Kirov II: Cauldron Of Fire (Kirov Series) (32 page)

“Then why
waste time,” said Karpov. “They may be ahead when we draw near, but from that
moment our speed is decisive. We will overtake them and leave them in our wake,
but to do this we need sea room if we are to stay outside the range of these
sixteen inch guns you talk about all the time. Let’s get the ship moving and
see if we can win this race!”

“My
inclination is to wait,” said Fedorov, and he immediately saw Karpov’s
frustration increase a notch.

“Alright,
Fedorov… I learned where our U-boat friend was after I came on duty. Hiding in
that little bay, eh? And Nikolin told me you had the KA-40 right on top of the
bastard and then just ordered it back to the ship. Alright,” he held up a hand,
head cocked to one side, “I let that pass. I understand why you decided to let
him go. In fact, we saw the boat on radar later when it surfaced, and I could
have finished it myself. I just didn’t want to waste a missile. But
this
—this
is something entirely different. If we have a chance to outrun these British
ships, then we should take it. All we have to do is put enough damage on them
to slow them down. They won’t be able to touch us, and we’ll win through. What
are you waiting for?”

Fedorov
looked at him trying to think his way through this. “But can we really use
measured force here? It will be close, Captain. If we have any further
difficulties—an air strike, another submarine, a mechanical problem, we will
not get past them in the Alboran Sea.”

“But we
should at least try,” said Karpov, though he could see the reluctance and
hesitation in Fedorov’s eyes. He pressed him further.

“What do you
want to do—go to Volsky with this? How much time will that take, an hour? Two
hours? And by then we will have lost our chance.
You
are captain of this
ship now, Fedorov. I know this was the last thing you ever expected when that honor
came to you, but Volsky is asleep in the sick bay and you are standing on the
bridge. Now I have given you my best tactical advice, and I will follow and
support any course you take here, but think carefully, Fedorov. Do you honestly
think the British will negotiate with us? How much do we tell them? How many
questions will they have before they are satisfied? You think they will just
calmly agree to let us sail through the Straits of Gibraltar and go merrily on
our way?
Think,
Fedorov. You know these men. You have studied them in
your history books all your life. Look what they are doing this very moment to
the south of us, risking half their fleet to save five merchant ships for
Malta. That tells you everything you will ever need to know about them. What
are they going to do when we come sailing up to Gibraltar with a white flag
flying and ask them to kindly step aside? What did they do at Mers-el-Kebir?
What did they do against
Bismarck?
Negotiate?”

Fedorov
lowered his head, beset with what he knew to be the truth in the Captain’s hard
words. That was one thing about Karpov—he was a grim realist. Fedorov had
indeed studied this war, and the men who fought it, for many, many years. They
were an entirely different breed. He remembered how he had tried to explain
this to Zolkin in the sick bay when he was hoping to prevent Karpov from
attacking the American fleet. And now Karpov was making the very same
argument—that these men were of a different mettle, they were exceptional, that
they would not hesitate or equivocate or accept anything less than complete
victory. They would stand, stalwart, implacable at Gibraltar and bar the way.
They would become the very things they named their ships at sea:
Indomitable,
Victorious, Furious
. This was the British Empire. This was the Royal Navy.
These were men of character, backbone and unflinching courage. They would not
give way in the niceties of discussion. They were going to want to know what
Kirov
was, where she came from, and so very much more, and they would not be
satisfied until they had their answer. Karpov was right, but now that he stood
at the edge of it, he could not decide what to do.

The captain
saw his hesitation, and spoke one last time. “Fedorov, if we negotiate then
they
will decide our fate, but don’t you understand? If we act now then the choice
is ours—we become the very thing we hope to win from them with reasons and
arguments—
we become fate itself
, Fedorov, and the future is ours to
decide.” He had given his last argument. Now he stood up straight, took a deep
breath and looked Fedorov in the eye, as an equal this time, waiting.

Fedorov
thought he knew what they had to do, what they
should
do. Karpov’s words
were a challenge, a gauntlet thrown down that could change everything from this
moment forward. He had been so certain in his mind before, but now it was
coming down to something else entirely. What
must
they do to save
themselves, and save the future intact to have a world to live in again? Could
he find a way to achieve both?

He decided.

Chapter 23

Orlov
sulked in his quarters, still burning with the
humiliation forced upon him by Troyak, and thinking how he might even the score
one day. No one put their hands on him like that. No one! He was Gennadi Orlov,
Chief of the Boat! At least he once was, after years and years of slogging up
through the ranks. Now he was busted back to a stinking lieutenant, along with
all the other stinking lieutenants, and his recent demotion still weighed
heavily upon him. More than that, he hated the fact that Karpov still held
forth in a command role on the bridge while he had been discarded to the aft maintenance
bay, and put under Troyak with his Marine detachment. He wasn’t used to taking
orders from anyone junior to himself, either, and the thought that dog eared
Fedorov was actually acting Captain of the ship galled him as well.

His only satisfaction since his release from the brig had
been the brief measure of face he had won back by leading the effort to
jettison the burning KA-40, though it had been short lived. His old habits of
bullying and deriding the men in the ranks soon grew even worse now, almost as
if he needed to have someone there in the pecking order below him to make him
feel stronger, better, more privileged, even if he knew his career and life had
gone to shit. The brief respect he had won from the other men that day had
quickly been overshadowed by his innate bad temper and disagreeable
disposition, and the others seemed to shun him now, seeing that everywhere
Orlov went some kind of trouble eventually followed.

He still blamed Karpov for his misfortunes, and had some
small gratification when he had eventually cornered the devious captain outside
the mess hall and put a fist in his belly, but he doubted he would get away
with anything like that again. He should have killed him, then and there, he
thought.

Yes, I could have choked the living breath out of that
weasel of a man, and left him dead right there outside the mess hall, he
thought. No…That would have been another mistake, eh? Too many men saw what you
did when you spilled that drink on his jacket. It would have come back to you
too quickly, and you would be rotting in the brig again.

He was sitting at his small desk, thankful at least that
they had not yet taken away his officer’s quarters. On the desk before him he
stared at a well oiled pistol he had been cleaning between swigs from a small
flask of vodka that he had hidden away in his locker. His life was going to be
one miserable step and fetch it after another now, with Troyak hovering over
him like a shadow every minute of the day. He was not a trained soldier. He had
never gone through combat drills. Why did Volsky stick him here with the
Marines? He knew why, and it only soured his mood further as he ruminated. It
only made him feel more useless when he was assigned to the engineering
section, and issued a tool box instead of a rifle and helmet. Now he was
supposed to become a dutiful grease monkey and rig out all the helicopters, and
that was bullshit too.

What would he ever find again on this damn ship but the drudgery
of daily work and menial servitude to skunks like Karpov and choir boys like
Fedorov? And now any time he said anything there would be Troyak, that bastard
Siberian, rock like, immovable, fearsome. He was going to have to do something
about it, but he did not yet know what it was.

As he stared at the pistol in his hand he realized how
stupid Volsky and the others had been. They never even bothered to search his
cabin! What, did they think he was just going to fall in line with the
Mishmanny
and
Starshini
down here and eat shit for the rest of his life? Oh, no,
he was going to do something, that much was certain, and as he slipped one
bullet after another into the ammo clip, an idea came to him at last. It was as
if his own wretched condition had brought him to the edge of a cliff in his
mind, and his sorry, decrepit soul had finally thrown down a gauntlet, daring
him to jump…. daring him to jump… Yes! That was it!

Yes! To hell with Troyak, and Karpov and Fedorov and fat
Volsky too. To hell with them all. To hell with this damn ship and everyone on
it! He pushed home the ammo clip with a hard snap, holding the pistol in one
hand, and the vodka in the other. The loose ends of a dark and exciting idea
were milling about in his head, like the ragged strips of the bandages on his
hands, and he finally knew what to do.

Admiral Syfret
looked out on the remnants of Force
Z, still harried by reports coming in from the action he was leaving behind. It
galled him to cut and run like this. Still, he held fast to the thought of
those brave men fighting their way around Cape Bon, and down past Pantelleria
with those infernal E-Boats nipping at them every step of the way and those
vulture-like Stukas overhead, screeching in on them as they dove for the kill.

He looked at the time, weary already, and it was only noon.
His haggard ships were already past Algiers, and dangerously close to the coast
in his mind, but he had received further cables advising him to take the most
direct route possible to Gibraltar, and make all haste. Thus far they had been
snooped out by a few high flying reconnaissance planes, and no doubt they’ve
had a look at my three aircraft carriers to give the buggers second thoughts
about launching an air strike on his ships.

What in the world was going on back at the Rock, he still
wondered? Did Fraser over on
Rodney
know anything about it? He had half
a mind to get him on the wireless and have a talk, but as Fraser was the Deputy
Commander of Home Fleet itself, and traveling incognito, he discarded that
idea.

Nelson
and
Rodney
, were the heart of his task
force, making all the speed they could given
Rodney’s
dodgy boilers and
steering gear. He reckoned it at eighteen knots, which would put Force Z off
Oran at 18:00 hours that evening. Thereafter the danger from enemy air strikes
should diminish as he came within the patrol range of friendly aircraft from
Gibraltar to augment the fighters he still had with his carriers. The Fleet Air
Arm had lost twelve fighters in combat, and another sixteen went into the sea
when HMS
Eagle
went down. Six more were on the
Argus
, which was
already back in Gibraltar.

That left him with 36 Sea Harrier and Martlet fighters, and
another 42 Albacore strike aircraft spread out among his three remaining
carriers.
Victorious
had also been lucky today. The Italians slipped in
a pair of fighters that were mistaken for British Sea Harriers and not fired
upon as they approached the carrier. When they suddenly peeled off and dove to
make bomb runs, one fighter scored a near miss, while the other planted a bomb
square of the ship’s forward armored flight deck. It took a good bounce, but
did not go off, and so he was lucky to have these ships intact and ready for
further operations.

He stared out the view screen, down the long ponderous
foredeck of
Nelson
, her three big main batteries all mounted forward of
the bridge. This was the only battleship class in the fleet where that was the
case—all guns forward, no guns aft. You would think the designers thought to
make this a pursuit ship, he mused, though they neglected to give her anything
near the speed required for that.

He squinted at the hapless destroyer
Ithuriel
off
his starboard quarter. Her captain had been a bit too rash when they encountered
an Italian sub surfaced near the task force, and he went charging in to ram the
damn thing, disabling the sub but also mangling his bow in the process. Syfret
took a dim view of that. What? Don’t these men realize that we’ve put deck guns
on their destroyers? There had been two ramming incidents on this operation,
and he was quite unhappy with both. He would have words with this Captain
Crichton when they got back to Gibraltar.

The bridge phone rang and a midshipman indicated that there
was a call from HMS
Rodney
on the wireless. That was odd, he thought as
he went to the wireless room to see about it. To his great surprise, it was
Deputy Commander of the Home Fleet, Admiral Fraser.

“Good day, Neville” came the voice. “Sorry to interrupt
lunch, but there’s been a development.”

“I assumed as much,” said Syfret.

“Yes, well I haven’t got all the details yet, but
Admiralty contacted me directly and asked me to brief you. Hush, hush and all.
Now I won’t say anything more on the wireless, but if you would be kind enough
to let Rodney come up on your starboard side, I’ll swim on over for tea and
fill you in. And, oh yes, after this we’re to lock everything down and go W/T
silent.”