The Mountains of the Moon: The Gulf War of 1964 - Part 2 (Timeline 10/27/62 Book 8)
Page 46
Why is the Kitty Hawk dead in the water?
“We’ve got her, chaps!” He called over the intercom. “I’ve got her dead centre...”
The whole airframe juddered, the controls froze.
Suddenly Guy smelled burning through his oxygen mask.
He turned to his right, blinked a couple of times in confusion. His co-pilot, a thoroughly decent fellow from Chippenham in Wiltshire whose parents were life-long doyens of the Wilton Hunt – or had been before the October War – was not there. Or rather, he was not there from the navel upwards and neither was most of the right hand side of the cockpit.
Guy felt the slipstream attempting to rip him out of his seat.
He was hanging on his straps.
Still The Angry Widow arrowed down towards the Kitty Hawk.
Physics, aerodynamics, ballistics had a lot to be blamed for, he thought idly. His mind was quiet as the flight deck of the great ship filled his windscreen. Only one more decision to make, old fellow...
Guy French shut his eyes as the Victor plunged through the curtain of anti-aircraft fire above the doomed flagship of Carrier Division Seven.
Chapter 93
19:45 Hours
Friday 3rd July 1964
HMAS Anzac, Arvand River
The hull of the destroyer clanged like a bell every time a 115-millimetre round from one of the handful of surviving T-62s sheltering in the ruins of Khorramshahr struck her. The tanks’ armour piercing shells went in one side – the starboard – and out of the other, port side, even the high explosive hits seemed to explode as they exited the ship unless they chanced to encounter something solid, like a bulkhead or a boiler.
Commander Stephen Turnbull had grounded the Battle class destroyer in the mud at the mouth of the Karun River after HMS Tiger had been beaten into submission. Rear Admiral Nicholas Davey had taken the big ship east of the tip of Om-al-Rasas Island before she ran onto a sand bank; by then the cruiser’s 6-inch main battery and Anzac’s four 4.5-inch guns had cleared the banks of the Karun River and both north and south like giant scythes reaping a crop of blood and iron. In the minutes before the enemy realised what was going on, firing unopposed over open sights, the two surviving ships of the ABNZ Persian Gulf Squadron gun line had destroyed the whatever hopes the Russians might still have had of any kind of victory. In those minutes they had made hay in the failing light; but as always, there was a reckoning.
If Tiger and Anzac had wrought terrible execution at ranges of a few hundred yards; each was equally as vulnerable to the point blank fire of the surviving Red Army tanks. Soon mortar rounds began dropping around and on the ships, and heavy machine gun fire tore up the waters of the Arvand River as dug in gunners on shore duelled with Anzac’s 40-millimetre Bofors and Tiger’s last operable quick-firing automatic 3-inch turret.
The enemy had concentrated on Tiger.
The water around her had boiled with shell splashes, and time and again the big ship had rocked with new hits as fires began to go untended. In the end her magazines were shot ‘dry’; and she was no more than an unmissable sitting target in the river. Even as Anzac – slowly sinking - had steamed past her Tiger was dying. Fire blackened and riddled with splinter and shell hits everything above the main deck was smashed, only her ragged battle flag still flew, blown hither and thither by the heat rising from the fires below.
“That’s the last of the HE, sir!”
Stephen Turnbull heard the shouted report as if through ears stuffed with cotton wool. He was half deaf from the concussion of the big guns, weak from the cumulative effects of several bloody splinter wounds.
“Shoot star shell if that’s all we’ve got!” He yelled above the bedlam.
Only one of the Anzac’s twin Bofors mounts was still in action; the destroyer had very nearly emptied her magazines. Under his feet Turnbull could feel the ship settling deeper into the muddy bottom.
The bastards would never sink the Anzac!
What he would not have given to have seen the look on the faces of the Red Army men on the banks of the Karun River when Tiger and Anzac glided out of the fog of war!
Anzac’s ‘A’ turret had been disabled by a direct hit from a big shell, either a 115-millimetre from a T-62 or a 100-millimetre from a T-54. The armour piercing round had penetrated it and killed everybody inside.
‘B’ turret’s twin 4.5-inch guns were still firing, the barrels of both probably very nearly red hot. Every flake of paint had sloughed off the overheated barrels, now in the half-light they looked almost...rusty.
Stephen Turnbull surveyed the darkling eastern horizon.
Gun flashes sparkled evilly from the north to the south, from the desert above Khorramshahr to the conflagration consuming the smashed refineries of Abadan.
“Permission to fire the Squid, sir?”
Turnbull tried not to grin too widely. He failed. The notion of shooting salvoes of four hundred pound Squid anti-submarine mortars at shore targets appealed to a mordant streak of his nature. The shore was easily within the two hundred-and-seventy-five yard range of the stern launcher.
“Yes. Carry on!”
The messenger scampered aft.
Ignoring the deck flinching beneath his feet as more hits slammed into the starboard side of the destroyer, Turnbull went to the twisted shambles of the bridge wing and looked aft down the length of his once handsome command. Anzac was being systematically wrecked and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.
The Squid mortar thumped three times, the big bombs arched across the muddy water between the ship and the northern shore, splashing into the detritus scattered along the northern bank of the Karun River.
Nothing happened for some seconds.
Each round was time-fused.
Two hundred pounds of Amatol made a satisfyingly impressive bang when it went off. The blast from the three explosions wafted across the Anzac’s bridge and afterwards, there was an odd quietness. It was the quietness of exhaustion and despair, that moment that comes sooner or later in all battles when the living collectively acknowledge that to fight on a second longer is pointless.
The fighting went on elsewhere; in the Arvand River the Tiger and the Anzac burned and the tide of human misery slackened, as if the flood tide of war had turned.
“Cease firing!” Turnbull ordered, hoarsely. “Cease firing!”
Chapter 94
19:45 Hours
Friday 3rd July 1964
South of Kharg Island, Persian Gulf
It was like a bad dream in which things seemed to be happening out of sequence, each scene tumbling over the next until all that remained was a melange of feverish impressions, any one of which in isolation would have beggared a sane man’s credulity.
Big grey warships were stopped in the water and burning; and there were great palls of rising smoke, smoke rising like Biblical pillars of salt all around the compass in the fast dwindling last gleaming of the day. And still guns hammered distantly and the trails of missiles still sporadically crisscrossed the sky like messengers of the gods.
The air above and around the flagship had become a killing ground.
The bombs of shattered aircraft still plummeted downward in unstoppable ballistic arcs; and still the USS Kitty Hawk had lay dead in the water. From over a mile away Walter Brenckmann had watched the swarm of smaller bombs, specs like motes in the corner of his eye but each one a five hundred or a thousand pound agent of death begin to fall around the flagship. Tall geysers of water erupted and walked towards the great ship’s bow.
One, two yellow-red flashes spoke of hits on the flight deck as the distant thunder of multiple explosions rolled across the iron grey seas. Kitty Hawk might have shrugged off such ‘gnat bites’ as these hits but her travails had hardly yet begun.
Walter watched the great black dart of the ten-ton Grand Slam falling impossibly fast. The huge bomb seemed to be falling vertically; except it was not. Relative to the Kitty Hawk the missile was still travelling i
n the direction of flight of the bomber which had released it, drifting, drifting ahead of the carrier. For a split second Walter believed it would miss the carrier’s bow.
When it came the explosion seemed to envelope the entire forward half of the massive ship; and Walter thought the Kitty Hawk must sink. A mile away from the detonation of the bomb’s four ton Torpex warhead the shock wave hit him like Rocky Marciano had just punched him in the guts. He was astonished when as the water settled the flagship was still...there.
He looked up at the screaming in the sky.
The silvery arrowhead silhouette of the diving bomber looked...wrong. In the time it took him to work out the most of the V-Bomber’s tail and sections of both wings were gone, the aircraft, a Victor had burst through the umbrella of light anti-aircraft fire the surviving escorts had thrown up above the flagship.
Large parts of the bomber peeled away, there were two small explosions seemingly just behind the nose of the falling aircraft and then the wreck was underneath the deadly mile-thick layer of detonating anti-aircraft rounds. Kitty Hawk cleared her Terrier rails again but by then it was too late, the Victor was too close, too fast and no guidance system known to man could ‘lock up’ a missile falling from the heavens at twice the speed of a rifle bullet.
Unlike the bombs which had very nearly fallen ‘long’ the Victor had to have been under some kind of control almost until the end, correcting for drift, its nose pointed at the middle of the Kitty Hawk’s flight deck like an assassin’s dagger to the heart of his next victim.
There were two explosions.
The first marked the impact of the bomber just aft of the carrier’s bridge; it was as if a small bomb had gone off on the deck.
A fraction of a second later the entire mid-third of the biggest warship in the World was consumed by a massive double detonation.
The bomber must have still had her bombs onboard...
Walter stared.
He had just stared, transfixed, hardly aware of the debris, large and small thrown hundreds, thousands of feet in the air tumbling randomly down into the sea between him and the doomed ship. Shrapnel splashed the grey waters nearby while, a mile distant the wreck of the Kitty Hawk began to settle in the water, her bow and stern lifting slowly, brokenly as she lay ever deeper in the water beneath a rising dirty grey mushroom cloud.
Beyond Kitty Hawk a Coontz class destroyer, either the William V. Pratt or the Dewey, was stopped in the water, her stern enveloped in flames. Closer to the sinking flagship the guided missile cruiser Albany was listing to port and smoking from damage forward. Farther away there was another pillar of smoke, another unknown ship on fire in a sea that was suddenly, sickeningly friendless. A lone Sikorsky SH-3 Sea King forlornly approached the broken stern of the Kitty Hawk.
The helicopter began to circle.
It was as if, like Walter Brenckmann, its pilot could not believe the evidence of his eyes and had not the first idea what was going to happen next.
[The End]
Author’s Endnote
‘The Mountains of the Moon: The Gulf War of 1964 – Part 2’ is Book 8 of the alternative history series Timeline 10/27/62. I hope you enjoyed it - or if you did not, sorry - but either way, thank you for reading and helping to keep the printed word alive. Remember, civilization depends on people like you.
* * *
These days I get asked quite a lot about my plans for Timeline 10/27/62; which is a bit tricky because obviously, one is always at pains to avoid putting inadvertent spoilers ‘out there’.
However, without offering ‘spoiler hostages’ I think I owe it to my readers to level with you as much as possible about my plans.
The Mountains of the Moon is the eleventh instalment of the Timeline 10/27/62 Series – or rather, ‘saga’ as it has become - and the simple answer to the question: what do I plan to do with the series? Is that I shall carry on!
I want to find out what happens in the alternative universe of the Timeline 10/27/62 universe as much as my readers; I am as curious as you about what happens next, and in the coming years to the band of survivors from the first dozen books!
So, any suggestion that I contemplated – even for a moment – drawing a ‘line in the sand’ with The Mountains of the Moon could not possibly be farther from the truth.
At the time of writing Ask Not Of Your Country the fourth book in the parallel USA series (and the twelfth in the series as a whole) is, in the jargon, ‘on the stocks’ and ready for release at the end of 2016. It synchronises the Main and USA series; leastways in the sense that it and The Mountains of the Moon end on 4th July 1964.
After that there will be a fifth USA book The American Dream set in 1964, and two more Main Series books All Along the Watchtower and Crow on the Cradle also set in 1964. All three of these books are scheduled for release in 2017.
There will also be an overdue excursion to Australasia in two books Cricket on the Beach and Operation Manna, both departures from the style of the Main and USA series prompted by feedback from Timeline 10/27/62’s loyal Australasian readership.
The two ‘Australian books’ will fill in the year-long gap in the narrative (November 1962 to October 1963) between Operation Anadyr and Aftermath and Love is Strange and California Dreaming. Both these books, Cricket on the Beach and Operation Manna will be published at the same time in late 2017.
Looking much, much further ahead, into 2018 – the Timeline Main series will unify and move on with Book 11: Independence Day, and Book 12: Changing the Guard.
* * *
Thank you again for reading Mountains of the Moon.
James Philip
September 2016.
Other Books by James Philip
The Timeline 10/27/62 World
The Timeline 10/27/62 - Main Series
Book 1: Operation Anadyr
Book 2: Love is Strange
Book 3: The Pillars of Hercules
Book 4: Red Dawn
Book 5: The Burning Time
Book 6: Tales of Brave Ulysses
Book 7: A Line in the Sand
Book 8: The Mountains of the Moon
Book 9: All Along the Watchtower
(Available 1st June 2017)
Book 10: Crow on the Cradle
(Available 27th October 2017)
Timeline 10/27/62 - USA
Book 1: Aftermath
Book 2: California Dreaming
Book 3: The Great Society
Book 4: Ask Not of Your Country
Book 5: The American Dream
(Available 27th October 2017)
Timeline 10/27/62 – Australia
Book 1: Cricket on the Beach
(Available 20th December 2017)
Book 2: Operation Manna
(Available 20th December 2017)
Other Series and Novels
The Guy Winter Mysteries
Prologue: Winter’s Pearl
Book 1: Winter’s War
Book 2: Winter’s Revenge
Book 3: Winter’s Exile
Book 4: Winter’s Return
Book 5: Winter’s Spy
The Bomber War Series
Book 1: Until the Night
Book 2: The Painter
(Available 31st March 2017)
Book 3: The Cloud Walkers
(Available 31st March 2017)
Until the Night Series
Part 1: Main Force Country – September 1943
Part 2: The Road to Berlin – October 1943
Part 3: The Big City – November 1943
Part 4: When Winter Comes – December 1943
Part 5: After Midnight – January 1944
The Harry Waters Series
Book 1: Islands of No Return
Book 2: Heroes
Book 3: Brothers in Arms
The Frankie Ransom Series
Book 1: A Ransom for Two Roses
Book 2: The Plains of Waterloo
Book 3: The Nantucket Sleighride
Th
e Strangers Bureau Series
Book 1: Interlopers
Book 2: Pictures of Lily
Audio Books of the following Titles
are available (or are in production) now
Aftermath
A Ransom for Two Roses
California Dreaming
Heroes
Islands of No Return
Love is Strange
Main Force Country
Operation Anadyr
The Pillars of Hercules
The Plains of Waterloo
Winter’s Pearl
Winter’s Revenge
Winter’s War
* * *
Details of all James Philip’s published books and forthcoming publications
can be found on his website www.jamesphilip.co.uk
* * *
Cover artwork concepts by James Philip
Graphic Design by Beastleigh Web Design