“Sir,” said Rear Admiral Takayanagi, the ship’s assigned commander. “I believe we have jammed our rudder with that explosion aft. We are circling. The gunners will have fits trying to plot solutions now. We will need to put divers in the water to clear the damage, and that flooding will cause us to list to starboard in time if it is not corrected.”
Yamamoto looked at Kuroshima, the gravity of the moment apparent to them both. The ship could no longer continue the engagement. The fires fore and aft were one thing, now they also had flooding, loss of speed, and a damaged rudder. He could no longer maneuver adequately, and was, for all intents and purposes, at the mercy of his enemy now if they continued to fire those terrible rockets. When would the next torpedoes come?
“Begin counter-flooding. We will continue firing to harass the enemy as best we can,” he said resolutely, knowing the situation was a lost cause. “There is no other course we can take for the moment. Do what you must to manage the ship Takayanagi, but this battle is over. Our concern now is saving the ship and any man left alive aboard her.”
“Aye, sir.”
She had taken hits from two P-900s, six Moskit-II missiles, but the two torpedo hits had been the telling blows. Yamato would not sink that night, but she could no longer fight effectively, and it was only the similar gravity of the damage control situation aboard Kirov that would end this battle in a draw, though Karpov would count the victory on Kirov’s side nonetheless. It was clear to him which ship had administered the greatest punishment, and which had endured. Yet Kirov had come within a hair’s breadth of having her back broken by an 18 inch shell, and the memory of that would not soon be forgotten.
The Russian battlecruiser was also taking water, her earlier wound opening to the sea again. A torpedo was jammed in her port Vodopad number three tube, her Top Mast radars blasted away, her ventilation conduits riddled with 20mm rounds and a slowly rising heat situation in her reactor was beginning to cause Dobrynin more concern. He asked the Admiral, still at his side, if the ship could keep speed moderate, and Volsky was soon hastening to the bridge.
Both fighters seemed exhausted for the moment, and a brief interval of relative calm settled over the scene, punctuated only by the distant thunder of Yamato’s aft turret, firing in protest, yet widely off the mark. Fedorov steered a course to open the range, wanting nothing more to do with the wounded behemoth that was still growling at them on the restless seas. He hoped the battle was finally over and that they could slip away into the night to lick their wounds, but these hopes would soon be dashed.
Off to the south a man stood stiffly at the forward view ports on the bridge of the cruiser Tone, his eyes pressed tightly on his field glasses as he noted the distant amber glow on the horizon. He heard a faint rumble, like thunder, and knew that a great battle was underway ahead of him, and that ships were burning, men fighting and dying on the heartless sea. His scout planes had been unable to contact him for some time now, the airwaves garbled with a strange wash of static, but he knew he was close. Battle stations had been sounded, the crews tensely alert, and all of Tone’s four twin 8 inch gun turrets forward of the bridge were ready for the fight. Behind him came two more heavy cruisers, Nachi and Myoko.
He was Captain Sanji Iwabuchi, and he was marching boldly forward to the sound of the guns.
Chapter 33
It is hard to say what keeps a man in a fight when he knows he has already been beaten. Heavyweights had been beaten senseless by their opponents and yet still fought on, answering the bell with bloodied faces, swollen eyes, and broken ribs. In war it was much the same. Men fought on in one desperate lost battle after another, all through human history. They strove and grunted and charged their enemy under impossible circumstances, willing to die first before they would ever admit defeat.
Half way around the world the Russians and Germans would begin their grueling five month battle for Stalingrad this very week, and in a few months time, on that cruel December after the 6th Army had been encircled, the surrounding Russian troops would see something that amazed them on Christmas Eve. Every section and platoon in the surrounded German Army fired tracer rounds up into the sky, lighting up the massive perimeter in celebration, spending badly needed ammunition to also say, ‘here we are. We are still here.’
The Japanese character was easily set to this mind, and though their navy had taken a severe beating in the last twenty-four hours, it fought on. No captain or admiral at sea in that era had ever faced steeper odds or a more powerful foe in a surface engagement. Had Kirov been in her prime, unblooded by weeks of combat at sea and still with full magazines, she would have fought the battle quite differently. Yamato would have never seen her, and never once been in a position to fire those massive guns. A salvo of ten or more missiles would have found her in the night, one single, lethal barrage that would have ravaged her superstructure and caused uncontrollable fires.
This is how Karpov might have preferred to fight his battle, with the struggle for the all important first salvo uncontested, the sole prerogative of the powerful ship beneath his feet. All the long discussions in the naval forums would mean nothing when those missiles hit home. End of story. Discussion over. Yet, given their strange circumstances, and the fact that he could not know what he might be facing in days ahead, he had to throw his punches in a slow and measured way, beating down his enemy by degrees, and hoping he could use as few missiles or torpedoes as possible in the process.
That said, the skill and determination of the Japanese Navy had seen them harry and hound the battlecruiser across a thousand miles of ocean, and to within a hair’s breadth of destruction. And there would be no discussion about that either, no meeting of the minds between Yamamoto and Volsky to find another way.
Yamato had taken every punch, every hit, and yet still fought on. Karpov watched it now, his head shaking in near disbelief as the ship continued to fire in frustrated anger, though its guns could not find their target as Kirov slowly slipped away. My God, he thought. There’s something to be said for armor after all. That ship took eight missiles and two torpedoes, beaten, but not broken. I could put more torpedoes into it from my port side Vodopad tubes, but we desperately need every weapon we have now. There’s no point in continuing this madness any further.
He turned to Fedorov. “I think we can safely move out of range now. Then we’ll need to see to our own damage and determine what to do next. That cruiser will be up on us soon enough, and Rodenko saw ships behind it earlier, before we lost the Top Mast radar.”
“Very well, Captain,” Fedorov had a distant, empty look in his eyes. “We’ll steer 45 northeast until we put some sea room between us and the enemy.”
And so it ended.
Karpov turned slowly to the mishman at the log and spoke quietly, an almost solemn expression on his face.
“Let the log read that at 21:40 hours battlecruiser Kirov disengaged from her action against battleship Yamato, after achieving ten hits on the enemy and leaving a badly damaged ship in her wake. Report damage sustained by this vessel by referencing Chief Byko’s log entry for this date. Anton Fedorov Commanding; tactical executive officer, Vladimir Karpov.”
“Sir, the log entry has been recorded.”
“As you were, mishman.”
The Captain looked over at Fedorov, and saw his eyes had glassed over, a hidden pain there as he stared at the HD panel above them, watching Yamato burn on infrared. Karpov stepped to the young Captain’s side and spoke in a lowered voice .
“It will get easier,” he said quietly.
“I’m not sure I want it to,” said Fedorov, and Karpov knew what he meant, nodding.
“Admiral on the bridge!”
Volsky huffed in through the main hatch, closing it behind him as he struggled to catch his breath. He wasted no time, his eyes quickly finding Karpov and Fedorov where they stood by the navigation station.
“We’ll have to slow the ship again. Byko reports damage to the hull patch and renewed floodin
g near the reactors.”
Fedorov nodded, “Ahead two thirds,” he said “and steady on 45 degrees.” He seemed a bit listless and sullen now.
“So the ship is in one piece after all. My God, is that what we did to the enemy?” He pointed out the forward view ports, seeing the dark silhouette of Yamato crowned by the wild dance of flame and fire. “Well done,” he said. “Both of you. But I have more news. It’s started. Dobrynin is seeing the same odd spikes in the core flux readings. He can hear it. There was also a vibration just now as I came up the stairs. Did you feel it? I think we may be shifting… moving somewhere else.”
“That would be most welcome at the moment,” said Karpov. Then they all felt yet another odd vibration, and a palpable smell of ozone in the air. Karpov instinctively looked about him, thinking a panel may have shorted out and they might have an electrical fire, but the crew sat attentively at their stations, and no one else seemed alarmed. For a brief moment he saw the glowering hulk of Yamato seem to dim and fade on the horizon, and assumed she had been masked in the billowing black smoke of her own fires.
“We’re pulsing again,” said Fedorov. “Thank God. I wish it had happened hours ago, and then we might have avoided that.” He pointed, also noticing the fading glow on the horizon. “Let us hope we don’t regress this time and end up back in the same borscht. I don’t think we need another round with the Imperial Japanese Navy—let alone the Americans.”
The ship was moving farther and faster than they realized, moving in and out of time itself, even as she slowed below twenty knots so Byko could reduce the stress on the dislodged hull patch. But something else was now going to happen that no man among them could have possibly anticipated, or even believed.
Kirov moved, the very fabric of her being becoming gossamer thin, a wisp of shadow on the sea, a vaporous menacing mist. It seemed only seconds to the crew, and no man could really say they noticed it, but the ship was indeed “pulsing” as Fedorov had come to describe it, fading in and out of the time period she had been trapped in, slipping into infinity and the limbo of uttermost nowhere. She loitered there but a few brief moments before falling back into the turbulent waters of the Coral Sea and her private war on war itself.
What seemed like a few insubstantial seconds away in this otherworldly place and time, were actually long minutes in the realm she had come from, the wee hours of August 27, 1942. She had been sailing at twenty knots, still moving in space, yet ten minutes passed in 1942 for every second she was away, and that happened again and again as the ship pulsed in time. The enemy ship that had been chasing her now had ample time to close the range.
Tasarov heard it before anyone saw anything. The sound that had once been a faint, high whine in his headphones was now grossly magnified, and when he looked at the signal profile he was shocked to see the pattern matched that of the enemy cruiser that had been hastening to join the battle.
“Sir,” he began, “that cruiser contact… I’m reading a range of only 50,000 meters now.”
Karpov spun around. “What? That’s impossible. That ship was nearly a hundred kilometers behind us just a minute ago.”
“It was, sir… At least I thought as much, but it seems to have cut that range in half!”
Fedorov took keen notice of this. “From their perspective we moved nearly 8000 miles in a single day when we vanished on August 23rd and reappeared off the Australian coast just a day later. I guess Time loses the beat when she plays a new song for us. It could be that time slows down for us when we shift, and then re-synchs when we appear again—like an old cassette tape fast forwarded to a new point in the music. That ship is gaining on us every time we pulse.”
There came a third vibration, and Kirov shuddered, slipping away again into the nameless void, a shadow on a sea of shadows now. Karpov walked slowly to the forward viewports, seeing the enemy battleship quaver and fade in the distance—and then the ship vanished. Kirov hovered like a single breath of God in time without end, then reappeared, gaining form and substance again in the real world of rock and sea and sky, and men in steel ships on the Coral Sea of 1942. Karpov suddenly saw what looked like a vast darkness looming off the starboard beam, a brooding, menacing thunderstorm, and then it seemed to sharpen to hard angles, as if a shadow had been frozen solid, resolving to the shape and form of a ship of war!
The moonlight gleamed on her long, forward deck, the white bow wave rising high as she came at the ship, hurtling toward them on a collision course.
“My God!” He pointed, a look of utter surprise and amazement on his face. “My God! It’s coming right at us! Hard to starboard, ahead full! Brace for impact!”
He had desperately tried to maneuver the ship to prevent a direct collision, and Kirov shuddered, not only with the straining effort of her turbines, the sea still clawing at the open gash in her side, her rudders vibrating as they fought to turn the ship, but also she quavered again with the cold hand of Mother Time on her neck.
The captain and crew of the heavy cruiser Tone were equally astounded by what they saw, a formless shadow on the sea that must have been unseen behind an impenetrable cloud of smoke. It suddenly became the long threatening presence of a great warship! Then a strange light came over it, as if it had been struck by lightning, a Saint Elmo’s fire of doom crowning her tall battlements and gilded decks—and she began to fade away, just as the sharp forward prow of the Tone slammed into her hull in a massive unavoidable collision.
There came the sound of metal on metal, a grinding scream of agony, and then it faded away as quickly as it came, and to Captain Iwabuchi on the bridge, it seemed that his ship was slowly being swallowed by the enemy vessel, as if Mizuchi had opened its maw to devour the smaller cruiser.
Aboard Kirov they saw the ship plunge right into the starboard side of Kirov’s broad armored hull, and then there was absolute chaos. Tone was there, and yet not there, careening forward through the ship, her form and structure a luminescent, translucent green, a ghostly phosphorous phantom ship that cut right through the heart of the Russian battlecruiser. And they could see right through the ship, through her bulkheads and into the labyrinthine metal innards where they glimpsed ghostly figures of men standing their spectral watches.
They heard screams of men frightened beyond their capacity to understand and endure. Karpov covered his ears, his eyes bulging at what he saw—the contorted faces of the enemy crew as the tall bridge pagoda on Tone passed completely through the armored citadel. And there, in the midst of a host of leering wraiths from hell, came the stalwart and brooding face and form of Sanji Iwabuchi, his arms clutching the binnacle on the bridge of Tone, officer’s hat pulled low on his forehead above murderous eyes. And it seemed that the soul of that man passed right through Karpov himself, and he suddenly felt his mind flooded with the awareness of another being, the dour Japanese Captain in all his wrath and ire, and all his carefully controlled madness.
The vision passed, as the ship plunged on through, and Karpov was doubled over with nausea, dropping to one knee, bewildered and beset with a fear unlike any other he had known in his life. The wail of frightened and panicked men followed in the wake of the ghostly ship, and it slowly faded, a long distended screed that diminished until it was devoured by the dark.
The sound of men screaming below decks still echoed through the ship, resounding through the corridors and passages, fading to a whimper of silence. Then a thick, cottony darkness enfolded them. Karpov turned to see Fedorov literally shaking with fear and shock. The Admiral was unconscious on the deck. Rodenko had his head buried in his arms, slumped over his lifeless radar station. Tasarov was just staring, his eyes unfocused, jaw slack. He heard the sound of a junior officer weeping at his station. Only Samsonov still sat on guard, his muscled arm poised over his CIC panels, an expression of shock giving way to the light of fire and anger in his eyes.
Somehow, Karpov forced his own limbs to move, fighting off the cold shiver of infinity. They had sailed through hell—or rat
her it had just sailed through them! They were somewhere else now. He looked out the viewport thinking to see the Japanese cruiser, but the sea was empty and calm. There was no sign of the angry glow of fire on the horizon. Yamato was gone as well. They had moved in time!
“Fedorov!” he had hold of the younger man’s shoulders now. “Fedorov! We’ve moved! We’ve shifted somewhere else. That ship…it passed right through us. God, what a nightmare! It went right through us. But we’re safe now… I think we are safe….” He was looking fearfully over his shoulder, as if the flaming hulk of Yamato might come boring in on them next, but all was calm. There was only the long wavering shimmer of the cold moonlight on the sea.
It was over.
EPILOGUE
“There are an infinite number of universes existing side by side and through which our consciousnesses constantly pass. In these universes, all possibilities exist. You are alive in some, long dead in others, and never existed in still others. Many of our ‘ghosts’ could indeed be visions of people going about their business in a parallel universe or another time—or both.”
—Paul F. Eno, Faces at the Window
It took a long time before the crew was able to shake off the terror of that night. It was not simply the heat and stress of battle, the long hours tensely at action stations, the lack of sleep, the meals snatched between endless shifts. All that they could have taken in stride, holding to their discipline and training in spite of severe trial. They had been a ship of raw and untested men, and now they were as seasoned as any crew who ever fought at sea, veterans all.
No. It was that last insane and unbelievable moment, as terrifying as it was astonishing to them all, when heavy cruiser Tone and all her crew of 824 sailors and officers finally caught up with the ship they had been chasing, and drove right through its heart. In doing so they passed right through the minds and souls of an equal compliment of men aboard Kirov, and each crew knew something of the other, in a dark, macabre nightmare meeting at sea that no man among them ever wanted to recall, or speak of again. Ships pass in the night, wrote Longfellow, and speak to one another in passing.
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