Knight's Move (Kirov Series Book 21)

by John Schettler

  Falkenrath did not quite know what to make of their recent find. A ship adrift like that was very strange, still underway, so eerily quiet and empty, and yet with such valuable cargo in her holds. It was a mystery he would never have time to solve, a ghost ship, an inexplicable derelict at sea. And what had happened to Kaiser Wilhelm during that brief, violent encounter? He had not seen the enemy ahead, but he heard those 15-inch guns well enough, until their resounding boom seemed to echo and quaver, strangely distended, as though coming from a faraway place.

  It was then that the strange milky green tendrils in the sky seemed to lick the sea ahead, and a roll of heavy mist came between the Goeben and Kaiser Wilhelm. The watch called out that they had lost their fix on the other ship and, as a precaution, Falkenrath reduced speed to one third. It was more than an hour before he sighted the other ship, and in all that time there had not been the slightest inkling of any enemy in the vicinity that would have prompted Kaiser Wilhelm to fire those guns. It left Falkenrath with a creepy feeling, and there was a sinister edge on the cold air, a warning in the oddly luminescent skies above. Ghost ship… That was how it all felt, but that thing they had brought aboard was certainly real enough, a great white shark’s tooth secreted away on the hanger deck.

  They had steamed out with Kormoran, before the faster German warships sped on ahead. Now the strange prize ship would be Detmers’ charge, and he wondered if he would ever get it safely back to a friendly port. They had a very long way to go, and much of it would simply be the open, empty sea. This time they would skirt well away from the small British base at Saint Helena, and Georgetown on Ascension Island. There would be no spiteful bombing run as before. Instead, they sailed at least 150 miles west of Ascension, entering the narrowest part of the Atlantic, still a vast 1700 mile sea between Brazil and Sierra Leon. Over 6000 nautical miles and ten days later at 18 knots, they planned to link up with Ermland again to refuel.

  That was when the difficulties began. It had been nearly a month since they last rendezvoused with the ship, though they had taken on fuel and fresh water at that distant French outpost of Kergulen. The round trip ticket would log nearly 14,000 nautical miles, and they could not have made it back this far without that fuel. Now the stocks were again running low, but at the designated coordinates, at 16:00 hours as required, there was no sign of the oiler. The weather had been too thick to fly off planes, but Falkenrath sent down a message to get two fighters ready for operations in any case.

  Marco Ritter would normally be the first man up to go, but the Kapitan had scheduled a meeting with him, so Eulers was assigned in his place. They waited, seeing the lowering cloud deck lift enough to have a chance at spotting anything. Then Falkenrath ordered the planes up. Otto Klein was going to join Eulers, but when they tried to turn over his plane’s engine, it would not start.

  “I told that damn mechanic the engine sounded odd last time I was up,” said Klein. “Wait for me. I’ll have them bring up another plane.”

  “Why bother? Look at the weather. I won’t see anything in this. Go have some coffee. I’ll be back before you know it.”

  Kline made a quick call to Ritter, and permission was granted for Eulers to fly alone. He was off the deck at 16:40, with little more than an hour before the sun would set at about 18:00 at this latitude. Climbing above the cloud deck, he circled briefly, looking for any break in the weather. There he saw the moon was already well up, a full evening crescent that would sail above the grey clouds until it set near midnight. It was one of those soulful, empty moments, just Eulers, his plane and that moon, and it seemed nothing else was living in any direction for a thousand miles.

  Until the missile came….

  * * *

  “Contact!” said the Radar Watch, “Single aircraft. Range 120 Kilometers, 3000 meters and climbing slowly. Bearing 185 Degrees, speed 380 KPH.”

  Captain MacRae folded his arms, thinking. The British had an airfield at Sao Filipe on Fogo Island, and a seaplane base at Brava. Might this be a plane out of one of those bases?

  “Contact range to nearest British base in the Cape Verde Islands?” He asked the most obvious question to solve this riddle.

  “Sir, that would be Brava Island, at approximately 930 kilometers north by northwest.”

  “Mack?”

  “Aye sir.”

  “Twitch your fingers and dial up someone in the Azores on the secure line. Ask them if they might have anything out that far.”

  Morgan would soon learn that the seaplane base at Brava was only flying three Supermarine Walrus, flown off there by Barham before she went down at Dakar. A little research indicated that plane had a maximum range of 965 kilometers, so unless it planned on landing in the middle of the sea, it could not be out from Brava.

  “But I’m told there’s a squadron of Bristol Beaufighters on Santiago Island at Praia Field. That would be a little more than 1000 klicks out, and the Beaufighter could be out that far. The plane has a range of 2800 kilometers.”

  “Well? Is it out that far? Do they have one up?”

  “No sir. This weather has them all socked in. That’s where the main front is now, right over the islands.”

  “Then who’s our guest down south?” MacRae scratched his chin, felt the stubble there. It had been a long night after that story Elena had told him, and he had not shaved before coming to the bridge. “Any other convoys down there that might have a cruiser in escort with seaplanes?”

  “No sir,” said Morgan. “I’ve had my people interfacing with the Royal Navy. We’ve got all their planned convoy moves charted. And there’s nothing up from Formidable either. We’d know about that.”

  “Alright then… Contact presumed hostile until otherwise determined as friendly. Where’s it going Mister Hawes?”

  “Just circling, sir.”

  “That obviously came off a ship,” said Morgan.

  “Aye, only what ship?” MacRae folded his arms. “You’re certain the British have nothing down there?”

  “Norfolk and Suffolk just left Freetown two hours ago. They’re coming up to meet us at Point Bravo as planned.”

  MacRae nodded. “Looks like trouble. Ships out that far will be looking to steer clear of British air search assets in the Cape Verde Islands.”

  “All convoy traffic goes right through those islands now,” said Morgan. “My bet is that we’ve found that German raiding group. They’ve a small aircraft carrier, or so we were briefed.”

  “Mister Dean,” said MacRae with the hard edge of a decision in his voice.

  “Sir?”

  “Send to the helo deck. I want an X-3 up, air-to-air missile loadout. Have them get out to the location of this contact and have a look.”

  “Aye sir.”

  Chapter 33

  Eulers never saw what fired at him. The cloud cover remained thick, and he was having difficulty locating the Goeben again until he dropped down very low, his eye cautiously on his altimeter as he did so. The X3 was behind him, tracking by both radar and infrared, and fast enough to stay on the fighter’s tail as long as it did not go full throttle. In this case, Eulers was cruising at about 400Kph, which was well under the maximum speed of the X3 at 475Kph. Lieutenant Ryan was flying that mission, and he clearly saw what the plane was looking for, two large contacts on the sea. One quick image on his long range camera was sufficient, and then he rose up into the grey cloud deck.

  Minutes later he had orders to fire, and that would end Eulers’ low level flight home with a streak and roar. The X3 was carrying a slightly modified variant of the Mistral M2, manufactured by the European weapons company MBDA. It was a close in air-to-air killer, ranging no more than 6 kilometers, but enough to do the job. The French and Dutch both used them on their own helicopters, and they often saw service on the Eurocopter Tiger.

  On the Goeben, the watchman had just spotted a grey speck below the clouds, and had seen enough of them to know it was the 109 heading home. Then there was a thin white streak emerging from t
he clouds above, zipping in so fast that it looked like a bolt of frozen lightning. The explosion dropped his jaw, and he immediately sounded the alarm.

  Kapitan Falkenrath was on the bridge when they heard the dull crump of an explosion. The watchman’s exclamation was pointed enough. “Rocket!” he shouted. “That was Eulers’ plane!”

  The Kapitan rushed out onto the weather deck, field glasses in hand, and was soon squinting at the remnant of what was once his fighter aircraft. The thin streak in the sky was still visible.

  “Radar!” he shouted back to the bridge.

  “Nothing sir. We have no contacts!”

  Nor would they have any contacts as long as that X3 was up there. The helo had a wide spectrum jammer operating that was going to blind the rudimentary radar sets of that day. Marco Ritter had just finished his meeting with the Kapitan, and had been half way to the flight deck when it happened. He turned and ran back up to the bridge, catching Falkenrath as he entered from the side hatch.

  “Do you want me to take the rest of the squadron up?” he asked,

  Falkenrath rubbed his chin, his brow furrowed, then shook his head. “No,” he said. “You saw what happened. It was a rocket attack. Something is out there…”

  “A plane?”

  “That looks to be the case. Eulers’ plane was killed from above. Look, you can still see the contrail of the missile.”

  “Then all the more reason to get up after them,” said Ritter.

  “What could you see in that cloud cover? The sun will be down in another twenty minutes. Besides, if I am correct, and that rocket was fired by a plane, then we have another problem. We are too far out to sea for it to have come from any British base, and that means they must have an aircraft carrier out here. Now I am new at this game, Ritter, but I know enough to realize we are in grave jeopardy here. They know where we are, but the inverse is not true. And if they can put those damn rockets on aircraft…”

  Ritter nodded. “What do you suggest we do?”

  “I will notify Kapitan Heinrich. My best advice would be to split the task force. If they do have a carrier out here, then we could face an air attack, but not tonight. That plane of theirs must have been out on search patrol. They just got lucky. Now they will have to return to their carrier, but there will be no light for a strike tonight. Not in this weather.”

  “Right,” said Ritter. “Even Eulers was having trouble finding us, God rest his soul, and he knew exactly where we were. That was lucky how they stumbled upon us.”

  “Or perhaps they found us with radar,” said Falkenrath. “Our own sets went down twenty minutes before this attack. I believe we were seen by an enemy plane on radar, and jammed. The ship will come to battle stations as a precaution. Get to the hanger deck and ready your planes for operations in the morning, and just hope we don’t see a naval rocket low on the sea any time soon. Don’t forget what happened to Graf Zeppelin. Kaiser Wilhelm has a decent armor belt, but we don’t have the metal to stop such an attack. I’m going to suggest we break off to an alternate heading immediately.”

  * * *

  “It seems we’ve found our bandits,” said MacRae.

  “Those ten Harpoons are in the silos and configured for operations sir,” said Dean. The bright young XO was standing near the wide row of forward windows, watching the slate cloud deck stretching all the way to the horizon. It would be dark soon, making visibility even more difficult.

  “What version did we get?” asked MacRae, looking at Mack Morgan at his side.

  “RGM-84, the so called ‘Next Generation.’ It’ll range out 240 kilometers.”

  “How big is the warhead?”

  “140 kilograms, 300 pounds, and it’s an H.E. warhead, not a penetrator. Damn thing used to have a 221Kg warhead, but they slimmed it down for this latest version to improve the range.”

  “That’s a problem,” said MacRae. “We don’t know how much armor those ships are packing out there. Our GB-7s had a 200Kg warhead, and they served for mixed results against these armored behemoths. This missile is a sea skimmer, is it not?”

  “Correct. It’s likely going to slam right into the belt armor of the target, and that will end up looking like we just threw a bottle of champagne at them.”

  “Well, the Russians didn’t seem to have any problems.” MacRae folded his arms.

  “They were throwing around warheads three times the size of that Harpoon, on missiles weighing well over a thousand pounds, and traveling at Mach 3. Even then, that Russian Captain told me they had trouble with the armor on these battleships. So they re-programmed their missiles for a plunging angle of attack. That deck armor was a little easier to punch through when you throw something at it that heavy, moving that fast.”

  “You spoke with this Captain?”

  “Fedorov. Aye, I picked his brain a bit when we were at Alexandria. We discussed tactics before that donnybrook we fought in the Med. He was fairly blunt in giving his advice—said we’d have trouble hurting these old WWII ships, and that’s been the case.”

  “Well, didn’t we slap the Hindenburg about the head and shoulders with our deck guns?”

  “Aye, it was likely some annoyance, but you didn’t really hurt that ship, not with those deck guns, nor any of the missiles we hit the damn thing with. No sir, these missiles were designed to hit unarmored modern ships, and cause their damage with blast fragmentation. This Fedorov told me that the real threat from those big Russian missiles of theirs was the fuel reserve when it hit. In effect, he said they were throwing Mach 3 fire bombs at the enemy, and the fire that fuel started was the real ship killer. You want to sink these ships, he tells me, then you’d better have good torpedoes.”

  “We’ve none we can fire from the ship,” said MacRae with a shrug. “Argos Fire was designed as a air defense and general fleet security picket. We never really anticipated going head to head with other major surface warfare combatants. This ship was built to shoot down air threats, and take on lighter frigates and fast attack boats—not bloody battleships.”

  “We’ve got two Sting Rays for each of the X3s,” said Morgan. “But then again, that’s a light weight torpedo designed to attack subs. We can skewer a U-boat, but the damn thing has no more than a 45Kg warhead. It won’t bother the anti-torpedo bulwarks on these old WWII ships. They were designed to resist torpedoes of this era, with warheads in the 300 to 400Kg range.”

  “We’ll have to save the Sting Rays for the U-Boat threat,” said MacRae.

  Morgan scratched his heavy beard. “Gordie,” he said, his voice lowered. “Remember what you told me earlier. This isn’t really our fight. We’ve done our best for them in finding those brigands. There’s an aircraft carrier behind us, and we can clear the skies for their torpedo planes with our SAM defense. That German scout carrier out there can’t have but ten or twelve planes aboard. They’ve one less now, and we’ll see anything else they launch easily enough. Beyond that, the British have a light cruiser and three destroyers in escort here, and then there’s those two heavy cruisers coming out to meet us from Freetown.”

  MacRae shrugged. “I know what I said, Mack, but when it comes down to the thick of things, and the Germans start pushing on shoulders out here, I’m one to be up and pushing back. That said, I think we’ll do as you say. I’ll have Mister Dean transmit the coordinates of the enemy position to the British. They’ve an Admiral out there aboard Formidable, and it’ll be his call. Let’s see what they can do, and we’ll play goalie this time. The least we can do, is keep watch on this convoy for them while they’re out for the hunt. With our sonar, they’ve no U-boat threat, at least as long as we still have those Sting Rays.”

  “Aye,” said Morgan with a wink. “The next six U-boats that bother us will rue the day. After that, it’s anybody’s game again. We’ll hear them coming, but we won’t be able to do anything more than wave at them as they fire their torpedoes.”

  “It’s not all that grim,” said MacRae. “I got the inventory from that fleet
replenishment ship. They had a dozen Sting Rays in crates for those Merlin helicopters. Perhaps we could sweet talk them out of a few.”

  * * *

  Kapitan Heinrich thought about the situation for some time. A rocket from the sky. Yes, he clearly saw the contrail himself. The British had found a way to mount their new American weapons on aircraft, and look what happened to Eulers. Now we’ve lost a damn good pilot, an a plane along with him. Will the British also have planes that can strike our ships like that? Falkenrath wants to break off, but we’ve already taken their ship launched missiles, and shrugged them off easily enough. It was the shells off the British battleships that hurt Bismarck and Hindenburg. Their rockets were an annoyance this time—much lighter in impact than those we faced earlier in the Med. This tells me they must have several prototypes in development.

  But what to do here? We’ve clearly been spotted. They’ve jammed our radar, and if they’re using equipment like the things we found on that prize ship, then they might even be tracking us with their own radar sets. So I must assume they know where we are. The only question I have is where is Ermland? If they spotted us out here, perhaps they found Ermland as well—or even sunk her. That will put us in a very serious situation. We’ve come a long way north, largely undetected until now, and we need fuel. I could probably reach Casablanca, but not if I have to churn up the sea at high speed in a fight here.

  How close are they? That plane was most likely off an aircraft carrier. Their Fulmars and Albacores have a maximum range of no more than 800 miles, which means they have a useful radius of perhaps 300 miles. Yet for all I know they could be right over my horizon. How can they fly in this weather? Clearly they did, and if I want to try and spot them with aircraft off the Goeben, then we will need the clearing skies to the west. But not tonight… There’s no light left for air operations, so we must turn as Falkenrath advises to avoid a possible surface engagement. Yet that takes us deeper into the Atlantic, farther from Casablanca….