“Missile? It fires a rocket?”
“Yes sir, and it’s quite effective—a semi-active laser guided tandem HEAT round, rated to penetrate 800mm of standard steel or reactive armor.”
O’Connor heard the words, but not their meaning. The man had just told him this rocket projectile could penetrate 800 millimeters! “Why, that would go in one side of a Matilda, and clean out the other,” he said, “and blow through four in a row! This can’t be so.”
“Our Lieutenant Gibson here is very well informed, General,” said Kinlan. “I’ll vouch for his claim, as I’ve seen these tanks in action. They’ll do everything he says, and more. This big fellow is also fairly agile for its size. You wouldn’t think that to look at the beast, but what is a fair battle speed, Lieutenant?”
“40KPH off road on decent ground, sir. Just under 60KPH on a good road.”
“And we can fire at that speed if we choose to do so,” Kinlan was enjoying this very much.
“Unbelievable…” There was no other work for what O’Connor was now seeing and hearing.
“Shall we have a look inside?” Kinlan smiled.
“By all means!” O’Connor was up onto the tank and, when his hand touched the heavy turret armor, he was stunned by its sheer mass. “Heavy as a block house!” he exclaimed.
“Third Generation Dorchester Chobham Armor, sir. The best protected tank in the world.” The Lieutenant was not making an idle boast.
O’Connor had put his hand firmly on the elephant’s mighty flanks, and seen its awesome trunk, yet when he finally lowered himself through the entry hatch his amazement was complete. He was shown the commander’s position, the periscope view and thermal imaging system, and then, to his utter astonishment, the digital electronics, and all within a cool, air conditioned and relatively spacious compartment. Tankers in the desert might endure temperatures north of 130 degrees in the hot sun, but not the men in these tanks, and this simple physical comfort improved their efficiency by 100%. They could think faster, react quicker, and fight longer in the controlled interior environment of the tank.
The General stared in utter amazement when the driver and gunner spoke of their respective duties.
“We’ve 25 of these at the ready,” the gunner explained, pointing the ammunition. “Another 25 stowed within easy reach.”
It was as if O’Connor had been swallowed by a behemoth, and when he emerged, he had a dazed, bedraggled expression on his face, Jonah expelled from the whale, senseless at what he had experienced. He got down from the tank, then stood there in complete silence, just looking at it.
“Start the engine,” he said at last. “Let me hear it.”
The driver inside accommodated him, and the deep low rumble of the big engine filled the air, thrumming with an expression of sheer power. O’Connor closed his eyes, listening to it, an almost frightening sound with overtones of doom in the lower registers. If Troyak had been there, he would have known it at once, a sound not unlike that deep, bone penetrating vibration they had heard in Siberia, only clearly audible this time. It had the same effect, and spoke of one word that it would put into the soul of any enemy it faced—fear.
O’Connor turned to the other men, and smiled. “It’s the bloody Hammer of God,” he said, and that was not too far from the mark. “This is… well its quite extraordinary! I had no idea a tank like this was even in development.”
Now he realized why this unit might be here, far from spying eyes, a new secret weapon, perhaps sent here to a remote proving ground for training. But Lord, he could only imagine these tanks in action now, thundering in at 40 kilometers per hour and firing as they went. There was no way they would ever hit anything, he thought, until they showed him how the tank could rotate its main body while the turret maintained a rigid and stable position aimed at a potential distant target.
“That’s what a stabilized gun system can do,” said Kinlan. “We can hit like lightning, move like a wildcat, and we’ve very sharp teeth. General,” he put his hand on O’Connor’s shoulder now. “This tank is all but invulnerable to anti-tank weaponry of this day. You could roll up one of your Matildas, park it right there and fire, and you might do nothing more than disturb the paint job on that armor. I have sixty of them sitting here, and woe betide anyone who gets in my way when I turn them loose. Now… What were you saying earlier about us having trouble holding off that Italian Infantry heading for Siwa?”
“Gentlemen,” said O’Connor. “I’m not much of a drinking man, but I’ll have a nip of anything you’ve got, just so I can stay on my feet.” He turned to them now, his astonishment becoming a broad smile. “Bloody marvelous!”
It was marvelous, and yet incomprehensible. O’Connor just kept staring at the tank, not one, but sixty of them! Behind the dazzle, a strange feeling came over him. The tank was extraordinary, its size and design astounding but, more than anything, he was flabbergasted at the things he had seen in the interior compartment. The whole space was immaculate, and looked like the dash board of an aircraft in places. Yet there were no typical needle gauges and dials. In their place the interior of the tank glowed softly with a strange light. Colored panels were lit up with numbers and symbols, and in one place he saw what looked to be a map glowing softly on a glass pane! The driver merely touched it with a finger and the whole image expanded and changed! He was so taken with it that he was almost mesmerized. He was seeing things here that boggled the mind. Look at that armor! The Lieutenant had said something about it that stuck in his mind.
“What did you call this armor, Lieutenant?”
“Third generation Dorchester Chobham, sir.”
“Dorchester?”
O’Connor knew the place. It was a small market town on the southern coast, just above Weymouth, with a population of about 10,000 people who chiefly traded local produce three or four days a week. The ladies there had taken to organizing for the coming war early on, setting up the local “Women’s Voluntary Service” or WVS, which was soon called the Widows, Virgins and Spinsters. The town, like many others after Dunkirk, had also set up the LDV troops, or “Local Defense Volunteers,” many armed with little more than broomsticks. After the people took to calling them the “Look, Duck and Vanish” squads, they changed the name to the “Home Guard” last July. He had a relative there, and she had written some time ago to say they were all busy making concrete anti-invasion blocks to drag off to the beaches, “Dragon’s Teeth” as they were called. Yet here this man was telling him they had also been hard at work on Dragon’s scales for this monstrous tank!
“Dorchester Chobham…” O’Connor repeated the words, an unaccountable feeling rising in him now. We could barely equip the troops that struggled home after Dunkirk. There weren’t even enough simple rifles in the country to re-arm the men! How in the world did we go from broomstick militias and concrete blocks to this?
“Third generation?”
“Yes sir, the process is hush, hush, but I understand that they’re using more exotic materials now in the composites—carbon nanotubes and all.”
O’Connor heard the words, but was oblivious to their meaning. He suddenly felt daft as a brush. Third generation? That implied two earlier models or versions of this armor. He suddenly felt something was very odd here. Secrecy was one thing, but hiding the design, development and testing of a weapon this sophisticated was quite another. There was simply no way these new vehicles could have been built and deployed in a fully combat ready status without thousands of men knowing about it, people in the factories, testing sites, dockyards, merchant marine, and anyone at Alexandria when they arrived. And he simply could not imagine that Wavell, with his back to the wall at Sidi Barani, would have blithely ordered a unit of this size and obvious value south into the heart of nowhere like this. It simply made no military sense. He turned to General Kinlan with a strange look in his eye.
“Just who in bloody hell are you people?”
Fedorov saw it now, behind the awe and surprise, a look of
profound doubt, and he knew the time was ripe to move O’Connor to a new understanding. The awakening had begun.
“Excuse me, sir,” said Popski on Fedorov’s behalf. “The Captain suggests it may be time to take the General aside for a more detailed briefing.”
Part III
Seeing the Elephant
“It was six wise men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.
― John Godfrey Saxe
Chapter 7
HMS Queen Elizabeth was in the vanguard of the fleet that day, her bow awash with rising seas as the grand old lady led the way at 16 knots. Laid down in 1912 and commissioned two years later, the ship had seen extensive service in WWI, with most of her combat hours logged near the Dardanelles until a troublesome turbine sent her home for repairs. She missed Jutland, eventually returning to Scapa Flow, but was nonetheless honored to present the terms of surrender to the German Admiral von Reuter after the armistice in 1918. After the war she went through two major refits, and first saw duty in the warm waters of the Mediterranean in 1925. Her latest refit was completed in the shadow of impending war at Portsmouth, where the ship had her guts torn out when 25 old boilers were removed to be replaced with 8 of the new high pressure boilers. New AA armament was installed, and her guns were modified to elevate just past 30 degrees, improving their range to 32,000 yards. Even the bridge structure got a facelift, and her distinctive tripod mainmast was finally crowned with the oddments of radar fittings, technology that had not existed when she first went to sea.
All this work kept the ship in the dockyards through most of 1940, and she had been scheduled to visit the powder room at Rosyth one last time before doddering out to sea for duty. There the Queen would have received her new Type 279 and Type 284 radars, but it was not to be. In this altered reality, the pressing need to reinforce Admiral Cunningham sent her off to Alexandria instead. Old but proud, she remained a stout hearted warrior, out now on her first real sortie of the war with the intent to find and hurt the enemy. Behind her two other old warriors sailed in stately review, Malaya and Warspite, both ships in this same class, and veterans of Jutland.
Captain Claud Barrington Barry was on the bridge that hour, a bit restless, as the fleet had been ordered to circle in place while the Admirals detached for an unusual rendezvous to the northeast off Crete aboard HMS Invincible. Cunningham had been aboard when the fleet left Alexandria, more to tour the ship and hearten up the crew than anything else. He had set his flag on Warspite, where his staff still waited, and would return there after the conference.
So Captain Barry was enjoying the last moments of calm he might know for some time. The fleet knew what they were in for, knew the odds were steep. The arrival of HMS Invincible and the strange Russian super destroyer, as the men called it, had been a welcome reinforcement, but that aside, the enemy outnumbered them two to one in capital ships. None of them really knew just what the Russian ship could do at sea, though they had heard rumors that it had played a vital role in turning back the Kriegsmarine north of Iceland. The aerial rocketry it displayed on arriving at Suez had given everyone quite a surprise, most of all the Italians, but you couldn’t sink a battleship with fireworks like that, or so the men thought.
The fleet had sailed west along the coast, all the way to Tobruk where the big guns cleared their throats lending fire support for the besieged garrison. They lingered there for a day until Admiral Tovey signaled that he would detach for an urgent meeting at sea, with no further details. Cunningham left in a hurry, boarding a destroyer and slipping off into the night, leaving Barry and the other fleet Captains in the dark as to what was causing the delay.
That night, on the 30th of January, they sailed north to a position well screened by British submarines. Since that time they had been sailing in a wide circle, attended by cruisers and destroyers just in case an Italian sub might get curious. They had been overflown by recon planes from Greece on the 31st, even while Fedorov was having his most unexpected first meeting with Brigadier Kinlan.
It was hard to keep up morale in these circumstances. Gibraltar had fallen, Malta was battling for its life, and the British army had just been chased halfway across Libya into Egypt again, wiping out all the gains O’Connor had delivered with his remarkable campaign. Captain Barry had a restless, worried feeling now, and the long slow circles he was sailing did little to calm his mind. Anything would be better than this, he thought. The men are as worried as I am, and it’s plain enough on their faces. We should be charging off to Malta now, guns at the ready, but instead here I am idling north of Derna, twiddling my thumbs and reading reports from the Chief of Engineers.
There had been an odd clicking sound in one of the turbines when they left Tobruk and started north. The engineers noted it, and were rousting about to see what it might be, but it did not seem serious. Probably just needs a little grease, he thought. The ship had been too long abed, and she was bound to have some creaks and squeaks now that she was up in her slippers and shuffling about again. That was all…
* * *
Cunningham had been welcomed aboard HMS Invincible, curious as to what this meeting was all about. It seemed very odd to be detaching like this, and politics were now uppermost in his mind as he sat down with Admiral Tovey for a briefing. He had assumed this meeting might have something to do with organizing fleet operations aimed at covering an evacuation of Greek forces, possibly to Crete, as they were sailing for Chania Bay. Andrew Browne Cunningham, old “A.B.C.” as he was called from his initials, had been disappointed when the planned attack on Taranto could not be teed up. He finally got hold of a pair of aircraft carriers, and now they were relegated to fleet air defense and anti-submarine patrols. His bid to even the odds and catch the Italians napping in port had been tabled with the news of the attack on Malta.
Now it was down to the real brass tacks, he thought. If we lose Malta the whole central Med goes with it. It was our unsinkable aircraft carrier, battered and beaten up daily by the Italian air strikes, but defiant. He knew the airfields at Ta’qali and Luqa would not hold for long. The Luftwaffe had come in droves, adding its considerable weight to Regio Aeronautica, and there was simply no way the threadbare squadrons on Malta could survive. They did their best, he thought, but we would have needed to get another thirty Hurricanes out there to make a fight of it. The carriers were here, and now I’ve a mind to see what we can do. Cunningham had a great deal on his mind that day, but he would soon learn things that would send him spinning like a top. The knowledge he was about to be handed, like an apple picked from the tree in paradise, was forbidden fruit. He would not be the same man when he returned to the fleet.
For his part, Admiral Tovey had anguished over what to do in this situation. He was the only man who really knew the whole terrible truth about the Russian ship and crew, or so he thought. At that moment, another man was learning that truth, as Fedorov struggled to convince Brigadier Kinlan of his impossible fate. Yet Tovey knew nothing of this when he stood to greet Admiral Tovey as he arrived for the meeting. He had been considering the situation for some time, and had determined that, given the circumstances calling for this meeting, there would be no way he could keep Admiral Cunningham in the dark. The man was simply too essential to the operation of the fleet here, a steady and reliable hand on the tiller that would be difficult to replace.
Volsky entered with two other men, one the young Lieutenant who would serve as his translator, and the other an older man in civilian dress, bespectacled, wizen with age, yet obviously carrying the wisdom those years had brought to him. He seemed like an amiable old grandfather, but Tovey could see there was something more to the man, a layer beneath that outer shell that spoke of something much deeper. The men all exchanged hearty handshakes, and Nikolin was pleased that Tovey remembered his name as well, taking h
is seat next to Admiral Volsky. There were still two more place settings at the table, and Nikolin wondered who was missing. He found out soon after when, to his surprise, a woman entered the stateroom, accompanied by a man in a dress white naval uniform, clearly a Captain by rank and bearing.
Cunningham looked up, also raising an eyebrow when he saw Elena Fairchild enter the room. Then he assumed this must be part of the diplomatic mission from Greece, though it seemed somewhat unusual. His reflex for propriety and decorum soon asserted itself, and he stood, as did the other men, politely greeting the woman as she was introduced.
“Miss Elena Fairchild,” said Tovey. “Allow me to welcome you aboard HMS Invincible. Please meet Admiral Andrew Cunningham, Commander of our Mediterranean Fleet and Admiral Leonid Volsky, a special representative of the Russian Navy.”
Fairchild gave Volsky a searching look, then quickly introduced Captain Gordon MacRae as they all took their seats. She had seen the long, dangerous lines of the battlecruiser Kirov, cruising on the far side of the British battleship, and it raised her hackles. There it was, Geronimo, the phantom ship that had bedeviled the British Empire, and led to the foundation of the Watch. When she first received the emergency message from the Russians, she had been shocked to learn the ship was here. From all she knew in her induction as a member of the Watch, Kirov had first appeared in the Norwegian Sea, in late July of 1941. Yet they had determined it to be January of 1941, six months before Kirov supposedly appeared!
The request for parley had been odd enough, but given that the two ships were both on a razor’s edge, it was a welcome reprieve, and much better than a scenario where their missiles would speak to one another in a battle at sea. The news that Admiral Tovey was on the line had been the next shock: “All is well, Argos Fire. All friends here. We request a rendezvous in the Gulf of Chania. Over.” So here she was, and that meeting was now about to convene.
Grand Alliance (Kirov Series) Page 6