by James Philip
Kurochnik noted the fore-shortened main battery turrets fore and aft, the smaller secondary turret below the bridge. The gun barrels were invisible, their muzzles levelled.
Uncannily, he sensed that if he reached out his hand he could touch the muzzles of those guns; the guns that would be the death of him and the last Red Army striking force in Iraq. In those moments before he died Major General Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik knew exactly what was about to happen and realised – too late - that Abadan Island was a giant bear trap.
His forces on the south bank of the Karun River were doomed to encirclement and destruction in detail; the men and machines trapped against the ruins of Khorramshahr on the north back were equally doomed; those men who somehow escaped the exposed north bank of the river would inevitably retreat straight into the arms of the force which had panicked Romanov’s 12th Urals Brigade beyond the town.
The last thing Kurochnik saw before he died was the whole side of the cruiser disappear behind a wall of fire and smoke as HMS Tiger unleashed her first broadside.
Chapter 90
19:22 Hours
Friday 3rd July 1964
The Angry Widow, above Kharg Island, Persian Gulf
In the aftermath of the two Blue Danube air bursts the projected ‘engagement window is six to seven minutes’. Any longer and the ‘swarm’ would be too enfeebled by losses and the surviving aircraft in it would be ‘easily’ picked off by the radar directed gunnery and precision guided missiles of Carrier Division Seven. Everything depended on utilising the confusion and – hopefully – the initial EMP damage inflicted upon the enemy’s advanced electronics by the Blue Danubes to ensure that several of the attacking bombers actually ‘got through’.
“Kitty Hawk is slowing!”
Squadron Leader Guy French did not immediately register what this signified.
“Everybody else is rushing about like they’ve got ants in their pants but Kitty Hawk is slowing down!”
“Roger, understood,” the pilot acknowledged. The automated bombing system was feeding him constant small course adjustments as if The Angry Widow was on a standard run in to the target from a fixed initial point.
The mixed fighter force of Hunters, Sea Vixens and Scimitars had piled into the fray two minutes ago. Several had already been hacked down by surface-to-air missiles; the others were dog fighting above Carrier Division Seven. Sometime in the next sixty seconds the Canberra’s would go in a sea level.
Guy French had no idea how many of The Angry Widow’s ‘big friends’ were still in the air. The ‘missile lock’ panel was constantly ablaze; the Victor ought by rights to have been shot down several times by now.
The voice of the V-Bomber’s navigator/radio operator broke over the intercom.
“I think the second Blue Danube went off within about ten miles of the Kitty Hawk. Too far away to do much harm but it must have given the Yanks a dreadful wake up call, skipper!”
How on earth had the Americans allowed a V-Bomber to get that close?
Anywhere close to twenty miles would have been a bonus; but ten miles!
That really was sleeping on the job!
“Kitty Hawk is dead in the water! Repeat, Kitty Hawk is dead in the water!”
Guy French was tempted to make a facetious remark.
Something along the lines of: ‘Perhaps, she’s surrendered?’
However, that would have been crass, so he simply acknowledged the report.
Hitting a five acre target – the Kitty Hawk’s flight deck was over a thousand feet long and at its widest point over two hundred and eighty feet broad – that was travelling and presumably, manoeuvring at high speed, was going to have been an interesting proposition. However, something that big which was ‘dead in the water’ was an altogether juicier prospect, assuming The Angry Widow somehow avoided getting blown to bits by a Talos or Terrier missile before she got within miles of the blasted thing!
Why am I worrying about shipboard missiles?
It was much more likely one of the F-4s would settle their hash with a Sidewinder heat-seeking air-to-air munitions or good, old-fashioned cannon fire.
Too many ways to die; best not to think about any of them!
“Dive point in six-zero seconds!”
The best advice on the subject of using a Victor as a dive bomber was...you must be insane! Up until yesterday nobody had ever questioned this proposition. It was after all, a self-evident fact. Although, in the circumstances less than very helpful, and positively inconvenient. Basically, if a pilot flipped the kite over and pointed it at the target as one might in an aircraft designed for that kind of work – dive bombing - the wings were liable to come off, more or less straight away. This being the case it was a thing people tended to avoid. Nevertheless, talking among themselves the pilots at Akrotiri had come to the conclusion that the only way to ‘get the job done’ was to ‘dive by increments’, and to see what happened. The theory was that if one got close enough to the target then it really would not matter if the wings came off, the physics of momentum, inertia and so forth could then be relied upon to take care of the rest. In any event even if the wings had not already parted company with the fuselage, there was absolutely no way a Victor or a Vulcan was going to pull out of a near vertical dive below ten thousand feet, with or without its wings still being attached to the rest of the aircraft.
Guy French planned to extend the air brakes, chop back on the throttles, point The Angry Widow’s nose down twenty-five degrees and gently steepen the angle of the dive as he got closer to the target. It was a thing best done without worrying about being shot down; so he had stopped thinking about the ‘being shot down’ side of the equation.
There had been a heated debate after the main crew briefing whether the tail would come off if the air brakes were fully extended at supersonic speeds. It was a moot point, since if a pilot pitched a Victor into a steep dive without the brakes ‘out’ the aircraft would go supersonic almost immediately and the kite would probably be uncontrollable anyway.
“THIRTY SECONDS!”
“Open the bomb bay doors!” Guy French ordered.
The Victor shook as the newly exposed surfaces dragged against the near supersonic air flowing past the bomber.
Both of The Angry Widow’s six-ton Tallboys were fused to explode 0.25 seconds after impact. The fusing calculations were complicated in one sense, horribly simple in another. If – and it was a big ‘if’ – one of the Victor’s Tallboys hit the deck of the Kitty Hawk it was liable to be travelling at Mach1.2, or 1.3 or 1.4, or something of that order; for the sake of argument say, in excess of around eight hundred miles an hour. At that speed if its progress was unmitigated by an impact it would detonate approximately three hundred feet beyond its point of contact. However, Kitty Hawk’s flight deck was in the parlance of naval architecture, an ‘armoured strength deck’. Not only was the flight deck built extremely robustly but it structurally incorporated a one to two inch layer of cemented armour plate, likely to retard, moderately but significantly none the less even a projectile the size and weight of a Tallboy, sufficiently to ensure that the six ton bomb’s two-and-a-half ton Torpex warhead exploded at the bottom of, or just below the keel of the carrier as it exited the hull.
The ten-ton Grand Slam on the CO’s kite, Waltzing Matilda, had been fused to detonate on impact on the grounds that no amount of gerrymandering with the fuse would otherwise stop the bomb going straight through the target and exploding hundreds of feet below it.
For any ship ever built a weapon like a Tallboy or Grand Slam was an unsurvivable nightmare. The Tirpitz, sister ship of the virtually unsinkable Bismarck, had been hit by a single Tallboy in September 1944 which had sliced through her bow and exploded in the water beside the battleship; Tirpitz had stayed afloat but shock damage had wrecked most of her machinery to such an extent that thereafter the Germans regarded the great ship as no more than a static, floating artillery platform. In a later raid Tirpitz had been hit by t
wo Tallboys and capsized in minutes. Any bomb dropped on the Kitty Hawk’s flight deck would probably disable her; a single Tallboy would cripple her if it did not sink her, a Grand Slam would certainly wreck her.
“TEN SECONDS!”
“Air brakes to maximum extension!” Guy French drawled. On a day like this a pilot owed it to his crew to sound as laconic as a man on a country drive in high summer. Like a man looking forward to a picnic with a pretty girl...
The bomber shuddered and air speed fell off.
The throttles pulled back.
“FIVE SECONDS!”
“FOUR...THREE...TWO...ONE!”
Guy French’s hands moved on the controls.
“Tally-ho, chaps,” he declared cheerfully.
The Angry Widow’s port wing tip dropped away into space and the bomber’s needle-nose tipped down into her final dive.
Chapter 91
19:23 Hours
Friday 3rd July 1964
South of Kharg Island, Persian Gulf
Walter Brenckmann was seeing things with his eyes that his mind was having a great deal of trouble rationalising in his head. He was seeing things he did not, could not, would not believe and yet; they were happening all around him. The evidence of his eyes was incontrovertible. Carrier Division Seven was fighting for its life in a battle in which its technological wizardry and incomparable space age weaponry was suddenly horribly fallible. Not since the latter stages of the Pacific War when it had been confronted with massed Kamikaze attacks had the US Navy fought a foe that, whatever it threw at him, just kept coming. In the Pacific War Japanese Kamikazes had attacked at two or three hundred miles an hour, often much, much slower speeds; the British aircraft were coming in two or three times faster dragging thundering supersonic booms behind them. Most of the men in the Kamikazes had been kids and trainees; the men attacking Carrier Division Seven were veteran professionals.
The Kitty Hawk had been two thousand yards away from Walter, almost directly stern on to him when the torpedoes dropped by the turboprop Gannets had started to hit the carrier. The fish must have been small, lightweight devices with relatively diminutive fifty or sixty pound warheads but that was no consolation. At least two of them had exploded under the stern of the flagship, others had gone off against or under her engine rooms; these latter would have caused local shock damage but been very unlikely to have breached the carrier’s double hull. However, the torpedoes which had detonated against or in close proximity to the ship’s propellers and rudders...
Although water still churned under her port transom, proving that at least one prop was still turning the Kitty Hawk was dead in the water.
She could not launch or land her fixed wing birds without wind over her decks.
She was helpless, her massive flight deck a giant target.
The cruiser Boston was manoeuvring to place herself on the flagship’s port beam. Walter assumed that the Albany would be steering to do likewise to starboard. The Boston had ranged ahead of the Kitty Hawk, now she was racing back into position.
Walter risked a glance skyward.
Five miles above the stricken Kitty Hawk vapour trails crisscrossed the heavens. Already in the east the sky was darkening to black and the first stars glittered. It would be night soon.
The approaching scream of jets drew Walter’s eyes down to the ocean.
Two English Electric Canberras; were both heading straight for the Kitty Hawk so low that their jet tailpipes were ripping up the waves behind them. The Boston, every gun firing was racing to put herself between the bombers and the carrier with a great bone in her teeth, cleaving through the water. The cruiser’s Terriers streamed smoke and fire as they sped towards the nearest Canberra at impossible speeds.
Walter had not imagined that a close range line of sight wave-skimming shot was viable with a Terrier launcher. Nonetheless the missiles dashed the bomber into the sea half-a-mile short of the Kitty Hawk.
Even in ideal conditions it took at least thirty seconds to reload the launcher rails, and longer to spool up the internal guidance systems.
Walter waited for the surviving Canberra to pull up.
It never happened.
The bomber flew straight into the starboard side of the Boston.
Moments later the its bombs, two thousand pounders and as many as four thousand pounders it had dropped unseen - probably by anybody on the Boston because the aircraft was so low and everybody on the cruiser was diving for cover - skipped once, twice across the water and crashed into the Boston’s starboard side.
First there was a big explosion and a crimson bloom of igniting aviation fuel as the bomber instantly disintegrated on impact with the amidships superstructure of the cruiser.
And then a terrible, devastating drum roll of heavy, booming explosions as the bombs hit.
In the space of a handful of seconds the fifteen thousand ton, six hundred and seventy feet long cruiser was a burning wreck. The wreck forged ahead several hundred yards before her engines fell silent and a series of huge secondary explosions began to wrack her shattered hulk.
The cruiser’s Terrier magazine lit off engulfing the previously untouched stern in a roiling fireball. A boiler imploded deep in the ship as water flooded into one of the fire rooms. Ready use ammunition for the Boston’s five inch secondary battery began to cook off.
Walter shut his eyes.
Men were throwing themselves over the side of the doomed ship to escape the flames. For most there was no hope as the cruiser, her flank torn open to the sea rolled over onto her starboard side where, for long moments she lingered on her beam ends, her red-leaded hull dull in the failing light, before turning turtle and staring to go down by the stern.
Walter watched her go, bobbing in the water a little over five hundred yards away.
Even as he had been witnessing the fate of the Boston he had heard other, heavy explosions – in fact, he had felt them through the water, punching him in the guts and reverberating in his chest – and now he saw a new pillar of smoke rising from somewhere beyond the Kitty Hawk.
As he watched the carrier flushed both her twin-Terrier launchers.
Walter tried to follow the track of the missiles.
And that what when he saw the silver specs diving towards the Kitty Hawk from on high; like three dark falling avengers, the evil delta bat-like wing of a Vulcan, and the two arrowhead silhouettes of Victors swooping on the helpless carcass of their victim.
The Terriers climbed almost vertically to meet the V-Bombers.
Two missiles found their target; the others slashed past.
Walter almost but not quite breathed a sigh of relief.
One of the deadly killer arrowhead silhouettes was still lancing down towards the stationary Kitty Hawk; and in her slipstream a cluster of tiny black shadows, and one ever larger and larger killer bomb.
It could only be a Grand Slam; twenty years after it was designed still the biggest conventional bomb ever made. It was capable of drilling through thirty feet of reinforced concrete or fifteen inches of armour plate like a knife through butter, before detonating its four ton Torpex warhead.
It was too surreal; a clutch of smaller bombs and one massive, ship-killing missile was following the surviving Victor down onto the Kitty Hawk.
Walter had seen enough in the last few minutes to know that even if all the bombs somehow missed the carrier’s five acre flight deck that the bomber would not.
He watched that descending arrowhead with numb incredulity.
Chapter 92
19:24 Hours
Friday 3rd July
The Angry Widow, South of Kharg Island, Persian Gulf
Squadron Leader Guy French had wondered if – when this moment came – he would have the chance to fill his mind’s eye with Greta’s face. She had been the love of his life. The October War had taken her from him and with her all the futures they might have lived together.
But actually he had no time for reflection and besides his se
nses, every single nerve in his body and his whole waking mind was overloaded with demands and the sensations of ‘the moment’. He had no idea if he was still actually flying The Angry Widow, or if in this terminal dive she was in any way still ‘flyable’. Something had hit the aircraft when the Terriers had rocketed past; for all he knew the tail had come off. Apart from anything else there was too much vibration and it was far too noisy to hear himself think.
Down below him the deck of the Kitty Hawk was growing larger in the windscreen. The carrier probably hoped to shoot off another salvo of Terriers but he was more worried about the wall of tracer that several ships beyond his field of vision had started to hose into the sky above the flagship.
Bizarrely, the exploding shells, harmless looking clusters of small black pock marks in the air and the tracery of cannon fire lacing the lower atmosphere prompted him to ask if the Americans’ fancy rocketry had proved, in some way, cranky the first time it had been tested in a real battle.
It was one thing to reload the launcher rails in half-a-minute and to get a new salvo in the air in no time flat in an exercise when nobody was shooting at you; but what was it like doing it over and over again in a real fight onboard ships that were twisting and turning like scalded cats? Was it really as easy as he had heard some US Air Force men claim to hold or re-acquire radar target locks when somebody had his hands around your throat and his knee in your groin? How great were all those marvels of space age gadgetry the Yanks built into their ships these days when it came to a real fight?
He had not expected there to be so much smoke down at sea level.