Then, like a pot that had finally reached its boiling point, the Admiral launched himself into a long, unhappy discourse.
“What does Rudnikov have to say now?” Volsky said to his radioman Nikolin. “Tell them we are fifteen minutes behind schedule. In that much time an American task force could have twenty Tomahawk cruise missiles bearing down on us, or worse. We would have lost the element of surprise, completely mishandled our approach to the target, and we would most likely be sitting at the bottom of the sea to contemplate the error of our ways. The man who fails to think ahead of time will have a very long time to think afterwards when his fat, ugly boat is berthed up in Murmansk with all the rest, waiting to be broken up for scrap and hauled away by the salvage teams. Perhaps then he will have learned the value of proper timing in a naval exercise.”
Members of the bridge crew smiled to themselves as they listened, accustomed to the Admiral's long diatribe on most any subject that did not meet with his approval. To them he was old “Papa Volsky,” Grand Admiral, Godfather, King of the Northern Seas. And they were his well favored and trusted retainers, many of them hand-picked and promoted up through the ranks by this very man. He was a shining example of naval professionalism, a consummate strategist, strict disciplinarian, yet an amiable father to a crew he regarded as his own private family. His strength, willpower, decisiveness, and quiet dignity had been an example to them all for years now, even as his wrath would be their bane. Just the sight of him, sitting thoughtfully in his command seat, his hand toying with the wood of his pipe, was a comfort to them. His deep set eyes would flash beneath graying brows when he spoke, his voice a strong baritone suited to his ample frame.
They would do anything for him, go anywhere with him, and he returned their loyalty with the generosity that sometimes seemed out of place on a naval warship where Spartan asceticism was the rule the day. Yet no one was surprised when a box of fine Cuban cigars would turn up in the wardroom, a gift from the Admiral to all his ranking officers and chiefs.
On the other hand, like the sea around him, he could be temperamental at times, quick to anger one moment, stoic and quiet at other times when a brooding inner vision seem to haunt him, a quiet darkness that hid within his soul in a place no man could sit with him for tea. At such times he expressed his frustrations in these long monologues, lecturing, as any father would do with wayward sons. He was firm in handling any perceived breach of procedure, but never cruel or heartless. When he criticized, he could drain the blood from a man's face in ten seconds. Yet when he praised a man, you could see the lucky soul swell right there before him. It was not mere bluster and the bludgeon of authority that gave the man his rank. His mere presence radiated command, from the cut of his uniform, to the tilt of his cap, Leonid Volsky was an admiral in every sense of the word.
Volsky crossed his arms and pursed his lips, clearly bothered by the delay. This was supposed to be a simple live fire exercise, a routine that had been practiced many times before, yet now it seemed to auger something dark and foreboding. He had a strange feeling that there was something amiss, something slightly off its kilter. It was not merely the impending onset of bad weather, or the frustrating incompetence of Rudnikov on the Orel. There was something more… He could not see what it was just yet, but some inner voice warned him that this day would be far from routine. Call it intuition, or the barnacled salt of many years experience at sea, but Volsky sensed something was wrong. He found himself listening intently to the ship, the sound of its turbines, the hum of the electronic consoles here on the main bridge, as if he might ferret out the vague disquiet that had settled over him. Yet everything sounded normal to his well tuned ear.
The ship he sailed was the newest addition to the fleet, a miraculous resurrection of one of the most imposing classes of surface combat vessels ever designed. Any sailor worth his salt will tell you that it's bad luck to rename a ship, but the Russians never seemed to bother with it. Most ships in the Kirov class had started with the name of the Russian city, and then been renamed after a famous admiral or general. In Kirov’s case, the ship also bore the name of the revolutionary hero Sergey Kirov. Sure enough, one by one, each ship seemed to suffer some peculiar fate, an accident, a mishap at sea, then a seemingly endless berthing at a lonesome port awaiting a promised overhaul that never came. Kirov had suffered more than others. First launched in the 1980s, the ship bedeviled Western naval planners for decades. She was renamed Admiral Ushakov much later in her history, but had long since been retired after an accident with her nuclear reactor made the vessel unserviceable.
And so went the fate of each ship in this unlucky class. The second ship, Frunze, had been renamed Admiral Lazarov, and it lasted no more than ten years in active service before being decommissioned. Kalinin, the third of ship, was renamed Admiral Nakhimov and fared little better, being retired in 1999. As if to avoid the curse, the final ship began as Yuri Andropov and then was renamed Pytor Velikiy, (Peter The Great) in 1992. It continued to serve until 2014 before it, too, was berthed in Severomorsk alongside the aging hulks of its sister ships. This last ship had run afoul of the curse during an exercise much like the one Leonid Volsky was organizing today. The Pytor Velikiy was coordinating live fire exercises with an Oscar II class submarine, when the undersea boat suffered a tragic misfire with one of her torpedoes and exploded taking the lives of all hands on board. And now it seemed the same situation was repeating itself again.
The Kirov class languished for years, laid up and removed from active service, the proud vessels wasting away in the cold northern harbors of Murmansk while the Russians haggled over how to find the money to refit them. But the money was never there. It was not until global circumstances forced the Russians to finally modernize their Navy that the designers and architects again began to draw up plans for an ocean going warship capable of standing with any other ship in the world. One proposal after another was drafted, yet each seemed too grandiose and far-reaching to ever be realized. In the end, the Russians decided that, with four old Kirov class cruisers lying in mothball, they would have enough raw material to refit at least one of these ships by cannibalizing all of the others. And this they did.
Built from the bones of every ship and its class, the new vessel had been given top priority in the shipyards to form the heart of a blue ocean task force that was still under development. Rather than rebuilding the ship from scratch, laying down the keel and working their way up, the ship had been gutted and redesigned from the inside out. The hull was extended and re-metaled, the superstructure modified, up-armored, and fitted out with all the very latest equipment in terms of missiles and sensors in the year 2017. Three years later, after extensive and still costly refitting, it was time to christen the new vessel and commission her into the fleet.
God created the heavens and the earth in just six days, thought Volsky, and on the seventh day he built Kirov. She was an awesome ship when finally completed. Her designers thought it only fitting that she be given back her old name, and they made her the flagship of the new Northern Fleet.
For years the Russian shipyards had turned out little more than a few insignificant frigates and corvettes. But after closely observing modern naval engagements from the Falkland Islands conflict to the wars in the Persian Gulf, Russian planners had decided it was necessary to revitalize their aging fleet with something a little more formidable. The new Kirov was everything they hoped for and more, like a proud old armored knight coming out of retirement in an hour of greatest need. At 32,000 tons when fully loaded, she was one of the largest surface action ships in the world, exceeded in size only by the American supercarriers and the aging Iowa class battleships that were now no more than tourist attractions and well past their day in any case. The Russians had always had a fondness for building things big, and building them strong. Kirov was both.
Officially designated a nuclear guided missile cruiser, Western planners referred to her as a battlecruiser, and in size and scale she was really very much
closer to that ship type, which had first entered the naval lexicon during the First World War-a ship with the speed of a fast cruiser, yet the fighting power of something much bigger. At 32 knots, Kirov was as fast as any destroyer or cruiser in the world. Yet her armament was considerably stronger, updated with the very latest in new Soviet technology for both guns and missile systems.
Her primary armament was a potent array of anti-ship missiles that were carried on her long forward deck section. Unable to compete with the West in terms of aircraft carriers, Russia pursued an intensive development in the area of missile technology, and now possessed some of most lethal and efficient anti-ship missiles on earth.
Kirov also boasted the latest in Soviet naval gun technology, twin 152mm guns mounted on their new stealth turret to help lower the radar signature. The gun was the equivalent of a 5.9 inch naval battery, and could fire 30 rounds per minute at a range exceeding 25 kilometers. The day of the big gun was long gone. Even these 152mm turrets would be thought of as typical secondary armament on an old WWII battleship, or the primary guns on lighter class cruisers of that era. Heavy cruisers might carry a bigger 8 inch gun, and the battlecruisers and battleships trumped this with guns firing shells in the range of 11 to 16 inches in diameter. The Japanese behemoth Yamato carried the largest guns in the world at 18 inches, three times as large as those mounted on Kirov. Yet, in her day, the year 2021, no ship mounted bigger or a more potent array of weapons.
For air defense, long-range SAM batteries were augmented by medium range missile defense systems and an array of rapid firing Gatling guns should anything penetrate this defense.
Finally, the ship was also equipped with the latest UGST versatile deep-water homing torpedo, a total of 10 firing tubes, five on each side. This was an extremely dangerous weapon, able to range out as far as 50 kilometers and travel that distance in one hour at its highest speed. As it approached the target, be it a submarine or surface ship, or even the wake of a surface ship, it could home in beginning at a range of 2 kilometers.
The aft section of the ship was also a landing platform for three helicopters. Two KA-40 naval helos could provide over the horizon reconnaissance, radar picket duties, and ASW defense carrying the APR-3 water-jet-propelled torpedo capable of attacking submarines at a submerged depth of 500 meters and KAB-250PL guided depth charges. One KA-226 scout chopper was a modified version of the rescue helo built for the Moscow police, and carried a 30 mm cannon with provisions for air-to-air or surface attack missiles on two stubby wing pods. With a flight endurance of between 4 and 6 hours, the helo mounted HD-optical zoom and infrared cameras, and also had laser range finding. All in all, the battlecruiser literally bristled with weaponry, one of the most powerful surface combatants in the world. Considering the chaos and contradiction of the nation all this had come from, it was a miracle the ship was ever rebuilt.
Admiral Leonid Volsky had sailed her throughout her trials and made two world cruises, showing the flag in ports o’ call all across the globe and again troubling the dreams of many Western naval analysts. Now, in the year 2021, increased tensions had put the Russian Navy on a near wartime footing.
The long fall had swept away Russia’s stilted Soviet political structures, leaving a hard shell of dysfunctional autocracy in its place in the neo-Russia that grew from the ashes. Her armies had diminished, just as the navy had been broken up and sold off to scrap yards, third world countries and even China had picked over the bones, purchasing one of Russia’s two large fleet aircraft carriers from Ukraine after that country inherited the ship from the old Black Sea Fleet. China was still rising, more powerful on the world stage than ever, but Russia never regained her lost glory. She was kept at arm’s length by NATO, shunned by the troubled European Union, and was a strange bedfellow in the new Asian coalition she had tried to forge with China.
Only her resources saved her from being relegated to the status of a third rate nation now-the vast mineral deposits, timber and oil of Siberia. Yet American oil companies, ever more thirsty for light sweet crude, had played hard ball with the Russians of late. They had tried to squeeze her out of the Caspian basin long ago, and the flow of aid and technology from the West had frozen in the pipelines of Siberia. Now even the oil fields languished in decline, but as Saudi Arabia failed, and the center of gravity shifted to the Pacific, Russian leaders pushed back against encroaching Western influence and control, and went so far as to embargo their oil, refusing to deliver it to British or American terminals, or to traffic in US dollars. The tensions eventually saw the deployment of Russian military forces near the breakaway republic of Georgia, where the Americans still kept a guarded watch on Iran, and push too often came to shove when the military was involved.
American carrier battlegroups still plied the oceans, largely unchallenged. Yet in recent months, Kirov had led several extended training exercises in the Norwegian Sea, an old hunting ground for the Russians, and the doorstep to the rich warm, commerce laden waters of the Atlantic. This latest maneuver was designed to simulate a raider breaking out into the North Atlantic accompanied by a single attack submarine.
And they were late.
As he waited for Rudnikov to report, the Admiral could not help but perceive the irony of his own situation. Here he sat in this waking zombie of a ship, resurrected from a sure appointment with the scrapping yards and pressed once again into useful service. Yet the uncanny echo of past mishaps still seem to haunt him, and the ship itself. His exercise was off schedule, and another old submarine was having trouble with its weapons.
Miles to the south, the cruiser Slava was deploying a line of target barges fitted with radar jammers to pose as a NATO task force in the Norwegian sea. If they had been real enemies, thought Volsky, they would have acquired his ship long ago and have missiles inbound while he still chafed and restlessly waited on Rudnikov and his old submarine to fit the proper warhead on his missiles. The exercise would have to be deemed a failure and replayed as soon as the approaching weather front cleared. There was nothing else to be done.
“Where is Rudnikov? Why hasn't he reported? What are they doing down there in that fat Oscar II? This whole situation is ridiculous!” The Admiral vented his impatience yet again.
Vladimir Karpov, the ship’s Captain, and his Chief of Operations Gennadi Orlov were listening, half amused, half embarrassed. This was all too typical of the fleet these days, old rusty ships; misplaced men and missions. Volsky had been intent upon changing that ever since taking his post as Admiral of the Northern Fleet. He had insisted that Kirov be built, then assigned as flagship of the fleet before he made it his own. It was a pity that there were not three or four destroyers that could sail with Kirov today, but those ships were still on the drawing boards. Kirov was alone in the cold, icy sea for this exercise, and it was just going to get colder and more lonesome as the day wore on.
Captain Karpov shook his head, noting the admiral’s obvious displeasure. “We would be better to wait, Admiral,” he said. A serious man, his eyes always seemed to look swollen and bloodshot, bulging under his thick woolen cap emblazoned with the gold insignia of the navy. A bit round shouldered from too many days at a desk earlier in his business career, Karpov had taken to the sea when things fell apart and the old Soviet Union dissipated.
“Wait until this front passes through and the weather clears. The targeting buoys and towing lines will be all in a tangle in these seas. Tell Rudnikov to get his missiles sorted out and meet us off Jan Mayen tomorrow at 1100 hours. There is no further need to proceed here. We should stand the men down and try again later.”
The Admiral looked at him sourly. “That will put us another day late back to Severomorsk,” he said. Then a look of resignation crossed his features, his eyes dim and distant. “Probably best to do as you suggest,” he decided. “Give the orders, Karpov. Give the damn orders, and let me know when Orel is finally ready. Tell Rudnikov-this time no excuses!”
“Aye, sir. I'll see to it.”
; Chapter 2
Captain Karpov was a straight laced and competent man, with a sharp intelligence, strong will, and much ambition. One of the only men on the ship that did not owe his present position to Volsky, the Captain had a volatile personality that sometimes seemed oddly out of place in a man with his obvious intellectual capacity. He was easily frustrated, sharp tempered, somewhat high strung and very defensive at times, though he balanced these emotions well with the steely logic of his mind. A thinker and planner, he had already plotted his course to the bridge of Kirov, winning the post in a hard fought competition with two other men. Volsky had, in fact, preferred another man, but Karpov had ingratiated himself with senior officers on the naval board, and won approval by other means. And he had even bigger plans if things went the way he imagined.
One day he would be wearing the Admiral's cap and the bold gold stripes on the cuff of his jacket. But not today. Today his black sheep wool Ushanka hat and thick leather sea jacket would serve him well enough, and he was content to be captain of the ship where his considerable talents could be put to the best use possible-as long as he could be captain. He saluted as the Admiral left the bridge, pleased to have the citadel to himself again.
He felt a strange sense of kinship with the battlecruiser. Kirov was rebuilt from an older life, just as he was with his new career in the navy. Russia had been doing some grave digging, he thought. Finances were so tight, resources so limited, that we have to pull ships out of retirement and refit them to have anything seaworthy these days. Oh, they had given the ship a clever new coat of radar absorbing paint, fitted those new carbon fiber tiles to her siding, with a curious coating of phototropic material that would change colors in various lighting conditions. It was a futile attempt to make the big ship less observable to both electronic and optical systems at a distance, and sometimes it worked quite well, but Kirov was a large vessel with a distinctive prow and silhouette that would be recognized without much difficulty. These features built into her redesign on the citadels, gun turrets, and all weather siding would make her seem smaller than she was to a curious radar set, but she would by no means be considered a stealthy ship.
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