Kirov II: Cauldron of Fire

Is there any place in this world where my heart can be at ease, he wondered? He had left no sweetheart behind when he sailed. His books and his history were his only true companions—the faces and haunting echoes of men, all long dead. He knew them so well that they often seemed more real and vital to him than his shipmates, and now here he was, thrown like a teabag into this hot water of time and in their very midst! At this moment, he realized with his sharp grasp of the history, Churchill was probably sitting down with Stalin in Moscow, and ready to break the news to him that there would be no second front in the west any time soon—if this was the year and month he now suspected.

The Eagle had been sunk on August 11, 1942. He had to be sure, and that pulsing urgency snapped his reverie and set him moving again, out the door and on his way to the bridge.

~ ~ ~

An hour later Fedorov had the answer to the many questions circling in his mind. Nikolin had been monitoring radio traffic closely, and the bands were slowly clearing up. He got hold of snippets of new broadcasts, and segments from the BBC. One after another they began to paint the gruesome new picture that Kirov now found herself in. The German 6th Army had just crossed the Don and captured the town of Kalach as they drove for their ill-fated attack on Stalingrad. Further south Operation Edelweiss was in full swing as well, and the Russians had lost the oil fields of Maykop as they fell back on the Black Sea coastal ports in considerable disorder.

There were other gleanings, smaller engagements that were given passing mention in the news stream. In the South Atlantic a U-boat attack sunk Norwegian SS Mirlo and all 37 crew members abandoned ship in 3 lifeboats to be picked up by the British sloop HMS Banff. Fedorov was able to hone in on the exact time and place of that attack in his research library: 2:27 PM, some 870 miles west of Freetown, Sierra Leone—the work of U-130. The night raid on Mainz by 154 RAF bombers was also reported, all events that had occurred on Aug 11, 1942. The evidence mounted to the conclusion that Kirov had slipped into the cauldron of fire once again.

Yes, thought Fedorov, out of the frying pan of the North Atlantic and into the fire of the Med! But they had lost all the days they had sailed in that black oblivion of the future. They had never really determined what year they had been in when Volsky set the ship on a course across the Atlantic, but now they were back, just a few days after they had disappeared in that first engagement with the Royal Navy, but a full year had passed in the war while they were gone. And this time there was no easy option to turn off into the wide expanse of the Atlantic and avoid conflict. This time they had sailed right into the bottle. There were only three ways out of the Mediterranean Sea: Suez, the Bosporus, and Gibraltar, and none of the three would be easy sailing. They had been sighted and attacked in the very first seconds when they emerged in this new time frame, and Fedorov had little doubt that they would soon be facing the most difficult decisions of their lives.

The young Executive Officer was finally convinced of the where and when of their present fate. That had been the easy part for him. He was a willing believer after all they had been through, and there was no Karpov on the bridge to oppose his speculation this time. Now he had to decide what to do about it, and more than ever he wished Admiral Volsky was sitting there in the command chair. What should he do?

The other men on the bridge were watching him, their attention moving from their radar screens and equipment to his own fitful activity near the navigation station. They could see the furrowed brow and dark eyes as he flipped through reference books, and peered at data stored on his pad. The more they watched, the more it became evident that Fedorov was very worried about something.

“Well Captain Lieutenant?” Rodenko finally came out with it. “What have you been digging up this last hour and a half—another bad dream?”

“Bad dream?” Fedorov looked over at his sensor chief. “You’ve said it well enough, Rodenko. If I’m correct, and these reports Nikolin has intercepted are accurate, then we’ve a real nightmare on our hands this time, and the only question in my mind now is what to do about it.”

“Don’t worry, Fedorov,” said Rodenko. “My systems are beginning to clear up now. I’m getting coastal returns from both Sicily and Sardinia, and I can see air contacts over those islands, though nothing is headed our way. We won’t be caught by surprise like that again, and we can blast anything we encounter out of the sea. So all you have to do is set our course. What are you worried about?”

“Well… If the date is what I think it is, then this is August 11, 1942, and we are very close to one of the largest naval operations of the war. What am I worried about?” Fedorov gave him a hard look, lowering his voice so the other men would not hear. “I can tell you that in one short word,” he said darkly, “survival.”

~ ~ ~

They had argued it for a very long time when the hatbands finally gathered at the Admiralty. PQ-17 had been a disaster when twenty-four of 39 merchant ships had been sunk in the ill fated attempt to run supplies up to Murmansk. Now the Prime Minister had insisted that they do the very same thing in the Mediterranean! The Admiralty had its reservations, to be sure. They were already stretched too thin in the Atlantic, and losses of both men and material had been rather severe. The German U-Boats had been having a field day feasting on convoys and sinking far too many ships, and there never seemed to be enough cruisers and destroyers to go around.

Now he was asking the navy to clench their fist with all of 50 warships to serve as escort for a convoy of only 14 transports to Malta! It seemed preposterous at first. The disaster on that last run to Murmansk had forced the cancellation of all convoys to Russia for the moment, and now this? Yet with his usual forceful eloquence the Prime Minister has clarified the critical importance of the island to the whole war effort then underway in the west.

Things had not been going well for Britain that year. Rommel had landed in Africa and chased Auchinleck back to Gazala, then sent him packing again in May on a long retreat to the Nile Delta. Now the battle lines were no more than 60 miles west of Alexandria, and Tobruk sat in stubborn isolation for a time, invested by Italian troops well behind that battlefront, the sole remnant of the favorable positions the British 8th Army once commanded in North Africa. It had finally fallen on the 21st of June, leaving nothing for the British to do in their desert war but lick their wounds near El Alamein and ferry fighters to Malta’s embattled garrison. The tide of Axis victory threatened to sweep their entire position away, and Malta was now the last, solitary rock in the stream.

If there was anyone who could sketch out the dire nature of the situation, it was Churchill, and he had done so, convincing his Admirals that the defense of Malta was of utmost importance. “We may lose our ships at sea in this struggle,” he argued “but Malta is an unsinkable aircraft carrier, sitting right astride the supply convoy lanes the enemy needs to use to reinforce Rommel.” From Malta the RAF could send out far ranging patrols to spy out the enemy supply ships and vector in their strike aircraft. After their disaster at Crete, the German Army was not likely to attempt another parachute assault on the tiny island, and the Italian Navy had not demonstrated either the resolve or the ability to cover an invasion by sea.

So Malta had become an echo of the fabled Battle of Britain, bombed day by day from airfields on Sicily and Sardinia, and defended by flights of Spitfires ferried in by Royal Navy carriers. The Germans could swarm the whole of North Africa, Churchill argued, but the British needed to hold only three places to ensure eventual victory: Gibraltar at one end, the Suez Canal at the other, and Malta in the middle of that cauldron of fire and steel. The island was a rock in the enemy’s soup, and as long as it could be held Rommel’s supply lines could never be fully secured.

So it was that the “Operation,” as it came to be called in the discussion, was deemed so vital that the Royal Navy would be asked to send fully half of its available escort fleet to secure it. Churchill’s eloquent arguments, shouted from the pedestal of his commanding position as Prime Minister, could not be dismissed, and so there would be another convoy—another “Winston Special” to be designated WS-21S. Its mission was the delivery of vital food and oil to Malta, and it was to be given the most powerful escort of any convoy in the war to date.

No less than five aircraft carriers would support various aspects of the operation, to muster as much seaborne air power as possible. The two grand old battleships of the interwar period, Nelson and Rodney, would both be assigned at the heart of the main escort. Identical in design, and representing the whole of their class, there were no others like them, with the biggest guns in the Royal Navy at 16 inches. Ponderous and slow at a top speed of just 21 to 23 knots on a good day, they were nonetheless well armored and perfect in this role of escorting slower merchant ship traffic. Both had served well in guarding the Atlantic convoys from German surface raiders, and one, HMS Rodney, had been instrumental in the hunt for the Bismarck a little over a year earlier.