Kirov Saga:
Three Kings
By
John Schettler
A publication of: The Writing Shop Press
Kirov Saga: Three Kings, Copyright©2014, John A. Schettler
Discover other titles by John Schettler:
The Kirov Saga: (Military Fiction)
Kirov - Kirov Series - Volume I
Cauldron Of Fire - Kirov Series - Volume II
Pacific Storm - Kirov Series - Volume III
Men Of War - Kirov Series - Volume IV
Nine Days Falling - Kirov Series - Volume V
Fallen Angels - Kirov Series - Volume VI
Devil’s Garden - Kirov Series - Volume VII
Armageddon – Kirov Series – Volume VIII
Altered States– Kirov Series – Volume IX
Darkest Hour– Kirov Series – Volume X
Hinge Of Fate– Kirov Series – Volume XI
Three Kings – Kirov Series – Volume XII
Grand Alliance – Kirov Series – Volume XIII
Award Winning Science Fiction:
Meridian - Meridian Series - Volume I
Nexus Point - Meridian Series - Volume II
Touchstone - Meridian Series - Volume III
Anvil of Fate - Meridian Series - Volume IV
Golem 7 - Meridian Series - Volume V
Classic Science Fiction:
Wild Zone - Dharman Series - Volume I
Mother Heart - Dharman Series - Volume II
Historical Fiction:
Taklamakan - Silk Road Series - Volume I
Khan Tengri - Silk Road Series - Volume II
Dream Reaper – Mythic Horror Mystery
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Kirov Saga:
Three Kings
By
John Schettler
Kirov Saga:
Three Kings
By
John Schettler
Part I – Fire With Fire
Part II – Strategy
Part III – Compass Headings
Part IV – Arrivals
Part V – Rommel
Part VI – Sonnenblume
Part VII – Sky Hunters
Part VIII – The Devil’s Teardrop
Part IX – The Brigade
Part X – Nick of Time
Part XI – Echoes
Part XII – Impossible
Author’s Note:
For readers who might be dropping in without having taken the journey here from Book I in the Kirov Series, this is the story of a Russian modern day battlecruiser displaced in time to the 1940s and embroiled in WWII. Their actions over the many episodes have so fractured the history, that they now find themselves in an alternate retelling of those events. In places the history is remarkably true to what it once was, in others badly cracked and markedly different. Therefore, events in this account of WWII have changed. Operations have been spawned that never happened, like the German attack of Gibraltar, and others will be cancelled and may never occur, like Operation Torch. And even if some events here do ring true as they happened before, the dates of those campaigns may be changed, and they may occur earlier or later than they did in the history you may know.
This alternate history began in Book 9 of the series, entitled Altered States, and you would do well to at least back step and begin your journey there if you are interested in the period June 1940 to January 1 1941, which is covered in books 9 through 11 in the series. That time encompasses action in the North Atlantic, the battle of Britain, German plans and decisions regarding Operations Seelowe and Felix, the action against the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir and Dakar, and other events in Siberia that serve as foundations for things that will occur in this book.
To faithful crew members, my readers who have been with me from the first book, the Altered States trilogy concluded with Hinge of Fate, and this is now the sequel to that set, and the bridge novel leading to the next trilogy, which will begin with Book 13, Grand Alliance. As we enter these next six fateful months of 1941, the war moves to the Western Desert, and so this series will present those actions as well, and not be merely confined to naval events. And as always, Fedorov, Volsky, Orlov and Karpov and others will be right in the thick of things, on land or at sea, for good or for ill. Enjoy!
-J. Schettler
Part I
Fire With Fire
“Be stirring as the time; be fire with fire;
Threaten the threatener and outface the brow
Of bragging horror.”
― William Shakespeare: King John
Chapter 1
Sergeant Hobson stood there in the darkness as the light from his Ronson wavered. He had been following the Barbary ape, feeling his way in the dark and expecting to catch it just round the next bend in the labyrinth of Saint Michael’s Cave beneath the Rock. This tunnel led south, down the last of the rocky spine of Gibraltar until it ended somewhere beneath Windmill Hill. It went on for just another few hundred yards, and he could hear the chatter of the Macaque up ahead, but it was very dark. Then he came up short, surprised to reach an impasse in a great boulder that blocked his way.
He knew this rock, as it marked the end of the passage but his Macaque was nowhere to be seen. He held up his lighter, scanning the strange twisted shapes of the rocks. He remembered the old legend that said there was a hidden tunnel that went all the way under the straits to Spanish Morocco, though he knew that was folly. Then he keened up his senses, looking about when he heard the echo of his quarry resounding, hollow and very distant.
“Now where have you gotten to?” he said, hearing only the echo of his own voice. There was no sign of the beast.
The Barbary ape was gone, but Hobson wasn’t about to let the creature off that easily. “If you’ve gone off that way, why it means there may be another passage down here the engineers have yet to find. It that is so…” He thought about it, wondering what he should do. Then his mind settled on the only course he could take. I’d best find someone who can do something about it, he thought. I’d best get to a Lieutenant, or better yet, a Colonel. We need to get Artisan Engineers down here to see where that bloody ape has gone.
What good would that do, he thought? Suppose there is another passage down there, or a whole bloody network of caves and caverns. Might they go all the way to Spanish Morocco as the legend has it? And what if they did? There’s bloody Germans there by now as well. No way out for us any way you look at it… but then an idea came to him, and he raised an eyebrow. He had been one of the very few men on the Rock let in an a little secret, a special cave that had been dug high up on the Rock in a hidden chamber. It was called the “Stay Behind Cave,” and he knew about it because he was in the detail that moved the rock out when the engineers finished the work. Six men had volunteered to enter the chamber, where a year’s worth of supplies, along with a 10,000 gallon cistern of water, had been stored to sustain their lives after they were sealed inside in the event the Rock was ever taken by hostile forces. Two were physicians. Others worked for British intelligence.
Cleverly positioned high up with two small observation slits, the team could observe both the Bay of Algeciras and the Straits of Gibraltar. They had rigged up a stationary bicycle that could be pedaled to generate electricity for a radio set, and the mission was to observe and report on enemy activity. It was to be called “Operation Tracer,” the last trace of British occupation of the Rock, and Sergeant Hobson had little doubt that the men were already there, sealed away for their long voluntary entombment.
What if we could hide some of the lads down here, he thought? How many? There was no way to know
until he got hold of the engineers and convinced someone to have a look. But there was one thing he did know. That Barbary ape was gone, without the slightest trace, and he knew enough about those wily creatures to realize they would not go anywhere unless there was a good chance of surviving. No. The little bugger knows something more about this place than we do, he realized.
And I’m bloody well going to find out where he’s gone.
* * *
The loss of Gibraltar had been a severe blow to British morale. Even though Liddell was still holding out in St Michael’s cave, there was already fighting for the upper galleries as the Germans sought to gain entry. It would be a long terrible siege. The German mountain troops would have to blast their way in, moving from one narrow passage to the next, around stony corners that led to chambers where the British could set off mines, booby traps, or simply lay in wait with a couple good Vickers machine gun teams. It would be a long and costly assault to pry the last of the British troops from their haunts, and the Germans were in a quandary as to how to proceed. Word from Berlin was adamant—get the job done—so the Oberleutnants and other senior officers gathered to discuss their options.
It was soon determined that, to fight their way in, they could expect to sustain hundreds of casualties, if not thousands. That was a loss that was unacceptable, especially considering that these were elite forces. It would be foolish to expend them in a bitter battle for the caves and tunnels. Could they simply wait the British out, starve them into submission?
“That would be fruitless,” said Kübler in the final staff meeting to decide the issue. “They most likely have enough water and supplies for hold out for months, if not longer. We discussed this with Halder before the attack. A long siege is out of the question. Each week we allow to pass without a swift victory here will bolster the British morale at home. Their Mister Churchill will seize upon it as a rallying point. They have already stopped Goering and his Luftwaffe, or at least that is what I now hear. The squadrons are being re-deployed to the Mediterranean, and the Führer now considers this to be a primary war zone. If we stumble here, or delay, we will not be easily forgiven.”
“You heard what I have proposed,” said Colonel Lahousen. He was Chief of the Sabotage Branch of the Abwehr, a man tasked with handling special missions that required unusual tactics. It was he who had put forward the need for the Brandenburgers in this attack, an element that ended up proving very useful in the initial stages of the operation. Now he had another idea that might do the job, not more troops—gasoline. It could be hauled up in Jerry cans and simply poured into the upper galleries where the German mountain troops had already gained entry. Like any liquid, it would find its way through any crevice or crack, and migrate down into the lower galleries. Then all it would take is a match to finish the job.
It was a macabre and horrific plan, and would make for a terrible death to any man trapped inside those passageways. The British had food and water to hold out for months, but a gasoline fire would consume the oxygen itself. Those that weren’t asphyxiated would suffocate if they tried to resist further. Yet in spite of the sinister promise of success, many of the senior German officers were appalled by the plan.
The war would end in merciless nuclear fire. Millions would die before it was over and, on some nights, as many as 100,000 would be consumed in a single horrific holocaust of chaos and flame, entire cities burned away by deliberate fire bombing at places like Tokyo, Dresden and others. Yet now, in late 1940, there was still some semblance of civility and humanity alive in the way the war was being fought. The unconditional, unrestricted mindset of war had not yet set in, and so the German officers decided to give the British one last chance to make an honorable surrender.
They called for a brief cease fire and came forward under a white flag, offering generous terms again, only this time they would tell Liddell what they were going to be forced to do if their offer was not accepted. Kübler refused to attend the conference, so Colonel Lahousen was sent to make the final threat.
“We will not lose any more of men to persuade you to accept what you already know is inevitable,” he told Liddell.
“Oh? Well I must tell you, Colonel, that if so ordered I am prepared to lose this entire garrison to forestall your occupation of this place.”
“Have you ever seen man burn to death?” Lahousen asked. “It is not a pretty sight. Then again, the fumes from thousands of gallons of gasoline will be another agony, a choking death for some, until I decide to end the matter and use this.” He reached into his pocket and took out a book of matches, setting it squarely on the table between the two men and smiling.
“Good day, General Liddell. We will give you the three days you request, and await your decision. Do not force me to become the monster I may now seem to be. After all, this is war.”
Liddell waited those three days, and put the matter to Whitehall, where it went round for a good long day before Churchill finally decided, delivering a speech that he had made at an earlier time in the history Fedorov knew. This time it was the loss of Gibraltar that inspired the eloquence of his rhetoric.
“Our enemy has threatened a most barbarous reprisal should the brave defenders of the Rock remain adamant at their watch. They have threatened to burn the whole mountain black as death itself, consuming every last man alive in that awful fire. I cannot permit such an atrocity, and in this threat we now know the mettle of the foe we face in the Nazi war machine, which will stop at nothing to grind us under its heels. I have ordered General Liddell to stand down rather than face such a terrible end, but the task of resistance passes now to all of us. The fire that might have made an end of the brave defenders of the Rock must now burn in each of us, and forge the steel of our continued resistance. We are the Rock now, every man woman and child left in these British isles, and in our colonies throughout the empire. We may have suffered another hard knock, but they have not put us to the fire—no—not yet.
“We shall continue to fight them, resolute, on every frontier. We shall fight them in the deserts of Egypt. We shall fight them on the high seas, where the Royal Navy maintains its watch with ceaseless vigilance. We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. And should they dare set foot on this sacred soil, our homeland of England, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old. We shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.”
The phrase “We are the Rock” went out like a clarion call, across the airwaves to inspire every man on the far flung fields of battle. Yet stirring rhetoric was one thing—the grim procession of British troops filing out from their caves and tunnels quite another, and the Germans countered Churchill’s eloquence with newsreels of the event, rubbing salt in the wound they had inflicted.
When the operation was finally concluded, Admiral Raeder sent Hitler a congratulatory note, praising his decisive will to prosecute the battle and secure this vital objective, He summarized again in that note many of the arguments he had made in favor of the plan:
“The significance of German occupation of Gibraltar is increased by the recent developments in the Mediterranean situation. Such occupation safeguards the western Mediterranean; secures the supply lines from the North African area, important for Spain, France, and Germany; eliminates an important link in the British Atlantic convoy system; closes the British sea route through the Mediterranean to Malta and Alexandria; restricts the freedom of the Br
itish Mediterranean Fleet; complicates British offensive action in Cyrenaica and Greece; relieves the Italians; and make possible German penetration into the African area via Spanish Morocco. Spanish ports, like Ferrol and Cadiz, are necessary for submarines and battleships, to facilitate attack on convoys. Occupation of Gibraltar is of great importance for the continuation of German war plans, if not decisive.”
For his part, the Kriegsmarine had played a secondary role in the Gibraltar campaign, one that was largely designed to tie down the assets of the British Home Fleet and prevent them from reinforcing Force H. But Raeder had strong ships at sea, a task force under Admiral Lütjens with Hindenburg, Bismarck and supporting ships. They had successfully raided the Faeroes and savaged Convoy-HX-69, and now they were in a race south to reach the French Ports before the British could catch them. Everything was going according to his wishes.
* * *
Britain was in a quandary as to how to proceed with the war after Gibraltar. Only a few doughty souls remained hidden in the Rock. Six were concealed in their “Stay Behind Cave.” And one other was hidden in a place he had not yet come to realize or understand.
Sergeant Hobson had tried his best to get the engineers to have a look behind that imposing rock blocking the lower passage of Saint Michael’s cave. There was too little time, he was told, and where might it lead? These were the same arguments the Sergeant had run through his own mind, but a curious and stubborn man, he decided to have one last look when the word came down that the garrison would capitulate.
Somehow, he worked his way behind the rock, straining and squirming to get through a crevice so narrow that his head and shoulders could barely fit through. But he could smell fresh air there, a cool draft that had to be coming from some place, so he continued to squirm until he had managed to squeeze on through.
Three Kings (Kirov Series) Page 1