Stormtide Rising (Kirov Series Book 29)

by Schettler, John

  Hitler nodded. “Very well, Raeder. After all, why should I moan and groan over the loss of a single destroyer? I will give you just a little more time to prove your worth, and that of the fleet. First, you must do as you now promise, and work with Goring to support our attack on Crete. Yet after that, I have one more task for you to undertake, and then let us see how well your ships can really fight.”

  That got Raeder’s attention, for he wondered what the Führer could have in mind, and asked as much.

  “The Russians,” said Hitler flatly. “The damnable Soviet Black Sea Fleet. It was driven from Sevastopol when we took the Crimea, but fled to Novorossiysk, and Ivan Volkov has been unable to take that place. In fact, Goring has already led the way for me on this new operation. Did you hear about the successful raid he launched on that enemy port? We have new weapons as well, Admiral. I have not been idle since the enemy first unleashed these naval rockets upon us. Perhaps you still see them as the main reason for your many setbacks at sea. Well, I can tell you that we have them now—radio controlled glide bombs, and rocket powered cruise missiles. That was what Goring tested for me in that attack, our new V-1 Sturmkrähe . Yes, the Storm Crows will soon do much more.”

  “Admirable,” said Raeder. “But what is it you want concerning the Black Sea Fleet?”

  “The six U-boats we have there are insufficient. I will tell you the same thing I told Halder before I threw him out of OKW. The Russian Black Sea Fleet still sits there on the coast and prevents us from shipping any of Volkov’s oil to Rumania as planned. It also guards the Taman Strait at Kerch, and the Army wants to cross there in conjunction with Operation Edelweiss to clear the last Soviet resistance in the Kuban sector. So after Crete, you will take all our remaining ships in the Med through the Aegean, and into the Black Sea. I have already obtained permission from the Turks. They see what we are doing with Operation Phoenix, and now they are quite amenable. So that is your major objective after Crete. The Russian Black Sea Fleet must be destroyed!”

  This came as a real surprise to Raeder, something completely unexpected. “You want me to engage the Soviet fleet?”

  “I see your hearing has not been effected, in spite of all the big guns you have fired to no good end in the Atlantic. Yes, destroy the Black Sea Fleet. You have it exactly.”

  “But my Führer… The Soviet fleet has a battleship, five cruisers, eighteen destroyers and over forty submarines, not to mention eighty more motor torpedo boats.”

  “Are you telling me you cannot do this? Because if you are, then after Crete, you can tender your resignation and I will mothball the entire fleet for the duration of this war.”

  It was no idle threat, and Raeder knew it. Goring had so poisoned Hitler’s mind that his mood was very dark concerning the outlook for the navy. Most of the fleet was still in the north. He had only those few ships in the Med, two large raiders, three destroyers, and the two carriers. But he also had the Normandie , now Friedrich de Gross . He had been contemplating a daring attempt to send them all into the Western Med, raiding any Allied convoy they encountered along the way before attempting to break out into the Atlantic. Now Hitler was asking him to make the dangerous transit of the Bosphorus and enter that Soviet lake! He could see disaster looming in this request, but the tone in Hitler’s voice showed him to be deadly serious. There was no other course he could set.

  “My Führer,” he said grimly. “ If you order this, I will do all in my power to do as you ask. Realize that this will expose the small flotilla I have available to grave risk of air attack, and we will need the full cooperation of the Luftwaffe to have any chance of success.”

  “I have already spoken to Goring. He has four of our new Zeppelins at Odessa, and I will send them additional munitions of the sort I have already mentioned. He has naval strike bombers, Stukas at Sevastopol, good fighters, and there are already the six U-boats there to lend a hand. Döenitz has agreed that they can all go under your command. I will also transfer a number of E-boats by rail to Odessa, and they can help you with the enemy torpedo boats. Surely the Bismarck is a match for anything the enemy has there. We have already sunk the one battleship they had at Novorossiysk, along with a cruiser and two destroyers. Your fleet should be more than capable of handling the rest.”

  “The surface ships, yes, I would agree. It’s those enemy submarines I worry about.”

  “Half of them are probably not even sea worthy,” said Hitler.

  “All the same, torpedoes sink ships,” Raeder cautioned. “Even twenty enemy submarines will present a grave risk. What I will need is more destroyers. If I could take some of the French destroyers along, that would help, and perhaps the Italians could contribute something from their Aegean Fleet.”

  “I will speak to Mussolini today,” said Hitler.

  And he did.

  When Raeder left that meeting, grateful to still be in command, he realized that everything rested on the outcome of this mission. It will either prove the merits of my surface fleet, confirm my newfound belief in the carriers, or end it, he thought, unable to shake the feeling that this was to be his last dance.

  Chapter 2

  Kirov ran due south, with three hungry hounds at her back. They had identified the three Japanese destroyers, Kirishima, Kongo, Atago , though the latter had stopped at the location of Takami’s burning hulk to begin rescue operations. For the time being, Karpov had no immediate plan other than to move south at good speed and see what the enemy would do. At this point, he did not know all the cards in his enemy’s hand, how many ships were really out there, how many planes. They had taken one enemy ship down, surprising it with Kazan’s own inherent stealth and the deadly effectiveness of those lethal Zircon missiles. Takami was dead, but now Hercules was suddenly fighting a Hydra with many more heads.

  * * *

  Admiral Kita sent up his Merlin helos and Osprey aircraft to bring back the surviving crew members off Takami . He was pleased to learn that most got safely off the ship into the water, though the missile strike itself had killed 23 crewmen below decks. So all the bridge officers had survived, and he wanted Captain Harada on Kaga as soon as possible.

  It would be over four hours before all his remaining F-35s would be prepped and refueled for operations. He would have Seahawk support from the three ships in his destroyer screen in half an hour, and that was his first order of business. No one really knew where the Russian sub was now, which made him edgy. He inwardly chided himself for not ordering those destroyer Captains to make their helos ready for ASW operations, as he never perceived any threat from the men of this era. Instead, both Takami and Kongo had sent out their birds for simple maritime surveillance. That gave them the longest endurance, and they did the job of locating the Russian battlecruiser. Unfortunately, they had no idea Kazan was in the game, and that blind spot had cost them a ship, and 23 lives.

  Now the Admiral considered his options as the ship’s chronometer rolled through 14:00. He had three hounds up front, and they were now running at 30 knots. A Russian helo was up at 16,000 feet, staying well outside SM-2 range, and keeping an eye on his ships. It was now approximately 230 nautical miles from Kaga , and he reasoned that the mother ship, Kirov , was probably somewhere south of that position. How far south? He had six planes loading out with the JSOW package, and that would give them a 290 mile strike radius. If Kirov was able to get outside that radius, then he would be forced to close the range considerably before he launched another strike.

  “How we doing on fuel?” he said to Captain Jenzu.

  “We’re burning a lot running full out like this, but we can do it for another 3 days and four hours. If we slow down that endurance will extend dramatically. As for those destroyers out there, they’ll have shorter legs, less than three days fuel if they run at 30 knots as they are now.

  “The problem is, this Russian ship is rated for 32 knots, and they don’t have a fuel issue with those nuclear reactors.”

  “You believe they broke off to run o
ut our leash?”

  “Sure seems that way. At this point, even our fighters may not be able to get to them. We’ll have to maintain speed like this just to stay in the hunt, but we may not be gaining any range on them if they’re running at 32 knots. In fact, we could be falling behind. For that matter, they could have turned, and so we can’t even compute a possible intercept course until we locate them again. We just got caught flat footed. We had helos on the destroyers ready for maritime surveillance, and when that sub turned up, the air crews started to load them out for ASW. So there we sat, with a big window where all we had was that single bird up off Kongo . Once it had to return to the ship, we lost its radar assist and Kirov slipped away.”

  “Sir, Akagi has two planes fully loaded out with the GBU/53, and they have a 450 nautical mile strike radius.”

  “Hold them for the moment, but let’s get a fighter up to see if we can find that ship. Send it south, and if that damn Russian helo is still up there, tell them to shoot it down.”

  “Aye sir, that’s a given.”

  Twenty minutes later that fighter was well on its way, and vectoring in on the easily spotted radar signal of Turkey 1. It wasn’t long before the sophisticated AN/ASQ-239 Barracuda sensor suite on the F-35 also got wind of the skunk they were after. They made contact at 14:18, and two minutes later that was refined to the assurance that they had again relocated Kirov .

  “Got him!” Captain Jenzu reported. “Recon 1 has him at 236 nautical miles, south by southwest. Our present heading is pretty good for an intercept, but I recommend we come five points to port.”

  “Make it so. Do we have target course and speed?”

  “Not yet. We’ll get that as our bird gets closer. See what a good sensor suite and elevation does for your day?”

  “Right,” said Kita. “Now we go after that Russian helo.”

  The pawn game was as interesting and important as anything else in chess. That single fighter was carrying four AIM 120-D missiles that could reach out 75 nautical miles, and the Russians had a problem.

  Turkey 1 had been quite brazen in activating its primary search radar, for that was its purpose. The Kopio-A, or “Lance” radar system it employed would give good medium range coverage out to 135 nautical miles at the maximum altitude of the helo, which was about 16,000 feet. But it was having great difficulty seeing the F-35’s. In fact, it had allowed two of the three strike groups to fly right through that coverage sphere completely undetected, and at that moment, it did not see the fighter bearing down on it either. That shortfall was compounded by the fact that the Kongo was aggressively jamming, and the Russians found their equipment was having difficulty in that environment. When it came to the actual electronics, the West still enjoyed a clear edge.

  Turkey 1 had been up a good long while, pegged the position of the three Japanese destroyers, and now it was turning for home, beginning a slow descent. At 14:32, Recon-1 sent the Brevity code “Fox Three” home to Kaga to indicate he was engaging, and went after that Turkey with 2 missiles. The Russian radar saw those Amrams, but it could still not locate the plane that fired them! The Russian helo pilot nonetheless knew he was now in real hot water. He switched off his Lance radar system, activated offensive ECM and dove for the deck, wanting to get as low as possible before those missiles came looking for him.

  The AIM-120 was a fire and forget weapon, very fast at Mach 4, and it used inertial guidance and terminal active radar to find its prey. Kirov was over 80 nautical miles away when they saw them on Rodenko’s screens, arcing up to an extreme altitude over 90,000 feet. They would then fall like meteors toward their target. Adjusting for the 60 plus kilometer range, and the agility of that helo as the pilot desperately maneuvered to avoid the missiles at the last minute, the 95% kill probability fell to a little under 60% by the time the missiles got close. The pilot evaded the first missile, but the second had locked on and would not be fooled.

  Admiral Kita had cooked his Turkey.

  The KA-40 exploded in a yellow orange fireball, and plucked out one of Kirov’s long range eyes. Throughout the whole of that engagement, the F-35 was never seen, lending weight to the claims that stealth kills more than anything else in a modern air-sea engagement. If you can’t see something, you simply cannot take any active defensive measures against it. Evasive maneuvers, chaff, and jamming were about all you had, and they would only give you a slim margin on defense.

  The result of that attack, however, was significant, and when Karpov got the news, he knew that in spite of his 100 nautical mile lead on his closest pursuers, the danger the enemy presented remained very real.

  * * *

  “Damn!” he swore. “They took out our KA-40. Why can’t we see their fighters?” He looked at Rodenko, but the Lieutenant simply shrugged.

  “That F-35 is stealthy. It’s what really gives it the edge over a good Fourth Generation fighter. Too bad we don’t have the Admiral Kuznetsov around.”

  Yes, thought Karpov. You fight a carrier with another carrier at sea, or with a submarine. That was what he had to do now. Without further hesitation, he had Nikolin send out a coded message to Gromyko on Kazan . First he congratulated him on his initial kill, for getting Takami was a real help. Then he asked him to backtrack north and look for the enemy carriers, but soon learned that Gromyko had already done this when he was updated with the sub’s present course and speed.

  Kazan had moved north, running very deep and sprinting at 35 knots. With the enemy coming south, he waited for the range to close, and at 19:00 he decided to slow down and get up above the layer to deploy his towed sonar array. It would trail down below the layer into the deep sound channel, and Chernov would have the best chance of hearing the enemy carriers. What he heard instead surprised him, and it was almost right on top of them.

  * * *

  “Con—Sonar. Surface contact! Fast revolutions, and very close. I make it no more than 12 nautical miles, south by southwest…. Heading 217 and running fast, over 30 knots from the sound of it.”

  Gromyko came over to have a look, thinking. “Read it for me Chernov. Stop beating around the bush.” He smiled.

  “Yes sir. I’ve got it now. DDE Takao . That’s one of their new Ashai Class Destroyers optimized for ASW.” He gave Gromyko a worrisome look.

  “Do you think they have us?”

  “I doubt it, sir. Not at that speed. But they may get wind of us soon at this range. I’d be real cautious here.”

  That was going to force Gromyko’s hand. He was carrier hunting, and as yet they had no contacts of that type. Carriers seldom travel in isolation, and he reasoned that this was probably a screening escort. He was getting close.

  Now he was going to have to decide what to do with this destroyer. To attack it might entail considerable risk. He was right behind that ship, right in its wake, which was a good place to be if they were listening for him. He could put missiles on it and, just to give himself that option, he turned to Belanov and gave the order.

  “Come shallow to 130 feet and slow to 12 knots. Ready one Zircon and two Onyx missiles for firing.”

  He was planning a repeat performance of the attack that had taken out Takami . The boat slid up through the opaline sea, stealth of another kind as it slowly ran shallow. Twelve knots would keep him nice and quiet at that depth, just below cavitation threshold, and he ran for fifteen minutes, letting Chernov listen for any sign that they may have been spotted. For all he knew, that escort destroyer might have helos up this very minute. This was very risky, but he had been emboldened by the successful strike on Takami .

  This time, he was trying to sneak into the theater with half a ticket stub. He had only ordered three missiles, instead of the six that he had used to take out Takami , and now he thought twice about that. Happenstance could further reduce the odds of a successful hit.

  “Belanov,” he said to his sturdy XO. “The Zircon failed to acquire numerous times in close range combat, did it not?”

  “Yes sir. It didn’t
make the dog leg turn correctly if I recall the results I read from early trials.”

  Gromyko clenched his jaw at that. The Zircon was programmed to always fire off axis, actually moving away from the target before it made a dogleg turn to acquire it with its active homing radars. This missile had tremendous range and speed, and if the target was too close, it could easily overshoot. Even if it had been told where to find its enemy, it often failed to acquire or turn as expected. The missile would then go soaring up over 44,000 feet, racing away into the heavens at over 4000 knots.

  Too damn close, thought Gromyko. This new missile was touchy. They had been lucky that the barrage he sent at Takami had all turned and tracked true. But what if they failed to do so here? It was simply too fast, and now he knew it needed room to acquire. 12 nautical miles just wasn’t enough, or so he began to reason. As for the Onyx, it was tried and true, a sea skimmer that the ‘Surface Dogs’ called the Moskit II with their variant. It would go right for the enemy ship, at about 1450 knots, skimming low at just 30 feet, which would reduce its target profile and aspect.

  The Japanese destroyer might see it at 9 miles out and start jamming as it started to fire its missile defenses, though this ship was not carrying the Standard Missile 2 that had proved so effective against the Russian missiles thus far. Instead it was carrying 32 RIM-162B ESSM evolved Sea Sparrow missiles, quad-packed in the Mk-41 VLS modules. It was a weapon that had originally been designed as an air launched missile, now evolved to fight at sea and defeat these fast moving hypersonic Russian missiles like the Zircon. The Sparrows could accelerate to Mach 4, and had very good maneuverability, with perhaps a 90% chance of scoring a kill. The speed of the Russian missiles and their small radar returns, probably lowered those odds to 70%, but two missiles were usually sent after each SSM.