Kirov III: Pacific Storm

Kirishima had run afoul of two of the powerful MDM-3s, both on the starboard side of the ship, and the combined weight of their explosive power was all of 3000 kilograms, over 6600 pounds! The hull shock factor of the twin explosions was tremendous. The shock effect to the ship itself was enough to shake it so violently that the engines and boilers were detached from their iron moorings and thrown against the bulkheads of their compartments. The crew were flung madly about, hundreds stunned an unconscious, limbs broken, necks snapped, skulls fractured. It was as if the hand of God had simply reached down and smashed a fist against the side of the great ship, bashing a hole in her side in spite of the heavy armor, and sending in the cobalt blue and aqua green waters of the sea.

Kirishima was dying a very painful death, as if a sleek and powerful shark had been seized upon and slammed down on the hardest of rocks. On the bridge the supply officer Kobayashi was dead, his spine broken when he was thrown against the edge of an open hatch. Secondary battery commander Ikeda would not get a chance to test his gunnery skills if Kirishima could have ever managed to get within 18,000 yards. Main gunnery officer Koshino was below in the damaged forward turret trying to get it operational again, unconscious but alive. XO Koro Ono had been out on the weather bridge and was thrown completely off the ship.

But amazingly, one man survived unscathed, bruised, shocked, but alive and livid with rage. Captain Sanji Iwabuchi struggled back up onto his hands and knees, gasping for breath. He could feel the heavy list of the ship, and when his mind cleared he instinctively called the name Yoshino, his flood control officer. He had seen no rockets this time. What had happened? His dazed mind would not function properly, but his instincts told him the ship had been dealt a fatal blow.

Thankfully not every man aboard was incapacitated, and small parties of white coated junior officers were making their way to the bridge. The ship was clearly sinking, but she had little more than seven meters of water beneath her at that moment and not far to go. She settled quickly, her hard metal hull scudding against the bottom and then rolled heavily to starboard, her tall pagoda main mast tilted crazily beyond thirty degrees. With a horrid grinding of metal on stone, Kirishima came to rest in the shallow reefs just south of the main channel, and there she would lie for a good long while. With most of her port side weather deck and superstructure still well above the water line. She would never meet with the US battleships Washington and North Carolina in the equally dangerous waters off Guadalcanal, and never founder and sink to the bottom of Iron Bottom Sound on the day she was appointed to die, November 15, 1942.

When Iwabuchi finally realized what had happened he reluctantly gave the order to abandon ship. Two of his cruisers had tried to find passages farther north, leaving the main channel to Kirishima. The last cruiser, the Tone, had finally caught up and joined his task force that evening. She was two kilometers behind the big battleship, ready to enter the channel, but now her captain ordered all stop, amazed at the spectacle of the battleship keeling over just ahead.

“I will transfer my flag to Tone,” said Iwabuchi angrily to a nearby officer. “See that the Emperor’s portrait is handled properly and notify me when it is safely aboard a life boat. I will follow.”

The venerable battleship would block the channel completely, and now he knew that the enemy was likely to slip away into the gathering shadows to the east. But I will follow, Mizuchi, he said to himself, a cold anger in his gut. Yes, I will follow….

Part VII THE LONG NIGHT

“Not the torturer will scare me,
nor the body’s final fall,
nor the barrels of death’s rifles,
nor the shadows on the wall,
nor the night when to the ground
the last dim star of pain is hurled,
but the blind indifference
of a merciless, unfeeling world.

~ Roger Waters

Chapter 19

Kirov moved slowly south into the gathering darkness, the sun blazoning gold behind her, and the threat of distant storm clouds fisting up over the shadowy green folds of Papua New Guinea to the north. They moved south for an hour, then slowed to five knots so Byko could get divers in the water with acetylene torches and hull sealing plates.

This was a new innovation the Russians had developed in 2018, designed specifically for waterborne ship hulls. It was a series of panels that could be placed on the exterior hull to cover a gash or hole. They had elastic sealing edges to eliminate caulking and pre-drilled joining holes with rivets that could be mounted at specific points along the existing hull and then secured by durable welds. The panels were four feet by eight feet, and the wound in Kirov’s hull required three to create a patch that was eight feet high by twelve feet wide. Once in place Byko could then activate pumps to void the flooded compartments of seawater, and then men could get inside that area to further reinforce the breach from within. That work would take considerably longer, but at least the ship could get underway with the exterior patch in place.

It took the divers over an hour to cut away jagged metal with underwater torches and prepare the area for the seal, and then another ninety minutes before the panels were in place. They had the KA-40 up behind the ship watching for signs of further activity from the Torres Straits, but the obvious presence of mines in the channels there had forced the Japanese to wait for destroyers to come up from Hara’s carrier force to sweep the area before capital ships could be risked again in the restricted waters. The lesson of Kirishima’s fate was evident for all to see, though Iwabuchi steamed aboard the cruiser Tone, angry at the delay. There were also a thousand men aboard Kirishima, in no danger of sinking further, but marooned on a derelict ship that would be an easy target for allied B-17s out of Cairns or Townsville. Hara’s A6M2 fighters were up at dusk over the stranded battleship, until darkness lessened the threat.

In the meantime, the crew of Kirov used the time feverishly to complete hull repairs and make the ship seaworthy for higher speeds. They were making the last of the welds on the hull patch when Rodenko reported he had something more than storm clouds on his radar at 21:20 hours, a signal out of the east that appeared to be a small formation of planes.

“Those will have to be out of Port Moresby,” said Fedorov. “Most likely Japanese bombers, or perhaps seaplanes out on a search pattern.”

They were, indeed, a squadron of G3M2 twin engine “Nell” bombers that had been sent to look for the enemy ship near dusk and mark its position. There were twelve in all, and they were flying a widely spaced search fan out of Port Moresby to the west, grouped in four shotai of three planes each. Only one of the three had been mounted with torpedoes, however, so the threat was not as great as it first appeared on radar.

Third shotai was lucky, or unlucky enough to be on a search vector that took them