Kirov II: Cauldron Of Fire (Kirov Series) (39 page)

 In they came and Syfret to one step back, his hand
reaching for a rail to steady himself as the fire in the sky came thundering in
and crashed right below the tall armored conning tower of his ship. The
concussion of the explosion shattered every window on the bridge, sending glass
showering over the deck, but it had not struck high enough to cause any real
damage there. Instead it came in low and rifled into the number three C turret
where it had exploded with terrible flame and smoke.

It was all the Admiral could do to remain standing. Two
midshipman were thrown to the deck. Black smoke poured in and choked every man
among them and Syfret instinctively crouched on his haunches, as much to steady
himself as to find better air.

“Mother of God!” he coughed. They hit us on the first
bloody shot! But with what? Then all the rumors, and sailor’s stories he had
quashed as nonsense for the past year came home to him—
rockets
, lighting
fast, with deadly precision. Rockets fired by a dark, dangerous ship that
slipped through the night like a phantom.

It was here! This was nothing the French could have
imagined or ever put to sea.
Strasbourg
had 13 inch guns, but this was
something else entirely—no ripple of bright enemy fire in the distance; no sign
of water splashed as her rounds came in. It was here! This was the ship Fraser
had warned him of—the ship that put
Repulse
in her grave and blotted the
side armor of both
King George V
and
Prince of Wales
. And now it
had stuck its fist in his face and drawn first blood.

His amazement suddenly gave way to a new emotion.
Nelson
had been a proud but plodding ship in her years of service. She had foolishly
run aground on Hamilton's Shoal in 1934, watched fast German cruisers and
destroyers dance around her in the North Sea, ever beyond her grasp. She was
nearly sunk by three German torpedoes near the Orkney’s, but miraculously
spared when all three failed to explode, then she blundered in to a mine off
Loch Ewe. Most recently she had been laid up by an Italian torpedo, returning
to service only in May of that very year. In all these actions her one great
liability had been her ponderously slow speed and sluggish maneuverability. But
never had any ship dared to put hands on her as this one just had.

Syfret stood up, no longer amazed, but angry now. He was standing
in the heavily armored conning tower, with steel plate over a foot thick on
every side, one of the most heavily protected citadels on any ship in the
world. Yet he disdained his armored castle and rushed to the weather bridge to
see if he could get a look at the damage.

C turret had been knocked about, and the concussion of the
hit had probably killed or disabled men on one side of the turret. The barbette
was black as tar and licked by flame, which had spread to engulf two lifeboats
on the other side of the ship. The turrets leftmost gun of three was inclined
upward like a metal finger, still pointing at the smoky contrail of the missile.
But the turret was even more heavily armored than his own citadel, a full 16.5
inches thick, and by god, he saw the guns begin to slowly rotate to re-train on
the target, its remaining two barrels adjusting their elevation, and he knew
there were men still alive and fighting in there, though the heat from the
flames that still broiled on one side of the massive turret must be unbearable.
He looked astern to see that
Rodney
had also been struck, a little lower
amidships where much of the blow had been taken by her heavy side armor. There
was a fire, but it did not look serious and all her guns appeared to be in good
order.

“Damn you, sir!” he shouted at the distant, unseen foe, and
rushed back into the citadel with an order. “Get the range, by God. Ready on A
and B Turrets.”

Down in the guts of the ship men were feverishly receiving
optical sighting reports and working the fire control boxes, or FCBs as they
were called. They were cranking levers to set elevation, gun deflection, range,
gun training, and also sliding precision rulers over tables to calculate wind
deflection. There were dials to set the estimated target speed and bearing, gyros
to read variations in the roll of the ship, measures to calculate the ballistic
height of the target and a line of sight transmitter. Within the box, wires and
cables connected all these dials, gauges and levers to try and make sense,
though to any untrained eye the contents of the box looked more like the
workings of a Swiss watch. There were metal plates etched with millimeter hash
marks, azimuth conversion gears, oil motors whirring to move levers and
flanges, speed governors spinning, fuze clocks for firing intervals, and even
heating elements to dissipate moisture and keep the system dry.

Other men were sighting from their gun director posts and
shouting information through voice pipes to the men who worked at the FCBs. The
controlling officer manned a telephone to the bridge. Still others were
squinting through telescopes and slowly turning hand wheels to fine tune their
settings. While it all seemed very precise, it was basically a mechanical
guessing machine. It was a team effort, with range takers, line of sight
finders, elevation directors, heightfinders, a collective synergy of human
eyes, heads and mechanical elements which took a long minute to reach a
solution while the crews in the gun turrets were seeing to the loading of the
massive shells and propellant charges. It made very well educated guesses in
the end, but was wrong more often than not, and by a wide measure.

When
Nelson’s
sister ship HMS
Rodney
engaged
the
Bismarck
, she had taken three salvos and fifteen minutes to get her
first hit, and that was at dawn, with a range of about 20,000 yards. Here the range
was greater, and it was a night action with Syfret’s ships initially relying on
forward spotters in his two sheep dogs,
Ashanti
and
Tartar
. He
knew it would take at least five salvos before they got the range, and perhaps
even more, and he hoped he had the time before this demon slipped from his
grasp.

“Give them bloody hell!” Syfret yelled at the top of his
voice, commanding the whole process from the bridge. “Shoot!”

Seconds later the whole ship shook with the kick of the
massive guns. Anything on the bridge that was not riveted down went clattering
across plotting tables and rattling to the deck. The last loose shards of glass
in the viewports were shaken free and the binnacle rattled and vibrated with
the concussion, which was basically just a controlled explosion gripped in the
tight steel cylinder of the gun barrel. It did indeed look like hell when the
fire and smoke belched from the yawning muzzle of the guns, and the scream of
the heavy shells as they went wailing away towards the enemy was frighteningly
loud. Now he could just make their adversary out on the far horizon, lit by the
fire of their own rocketry as the range slowly diminished.

They wanted a fight, with the Royal Navy, he thought. By
God, I’ll give them one!

The salvo
that had sent
Kirov’s
P-900
missiles flying was again long, but frightening as the shells whooshed overhead
and fell into the sea, sending tall white plumes of seawater up into the air.
Karpov saw the missiles strike home, smiling when each one ignited in a
fireball, dead amidships.

“Two hits!” he said.

“Come right, fifteen,” said Fedorov. “Begin evasive
maneuvers.”

“That will take us right into their last salvo,” said
Karpov.

“Exactly,” said Fedorov excitedly. “We have the speed and
maneuverability to chase salvos here. They’ll be correcting that long shot based
on their read on our heading and speed. Their next shots should fall off our
port side and short.”

He wanted to use
Kirov’s
great advantage in speed to
make it more difficult for the British battleships to accurately range on the ship.
They saw the night ripped apart by another salvo, a second ship behind it
firing as well, and the thought that there were now at least twelve, and
possibly eighteen massive shells heading their way gave him a chill.
Kirov
was a middleweight champion with a merciless jab, a strong right arm, and
terrible speed. The ships she was facing were big, bruising heavyweights,
lumbering slow but with tree trunk arms and hammers in their fists. They only
needed one punch to connect to stagger their opponent and possibly decide the
bout.

Karpov’s words returned to him again. What did they have
for us after the ball? No, thought Fedorov, the dance is not yet over. We have
to move, maneuver, and one glance at his navigation plot told him they needed
to do everything possible to get out of range of these guns.

The two salvoes fell in a long line off the port side as he
had predicted, better placed now, and ranging nearer. He changed heading quickly,
turning into the salvos, the ship’s powerful turbines frothing the sea in her
wake as
Kirov
ran at full battle speed, all of 32 knots.

“Shall I finish them?” Karpov asked, the elation of battle
in his eyes. He was leaning over Samsonov, waiting to make his next missile
selection.

“Finish them?” said Fedorov. “They’re just getting started,
Captain. I’m afraid we only angered those two monsters out there. Speed is what
we need now. Speed and a quick hand on the helm.”

“Yes, well I suggest we hit them again, and this time with
the Moskit-IIs.”

“Fight your battle,” Karpov. “I will maneuver the ship.”

Karpov nodded, glad to have a freer hand, and turned to
Victor Samsonov. “Give me a salvo of four Moskit IIs…” He had suddenly noticed
two the secondary contacts edging closer to the ship on Samsonov’s screen.
“Those must be destroyers,” he said quickly. “They are at 15,000 meters. Engage
them with the 152mm deck guns. Then put two missiles on each primary.”

“Aye, sir!” Samsonov went to work, feeding commands to the
ship’s weapons systems. In contrast to the labor of the British at their gun
directors and FCBs,
Kirov
’s systems were lighting fast computers
integrated with their 3D radar. Seconds later they saw the forward 152mm
battery rotate, its twin gun barrels elevate slightly, and then a crack, crack,
crack, as the guns fired, both barrels recoiling in perfect unison with every
salvo. One of the two aft batteries joined the fray as Samsonov targeted each
of the two advancing destroyers with one battery.

Then the forward deck hatches flipped open and up leapt the
Sunburns. They would fire at three second intervals at a range of 28,000
meters. In a matter of six seconds they would accelerate rapidly to mach three,
over 3500 kilometers per hour or about 1000 meters per second. They would
strike their targets in just twenty-eight seconds! By comparison the muzzle
velocity of the British 16 inch guns was 766 meters per second. The missiles
were actually faster, designed to defeat the lighting reflexes of American
Aegis class cruisers, and they were a hundred times more accurate than
Nelson’s
guns. They were going to hit whatever they were aimed at, almost without fail,
and they were going to hit hard.

While the British heavyweights swung their heavy arms, sending
metal haymakers
Kirov’s
way in wide arcs, it was as if the Russian ship
calmly reached out one hand to steady their foe’s chin, then rammed a strong
right hand right to the face with thunderous speed. And the only way they were
going to knock these ships out was by a head shot. Their armor was simply too
thick to give them body shots. Karpov was again targeting the ship to be hit
well above the water line, hoping to strike the superstructure. The Moskit-IIs
each carried a 450KG semi-armor penetrating warhead, and tons of fuel for their
propulsion system which would ignite when they exploded. The whole missile
weighed over four tons. They were basically a hypersonic armor piercing fire
bomb, and fire had been the nemesis of ships at sea for centuries.

Syfret had ordered
Nelson
and
Rodney
to give
their enemy hell, and seconds later it came rebounding back at them with a
fury. The missiles flashed in on the battleships and blasted into the center of
the ships with terrific force. They exploded in huge massive fireballs of
broiling heat and molten shrapnel, almost as if two miniature suns had ignited
their angry fire at the heart of each vessel. One warhead smashed into the
armor plating at the base of
Nelson’s
citadel but was frustrated by
twelve inches of hardened armor there. Seconds later the second hammered
against C turret again, this time immolating the guns with its terrible impact
and fire. The armor withstood the impact, but not the men inside, who were
killed almost instantly by the terrible concussive force generated by the
velocity of the missile.

A column of torrid fire and smoke mushroomed up from the
ship, and this time Admiral Syfret was thrown from his feet, his head striking
the bulkhead and knocking him unconscious. For her part,
Rodney
suffered
equal harm, struck slightly aft of the main conning tower where the range
finders, gun directors and FCB controllers were feverishly working up their
next salvo. They had fired just as the first missile came in, however, and the
second Moskit was caught in the tremendous blast of six huge guns, adding its
exploding fury to their tumult and shock, which rocked the ship violently.
Pipes burst all over the ship. Chairs went flying in the mess halls, hand rails
quavered, equipment was shaken loose from its bolted moorings and, aft of the citadel
where the armor was thinner, the warhead came on through the outer bulkheads
and blasted into the metal chambers beyond.

Had these been modern ships, those hits would have utterly
destroyed both targets. But here, though rocked and damaged, burning fiercely
and shaken almost senseless, neither
Nelson
nor
Rodney
had been
dealt a fatal blow. Men scrambled up from below, some aghast to see the hard
pine wood main deck planks contorted and bent by the concussion of their own
guns alone. Dazed and tired, they reacted by reflex, fetching fire hoses,
grabbing crowbars to move loosened shards of mangled steel, and then set about
fighting the terrible fires. Some tried to get to the back hatch on
Nelson’s
stricken C turret but were amazed to find the hatch wheel was melting when they
fought their way to the scene with fire hoses!