At 2 o'clock in the morning on June 6, 1860, the sky of the entire Jiangsu and Zhejiang regions was full of faint dark clouds, and the moon had been completely obscured.

Usually, in the dark of night in this weather, even if there is no wind and waves, there are generally no ships going to sea.

This is because in this era, the means of navigation are still dominated by the sextant, and the sextant is greatly affected by the weather, if the weather is bad, such as overcast clouds, there is no bright celestial body as a reference, it will strictly affect the judgment of navigation.

Therefore, if you are not sailing in the sea, then in such a dimly lit night, most of the ships will be anchored in the harbor and do not come out, waiting for the dawn or the weather to improve before going to sea.

However, in a small private port in Tangjiawan, Pinghu County, Jiaxing Prefecture, there is a fleet quietly going to sea.

Normally the fleet goes out to sea in the dark, especially in this kind of night when the light is very bad, and it is very strange that this fleet is very strange, because all the ships in the whole fleet are not lit at all, and all of them sail in the dark like ghosts.

The reason for this is that these ships have night vision equipment, which allows the crew to see the surrounding sea conditions with the help of night vision equipment even if they don't need to light the lights, plus radar and radiolocators, which allows these five ships to sail accurately in the sea even if they are not lit in the dark.

That's right, this fleet that quietly sailed in the middle of the night was a fleet carrying the female frog special combat team, and the purpose of their trip was to go to Zhoushan Port in Dinghai County to carry out a surprise attack and blow up all kinds of ships moored in the port to serve the British and French forces.

For this operation, Li Yongji took great pains to organize personnel to train qualified frogmen and let them learn how to use modern equipment to conduct underwater operations in the fastest possible time, but also to find out how to find out the situation in Dinghai County and find out the information of the combined fleet of the British and French forces.

In terms of training, it is easy to say, after all, there are personnel and equipment, as long as the training intensity is increased and the order is carried out, it is more troublesome in terms of intelligence, because after those foreigners broke through Dinghai, they blocked the nearby sea and did not allow Chinese ships to approach, which shows that the other side still attaches great importance to secrecy work.

In the end, Li Yongji had to take advantage of Wall's connections to rent a steam sailing ship named Mermaid in English from an American merchant in Shanghai, and went to Dinghai to find out the truth in the name of transporting supplies.

This process of probing the truth is also very skillful.

First of all, it is to hire foreign merchant ships for the whole ship. That is to say, the captain, first mate, boatswain and others on the mermaid merchant ship are mainly foreigners who are Americans, and only some of the coolie sailors are Chinese, so as to dispel the doubts of the top management of the Anglo-French combined fleet anchored in Dinghai to the greatest extent.

Secondly, provide some goods that foreigners can't refuse! The supplies on the Mermaid are not dispensable ordinary things, but tobacco and alcohol that Li Yongji got from later generations. The cigarettes are mainly cigarettes without filters, and the alcohol is mainly beer. These two things are the favorite things of foreigners at this time, and in terms of craftsmanship and taste, these two things can be called high-end luxuries of this era, comparable to Havana cigars, and the middle and high-level officers of foreigners liked it at once after tasting the taste of the samples, and saw that the captain and crew were basically foreigners, and the price was not expensive, so the supply ship was allowed to come and go.

When you see this, you can understand that the foreign crew of the Mermaid is normal, they are not spies, and they also think that this is a normal business transaction, but the Chinese coolies on board are different, they are all spies!

Although the Mermaid could only anchor in a designated place after arriving in Dinghai, and the Chinese were not allowed to disembark from the ship, this could not stop the infiltration of these Chinese spies with ulterior motives.

You know, although Dinghai County was occupied by the British and French forces, but it was originally the territory of the Qing Dynasty, itself had many Chinese, after the British and French forces occupied Dinghai, because most of the local Chinese were poor, out of various factors such as health and influence, they did not burn and loot these Chinese, but established a quarantine area, separating foreigners from Chinese, and the two sides did not interfere with each other.

Foreigners look at Chinese, just like Chinese look at foreigners, they are all the same look when they don't look at them, so the Chinese spies on board can easily sneak off the ship, sneak into Dinghai, and then change their clothes, and immediately become local residents of Dinghai, and foreigners can't tell the difference at all.

However, it is easy to infiltrate Dinghai, but it is difficult to get out, after all, the entire coast is blocked, but these spies do not need to go to sea to deliver news at all, because they carry with them the radio and telescopes that Li Yongji got from modern times, so they only need to wander around, and then report the information they see and hear to the portable radio station and report it directly to Li Yongji.

These radios are all radios, which can be charged by hand-cranked electricity, so the electricity is not worried, and this thing does not need to learn any Morse code, just talk directly like making a phone call, so these spies do not need to have too advanced technology, as long as there is something to say, which greatly reduces the difficulty of training spies.

The British and French forces were also, after the army arrived in Dinghai, they thought it was a lonely island, and blocked the coast, so they didn't have any sense of secrecy at all, and those Chinese spies who had mixed up didn't even need to do anything, they only needed to observe with a telescope on a slightly farther high ground, and they could see the situation in the entire camp and the port clearly.

Therefore, with these spies carrying high-tech equipment, it is difficult to say in too much detail, but where the camp of the British and French forces is, where the main anchorage points of the warships are, and even the general number of the coalition forces, what the military discipline is, the usual living time, etc., Li Yongji is very clear.

After that, things were easy to do, Li Yongji trained the members of the female frog special combat team to familiarize them with modern equipment, and on the other hand, he always paid attention to the information on the Dinghai side, in order to keep abreast of the dynamics of the British and French forces.

When Li Yongji learned from the spy that the land forces of the British and French forces began to assemble and transport supplies to the ship one after another, he knew that the fleet of the British and French forces was going north.

In this way, when Li Yongji learned that the British and French troops had boarded the ship one after another, he quickly organized an assault force to carry out the assault plan that had been rehearsed many times earlier.

Li Yongji was not afraid that the fleet would run away, after all, such a large fleet, even if the troops boarded the ship, they could not set sail immediately, but they had to stay on the ship for a while, get used to it, and then set sail in order when all aspects were ready.

The composition of the fleet for the assault on the combined Anglo-French fleet was also quite peculiar, with three modernized bird boats, in addition to the two 170-ton sightseeing submarines in a semi-submersible state, especially those with external propeller thrusters.

Not to mention the submarines, as for the three bird boats, they are all sea ships with a displacement of more than 210 tons, also known as Green Eyebrows, which is one of the four major sea ships in China and the only remaining main ship in Mojia Village. But when you look at the appearance of these three ships, especially after seeing those gun emplacements, you will understand that this is obviously not for fishing, but for fighting. In fact, these three ships are all professional equipment used by the people of Mojia Village as pirates to steal things, and they are also their housekeepers, there were more similar ships in the past, and there were even Dafu ships, but after the naval battle a year ago, there were only these three bird ships. Naturally, when Mojia Village collectively surrendered to Li Yongji, these three ships were naturally dominated by Li Yongji.

Although judging from the distance from Tangjiawan to Zhoushan Island, the two submarines can go back and forth two or three times with full fuel at a time, but in order to prevent accidents, plus the tonnage of the submarine is too small, minus the personnel, it will not be able to load much explosives, so it is still necessary to add some supply ships as insurance, and the task of this supply ship was handed over to these three bird ships by Li Yongji.

In order to allow the bird boat to keep up with the speed of the submarine and not to lag behind, the three bird boats have been transformed, in addition to the installation of modern navigation equipment and night vision equipment, but also the installation of external propeller thrusters, which allows the three bird boats to run out of 11 knots without sails, only by propeller thrusters, faster than the speed of submarines, if the sails are added, and then downwind, the hatchback combination can run out of 19 knots of high speed, in this era, it is definitely the fastest ship under the same tonnage.

With these three extremely fast and tonnage bird ships as supply ships, plus the two submarines that serve as the main attack mission, as long as the luck is not too bad, the success rate is still very high to destroy those wooden sailing ships in Dinghai Harbor.

When Li Yongji decided to let this mixed formation decide to attack, the sky became dark, which increased the stealth of the surprise attack of this task force, and in order to make the attack operation as successful as possible, plus he also wanted to see the results with his own eyes, so Li Yongji decided to personally participate in this assault activity and command this assault operation that he called "Huohuhuo" nearby.

Of course, for his safety, Li Yongji did not enter the sightseeing submarine, but stayed on one of the largest bird boats, and at the same time he also brought a guard platoon, a mortar squad, and Mojia Village also sent a lot of the best water players to follow, just in case.

After all, after more than a month of getting along, the people in Mojia Village already have a great sense of identity with Li Yongji, and they don't want Li Yongji, who brings them a new life and new hope, to have an accident.

In this way, a mixed fleet of three bird ships and two submarines, in the middle of the night when the moon was dark and the stars were scarce, with the support of modern equipment, quietly left the port without lights, and rushed to their destination - Zhoushan Port with excitement and anxiety!