Kirov III: Pacific Storm

deck of the bow. There it smashed through the armor and burned into the ship’s interior, plunging through two more decks and igniting yet another major fire.

The ship now had fires from bow to stern, yet her speed was unimpeded and she turned slightly to allow the two functioning guns of her aft turret to join the battle. The next salvo came only from the number two forward turret, an angry reprisal that managed to drop shells short, but within 500 meters of the enemy ship. Spotters on the high main mast eagerly shouted out the news to their officers, who then relayed the information to the fire control station, and the crews hastily fed in corrections to make their next best guess at where Kirov would be in a hundred and twenty seconds.

~ ~ ~

Anton Fedorov did not want to make that rendezvous with an 18.1 inch shell. He gave the order ahead two thirds and starboard twenty, slowing and turning in towards the enemy ship. Yamato was now clearly visible in the distance, her massive silhouette illuminated by her own fires. He knew the enemy would correct their shortfall by firing longer, presuming he would maintain his old speed. By slowing and turning he hoped the next salvo would be long and well ahead of the ship. He was correct.

Three more rounds fell in a tight pattern, this time about 700 meters off his forward port side. Elated with his success, he turned to the helmsman and gave his next order. “Port twenty and ahead full!” He was chasing salvos, but now he saw what looked like three explosions near the aft quarter of the enemy ship. Both of Karpov’s torpedoes hit home with a vengeance. The third explosion was Yamato’s aft turret firing, and the officer in charge had not corrected based on the last salvo from the forward guns. He was using stale data, but it proved to be remarkably fresh when the spotters saw the results. To compound matters, when Fedorov called for renewed speed, it was not there. The damage worked by that small twenty millimeter round had forced Dobrynin to feed in much more cooling to the reactors, and they were slowly losing power.

Two rounds came withering in towards the ship, the sound of their approach magnified greatly. God, no, thought Fedorov. God help us, no!

The first round came hurtling towards the main mast, just a little high, but so close that it sheared away the Top Mast antennae as it screamed by and plunged into the sea off the ship’s port side with a massive geyser. The second round fell just shy of the ship’s starboard side sending a huge column of water up beyond the height of the main mast, which cascaded down onto the weather deck in a great fall of seawater. The ship rocked from the wave action generated by the titanic rounds, careening through the falling spray and pressing on.

Fedorov finally released his breath. A straddle! The enemy had finally found the range and the ship had just come within a hair’s breadth of annihilation. Twenty or thirty feet in either direction and those rounds would have broken her back.

Karpov was leaning over the radar screen with Rodenko when his monitor quavered and then went entirely black on the Top Mast system. Kirov had just taken a head butt and a hard thumb to the eyes. The Fregat system was still off line, and now they had lost their other long range weather and general surveillance radar. She was blind.

“I’ve lost Top Mast,” Rodenko reported. “The entire system is down. Attempting to Cross circuit to the MR- 212B system….No luck, sir. I’ve got yellow fault lights all through the navigation radar sets as well. The Active Phased Array is presently offline, and in reset diagnostic mode. I can give you short range returns with individual system fire control radars, but we have no effective long range coverage at the moment.”

That was not all. Byko called up to the bridge and indicated the emergency hull patch had been jarred by the near miss and was again leaking. They were taking seawater amidships. Dobrynin seconded the matter by confirming he could only give the ship twenty knots while he worked to control his reactors. Events were stacking up like good cards in the enemy hand, and Fedorov could only think that Yamato was now about to play an Ace at any moment.

“Helm, port twenty and all the speed you can give me!” The young captain wanted an immediate course change, this time in the same direction he had turned earlier instead of a ziz-zag back to starboard. He wanted to get the ship off the range line that now must surely be plotted by the enemy.

“There was a second contact bearing on our position from the southwest,” said Karpov. “We were looking at it just before we lost the radar scan.”

“Sir….” Tasarov spoke up now. “I can hear it on sonar.” He had been listening closely to the battle, both his equipment and inner ear sorting out the chaos in the sound field. When the big rounds came in so close he thanked God that his system was capable of detecting and muting sound spikes to protect his ears. It was state of the art, and among the best surface sonar systems in his world of 2021. Kirov’s own screws were a loud wash over everything, but Tasarov had that signature well profiled and he was filtering it well. He also had a good read on the deep thrum of Yamato’s screws, but there was a third contact, faint but growing louder, higher in pitch, more distant, with a unique signal pattern, and he had been listening to it for some time now.

“That will be the heavy cruiser Tone,” said Fedorov.

“I last marked it at about a hundred kilometers and closing fast at the angle we’ve been running on.” Tasarov confirmed the estimated range, then noticed something more.

“The screw pattern for the Yamato contact has changed significantly, sir. I think they’re slowing down too.”

Tasarov had very good ears.

~ ~ ~

The torpedoes found their target easily enough after their long seventeen minute run. One activated its wake homing mode, easily profiled the big ship’s frothing footprints, and rode them right into the rightmost screw, demolishing it with its powerful explosion. The second followed, slipped a few hundred feet wide and then detonated to damage the ship’s hull very near the end of her underwater torpedo bulwark protection. There was an immediate hull breach and Yamato started shipping water across three compartments. The ship also reeled to starboard, her rudder batted violently by the explosion of the first torpedo, and also damaged.

The sudden movement threw off all the carefully plotted calculations that had enabled the guns to straddle their enemy moments ago, and now officers and crews were struggling to re-plot, as one new sighting variable after another was shouted down to the fire control operators, new roll, new speed, new bearing, new declination. They were essentially starting from scratch, with only a decent handle on the probable range to the target. The bugle sounded and the aft turret fired its two good barrels again, but the shots were now well off the mark.

“We are losing speed, sir,” the helmsman reported. “Twenty knots…eighteen knots… I’m having difficulty getting back on our heading, sir.”

The flooding had surged into two boiler rooms, and was now entering a third. Yamato quickly lost 25% of her steam and the engines slowed, the grinding of the damaged screws now clearly evident as a rumbling vibration.

Yamamoto realized that the ship had been hit by torpedoes. So this demon has yet another sting, he thought. Their torpedoes are as good as our own! Now he had lost the speed he needed to stay in the chase and close the range. His guns were already at an ideal range now, but the ship’s new heading had taken the forward turrets out of the action.

“Sir,” said Rear Admiral Takayanagi, the ship’s assigned commander. “I believe we have jammed our rudder with that explosion aft. We are circling. The gunners will have fits trying to plot solutions now. We will need to put divers in the water to clear the damage, and that flooding will cause us to list to starboard in time if it is not corrected.”

Yamamoto looked at Kuroshima, the gravity of the moment apparent to them both. The ship could no longer continue the engagement. The fires fore and aft were one thing, now they also had flooding, loss of speed, and a damaged rudder. He could no longer maneuver adequately, and was, for all intents and purposes, at the mercy of his enemy now if they continued to fire those terrible rockets. When would the next torpedoes come?

“Begin counter-flooding. We will continue firing to harass the enemy as best we can,” he said resolutely, knowing the situation was a lost cause. “There is no other course we can take for the moment. Do what you must to manage the ship Takayanagi, but this battle is over. Our concern now is saving the ship and any man left alive aboard her.”