Kirov III-Pacific Storm (Kirov Series) Read online

  Kirov III

  Pacific Storm

  By

  John Schettler

  “The death of God left the angels in a strange position.”

  ― Donald Barthelme

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  The Writing Shop Press

  Kirov III – Pacific Storm, Copyright©2013, John A. Schettler

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  Kirov Series - Military Fiction

  Kirov

  Kirov II – Cauldron Of Fire

  Kirov III – Pacific Storm

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  Meridian - Meridian Series - Volume I

  Nexus Point - Meridian Series - Volume II

  Touchstone - Meridian Series - Volume III

  Anvil of Fate - Meridian Series - Volume IV

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  Kirov III

  Pacific Storm

  By

  John Schettler

  “On the sea the boldest steer but where their ports invite;

  But there are wanderers o’er Eternity

  Whose bark drives on and on,

  and anchor’d ne’er shall be.”

  —Byron: Childe Harold III.lxx.

  Prologue

  Part I – The Interval

  Part II – The Operation

  Part III – Engagement

  Part IV – Thunder Gods

  Part V – Damage Control

  Part VI – Vendetta

  Part VII – The Long Night

  Part VIII – Shadow Dancer

  Part IX – Decisions

  Part X – Clash of Titans

  Part XI – Shadow On The Sea

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note:

  This a novel presenting an alternate history of WWII as a result of variations in the historical timeline caused by the presence of the battlecruiser Kirov and its actions in Volumes I and II of this series. Events depicted, however are well underpinned with good historical research.

  While the ship and crew of the Russian battlecruiser Kirov are of my own making, every other ship and character mentioned, from the highest officers on down to the lowest able seaman or pilot, is a historical figure, placed in the roles and locations where they served during the action describe.

  Prologue

  It was a long night for Charlie One and Strangler Mackenzie out on the Melville Island group. Strangely named, they were a pair of very diligent Aborigine coastwatchers working in a unit called the “Black Watch” established by patrol officer Jack Gribble from the Native Affairs Branch at Snake Bay. The native contingent was doing some very effective work. American pilot Lt. J. Martin had been rescued after a grueling 214 kilometer overland trek by these able scouts, and the Army was thankful for it, and for the capable eyes these men brought to places few others could even travel.

  Gribble had pulled together thirty-six men in all, Aborigine natives, and given each one an easy handle he could live with and pronounce, as their own real names were beyond his grasp. The unit worked out of a small ration station, and the natives were given all the tobacco they could ever want as an advanced payment for services, with a promise that they would be paid in real cash at the end of the war, whenever that came.

  Dem darn blurry Japs gonna make war for a very long time, thought Charlie. Who knew how long it might take before they would ever see any real money, but at least the nice new naval uniforms, regular food, and a new rifle with the tobacco were good prizes in the short run. Charlie had trained with Ginger One and Harry One on how to throw grenades, mount and use a machine gun in a coastal lighter, and best of all, how to ride in an undersea boat, all the way out to Timor Island to have a look at what the Japs were up to there.

  Blurry Japs put men on dat island too. Gonna fill dem trees with snipers in time. Very dangerous there on Timor now. But methinks dey come here now too, right on dis Melville Island, and very soon.

  The coastwatchers had been brought under tighter Army control in June of 1942, with the aim of finding and rescuing downed allied pilots, capturing enemy pilots, locating and investigating plane crashes from either side, and also providing assistance as spotters for the West Point Defense Coastal Battery. On occasion they would even serve as guards for the Australian Naval Headquarters at Darwin, and Charlie One had recently finished a tour there before heading back up to the north coast of Melville Island as a coastwatcher. He was very glad to be where he was when he saw the Japanese planes heading in for Darwin again that day, and heard the distant explosions, saw the tall billowing columns of smoke on the horizon to the south.

  Yup, he nodded inwardly, blurry Jap soldiers be follerin those planes in just another day or two now. All these places out amonga mangroves soon be crawling with bad men carrying rifles.

  In fact, on this very day he had been sent here with Strangler Mackenzie to look for an unidentified plane. It was feared that the Japanese were already landing early detachments on the island from seaplanes. But it was no seaplane Charlie One saw that evening as he peered north from the coast of Bathurst Island. It was a flock of enemy planes chasing something much bigger and getting some real trouble for their effort.

  “Strangler!” he called insistently. “Lookie here!” His mate was soon up at his side, eyes wide as the two men watched the battle scene unfold. They saw the arrival of enemy torpedo planes, swooping down on a distant ship, large and menacing on the seas. Then they gasped in awe at what they saw next, and sat mesmerized by the smoke and fire of anti-aircraft guns. Strangler had the presence of mind to pull out his picture box and was snapping photographs of the scene as best he could in the waning light.

  “What dem blurry Japs chasin’?” asked Charlie.

  “Somethin big!” said Strangler.

  “We best be done gawkin’ and take that picture box south to Darwin. They be wantin’ those photos on a plane straight away.”

  “Heather 16 be dokin’ at Darwin now,” said Charlie. “That’s Bin Sali’s boat. He can give dem pictures to his Lieutenant.”

  Heather 16 was a coastal lugger that had been operating in a small fleet of pearling boats along the Kimberly Coast, and was now pressed into service as a patrol boat out of Broome, owned by Lt. D.L. Beau Davis. A capable man, Davis spoke both Russian and German in addition to several dialects of Aboriginal language, and even a little Japanese. Not to exclude anyone, his lugger was now crewed by seven Chinese, two Timorese and one Malay in addition to Bin Soli and Lenny Leonard, two Aborigines. He plied the waters off the coast for years, trading tobacco and turtle shells with the local natives, along with dingo scalps and sometimes even a pearl or two nestled in a good clay pipe.

  Well known in these parts, Davis made the acquaintance of an enterprising journalist, and this is what Charlie One had in mind, for he had seen the two men together drinking in bars at Darwin and talking long into the night.

  “L.T. be givin’ us a pearl for dem photos,” Charlie suggested, “cause he be givin’ dem to dat reporter for some good money.”

  Strangler nodded eagerly as the two men set foot south, ready to run down to the coastal lighter tied up at the shore and sail all night from Bathurst Island across Beagle Gulf
to Darwin. What they carried was indeed a pearl of great price, for their photos would soon find their way into the hands of that curious newspaper correspondent and journalist, a man named Cyril Longmore who had come out to document the war on the Kimberly Coast.

  When Longmore got them developed that same day, he gaped at the images, amazed to think the Japanese would have been engaged with such a large and formidable looking vessel in the Timor Sea. He knew for a fact that there were no Australian or British ships in the region, and a few long conversations with associates on the telephone soon convinced him that there were no American ships about in these waters as well.

  As it happened, Longmore, later to be Captain Longmore, was good friends with the Australian Prime Minister John Curtin, who was an old journalist and newspaper man himself. So he was able to get the photos quickly into the right hands to attempt to answer the very same questions running through his own mind. Curtin had also just been sworn in as Australian Minister of Defense, and when Longmore called, the photos got some very high level attention, very fast.

  So it came to pass that knowledge of a strange, unaccountable warship in the Timor Sea soon traveled from the eyes and ears of two Aboriginal scouts, to journalist Cyril Longmore, and thence to Prime Minister John Curtin himself, and right into the hands of Allied intelligence units. Copies went out quickly to Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, and then on to the British Naval Station at Trincomalee on Ceylon by plane for a flight to Alexandria. After that it was just a few quick hops to Gibraltar where other curious eyes were soon to see them and note the uncanny similarity to a ship they had confronted just days earlier. The next plane to England would begin to unravel the long mystery that had baffled British intelligence for a very long year, and the word “Geronimo” was soon again being whispered in exclusive circles, and carried once more to the arcane halls of Bletchley Park by a most able and determined man.

  Part I

  The Interval

  “So long the path; so hard the journey,

  When I will return, I cannot say for sure,

  Until then the nights will be longer.

  Sleep will be full of dark dreams and sorrow,

  But do not weep for me…”

  - Russian Naval Hymn

  Chapter 1

  A car drove quickly up the lane towards a stately estate, its buildings clustered one against another in an odd mingling of architectural styles. Bletchley Park, or ‘Station X’ as it was called, was one of ten special operations facilities set up by MI6, where ‘Captain Ridley’s Shooting Party’ was supposed to be enjoying afternoons on the adjoining sixty acre estate, with shotguns and hounds to hunt down quail. Yet its real purpose was derived from the feverish activity of the Government Code and Cypher School, England’s code breakers, a collection of brilliant and dedicated men and women who would generate the vital intelligence information needed to prosecute the war.

  Here there were walls of colored code wheels, strange devices like the Enigma machines and odd looking equipment fed by long coiled paper tape, dimpled with a series of small black dots of varying sizes. The minds of Bletchley Park were already in the first stages of digitizing the analog world into forms their nascent computing machines could digest and ruminate upon. A year later the estate would see the installation of the first “Colossus” machine, a rudimentary computer housing all of 1500 vacuum tubes to power its mechanical brain.

  The car stopped, its door opening quickly as Admiral Tovey stepped out, a thick parcel under his right arm. He did not approach the styled mansions up the main walkway, but veered left towards a green sided extension—Hut 4, the heart of naval intelligence. A year ago the men who worked there had been reveling in their first breakthrough, the deciphering of the German Enigma code. Then came the unaccountable appearance of a strange ship in the Norwegian Sea, and it set the whole community back on its heels.

  Tovey walked past the row of white trimmed windows and entered through a plain unsigned door. He was immediately greeted by a Marine guard, who saluted crisply and led him down the narrow hall to the office of Alan Turing, who had been reading a volume of Byron’s poetry as he waited for the Admiral.

  “Good day, Doctor,” said Tovey as he walked briskly in, his hand extended. Turing set his poetry down and rose to greet him, his dark eyes alight with a smile.

  “Call me ‘Professor,’ Admiral. Everyone else does here, though I haven’t been given a formal chair as yet. The word doctor always seemed a tad sterile for me.”

  “Very good, Professor. I’ve brought you a little something more for your file boxes,” said Tovey.

  “Ah,” said Turing, “The photography!”

  “Indeed. Two reels of film here with photos, and a full report. I’ve collected the logs of all ships involved, so you’ll have a good time sorting it all through before it gets filed away with everything else on this Geronimo business.”

  “Very good, sir,” said Turing, his curiosity immediately aroused. “I wonder, Admiral. Might I persuade you to allow me to fly out to St. Helena one of these days and have a look for myself?”

  Tovey raised an eyebrow, his face suddenly serious, and seated himself, his eye falling on the open volume of Byron’s poetry. He scanned the lines, reading inwardly:

  “On the sea the boldest steer but where their ports invite;

  But there are wanderers o’er Eternity

  Whose bark drives on and on,

  and anchor’d ne’er shall be.”

  With a heavy sigh he looked at Turing, and all the unanswered questions in his mind took a seat there with him, waiting to have their say. “I’m afraid I have some rather interesting news for you, Professor,” he said quietly. “And I think it’s high time that you and I have a very frank chat.”

  “News, sir?” Turing received most information that might be considered news well before anyone else, so it was unusual, and even interesting to hear something he might not know.

  “This ship—Geronimo—well it’s vanished again.”

  “Vanished?” The word got Turing’s attention immediately, and he leaned forward, waiting to hear more.

  “Indeed, and just as the escort reached St. Helena.”

  “Are you saying it sunk, sir?”

  “No, Professor, I am saying it simply vanished—sailed into a bank of fog and disappeared. Oh, we put divers down and scoured the sea floor. There was not a trace. We had two cruisers and three search planes look in every direction, and there was no sign of this ship whatsoever. There was no visible or audible explosion, so we have ruled out accident or deliberate scuttling as well. By God, some magician pulled this rabbit out of his hat, and then just waved his hand and made it disappear again! It sounds impossible, but what else are we to conclude? The ship is gone, or at least that is what we thought….Until this came in today.”

  Tovey handed him another plain Manila envelope, much smaller than the first, a raised eyebrow betraying his obvious excitement. “Sorry to tell you that any photographic evidence related to this Geronimo business has been re-routed to Admiralty first. Admiral Pound was none too happy with the decision I made to parley with the Admiral of this rogue ship, and even less amused when it pulled this incredible disappearing act. I daresay the Prime Minister was rather teed off as well. Neither man can accept the ship has vanished without a trace. That said, I managed to keep my head on my shoulders, though if Admiralty knew what I have for you in this second envelope it the gallows might be waiting for me soon.”

  “I see,” said Turing, his own excitement rising as he opened the envelope and slipped out five badly exposed photos, clearly not proper gun camera shots, or even military formatted photos. “You must tell me about this man—the Admiral you parlayed with.”

  “In due course, Turing. First have a look at those photos. No one else in the Kingdom has seen them outside of Admiralty Headquarters. They were taken by a pair of eagle eyed coastwatchers on the Melville Island group north of Darwin three days ago.” Tovey crossed his
arms, watching Turing closely. He noted how he immediately took up a magnifying glass and stared intently at the images, moving from one to another, then back again. When he looked at Tovey it was evident that he was deeply concerned.

  “It’s Geronimo,” he said quietly. “There’s no question about it. The silhouette is unmistakable. And those other ships are Japanese cruisers.”

  “Indeed,” said Tovey. “Those photos were taken August 24th. Now Professor, might you tell me how this ship, which was a thousand yards off the Island of St. Helena on the morning of August 23rd, could suddenly vanish, and then reappear off Melville Island, a distance of 7,800 nautical miles away in a period of twenty-four hours? That is ten days sailing time at a high speed of thirty knots, and even if this ship could fly it would be hard pressed to cover that distance in the time allotted.”

  Now it was Turing’s turn to raise eyebrows, both of them. He studied the photos, his eyes moving from the images to Tovey and back again. Then he took a deep breath, and blinked, shutting his eyes tightly for a moment. When he opened them there was a quiet determination in them, and a light of fire.

  “Well, Admiral,” he began. “As you so ably point out, no ship would cover that distance in a single day. It’s quite impossible. Then again, no ship that I know of is like to up and vanish without a trace as you claim this one did. Oh, there have been hundreds of lost ships, sir, accidents, storms at sea, but as you describe it, Geronimo disappeared right under the noses of some very experienced naval personnel sent to St. Helena to keep watch on her. Yes, I heard something unusual had happened through channels…some rather dark channels, and I’ve been trying to come to grips with it for these last three days. Admiralty may sit on all the photography they want, but things have a way of getting round to the people who can do anything useful with them, as your presence here proves quite plainly.”