heading.
He looked at the ship’s chronometer, biting his lip. When would they move again in time? The last change had taken only a few hours, but it might be a long day before anything happened. He now concluded that if Yamato was cagey, and her cruiser screen agile enough, they might be able to catch Kirov somewhere south of Bona Bona Island on Orangene Bay, the south coast of New Guinea. Yamato would be right behind the cruisers. Karpov returned from his rest period two hours later, clear headed and ready for battle, and he did not have long to wait.
“Those cruisers are getting very close now,” said Rodenko. “I make it about fifty kilometers. They’re moving at 36 knots, and there’s a small group of three ships about ten klicks behind them at 33 knots.”
“Most likely a destroyer group,” said Fedorov.
“We can take them out now with missiles,” said Karpov, raising an eyebrow at Fedorov.
“Would that be your recommendation, Captain?”
“Our ability to strike at range is a great advantage,” said Karpov. We should use it now and thin out the odds. Otherwise it will be work for the deck guns in another hour, and they may get those long range torpedoes in the water you talk about.”
Karpov was correct. The first factor in the engagement was going to be range, he knew. Kirov could find, target, and strike its enemy anywhere inside a 200 kilometer radius of the ship. The cruisers would need to get inside 20,000 meters, just as before, and that was the decisive difference.
Yamato had to first close inside the 45,000 kilometer range of its main guns, and even then it would not be likely to obtain any hits until it got inside 26,000 meters. It was Ali vs Frasier. Kirov could put one hard jab after another on the lumbering hulk of her enemy, like a fast, lean champion dancing around her foe. Yamato had to simply tuck in its chin and drive in for a body shot, and in this instance, with the coast of New Guinea to the north, she was hoping to eventually pin her elusive enemy to the ropes.
Unlike Ali, Kirov did not have the armor to take much punishment. There would be no ‘Rope a Dope’ strategy if that happened. So Fedorov was maneuvering east to avoid the land mass to his north, but in doing so he would soon be skirting the effective range of Yamato’s big 18.1 inch guns. It would then come down to how long the battleship could stay in any kind of effective firing range, for time was a factor in obtaining a hit, in a very convoluted process that relied on the successful coordination of numerous elements to get just one good result. One thing Yamato had in her favor was durability. Her armor would let her take hits and keep fighting as long as the Japanese had the will, and Fedorov would never underestimate that factor.
“Very well,” he said. “Engage the cruiser screen at long range. These are lighter ships. Their belt armor is little more than sixty millimeters.”
“Then any of our missiles will hurt them badly. I suggest we start with our smaller warheads and see if we can break their speed advantage by lighting a few fires. Mr. Samsonov…”
“Sir!”
“Sound alert level two. Secure for missile combat. Activate MOS-III missiles, a bank of three, please.”
“Aye, sir. Activating missiles seven, six, and five. System reports ready.”
The warning claxon sounded, and Samsonov keyed his missile prime toggles, waiting for targeting information to be sent to his panel. A battle that had been talked about, ruminated, argued in forums and naval colleges the world over was now about to begin, for the cloak of darkness would prove to be only a thin veil of protection for Kirov that night, and a clash of titans was now almost inevitable—the most powerful ships of two different eras facing one another in a final confrontation that would decide the fate of nations and perhaps humanity itself.
Yet none of this entered the minds of Fedorov, Karpov, Rodenko or the other men on the ship. Their only thought was whether this battle would see them through to a good breakfast the following morning. The world and time could wait. For them it was simply a matter of surviving yet another day.
They saw it light up the night, a bright fire against the dark, climbing up and then arcing slowly down, growing more prominent with each passing second. The watchman on the light cruiser Jintsu pointed to his mate, eyes wide, then called out a warning. It looked like a distant plane on fire, plummeting down to a watery death in the sea, but as it fell it suddenly leveled off and seemed to skim right over the water, brighter, closer, impossibly fast! There was a second fire in the sky, then a third following the very same path.
Jintsu was the second of three Sendai type light cruisers, commissioned in 1925 and intended as fast destroyer flotilla leaders. She had four stacks venting the steam from ten Kampon boilers and four shaft Parsons geared turbines driving her at just under 36 knots. Her seven 5.5 inch guns were waiting silently in their turrets, her four 610mm torpedoes sleeping in their tubes. They would never get the chance to fire at the enemy the ship was stalking that night, nor would those on the two ships following her, Nagara and Yura, both fast three stack light cruisers with similar armament. The supersonic missiles would find them some fifty kilometers away, and come boring in on their side armor, a 1.5 ton missile with a 300kg warhead flying at Mach 5, one of the fastest missiles in the world Kirov had come from.
The damage was immediate and near catastrophic. Jintsu was struck amidships, her armor easily penetrated and the missile smashed through four of her ten boilers before exploding, blowing away two of her four stacks in the process. She reeled with the hit, her side ripped open, severe fires amidships and thick black smoke choking the life out of her crew. The ship immediately fell off in speed, slowing to under twenty knots and taking water fast.
Nagara and Yura received equal treatment, their side armor simply too thin to stop the missiles from penetrating to do severe damage deep within the ship. Of the three Nagara came away the best, and she had turned to avoid the chaotic scene of Jintsu ahead, and the angle of the missile that struck her saw it scudding along her side armor, detonating outside the ship, and buckling her hull badly, right at the water line.
Karpov had used three, fast lethal darts to skewer the cruisers, and they were suddenly out of the equation as serious threats, their speed reduced, crews frantically struggling to fight the fires and flooding. Jintsu would not survive the hour. Over 120 of her 450 man crew were dead after the missile impact, and the remainder would be in the sea soon after when the ship keeled over in a rasp of steam and smoke, her guts flooded with seawater hitting the hot boiler fires. She sunk in twenty minutes. Yura was little better off, her fires threatening to consume the ship. Nagara stood by, calling for help from the three destroyers in the wake of the cruisers. There were too many men in the sea for her to contemplate continuing in the hunt.
So it was that the lighter screening forces Yamamoto had sent to find and harry his prey came to a desperate fate. The destroyers would help in the rescue operation, and then bravely turn to seek the enemy again, but they were of little concern to Kirov now. She had bigger fish to fry, a 72,000 ton behemoth still bearing down on an intercept course that Fedorov did not think they could evade. Yet the Russian battlecruiser still had nineteen ship killers under her forward deck, more than enough to deal with a single adversary, or so he thought.
The chronometer read 20:10, just an hour after the waning gibbous moon rose, a hair off full, casting her pale wan light on the sea. Rodenko reported the fast screening force had been decisively stopped, at least on radar, and Karpov breathed a little easier.
“This shark still bites,” he said. “The MOS-IIIs did the job well enough. Are there any other targets close in, Rodenko?”
“There’s a seaplane getting a little too nosey,” he said, “it’s been following our wake for some time, most
