Kirov II: Cauldron Of Fire (Kirov Series) Read online

  “I want to have a look at Rome before we turn and head back out into the Atlantic,” said Volsky. “I thought we might transit the Aegean and head for Sevastopol, but I see no point in that now. If there is still anything living on this earth it will likely be in the southern latitudes. We’ll skirt the Italian coast, then head west again through the Tyrrhenian Sea. After that, who knows.”

  “That island, Admiral?” Karpov managed a wan smile.

  “That island.”

  Volsky stood and went to the door, looking over his shoulder as he went with one last word. “I’ll have the guard escort you back to the brig now. It’s best that the men see the consequences of what you have done, and it’s also best if you bear it like a man. In due course I’ll have you transferred to your quarters, and from there I suppose the rest is up to you.”

  Before he left he poured his Captain one last shot of Vodka. Then he tipped his hat lightly and reached for the door.

  “Admiral….”

  Volsky looked over his shoulder again.

  “I was wrong… I… I made a stupid mistake.”

  Volsky nodded gravely. It was probably as close as Karpov could come at the moment to a genuine realization of his wrongdoing, and an apology, but the Admiral said nothing more.

  Chapter 2

  Now the Admiral was on the aft quarter, walking with memories of his discussion with Karpov and the still heavy sense of guilt he harbored for not seeing things more clearly.

  I should have seen it coming, he thought. Karpov was too wound up, too argumentative and combative—and too hungry for advancement. At the time I was preoccupied with trying to get my mind around the insanity of our situation, but I should have seen what he was planning, what he would do if given the chance. Too late now, he concluded. The man may recover himself and prove to be of some use in the days ahead. But for now he’s better off in the brig where he can come to that conclusion himself.

  He walked with little enthusiasm this night. They had scouted down the north Italian coast and come at last to the fabled city on seven hills—Rome. There he gazed on Esquiline, the largest of the seven, where the Emperor Nero had built his 'golden house,' at one end, with the other end blighted by the charnel pits where criminals would be buried or their carcasses left for the birds. It was a fitting metaphor for the human endeavor, he thought grimly, that the same hill should be put to these disparate uses. Once the Gardens of Maecenas bloomed there to hide the remains of the dead, but no longer. He had resisted the urge to put men ashore, unwilling to hear the reports or view the evidence they would bring back to him. It was all gone, he knew, the city, the architecture, the amphitheaters, the cathedrals, paintings, statues, the Vatican and the long history behind it all, not the mention the lives of so many who lived there.

  With a heavy heart he had given the order to move on, down past Naples, which was equally devastated, and then he gave up and simply turned the ship west. Kirov was now cruising roughly two hundred miles southwest of Naples in the Tyrrhenian Sea as Volsky walked, and that vague sense of disquiet became something more in the back of his mind. He stopped by the edge of the deck, holding on to a gunwale, strangely alert, his ears straining to hear something in the distance. Then he felt it, an odd vibration in the ship beneath his feet and, without really thinking, he was moving toward a nearby bulkhead to look for a call phone up to the bridge.

  Volsky opened the latched door and picked up the handset, thumbing the comm-link button for the citadel above. “Admiral Volsky to bridge.”

  The voice of Anton Fedorov, his acting Executive Officer was quick to return. “Aye, sir. Fedorov here.”

  “Any developments I should be aware of?”

  “Strange that you should call, sir. We just got a message from Dobrynin in Engineering. It seems the reactors are acting up again.”

  “Acting up?”

  “That same odd vibration, sir.”

  “Yes, I felt it myself here on the aft deck.”

  “I’m holding at twenty knots unless you advise otherwise, sir.”

  “Hold speed for the moment, unless Dobrynin requests slower rotations on the turbines. You might call him and ask if that might help the situation. Anything more, Captain?” He had promoted his young Lieutenant to Captain Lieutenant and Starpom after the Karpov incident, not two weeks past, and the young man was working into the position with real energy now, gaining experience and competence, and more confident in his abilities with each day.

  “Well, sir…” Fedorov hesitated slightly, then went on. “Signals are showing some interference as well. Both Rodenko and Tasarov have picked up on low level background noise. They…well they look worried about it, sir. Perhaps you should come to the bridge, Admiral.”

  “Very well,” said Volsky. “Keep monitoring the situation, Captain, I’m on my way.”

  Volsky hung up the receiver, latched the call box door shut and turned forward, heading for the nearest stairway up. He walked past the life boats, glad they had no occasion to use them in spite of the ordeal they had been through these last weeks. Reaching the center of the ship he now had several levels to climb, and thought again how nice it would be to have elevators put in to relieve his thick but tired old legs of the burden of carrying his considerable weight. He was up his second flight on the upper aft deck near the outer hatch when he perceived what looked like an odd discoloration on the sea around them. He stopped, sensing something very wrong, and feeling again the same thrumming vibration that seemed to emanate from the bowels of the ship.

  His mind raced over the last reports he had taken in before he left the bridge. Weather outlook was good, with no fronts or impending squalls, and calm seas. Yet the night seemed to thin out around him and he perceived a light glow all around the ship that seemed oddly out of place. It should be pitch black at this hour.

  As he gazed at the sea, the peculiar discoloration grew more intense, an odd milky green, and he was stricken with the fear that something was again terribly wrong. Rather than navigating his way through the labyrinthine inner passages of the ship, he decided to climb the long vertical ladder on the main tower, and enter through the first maintenance entrance, coming to the citadel through the upper side hatch on the command deck. As he started to climb, another odd sound came to him, breaking the long silence of calm sea and sky they had been sailing in. He stopped, as if frozen in place, his senses keenly alert as he listened, eyes instinctively searching the rapidly lightening skies beneath his heavy brows. What was happening? The sound filled him with both excitement and dread, for he immediately knew what he was listening to—the drone of a low flying aircraft!

  Who was out there? By God, something survived this hell of a war after all! But who? And what was bearing down on them now in the grey skies above. Grey skies? Where has the night gone? He looked out to the horizon, astounded to see it brightening with each passing second. It was just past one in the morning when he rose from his bunk to clear his mind and take this walk on the aft deck. Could he have idled here for four hours? It seemed like minutes to him. Then all these questions suddenly coalesced into a dark shape in the sky, bearing down on the ship from the aft quarter. He reached for the next rung on the ladder, breath coming fast now, and his heart racing more with anxiety than anything else. Every instinct in his body screamed danger, and the adrenaline rushed through his system, giving him renewed strength to climb.

  What now, he thought, his mind racing ahead of him to the bridge. Did Fedorov see it? Would he know what to do? Thankfully, the sound of a warning claxon signaling battle stations was a relief.

  The drone of the engines was very loud now, so much so that Volsky stopped and craned his next to look behind and above where the ominous winged shadow loomed in the glowering sky. Then it suddenly seemed to come alive with white fire, and he could clearly see the hot streak of tracer rounds coming towards the ship, followed at once by the harsh rattle of what sounded like heavy caliber machine guns. They were under attack!

 
; August 11, 1942 – Tyrrhenian Sea East of Sardinia

  Flight Officer George-Melville-Jackson was up in his twin engine Bristol Beaufighter VIC for a reconnaissance run. Assigned to the newly arrived 248 Squadron, he had landed on Malta the previous day from Gibraltar where the squadron had been flying missions for Coastal Command. Now the flight of six Beaufighters was to support the crucial effort at hand as Britain struggled to push yet another convoy through the dangerous waters of the Mediterranean to send much needed supplies of food, munitions and most importantly, oil to the beleaguered island outpost.

  He had flown northwest over the dangerous waters of the Sicilian Narrows, and then turned north towards the Tyrrhenian Sea until he reached a position about 300 nautical miles out where he made a graceful turn as he began to scour the sea for signs of enemy shipping. With the convoy due in just a few days time, it was imperative that the fighters and bombers on Malta keep the seas clear of heavy enemy units, and Melville-Jackson did not have to wait long before he made his first contact. Squinting through his forward windshield, his eye was pulled to a strange glow on the sea below. He nudged the stick and eased his plane down a few degrees for a better look .

  “What’s this, Lizzy?” he said aloud, invoking the name of his sweetheart and wife back home. “What have we got here?”

  He spoke into his face mask, somewhat annoyed that he had not been advised of the contact sooner. “Sleeping are you, Tommy? What’s that down there at three o-clock? Not much good having these new radars in the nose if you’re not going to use them, eh?” He squinted at the strange glow below them, as if the water was upwelling from bottom and churning the surface of a quarter mile swath of the sea. There he could now vaguely discern a dark shadow in the center of the disturbance. Was it a submarine coming up from below? Impossible. This was much too big for a U-Boat.

  Designed as a night fighter, his Beaufighter was also equipped with Britain’s latest airborne intercept radar set in its nose, the Mark VIII unit with one of the newest concentric screens, and he wanted to know if it had the contact as well on this initial dry run. All the other Beaus had the older AI Mark IV radars, and the Germans had found its bandwidth and were doing a good job of jamming it in recent weeks. It was hoped his new set would solve the problem.

  “Not a whisper of anything on my screen the whole way out,” said Thomason on radar, “but right you are now… reading something at five miles—very odd though.”

  “It looks big! I suppose we had best get down and have a look.”

  Melville-Jackson put the plane into a fast descent, racing down through the pre-dawn sky with his two powerful supercharged radial engines roaring as he went. His navigator and radar man snapped alert now in the rear cupola when the plane went into action.

  As he dove on the contact Jackson tightened his jaw, lips pursed beneath his sandy mustache, expecting the skies to light up with flak at any moment, but none came. A moment later the shadow on the sea took on the ominous shape of a warship, its superstructure and battlements now quite evident as he closed the distance.

  “What, have we caught the Macaronis flat footed this time?” He smiled, sure he had come upon a big Italian cruiser positioning itself to lay in wait for the convoy. “Let’s announce ourselves, Tommy,” he shouted through the headset.

  The Beaufighter was one of the most powerful long range fighters in the RAF inventory. It’s bomb bays on the lower fuselage had been removed to mount four 20mm cannon there, and this was augmented by six Browning .303 machineguns in the wings, more firepower than any smaller fighter, and even more than many heavier bombers might muster.

  As the plane descended he could see no markings or service flags, but he was certain from flight briefings that there would be no friendly ships in these waters if he encountered anything. On another day he might have made one high altitude flyby for an IFF run before he made a strafing attack, but not today, not with hostilities impending and the noose tightening on the island fortress as never before. Rommel had pushed damn near all the way to the Nile and Jerry was keen on smashing what was left of resistance on Malta so they could get him the supplies he needed for one last big push. If this new General Montgomery was to have any chance of stopping him short of Alexandria, they would have to make sure the sea lanes remained a hostile environment for Axis supply ships. Malta was the key to that effort—Malta and men like Melville-Jackson in his Bristol Beau. He tightened his finger on the gun triggers as he aimed the plane at the ship below, amazed to see a pulsing light surround the shadow on the sea.

  “Get a message off,” he called back to his navigator. “Sighted one hell of a big cruiser, these coordinates. Saying hello before we return home.” He was in no hurry to get back to Takali airfield on Malta, but switched on his gun cameras as he dove, mindful that intelligence would want more than his word on the sighting. Pity we didn’t have a torpedo at hand for a moment like this, he thought. Perhaps another time.

  Then he fired, and the powerful 20mm cannons snarled in anger, joined by the fitful chatter of his Browning .303s. The guns sent a hail of iron at the center of the ship, raking the sea in a wild rain of fire and water and smashing into the superstructure in a storm of fire and smoke.

  Volsky heard the guns firing, then the terrible howl of the plane’s engines as it flashed by overhead. The sea was awash with spray where the leading rounds fell short, but they raked across the center of the ship, shuddering into her superstructure and sending a scatter of flayed aluminum shrapnel and hot white sparks flying in all directions as the heavy rounds slammed into Kirov with deadly effect. Admiral Volsky felt a searing hot pain as something struck his side and leg, and he was flung from his perch on the ladder, falling all of eight feet with a hard thud as his head struck a hand rail below. He was lucky he had not climbed higher, as the fall itself could have killed him. As it was, he lay unconscious and bleeding from shrapnel wounds on the deck below, and did not hear the shrill panic that wailed through the ship as heavy booted men were running in all directions, shouting and donning life preservers and helmets as they manned their battle stations.

  On the bridge, acting Starpom, Anton Fedorov heard the awful drone of the plane as it dove to attack, hastening to the port viewport in a state of surprise and shock. Rodenko had been complaining of a strange interference on his sensor screens—Tasarov as well, but they had seen and heard nothing until the distant sound of an aircraft emerged from the thick cottony silence of the night, strangely attenuated, now loud and threatening, and then hollow and forlorn. The air seemed suddenly charged with heavy static, and a throbbing pulsation seemed to quaver all around them. Fedorov took in the scene outside the ship with wild surmise. The sea was aglow with undulating light, and the skies were brightening with an impossible luminescence. He glanced quickly at his chronometer and read the time. It was 1:37 in the morning, and the night had been clear and dark just a few moments ago, the new moon not yet risen. What was happening?

  Then the sound of the aircraft seemed an angry roar, and Fedorov’s better instincts for survival prompted him to wheel about. “Sound alarm,” he shouted. “Battle Stations!”

  A split second later the night sky seemed to erupt with light and fire, something came flashing down from above in terrible rage, and white hot shafts of light seemed to pass in through the view panes and bulkheads, like lasers, vanishing into the guts of the ship. The sound that followed was clear and unmistakable, a rattling grind of metal on metal. It was as if the light had suddenly found shape and form, and become a liquid fire, then hard iron as it finally bit into the ship.

  They felt heavy rounds shudder against the armored citadel and sheer through the lattice of more delicate antenna domes above them. Then the deep growl of the plane’s engines diminished, fading off the starboard side of the ship. Fedorov turned and saw everyone on the bridge staring at him, some with expressions of shock and others with fear and amazement. His mind was racing as he struggled to make sense of what he had just experienced.
/>   “Did you see that?” Tasarov was pointing to the spot where the searing light had lanced through the bridge and vanished into the deck plates, but there was no sign of damage there at all.

  Fedorov could not answer him. He knew he had to do something, take military action to secure the safety of the ship, but what should he do? He was trained as a navigator. He had never gone to combat schools, though his instincts were good and his judgment usually sound, he had no real reflex for battle at sea. He removed his cap for a moment, running the sleeve of his jacket over his brow where a cold sweat had settled. They were all waiting, watching him now, and he struggled to remember how Admiral Volsky would act in a similar situation, and how Karpov would maneuver the ship in the heat of an engagement.

  “Rodenko,” he said haltingly. “Look to your screen. Are we tracking that aircraft?”

  “There was nothing on my readout earlier, sir, but yes, I can see him now, just barely. The signal is very weak and I still have a lot of clutter, but he’s moving off to the south—fading in and out. I don’t think he’s coming around again.”

  “Tasarov—anything?” Fedorov wanted to know what was happening beneath them as well. The first rule, he remembered, was to assess their immediate situation and get as clear a picture as possible of the battle space around them. He had seen Karpov do this on exercise many times, and so he did the same, checking the ship’s eyes and ears, and letting the unanswerable questions go for the moment.

  Tasarov fitted his headset more snuggly, closing his eyes. Then he blinked and checked his sensor screens as well. “Nothing sir,” he said. “The sea is calm. I have no transients—but I have no range either. Something is wrong, sir.”

  “Helm, come around. Fifteen degrees to port.”

  “Port fifteen, sir and coming about on a heading of 210.”