Kirov II: Cauldron Of Fire (Kirov Series) (4 page)

As he gazed
at the sea, the peculiar discoloration grew more intense, an odd milky green,
and he was stricken with the fear that something was again terribly wrong.
Rather than navigating his way through the labyrinthine inner passages of the
ship, he decided to climb the long vertical ladder on the main tower, and enter
through the first maintenance entrance, coming to the citadel through the upper
side hatch on the command deck. As he started to climb, another odd sound came
to him, breaking the long silence of calm sea and sky they had been sailing in.
He stopped, as if frozen in place, his senses keenly alert as he listened, eyes
instinctively searching the rapidly lightening skies beneath his heavy brows. What
was happening? The sound filled him with both excitement and dread, for he
immediately knew what he was listening to—the drone of a low flying aircraft!

Who was out
there? By God, something
survived
this hell of a war after all! But who?
And what was bearing down on them now in the grey skies above. Grey skies?
Where has the night gone? He looked out to the horizon, astounded to see it
brightening with each passing second. It was just past one in the morning when
he rose from his bunk to clear his mind and take this walk on the aft deck.
Could he have idled here for four hours? It seemed like minutes to him. Then
all these questions suddenly coalesced into a dark shape in the sky, bearing
down on the ship from the aft quarter. He reached for the next rung on the
ladder, breath coming fast now, and his heart racing more with anxiety than
anything else. Every instinct in his body screamed danger, and the adrenaline
rushed through his system, giving him renewed strength to climb.

What now, he
thought, his mind racing ahead of him to the bridge. Did Fedorov see it? Would
he know what to do? Thankfully, the sound of a warning claxon signaling battle
stations was a relief.

The drone of
the engines was very loud now, so much so that Volsky stopped and craned his
next to look behind and above where the ominous winged shadow loomed in the
glowering sky. Then it suddenly seemed to come alive with white fire, and he
could clearly see the hot streak of tracer rounds coming towards the ship,
followed at once by the harsh rattle of what sounded like heavy caliber machine
guns. They were under attack!

August 11, 1942 – Tyrrhenian Sea East
of Sardinia

Flight
Officer
George-Melville-Jackson
was up in his twin engine Bristol Beaufighter VIC for a reconnaissance run.
Assigned to the newly arrived 248 Squadron, he had landed on Malta the previous
day from Gibraltar where the squadron had been flying missions for Coastal
Command. Now the flight of six Beaufighters was to support the crucial effort
at hand as Britain struggled to push yet another convoy through the dangerous
waters of the Mediterranean to send much needed supplies of food, munitions and
most importantly, oil to the beleaguered island outpost.

He had flown
northwest over the dangerous waters of the Sicilian Narrows, and then turned
north towards the Tyrrhenian Sea until he reached a position about 300 nautical
miles out where he made a graceful turn as he began to scour the sea for signs
of enemy shipping. With the convoy due in just a few days time, it was
imperative that the fighters and bombers on Malta keep the seas clear of heavy
enemy units, and Melville-Jackson did not have to wait long before he made his
first contact. Squinting through his forward windshield, his eye was pulled to
a strange glow on the sea below. He nudged the stick and eased his plane down a
few degrees for a better look .

“What’s
this, Lizzy?” he said aloud, invoking the name of his sweetheart and wife back
home. “What have we got here?”

He spoke
into his face mask, somewhat annoyed that he had not been advised of the
contact sooner. “Sleeping are you, Tommy? What’s that down there at three
o-clock? Not much good having these new radars in the nose if you’re not going
to use them, eh?” He squinted at the strange glow below them, as if the water
was upwelling from bottom and churning the surface of a quarter mile swath of
the sea. There he could now vaguely discern a dark shadow in the center of the disturbance.
Was it a submarine coming up from below? Impossible. This was much too big for
a U-Boat.

Designed as
a night fighter, his Beaufighter was also equipped with Britain’s latest airborne
intercept radar set in its nose, the Mark VIII unit with one of the newest
concentric screens, and he wanted to know if it had the contact as well on this
initial dry run. All the other Beaus had the older AI Mark IV radars, and the Germans
had found its bandwidth and were doing a good job of jamming it in recent
weeks. It was hoped his new set would solve the problem.

“Not a
whisper of anything on my screen the whole way out,” said Thomason on radar,
“but right you are now… reading something at five miles—very odd though.”

“It looks
big! I suppose we had best get down and have a look.”

Melville-Jackson
put the plane into a fast descent, racing down through the pre-dawn sky with
his two powerful supercharged radial engines roaring as he went. His navigator
and radar man snapped alert now in the rear cupola when the plane went into action.

As he dove
on the contact Jackson tightened his jaw, lips pursed beneath his sandy
mustache, expecting the skies to light up with flak at any moment, but none
came. A moment later the shadow on the sea took on the ominous shape of a
warship, its superstructure and battlements now quite evident as he closed the
distance.

“What, have
we caught the Macaronis flat footed this time?” He smiled, sure he had come
upon a big Italian cruiser positioning itself to lay in wait for the convoy.
“Let’s announce ourselves, Tommy,” he shouted through the headset.

The
Beaufighter was one of the most powerful long range fighters in the RAF
inventory. It’s bomb bays on the lower fuselage had been removed to mount four
20mm cannon there, and this was augmented by six Browning .303 machineguns in
the wings, more firepower than any smaller fighter, and even more than many
heavier bombers might muster.

As the plane
descended he could see no markings or service flags, but he was certain from
flight briefings that there would be no friendly ships in these waters if he
encountered anything. On another day he might have made one high altitude flyby
for an IFF run before he made a strafing attack, but not today, not with
hostilities impending and the noose tightening on the island fortress as never
before. Rommel had pushed damn near all the way to the Nile and Jerry was keen
on smashing what was left of resistance on Malta so they could get him the
supplies he needed for one last big push. If this new General Montgomery was to
have any chance of stopping him short of Alexandria, they would have to make
sure the sea lanes remained a hostile environment for Axis supply ships. Malta
was the key to that effort—Malta and men like Melville-Jackson in his Bristol
Beau. He tightened his finger on the gun triggers as he aimed the plane at the ship
below, amazed to see a pulsing light surround the shadow on the sea.

“Get a
message off,” he called back to his navigator. “Sighted one hell of a big
cruiser, these coordinates. Saying hello before we return home.” He was in no
hurry to get back to Takali airfield on Malta, but switched on his gun cameras
as he dove, mindful that intelligence would want more than his word on the
sighting. Pity we didn’t have a torpedo at hand for a moment like this, he
thought. Perhaps another time.

Then he
fired, and the powerful 20mm cannons snarled in anger, joined by the fitful
chatter of his Browning .303s. The guns sent a hail of iron at the center of
the ship, raking the sea in a wild rain of fire and water and smashing into the
superstructure in a storm of fire and smoke.

Volsky
heard the guns firing, then the
terrible howl of the plane’s engines as it flashed by overhead. The sea was
awash with spray where the leading rounds fell short, but they raked across the
center of the ship, shuddering into her superstructure and sending a scatter of
flayed aluminum shrapnel and hot white sparks flying in all directions as the
heavy rounds slammed into
Kirov
with deadly effect. Admiral Volsky felt
a searing hot pain as something struck his side and leg, and he was flung from
his perch on the ladder, falling all of eight feet with a hard thud as his head
struck a hand rail below. He was lucky he had not climbed higher, as the fall
itself could have killed him. As it was, he lay unconscious and bleeding from
shrapnel wounds on the deck below, and did not hear the shrill panic that
wailed through the ship as heavy booted men were running in all directions, shouting
and donning life preservers and helmets as they manned their battle stations.

On the
bridge, acting
Starpom
, Anton Fedorov heard the awful drone of the plane
as it dove to attack, hastening to the port viewport in a state of surprise and
shock. Rodenko had been complaining of a strange interference on his sensor
screens—Tasarov as well, but they had seen and heard nothing until the distant
sound of an aircraft emerged from the thick cottony silence of the night,
strangely attenuated, now loud and threatening, and then hollow and forlorn.
The air seemed suddenly charged with heavy static, and a throbbing pulsation
seemed to quaver all around them. Fedorov took in the scene outside the ship
with wild surmise. The sea was aglow with undulating light, and the skies were brightening
with an impossible luminescence. He glanced quickly at his chronometer and read
the time. It was 1:37 in the morning, and the night had been clear and dark
just a few moments ago, the new moon not yet risen. What was happening?

Then the
sound of the aircraft seemed an angry roar, and Fedorov’s better instincts for
survival prompted him to wheel about. “Sound alarm,” he shouted. “Battle Stations!”

A split
second later the night sky seemed to erupt with light and fire, something came
flashing down from above in terrible rage, and white hot shafts of light seemed
to pass in through the view panes and bulkheads, like lasers, vanishing into
the guts of the ship. The sound that followed was clear and unmistakable, a
rattling grind of metal on metal. It was as if the light had suddenly found
shape and form, and become a liquid fire, then hard iron as it finally bit into
the ship.

They felt
heavy rounds shudder against the armored citadel and sheer through the lattice
of more delicate antenna domes above them. Then the deep growl of the plane’s
engines diminished, fading off the starboard side of the ship. Fedorov turned
and saw everyone on the bridge staring at him, some with expressions of shock
and others with fear and amazement. His mind was racing as he struggled to make
sense of what he had just experienced.

“Did you see
that?” Tasarov was pointing to the spot where the searing light had lanced through
the bridge and vanished into the deck plates, but there was no sign of damage
there at all.

Fedorov could
not answer him. He knew he had to do something, take military action to secure
the safety of the ship, but what should he do? He was trained as a navigator.
He had never gone to combat schools, though his instincts were good and his
judgment usually sound, he had no real reflex for battle at sea. He removed his
cap for a moment, running the sleeve of his jacket over his brow where a cold
sweat had settled. They were all waiting, watching him now, and he struggled to
remember how Admiral Volsky would act in a similar situation, and how Karpov
would maneuver the ship in the heat of an engagement.

“Rodenko,”
he said haltingly. “Look to your screen. Are we tracking that aircraft?”

“There was
nothing on my readout earlier, sir, but yes, I can see him now, just barely.
The signal is very weak and I still have a lot of clutter, but he’s moving off
to the south—fading in and out. I don’t think he’s coming around again.”

“Tasarov—anything?”
Fedorov wanted to know what was happening beneath them as well. The first rule,
he remembered, was to assess their immediate situation and get as clear a
picture as possible of the battle space around them. He had seen Karpov do this
on exercise many times, and so he did the same, checking the ship’s eyes and
ears, and letting the unanswerable questions go for the moment.

Tasarov
fitted his headset more snuggly, closing his eyes. Then he blinked and checked
his sensor screens as well. “Nothing sir,” he said. “The sea is calm. I have no
transients—but I have no range either. Something is wrong, sir.”

“Helm, come around.
Fifteen degrees to port.”

“Port
fifteen, sir and coming about on a heading of 210.”

Change your
heading, he thought. Good. He had seen Karpov do this as well to throw any
stalking enemy off the scent, the most rudimentary of evasive maneuvers. As the
ship came around on the new heading the tension subsided somewhat, and then
Fedorov looked to his radio man. “Mr. Nikolin,” he said calmly. “Please
activate the Tin Man display and do a full pan of our forward and rear arcs.”
If the sensors had not seen the plane, he thought, what else might they have
missed?

“Aye, sir.”
Nikolin toggled his display to activate HD video camera systems for optical
data feed to a hi-res flat panel monitor on the bridge. These systems stood on
the forward and aft towers to give the bridge a real time 360 degree video view
of the surrounding area. The feed came in, with mild breakup due to the residual
static that still seemed to be affecting all the equipment on the bridge, but
Fedorov could see that the image showed a clear, calm sea, with no sign of any
visual contact on any heading. Yet it was broad daylight now! The scene seemed
to astound the junior bridge crew members, who watched the screen with large
round eyes, looking at the images and then at Fedorov to note his reaction.
Light streamed in through their forward view panes, chasing the soft glow of
their night lighting away. Fedorov blinked, amazed, but composed himself to try
and set an example for the men.