Kirov II: Cauldron of Fire

Who was out there? By God, something survived this hell of a war after all! But who? And what was bearing down on them now in the grey skies above. Grey skies? Where has the night gone? He looked out to the horizon, astounded to see it brightening with each passing second. It was just past one in the morning when he rose from his bunk to clear his mind and take this walk on the aft deck. Could he have idled here for four hours? It seemed like minutes to him. Then all these questions suddenly coalesced into a dark shape in the sky, bearing down on the ship from the aft quarter. He reached for the next rung on the ladder, breath coming fast now, and his heart racing more with anxiety than anything else. Every instinct in his body screamed danger, and the adrenaline rushed through his system, giving him renewed strength to climb.

What now, he thought, his mind racing ahead of him to the bridge. Did Fedorov see it? Would he know what to do? Thankfully, the sound of a warning claxon signaling battle stations was a relief.

The drone of the engines was very loud now, so much so that Volsky stopped and craned his next to look behind and above where the ominous winged shadow loomed in the glowering sky. Then it suddenly seemed to come alive with white fire, and he could clearly see the hot streak of tracer rounds coming towards the ship, followed at once by the harsh rattle of what sounded like heavy caliber machine guns. They were under attack!

August 11, 1942 — Tyrrhenian Sea East of Sardinia

Flight Officer George-Melville-Jackson was up in his twin engine Bristol Beaufighter VIC for a reconnaissance run. Assigned to the newly arrived 248 Squadron, he had landed on Malta the previous day from Gibraltar where the squadron had been flying missions for Coastal Command. Now the flight of six Beaufighters was to support the crucial effort at hand as Britain struggled to push yet another convoy through the dangerous waters of the Mediterranean to send much needed supplies of food, munitions and most importantly, oil to the beleaguered island outpost.

He had flown northwest over the dangerous waters of the Sicilian Narrows, and then turned north towards the Tyrrhenian Sea until he reached a position about 300 nautical miles out where he made a graceful turn as he began to scour the sea for signs of enemy shipping. With the convoy due in just a few days time, it was imperative that the fighters and bombers on Malta keep the seas clear of heavy enemy units, and Melville-Jackson did not have to wait long before he made his first contact. Squinting through his forward windshield, his eye was pulled to a strange glow on the sea below. He nudged the stick and eased his plane down a few degrees for a better look .

“What’s this, Lizzy?” he said aloud, invoking the name of his sweetheart and wife back home. “What have we got here?”

He spoke into his face mask, somewhat annoyed that he had not been advised of the contact sooner. “Sleeping are you, Tommy? What’s that down there at three o-clock? Not much good having these new radars in the nose if you’re not going to use them, eh?” He squinted at the strange glow below them, as if the water was upwelling from bottom and churning the surface of a quarter mile swath of the sea. There he could now vaguely discern a dark shadow in the center of the disturbance. Was it a submarine coming up from below? Impossible. This was much too big for a U-Boat.

Designed as a night fighter, his Beaufighter was also equipped with Britain’s latest airborne intercept radar set in its nose, the Mark VIII unit with one of the newest concentric screens, and he wanted to know if it had the contact as well on this initial dry run. All the other Beaus had the older AI Mark IV radars, and the Germans had found its bandwidth and were doing a good job of jamming it in recent weeks. It was hoped his new set would solve the problem.

“Not a whisper of anything on my screen the whole way out,” said Thomason on radar, “but right you are now… reading something at five miles—very odd though.”

“It looks big! I suppose we had best get down and have a look.”

Melville-Jackson put the plane into a fast descent, racing down through the pre-dawn sky with his two powerful supercharged radial engines roaring as he went. His navigator and radar man snapped alert now in the rear cupola when the plane went into action.

As he dove on the contact Jackson tightened his jaw, lips pursed beneath his sandy mustache, expecting the skies to light up with flak at any moment, but none came. A moment later the shadow on the sea took on the ominous shape of a warship, its superstructure and battlements now quite evident as he closed the distance.

“What, have we caught the Macaronis flat footed this time?” He smiled, sure he had come upon a big Italian cruiser positioning itself to lay in wait for the convoy. “Let’s announce ourselves, Tommy,” he shouted through the headset.

The Beaufighter was one of the most powerful long range fighters in the RAF inventory. It’s bomb bays on the lower fuselage had been removed to mount four 20mm cannon there, and this was augmented by six Browning .303 machineguns in the wings, more firepower than any smaller fighter, and even more than many heavier bombers might muster.

As the plane descended he could see no markings or service flags, but he was certain from flight briefings that there would be no friendly ships in these waters if he encountered anything. On another day he might have made one high altitude flyby for an IFF run before he made a strafing attack, but not today, not with hostilities impending and the noose tightening on the island fortress as never before. Rommel had pushed damn near all the way to the Nile and Jerry was keen on smashing what was left of resistance on Malta so they could get him the supplies he needed for one last big push. If this new General Montgomery was to have any chance of stopping him short of Alexandria, they would have to make sure the sea lanes remained a hostile environment for Axis supply ships. Malta was the key to that effort—Malta and men like Melville-Jackson in his Bristol Beau. He tightened his finger on the gun triggers as he aimed the plane at the ship below, amazed to see a pulsing light surround the shadow on the sea.

“Get a message off,” he called back to his navigator. “Sighted one hell of a big cruiser, these coordinates. Saying hello before we return home.” He was in no hurry to get back to Takali airfield on Malta, but switched on his gun cameras as he dove, mindful that intelligence would want more than his word on the sighting. Pity we didn’t have a torpedo at hand for a moment like this, he thought. Perhaps another time.

Then he fired, and the powerful 20mm cannons snarled in anger, joined by the fitful chatter of his Browning .303s. The guns sent a hail of iron at the center of the ship, raking the sea in a wild rain of fire and water and smashing into the superstructure in a storm of fire and smoke.

~ ~ ~

Volsky heard the guns firing, then the terrible howl of the plane’s engines as it flashed by overhead. The sea was awash with spray where the leading rounds fell short, but they raked across the center of the ship, shuddering into her superstructure and sending a scatter of flayed aluminum shrapnel and hot white sparks flying in all directions as the heavy rounds slammed into Kirov with deadly effect. Admiral Volsky felt a searing hot pain as something struck his side and leg, and he was flung from his perch on the ladder, falling all of eight feet with a hard thud as his head struck a hand rail below. He was lucky he had not climbed higher, as the fall itself could have killed him. As it was, he lay unconscious and bleeding from shrapnel wounds on the deck below, and did not hear the shrill panic that wailed through the ship as heavy booted men were running in all directions, shouting and donning life preservers and helmets as they manned their battle stations.

On the bridge, acting Starpom, Anton Fedorov heard the awful drone of the plane as it dove to attack, hastening to the port viewport in a state of surprise and shock. Rodenko had been complaining of a strange interference on his sensor screens—Tasarov as well, but they had seen and heard nothing until the distant sound of an aircraft emerged from the thick cottony silence of the night, strangely attenuated, now loud and threatening, and then hollow and forlorn. The air seemed suddenly charged with heavy static, and a throbbing pulsation seemed to quaver all around them. Fedorov took in the scene outside the ship with wild surmise. The sea was aglow with undulating light, and the skies were brightening with an impossible luminescence. He glanced quickly at his chronometer and read the time. It was 1:37 in the morning, and the night had been clear and dark just a few moments ago, the new moon not yet risen. What was happening?

Then the sound of the aircraft seemed an angry roar, and Fedorov’s better instincts for survival prompted him to wheel about. “Sound alarm,” he shouted. “Battle Stations!”

A split second later the night sky seemed to erupt with light and fire, something came flashing down from above in terrible rage, and white hot shafts of light seemed to pass in through the view panes and bulkheads, like