Kirov II: Cauldron Of Fire (Kirov Series)

by Schettler, John

  “We won’t be forming a battle line either. All those tactics went down the drain the first time we tangled with this ship. So I plan to spread our four battleships out along this arc, each one within supporting fire range of the other three, but spaced far enough to force the enemy to disperse his fire. The cruisers and destroyers will deploy as a forward screen. We’ll keep the carrier well back and to the north along the Spanish coast. Avenger can launch everything she has. I’ll want all those Sea Harriers in her 802 Squadron armed with bombs. The Swordfish can go in low with the Harriers up topside. They, too, will fly in a widely dispersed approach. There will be no formation of squadrons and sub flights once aloft. It will be every man for himself. These rockets were taking out two and three planes at a time in the Atlantic. It won’t happen here.”

  They looked at the plan, noting the careful dispersion of forces to cover any route of escape if the enemy exited the straits, and Tovey explained his reasoning further.

  “If this ship is Geronimo, and they fling one of those blasted wonder weapons our way as they did with the Americans, they stand to hit no more than one of our capital ships in a single strike. It’s a damn ruthless logic, but after what we saw a year ago, it’s the only way to fight this engagement. If this ship breaks through Force Z, we had better be in position and ready for anything. As soon as they put their nose into the Straits of Gibraltar, I’ll order Home Fleet to go into action. It will be the charge of the heavy cavalry, gentlemen. Every ship is to go in full out, and with all guns blazing. Just counting the two forward turrets on the four battleships, we’ll have twenty four 14 inch guns in play. If any ship gets the range on the target and wishes to effect a turn to bring their rear X turret to bear, all the better, but I want you to close the range smartly, and get hits. You can expect hits as well if they fling those damn naval rockets at us again. As I said before, it will come down to the armor in the end—the armor, good gunfire, and a good measure of nerve. Now we’ve got King George V, Prince of Wales, Duke Of York, and Anson. One of us has to run this bastard through.”

  Part X

  The Gauntlet

  “The soldiers in black uniforms stood in two rows, facing each other motionless, their guns at rest. Behind them stood the fifes and drums, incessantly repeating the same unpleasant tune.

  'What are they doing?' I asked the blacksmith, who halted at my side.

  'A Tartar is being beaten through the ranks for his attempt to desert,' said the blacksmith in an angry tone, as he looked intently at the far end of the line.”

  ~ Tolstoy ~ After the Ball

  Chapter 28

  It began a little after 23:00 hours the 13th of August, 1942. Kirov had raced south, undiscovered, and was now making the turn Fedorov had planned to run due west to Cabo de la Gata. They would take the 60 mile run in two hours. Reaching the cape by 1:00 AM. But as midnight approached they saw three planes coming up from the south flying obvious search patterns.

  “These must be off the carriers,” said Fedorov.

  “Shall we shoot them down?” Karpov had returned to the bridge, rested and ready for action.

  Fedorov thought a moment, and shook his head. “Why bother. If we do kill them, that act alone will give the British our approximate position, and immediately mark us as hostile. I want to see if we can try our ruse as a French ship. It might buy us just a little time.”

  So they watched the search planes grow ever closer, the nearest no more than four kilometers out before they all turned, heading south again. It was not long before Nikolin perked up, adjusting his headset and waving for Fedorov’s attention.

  “A radio message, sir. In English, and right in the clear.”

  Nikolin put it on the speakers and they listened, eyes drawn to the overhead grill, brows raised as Nikolin translated.

  “Ship heading two-seven-zero, latitude thirty six degrees, forty two minutes, longitude negative two, please identify yourself.”

  Fedorov smiled. “Someone is ringing the door bell. They must have some good men in one of those planes. Those coordinates are very close to the mark.”

  “What shall I do, sir?” asked Nikolin. “Should I ignore them?”

  “No, Mister Nikolin, now you get to practice your English a bit. But if you can sound more like a Frenchman, that would be even better! Tell them we are battlecruiser Strasbourg, and that we have broken out of Toulon, fought off two Italian battleships that tried to intercept us, and that we are running for Free French ports in Equatorial Africa to join Admiral Darlan.”

  “Very well, sir.” Nikolin translated, his big brown eyes moving from his microphone to Fedorov and back again, excited. Time passed, and then they heard the reply Fedorov expected.

  “Sir, they want us to reduce speed and come to a heading of 255 degrees. They say they will escort us to Gibraltar and that we may arrange passage south from there.”

  “Very well. Tell them we are coming around on that heading at twenty knots and will send up signal flares in thirty minutes.”

  “You’re going to do what they say?” Karpov has a bemused look on his face.

  “Of course not. Helm, steady on 270 and ahead full battle speed. Now we’ll see how cagy the British are. If they wanted us on 255 then they should alter course to near zero degrees north to effect a rendezvous from their present position. Any course they take west of that will mean they aren’t taking any chances and are maneuvering to make sure they can cut us off. Even if they do think we’re Strasbourg they would know we can run up to thirty knots. Let’s see what they do.”

  They had their answer shortly when Rodenko, now back on radar, indicated the contact had altered course to 302 degrees northwest and increased speed to near twenty knots.

  “A careful breed, these British.” Karpov seemed restless, arms clasped behind his back. “They made that course change before they even gave us a chance to come round on 255.”

  “They’ll probably move something that direction, but I don’t think they are buying our apples today. They didn’t make the claim that Britannia rules the sea lightly,” said Fedorov. “They know Strasbourg would not easily prevail over two Italian battleships. This is the one heading they should have taken if they wanted to intercept us on our old reported course and speed. Very well… we’ll play the game a bit. In a few minutes I want a missile rigged with a star shell and fired right here, where we should be if we had turned on the heading they requested. They’ll most likely loop those planes back to shadow us, but this may prove a distraction.”

  “We can just fire one of the UDAV batteries,” said Karpov. “A single rocket timed to explode in the air should suffice.”

  They waited out the interval, and fired their rocket at maximum range. All the while Rodenko noted the steady approach of another aircraft. It was clear that the British were taking no chances with them at all. The plane diverted briefly to the location where they had fired their missile, then quickly turned northwest on a heading to intercept them.

  “Are they seeing us on radar?” asked Karpov. “What’s wrong with our jammers, Rodenko?”

  “Nothing wrong, sir. I have the all their bandwidths snowed over.”

  “They are just experienced and efficient men,” said Fedorov. “That man is flying by the seat of his pants out there, but he knows enough to get his plane northwest where we would be on our old heading.”

  “At his present speed they will re-acquire our position in approximately ten minutes,” said Rodenko.

  “Let them. They won’t learn anything they don’t already suspect. Our ruse is over, and now we run the gauntlet. Very well, rig the ship for black. We should reach the cape at zero one hundred hours. I’ll want the ship at battle stations by then, and we’ll alter course fifteen degrees to port to avoid the Almeria sea transit lanes. There are good thermals along the coast, and they make for excellent cruising stations for submarines. We’ll avoid them if we can, but by 01:thirty we may be engaged. I suggest we take whatever time remaining to check the w
eapons systems. I don’t want a repeat of that accident we had with the Klinok missiles. We’ll need every round we have.”

  Aboard HMS Nelson Admiral Syfret had made the early assessment that this was a renegade French battlecruiser, on one side of the French coin or another, and nonetheless maneuvered to get his battleships in the best possible position to engage if they did not comply with his request. He had separated his force at 18:00 hours earlier that evening, sending the three carriers under Rear Admiral St. Lyster on Victorious some forty miles south on a parallel course to his own, along with his last remaining cruisers and an escort of five destroyers. It was also necessary to detach the wounded destroyer Ithuriel, and he sent her off south with DD Quentin. This left him with his two battleships and six more destroyers, more than enough, he reasoned, to run this Geronimo to ground. When they got within gun range, he would signal Captain Troubridge on the carrier Indomitable to launch his Albacore II torpedo bombers for good measure. He’d get his battleships right astride Strasbourg’s line of advance and then have one last word before he let his 16 inch guns do the talking.

  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.