Kirov III: Pacific Storm k-3

by John A. Schettler

  At that time Hara’s carriers had reached the western approaches to the Torres Straits, and his destroyers were busy sweeping a channel for their passage. With the main Prince of Wales Channel closed by the imposing hulk of Kirishima, an alternate route was sought that night. The Dayman and Simpson Channels to the north were too shallow for the 8.8 meter draft of the carriers so it was decided to risk going south of the large Prince of Wales Island and into Endeavour Strait near Cape York. The Japanese had good charts of the region, and the depth of Endeavor Strait was typically between ten and thirteen meters, enough water to slip the carriers through, though they would come under the watchful eyes of a small Australia Command Outpost on Horn Island.

  There Lt. Commander Fenton’s Horn Island Detachment was surveying sites for a possible airfield, guarded by a small militia battalion under Lt. Commander Davies. They got a good look at a small procession of Japanese ships, five destroyers, the heavy cruiser Tone, light carrier Zuiho and then the sleek new fleet carriers Zuikaku and Shokaku. The two other cruisers Nachi and Myoko were able to find passage north of Kirishima’s position, their shallower draft of 6.3 meters enabling them to navigate the waters there better. Far behind, the large battleships Mutsu and Nagato would follow the carriers in time, with another fist full of destroyers.

  The men on Horn Island would get a more than a few rounds that night as the price for their front row seat to the parade. They hunkered down in slit trenches with field glasses trained on the glassy sea, sweating it out in the mud and rain as the Japanese fleet moved slowly through the strait. Something big was obviously up if all these ships were moving east, and they made a full report by wireless to coastwatchers on the York Peninsula. Australia Command was soon informed that the Japanese seemed to be moving heaven and earth to get after a mysterious ship that was still at large in the Coral Sea—a ship that had managed to sink heavy cruiser Haguro, leave the battleship Kirishima a burning wreck in the channel, and beat off every air strike the Japanese threw at it.

  ~ ~ ~

  Things were getting very interesting at FRUMEL Headquarters in the Monterey Apartments of Melbourne. Osborne and Novak worked the whole afternoon, taking phone calls from British liaison officers out of Perth that seemed to muddy the water more than anything else. In the meantime, decrypts of Japanese naval signals indicated that the enemy seemed to be extremely concerned about this mysterious ship they had come to call Mizuchi. Osborne and Novak were equally concerned, as there seemed to be no way to explain the ship’s presence, until a strange signal was received from the British near dusk on the 26th of August.

  It seems someone had sent a message all the way from Bletchley Park. It hopped into Gibraltar, went out as coded signal to Alexandria where it was relayed to Colombo on Ceylon. From there it was sent to Perth, and then phoned in to Melbourne. The shock was that the British stated their belief that the ship now being scrutinized by FRUMEL analysts had been the same one escorted to the Island of St. Helena, arriving there three days earlier and then simply vanishing.

  “Vanishing?” Novak looked at Osborne, clearly astounded. “They used that exact word?”

  “They did.”

  “The British actually think this is the raider they were after in the Med? My, God, Man. It’s thousands of miles away!”

  “7,800 nautical miles, to be more exact,” said Osborne.

  “In 24 hours? The damn ship was spotted by our coastwatchers on the 24th. The British have had a little too much brandy, Ozzie. This is nonsense.”

  “It came right from Bletchley Park. Hut Four.”

  That was enough to give Novak pause, but he was still shaking his head. “Look, you and I both know—”

  “Some very big names have signed off on this message, Admiral John Tovey for one. Alan Turing for another.”

  “Turing? Well they’ve got it wrong. It won’t be the first time. They kept insisting the Japanese were going to hit us at Pearl, but what came of all that? Nothing.”

  “No, but they damn well hit us at Manila, didn’t they, and they’ve been hitting us ever since.”

  “That’s another matter,” Novak was adamant. “No ship can move nearly 8000 miles in a single day. I don’t suppose this message cares to explain that little detail, does it?”

  “No, it doesn’t. But they have their own name for this ship, this sea dragon the Japanese have been after the last three days. They call it Geronimo.”

  “Well they can call it whatever they like, it can’t be the ship they escorted to St. Helena, and they’re fools if they think it is.”

  Osborne, took a long puff from his pipe, exhaling slowly, and looking at Novak with a serious expression on his face now. “I may be going out on a limb here,” he began. “Ever hear that code name before, Novak?”

  “Geronimo? Can’t say as I have.”

  “Well I’ve heard it, and it doesn’t surprise me that neither you or anybody else knows about it.”

  “What’s so special about you, Mr. Wizard? Where did you get wind of it?”

  “That would be telling,” said Osborne evasively. “Let’s just say that the British have held this one close to their chest for at least a year. You know about that incident in the North Atlantic last August, eh?”

  “Of course. I knew men on the Mississippi. Nazis made a big mistake setting their U-boat fleet loose on that ship. What did it get them?”

  “It wasn’t a U-boat attack,” Osborne said slowly, an edge of caution in his voice.

  Now Novak looked over his shoulder at the man, suddenly quiet. Then he turned and pulled out a chair, sitting down and leaning heavily on his elbows, one hand in his dark wavy hair. “Suppose you tell me what really happened then,” he suggested.

  “Can’t say as I have all the dope myself,” said Osborne. “But I do know it was no U-boat attack. There was a raider at sea, and the British sortied damn near the whole Home Fleet to go after it. Seems this ship was using some rather formidable weapons—rockets used against both ships and planes.”

  “Rockets? Well the Russians have been using them for years. What’s so new about that?”

  “The accuracy,” said Osborne slowly. “The impact. These were not like the Russian RS-82 and RS-132s. Not like the British 3 inch rockets, or even our own Forward Firing Aerial Rocket project for ASW work. They were something much bigger, deadly accurate, enough to take out an incoming strike wave of planes miles before it ever got anywhere near the firing ship.”

  “I see…” Novak was now very interested.

  “Yes, and they had bigger stuff as well. Anti-ship rockets, incredible range, pinpoint accuracy. They walloped the British something fierce. Put a couple of their carriers in dry dock and sunk the Repulse.”

  Novak’s eyes widened. “You mean to say Repulse was sunk by this raider? There was no U-Boat attack there either?”

  “No U-boat attack. It was this ship they started calling Geronimo, the one the US claimed as a trophy after Mississippi went down. You read the reports—Desron 7 was supposed to have taken the bastard down, though not a single ship survived that attack, right?”

  “That’ s the way the official report reads.”

  “Well the official report is bullshit,” Osborne tapped his pipe in the ashtray, picking at some loose tobacco as he did so. “The whole Desron 7 thing was nothing more than a cover story. Now you keep this quiet, Novak,” he lowered his voice, a warning evident in his eyes behind his dark rimmed spectacles, “but I can tell you this much. Five destroyers showed up at Halifax twelve days after they supposedly disappeared during this incident with the raider. You want to know their names? Plunkett, Hughes, Madison, Gleaves and Lansdale—Desron 7, or at least the last five destroyers from that group. They told quite a story too. Said they returned to Argentia Bay and there was nobody there—no ships in the harbor, no airbase, absolutely nothing. They claimed they searched the whole area, even put men ashore, but that the whole place was abandoned, flattened.”

  “But the Atlantic Chart
er conference was going on at that time. That’s ridiculous!”

  “Yes, it certainly is, but this is what the skipper off Plunkett claimed, a fellow named Kauffman. They interviewed every man on every goddamned ship and they all corroborate what this Captain Kaufman says. The men say those destroyers pulled up anchor and headed south for Halifax, and they just come waltzing into the harbor some days later. Hard to believe, but that’s what really happened to Desron 7. The Navy got hold of those ships, painted over their hull numbers, renamed every last one and scattered them to harbors all over the Pacific Coast.”

  “Are you serious? How did you get this information?”

  “I never did get it. You never heard about it either, Novak. Use your head. This stuff is buried as deep as they could dig the hole, but I have a few contacts here and there that I can’t mention, and I got the scuttlebutt from them. Either it’s all a crock of shit, or something really strange went down in the Atlantic last year.”

  “Then if Desron 7 didn’t get this raider, this Geronimo the British are talking about, what happened to it?”

  “It just vanished…” Osborne let that dangle for a moment. “And that’s what they say right here in this message, Novak: Contact lost, 23-AUG-42, no sightings. Confidence high this is Geronimo. Details to follow.”

  Novak leaned back in his chair, clearly nonplussed.

  “Well I’ll be a monkey’s ass,” he said slowly.

  Osborne lit his pipe again.

  Chapter 20

  Fedorov found Admiral Volsky in the reactor room, leaning over a table with Dobrynin. The floor was still wet with an eighth inch of seawater, and men were working mops in one area of the compartment. Two bulkheads away they could hear the sound of the pumps running, and the clatter of tools on hard metal. It had been very close, he thought. If the reactor room had been flooded…. He didn’t want to think about it further.

  “Mister Fedorov,” said Volsky. “Just the man I wanted to see! Come have a look at these printouts.”

  “These are charts of the reactor performance data the Admiral asked me to produce,” said Dobrynin.

  “Is there something wrong with the core?” That was always a great hidden danger on any nuclear powered ship.

  “No, don’t worry about it,” said Dobrynin. “The core was never threatened. Just a little leakage from the outer hull breach, a little seawater is all that made it in here. The men will have it mopped up in no time.”

  “But have a look, Fedorov. Notice the line of that chart.”

  Fedorov leaned over, staring at the chart, a bit like a seismograph reading it seemed to him, and he noted a series a vertical lines pointed out by Dobrynin with a heavy thumb.

  “Each line is one day, marking the end of a normal twenty-four hour period. This red line is the total power output, so you can see where it increases when we were running the ship at high speed. This violet line however, those are flux levels in the core.”

  “Do you notice anything?” Volsky asked, eager to see if Fedorov saw what the other two men had been discussing.

  “Well it looks like the line spikes every so often.”

  “That’s what I saw,” said Volsky. “Dobrynin here tells me its normal, however.”

  “It’s just a routine maintenance operation,” the engineer explained. “We’re running a 24-rod reactor core here. Twenty-four control rods, but we have to inspect them at regular intervals. So what we do is pull one rod into this containment structure,” he gestured to a point high up above the main equipment in the room. “We can look the rod over for decay with inspection equipment, even on a microscopic level if need be. While we do this we have to insert a spare rod that descends from that metal tube there,” he pointed again. “That’s rod twenty-five. It gets a dip into the core every so often when we pull one of the other rods for this inspection routine.”

  “Then you are saying you get reactor core flux events whenever you do this procedure?”

  “Correct,” said Dobrynin, “but not immediately; not during the procedure itself, but just a little while after, sometimes a few hours, sometimes a full day. I suppose that’s why I never connected the two events.”

  “I see,” said Fedorov. Then something occurred to him, and his next question was obvious. “Chief…How often do you perform this maintenance routine?”

  Admiral Volsky smiled, folding his arms over his broad chest with a wink at Fedorov. “Go on Dobrynin,” he said. “Tell him.”

  “Well every twelve days, sir. We pull a rod every twelve days, but I never associated the flux event with the procedure until—”

  “Until I had him run these performance charts,” said Volsky.

  Fedorov’s eyes widened, a quiet light there now. “Every twelve days? The interval, Admiral! This could explain a great many things!”

  “Indeed it might,” said Volsky. “It could be that the answer to this entire mystery has been right under our noses the whole time. We thought the explosion on Orel set off this crazy chain reaction, this time displacement we’ve been trapped in.”

  “Perhaps it did,” Fedorov suggested, “but my hunch about the interval is certainly telling.”

  “What’s this talk about an interval?” asked Dobrynin.

  “I’ve been tracking the dates closely,” said Fedorov. “Every twelve days there has been a time displacement. We either move forward, or back again. Let me see the dates of these maintenance checks…”

  He leaned over the chart, his head nodding with the excitement of discovery. “Yes! Look Admiral. There was a rod just before our live fire exercises were scheduled. Then look here, another procedure the day before we vanished near Argentia Bay. Dobrynin… when was the last procedure run?”

  Dobrynin squinted. “Why, three days ago. I pulled the number eight rod, stuck in number twenty-five and—”

  “And here we are,” said Admiral Volsky, “shooting missiles at Japanese planes and ships!”

  “Then this is even more evidence that the cause of these displacements is not some external event,” said Fedorov. “It could be right here, right in our own reactor. We could be causing it just by running this maintenance procedure.”

  “Which means…” Volsky’s eyes were bright under his heavy gray brows. “It’s just as Doctor Zolkin suggested. He told us to go tell Dobrynin to fiddle with his reactor and send us home. He was speaking in jest, but now we find that this may end up being the truth after all.”

  “What do you suggest we do, Fedorov? Should we test it?

  “You mean complete the maintenance procedure and see what happens?”

  “Of course! Dobrynin, is there any reason why you could not run this procedure now?”

  “Now, sir? Well, nothing in principle, except I think we should wait for the men to clear the last of this seawater. The rods are just absorbing neutrons produced by the fission in the core. They just moderate the temperature of the reaction and control the flux.”

  “Why would this maintenance procedure cause these neutron flux events you’ve recorded? They were very unusual, yes? Not normal?”

  “I’m not exactly sure. If there was an air leak in the inspection module and the zirconium alloy coating the rods came into contact with air we could get oxidation there that would produce hydrogen. But the monitors have not detected any unusual hydrogen levels. I could also check the cooling water for contaminants. It must remain very pure, no ions, no chlorides.”

  “Run some diagnostics, Dobrynin, and if possible, try to complete a normal maintenance procedure as soon as possible. Be sure to inform the bridge when you do so.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  “This is going to be interesting,” said Fedorov. “How long will this procedure take, Chief?”

  “I should have everything ready to go in an hour. After that, the rod inspection normally takes two hours.”

  “Then do it exactly as you would any other time,” said Volsky. “I want it perfectly routine. No rush. Just let us know when you complete i
t. Come now, Fedorov, let us get to the bridge. What were those three missiles I heard a while back?”

  “Japanese planes out of Port Moresby. They were flying a typical search pattern and one group got a little too curious. Karpov took them down.”

  “It sounded like the Klinok system. I thought as much. Well, Fedorov, now that we’ve got the repairs well in hand what next? We are in the Coral Sea, where should we steer?”

  “We’ll want to stay well away from the Solomons. They would be east of our present position. I suspect there will be fighting there, whether the history has changed or not. Some places just have strategic magnetism about them, and the Southern Solomons is one of them insofar as this campaign is concerned.”

  “Should we try to go north?”

  “I wouldn’t advise it, sir. That’s all Japanese territory, and New Britain Island, the Bismarck barrier, will force us into restricted channels within range of Japanese air bases at Lae and Rabaul. The Bismarck Sea north of that Island is a Japanese lake at the moment. No, I think we must go south.”

  “What about the Americans. Should they discover us they may be as dogged as the Japanese, particularly if they should manage to put two and two together and realize we are the ship responsible for that attack in the North Atlantic.”

  “That would be quite a stretch, sir. I suggest we stay on a heading of 135 degrees southeast. That should keep us in the Coral Sea for a good long while, but well off the Australian Coast. There will not be much threat from the Australians. They had very little air or naval power to speak of at this point. New Caledonia is another matter. There’s a big American buildup underway at Noumea. We should keep well away from that place, and this course will give us a 400 mile buffer. We’ll eventually approach New Zealand on that heading, but we can turn on 90 degrees due east well before that and head into the South Pacific. That will take us down below the fireworks in the Solomons, and who knows, sir, we might even find your island girls out there somewhere. Tonga is 400 miles southeast of Fiji, then there is Niue, the Cook Islands, French Polynesia, Tahiti, Bora Bora, even Pitcairn Island. That’s the most isolated place I can think of on earth. The mutineers from the old ship Bounty settled there, but it’s virtually deserted.”