Kirov k-1

by John Schettler

  Kirov

  ( Kirov - 1 )

  John Schettler

  John Schettler

  Kirov

  Prologue

  On a late summer day, August 5, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt boarded the yacht Potomac and slipped quietly away on what was scheduled to be a fishing trip to the waters off the coast of New England. A day earlier, the Prime Minister of England, Sir Winston Churchill, had declared a “Flag Day” and quietly canceled official business at the House of Commons to get away for a supposed vacation as well. Yet these were merely cover stories fed to the press to mask planning for a secret meeting that would lay the groundwork for a new power structure in a world that was embroiled in the greatest conflict in human history.

  Churchill boarded the destroyer HMS Oribi and traveled to the British Home Fleet anchorage at Scapa Flow where he was discretely transferred to the battleship HMS Prince of Wales. The great ship was the youngest daughter of Britain’s powerful battle fleet, bloodied as a young debutant when she sailed on the arm of Admiral Holland’s flagship HMS Hood, just two months earlier in the hunt for the German Battleship Bismarck. In the engagement that followed, the raw crew aboard the ship struggled in battle with the mighty German battleship, witnessing the horror of the destruction of HMS Hood, with the tragic loss of all but three of her crew.

  Prince of Wales had herself sustained damage from at least three 15 inch shells fired by Bismarck and four 8 inch shells from the heavy cruiser Prince Eugen. One shell struck directly on the bridge, killing or wounding everyone except the Captain and Chief Yeoman. The ship was driven off behind a covering screen of smoke, and limped away to Iceland, conducting burials at sea for all those hands lost in the action while in route. Yet, in spite of severe difficulties with her main batteries, she had managed to wound the German ship as well, which continued on into the North Atlantic trailing a wake of black oily blood.

  Undaunted, Prince of Wales reached the dockyard at Rosyth for repairs, where astonished engineers soon found an unexploded 15 inch shell lodged well below the waterline near the starboard diesel room, like a sharp tooth of a shark left in the wounded belly of the ship after her harrowing encounter with the Bismarck. She was soon restored to health, patched up and re-armored, her guns dressed out in fresh camouflage paint, and a new type 271 radar mounted on her upper mast. The rest of the Royal Navy ruthlessly hunted down the German battleship, sinking Bismarck on 27 May, 1941, finally avenging the loss of Hood.

  Now, her refit complete, Prince of Wales rejoined the home fleet, completed gunnery trials with her sister ship King George V, and was ready for a very special honor. The Prime Minister himself made his way aboard, there to be joined by Admiral of the Fleet and First Sea Lord Sir Dudley Pound, Army General Dill and Vice Air Chief Freeman, all bound for a rendezvous that would lay down the political and geopolitical framework to govern the entire post war world.

  They were sailing aboard Prince of Wales to meet their respective American counterparts, for President Roosevelt was not going fishing that morning. Instead he was to be joined by Generals Marshall and Arnold, and Admirals Stark and King of the United States to embark on the heavy cruiser Augusta and sail quietly out of Massachusetts Bay to points unknown. The old battleship Arkansas, heavy cruiser Tuscaloosa, and five more destroyers would join the task force en route for an extra measure of defense.

  Prince of Wales raced out into the gray north Atlantic with three destroyers at her side to join the American leaders for a scheduled meeting at Ship Harbor, Argentia Bay, Newfoundland on August 9th, 1941. There they would discuss potential future military cooperation, and set down guiding principles for how the world would be governed by Anglo-American power after Germany’s defeat, which at that time seemed a distant and chancy prospect. The document they drafted would come to be called the Atlantic Charter, a series of seminal principles that would underlay the founding of the United Nations.

  Yet on that fateful day, and unbeknownst to many, they secretly discussed something more, the dark presence and mystery of a strange new interloper on the wide Atlantic Ocean, a frightening new raider with awesome power and ominous intent.

  Part I

  Maneuvers

  “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

  Admiral Leonid Volsky shifted uncomfortably in his chair as he stared out at the slate gray sea. There was something wrong with the morning, he thought, and something vaguely disturbing about this whole mission. He felt it from the very first, that vague sense of disquiet within him that had dogged his thoughts all morning. What was it?

  The mission itself was nothing out of the ordinary-a simple live fire exercise in the Norwegian Sea. There had been so many before it, long, dull cruises punctuated by a single moment of bravado when the missiles would catapult up from the forward deck and rocket away, the men cheering them on as they went to find the target barges to the south.

  He was waiting on K-266, the submarine Orel, scheduled to make its missile firing at zero eight hundred hours, but Orel was late, and the Admiral had become more and more impatient. The crew could see it in his eyes, dark brown eyes, deep set under bristling low brows. Orel was late, and for a man accustomed to tight schedules, itineraries, precise maneuvers required to coordinate fleet actions, tardiness was inexcusable.

  Orel was late because her Captain Rudnikov was fat and stupid, he thought. And Rudnikov was fat and stupid because the aging incompetence of the Russian system itself still permeated the navy these days, and that was the sad fact of the matter.

  Leonid Volsky was not happy. He was in his seat on the bridge of the most formidable ship his country had ever put to sea, the nuclear guided missile cruiser Kirov, flagship and pride of the Russian Navy, and he was about to unleash her scheduled missile salvo for the exercise now underway. Thirty kilometers to the south, the old cruiser Slava was towing a line of targeting barges, a makeshift NATO task force, but hapless captain of the Orel had had radioed to say that he was having trouble with one of his missiles. It seems the crew had mistakenly loaded a 15 Kiloton nuclear warhead, and not the required high explosive version designated for the target. The breach of weapons handling procedures for nuclear armaments was unthinkable. The incompetence galled him, and he let the Orel’s captain know exactly how he felt about the matter, his deep voice loud and irritated on the radio, edged with impatience, and carrying the considerable weight of his thirty years command.

  The more Admiral Volsky thought about the exercise, the more he came to see in it a reflection of his own nation's predicament at that time in history. Here he was, in the pride of the Russian fleet, yet largely alone on the cold gray Arctic seas. He was not in the warmer, busy waters of the Atlantic, nor in the tranquil humid climes of the vast Pacific. No, the Russian fleet was consigned to maneuver in these forsaken, icy waters, just as Russia herself had been isolated by a new political frost that seemed to cover the world in recent years. After conflicts with the Americans over Iran's nuclear program, particularly involving the Russian fleet that had been sent to the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, relations between Moscow and Washington had deteriorated considerably. Sadly, the Russian Navy had deteriorated as well. It was no longer the great threat that it had once been when the Red Banner Fleet was the terror of NATO war games in the North Atlantic. This exercise seem pathetic to him compared to the old days when he would sail with a full battle squadron in a powerful surface action group accompanied by five to seven attack submarines as well.

  But Mother Rus
sia was a sick old woman now, and could not afford the blue water navy she had always dreamed of. In the year 2021, the country was a strange patchwork of conflicting influences. In the big cities, there was still wealth, consumerism, along with all the ills of modernity-advertising, financial crime, corruption in government and politics. The country had opened itself to Western commerce and culture, but was still harried by a lingering state of mind that could only be described as paranoid suspicion. The Kremlin too often found foreign fingerprints on any crisis, and in a country where political and historical reality was a construct of words more than deeds, it was too easy to foist off the failures of government and Russian society as a whole on unfriendly outside influences.

  When the great financial crisis fell on the world between 2008 and 2015, it was said that the Americans created the crisis as a means of destroying Russia, and America was to blame for every ill that now beset the nation. It was almost a reflexive reaction to adversity at times, this propensity to blame anyone other than one’s self, and it extended right up through the whole system to the highest levels of government.

  When a TU-134 jet went down near Petrozavodsk, killing 47 passengers, the incident was first blamed on Chechen terrorists, then on faulty aircraft parts obtained from a foreign manufacturer. Nothing was said of the pilot, Anton Atayev, who was drunk as he piloted the plane that day. Later it was whispered that Anton had only turned to vodka to soothe the pain of his divorce, and that his wife had betrayed him-again foisting the real problem off on someone else. Too many Russian men were still like Gogol’s “lost souls,” mired in their own self-indulgent and complacent mediocrity, a condition described by the untranslatable Russian word poshlost. They muted the pain of their lives with vodka, and took out their simmering frustrations on their women, who were often the victims of abuse. Excuses were easy to come by in Russia-reasons, justifications, stories put forward to rationalize any ill. Anton was just a victim of an unfaithful wife, that was all, it was whispered. She should be beaten, or worse, and reminded of her place.

  The words became a balm, and a means of dismissing the crushing problems of daily life, whether they were true or not. Yet in spite of their sad and degrading lot, deep down, Russians still took great pride in their heritage and roots, just as Moscow still clung to the vestige of its history in the aging architecture of earlier times, the gold domes and minarets of the Kremlin still gleaming in the wan light on the cold winter days. Now the city again had a brooding military hue at times, and the winters there were no less cold and harsh in spite of the brief warmth of Glasnost with the West that had brought capitalism to the heart of the nation.

  The farther you went from the big cities, however, the more you came to feel you were still trapped in that older world, in the old fallen Soviet state where nothing of value had ever been born. Volsky remembered that last long train ride he had taken from Moscow to his base at Severomorsk. The small villages and towns were still struggling to make the transition away from communism and define a new way of life. The rusting infrastructure of the old Soviet regime was still there. Old manufacturing towns that were once centered on a worker’s kollectiv, a state farm, a factory, a shipyard, were now like failed industrial ghost towns. People struggled for the barest necessities of life and to simply secure those few things that could provide a little comfort, safety and stability for their family-food and shelter.

  Thankfully, he no longer had to concern himself with those struggles. His position as Admiral of the Fleet came with certain privileges, and enough for him to keep his family and aging parents comfortable enough in St. Petersburg. He had secured his post through long years of service and hard work, however, and a stoic acceptance of the creaking machinations of the system the navy had become-a clear reflection of the decrepit state of the nation as a whole.

  Politically, Russia was still fundamentally irrational at heart. It had moved from autocracy, to revolution, to empire and then into rapid decline, a fall so dark and bleak that the nation struggled to hold onto the barest hint of its old glory, prompting many to long for the old days of Soviet discipline and power. Corruption in government was everywhere apparent, yet never really challenged by any countervailing authority. A new lie was broadcast each day to justify all those that came before it, and this aching nostalgia for a time when Russia had once been a great and mighty world power was a way to forget the lies, and turn a blind eye on the corruption.

  Fraud and bribery were old and familiar habits in the system. Enforcement of laws was arbitrary, and often rested on a network of complex relationships-in groups, out groups, favored sons-the blat that held the system together. Anything that got done was usually done poblatu, using blot to grease the way.

  Prestige was just as important as power, and pride that had become a tainted hubris was still at the heart of the Russian psyche as well. The people endured, for if they could not easily expect a time when things might be better, they could almost always remember a time when they were worse. People lived with their broken system, lived in it, worked in it, struggled on in spite of it, and this fear that everything might again get so much worse was always at the heart of the fear in every Russian’s soul.

  Getting anything done in this environment required guile, blat, and more than a little babki in the right palms, the monetary bribes that would seal deals and open doors. Vodka was a second currency in the country, and people literally traveled with cases of the stuff in the trunks of their cars-those lucky enough to even have a personal vehicle. Thankfully, Volsky had avoided the blight of vodka in his own life. He drank, as virtually all Russian men did, but was able to impose his basic rule of thumb in life on those habits-moderation in all things. Yet, vodka could be traded for gasoline, food, a night’s lodging, or special favors that might untangle the Gordian knots of local administrative districts, or bypass overly curious authority figures, and the Admiral was fond of giving it as a gift when appropriate. The system was long entrenched, a way of life, and no one avoided the necessities of blat and babki in Russia, no matter how high they had climbed.

  In many ways, the blat provided by friends and favors was often more important than cash. Rubles could buy you a meal today, but friends and the right connections could feed you for a lifetime, so it was said that it was better to have a hundred friends than a hundred rubles. Yet this system of installing people in key posts due to affiliation had a blowback in the sad fact that many positions soon became filled by people who were simply incompetent. And once there, they held on to jobs stubbornly because they never knew if they would ever find another one. They were stuck to their chairs with blat, not because of any particular merit or skill they possessed.

  Rudnikov, the Captain of the Orel, was a perfect example, thought Volsky. He was old, and tired, and rusty like his submarine. He should have been replaced by a younger man years ago. There were enough of them out there in the ranks, eager for promotion and a way up the gangways to a more comfortable place of power and privilege. Rudnikov was stuck in his post just as Russia itself seemed mired in its own systemic incompetency.

  As she completed the second decade of the twenty-first century, Russia was still a nation still struggling up off her knees, a population deeply distrustful of authority, but who nonetheless submitted to it for fear of change and the uncertainty that is at the very heart of that process. Change was uncomfortable, except for the very young, and always went hand in hand with the notion of threat and instability. So the Russians adapted, and they endured the hard change of recent years, always hoping for better times, but always expecting things to get worse.

  Volsky shook these sad thoughts from his mind, glad at least that Kirov was here beneath him in spite of these difficulties. It took all the nation’s technical resources, and the cannibalization of several older vessels, to build the ship the Admiral was standing upon now. As for Orel, he thought, that old submarine should have been mothballed years ago. The day of the Oscar had come and was long since gone. Construction
had been halted on the last three in her class, and there would be no further development.

  The same could be said for the submarine’s crew, he thought. Mounting the wrong ordnance was sheer stupidity. Such a misstep would be unthinkable in time of crisis, which was exactly what this exercise was supposed to be simulating. It spoke of gross incompetence, disorderly procedures, and poor leadership. He had seen all too much of that in his time in the navy, and was tireless in trying to root it out. If he had been aboard that boat, he would have the Captain in a pot for soup. But instead it was the Admiral who was stewing, shifting restlessly in his chair, his eyes ever on the barometer at the far wall of the bridge citadel, dark flashing glances that spoke volumes. Leonid Volsky was worried about something.

  For two days now he had been bothered with an ache in a tooth that always seemed to signal bad weather. Now the sallow grey skies, rising winds, and slowly surging seas also spoke the same to him. He could ask Rodenko about it, his able radar man, but he would learn nothing more than he already knew. The Arctic seas were vast and fickle, dangerous and temperamental. They could lull you with a sea of glass under a thick icy fog one minute, and then blow with a force nine gale the next. The current situation had all the hallmarks of big storm brewing on the horizon. Rodenko would tell him the front was 60 miles out and moving at 30 knots, leaving him plenty of time to complete this exercise and batten down for rougher seas, but the smell of the air, that dull, empty, icy cold Arctic air, told him everything he needed to know. He could sense the storm, taste it, feel it as the pressure slowly dropped. His ears would ring, his eyes begin to water from the chill, his sinuses dry and irritated.

  And the Admiral was irritated as well. It was something more that was bothering him now, a vague unrest, a veiled inner thrum of anxiety, an off sense of foreboding that he could not quite localize in his mind. Yes, he had good reason to worry now with tensions on the rise and war games in the offing again. The frost of a new cold war was blowing in like that distant threatening weather front. Yet this was something more. He could feel the unease in his bridge crew as well, sense their quiet apprehension. Karpov was, of course, the worst of the lot. The Captain was pacing, his hands clasped behind his back, his face hard beneath the thick wool fringed Ushanka that he always wore when on duty.