Kirov II: Cauldron Of Fire (Kirov Series) (44 page)

Aboard
King George V
the wireless operator
got a most unusual message, just before sunset, and in plain English. It was
directed to Admiral John Tovey, coming as a great surprise to him when he heard
it. He listened to it carefully, repeating quietly over and over, and thinking
about it as he listened. Considering the gravity of the situation, Tovey found
it welcome. He had to hurry on if he was to get a good blocking position in the
western approaches. He was nearly there, but all reports out of Gibraltar
indicated the enemy was now in a very good location to make a run for the
straits, heading south of the Rock, just outside the range of their shore
batteries. These circumstances were going to see him arriving there just before
sunset, a most unfavorable situation, with all his ships nicely silhouetted on
the horizon.

 When he finally caught up with
Bismarck
, he wisely
elected to refuse battle at dusk and fight in the morning. If at all possible
he wanted to fight at sunrise, with his enemy well silhouetted instead of his
own ships. That may not matter to the enemy, he thought, but it would certainly
help his own gunners. This message gave him just what he needed now—time—and he
agreed to it at once, smiling at his flag officer of the watch.

“Get a message off immediately,” he said. “Send it in the
clear.” He folded his arms.

“What shall we send, sir?”

“Las Palomas. Just that. Nothing more.”

Chapter 32

The island
of Las Palomas is the southernmost point
in all of Spain, poised at the edge of the Straits of Gibraltar and marking the
boundary between the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. It dangles like a
pendant from the Spanish mainland, a small heart-shaped spit of land no more
than 1800 feet wide, with an equal length. Layers of history can be found
there, from yawning caves where Paleolithic petroglyph drawings of horses grace
the stony walls, to ruins of ancient Roman sites, and on through the centuries.
Its strategic position at the entrance to the Straits of Gibraltar had seen it
fortified by many empires. The nearby Spanish town of Tarifa just north of the
island on the mainland was named after the Moorish general Tarif Ben Malik, who
spearheaded the invasion in the year 711. Some said that the word “tariff” was
derived from his name when the island became one of the first ports in the
region to levy fees on ships seeking an anchorage. Remnants of castle walls and
towers can still be found there, some built by the famous Abdul Ar Raman, a
prominent Caliph of the Moors who invaded southern Europe until he was
eventually stopped by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours.

Given the island’s location, it had seen many desperate
battles over the years. The Spanish fought to reclaim their land from the Moors
for centuries, and the island had also been noted for a few famous last stands,
one in the year 1292 when the Spanish Lord Guzman El Bueno was holed up in a
fortress there and besieged by 5000 Moorish warriors. A treacherous rival, the
Lord Don Juan had kidnapped Guzman’s son and thought to force his surrender
with the threat of the boy’s execution. Yet stalwart to the end, Guzman
refused, standing on the high walls and even throwing down his own knife so his
antagonists might use it to kill his son.

In 1812 it was the British who joined the Spanish there to
make a gallant defense against the invading Armies of Napoleon. Jean Francois
Leval sent 15,000 French soldiers against Tarifa and was stopped by the
tenacious defense of the 3000 man garrison. In the end the miserable and incessant
rains had as much to do with the outcome of the battle as anything else. The
French army slogged away, wet and beset with illness, leaving many of their
siege guns stuck in the thickening mud. Now it would see warriors meet again,
for a delicate negotiation on the razor’s edge of war.

Just after 17:00 hours on August 14, 1942 the ominous
shadow of
Kirov
stretched in the wake of that imposing ship where it waited
in the eastern approaches to the narrow Straits of Gibraltar. Her active sonar
was pinging audibly, to make certain no undersea threat could come anywhere
near them. Her radars rotated to scan the airspace all around them equally
alert. To the northwest they could see the stark angles of the Rock itself, one
of Great Britain’s most important and strategic bases in all the world.

A small motor craft had been launched from the ship, and it
made its way under a flag of truce slowly through the straits toward the rocky
eastern shore of Las Palomas. Admiral Volsky sat proudly in the center of the boat,
flanked by five other men. They could have made a much more dramatic appearance
by landing on the island with the KA-40, but Volsky had decided not to create a
spectacle that would simply lead to more uncomfortable questions. The less
these men knew about them, the better.

He knew, however, that what he was attempting now was
dangerous, perhaps more dangerous than anything the ship itself had faced in
these last few harrowing days. Soon the Admiral’s party made landfall and
worked their way ashore. Now they stood beneath one of the old coastal ramparts,
a beautiful castle ruin built in Neo-Renaissance fashion, smooth walls of amber
sandstone with crenulated tops and styled parapets where the swarthy Moorish
archers once stood their vigilant watch. Beneath it sat the squat rounded
shapes of heavy stone encasements where old naval guns cast off from Spanish
WWI Dreadnaughts had been installed as shore batteries in 1941. Their stark
steel barrels jutted from the recessed gun ports, cold and threatening, and
shadowed Volsky with the thought that war seemed to have no end, persisting
through every generation throughout the whole of human history. The ruins and
fortifications of one epoch after another were all folded together here on this
tiny sentinel outpost, yet here he was, an outcast from another era, fighting
in a war where he was never meant to be.

In the distance he could see the whitewashed stone
lighthouse that marked the entrance to the straits. Built in the 1800s, it sat
on a high cliff and towered over the rocky coastline below, where squadrons of
sea birds soared in from the restless ocean, gliding over the stony shore. The
wind was up, whipping the wave tops out in the straits, and he could look
across and see the hazy silhouette of Jebel Musa rising on the coast of Spanish
Morocco in the distance.

Volsky’s boat had come in on the Mediterranean side of the
island with his small detachment that included Fedorov, Nikolin as translator,
and the redoubtable Kandemir Troyak with two of his best Marines. Admiral
Tovey’s launch had landed on the Atlantic coast on far side of the islands, and
they would meet here, men of two different eras standing in the shadow of all this
history, the legacy of mariners, sailors and soldiers that had occupied this
tiny demarcation point in the long stream of time.

They saw Admiral Tovey’s detachment approaching from the
northwest, making their way slowly along the rocky shore. The Admiral stood
tall in his dark navy blue uniform, his deportment clearly marking him as much
as his uniform and cap as a man of authority. Admiral Volsky waited for him at
a point he deemed to be the thin borderline between the ocean and the inland
sea, a fitting place, he thought, for the meeting of two minds. There were six
men in the British party as well, one clearly come from the Admiral’s staff,
his uniform crisp and proper, then another seaman in common dungarees and
sweats, with three more men at arms to match his own. As they approached Volsky
heard one of his Marines shift his automatic weapon to a ready position, and he
turned, gesturing with his palm for the man to stand down. Troyak glared at the
Marine, who quickly assumed a position at ease, lowering his weapon.

The British party came up, stopping about thirty paces off,
a mixture of curiosity and caution in their eyes. Tovey indicated that his armed
escorts should stand where they were, and he tapped the shoulder of his Chief
of Staff Denny and the Able Seaman who would serve as their translator, leading
them forward with a steady, measured pace. For his part, Volsky turned to
Fedorov and Nikolin with a wink, and then stepped forward to greet the British,
a noticeable limp still evident as he favored his bandaged right leg. He
stopped, taking in the man before him now, noting Tovey’s thin nose and narrow
eyes beneath his well grayed hair.

Fedorov stood just a pace behind him, his eyes filled with
awe and admiration as he stared at Tovey, a man with whom he had spent many
long hours in his mind, within the history books he so loved. It was as if a
living legend was before him now, yet flesh and blood, not the small black and
white photos he would stare at to try and see into the man’s mind. Here he was,
Admiral of the Home Fleet!

Volsky extended his hand, his eyes warming as he greeted
this fellow officer and denizen of the high seas. Tovey took the man’s big
hand, listening as Volsky spoke first, with Nikolin quickly translating what he
said.

“My admiral says that, as it is impossible to get any sleep
with all these guns and rockets and torpedoes flying off, he thought it might
be best to have a little talk and see if we could calm things down before
dinner.”

The remark brought a smile to Tovey’s face, softening the
hard lines of his taught cheeks and easing the tension inherent in the
situation. So here was his modern day Captain Nemo, human after all, he thought
to himself, a hundred questions in his mind. But which to ask first? Politeness
was always best, and he introduced himself with a tip of his cap. “I heartily
agree, sir. I am Admiral John Tovey, Commander of the British Home Fleet, Royal
Navy.” The Able Seaman translated slowly, and Volsky nodded. Nikolin was to
speak up if he heard anything mistranslated, but all was well.

“You will forgive me, Admiral, if I do not introduce myself
beyond saying that I, too, am a commander of a proud fleet, and so we stand as
equals here, at the edge of these two seas, and hopefully to find a better way
to resolve our differences without further bloodshed. As you can see, I have a
bit of a limp today, from a fragment of shrapnel that found me while I was
climbing a ladder and decided to bite my leg. So I know only too well what can
happen when men speak first with the weapons they command, and not their wits
instead.” Nikolin’s voice echoed Volsky’s, the Able Seaman listening, and
satisfied that all was translated correctly.

“My apologies, Admiral,” said Tovey. “It’s just that your
ship has made its way into a war zone, and has been taken as hostile from the
moment it was first encountered. The attacks made on numerous Royal Navy ships
did little to dissuade us from that conclusion.”

“That is understandable,” said Volsky. “But wrong. I must
tell you that it was never my intention to involve my ship or my crew in battle
with your navy. Yet one thing leads to another, does it not? Particularly at
sea, when faced with uncertainty and driven by the need to defend your ship,
and your country, from all harm.”

“Then I’m to understand that you now wish to claim that
everything that has transpired these last days had been an exercise of self
defense?”

“That is so,” said Volsky, his eyes trying to convey his
sincerity.

“In defense of what country, may I ask?”

“You may not. The answer would not mean anything, and it
would not help us resolve the issue before us now.”

That confused more than it helped, but Tovey pressed on, edging
out on a limb he had been climbing for so very many long months, ever since
those first rockets branded his ship, and he saw that awful mushroom cloud of
sea water towering over the cold North Atlantic.

“May I ask the Admiral if it is true that our ships and
planes have met once before in this war, a year ago to be more precise, in the
waters southwest of Iceland?”

Volsky shrugged. “Yes, you may ask it, and you may know it
as well without the question. But I think it best we confine our chat to what
lies ahead now, Admiral, and not what we have left behind us. Nothing that has
happened can be undone—or at least that is something I once believed. I am not
so sure any longer. But I will tell you that what we decide here today may have
a grave impact on days that lie ahead, and more than either you or I can fathom
at this moment.”

Was the man being deliberately evasive, Tovey wondered? Yet
he seems sincere. I can see it in his eyes, and hear it in his tone of voice.
Yet who is he? Where has he come from? What is this dreadful
Nautilus
of
a ship he commands with weapons the like of which this world has never seen?

“Then it
was
your ship that engaged the Royal Navy a
year ago? Well now it is I who must ask your forbearance sir, but this is
incomprehensible to us. How is it possible that we now find you here, in these
waters, and yet have not had the ghost of a whisper of you, your ship, or these
terrible weapons you possess, not in all the world for a whole long year? Your ship
is not a submarine like the German U-Boats which use the swift currents in
these straits to drift silently into the inland sea, unseen. You could not have
passed Gibraltar without our knowing about it, and for that matter
unchallenged. Nor could you have entered via the Suez Canal. Your presence here
is therefore a matter of grave concern, and utterly confounding.”

“Believe me when I say this, Admiral, but I am as much
bewildered by these questions as you are. Yet I must be frank with you, sir. I
do not wish to speak of who and what we are, or where we have come from, or how
we came to be here. Yes, I know these questions beg answers, but the less that
is said about them, the better. You may come to your own conclusions, I
suppose. First off, you have found a young Able Seaman here who speaks our
mother tongue.” He let his eye rest on Tovey’s, noting the man’s reaction as he
continued. “And from this you may surmise that we are a Russian ship and crew,
but I must tell you that Joseph Stalin back in Moscow will have no inkling of
us either—no knowledge whatsoever of our presence here, and he would have these
very same questions for us if this were Murmansk and we were standing at the
edge of the Kara Sea. We do not now sail in his name or serve the interests of
the Soviet state he commands.”