Kirov II: Cauldron Of Fire (Kirov Series) (46 page)

“But surely, you’ll need fuel, water, food and supplies for
your crew.”

“We carry all the fuel we will ever need, and then some.”
He realized that Tovey would not comprehend that, so he manufactured a little
white lie, a little
vranyo
to smooth the matter over. “We have a way to
convert seawater to steam, so fuel is never a concern. As for food and water,
these things we will find on our own, and with as little interference with
others as possible.”

“Then you don’t see any further room for compromise?”

“I have compromised, Admiral. I did not have to ask for
this conference, but yet I found it a wiser course than the one I was sailing
at the time. I know the issue foremost in your mind now is trust. I suppose
your Mister Churchill is thinking the same thing at this very moment as he sits
down to dinner with Joseph Stalin in his
dacha
at Moscow.” He saw Tovey
raise an eyebrow at that, and pressed his point home. “Perhaps that is the one
thing a man really needs to act intelligently—a little trust, a little faith,
and a good heart. I know that you are driven to find answers to the questions
in your mind about all of this, but I must caution that you stand to lose very
much more than you gain should you do so.”

Tovey breathed deeply, struck by that last remark. There
was something more in the what the Admiral said just now. Something very much
more. The conference in Moscow was held as a state secret and a matter of high
security. Only very few knew it was taking place, even within the highest
circles of the British government. For this man to know of it, and speak of it
so casually…He regarded this Admiral with a knowing eye.

“Very well, Admiral. I will consider what you have said and
asked here, but I think it best that I return to my ship for the moment, and
you to yours. I will contact you at Midnight with an answer to this dilemma.”

Volsky reached and again shook the man’s hand. “Consider
well, John Tovey. I will await your message.”

Tovey
spent those last hours considering the careful
logic of his war plan, and wondering about all the subtle clues he had taken
from this extraordinary encounter.
Russian
, he thought. They were
clearly Russians, but yet they denied any affiliation with Stalin or the Soviet
state. But how could they know of Churchill’s meeting with Stalin in Moscow?
Were they lying? The man’s candor was clearly apparent, but more than that it
was the logic of his argument that weighed more heavily on the issue. When I
mentioned that Russia was our ally, the man’s remark was rather telling … ‘At
the moment…’

He said it as though he knew something to the contrary.
Could
this ship be a new Russian model, one they managed to build in the Black Sea,
perhaps? Is that how it came to be in the Med—sneaking out through the Bosporus?
Was it trying to get out into the Atlantic to strike at our convoys? Was Russia
about to switch sides in this war? Then what about that business a year ago.
The man clearly led me to believe that this ship was the same we encountered
earlier. Was it? Could it have come out of Murmansk a year ago, and was it sunk
by the Americans? This could be a sister ship, perhaps launched from Odessa or
Sevastopol…But could the Russians build something like this, and without our
knowing about it?

One question after another ranged through his mind, and he
ticked them off, discarding each as utterly impossible. The Russians could not
have built this ship any more than the Germans could have built it. Even if
they did, how would it have escaped our notice? How could it have passed our
coast watchers along the Dardanelles unseen, sailed through the Aegean like a
phantom and then right past Vian’s cruisers in the Eastern Med, let alone the
Italians at Taranto? Impossible! No nation on this earth could have built it,
unless there
was
some mysterious island out there where a consortium of
renegade mad scientists had built this ship. The mystery was profound.

And what did this man mean when he pointed to those old
fortifications like that, saying I would have a good deal of trouble explaining
the presence of my fleet here to the Moors. There was clearly something there
that kept tugging at the edge of his thinking, all wrapped up with his muse
about Jules Verne and his strange story of Captain Nemo, and again, with the
odd look in Professor Turing’s eye in that hallway back at the Admiralty.

Why was this man being so blasted evasive? He refused to
account for his presence, either here or in the North Atlantic a year ago, and
it was as if the disclosure would cause some irreparable harm. He chided
himself for not being more insistent, more forceful. By God, he had all the muscle
and sinew of Home Fleet with him here. Syfret and Fraser had a couple of old,
slow inter war battleships, their keels laid down in the early 1920s. He had
four of Britain’s newest dreadnoughts, fast, well protected, well gunned. He
could force the issue and have an answer to these nagging questions once and
for all, but the Admiral’s remark still haunted him
: “I know that you are
driven to find answers to the questions in your mind about all of this, but I
must caution that you stand to lose very much more than you gain should you do
so.”
Was that simply another veiled threat should it come to battle here,
or was there some darker implication in the Admiral’s warning?

 The damage reports from Fraser on
Rodney
finally
reached him. There were over 200 casualties, yet the fires had finally been put
out. Neither ship could make more than twelve knots, and
Nelson’s
C
turret was out of commission. But beyond that they were both still sea worthy,
and their remaining guns were in good order. It would take them some time to
come up behind this enemy ship again, but eventually they could throw in with
his own fleet and he could squeeze this
Geronimo
between his fingertips
like a bug.

Or could he… Memories of that awful mushroom of seawater and
the capsized hull of the American battleship
Mississippi
glistening in
the angry sea like a dead whale still haunted him, and told him that this bug
might not be so easily squashed, and might as yet have some considerable bite.

Damn it then, Jack, he anguished. What’s it to be? Did you
sail here with the whole of Home Fleet to bandy about like this? The man wanted
an island, he said. He just wanted to be left in peace and find his way home.
And where was that?

He thought of Nemo coming at last to that Mysterious Island
to die an old man, his vengeful sorties against navies of the world now ended.
He would not accept internment at a neutral port…Then he thought of Napoleon
again and had his answer. Yes! St. Helena! Suppose he offered this man safe
passage and escort to St. Helena, a place far enough away from the curious eyes
of anyone, to be sure. Yet his ships were already low on fuel and St. Helena
was another thousand sea miles to the south. Yet he could transfer fuel to
Norfolk
and
Sheffield
, topping them off. That accomplished those two ships would
have both the range to serve as escorts, and the speed to serve as a shadow if
this ship attempted to slip away.

That thought was a foil opposing his hope in this
alternative. If he needed every battleship the Royal Navy could spare here just
to have an even chance with this demon, then
Norfolk
and
Sheffield
would be no match. They could not prevent this ship from sailing off if it
wished. Then he realized it all came down to that one thing this Admiral had
argued—trust. He had looked in this man’s eyes and the mysterious and
impenetrable riddle had become a human being, just another ordinary man and not
a wizard from heaven or a monster from hell. His ship and its weapons might be
monstrous, but so were the guns on
King George V.
Men build these
monsters, and it is men who decide whether or not they will be used.

He folded his arms, staring at his battle plots in the
chart room, seeing the action unfold in his mind’s eye, wondering which ships
would be stricken by those deadly sea rockets, or if the ocean would again be seared
and boiled away by another of those terrible atomic weapons. He could probably
sink this ship, but a very great many men would die tomorrow if he tried.

He decided.

Epilogue

“Ship ahead!”
A watch stander called from the
weather bridge, pointing off his starboard bow. Captain Clark stood on the flag
bridge of the cruiser
Sheffield
, field glasses at his eyes as he peered
at the distant ship.

The word was flashed quickly by lantern and signal flag to
their companion, the heavy cruiser
Norfolk
, steaming a few hundred
meters in their wake. From there it was passed again to the distant gray
silhouettes of the big battleships farther out to sea. It was here…It was
coming through the straits even now. Clark could see it—the white bow wave
kicked up by the long, sharp prow, the dark mass behind it, her superstructure
climbing up and up, bristling with strange antennae and pale metal domes. The
sight of it gave him a chill, for every line and cut of her jib spoke of power,
massive and threatening power. He had heard all the rumors about this ship;
that it bloodied the noses of both
Nelson
and
Rodney
combined!

“Hal-o Mate,” he said aloud to the distant ship. “What are
we to do with these six inch popguns if
Nelson’s
sixteen incher’s
weren’t enough?”

He passed the word on to the Signals Lieutenant where he
would let Captain Wilson on
Norfolk
worry about it with his eight inch
guns. He was just told to get out in front of the fleet with Shiny Sheff and
keep a sharp eye out for this ship at all times, and that is what he would do.

Sheffield
had been selected for a very special
mission. His ship was called ‘Old Shiny’ in the navy, because
all the
fittings that were normally crafted in brass on the other ships in this class had
been machined in stainless steel on
Sheffield
. All her railings, stanchions,
horns and even the ship’s bells, were made of steel, and the ship sometimes
glimmered in the light as she rolled in the heavy seas. But that had little to
do with her mission here today. It was more her speed, good endurance, and most
of all her advanced radar that made her the perfect scout ship.

The radar was mounted well up on the foremast, which came
to be called the “cuckoo’s nest” when sailors finally got a look at the odd
antenna mounted there. The ship he was looking at now had even more wizardry
about it. He could see the slowly rotating antennae on her aft mast and it gave
him the chills to think of how far it might see, through weather and darkness,
and even the smoke and fire of battle. By comparison the antennae rigged out in
the cuckoo’s nest on
Sheffield
seemed feeble.

Clark watched, spellbound, as the ship emerged from the
mouth of the straits, like some evil sea beast being spewed from the belly of a
whale. He looked over his shoulder again at the heart of Home Fleet, glad the
stalwart battleships were there, spread out behind him in an arc of steel. They
were cruising at wide intervals, their huge guns gleaming in the morning sun.

The strange interloper loomed ever nearer, then he saw the phantom
ship turn fifteen points to port on a heading to take it quickly past the sharp
rocky headlands of Cape Spartel west of Tangier. Its mass and size were even
more evident now at this angle, and he found himself admiring the hard, yet
elegant beauty of the ship, an amazing synthesis of artistry, power and speed.
Yet, peering through his field glasses, the gun turrets he could make out at
this range seemed no bigger than his own. He had heard about the rocketry, all
the rumors, and had even seen some of the damage himself, but it was still hard
to believe.

After a hard and costly journey through the cauldron of
fire of the Mediterranean Sea,
Kirov
was finally back in the Atlantic.
Admiral Tovey had sent word three hours ago that if this ship would accept an
escort of two British cruisers and sail to the Island of St. Helena in the
South Atlantic, then he would accept the offer of armistice in exchange for
neutrality for the duration of the war. Admiral Volsky was grateful that he did
not have to order the ship to fight again that morning, and that no one else
would have to die. And he would have his island in the bargain as well! So he
had agreed to sail on a course that would have him skirt Funchal Island, then
to Palma in the Canaries and finally Ribeira Grande in the Cape Verde Islands
where coast watchers could also mark their progress south. From there it would
be southeast to St. Helena, the island where England buried its monsters and
the place where Napoleon Bonaparte had lived out his final days in captivity.

Fedorov had impressed the significance of this upon Admiral
Volsky, urging him to accept Tovey’s offer, but the Admiral needed no
convincing. He got what he had asked for, a grudging peace, but peace nonetheless,
and an island where he and his crew could rest, far from prying, curious eyes
to have some time to decide their fate. Volsky had agreed to sail at no more
than twenty knots speed at all times, and not to jam the British radar, as long
as the two British ships would come no closer to his own vessel than 5
kilometers. He knew that range was nearly point blank for a well sighted naval gun,
but trusted to the integrity of the men who had made their pledge in this negotiation.
He wanted
Kirov’s
war on the world to be over, but like the wishes of so
many others that have gone unfulfilled, the world would not yet give that to
him.

It was the fifth day since the ship had first arrived in
the Tyrrhenian Sea of 1942, and
Kirov
sailed on through the Straits of
Gibraltar on the 15th of August, cruising boldly past the long baleful line of
Tovey’s Home Fleet, the squat metal shapes of four identical battleships
watching in silence. High overhead they saw fitful flights of British aircraft
off the carrier
Avenger
, circling with watchful eyes.