Kirov II: Cauldron of Fire

just bit into a fairly salty cracker considering the number of stripes in this room.”

Pound got right to the point, “Professor Turing received some gun camera footage taken by a Coastal Command Beaufighter at mid-day yesterday. Air Vice Marshall Park of the Malta Air Defense had a look at it and thought he better send in on to Gibraltar, where it was received at 17:00 hours and just happened to catch the last plane out an hour later. It’s a miracle it got in to Bletchley Park as soon as it did. I’m to understand that Park also phoned ahead and set a watch on the parcel, putting the spurs to it, if you will. Just our good fortune that Professor Turing was also working very late last night, and round midnight he had a look at the footage and made a rather alarming deduction.” The Admiral gestured to the chairs as all the men seated themselves.

Tovey’s heart sank as he knew from the code word he had received what the general subject of this meeting was to be about. Admiral Pound settled in, and then extended a hand to Turing, inviting him to take the floor.

The young man cleared his throat. “Well gentlemen,” he began, his eyes widening a bit as he spoke, “it was a simple enough request for identification of a vessel sighted in the Tyrrhenian Sea yesterday. There were two photos, he pushed a file over to Admiral Pound, “and I’ve taken the liberty of including photography taken of the Geronimo raider incident last August as well. I ran the footage and something about the look of this ship just set my stomach turning—considering the impact Geronimo had on our operations.”

Pound had seen the photos and he passed them to Whitworth on his right, who studied them closely, a look of intense interest on his dignified features. He had been in the Royal Navy since the turn of the century and had commanded the Battlecruiser Squadron with its flagship HMS Hood in the first years of the war. No stranger to combat at sea, his flag was on the battlecruiser Renown when he mixed it up with the German raiders Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in the Norwegian Sea, besting both ships in the action and driving them off to lick their wounds. Just a few weeks before Bismarck sortied, he had been recalled from Hood to the Admiralty to take up a new post as Lord Commissioner of the Admiralty and Second Sea Lord. The loss of Hood days later was a shock to him, and he realized the change of command may have very well saved his own life, though he still regretted not being with his ship when she made her last desperate voyage. He ran a hand through his grey-white hair, high on his forehead now, but still full.

Whitworth passed the photos to Wake-Walker, a man who’s career had been dogged with some misfortune, though it did not impede his steady rise in the ranks to his present position as Third Sea Lord. He had been found liable for mishandling his ship, then HMS Dragon, in 1934. Last year during the hunt for the Bismarck Admiral Pound had faulted him severely after the sinking of Hood for not re-engaging with Norfolk, Suffolk and Prince of Wales. In that incident Tovey had to come to his defense and threatened resignation if charges were brought forward, saying he would sit as a defense witness in any proceeding brought against Wake-Walker. The matter was eventually dropped. Then, scarcely a few months later, it had been Wake-Walker’s carrier Force P that had first sighted, shadowed and engaged the Geronimo raider, which is why he took particular interest in the photos, staring at them a long time before he gave them over to Admiral Tovey.

“Please note the antennae situated on the secondary mast, on both photos,” said Turing. “See how the panels are tilted at the same angle. Some thirty degrees off the vertical? That was one similarity that immediately caught my eye.”

Tovey looked up, somewhat surprised. “You believe the Italians have mounted radar sets on their capital ships—perhaps technology given them by the Germans?”

“That was what I suggested,” said Admiral Pound. “It’s clear that this could not possibly be a German ship.”

“My pardon, sir,” said Turing, “But isn’t that what we deduced a year ago—that the Geronimo raider could not have possibly been anything in the German inventory?” They had scoured every harbor, every shipyard, and came to the conclusion that the ship they had faced a year ago in the North Atlantic had been a pariah. Every other known ship in the German Navy that could have exhibited its speed, and characteristics had been accounted for. Yet this ship was a complete mystery. How it could have been built by the Germans without being seen and documented by Royal Navy Intelligence was a matter of lengthy discussion, and it had forced the Boys at Bletchley Park to review reams of signals traffic for months after. Yet they had found nothing whatsoever that in any way hinted at the existence of the ship, let alone the weaponry it deployed and used with such dramatic effect.

In the end they simply came to call the raider “Geronimo,” after the renegade Indian chief that had been harried and pursued by the Americans, hunted down by a select group of Federal cavalry. The Royal Navy had its own select scout ships out in the hunt when this raider first appeared, followed by carriers under Wake-Walker and then Admiral Tovey’s battleships from Home Fleet, but it did them no good. In the end they had acquiesced to the American line that the enemy ship had been sunk by the their own Desron 7, though none of the eight destroyers that formed that group survived the encounter to provide any real confirmation of that claim. Not a single survivor had been found, nor was there any sign whatsoever of wreckage on the sea, not even a drop of oil to mark the place where they must surely have fought the enemy to the death.

It left an uncomfortable feeling in the stomachs of men accustomed to much more certainty when it came to the intentions and capabilities of the enemy they were still facing. The intelligence failure had been profound. That was the way Churchill put it, and when the doughty Prime Minister stuck his umbrella in your gut it was sure to get your attention. Yet that was how they left it—a stinging black eye where the Abwehr had jabbed them blind. But Turing still had deep misgivings about the ship, and the weaponry it displayed. He kept it largely to himself, but inwardly never believed any of the official lines about the incident. He thought it useless to raise his suspicions with all the intensity of the brou-ha-ha then underway in the intelligence community. Yet he never gave them up or was able to put them to rest.

Pound looked at him, somewhat perturbed. “Would you say this is a cruiser? It looks to be something quite more.”

“That is what struck me immediately,” said Turing. “I can tell you definitively that this is not an Italian cruiser, sir. We have all those ships accounted for. Their battleships are very low on fuel, and they’ve taken to leaving them in port and using their oil to refuel smaller ships and submarines. Our operatives can verify that Taranto has not sent anything of this size out of in the last three days, and the same for La Spezia. Now we do know that Admiral Da Zara has sortied with his 3rd Cruiser Division out of Calabria— two light cruisers and three destroyers. And he is also moving the 7th Cruiser Division out of Messina and Naples with a couple of heavy cruisers and a handful of destroyers, but those ships were not anywhere near these coordinates when this photo was taken.” He indicated the message decrypt record, also a part of the file, which listed the exact coordinates of the sighting.

“I can verify that,” said Whitworth. “I had a look at the latest intercepts this morning. We’ve got all those ships under observation. But there’s more to this sighting than these photographs. First off this ship was sighted alone, with no other escorts.”

Pound shifted uncomfortably as Whitworth continued.

“We sent 248 Beaufighter Squadron from Gibraltar to Malta on the 10th of August. They were the planes responsible for this sighting, and I have Park’s latest communique indicating this same group flew a strike mission on the afternoon of the 11th. They found the ship again, and, well…they were cut to pieces for their trouble. Four of six Beaus went down, and only two crews came out alive. And here’s the rub—they were shot down by some sort of naval rocketry.” He folded his arms gravely, looking at Wake-Walker and Tovey.

“Rocketry?” said Wake-Walker, the memory of his own squadrons off Furious and Victorious still an unhealed wound. “You mean to say the Italians have these weapons now?”

“Apparently so,” said Pound quickly. “It’s my belief that the Germans have brewed up a new lot of these fire sticks and they’ve shipped them to Regia Marina in an effort to tip the balance of the war in the Mediterranean theater. For that matter we might expect to find Tirpitz or their other heavy ships equipped with them in the near future as well. And should they be carrying anything more…” His implication was