Taiwan Strait
DAWN OVER A tropical ocean can be a magnificent sight. It can creep up on you, grey and mysterious, only for the sky to burst suddenly into an explosion of pinks, yellows and eggshell blues. But dawn that morning, for the crew of HMS Daring, was not such a day.
For those on watch on the bridge of the Royal Navy’s Type 45 air defence destroyer, bleary-eyed as they nursed their cups of tea and coffee, dawn was a singularly unspectacular event. While they steamed northwards past the Tropic of Cancer the night leached away into a grey half-light of drizzle and low cloud. The Captain had his own personalized mug, a farewell gift from his previous command in the Gulf, a little memento he took with him everywhere. Up and dressed since 0530, Commander Ross Blane had a lot on his mind. Following the action of two days earlier, when a Chinese warship, Lhasa, had fired a missile practically across their bows, fresh orders had come in from PJHQ at Northwood.
It was the job of Britain’s Permanent Joint Headquarters, on the north-west edge of London, to execute the military decisions taken by government. Those on the receiving end of these orders were often unaware of just how arbitrary was the way in which these decisions were sometimes arrived at. It could be a result of a personal whim of the Secretary of State, a five-minute phone call with their opposite number in Washington, or even a curt WhatsApp message sent by a prime minister in a hurry. But that was not the case today. Urgent and serious three-way conversations had already taken place between Whitehall, Washington and Canberra following the Chinese Navy raid on Lieyu Island. NATO’s North Atlantic Council had convened an emergency session. The vetoing of the French-sponsored UN resolution condemning Beijing’s actions had only resulted in an even greater Western resolve to deter any further incursions. It was hastily agreed that the current tri-nation AUKUS Task Group should divert from its intended route up to the East China Sea and instead take up a defensive posture off the north-west coast of Taiwan. Nobody was under any illusions this would stop an invasion force coming from the mainland. It was simply a stopgap measure, a deterrent tripwire until more forces arrived in-theatre.
Daring was on defence watches, a state of readiness just below action stations but ready to move there at a moment’s notice. Down in the Ops Room they were all in dark blue coveralls with their white anti-flash kit near at hand as they sat at their consoles, looking intently at the screens and talking quietly into their headset microphones. Standing up and in charge was Sam Glazeby, the Principal Warfare Officer, having just begun his six-hour watch. He was now moving this billion-pound-plus state-of-the-art warship into the position she’d been tasked to take up.
‘Officer of the Watch,’ he said into the ship’s internal comms system. ‘Come hard left 270.’
On the bridge, the OOW, standing next to the Captain, issued his own orders, steering the ship where it needed to go. ‘Port 30 altering 270,’ he said. ‘Both levers ahead five zero.’
Up on deck, Daring had her weapons systems – her missile launchers, her 4.5-inch Mk8 naval gun and her suite of machine-guns and cannons – uncovered, crewed and made ready by sailors in coveralls and full anti-flash gear. Her lone helicopter, an Augusta Wildcat armed with Sea Venom anti-ship missiles, was prepped and ready to fly at fifteen minutes’ notice. But it was the unseen things that gave this ship such a formidable capability, like her Sampson multi-function air-tracking radar, housed in the great pyramidal superstructure that towered over the deck and capable of detecting and tracking hundreds of targets simultaneously.
At 0700 hours, with the whole ship’s company of 190 sailors awake, Sam Glazeby gave a general broadcast pipe to update everyone with the latest situation report.
‘PWO speaking. Sitrep. We are maintaining our sector seventeen miles west of Taiwan. Air and surface warnings remain yellow.’
Glazeby, like several of the more experienced hands onboard, was already a veteran of active operations when the ship had been placed on defence watches. Playing cat-and-mouse with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Navy in the Strait of Hormuz, for example, or being shadowed by Russian warships in the icy seas off the north coast of Norway.
This morning, with the ship’s helicopter ranged on deck at alert fifteen, he had one of her crew posted on lookout, standing beside the aircraft watching astern with a pair of binoculars. Lieutenant Sasha Dalziel was a qualified Wildcat pilot, passing out top of her course with 705 Naval Air Squadron at RAF Shawbury, just outside Shrewsbury. She was also an experienced observer, methodically scanning the waves behind Daring’s wake with a practised eye. It was twenty-five minutes into her watch when she suddenly stopped in mid-sweep. Something was sticking out of the water around 2500 metres off the stern. Something that should not have been there. Lieutenant Dalziel did not need a second look: she knew exactly what it was and what she needed to do. She grabbed the microphone attached to the bulkhead beside her and made the call to the bridge: ‘Bridge – Flight Deck – submarine periscope sighted – green 140, range near.’
Daring was being shadowed by an unidentified submarine.