Kirov II: Cauldron Of Fire (Kirov Series) (38 page)

They were running W/T silent, but he imagined that Admiral
Fraser had forsaken his role as an incognito observer on
Rodney
and was
now on the bridge there. He signaled his intentions by lamp to his sister ship,
asking her for her very best speed. When the lights winked back saying they
would not be late for tea, he knew his hunch about Fraser on the bridge had
been correct.

What was all this fuss and bother about, he thought. We’ll
have the matter in hand in two or three hours. No need to cancel major
operations and send Home Fleet rushing off like a chicken with its head cut
off. Yet what about this sighting report coming over from
Indomitable’ s
827 squadron. He did not know what to make of it.

Sub Lt.
William Walter Parsons, Fleet Air Arm
Observer, 827 Albacore Squadron off
Indomitable
was the lucky man who
spotted
Kirov
that day, and the sight of the ship gave him the willies.
As fate would have it, he had been up north with Force P a year ago for the planned
raid at Kirkenes with this very same 827 Squadron on
Victorious
at that
time. The appearance of a strange new German raider had forced Wake-Walker to
cancel the mission and enter that long, ill fated hunt. Oddly, the history once
recorded that he was to be shot down over Kirkenes and captured by the Germans,
but all that changed when this mysterious ship appeared in the Norwegian Sea,
though he never knew it.

The cancellation of the Kirkenes mission meant that he
would not spend those hard years in a cold German POW camp, or make that
torturous long march from Sagan, forced to push a wheel barrel for several
hundred miles on those frozen ice-gutted roads. His favorite ring would not be warped
by his gripping the arms on that wheel barrel, and it still fit his finger snugly
where he wore it every day—his lucky ring. Lucky indeed, for his squadron had
been hit particularly hard chasing after that raider, losing some very good men.
He was one of the very few that made back alive. He still remembered the faces
of the men who died, McKendrick, Turnbull, Bond, Greenslade, Miles… And the
awful memory of those rockets in the sky, like a wild pack of voracious sharks
swerving and swooping in on the planes…awful…

One look at the ship below, knifing through the dark sea
off the Spanish coast brought all this back with the sureness of an old memory
that might be summoned up by a sound, or a smell. And with it came a sense of
dread and foreboding. He was to shadow this ship, but something forced him to
pull on the yoke and put the plane into a turn, and get himself as far away
from this place as possible. He made his report and, some minutes later, he got
hold of himself, realizing he would have to circle round and re-acquire the
target.

“What’s gotten into you?” he said aloud to himself. That
ship, he knew, that’s what’s done it! I’ll not be a shirker, but I’ll be damned
if that’s a French battlecruiser. No sir. That looks all the world like… But it
couldn’t be here, could it? it couldn’t be…

It was.

Thankfully the fuel gauge on Parson’s plane allowed him to
slip away with a little dignity, and he soon turned south for
Indomitable
.
He had the odd feeling that he had been following a shadow, a nightmare, and
the farther away from that demon he got the more he felt his old self again.
When he landed on the carrier they would want him in the briefing room bang
away. What should he tell them? He reported to his Squadron Leader, Lt.
Commander Buchanon-Dunlop, and he spoke his mind.

“You weren’t with us back then,” he concluded, “and lucky
for it. But this ship out there looks for all the world like the one we fought
in the North Atlantic last August. Put most of my mates into the sea and stuck
a fire bomb into
Victorious
as well.”

Admiral
Syfret eventually received the opinion
through proper channels, but didn’t weigh it too heavily. Men get spooked on
these night operations, he knew. A case of the jitters before combat was
normal. At least the man knew his duty, held on to his contact, and got a good
read on her course and speed.

Parsons never knew that Fedorov had spared his life that
night by declining to fire on his plane. So he would go on to survive the war,
become a school teacher, and have grand children one day. Yet many in his 827
Squadron would not. They were already in the briefing room while the flight
engineers worked the torpedoes onto the planes below decks. He would not be
tasked to fly the strike mission, but would probably be up for battle damage
assessment later on that night. So he caught one of his mates as he came out of
the briefing room, tugging at his flight jacket.

“Have a care, Tom,” he said in a low voice. “Don’t bunch up
on this one. Get down real low, and spread your flight out nice and wide. Stay
down real low, and find any cover you can on the approach.”

It was the best advice Thomas Wales was to receive in his
life.

Force Z
pushed on, their course aiming for a point
some thirty nautical miles southwest of Cabo de la Gata. The latest sighting
reported that his quarry was moving extremely fast. At midnight they were some thirty-two
nautical miles apart, or sixty kilometers, and closing on that same distant
point. He sounded battle stations and the ship was trimmed for action, her big
guns loaded, the heavily armored turrets slowly turning toward the direction
they expected their adversary.

It was time for one last effort at settling the matter
amicably, and he had his radioman broadcast a demand to reduce speed at once
and prepare to be boarded by a British liaison officer. There was no response,
and so he folded his arms, shaking his head and had the signalman wink a
message to Admiral Fraser: “Contact will not heave to. Will commence firing as
soon as practicable. Please join in.”

The men in the crow’s nest with their high powered
binoculars would have the next say, and it would be a difficult sighting. Radar
seemed all fouled, and the operators reported they could get no signal returns
from any ship in the formation. So it would come down to the old fashioned
methods, he thought, a pair of sharp eyes behind the glass and well trained gun
crews. So be it. He had his quarry just where he wanted it, penned up against
the Spanish coastline and with little room to maneuver to their starboard side.
He knew he would not have the speed to get much under 20,000 meters as they
approached, but he could engage well before that. The target was fast, but it
would have to run for nearly an hour under his guns. The crescent moon had set
five hours earlier, so it was very dark. The French had picked a perfect time
to make their run, but if they could spot the enemy, he was confident his
gunners would do the rest.

He looked at his watch and gave an order. “Very well. W/T
silence lifted. Time to get a couple of watch dogs out in front to look for
this ship gentlemen. Send
Ashanti
, and
Tartar
. We’ll hold the
remaining escorts for the time being.” He wanted a couple of fast destroyers to
flush this rabbit out for his big guns, and the two ships soon broke formation
off his starboard quarter and accelerated rapidly. It was a little after one in
the morning when word came back that a ship had been sighted to their northeast.
Range was well out, but it was clear that something big was sailing just southwest
of Cat’s Cape, and moving too fast to be commercial traffic. Syfret decided to
send a more forceful message to this recalcitrant French ship. He knew his
first salvo would be well off the mark, but it would serve him well as a
proverbial shot across the bow before open hostilities ensued.

He selected A and B turrets, his foreword most guns, and
opened fire with just the centermost barrel in each turret. There was something
to be said for courtesy, even if this was war and deadly earnest business. And
the thought that he was giving them his middle finger amused him as well. If
the French returned his warning shots with a salvo of their own, then the bar
fight was on, and he had little doubts as to who would come out the better. He
noted that HMS
Rodney
had not fired, her dark shape tall and threatening
some 5000 yards in his wake. He waited, calm and confident, until spotters on his
lead destroyers caught the distant wash of white where his shells had fallen.
They radioed back to report all shots wide off the bow and long by several
thousand yards. It had begun.

Fedorov
heard the first shells rushing overhead and
their distant impact on the dark swells of the sea. He noted the time—01:10 hours
in the early morning of August 14, 1942. A sea battle was about to be fought
that never should have occurred. Men might die, perhaps on both sides, who
might have lived. It was a maddening thought. The whole notion of war itself
was a maddening thought, but here they were. His ship wanted sea lanes where
another ship forbade him to pass. He briefly considered turning about and
heading back to the Balearics, but knew that would only postpone this
inevitable engagement. There was nothing left to do but fight.

In Karpov’s mind the equation was simpler. One side or
another must give way, and it would not be
Kirov
. He looked at Fedorov,
saw him waiting, an anguished look on his face, and then said. “I believe we
are under attack, Mister Fedorov. We’ve had our dance with Varenka and your
Operation Gauntlet has now begun. Let’s see what they have for us after the
ball.”

Fedorov caught the reference to the famous short story by
Tolstoy where a man had been bemused at a ball by the beauty and charm of a
lovely woman named Varenka. Later that evening he walked alone and stumbled
upon a military discipline where an escaped Tartar was being forced to run the
gauntlet, and the punishment was being administered by Varenka’s father, a
colonel in the army. It was cruel, and merciless as the soldiers were ordered
to beat the man ever harder, and it shook his faith in human compassion so
completely that he lost his ardor for the man’s daughter. He claimed this
chance encounter had changed his life forever, and something died in him with
each withering blow on the poor renegade’s shoulders and back.

Now
Kirov
was the renegade, a fugitive Tartar about
to run the gauntlet of fire and steel. For the next hour the ship would be in
the gravest danger, well within range of those lethal 16 inch guns. A chance
encounter, a planned encounter, it mattered not which. In the end it was a
madness at sea that would change the lives of every man present forever.

“Mister Fedorov?” Karpov prodded him again.

“That was just a warning shot,” he said quietly.

“Yes, well it would be nice to reply in kind, but I don’t
think we can afford to waste the ammunition. I suggest we lock weapon systems
on the target and give them a more direct warning. We have fourteen Moskit IIs
remaining. Six should do the job.”

“These are not the Italians,” said Fedorov, deflated but
coming round to the realization that this was a choice he had made hours and
hours ago. Now the time was here, and they had to fight. He turned to Karpov
and gave an order. “I want to put one P-900 on each of the two battleships
immediately following their next salvo.”

“P-900s? They are very slow.”

“Yes, but I want them to
see
the missiles coming.
See them clearly.” He had asked for the sub-sonic cruise missiles instead of
the more lethal supersonic Moskit Sunburns. The P-900s were slow, but still
dangerous with a 400 kilogram warhead and pinpoint accuracy.

“Very well—Mister Samsonov, ready on the P-900 system, two
missiles, target your primaries.”

Samsonov could clearly read the positions of the two big
battleships on his display. He moved a light pen, tapped each one, then selected
his weapon system and keyed “ready.”

“Sir, two P-900 missiles keyed to targets and ready.”

They waited in the stillness. The satin of the moonless
night seemed to flow in all around them, enveloping them with a suspended sense
of profound uncertainty. Their faces were illuminated by the green luminescence
of the radar screens, eyes searching the black silky night, as if they thought
some horrible beast, a sleek panther, might leap upon them from the darkness at
any moment. Then the distant horizon seemed to explode with fire and violence.
Seconds later they heard a loud boom, thunder-like in the distance.

Nelson
and
Rodney
had fired in earnest.

Fedorov shrugged, then looked at Karpov, a grim expression
on his face. “Give them a little shove on the shoulder, Captain.”

“Aye, sir.”

Chapter 29

Syfret
had never seen anything quite like it. The darkness
lit up with distant flame and smoke, far off on the edge of the night. He could
see something bright in the sky, arcing up, and then he heard a low, distant
growl.

“What do you make of that?” he said to a Senior Lieutenant,
pointing at the fiery light, which grew more prominent, and closer with each
passing second. The slow approach had exactly the effect Fedorov wanted. Every
man on the bridge seemed transfixed by the oncoming glow. They had seen burning
planes plummeting into the sea at night, but this was nothing like that. It had
a slow, purposeful movement, rising up and up, then leveling off to begin a
gradual descent. Down it came, a bright burning tail behind it illuminating a
trail of ghostly smoke. It was a plane, some thought—poor bloke going into the
drink at last. Probably one of our search planes that got in too close.

But it wasn’t a plane…It
wasn’t
a plane! It suddenly
seemed to leap at them with a mighty roar, a fiery dart aimed right at the
heart of the ship. The P-900s had ignited their ramjet afterburners to make their
final run into the target at mach three, but by that time every crewman with
eyes out to sea had been transfixed by the spectacle.