Kirov III: Pacific Storm

“None, sir. You can go to full battle speed, that is if Byko says the turbines have no problems. I can give you all the power you need.”

“Very well, Dobrynin. Carry on.”

The Admiral would make one last call before returning to the bridge, to Martinov in the weapons bay, hoping to see if there were any old missiles still stored away in the corners of his main magazine. But what he found out in that conversation set him immediately on a heading to the bridge, a quiet anger simmering in his chest.

~ ~ ~

They watched the steady approach of the pursuing enemies using the long range weather radar to plot their position. In the first hour the hunters made up all of eight nautical miles on them, closing the range to thirty-five kilometers. Over the next hour they could clearly see the enemy ships darkening the distant horizon behind them, though the increase in speed to 25 knots only allowed them to gain three nautical miles.

Rodenko estimated the range at just under thirty kilometers, 30,000 meters, still a long shot, even for a battleship. It seemed like the enemy may not be gaining on them for a while, but thirty minutes later a lookout spotted a bright flash from the center of the pursuing silhouettes behind them, and seconds later they heard a distant rumble of thunder. Kirishima had fired her challenge, though the rounds came in very short. Karpov reached for his field glasses and peered back at the enemy ships.

“I can put them on HD video for you,” said Fedorov. “The aft Tin Man was very near that explosion, but it sustained only minor damage. A shrapnel fragment just grazed the lens cap, but it held.”

He tuned in the display, and they looked to see the clear silhouettes of three ships, one much wider abeam and with a tall pagoda main mast; two smaller, the cruisers that had tried to close with them earlier.

“I’ll say one thing for the men of this era,” said Karpov, “they are damn persistent.”

They waited some time but no further rounds were fired. Iwabuchi had merely announced his presence, as if to taunt them with the fact that they had run all night at their best speed and failed to shake him off. Karpov watched the ships, a look of disdain on his face, shaking his head.

“If I thought this might be our final battle I would sink those ships in five minutes,” he said to Fedorov.

“That’s the catch,” said Fedorov. “We have only twenty-five anti-ship missiles, and who knows how many more situations we will have ahead of us. Each time we have displaced to the past we have been marooned there for at least twelve days. This is only day three this time. I think we began shifting in and out of this timeframe three days ago, though it took a while for us to manifest here this time around.”

“So you think we may disappear again in another nine days?”

“It’s a possibility. Who can say? The Admiral made a good point in our discussion about this earlier. A rock skips only so far on the water. It must settle somewhere. Did you notice how subtle these last two shifts were? We vanished at St. Helena like a whisper in fog, then appeared here before we really perceived it. There were no odd effects like the earlier displacements, and none of that strange static or color in the sea.”

“What does this mean, Fedorov?”

“I cannot say. Only it seems to me that the energy of our movement in time is dissipating, weakening.”

“And what if there isn’t enough left to take us somewhere else in nine days. What then?”

Fedorov just looked at him. “Well, Captain, then we’ll stay right where we are, won’t we. And in that case I can assure you that this will definitely not be the last time we have to call the crew to battle stations.”

They saw another bright flash in the image on the HD display, and heard the rumble of thunder again, as if a bad storm were riding their wake. This time the rounds fell a little closer, a spread of two closely spaced water plumes falling about 2000 meters behind them.

“I may have to do something about this soon,” said Karpov.

“That was only one turret firing,” said Fedorov. “I think they are just clearing their throats, Captain. But it may be wise to prevent them from getting any closer.” He turned to the helmsman.

“Ahead thirty and five points to starboard.”

“Aye, sir. Starboard five and speed thirty.”

He looked at his navigation map on the Plexiglas. “We should reach the Torres Strait in three hours or so. That’s about 600 kilometers west of Port Moresby. They’ll have planes there, but I would not expect a strike until we are through the strait and well into the Coral Sea. We’ll have to sail well east of Daru, here,” he pointed to the belly of New Guinea, just above the tip of the Cape York Peninsula where it jutted at that great island. “Then we turn south into the Coral Sea. At that point we’ll be in range of anything they have operating out of Port Moresby.”

Nikolin seemed to perk up, fiddling with his radio set and adjusting the gain and reception. Fedorov caught his sudden energy out of the corner of his eye and turned his head.

“Something on the radio, Mister Nikolin?”

“A lot of traffic all the sudden, sir. I’m getting ship to ship, air to ground, and a lot of Morse code in the middle of it all. It sounds like something big is going on.”

Fedorov frowned, looking at Karpov. “Most likely the other half of the operation we’ve stumbled upon here,” he said glumly.

“This one isn’t in any of your history books?”

“I’m afraid not, Captain. But I can make some fairly good guesses about what is going on. This operation against Darwin is nothing more than a side show. The main event is further east, and if the Japanese are trying to isolate Australia, as I think they are, then they are aiming for one or two places of strategic importance: the lower Solomons, Espiritu Santo on Vanuatu, or New Caledonia. To attack any of those locations they will need a lot of aircraft carriers in the Coral Sea, probably two divisions, at least four fleet carriers if they have them, and I’m inclined to believe that they do if they were able to assign two fleet carriers and a light escort carrier to the Darwin operation. They know we are here, but it’s a very big ocean out there. It would be my guess that Yamamoto is leading the main attack, and that his Kido Butai is already in the Eastern Coral Sea, perhaps about here.” He fingered a location on the map roughly equidistant from the northern tip of New Caledonia and Vanatu Island.

“Frankly, I would take Espiritu Santo first, and build an airstrip that can work in tandem with the field on Guadalcanal. From there the Japanese could strike at either Noumea on New Caledonia or Fiji by using land based aircraft.”

“And the Americans?”

“That’s the real unknown for the moment. We don’t really know whether they got hit at Pearl Harbor, and we don’t know how things have gone since. It’s obvious they lost the Battle of the Coral Sea, as the Japanese have Port Moresby. You killed Wasp in the Atlantic, so that will leave them Enterprise, Lexington, Yorktown, Saratoga, and Hornet. They may have lost one or more of these by this point in the war, but we do not know. Their intelligence was fairly good. They had broken the Japanese naval code before Midway was supposed to have been fought in May of this year. It could be that they are well aware of the Japanese plan and preparing to make a counter thrust of their own.”

“So what may lie east if we keep sailing this direction?”

“Perhaps one of the largest air/sea battles in history,” said Fedorov, his eyes alight. “There will be at least four fleet carriers on the Japanese side, and three or four on the American side, each with over seventy planes, and we would be presumed hostile by either side if we get mixed up in it. If the Midway battle wasn’t fought earlier, then it will be fought here, now, in the Coral Sea, and the outcome will decide the war in the Pacific theater for years to come.”

“I see,” said Karpov, a gleam in his eye as well. “Our missile inventory is wearing thin, but I must remind you that we still have weapons aboard this ship that can also prove decisive. We have the power to decide the outcome of this campaign as well, Fedorov. Don’t forget that.”

Fedorov said nothing more.

Chapter 15

“Admiral on the bridge!”

The first watch called out the return of Admiral Volsky, and the men saw him make a perfunctory salute as