, and with help from the crews of the LST, Destroyer, and one or two from the Salvage tug. They had cleaned up the battlefield, again. They had used the operational LAV and the last AAVP to recover any heavy items from the grounded pirates or pull to shore the flaming wrecks of their vessels. Heavy, was defined as anything that four very strong marines could not lift on their own. Besides the heavy weapons and ammunition the pirates had used, other things were recovered. The engines were very highly prized, and not only by the navy. Most of the vessels had at least one, but three of the shot-up pirate boats had three powerful engines that could be recovered. Most of the marine engines already had been modified to burn alcohol, those were almost as valuable as the recovered heavy weapons. Those heavy weapons had ranged from belt fed 7.62 machine guns going all the way up to a 37mm AA gun, along with a dozen RPGs recovered.
The work had been going slowly, until the crabs showed up for a meal of the dead. That had gotten the survivors and walking wounded moving to finish the details at a very rapid pace. All of those recovered supplies were moved over to the now very crowded and overloaded LST. The Tug and the Edwards did not have the room for them, and still do their primary missions. And the Smotryaschy needed to be as light as they could get her. The more weight they added to her hull? It would only make it harder to move her off the sand.
With so much fire and smoke, there was no way to keep this mission a secret from the larger area. All of the ground teams would be pulled off the island, after the post battle clean up. They would be staying on the boats, in case they had to leave in a hurry for some reason. After seeing the crabs starting to work on the dead bodies of the pirates? The ground personnel had been overjoyed at the news that all of them would be sleeping or otherwise staying in the hot metal hulls when not on an active detail on the beach.
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The Captain of the Solstar, was waiting for just the right time as he scanned the water moving around his little ship. The tide was coming in and he was not going to wait until it reached its maximum height. That would be cutting it too short in his experience. Suddenly with a wave of his hand to the helmsmen. The throb of the engines started to grow, and he looked over his shoulder at the thick tow line. He could see the water being twisted out of the line as more and more stress was applied to the nylon core. He had been on this boat long enough, to know when she hit her limit just by what his ears and feet told him.
The strain was building in both ship and man. “Let the Alexander Bonnyman know they are to start pulling, and to let us know when they hit the rev limit.” The captain was in his element. Gun fire scared him to death, but this was right in his wheelhouse.
The Captain of the salvage ship moved back to the helm station and waited some more. Off to his port side, he could see the Polish made LST start to move, very slowly. The tow line came flying out of the water from her stern in a flash of bright yellow. Soon it was also, under heavy strain of trying to pull the old warship off the sand. He could hear the lines “singing” in the cool night air as the yellow lines were pulled. That was not a good sign.
“Okay let the Edwards know, that they are going to be needed after all.” If another line was not added soon, both lines were in danger of parting under the load.
Now the captain went back to the starboard wing of his little craft. The borrowed night vision device was attached to a mount for tonight’s operation and mainly for his use. He had just got the devices settled onto his face when a third line came flying out of the water. The two best ships for this kind of work, were the tug and LST. The Large Slow Target had the torque to pull her fully loaded hull off an enemy occupied beach. Now it looked like they were not going to have enough power for tonight’s work. The Edwards only had a single shaft, and her prop was not designed for this type of work. It and her hull were designed for speed, not this kind of torque loading.
Just as he was starting to worry that they would not have enough power, to get the target off the beach or the lines might break. He did not know what they would do if that happened. He was also worried, that if they put too much power into pulling on the stern of the old warship. If they put too much load on the grounded ship. It might rip off or otherwise damage her watertight hull and ruin the whole reason for this mission. Then he felt his boat move. He did not need to hear the report from his team on the tow. He could tell that it was coming off the island. He felt his vessel jump and start to move…. to fast way to fast. “Cut the Edwards loose!!”
Ten seconds after the bellow. The thick line between the two small warships went shooting threw the air with a whip crack. The team on the old warship would have used two heavy fire axes, to cut that tow line. As soon as the heavy line was cut. The rate his ship was moving dropped suddenly. It didn’t stop moving, but it was not moving as quickly as it was just a few seconds ago. With a smile, he returned to his bridge. Now all they would have to do was recheck the tow’s hull, rig up a bow tow line, back up, and then make the trip back to safe harbor.
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