WesWorld

Vice Admiral Yang Guangyuan: If it's really the MV D'Artagnon, then of course the ship is yours, including the cargo. But your men have to be fast, so our enemy has no chance to destroy the freighter.

Simmons:
Don't fear, it's our job and we will made it!


Vice Admiral Yang Guangyuan: Okay. So now we have the following plan:

X - 12h = Mudpuppies start their mission to destroy the seaplanes
X - 2min = exploding of the mines under the seaplanes
X Time = Attack of the airstrip
X + 5min = Jumping of the Airborne units over the 115mm guns
X + 10min = Landing of the SAC-52Ws at marked points
X + 15min = Landing of the marines at southern beach

So check the watches. Operation Thunderstrike will start in exactly one hour. Anything clear ?



So it begins 1 Sep 1936 0000 local. Two Mudpuppies crawl forth from the Alaska Maru as they operate on the battery.

H

Alaska Maru

Simmons in overall command, Roboet leads the RTA/ISP contingent



CMD Charles Fitzxhugh: Mudpuppy #1



MSO Elise Kilroy Mudpuppy #2
______________________________________________

Alaska Maru

Simmons watches anxiously as the cranes swing over and launch the two mini-subs. The Alaska Maru is just over the horizon distant out of sight of Jackson Atoll at 17,000 meters. The night sky is heavily clouded with no moon. Wind is out of the NW at 17 knots. Swells have a period of moment of 22 seconds and a crest trough range of 6-8 feet. Navigation will have to be by dead reckoning in these less than ideal conditions. He sees a line of squalls closing as a line of dark on the horizon to the west. The mini-subs have to swim through that condition awash with their hatches open. Simmons is grimly aware that he risks sixteen lives in this launch.

Alaska Maru OOD: "Boats away. Godspeed,"

Simmons adds an "Amen" as the mini-subs both turn west and the Alaska Maru flees east to avoid the circling fishing smack patrol boat the pirates use as a picket ship around Jackson Atoll.

_____________________________________________

Master Submarine Operator Elise Kilroy, huddles miserably in her conning tower bridge seat. As she expects, both her Thai-provided foul weather gear and the English-built gyro-compass in the conn station malfunctions. She has a radio buoy that some Chinese frogmen laid a week ago in the West Channel as her backup. She can steer LORAN on that if she has too. Her co-driver, Salmon Chasde, tries to get the repeater to work, so that they can take a bearing from main steering's gyro. The last thing she wants to do is try to bottom echo the course off the submarine charts she has. She doesn't trust the fathometer to register. It was built by the same company that made the gyro-compass.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Fitzhugh doesn't have that much to do. He leads a team of five divers, who have to sabotage two seaplanes and then storm a SHIPLOAD OF PIRATES. Things will be easier if the HEBCO D'Artagnon crew survives and is aboard. All he has to do, then, is kill the pirate guards and then get the ship underway and out by the South Channel and flee in the direction of the Chinese task force. Tall order to do that before the bombers arrive. If the HEBCO crew is dead?

For now he watches the Mudpuppy's MSO steer confidently for the Northeast Channel. Fitzhugh looks to the northwest and all he sees is a wall of rain approaching.

__________________________________________________

0450 local time

The five HEBCO divers don their diving gear and exit the lockout from the grounded Mudpuppy.

Two of the divers head for the seaplane ramp, thbeir targets are the two Dornier flying boats.



The two divers headed for the flying boats each swim with a demolition charge . They swim fifty minutes to their targets and attach the charges to the float cells of the flying boats. Time delay is by clock. They set the charges for the expected arrival of the CAF air-raid. Both divers, tired, now swim to the freighter, They have an hour's swim ahead of them.
_____________________________________________

The three divers headed to the MV D'Artagnon have a thirty minute swim. They swim with cable, knives, silenced waterproofed pistols and Arvad Singham's latest invention-suction cup climbing gear.

On the side opposite of the Jacob's ladder, the side where there are no guards, the divers climb up the side and roll over the port-side gunwale.

THUMP THUMP. McConnell, an ex IRA man, puts two pistol shots into the first guard's ribs, and the port-side guard is gone. He heads to the stern and does a little wire work. So strong is he when he jerks the garrote closed, that he snaps the second guard's neck with a loud CRACK. he waits to see if anybody hears.

McConnell searches the aft deck for more men to kill, He finds no-one. He then quickly dons the clothes of the second guard he killed and takes the guards MP-35. Daylight will come soon, and he will then become a thespian.
_____________________________________________

Fiitzhugh and Chiram Teo sneak up to the pilot house, port-side, They find the first guard, asleep in a chair of all things.

SNAP. Teo twists the guard's head violently.

'You can take the man out of the White Mice, but you cannot take the White Mouse out of the man.' thinks Fitzhugh. He motions the Thai up to where the Chinese spy told HEBCOSec, the D'Artagnon crew was supposedly held. 'Thank goodness the Chinese secret service put a man in here.' Fitzhugh adds in thought

Fitzhugh peers into the window. He sees the D'Artagnon crew all gathered in the pilot house. Astonishingly there are only two guards.

Fithugh motions Teo forward to the door. Teo opens the door and then there is five seconds of extreme silent violence.. THUMP. Fitzhugh shoots his man in the head and then rushes forward to catch the dead body before it falls and clatters to the deck

In a loud whisper Fitzhugh shouts to Teol; "That man is OURS!" as he recognizes the CSS man.

Things should not be this easy, but they are?. General Xiaung's cutthroats seem to be as overconfident in their hide as the CSS reports.
---------------------------------------------------

As Fitzhugh and Teo release the 28 survivors of the original 50 man D'Artagnon crew, Fitzhugh sets about seeing how to get the D'Artagnon under weigh. The plan calls for the freighter to sortie during the general assault.

Fitzhugh speaks to the CSS man: "Are there any guns besides these on this ship?" He brandishes the SMG he took from the dead guard he shot

The CSS man laughs: "Come forward with me."

http://world.guns.ru/smg/smg33-e.htm

TYPO!

The Erma EM MP-36 was the source prototype. I would expect that black market in WW operates the same way in WW as it does in OTL.

The Do-24s? Shrug. They belong to somebody. Check your inventories and factory runs.

H.

Elise Kilroy cannot submerge completely, running toward the west passage. Amazingly the pirate fishing smack comes within five hundred meters of her sub as she runs flat out on the diesel toward the West Island.

The noise doesn't carry and they don't see her sub as she silences the diesel. The mini-sub bobs about and turns off bearing as the weigh falls off. Kilroy wonders if she should dive the boat, a two minute process to do safely, as she must secure the snort tube, shift over to battery and motor, and manually adjust trim all by herself, as she is the only HEBCO operator aboard. The rest of the HEBCO team having gone with Fitzhugh.

Her RTN crew is willing, but they are hastily trained to swim using rebreathers , not operate this sub under these emergency conditions. Her Thai sub helmsman crew member is just trained well enough to follow her orders to steer and trim under supervision. Salmon Chasde is a pickup crewman from the MV County Armaugh who has never been aboard a sub before in his life. The reason he is here is because she needs a diesel mechanic and HEBCO provides him.

"Close the Conn access." she yells at him in Irish.

Waves wash over the Conn as the boat broaches sideways. Chasde unbuckles his seatbelt and flips the deck hatch closed and dogs it, silently.

"We go down altogether, if we fail?" he asks when he finishes and staggers back to his chair to strap in.

The rain which drizzles before, now falls in sheets. The spillouts which would drain the Conn cannot keep up with the pool of water that now rises to Kilroy's ankles. She watches the fishing smack turn into the wind and waves to take the seas bow on. It moves off northwest, She cannot follow the trawler's example. She has to hope the waves carry her boat away from the danger close aboard. The waves do carry her southeast, and off her chart and her planned track.

A couple of minutes pass while Chasde's question hangs unanswered as the tiny boat corks about in the darkness amidst wind and wave that a freighter would find inconvenient, but which the fishing smack and the tiny sub, it unknowingly hunts, finds deadly.

"We wait." she shouts above the weather at Chasde. "We won't sink. I won't let us!"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Kilroy never asks the men she traps below about what they think during the next three hours, about her sealing and locking them in; or what they think when she runs them and the boat aground twice, as the currents bump it up against North Island, or what they think as she brazenly runs the West Channel ON THE SURFACE in full view of the floodlit facilities on that island. She stands into the lagoon and approaches to within 500 meters of her target piers before she finally dives the boat, far closer than what has been planned or deemed safe when this crazy mission was laid on.
-----------------------------------------------

The divers go out twice and mine the three flying boats and half dozen trawlers and small freighters they find. When the mines explode, the mines will hole and sink the flying boats at their moorings, or blow the propellers off or rupture the shaft seals of the ships mined. There will be no escape for General Xiaung off of North Island that way.

And both HEBCO and China has plans for these assets and him; if they can catch him alive,

Quoted

Originally posted by Hrolf Hakonson
Scuba gear hasn't really been invented yet, it won't be invented until 1943 by Cousteau and Gagnan. Some early rebreathers are available, though. The first military frogman unit (the Italian 10th Light Flotilla) formed in 1940, based on a suggestion from October 1935.

???????????????????????????????

Quoted

n 1853 Professor T. Schwann designed a rebreather in Belgium; he exhibited it in Paris in 1878.[3]

In 1878 Henry Fleuss invented the first certainly known rebreather using stored oxygen and absorption of carbon dioxide by an absorbent (here rope yard soaked in caustic potash solution), to rescue mineworkers who were trapped by water. [4]

The Davis Escape Set was the first rebreather which was practical for use and produced in quantity. It was designed about 1900 in Britain for escape from sunken submarines. Various industrial oxygen rebreathers (e.g. the Siebe Gorman Salvus and the Siebe Gorman Proto, both invented in the early 1900s) were descended from it; this link shows a Draeger rebreather used for mines rescue in 1907.

In 1903 to 1907 Professor Georges Jaubert, invented Oxylithe, which is a form of sodium peroxide (Na2O2) or sodium dioxide (NaO2). As it absorbs carbon dioxide it emits oxygen. In 1909 Captain S.S. Hall, R.N., and Dr. O. Rees, R.N., developed a submarine escape apparatus using Oxylithe; the Royal Navy accepted it. It was used for shallow water diving but never in a submarine escape[4]; it was used in the first filming (1907) of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

The first known systematic use of rebreathers for diving was by Italian sport spearfishers in the 1930s. This practice came to the attention of the Italian Navy, which developed its frogman unit, which affected World War II.[4]

from here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebreather

I research this stuff. Units that can be used for 100 minute shallow swims are well within 1935 tech.

H.

Quoted

Originally posted by thesmilingassassin
A good history.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of…ater_technology

Thanks much. It bolsters the case substantially, and I appreciate the sources you provided considerably.

H.

Quoted

Originally posted by Hrolf Hakonson

Quoted

Originally posted by howard

Quoted

Originally posted by Hrolf Hakonson
Scuba gear hasn't really been invented yet, it won't be invented until 1943 by Cousteau and Gagnan. Some early rebreathers are available, though. The first military frogman unit (the Italian 10th Light Flotilla) formed in 1940, based on a suggestion from October 1935.

???????????????????????????????

Quoted

n 1853 Professor T. Schwann designed a rebreather in Belgium; he exhibited it in Paris in 1878.[3]

In 1878 Henry Fleuss invented the first certainly known rebreather using stored oxygen and absorption of carbon dioxide by an absorbent (here rope yard soaked in caustic potash solution), to rescue mineworkers who were trapped by water. [4]

The Davis Escape Set was the first rebreather which was practical for use and produced in quantity. It was designed about 1900 in Britain for escape from sunken submarines. Various industrial oxygen rebreathers (e.g. the Siebe Gorman Salvus and the Siebe Gorman Proto, both invented in the early 1900s) were descended from it; this link shows a Draeger rebreather used for mines rescue in 1907.

In 1903 to 1907 Professor Georges Jaubert, invented Oxylithe, which is a form of sodium peroxide (Na2O2) or sodium dioxide (NaO2). As it absorbs carbon dioxide it emits oxygen. In 1909 Captain S.S. Hall, R.N., and Dr. O. Rees, R.N., developed a submarine escape apparatus using Oxylithe; the Royal Navy accepted it. It was used for shallow water diving but never in a submarine escape[4]; it was used in the first filming (1907) of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

The first known systematic use of rebreathers for diving was by Italian sport spearfishers in the 1930s. This practice came to the attention of the Italian Navy, which developed its frogman unit, which affected World War II.[4]

from here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebreather

I research[/u[] this stuff.

H.

<snort> If you DID research it, you did a poor job.

What's usually referred to as SCUBA gear was invented by Cousteau and Gagnan, in 1942-43, also known as the Aqualung. Rebreathers, another technology that can be referred to as SCUBA gear, are somewhat older, dating from the period you quote above. As I mentioned and you quoted above, rebreathers were first used in military service for non-rescue work by the Italian 10th Light Flotilla (the Italian frogman unit you quoted about), which was formed in 1940.

Countersnort- the demand rebreather regulator which is the heart of SCUBA is French invented in 1934-1935 and available 1936. The mixed gas pressurized flask is available in 1930-swim fins in 1933, Italians using underwater breathing gear of a sort in 1935, the bits and pieces are already floating around in 1936. The Italians put it together in 1940 in a form and deploy. The Americans learn from the Italians and develop their own in 1943. [UDTs Hawaiii 1943] I just push it all together what is available in 1935 to function in 1936. What is the PROBLEM?

http://www.extendair.com/rb/rbfrm.html?=rbhist.html

Quoted

A little history
Rebreathers were invented in the early 1700’s, and were first used in mine rescues. They remained primarily as land based devices until the late 1800’s when they were adapted for underwater use. The U.S. Navy has used SCUBA rebreathers since the 1930’s and all of the national militaries continue to use them for covert operations. Land based rebreathers are used in mine safety, fire fighting and medical applications. The recreational dive market is now seeing SCUBA rebreathers in greater numbers as the technology has become more user friendly and less expensive.

I have two types of four from which to choosein 1935.

http://www.halcyon.net/rebreather/rebreather_types.shtml

Guess which two?

H

[SIZE=4]Operation Thunderstrike DAWN:[/SIZE]

H hour announces itself aboard M-2 with Elise Kilroy looking at the passing of the last rain squalls to the east as the sun appears through the layered clouds. She and the rest of the crew hear the explosions through the water as Chinese bombers make their runs on Center and East Islands. Soon will come the boat landings. It is now that she is supposed to escape out the south channel to the rendezvous point for pickup.

Elise Kilroy, Salmon Chasde and Hian Athma, the Thai helmsman, are crammed inside the Mudpuupy in fear, with the four live RTN divers who survive their swims. The fifth diver, a Chinese Navy volunteer dies noisily now of oxygen poisoning because his experimental breathing apparatus failed him . So much of what HEBCO attempts here in Thunderbolt is new, experimental, or is existing technology never put to the applications which the M2 crew now use.

Kilroy swings the periscope east and sees the MV D'Artagnon belch a puff of smoke while little ants scurry across her decks. Small floating dots seem to appear out of nowhere to swarm around her, as the rusty freighter somehow manages to turn circle in a length that is impossible and points her bow west on her escape vector. The freighter sparkles with lights: what can only be the gunfire from men firing down into the water with machine guns.

Kilroy adjusts magnification to high to see what they of the D'Artagnon do.

"Clever! Use your anchor as a pivot point to make your turnaround!" she exclaims.as she gives her crew the running commentary. She wonders where Fitzhugh finds all the sudden firepower? The D'Artagnon seems to bristle with automatic weapons fire. She watches as some ants rush forward to the forecastle and DROP the anchor chain out of the chain runners. She sees some of the ants die in the doing of this deed, but their efforts succeed. The old rust-bucket gathers weigh as Elise notices the rooster wake of the stern rise as Fitzhugh's people push the freighter up to her fastest speed.

"Shell splashes. I think the goofballs on Center Island are awake." she says to her crew. Columns of water start rising and falling around D'Artagnon as the puffing from that ship's funnel now becomes a continuous stream of dirty brown smoke that hangs over the lagoon.

Small bangs, transmitted directly into her boat's hull from aft, alarm her, so Kilroy turns her attention and her periscope northwest to see what the noise source is. Is she discovered? Is she depth charged?

No. She observes the timer-delayed charges planted by her divers go off: one gunboat, two gunboats, then the two fishing smacks and then the small coastal freighter go BOOM, as water spouts show their sterns blown to bits. All of them must be packed with ammunition or explosives. 'Idiots!' she thinks. She adds up the tonnage quickly in her mind as she compiles what she will report to Simmons about this operation's damage results. With a sudden jerk of the periscope she looks for the seaplane ramp. Two of the seaplanes scuttle tail-first sinking as she expects, but the third remains intact!

"Course 285! Make fifty revolutions. Prepare to surface! !@#$%^&*()! Chasde break out the small arms, I think a seaplane we missed is trying to take off!" she says.

The M2 Mudpuppy champaign bottles in front of the Dornier just as the seaplane taxies into its eastern escape run and prepares to rev engines up for takeoff. Kilroy scrambles topside with an absurdly heavy Zk383 Czech sub-machine gun in her arms, the only automatic weapon her sub carries. She flips down the bipod, emplaces it on the lip of the Conn, yanks the charging handle, aims, and for the first time in her life fires any weapon in anger. She promptly kills the man in the bow observer gunner's position on the Dornier before he overcomes his own stupidity. Her second rake takes care of the two pilots in the cockpit. The Dornier sits there with its engines turning now, going nowhere.

Chasde, who follows her up into the Conn, looks around wildly, points to the sitting seaplane, and asks: "Now what?"

Kilroy hands him the sub-machine gun and takes Chasde's pistol and replies: "Finish the job."

Before Chasde protests, she tells him, "You know our escape plan and rendezvous as well as I do. Take the boat out and follow D'Artagnon"

She then jumps over the side of the Conn and dives into the water. As she swims toward the Dornier, she hears Salmon yell at her, "Are you crazy?"

Its a short swim. She pulls herself into the cockpit to see shattered windscreen glass everywhere and two bloody men. The co-pilot is still feebly alive. She shoots him twice to fix that problem, and with some difficulty dumps both dead bodies into the lagoon.

She has a seaplane now......what to do? She forgets to bring a scuttling charge. She sees boats putting out from North Island filled with angry ants. With some fury rising in her at the indecisive Chasde, who just sits there, she waves at her sub, at HIM, to get the boat moving, before those enemy men in those enemy boats swarm it. Of course those boats full of angry men are also after HER.

She has only one choice. A Mudpuppy operates underwater much like an aircraft in air. She took some flight training to learn how to operate her sub in that fashion.......so.
____________________________

A Dornier 214 takes off east, passes over East Island, and then heads over to orbit the Alaska Maru. A few minutes of inter-radio traffic between the ship and the flying boat pilot and the Dornier then turns northwest, to head toward the Chinese operations base at Thuni, where the woman pilot will be talked down to a safe landing by a highly competent CAF air controller to a heroine's welcome.



That is how LEGENDS are made.

[SIZE=4]Operation Thunderstrike, MIDDAY: [/SIZE]

Simmons paces the Alaska Maru pilot house port to starboard and then port again. The only radio contacts he has/had was early in the morning, when that crazy submarine operator, Elise Kilroy, shows up overhead in a strange German flying boat. For a moment Simmons suspects that everything has gone wrong and the Alaska Maru is going to be bombed, but then that crazy woman comes on the radio and asks for landing instructions.

It takes befuddled Simmons almost a minute to sort out that she stole the plane. It tales the ever-sensible Ha Ri Roboet to suggest though: "We can't land her here. See if she can make it to the Chinese at Thuni and hook up with our own RTAF detachment. They should be able to fix that bird up, so we can use it later."

Simmons concurs as the Alaska Maru crew ignores him in his moment of paralysis, and goes about their own business of handling the ship's approach to its landing station off East Island.

As for Roboet, he has a boat assault on East Island to lead, while the Chinese mount the main effort on Center Island.

That ISP assault went in four hours ago. Simmons from them hears nothing.

A lookout portside now shouts: "Smoke to the southwest!"

Simmons runs out the portside door of the pilot house onto the weather walk and grabs a pair of binoculars from the lookout there. He scans the horizon.


_____________________________________________
An hour later...............

The MV D'Artagnon lays alongside. Transfer of the doctor and additional; crew to that ship from the Alaska Maru proceeds slowly. The Royal Thai Navy has little experience with blue water operations, For that matter, neither has HEBCO. Fitzhugh eventually bosun chairs aboard to make his report. Simmons is in the ship's Mess to hear it, as the HEBCOSec on the spot. He waits for the HEBCO master chief diver to show up. What will this twenty year man who has been with HEBCO, since it was a small paper division within Howard Marine Insurance and Salvage, have to say to Simmons, a johnny come lately company man of less than six months?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Fitzhugh takes his time before he meets Simmons. First he has his shoulder wound treated by an RTN corpsman. Priorities don't you know! The bullet, when it went through him, missed the bones and it didn't tear muscle, so he considers himself lucky. Of the thirty-four men with which he started this escapade: his five divers, the twenty-eight D'Artagnon crew survivors, and the Chinese Secret Service agent, twelve have not been lucky. Half of them die getting the anchor cut clear, and another six die when a howitzer shell explodes close aboard starboard, when they beat off the last enemy boarders as they get underway. Seven more are wounded to various degrees of severity in the escape, when they are shelled.

Fitzhugh knocks on the compartment doorway before he enters the mess. Simmons calls out: "Enter!" Fitzhugh glances at the little lawyer and wonders aloud: "Since when did we become NAVY all of a sudden?"

Simmons who starts to smile doesn't realize it is Fitzhugh's way of cracking a joke, and suddenly assumes that this is some form of justified Fitazhugh criticism. He defensively turns solemn and serious, almost apologetic in manner, as he ask: "How bad was it?

Fitzhugh grabs a spot at the table and sits on the benchside immediately opposite Simmons. He answers Simmons' question.

That question is actually Fitzhugh's professional cue. Almost laconically he monologues: "At H minus six hours, after reaching our assigned stations we began swimmer operations to take the [D'Artagnon and disable our local assigned targets; two seaplanes and two patrol boats. That took us two hours and resulted in no casualties. At H minus two hours we completed all power-plant under weigh preparations to escape. At H-hour when the Chinese attacked Center Island, D'Artagnon began her sortie. We came under fifteen minutes of sporadic shore battery shelling, which killed and wounded a half of us aboard. The D'Artagnon took a near miss starboard which damaged the amidships deckhouse and started a fire in the number #2 signals locker. We put the fire out and exited the lagoon at H plus two hours give or take fifteen minutes. I had many dying and severely wounded aboard, so instead of heading southwest to rendezvous with the Chinese, as we originally planned, I turned east and hunted for you to get medical aid."

"What about the subs?" asks Simmons.

"They were right behind me" says Fitzhugh. "I didn't have the men, or gear to recover them, so I assume that they are coming home to mother to return to their nests."

A buzzer noisily announces itself then, as the ship's intercom rings off.

Fitzhugh stands up from the table and goes to the compartment frame where the phone is mounted. He picks up the phone, says "Yeah." and listens. He grunts once and hangs up:

Simmons asks: "Well, what was that?"

Fitzhugh: "Radio shack. Both subs are here. M1 has shell damage to the Conn and is sinking. She needs recovery aboard FAST. M2 reports one dead diver and their MSO missing in action. All in all, except for that seaplane getting away from Kilroy, I'd say we did as well as far as we could, Mister Simmons." as he finishes his report."

Simmons now can smile. M1 can be craned aboard as soon as the Alaska Maru cable hooks a crane and winch line up to her Mudpuppy strongback. Casualties are far worse than he hoped, but far better than he expected.

"Kilroy stole the seaplane and flew it out" he says nonchalantly. "With any luck......"

Fitzhugh who doesn't think much of woman drivers, woman divers, or woman submariners; just stands there with his mouth open for a couple of seconds. He closes it with a snap: "Well I'll be a !@#$%^&! baboon's close relative!"

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thuni base radios Kilroy's safe arrival to Alaska Maru an hour later. After that, the rest of Thunderstrike for HEBCO is rather anti-climatic. It is up to the other actors to tell their parts in this drama, but for HEBCO now......

The MV D'Artagnon heads for HEBCO Krabl after some repairs. She will pick up RTN naval escorts enroute.

The Alaska Maru will remain on station until the RTA/ISP frinish their part of Thunderstrike and then they too will eventually return to HEBCO Krabl.

The Chinese either get or not get General Xiang Xielaung. They just don't know. Its very possible that Elise Kilroy killed him when she sprayed that Dornier with machine gun fire and shot the co-pilot again to make sure. Pity she didn't photograph the corpses, or keep the bodies to make sure of positive identification.

Well...............nobody is perfect!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Next installment: The Thais Strike!

[SIZE=4]OPERATION THUNDERSTRIKE: East Island, H plus 2 hours:[/SIZE]



Four landing barges approach the east shore of East Island

Har Ri Roboet has 80 men divided into three short platoons.

5 man company HQ section

Himself, 3 radiomen and a submachine gunner messenger runner. all with ZK-383s

3 x 25 man platoons

1 platoon sergeant
3 x 8 man rifle squads.

8 man squad
1 corporal with a ZK383
1 rocketeer with a BAM RPG-1
1 loader/spotter
4 riflemen with ZK-29s
1 gunner with a ZK-383

The weapons he uses:







The fighting doesn't take that long. East Island has mostly the clerical and technical scum who keep the illegal arms smuggling and drug trafficking that finances Xiang Xielaung's criminal political enterprises operating.

Roboet's two main targets, the twin warehouses full of contraband, fall without too much trouble as he runs his men across the island east to west in three flying wedges.

The piers that service the flying boats lagoon-side, Roboet's third target, are where Roboet's men face their toughest fight.

"Those !@#$%^&s have mortars." Roboet hears over the radio from his third platoon, as he moves up with his second platoon to support the right flank of his assault. The pirates past participle (dying under an artillery barrage and Chinese aircraft strafing) who should have exploited his present mistake, took to boats and chased the MV D'Artagnon an hour earlier. Most of them died when their inept compatriots hit everything but the D'Artagnon during its escape when they shelled her.

Thus fortune favors the lucky. Roboet's foolish gap he leaves between platoons has no one there to exploit it.

The forty odd pirates who defend the piers have no cover and apparently no brains either. They fail to support their mortar crews with protective fires as the mortar men try to set up in the open. Two rockets later Roboet has a couple of mortars and twenty prisoners. His men drop mortar bombs on the pirate boats returning from the drubbing the MV D'Artagnon gives them.

It is all over in a couple of hours around 1100 local time. The rains, which have been off and on all morning, suddenly unload with a deluge. That kills the radios, so Roboet cannot tell Alaska Maru until he sends a boat back demanding reinforcements and help to start transferring the warehouses' contents to the freighter that he succeeds.^1

Five dead and three wounded are Roboet's totals? Most of the surviving enemy left, about two dozen of them flee into the jungle. Roboet's men will hunt them down later, but now he has to secure what he's won and ship off his prisoner's. The pirates from the lagoon who come ashore now beaten, his men round up. Twenty prisoners become fifty, one hundred, soon too many.

Roboet starts a shuttle service to Center Island to dump his haul on the Chinese. Let them handle the riff-raff. The very boats the pirates have prove surprising to the Thais.

"Where did the pirates get these?" one of Roboet's sergeants asks him.



[SIZE=4]Captured enemy "boat".[/SIZE]

Roboet points at some prisoners being loaded into one of those "boats" for shipment over to the Chinese: "Why don't you go over there, pick out a victim and ask him?"^2

^1 Gold, silver, platinum, other precious metals, gems of various types, currency, etc, and of course stolen Chinese art works. HEBCO returns the stolen art objects: but after splitting the taken contraband, with Thailand with the HEBCO costs of equipping this little expedition taken out, there is only $10,000,000.00 left to give the Chinese as their share.

^2 Some WW power has got a lot of explaining to do.