Three Kings (Kirov Series)

by John Schettler

  That was the nickname of one of the largest airships in his small fleet, the Krasnoyarsk, or “Old Krasny,” which meant ‘red’ in the Russian language. Most simply called the ship ‘Big Red,’ and the tarps that covered its duralumin skeleton had been tinted a dull red to fill the bill nicely.

  The project Karpov had been busy with was the development of a hammer big enough to smash the nail he had in his shoe, Ivan Volkov. He knew he would never get his hands on another nuclear warhead, so he tried something else, a rudimentary air fuel bomb the like of which had been pioneered by a German engineer named Mario Zippermayr during the Second World War. In fact, the man was probably out there somewhere working on a similar project now, he thought, but I have beaten him to the punch.

  He had come to the Kaa-Chem coal mine to get the dust—coal dust, which could be highly explosive if applied properly in the weapon his engineers had designed. He had rigged out a bomb container the size and appearance of a sub-cloud car. In fact, he began with the empty shell of one such car to create his prototype. Then he used the data available in his jacket computer to find how to suspend the coal dust in a liquid, and combine it with oxygen in his new bomb. It would be a two stage delivery process, one to first burst open the receptacle and cause wide area dispersion of the material inside, and a second charge to then ignite the holocaust. The explosive shock of the weapon was severe, far beyond that off any normal detonation.

  The trick was how to deliver it on target, an enemy ground force threatening his lines, without having his airships shot to pieces by heavy caliber flack guns. The answer was to drop or parachute the weapon over the battlefield from high altitude, and he drilled his zeppelin bombardiers hard on delivery even while the engineers were feverishly putting the weapons together. They tested for wind, altitude, potential drift off target. In time he had a deliverable bomb, and one of considerable power that had been tested to create an intense shock wave over an area of 600 meters in diameter.

  Karpov had his hammer.

  Big Red was soon rigged out with three of the new bombs, and Karpov assembled a small flotilla of zeppelins to make his first strike against the advancing forces of the Orenburg Federation. Volkov’s 9th Infantry, 22nd Air Mobile, and 8th Armored Cavalry Brigade had formed the right pincer of his attack against Omsk. Two other divisions invested the town, encircling Karpov’s 18th Siberian Division there, but these other three pressed on towards Novosibirsk, hoping to quickly storm the defenses.

  There Karpov had positioned his crack 32nd Siberian Guards, blocking the way east behind their Ob River defense line. Volkov’s men would have a tough fight ahead, with an opposed river crossing being the least of it. It was the perfect opportunity to test out his new weapon. If the enemy was able to cross here, then they could maneuver to stage a crossing north of the city, and cut the main road and rail connections.

  Big Red was up and approaching the river crossing zone, where Volkov’s forces were massing near a smaller tributary about 5 miles west of the main river. One advantage Karpov had was that he would not be opposed by enemy zeppelins here. He had amassed all the air power he could get his hands on and sent the fighters to the airfields in and around Novosibirsk. Volkov’s single zeppelin accompanying the attack, the Pavlodar, was finally forced to withdraw to avoid the ceaseless duels with Karpov’s fighters.

  Fighter squadrons were now in dutiful escort, and Abakan was there should any other airship return to challenge the action. Karpov had rehearsed the maneuver five times, each time doing no more than high level reconnaissance, and this had the effect of dulling the enemy’s concerns, thinking the real attack was nothing more than another high level observation run. Now, in the pre-dawn hour, Big Red drifted ominously above the battle zone, accompanied by Karpov aboard the Abakan.

  He could see that bridging equipment had been brought up the previous day, and knew the enemy crossing was imminent. But they did not expect the surprise Karpov had waiting for them that day.

  “Well, Bogrov,” he said to his airship Captain. “Today we teach Volkov a lesson he will not soon forget. You will see what the real application of power is here. Mark my words.”

  Bogrov marked them, though he inwardly felt there was something cowardly in the action. He had seen the test dropping of the weapon near the coal mines, and he knew there was not a flock of sheep down there, but men, human beings. Yes, they were enemies, but something in him preferred the more equal duel of airships, gun to gun, man to man, and not this dastardly attack. Karpov could see that he had reservations, though the Captain had said nothing.

  “You have issues with this, Bogrov?”

  “Sir? Well, war is war, I suppose, but they won’t know what hit them, will they.”

  “Volkov will know when he gets the news. This war is just getting started, Bogrov, and the gloves have not yet come off. This is strategic bombing. Before this war ends both sides will adopt this tactic, mostly the allied powers. Entire cities will burn in a single night. You will see.”

  There it was again, thought Bogrov, that odd way the Admiral had of talking about the war as if it had already happened, as if it was something he had read about once in a history book.

  “And what will Volkov do when he gets the news, sir? That was on my mind.”

  “Hopefully he will take a hard lesson from what happens here today, and realize who he is dealing with when he raises his hand against Vladimir Karpov.”

  Bogrov thought he had raised it against the 18th Siberian Division encircled at Omsk, but he said nothing of that. “I suppose I meant that Volkov might think to do the same thing to us, sir. He has a lot more airships than we do. Suppose he were to rig out his zeppelins with these new sub-cloud car bombs as well. Then what?”

  Karpov thought about that. What would the Japanese have done if they could have gotten their hands on an atomic bomb after being hit at Hiroshima?

  “Perhaps you are correct,” he said. “He may think to fight fire with fire, unless I can talk some sense into him after this. But first, the lesson, the hard lesson of war—retribution. We’ll see how keen he is to cross the Ob after I get finished with his 9th Infantry Division down there. It’s a pity he hasn’t moved up all of his 8th Armored Cavalry yet, but we must go today. The weather will not hold, and today it is perfect. Signal Big Red. They may begin their bombing run.”

  The massive zeppelin maneuvered out in front, and ten minutes later Karpov saw them fall, one, two, three, sailing down through the grey dawn to awaken the troops below when they ignited in a blinding flash and broiling fireball that carried a tremendous shock wave. Eardrums burst, the very breath of a man was literally squeezed from his chest as the shock wave thundered over the scene with terrible force. Yet more terrible was the searing fire that came after, devouring anything exposed, and literally sucking the oxygen right out of the air. Indeed, when the first small charged burst the weapon open to disperse the deadly contents, the liquefied coal droplets relied on the oxygen in the air to increase the potency of the detonation.

  Karpov heard the three loud booms from far below, saw the bright red-yellow fireball ignite with their fury, and a slow smile crept onto his face. It worked! One of the three fireballs was slightly off target, very near the tributary, but that was also good, for it smashed a pontoon bridge under construction there. The other two had fallen amid the encamped enemy division, and thousands would not awaken that morning for reveille—a wakeup call that was never to be heard.

  “Excellent!” Karpov said aloud. “Now! Signal Kalmenikov to start his attack!”

  That night, the thick woods to the north of the site had been slowly infiltrated by Karpov’s tough 2nd Cossack Cavalry Division. The men moved like shadows on their grey white steeds, emerging from the tree line like a sweeping fog. They moved out at the canter, the mass of horsemen slowly gaining speed until the bugler sounded the attack. Then the Cossacks drew their cruel curved swords and came charging south toward the main road that led back to Omsk.

  T
here were elements of the 2nd Armored Cavalry, armored cars, motorized infantry, who had also been roused by the thunderous explosions to the east near the river. The Majors told the Captains, and the Captains told the Sergeants, with orders shouting the alarm as the charge came in. The Sergeants told the buglers, and the buglers thought to raise their horns to rouse the sleeping men, but the Cossacks told them all.

  The cold swords flashed in the grey dawn, and the thunderous sound of ten thousand horseman shook the ground. At one point in the column, six armored cars put up a gallant defense, the machine guns in their armored turrets taking a fearful toll. But they could not stem the tide, and the Cossacks swept by, some hurling Molotov cocktails at the light armored vehicles, and adding more fire and torment to the morning. Others threw grappling hooks and the horsemen literally toppled two of the armored cars by dragging them onto their side, rendering them useless.

  Soldiers shaken by the terrible explosion, yet still alive on the outer fringes of the detonations, were dazed and confused, some barely struggling to their feet only to be cut down by those flashing sabres. The carnage was terrible to behold, and soon the chaos of panic began to spread, from one platoon to another until the encampment became a rout. The Cossacks swept through like a tide of death until they reached the village of Kochernevo, just south of the main road. There the hard shorn horsemen galloped through the cobblestone streets, setting fire to every building they could reach with Molotov cocktails and torches—fighting fire with fire. This was the site of the enemy headquarters, and now all the Majors and Captains were put to the test of war, and they fled in all directions, many ridden down and slaughtered by the last waves of the cavalry.

  There had been many battles like this throughout the long history of the bloody Russian civil war. Tartar and Cossack cavalry units prowled the Siberian woodlands, but were seldom deployed en mass like this against formed units of a modern army. Yet here they had caught their foe completely by surprise, shocked and stunned by Karpov’s deadly new weapons.

  High above, Karpov was watching the battle with his field glasses, as he often did on the ship. He had become accustomed to thinking behind the protective cups of the eye pieces, and watching the action unfold, as if he was seeing it in a movie. It brought him closer to it all without having to go there himself and actually enter the fray, which is just as he preferred things. Combat was for stupid soldiers. He was a General, an Admiral, and soon to become a head of state. These soldiers were merely things he used to achieve his ends, as he had thought to use the awesome power of Kirov.

  He saw the gallant and deadly charge, the carnage it inflicted, and was elated. But soon, he knew, the enemy would respond by bringing up armor from the heart of that mechanized cavalry unit. The shock of his attack had done its job, completely unhinging the enemy river crossing operation, and so now he turned and gave another order to Bogrov.

  “Signal Kalmenikov. Tell him to pull his Cossacks out and proceed to the rally point. And be certain they leave behind those gifts!”

  The late Christmas presents Karpov was delivering were thickets of hand deployed mines, that were being dropped all over the ground as the horsemen withdrew. Now, when a more organized column of armored cars came barreling up the main road into Kochernevo, they got another nasty surprise, running right over the mines, which exploded to send the lead vehicle hurling up and then crashing down onto its side in another fiery wreck.

  “Begin regular bombing now. Let them taste our conventional munitions.”

  Abakan was high up, but a hovering zeppelin was a near perfect bombing platform, with unequaled stability. The long rack of 100 pound bombs were deployed from each gondola, and the rain of evil metal fell unerringly to the scene below, the bomblets erupting with more fury, setting off many of the mines and leaving the whole target zone a hell of fire and shrapnel. The last touch were the barrels of another mixture Karpov had devised with his engineers, a makeshift napalm that he sent careening down into the entire mix, ending the attack with the hideous assault of fire, even as it had begun.

  The hammer had fallen. The lesson had been taught, but it now remained to be seen whether Volkov would get the message Karpov was delivering that day. He would soon learn that the heart and soul had been burned out of his 9th Infantry Division, and his 8th Armored Cavalry Brigade had been gutted. There would be no river crossing operation that day, and by nightfall the remaining units were beginning to withdraw down the long road west to Omsk.

  Karpov monitored their slow, steady progress, content. Now he contemplated what he might say to Volkov after his little victory on the Ob here. Should he offer the man a truce, demand the return of Omsk and withdrawal of all his divisions on Free Siberian territory to the south of Novosibirsk? He knew that Volkov had three big zeppelins operating there, the units Symenko had told him about, but thus far, only the 15th Division had been seen to cross the border zone. It was probing toward his defenses on the lower Ob.

  “Signal Big Red. We return to Kaa-Chem. But we will take a roundabout course to throw off Volkov’s spies, and navigate there tonight under cover of darkness.” He was looking at his map as the operation concluded, well satisfied.

  “Yes Bogrov, war is war. You can either be the one on the delivering end of an attack like the one you just witnessed or you will one day end up on the receiving end. War is war, and we do what we must. But doing it first is the best way, before your enemy gets his stinking hands on your throat. We could have fought a hard defensive battle here. An opposed river crossing would have been very costly for Volkov’s troops. But the best defense is a good offense, and I have just demonstrated that clearly enough.”

  “Aye sir,” said Bogrov. “That you did.”

  Part II

  Strategy

  “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”

  ― Michael E. Porter

  Chapter 4

  Far away to the north, other men were hidden away in tunnels as they pondered the fate of Gibraltar, weaving the tangled web of war. The lights burned late at Whitehall. In the Admiralty bunker, the lights had first been turned on 27th of August, 1939, and they would burn continuously with their own stalwart glow of resistance for six years, until finally turned off on the 16th of August, 1945. Admirals Pound, Tovey, and Fraser were present that day. As Tovey seated himself at the table, he had the fear that he might soon be scapegoated for the disaster of Convoy HX-69, and the escape of the German battlegroup that had slipped past his guard. To his great surprise and relief, Admiral Pound took full responsibility upon himself for the debacle.

  “I must first apologize to you, Admiral Tovey, and to all present, as it was my insistence that Home Fleet deploy west in the Iceland passages that was largely responsible for what happened. Had I permitted the Commander of Home Fleet to decide his course of battle and dispose accordingly, we might have caught the German movement well north of the convoy. It was my feeling that our newly established air base on the Faeroes would provide sufficient coverage of the inside passage, and yet the Germans were able to run heavy ships right up to those islands and shell our boys senseless. I realize you did your best when the alarm rang, rushing HMS Invincible to the scene and shadowing the bandits as they fled south.”

  “That we did, sir but with King George V and Prince of Wales unable to catch up, I thought it unwise to engage the enemy with my single ship.”

  “The responsibility is entirely mine,” said Pound, “and I am prepared to place my own head firmly on the chopping block this time, and will fix blame nowhere else.”

  “If I may, sir,” said Tovey. “We’ll have need of every head at our disposal in the weeks and months ahead. Your assumption that R.A.F. Vagar might provide us with adequate warning of any German movement near the Faeroe Islands was entirely sound—save for one factor—the Graf Zeppelin. That single ship has changed the equation considerably, and we have not given it adequate consideration. It was fighters off that ship that blinded our air search effort fr
om Vagar. Now that it has happened once, we must take every precaution to assure it never happens again.”

  “Thank you, Admiral,” said Pound. “Yet it was also my bull headed order that you move both Illustrious and Ark Royal well west. Had they been closer perhaps we could have put up a challenge to this German carrier.”

  “Perhaps,” said Tovey. “Our pilots are certainly capable and determined, yet we must get to work to give them a plane that can match what the Germans have aboard that ship. Their Bf-109 is superior in every respect to our Skuas, and even the new Fulmar may not be able to match it.”

  “Agreed,” said Admiral Fraser, pleased at the gracious and diplomatic manner in which Tovey had eased the First Sea Lord down from the hangman’s scaffold. He was correct. They were going to need every head they could bring to the task now, and there was no longer any margin for error in these deliberations. “What we need is a plane like the Hurricane or the Spitfire. Mister Fairey proposed he could build a carrier-borne Spitfire a year before the war, and we were fools not to listen to him then.”

  “It was Churchill who skewered that project,” said Pound. “He thought it would impede production of the land based variant and, as it stands, we’re barely able to keep production on those up to hold off the Luftwaffe. We do have the Fulmars coming on line now, though they are few in number. Yet, for the time being, they will have to suffice. At the same time I will listen to my Home Fleet Commander on this matter, and make every effort to see what we can do about a seaborne Spitfire or Hurricane. We already have a few Hurricanes modified for use on carriers. I believe those went to HMS Furious, did they not?”