The Indonesian Frigate Karel Satsuitubun
45 Miles North-Northeast of Damar Island, the Banda Sea.
2257 Hours; Zone Time, October 23, 2008
The Karel Satsuitubun was an old, tired ship. A modified copy of the British Leander class frigate, she had been originally built for the Netherlands Navy in the 1960s. The irony of her being purchased by a former Dutch colony had long since faded.
The Karel had been rebuilt and modernized several times, but there was only so much that new harness could do for an old horse. Her worn engines had lost power, her hull skin had wrinkled from wave stress, and rust was gnawing at her plates and frames. She deserved the peaceful oblivion of the scrapper’s yard – yet she soldiered on, for the nation she served was in dire peril. She was all there was in a time when she might not be enough.
The Karel’s failings had driven her captain on deck along with the majority of her personnel not on watch. In addition to a number of other secondary systems, the onboard air conditioning had failed, rendering the frigate’s berthing spaces a humid, sleepless hell.
From his station on the starboard bridge wing, the Captain could see his crewmen sprawled on the weather decks, striving for a degree of rest and relief in the smothering airless heat of the tropic night.
Scattered among the sailors were the darker, camouflage-clad outlines of the company of KOPASSUS commandos they were carrying, a burden the Karel decidedly did not need but which must be borne. The remainder of the Army Special Forces Group with their vehicles and heavy weapons had been crowded aboard the Teluk Berau. If conditions were bad aboard the Karel, they must be agony aboard the elderly ex-East German LSM holding tenuous station off the frigate’s port bow.
The Teluk had problems of her own. A steering gear failure had delayed their departure from Surabaya by half a day, and the leakage from a bad propeller shaft gland was barely being kept in check by her wheezing pumps.
Even the third and newest ship of the little task group, the Dagger class missile boat Rencong had started to report engine room casualties. The smaller vessel kept falling astern, laboring to keep pace.
Such problems were endemic within the Indonesian Fleet. Its ships, mostly aging cast-offs from the First World navies, were worn down from long years of hard service with too few rupiahs and trained man hours available for servicing and maintenance. In recent months, the situation had grown worse as government military units had raced from one hot spot within the archipelago to the next, fire brigading against open rebellion, slipping farther and farther behind the curve with each outburst.
Now the savages on Irian Jaya had gone berserk. The warriors of the Morning Star Independence Movement were attacking government outposts and facilities with a ferocity and strength no one had ever before seen. The native Papuans were now threatening to push the Indonesian authorities off the island all together.
Several key mining colonies had already been overwhelmed and Morning Star marauders were boldly striking at the outskirts of the island capital Jayapura itself. Casualties were reported as heavy and the fighting brutal. Pray to Allah that this last handful of reinforcements to the colonial garrison would be enough to stabilize the situation.
The Karel’s captain looked aft and to starboard and scowled into the thick night. The Rencong should be keeping station on the frigate’s quarter, a kilometer astern, but the missile boat’s running lights were no longer in sight.
“Officer of the watch, why has the damned Rencong fallen back again?”
“I can’t say, sir. We haven’t heard anything from her,” a voice replied from the interior of the bridge.
“Do you have her on the radar?”
“I’m sorry, sir.” The voice was hesitantly apologetic. “The surface search radar is down. The system has overheated. The air
conditioning …”
The Captain muttered a curse under his breath and groped for a pair of night
binoculars from the bridge wing storage rack. “If the cursed Talk-Between-Ships still works, get on with her and find out what
silly buggers they’re playing at.”
Lifting the binoculars to his eyes, the Captain swept the stern arc, searching
for the errant missile boat. Nothing but darkness. Nothing …
Wait!
Well off the starboard quarter there was a flickering flash like ruddy heat lightning. A second followed a few moments later, a sequence of them. Was that the Rencong? Was she on fire? His grip on the binoculars tightened and he peered down the bearing more intently.
Another flicker, growing brighter rapidly. No, growing closer rapidly …
The Karel’s captain was frozen in place by surprise and total, stark disbelief. When he managed to break the lock on his muscles, there was no time left for anything but a single scream of denial.
The first Exocet anti-ship missile slammed into the base of the bridge, homing on the largest radar cross-section of the ship. Detonating, the one hundred-and-sixty-five kilogram warhead ripped away the entire forward end of the frigate’s superstructure, hurling it over the side and shredding the tightly packed bodies laying on the foredeck with a storm of shrapnel.
The maimed were still arcing through the air from the concussion of the first explosion when the second Exocet gutted the helicopter hangar aft.
Neither of the ship-killers had traveled a great distance; the bulk of their propellant was unexpended. Flaming chunks of solid rocket fuel joined in conflagration with kerosene from the tanks of the Karel’s demolished Sea Lynx helicopter, setting her ablaze from bow to stern.
The handful of duty crewmen in the Karel’s engineering spaces were trapped screaming under a roof of flame.
And from below came the water. Aged hull plates yielded under the whiplash shock of the warheads. Welds fractured; seams gaped open. In a hundred places, the sea poured in, unchecked by the watertight doors and hatches that had been left open to promote a wisp of air circulation within the hull. The damage control men who should have been closing them lay dead amid the jagged, sizzling steel topside.
Slowly, groaning in her final agony, the Karel Satsuitubun capsized, far from the chill North Atlantic waters that had given her birth.
The meager handful of crew who yet lived were likely unaware that the Teluk Barau, the transport they had been escorting, was also dying in the night.
Initially at least, the Teluk had been more fortunate. One of the pair of Exocets fired at her had “gone stupid” and missed. Only a single missile found the LSM, striking her well aft. On fire and with her engines dead, she was finished as a ship. But there were many survivors, a few officers coherent enough to give orders and a little time to don life jackets and get the life rafts over the side.
Only there were too few life jackets and too few life rafts. The LSM had been catastrophically overloaded. The Titanic disaster would be repeated in the midst of the Banda Sea.
But here, in these tepid tropic waters, hypothermia would not be a concern. Here, death would take another form. Tuned into blood and turbulence in their realm, the sharks were already converging – not in hate or anger, for those were human concepts, but merely in hunger.
Suddenly, a searchlight slashed across the oil-smeared surface of the sea. A ragged cheer arose from the men lingering on the Teluk’s slanting deck or clustered around the floating rafts as illumination flares arced into the sky and burst alight, raining down their piercing metallic glare.
The chunky outline of the Rencong could be seen rapidly closing the range. Their comrades of the fleet coming to their rescue. Again, a hoarse cheer of gratitude and deliverance rang out.
The missile boat’s engines throttled back and she settled out of plane, swinging broadside to the sinking ship, clearing her firing arcs. In the flare light, maybe only one or two of the survivors noted that the gaping mouths of her Exocet tubes were charred and smoking.
Then the Rencong opened fire. The big 57mm Bofors forward, the 20mm Reinmetals amidships, the twin 40mm aft. For maybe three minutes, the autocannon raged and probed and slew until the screams had all died away and the riddled hulk of the Teluk Berau had slipped beneath the waters.
The engines of the Rencong, good reliable engines suffering from no mechanical difficulties, rumbled to life and the big missile boat accelerated smoothly away from the massacre site, bound to the northwest under new orders.
The first sickle-shaped fin cut the water, trailing a thin line of luminescence. Unconcerned with the treachery of men, the lords of the Banda Sea began reaping their harvest.
