Kirov II: Cauldron of Fire

suffice.”

They waited out the interval, and fired their rocket at maximum range. All the while Rodenko noted the steady approach of another aircraft. It was clear that the British were taking no chances with them at all. The plane diverted briefly to the location where they had fired their missile, then quickly turned northwest on a heading to intercept them.

“Are they seeing us on radar?” asked Karpov. “What’s wrong with our jammers, Rodenko?”

“Nothing wrong, sir. I have the all their bandwidths snowed over.”

“They are just experienced and efficient men,” said Fedorov. “That man is flying by the seat of his pants out there, but he knows enough to get his plane northwest where we would be on our old heading.”

“At his present speed they will re-acquire our position in approximately ten minutes,” said Rodenko.

“Let them. They won’t learn anything they don’t already suspect. Our ruse is over, and now we run the gauntlet. Very well, rig the ship for black. We should reach the cape at zero one hundred hours. I’ll want the ship at battle stations by then, and we’ll alter course fifteen degrees to port to avoid the Almeria sea transit lanes. There are good thermals along the coast, and they make for excellent cruising stations for submarines. We’ll avoid them if we can, but by 01:thirty we may be engaged. I suggest we take whatever time remaining to check the weapons systems. I don’t want a repeat of that accident we had with the Klinok missiles. We’ll need every round we have.”

~ ~ ~

Aboard HMS Nelson Admiral Syfret had made the early assessment that this was a renegade French battlecruiser, on one side of the  French coin or another, and nonetheless maneuvered to get his battleships in the best possible position to engage if they did not comply with his request. He had separated his force at 18:00 hours earlier that evening, sending the three carriers under Rear Admiral St. Lyster on Victorious some forty miles south on a parallel course to his own, along with his last remaining cruisers and an escort of five destroyers. It was also necessary to detach the wounded destroyer Ithuriel, and he sent her off south with DD Quentin. This left him with his two battleships and six more destroyers, more than enough, he reasoned, to run this Geronimo to ground. When they got within gun range, he would signal Captain Troubridge on the carrier Indomitable to launch his Albacore II torpedo bombers for good measure. He’d get his battleships right astride Strasbourg’s line of advance and then have one last word before he let his 16 inch guns do the talking.

They were running W/T silent, but he imagined that Admiral Fraser had forsaken his role as an incognito observer on Rodney and was now on the bridge there. He signaled his intentions by lamp to his sister ship, asking her for her very best speed. When the lights winked back saying they would not be late for tea, he knew his hunch about Fraser on the bridge had been correct.

What was all this fuss and bother about, he thought. We’ll have the matter in hand in two or three hours. No need to cancel major operations and send Home Fleet rushing off like a chicken with its head cut off. Yet what about this sighting report coming over from Indomitable’ s 827 squadron. He did not know what to make of it.

~ ~ ~

Sub Lt. William Walter Parsons, Fleet Air Arm Observer, 827 Albacore Squadron off Indomitable was the lucky man who spotted Kirov that day, and the sight of the ship gave him the willies. As fate would have it, he had been up north with Force P a year ago for the planned raid at Kirkenes with this very same 827 Squadron on Victorious at that time. The appearance of a strange new German raider had forced Wake-Walker to cancel the mission and enter that long, ill fated hunt. Oddly, the history once recorded that he was to be shot down over Kirkenes and captured by the Germans, but all that changed when this mysterious ship appeared in the Norwegian Sea, though he never knew it.

The cancellation of the Kirkenes mission meant that he would not spend those hard years in a cold German POW camp, or make that torturous long march from Sagan, forced to push a wheel barrel for several hundred miles on those frozen ice-gutted roads. His favorite ring would not be warped by his gripping the arms on that wheel barrel, and it still fit his finger snugly where he wore it every day—his lucky ring. Lucky indeed, for his squadron had been hit particularly hard chasing after that raider, losing some very good men. He was one of the very few that made back alive. He still remembered the faces of the men who died, McKendrick, Turnbull, Bond, Greenslade, Miles… And the awful memory of those rockets in the sky, like a wild pack of voracious sharks swerving and swooping in on the planes…awful…

One look at the ship below, knifing through the dark sea off the Spanish coast brought all this back with the sureness of an old memory that might be summoned up by a sound, or a smell. And with it came a sense of dread and foreboding. He was to shadow this ship, but something forced him to pull on the yoke and put the plane into a turn, and get himself as far away from this place as possible. He made his report and, some minutes later, he got hold of himself, realizing he would have to circle round and re-acquire the target.

“What’s gotten into you?” he said aloud to himself. That ship, he knew, that’s what’s done it! I’ll not be a shirker, but I’ll be damned if that’s a French battlecruiser. No sir. That looks all the world like… But it couldn’t be here, could it? it couldn’t be…

It was.

Thankfully the fuel gauge on Parson’s plane allowed him to slip away with a little dignity, and he soon turned south for Indomitable. He had the odd feeling that he had been following a shadow, a nightmare, and the farther away from that demon he got the more he felt his old self again. When he landed on the carrier they would want him in the briefing room bang away. What should he tell them? He reported to his Squadron Leader, Lt. Commander Buchanon-Dunlop, and he spoke his mind.

“You weren’t with us back then,” he concluded, “and lucky for it. But this ship out there looks for all the world like the one we fought in the North Atlantic last August. Put most of my mates into the sea and stuck a fire bomb into Victorious as well.”

~ ~ ~

Admiral Syfret eventually received the opinion through proper channels, but didn’t weigh it too heavily. Men get spooked on these night operations, he knew. A case of the jitters before combat was normal. At least the man knew his duty, held on to his contact, and got a good read on her course and speed.

Parsons never knew that Fedorov had spared his life that night by declining to fire on his plane. So he would go on to survive the war, become a school teacher, and have grand children one day. Yet many in his 827 Squadron would not. They were already in the briefing room while the flight engineers worked the torpedoes onto the planes below decks. He would not be tasked to fly the strike mission, but would probably be up for battle damage assessment later on that night. So he caught one of his mates as he came out of the briefing room, tugging at his flight jacket.

“Have a care, Tom,” he said in a low voice. “Don’t bunch up on this one. Get down real low, and spread your flight out nice and wide. Stay down real low, and find any cover you can on the approach.”

It was the best advice Thomas Wales was to receive in his life.

~ ~ ~

Force Z pushed on, their course aiming for a point some thirty nautical miles southwest of Cabo de la Gata. The latest sighting reported that his quarry was moving extremely fast. At midnight they were some thirty-two nautical miles apart, or sixty kilometers, and closing on that same distant point. He sounded battle stations and the ship was trimmed for action, her big guns loaded, the heavily armored turrets slowly turning toward the direction they expected their adversary.

It was time for one last effort at settling the matter amicably, and he had his radioman broadcast a demand to reduce speed at once and prepare to be boarded by a British liaison officer. There was no response, and so he folded his arms, shaking his head and had the signalman wink a message to Admiral Fraser: “Contact will not heave to. Will commence firing as soon as practicable. Please join in.”

The men in the crow’s nest with their high powered binoculars would have the next say, and it would be a difficult sighting. Radar seemed all fouled, and the operators reported they could get no signal returns from any ship in the formation. So it would come down to the old fashioned methods, he thought, a pair of sharp eyes behind the glass and well trained gun crews. So be it. He had his quarry just where he wanted it, penned up against the