In Karpov’s mind the equation was simpler. One side or another must give way, and it would not be Kirov. He looked at Fedorov, saw him waiting, an anguished look on his face, and then said. “I believe we are under attack, Mister Fedorov. We’ve had our dance with Varenka and your Operation Gauntlet has now begun. Let’s see what they have for us after the ball.”
Fedorov caught the reference to the famous short story by Tolstoy where a man had been bemused at a ball by the beauty and charm of a lovely woman named Varenka. Later that evening he walked alone and stumbled upon a military discipline where an escaped Tartar was being forced to run the gauntlet, and the punishment was being administered by Varenka’s father, a colonel in the army. It was cruel, and merciless as the soldiers were ordered to beat the man ever harder, and it shook his faith in human compassion so completely that he lost his ardor for the man’s daughter. He claimed this chance encounter had changed his life forever, and something died in him with each withering blow on the poor renegade’s shoulders and back.
Now Kirov was the renegade, a fugitive Tartar about to run the gauntlet of fire and steel. For the next hour the ship would be in the gravest danger, well within range of those lethal 16 inch guns. A chance encounter, a planned encounter, it mattered not which. In the end it was a madness at sea that would change the lives of every man present forever.
“Mister Fedorov?” Karpov prodded him again.
“That was just a warning shot,” he said quietly.
“Yes, well it would be nice to reply in kind, but I don’t think we can afford to waste the ammunition. I suggest we lock weapon systems on the target and give them a more direct warning. We have fourteen Moskit IIs remaining. Six should do the job.”
“These are not the Italians,” said Fedorov, deflated but coming round to the realization that this was a choice he had made hours and hours ago. Now the time was here, and they had to fight. He turned to Karpov and gave an order. “I want to put one P-900 on each of the two battleships immediately following their next salvo.”
“P-900s? They are very slow.”
“Yes, but I want them to see the missiles coming. See them clearly.” He had asked for the sub-sonic cruise missiles instead of the more lethal supersonic Moskit Sunburns. The P-900s were slow, but still dangerous with a 400 kilogram warhead and pinpoint accuracy.
“Very well—Mister Samsonov, ready on the P-900 system, two missiles, target your primaries.”
Samsonov could clearly read the positions of the two big battleships on his display. He moved a light pen, tapped each one, then selected his weapon system and keyed “ready.”
“Sir, two P-900 missiles keyed to targets and ready.”
They waited in the stillness. The satin of the moonless night seemed to flow in all around them, enveloping them with a suspended sense of profound uncertainty. Their faces were illuminated by the green luminescence of the radar screens, eyes searching the black silky night, as if they thought some horrible beast, a sleek panther, might leap upon them from the darkness at any moment. Then the distant horizon seemed to explode with fire and violence. Seconds later they heard a loud boom, thunder-like in the distance.
Nelson and Rodney had fired in earnest.
Fedorov shrugged, then looked at Karpov, a grim expression on his face. “Give them a little shove on the shoulder, Captain.”
“Aye, sir.”
Chapter 29
Syfret had never seen anything quite like it. The darkness lit up with distant flame and smoke, far off on the edge of the night. He could see something bright in the sky, arcing up, and then he heard a low, distant growl.
“What do you make of that?” he said to a Senior Lieutenant, pointing at the fiery light, which grew more prominent, and closer with each passing second. The slow approach had exactly the effect Fedorov wanted. Every man on the bridge seemed transfixed by the oncoming glow. They had seen burning planes plummeting into the sea at night, but this was nothing like that. It had a slow, purposeful movement, rising up and up, then leveling off to begin a gradual descent. Down it came, a bright burning tail behind it illuminating a trail of ghostly smoke. It was a plane, some thought—poor bloke going into the drink at last. Probably one of our search planes that got in too close.
But it wasn’t a plane…It wasn’t a plane! It suddenly seemed to leap at them with a mighty roar, a fiery dart aimed right at the heart of the ship. The P-900s had ignited their ramjet afterburners to make their final run into the target at mach three, but by that time every crewman with eyes out to sea had been transfixed by the spectacle.
In they came and Syfret to one step back, his hand reaching for a rail to steady himself as the fire in the sky came thundering in and crashed right below the tall armored conning tower of his ship. The concussion of the explosion shattered every window on the bridge, sending glass showering over the deck, but it had not struck high enough to cause any real damage there. Instead it came in low and rifled into the number three C turret where it had exploded with terrible flame and smoke.
It was all the Admiral could do to remain standing. Two midshipman were thrown to the deck. Black smoke poured in and choked every man among them and Syfret instinctively crouched on his haunches, as much to steady himself as to find better air.
“Mother of God!” he coughed. They hit us on the first bloody shot! But with what? Then all the rumors, and sailor’s stories he had quashed as nonsense for the past year came home to him—rockets, lighting fast, with deadly precision. Rockets fired by a dark, dangerous ship that slipped through the night like a phantom.
It was here! This was nothing the French could have imagined or ever put to sea. Strasbourg had 13 inch guns, but this was something else entirely—no ripple of bright enemy fire in the distance; no sign of water splashed as her rounds came in. It was here! This was the ship Fraser had warned him of—the ship that put Repulse in her grave and blotted the side armor of both King George V and Prince of Wales. And now it had stuck its fist in his face and drawn first blood.
His amazement suddenly gave way to a new emotion. Nelson had been a proud but plodding ship in her years of service. She had foolishly run aground on Hamilton's Shoal in 1934, watched fast German cruisers and destroyers dance around her in the North Sea, ever beyond her grasp. She was nearly sunk by three German torpedoes near the Orkney’s, but miraculously spared when all three failed to explode, then she blundered in to a mine off Loch Ewe. Most recently she had been laid up by an Italian torpedo, returning to service only in May of that very year. In all these actions her one great liability had been her ponderously slow speed and sluggish maneuverability. But never had any ship dared to put hands on her as this one just had.
Syfret stood up, no longer amazed, but angry now. He was standing in the heavily armored conning tower, with steel plate over a foot thick on every side, one of the most heavily protected citadels on any ship in the world. Yet he disdained his armored castle and rushed to the weather bridge to see if he could get a look at the damage.
C turret had been knocked about, and the concussion of the hit had probably killed or disabled men on one side of the turret. The barbette was black as tar and licked by flame, which had spread to engulf two lifeboats on the other side of the ship. The turrets leftmost gun of three was inclined upward like a metal finger, still pointing at the smoky contrail of the missile. But the turret was even more heavily armored than his own citadel, a full 16.5 inches thick, and by god, he saw the guns begin to slowly rotate to re-train on the target, its remaining two barrels adjusting their elevation, and he knew there were men still alive and fighting in there, though the heat from the flames that still broiled on one side of the massive turret must be unbearable. He looked astern to see that Rodney had also been struck, a little lower amidships where much of the blow had been taken by her heavy side armor. There was a fire, but it did not look serious and all her guns appeared to be in good order.
“Damn you, sir!” he shouted at the distant, unseen foe, and rus
hed back into the citadel with an order. “Get the range, by God. Ready on A and B Turrets.”
Down in the guts of the ship men were feverishly receiving optical sighting reports and working the fire control boxes, or FCBs as they were called. They were cranking levers to set elevation, gun deflection, range, gun training, and also sliding precision rulers over tables to calculate wind deflection. There were dials to set the estimated target speed and bearing, gyros to read variations in the roll of the ship, measures to calculate the ballistic height of the target and a line of sight transmitter. Within the box, wires and cables connected all these dials, gauges and levers to try and make sense, though to any untrained eye the contents of the box looked more like the workings of a Swiss watch. There were metal plates etched with millimeter hash marks, azimuth conversion gears, oil motors whirring to move levers and flanges, speed governors spinning, fuze clocks for firing intervals, and even heating elements to dissipate moisture and keep the system dry.
Other men were sighting from their gun director posts and shouting information through voice pipes to the men who worked at the FCBs. The controlling officer manned a telephone to the bridge. Still others were squinting through telescopes and slowly turning hand wheels to fine tune their settings. While it all seemed very precise, it was basically a mechanical guessing machine. It was a team effort, with range takers, line of sight finders, elevation directors, heightfinders, a collective synergy of human eyes, heads and mechanical elements which took a long minute to reach a solution while the crews in the gun turrets were seeing to the loading of the massive shells and propellant charges. It made very well educated guesses in the end, but was wrong more often than not, and by a wide measure.
When Nelson’s sister ship HMS Rodney engaged the Bismarck, she had taken three salvos and fifteen minutes to get her first hit, and that was at dawn, with a range of about 20,000 yards. Here the range was greater, and it was a night action with Syfret’s ships initially relying on forward spotters in his two sheep dogs, Ashanti and Tartar. He knew it would take at least five salvos before they got the range, and perhaps even more, and he hoped he had the time before this demon slipped from his grasp.
“Give them bloody hell!” Syfret yelled at the top of his voice, commanding the whole process from the bridge. “Shoot!”
Seconds later the whole ship shook with the kick of the massive guns. Anything on the bridge that was not riveted down went clattering across plotting tables and rattling to the deck. The last loose shards of glass in the viewports were shaken free and the binnacle rattled and vibrated with the concussion, which was basically just a controlled explosion gripped in the tight steel cylinder of the gun barrel. It did indeed look like hell when the fire and smoke belched from the yawning muzzle of the guns, and the scream of the heavy shells as they went wailing away towards the enemy was frighteningly loud. Now he could just make their adversary out on the far horizon, lit by the fire of their own rocketry as the range slowly diminished.
They wanted a fight, with the Royal Navy, he thought. By God, I’ll give them one!
The salvo that had sent Kirov’s P-900 missiles flying was again long, but frightening as the shells whooshed overhead and fell into the sea, sending tall white plumes of seawater up into the air. Karpov saw the missiles strike home, smiling when each one ignited in a fireball, dead amidships.
“Two hits!” he said.
“Come right, fifteen,” said Fedorov. “Begin evasive maneuvers.”
“That will take us right into their last salvo,” said Karpov.
“Exactly,” said Fedorov excitedly. “We have the speed and maneuverability to chase salvos here. They’ll be correcting that long shot based on their read on our heading and speed. Their next shots should fall off our port side and short.”
He wanted to use Kirov’s great advantage in speed to make it more difficult for the British battleships to accurately range on the ship. They saw the night ripped apart by another salvo, a second ship behind it firing as well, and the thought that there were now at least twelve, and possibly eighteen massive shells heading their way gave him a chill. Kirov was a middleweight champion with a merciless jab, a strong right arm, and terrible speed. The ships she was facing were big, bruising heavyweights, lumbering slow but with tree trunk arms and hammers in their fists. They only needed one punch to connect to stagger their opponent and possibly decide the bout.
Karpov’s words returned to him again. What did they have for us after the ball? No, thought Fedorov, the dance is not yet over. We have to move, maneuver, and one glance at his navigation plot told him they needed to do everything possible to get out of range of these guns.
The two salvoes fell in a long line off the port side as he had predicted, better placed now, and ranging nearer. He changed heading quickly, turning into the salvos, the ship’s powerful turbines frothing the sea in her wake as Kirov ran at full battle speed, all of 32 knots.
“Shall I finish them?” Karpov asked, the elation of battle in his eyes. He was leaning over Samsonov, waiting to make his next missile selection.
“Finish them?” said Fedorov. “They’re just getting started, Captain. I’m afraid we only angered those two monsters out there. Speed is what we need now. Speed and a quick hand on the helm.”
“Yes, well I suggest we hit them again, and this time with the Moskit-IIs.”
“Fight your battle,” Karpov. “I will maneuver the ship.”
Karpov nodded, glad to have a freer hand, and turned to Victor Samsonov. “Give me a salvo of four Moskit IIs…” He had suddenly noticed two the secondary contacts edging closer to the ship on Samsonov’s screen. “Those must be destroyers,” he said quickly. “They are at 15,000 meters. Engage them with the 152mm deck guns. Then put two missiles on each primary.”
“Aye, sir!” Samsonov went to work, feeding commands to the ship’s weapons systems. In contrast to the labor of the British at their gun directors and FCBs, Kirov’s systems were lighting fast computers integrated with their 3D radar. Seconds later they saw the forward 152mm battery rotate, its twin gun barrels elevate slightly, and then a crack, crack, crack, as the guns fired, both barrels recoiling in perfect unison with every salvo. One of the two aft batteries joined the fray as Samsonov targeted each of the two advancing destroyers with one battery.
Then the forward deck hatches flipped open and up leapt the Sunburns. They would fire at three second intervals at a range of 28,000 meters. In a matter of six seconds they would accelerate rapidly to mach three, over 3500 kilometers per hour or about 1000 meters per second. They would strike their targets in just twenty-eight seconds! By comparison the muzzle velocity of the British 16 inch guns was 766 meters per second. The missiles were actually faster, designed to defeat the lighting reflexes of American Aegis class cruisers, and they were a hundred times more accurate than Nelson’s guns. They were going to hit whatever they were aimed at, almost without fail, and they were going to hit hard.
While the British heavyweights swung their heavy arms, sending metal haymakers Kirov’s way in wide arcs, it was as if the Russian ship calmly reached out one hand to steady their foe’s chin, then rammed a strong right hand right to the face with thunderous speed. And the only way they were going to knock these ships out was by a head shot. Their armor was simply too thick to give them body shots. Karpov was again targeting the ship to be hit well above the water line, hoping to strike the superstructure. The Moskit-IIs each carried a 450KG semi-armor penetrating warhead, and tons of fuel for their propulsion system which would ignite when they exploded. The whole missile weighed over four tons. They were basically a hypersonic armor piercing fire bomb, and fire had been the nemesis of ships at sea for centuries.
Syfret had ordered Nelson and Rodney to give their enemy hell, and seconds later it came rebounding back at them with a fury. The missiles flashed in on the battleships and blasted into the center of the ships with terrific force. They exploded in huge massive fireballs of broiling heat and molten shrapnel
, almost as if two miniature suns had ignited their angry fire at the heart of each vessel. One warhead smashed into the armor plating at the base of Nelson’s citadel but was frustrated by twelve inches of hardened armor there. Seconds later the second hammered against C turret again, this time immolating the guns with its terrible impact and fire. The armor withstood the impact, but not the men inside, who were killed almost instantly by the terrible concussive force generated by the velocity of the missile.
A column of torrid fire and smoke mushroomed up from the ship, and this time Admiral Syfret was thrown from his feet, his head striking the bulkhead and knocking him unconscious. For her part, Rodney suffered equal harm, struck slightly aft of the main conning tower where the range finders, gun directors and FCB controllers were feverishly working up their next salvo. They had fired just as the first missile came in, however, and the second Moskit was caught in the tremendous blast of six huge guns, adding its exploding fury to their tumult and shock, which rocked the ship violently. Pipes burst all over the ship. Chairs went flying in the mess halls, hand rails quavered, equipment was shaken loose from its bolted moorings and, aft of the citadel where the armor was thinner, the warhead came on through the outer bulkheads and blasted into the metal chambers beyond.
Had these been modern ships, those hits would have utterly destroyed both targets. But here, though rocked and damaged, burning fiercely and shaken almost senseless, neither Nelson nor Rodney had been dealt a fatal blow. Men scrambled up from below, some aghast to see the hard pine wood main deck planks contorted and bent by the concussion of their own guns alone. Dazed and tired, they reacted by reflex, fetching fire hoses, grabbing crowbars to move loosened shards of mangled steel, and then set about fighting the terrible fires. Some tried to get to the back hatch on Nelson’s stricken C turret but were amazed to find the hatch wheel was melting when they fought their way to the scene with fire hoses!
Kirov II: Cauldron Of Fire (Kirov Series) Page 28
