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

  “Ah, Mister Fedorov. I was hoping to see you soon. They tell me that a plane strafed the ship? Is this so? I hope there was not any serious damage. As you can see we have already lost enough.” He gestured grimly to the three bodies.

  “All is well—for the moment,” said Fedorov. “But what about the Admiral, doctor? The men tell me—”

  “Don’t bother with what the men are saying,” said Zolkin. “Here I was just lecturing these last two to keep their composure and stop with all these preposterous rumors. One man says this, another one says that, and the next thing you know the Titanic is sinking off our starboard bow.” He was drying his hands with a clean white towel as he spoke, and Fedorov could not help but notice the blood stains on his medical apron.

  First blood, he thought. The enemy, whoever they were this time, had finally put claws into the ship, and hurt us with an attack.

  “Then the Admiral is alive?”

  “Of course he’s alive—at least he was five minutes ago—but he’ll have one hell of a headache when he wakes up. He was struck by shrapnel when that plane came in on us. What in the world is going on, Fedorov? I thought we were clear of danger, floating around in some new nightmare of our own making. Now this! What has happened?”

  “Admiral Volsky will recover?”

  “Yes, he’s just in the next room. Leg wound and a superficial side wound, but he was apparently trying to climb the long maintenance ladder on the main tower and fell when we were fired on. What was that old man thinking by trying to climb that ladder at his age? The Admiral has been in fairly good health, but he is no spring chicken. Now he has a nasty weal on the side of his head, and probably a nice concussion for his trouble as well. But I’ve patched him up and he’ll be well enough in a few days.”

  “We lost three men?”

  “I’m afraid so. There was nothing I could do for them. They were dead before the rescue crews got them to me. Lucky for Volsky that a fire crew fetched a stretcher and got him in here safely. But what about my question. What’s going on out there?”

  “We don’t know just yet.”

  Fedorov was going to say he was as much in the dark as anyone else, but an inner voice reminded him that he needed to show more resolve now, and muster all the strength at his disposal. At that moment, the comm unit buzzed and Zolkin glanced at it over the rim of his round silver spectacles.

  “Be my guest,” he gestured as he finished drying his hands. “It’s probably for you in any case, yes? I’ll get rid of this apron and tidy up.”

  Fedorov reached for the handset and answered. It was Issak Nikolin, his radio man reporting on a signal. “It came in on the wireless bands, fairly weak but audible. Sounded like ship to ship traffic, sir. I recorded it, but it is in English. Something about an eagle.”

  “An eagle?”

  “Yes sir, but I think it’s something about a ship—they say it’s the fifth of the war now, at least I was able to hear that much. Then the signal cut loose and I lost it again.”

  Fedorov thought hard for a moment. An eagle…a ship…the fifth of the war… Then his mind suddenly joined the three odd clues and he knew like a thunderclap what it was about, and where they were!

  “Keep listening, Mister Nikolin. I’ll be on the bridge again shortly.”

  Fedorov’s mind reeled with the sudden realization that had come to him. How could he be sure? How could he get confirmation?

  “More bad news?” asked Zolkin as he tossed his soiled medical apron into a hamper. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost. Here, why don’t you sit down for a moment, Fedorov.”

  “No time, Doctor. I’ve got too much on my back just now.”

  Zolkin gave him an understanding look, and clasped him by the shoulder. “Yes, I can feel it,” he said with a wry smile. “Take your time, young Captain Lieutenant. Catch your breath and give yourself a moment. You’ve been under the spotlight all these last days in your new post, and that’s enough to unsettle most any man.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Fedorov nodded, and then lowered his voice. “I think something has slipped again. That was Nikolin with a fragment of radio traffic. I think I may know what has happened—where we are—and it gives me no cause for comfort. How soon before the Admiral might recover?”

  “Hard to say. He’ll need at least a day before I allow you to pile your load on to his belly again. I’m afraid you’ll have to carry things for a while longer. Go and see to your business on the bridge, and if you can manage to get some sleep, that would be good as well. I see we have an unaccountable day, and my night’s sleep is gone as well, but I take it to have something to do with all the other scenes in this nightmare we’ve been living these last weeks. Come back when you know more and we’ll all have a chance to sort it through—you, me and the Admiral.”

  “Probably best,” said Fedorov. “I’ll get up to the bridge then—oh yes—do you remember that book I brought with me and gave to the Admiral? The Chronology of the War at Sea?”

  “Need to do some more reading? What are you fishing out now, Fedorov?”

  “I need to check some dates and times.”

  Zolkin folded his arms, rubbing his thick beard as he thought. “Well I think the Admiral had that book in his quarters. After this Karpov business was finished it kept him up reading a good many nights.”

  “Thank you, Doctor. I’ll be off now.” He looked at the three men lying under those sheets. “What should we do about them? I suppose a burial at sea would be appropriate.”

  “I’ll handle that,” said Zolkin. “You’ve enough to worry about as things stand now. Go and find your book.”

  Fedorov tipped his hat with grim nod as he left, and Zolkin shook his head after him.

  Yes, there was a great deal on his shoulders now, thought Fedorov. More than he had ever tried to carry in his life. He wondered if it would break his back, or if his legs would give out from under him in a crucial moment that would cost them all much more than the lives of those three men.

  As he walked on down the long corridor to the ship’s officer’s quarters a fragment of a poem came to him when he thought about the men he had seen there in sick bay.

  No heroes death for those who die

  in boats where none can see.

  no wreaths, no flags, no bugle calls -

  just peace, beneath the sea…

  Part II

  The Operation

  "It will be necessary to make another attempt to run a convoy into Malta. The fate of the island is at stake, and if the effort to relieve it is worth making, it is worth making on a great scale. Strong battleship escort capable of fighting the Italian battle squadron and strong Aircraft Carrier support would seem to be required. Also at least a dozen fast supply ships, for which super-priority over all civil requirements must be given. I shall be glad to know in the course of the day what proposals can be made, as it will be right to telegraph to Lord Gort thus preventing despair in the population. He must be able to tell them: “The Navy will never abandon Malta.”

  - Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill

  Most Secret memo to the first lord of the Admiralty, the First Sea Lord, and his Chief Of Staff, Gen. H. L. "Pug" Ismay.

  Chapter 4

  Fedorov flipped through the pages of his book, intent on running down Nikolin’s clues in the history. His first thought was that the ship had rebounded in time, and had returned to the year 1941, but as he read the entries for activity in the Mediterranean, he could see nothing that mated with the cryptic message his radio man had received. He was sitting in the quiet of the Admiral’s cabin, where he had found the book there on the nightstand, just as Zolkin had advised him.

  “An eagle, a ship, the fifth of the war,” he muttered aloud. He was sure of his hunch now. HMS Eagle was the name of a British aircraft carrier operating in the Med during 1941 and 1942. She was found by a German U-boat that slipped inside her destroyer screen and the carrier was hit by four torpedoes broadside, keeling over and sinking
in a matter of minutes. There! He had the reference now, and he had slipped in a photograph of the from page of the Daily Telegraph when the story broke in England under the glaring headline: “Fifth Aircraft Carrier Lost.” He squinted at the blurry text, reading:

  “Admiralty communiqué this afternoon announced that the aircraft carrier H. M. S. Eagle has been sunk by a U-boat in the Mediterranean. A large number of the ship's company are safe. Next of kin will be informed as soon as details are received.

  H M S Eagle, 22,600 tons was commanded by Captain L. D. Mackintosh. She was begun by Armstrong Whitworth as a battleship for the Chilean Navy in 1913, but in 1917 Britain purchased her for 1,334,358 pounds and she was commissioned for trials as an aircraft carrier on April 13, 1920.

  The last British aircraft carrier to be lost was Hermes, which went down last April in sight of Ceylon, sunk by Japanese bombing. Since the outbreak of war three others have been lost. The first was Courageous, torpedoed in September, 1939. Glorious was lost in 1940 after an action with the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau off Norway, and the third was Ark Royal.”

  Eagle was the fifth carrier lost in the war, thought Fedorov. He had been correct! But oddly, when he checked the date of the article it read August 12, 1942, a full year after their last dreadful ordeal in the North Atlantic. Since then they had vanished into to some unknown future time where blackened cinders seemed to be all that remained of the world. They had cruised across the whole of the Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea, and their chronometer now read August 20. Yet checking his references it was clear that the Eagle had been sunk August 11, 1942 at 1:15PM, and that story in the Daily Telegraph had come out a day later. The dates did not match up, and he was suddenly confused.

  The attack by that plane, clearly not a modern aircraft of any sort, and the sudden change from darkest night to mid-day sunshine convinced him that they were indeed outcasts in another time again. Was Nikolin receiving a radio story about an event that happened weeks ago? Or was the event current, happening now, and a clear signpost to their present position in time? He needed more information, and he looked to his radioman eagerly for any further news.

  He stood up, feeling the urgency of the moment and nagged by the realization that he should be on the bridge. As he did so he noticed a photo of the Admiral and his wife together there on the nightstand, and the thin tracings of pen on paper. The Admiral had been writing a letter, it seemed, and Fedorov had been so intent on getting his hands on the Chronology of the War at Sea that he did not even notice it until he stood to leave. He passed a brief moment tussling with the temptation to read the letter. The clear salutation was written at the top in a firm hand, “My Darling Wife….”

  He smiled to think that if the Admiral had begun this letter earlier, when they were in the heat of action in the Denmark Strait, the woman had not even been born yet! And if he composed it in recent days it was clear that she could not have survived the devastation they had seen as they cruised from one blackened shore to another.

  He was touched by the moment, but his thoughts suddenly left him feeling very alone. Every man finds his comfort somewhere within, he realized. Even the Admiral needed someone to hear him out on the long, empty nights aboard ship, lost as they were in this impossible dilemma, so he wrote to his unseen wife. Every man held on to something—memories, places, people he had known and loved, all wrapped up in that nurturing inner place he called “home.”

  Is there any place in this world where my heart can be at ease, he wondered? He had left no sweetheart behind when he sailed. His books and his history were his only true companions—the faces and haunting echoes of men, all long dead. He knew them so well that they often seemed more real and vital to him than his shipmates, and now here he was, thrown like a teabag into this hot water of time and in their very midst! At this moment, he realized with his sharp grasp of the history, Churchill was probably sitting down with Stalin in Moscow, and ready to break the news to him that there would be no second front in the west any time soon—if this was the year and month he now suspected.

  The Eagle had been sunk on August 11, 1942. He had to be sure, and that pulsing urgency snapped his reverie and set him moving again, out the door and on his way to the bridge.

  An hour later Fedorov had the answer to the many questions circling in his mind. Nikolin had been monitoring radio traffic closely, and the bands were slowly clearing up. He got hold of snippets of new broadcasts, and segments from the BBC. One after another they began to paint the gruesome new picture that Kirov now found herself in. The German 6th Army had just crossed the Don and captured the town of Kalach as they drove for their ill-fated attack on Stalingrad. Further south Operation Edelweiss was in full swing as well, and the Russians had lost the oil fields of Maykop as they fell back on the Black Sea coastal ports in considerable disorder.

  There were other gleanings, smaller engagements that were given passing mention in the news stream. In the South Atlantic a U-boat attack sunk Norwegian SS Mirlo and all 37 crew members abandoned ship in 3 lifeboats to be picked up by the British sloop HMS Banff. Fedorov was able to hone in on the exact time and place of that attack in his research library: 2:27 PM, some 870 miles west of Freetown, Sierra Leone—the work of U-130. The night raid on Mainz by 154 RAF bombers was also reported, all events that had occurred on Aug 11, 1942. The evidence mounted to the conclusion that Kirov had slipped into the cauldron of fire once again.

  Yes, thought Fedorov, out of the frying pan of the North Atlantic and into the fire of the Med! But they had lost all the days they had sailed in that black oblivion of the future. They had never really determined what year they had been in when Volsky set the ship on a course across the Atlantic, but now they were back, just a few days after they had disappeared in that first engagement with the Royal Navy, but a full year had passed in the war while they were gone. And this time there was no easy option to turn off into the wide expanse of the Atlantic and avoid conflict. This time they had sailed right into the bottle. There were only three ways out of the Mediterranean Sea: Suez, the Bosporus, and Gibraltar, and none of the three would be easy sailing. They had been sighted and attacked in the very first seconds when they emerged in this new time frame, and Fedorov had little doubt that they would soon be facing the most difficult decisions of their lives.

  The young Executive Officer was finally convinced of the where and when of their present fate. That had been the easy part for him. He was a willing believer after all they had been through, and there was no Karpov on the bridge to oppose his speculation this time. Now he had to decide what to do about it, and more than ever he wished Admiral Volsky was sitting there in the command chair. What should he do?

  The other men on the bridge were watching him, their attention moving from their radar screens and equipment to his own fitful activity near the navigation station. They could see the furrowed brow and dark eyes as he flipped through reference books, and peered at data stored on his pad. The more they watched, the more it became evident that Fedorov was very worried about something.

  “Well Captain Lieutenant?” Rodenko finally came out with it. “What have you been digging up this last hour and a half—another bad dream?”

  “Bad dream?” Fedorov looked over at his sensor chief. “You’ve said it well enough, Rodenko. If I’m correct, and these reports Nikolin has intercepted are accurate, then we’ve a real nightmare on our hands this time, and the only question in my mind now is what to do about it.”

  “Don’t worry, Fedorov,” said Rodenko. “My systems are beginning to clear up now. I’m getting coastal returns from both Sicily and Sardinia, and I can see air contacts over those islands, though nothing is headed our way. We won’t be caught by surprise like that again, and we can blast anything we encounter out of the sea. So all you have to do is set our course. What are you worried about?”

  “Well…If the date is what I think it is, then this is August 11, 1942, and we are very close to one of the largest naval operations of the
war. What am I worried about?” Fedorov gave him a hard look, lowering his voice so the other men would not hear. “I can tell you that in one short word,” he said darkly, “survival.”

  They had argued it for a very long time when the hatbands finally gathered at the Admiralty. PQ-17 had been a disaster when twenty-four of 39 merchant ships had been sunk in the ill fated attempt to run supplies up to Murmansk. Now the Prime Minister had insisted that they do the very same thing in the Mediterranean! The Admiralty had its reservations, to be sure. They were already stretched too thin in the Atlantic, and losses of both men and material had been rather severe. The German U-Boats had been having a field day feasting on convoys and sinking far too many ships, and there never seemed to be enough cruisers and destroyers to go around.

  Now he was asking the navy to clench their fist with all of 50 warships to serve as escort for a convoy of only 14 transports to Malta! It seemed preposterous at first. The disaster on that last run to Murmansk had forced the cancellation of all convoys to Russia for the moment, and now this? Yet with his usual forceful eloquence the Prime Minister has clarified the critical importance of the island to the whole war effort then underway in the west.

  Things had not been going well for Britain that year. Rommel had landed in Africa and chased Auchinleck back to Gazala, then sent him packing again in May on a long retreat to the Nile Delta. Now the battle lines were no more than 60 miles west of Alexandria, and Tobruk sat in stubborn isolation for a time, invested by Italian troops well behind that battlefront, the sole remnant of the favorable positions the British 8th Army once commanded in North Africa. It had finally fallen on the 21st of June, leaving nothing for the British to do in their desert war but lick their wounds near El Alamein and ferry fighters to Malta’s embattled garrison. The tide of Axis victory threatened to sweep their entire position away, and Malta was now the last, solitary rock in the stream.