Kirov III: Pacific Storm k-3

by John A. Schettler

  “I should have saved the last of the Kashtan missiles,” Karpov breathed. “Now it’s down to the Gatling guns.”

  He stepped quickly over to the view panes, reached for his field glasses where they always hung there on a hook, and snapped them quickly up to his eyes. Then he saw something unexpected—more missiles streaking in from high above and vectoring in on the hurtling D3As. He had forgotten the KA-40!

  The helicopter had climbed to high elevation over 16,000 feet, and was hovering well above the strike wave now. The Japanese Zeros had been so intent of sacrificing themselves to the missiles that not one of them had seen the helo, and now it fired off its load-out of four air-to-air missiles. Two Zeros and two more of Sakamoto’s dive bombers were hit and flamed by the helo, but it could do little more.

  Sakamoto screamed in on the ship, streaking through a thin cloud. His vision seemed to blur, and he reached for his goggles to remove them as the ship seemed to resolve into shadow. Then he saw it again, pulling on the stick to re-orient the angle of his attack, but the target was wreathed in an undulating veil of cloudy mist, a glimmer of light was winking at him then flashing out from the ship below. He was so disoriented that he lost his concentration, and saw two other planes swoop past him. He shook his head, trying to clear his senses. Then he heard his men shouting in his head set: “Where is it? I can’t see it now—off on your left, bank left!”

  He saw a stream of hot tracer rounds zipping up from below, and knew he would be hit but, to his amazement, the rounds seemed to pass right through his plane—one right through his canopy—yet there was no visible damage! Then he saw the lead planes swoop and climb, their bombs arcing down at a shadow on the sea. It must be making smoke, he thought, seeing a third brave pilot, his bomb gone, still resolutely aiming his plane for the enemy ship. This Shadow Dancer is trying to throw a cloak of black and gray over itself to hide from us!

  He looked again, and then again… The ship was not there. Stupefied, he banked his plane this way and that, thinking he had lost consciousness and drifted off course, but he could see nothing. Then Sakamoto pulled hard on the stick, his engine straining, dive brakes shuddering as he struggled to pull up and avoid crashing into the empty sea. He was astounded to see three thin white streaks on the ocean below, wakes of torpedoes that had been aimed right into the heart of the ship, but now they crossed each other, heading off away from the scene. There was a great water splash there where one of his dive bomber pilots, his bomb expended, had flown his plane right into the empty sea! The torpedo bombers were still low on the deck, and now he saw them fly past one another, banking away to avoid colliding, and heard the pilots calling to one another: “Where is it? Have we sunk this demon?” Yet no man among them had seen any bomb or torpedo hit the ship. Their target had simply vanished!

  A submarine! Thought Sakamoto. It was the only thing that entered his mind at the moment to explain what had happened. The ship must have been a submarine! It has dived beneath the sea! Amazed, and yet exhilarated by the thrill and the fear of the attack, he steadied his plane and started to climb again.

  “This is strike leader Sakamoto,” he shouted through his microphone. “All planes form on me. This Shadow Dancer has slipped beneath the sea. We’re going home…”

  ~ ~ ~

  Aboard Kirov they braced themselves for the attack. Karpov saw the AR-710 Gatling guns jerk to life and spit their lethal flaming fire at the oncoming torpedo planes, two were found and quickly flamed. There came a third shudder, so noticeable now that every man on the bridge instinctively reached to brace themselves, and the Captain wondered if the ship had already been struck by a bomb. He saw another bomb fall off the starboard side, a tall geyser exploding upward in the sea, but the whole scene seemed veiled and strangely out of focus. The Kashtan system was now firing its twin Gatling guns, almost straight up in a snarling rattle of violence and flame. Then the planes he had been squinting at on the horizon seemed to blur and waver in his field glasses and he reached to adjust the focus. As he looked again, he saw the planes were gone, then there again, driving through the smoke of a fallen comrade downed by the AR-710s.

  Then the ship seemed to quaver, the lights winking on the bridge, a strange ozone smell was in the air and a crackle of static. Rodenko pushed back away from his radar screen, thinking that a power surge was shorting out his board. They heard an awful, distended roar that seemed to stretch thin to a terrible wail. Something was coming in at them from above, like a shadow of death, and it suddenly seemed to pass right through the ship wailing like a banshee. Two men on the bridge actually cowered, reflexively shielding their heads and crouching low, but it was all sound and shadow, then an eerie calm, and complete silence.

  The guns had ceased firing, their fire control radars spinning fitfully as they searched in vain for targets that were no longer there. Rodenko’s system winked on again as the bridge lights quavered to life. He saw nothing on his screen and thought that his radar was down, the delicate phased array system shorted out by the static charge they had experienced.

  Karpov was standing by the foreword viewport, shifting his field glasses this way and that, up and down, yet he saw nothing, heard nothing.

  The enemy was gone.

  ~ ~ ~

  “We must have shifted again!” Fedorov said excitedly. “Right in the middle of that attack! I wasn’t aware that Dobrynin had completed his maintenance procedure.”

  Admiral Volsky was on the bridge with them now, smiling broadly. “From the sound of things we were in the thick of it,” he said. “I could hear the missiles firing, but the sound of the planes just kept getting closer and closer. Believe me, it was very worrisome.”

  They explained what they had discussed with Dobrynin to Karpov, who listened with great interest “Amazing,” he said at last. “Nikolin told me something about Dobrynin, but I had the ship’s defense on my mind and could think of nothing else. It’s a pity! We fired every last missile we had at those planes. Had I known we were going to pull this vanishing act, I would have saved us the missiles.”

  “No, Karpov,” said Volsky, “it has been a hard lesson these many weeks, but I think we have learned to shoot first and ask questions later.”

  “It was astounding,” said Rodenko. “At the very end I thought I saw something pass right through the ship—just like those shells came through the citadel when we first appeared in the Med, yet caused no damage.”

  “We were pulsating for a while again,” said Fedorov,”

  “Yes!” the Admiral put in. “I was down with Dobrynin, and he reported those strange flux events in the reactor core again. This time I could hear it myself, when he pointed it out, and sure enough, the data stream monitors recorded the event as well.”

  “It’s shuddering to think that one of those planes must have plunged right through the ship,” said Fedorov “but we were just enough out of phase with that time frame that there was no substance to us then. We were here, but not here, not in the exact moment the plane was. And I think that we would have be exactly in phase with the plane in time for it to strike us physically.”

  “This is all more than I can fathom for the moment,” said Volsky. “The only question is this: where are we now? Are we back in the future again? If that turns out to be the case I think we will stay for a while. The world there was empty and bleak at times, but at least no one was shooting at us.”

  Nikolin spoke up, saying he had nothing at all on his radio set now. “The bands were virtually jammed with radio traffic earlier,” he said, “not only with the local traffic from those planes, but also with more distant signals. I think there was a big battle underway somewhere.”

  “And thank God we are no longer a target,” said Volsky. But he spoke too soon, his elation quashed by another call from engineering. It was Dobrynin.

  “It’s back again, sir. I can hear it, and I have the same confirming flux data sets on the recorders, except this time the line is below the median, not above like the othe
rs. Very strange, sir.”

  The Admiral set down the receiver, listening, his senses keenly alert, looking around him as if to see signs and effects of what Dobrynin was talking about there on the bridge, but all seemed calm and quiet. He walked slowly to the forward view pane to look at the sea, thinking he felt a slight shudder, and a ripple of movement underfoot.

  “Did anyone else feel that?”

  “Yes sir,” said Fedorov. “It was very subtle, and I felt the same thing before those planes came in.”

  Nikolin was suddenly alert again, his head cocked to one side, and a perplexed look on his face. “Admiral I… I think I’m hearing something again.” But the signal was gone, an echo lost in the wash of static.

  Fedorov had a grim expression on his face. “It isn’t over,” he said. “We’re still moving, pulsing again. Perhaps we have not yet settled into a new timeframe.”

  They felt it a second time, a deeper thrum, followed by a slight roll of the ship, as though it had hit an unseen wave and was jostled about, though the seas were still and calm. Nikolin heard much more now, voices and signals quavering in his headset. Rodenko’s Top Mast radar screen seemed to trace out cloudy contacts, but when the line swept around to that point again, the scope was clean. Then his scope seemed to come to life, the signals clear and sharp. Nikolin confirmed that something had happened as well.

  “I have heavy radio traffic again,” he said. “Just as I did earlier.”

  “Conn… Airborne contact at ten thousand feet and descending. Strong signal!”

  Everyone instinctively looked up, as if they expected another Japanese dive bomber to come barreling through the roof of the citadel at any moment. Then Rodenko blinked at the screen. “Wait a second—it’s the KA-40! I just got IFF telemetry and it’s reading green.”

  “I had almost forgotten about the helo,” said Karpov. “I saw it fire its air defense load-out at those dive bombers!”

  “Contact that helo, Mister Nikolin.” The Admiral came shuffling over to his radio man’s station.

  “Mother one to KA-40, do you copy, over?”

  They had an answer seconds later.

  “KA-40 to Kirov, thank God we’ve found you! Where have you been? We’re running low on fuel. Request permission for immediate landing.” It was Lieutenant Alexie Rykov. He had been top of the duty list for helo operations that morning and had seen the show of a lifetime as he watched the Japanese planes come in for that last attack. He fired off the only four air-to-air missiles he had, then could do little else. When his telemetry link to the ship faded out, his first thought was that Kirov had been hit, but he could see no sign of an explosion below, and the Japanese planes still seemed to be buzzing about like agitated flies. Yet there was no sign of the ship, visually or on his radar. In one heart-rending moment he thought Kirov had sunk, and he had been searching for the ship ever since, long hours, putting sonobuoys in the sea and using dipping sonar in the water, but finding nothing.

  ‘Tell him to land immediately,” said Volsky. Then he looked at Fedorov.

  “Well our little experiment worked, Fedorov, yet not for long. The presence of that helicopter out there tells us we must have shifted back again, yes? Back to the same point in time we have just come from. Surely it did not move with us.”

  “I have no further contact on those Japanese planes,” said Rodenko. “My screen is clear.”

  “Your radar always acts up when we move,” said Karpov. “The ship is still at alert one. Let’s leave things that way.”

  “Probably best, Captain,” said Fedorov, “but I don’t think we have anything more to worry about from those planes. Look at the sun!”

  For the first time they noticed that the sun was high in the sky, well past its zenith for the day. The entire morning had passed in less than an hour, lost in the welcome peace and calm of some other era, and they would never know exactly where they had been. Only one thing was certain. The KA-40 could not have moved with them to that other time. It was simply too far away from the ship. But if they were now watching it land on the aft fantail deck, they must surely be back on the date and time they had come from.

  It was August 27, 1942, yet they had reappeared seven hours later, at 12:30 hours, and the noon day sun was already falling towards the sea.

  Chapter 24

  At a meeting of the senior staff in the officer’s briefing room Yamamoto listened quietly to the report made by Kuroshima, his face a mask, eyes set and distant. Events to the east near Guadalcanal had not gone well that morning. The American carriers had been found easily enough, but they had put up a ferocious fight. Admiral Nagumo had been first to reach strike range at dawn, approaching from the deep Pacific but there had been a strange radio communications failure just after sunrise. He had been unable to ascertain the exact position of the Western pincer under Admiral Yamashiro, and even communications at short range to his forward screening force had proved spotty, the airwaves broken up by an undulating wave of static.

  Frustrated, he had come to conclude that the Americans must be using some new kind of jamming equipment, and paced nervously on the bridge of his flagship Kaga, trying to decide what to do. He was approaching the northernmost region of the Santa Cruz Islands and, unbeknownst to him, the Americans had been operating several seaplanes from Graciosa Bay off Nendo Island there. His task force had been spotted and a signal sent before his fighters could get to the seaplane and shoot it down. Now he realized that the Americans must know exactly where he was, and that it would be imperative that he get his planes in the air as soon as possible.

  The Japanese knew where the Americans were as well, northeast of Guadalcanal, just as Genda had argued. And he had also emphasized the importance of striking first. Yet the two arms of the Japanese pincers were coming from different directions, widely separated from one another, and Yamashiro’s warning to coordinate their operations was also in his mind.

  At 05:20 hrs, Nagumo decided he could wait no longer. No matter where the Western Group was, he had to strike now, lest he see the morning skies filled with American planes, catching his own strike wave flat footed on the decks of Kaga and Akagi. It was a fateful decision. Just after his formations finished their launching operations and began winging their way southwest, the alarms rang out. A large enemy air strike was heading his way, and the A6M2s were already scrambling to intercept. But they would not be enough.

  The Americans had emptied the decks of all three of their fleet carriers grouped in a tight fist northeast of Guadalcanal. There Enterprise, Hornet and Saratoga stood a worrisome watch over the second day landing operations for Vandegrift’s 1st Marine Division at Guadalcanal. Their strike wave was massive and well coordinated, and in spite of a gallant defense mounted by Nagumo’s fighters, it blew through the combat air patrols and soon the air was filled with the gleaming of Dauntless dive bombers as they swooped down on the Japanese task force.

  Ten minutes later both Kaga and Akagi were on fire, the latter listing heavily from two torpedo hits amid ships. The heavy cruiser Chikuma had also taken two bomb hits, and two destroyers were sunk. The Kaga was still seaworthy, but her flight deck had been ripped apart by three bombs and the fires had proved difficult to control. It was soon clear that Akagi could not correct her list, and the carrier began to slowly capsize at 06:30 hours, hastened to her doom by a torpedo fired by one of her escorting destroyers. The Americans would not be permitted to take her as a trophy.

  Nagumo stared at his shattered carrier division realizing that he now had only the small light carrier Ryujo operational. It had taken one bomb on the fantail, but the damage had been controlled. Neither of his fleet carriers could receive the returning waves of planes, and Ryujo could accommodate no more than thirty aircraft. He had sent eighty strike planes and twenty fighters against the Americans, pleased to learn that they had scored hits on two of the three carriers there, and that a battleship had also been hit. Thirty planes had been lost in the attack, but where would the remainder go? He
also had fighters aloft and needed Ryujo for defense operations over his task force, or he would certainly lose Kaga should the American planes return for a second strike. The dogged American Marines had also wrested control of the airfield on Guadalcanal at Lunga, so his surviving planes could not land there.

  He had no choice but to order them to fly southwest in the hope of somehow finding the Western Task Force under Admiral Yamashiro where they could land on Hiryu and Soryu. This they did, eventually finding that task force south of San Cristobal and east of Rennell Island, but the haggard formations of Nagumo’s precious strike planes arrived at a most inopportune time.

  Yamashiro had been unable to get any radio communications through to either Nagumo or Combined Fleet Operations in the Kondo Bombardment group. The radio waves eventually cleared up, but unlike Nagumo, the urgency to strike at once was not as great for him. The Americans did not know where his ships were. For all they knew, Nagumo’s force represented the only real threat to their operations. He therefore held his strike wave on deck—until the airwaves suddenly cleared a little after 06:00 hrs that morning and he heard the urgent calls coming from Nagumo’s planes as they desperately tried to locate his carriers.

  Realizing that he now had to receive some fifty planes in a recovery operation, he hastily began launching everything he had to make room on the already crowded decks of his two fleet carriers. Nagumo’s planes arrived short of fuel, and many had to be given immediate priority to land. If he had kept his third carrier in hand, the light escort carrier Ryuho, he could have started bringing Nagumo’s planes in there, but the Dragon Phoenix was well to the north by now, coordinating with the Hara Group for a strike on a mysterious ship that appeared to be threatening the second wave transport fleet where troops of the 3rd division were still riding at sea.