Kirov II: Cauldron Of Fire (Kirov Series) (7 page)

H M S
Eagle
,
22,600 tons was commanded by Captain L. D. Mackintosh. She was begun by
Armstrong Whitworth as a battleship for the Chilean Navy in 1913, but in 1917
Britain purchased her for 1,334,358 pounds and she was commissioned for trials
as an aircraft carrier on April 13, 1920.

The last
British aircraft carrier to be lost was
Hermes
, which went down last
April in sight of Ceylon, sunk by Japanese bombing. Since the outbreak of war
three others have been lost. The first was
Courageous
, torpedoed in
September, 1939.
Glorious
was lost in 1940 after an action with the
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
off Norway, and the third was
Ark Royal
.”

Eagle
was the fifth carrier lost in the
war, thought Fedorov. He had been correct! But oddly, when he checked the date
of the article it read August 12, 1942, a full year after their last dreadful ordeal
in the North Atlantic. Since then they had vanished into to some unknown future
time where blackened cinders seemed to be all that remained of the world. They
had cruised across the whole of the Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea, and their
chronometer now read August 20. Yet checking his references it was clear that
the
Eagle
had been sunk August 11, 1942 at 1:15PM, and that story in the
Daily Telegraph
had come out a day later. The dates did not match up,
and he was suddenly confused.

The attack
by that plane, clearly not a modern aircraft of any sort, and the sudden change
from darkest night to mid-day sunshine convinced him that they were indeed
outcasts in another time again. Was Nikolin receiving a radio story about an event
that happened weeks ago? Or was the event current, happening now, and a clear
signpost to their present position in time? He needed more information, and he
looked to his radioman eagerly for any further news.

He stood up,
feeling the urgency of the moment and nagged by the realization that he should
be on the bridge. As he did so he noticed a photo of the Admiral and his wife
together there on the nightstand, and the thin tracings of pen on paper. The
Admiral had been writing a letter, it seemed, and Fedorov had been so intent on
getting his hands on the
Chronology of the War at Sea
that he did not
even notice it until he stood to leave. He passed a brief moment tussling with
the temptation to read the letter. The clear salutation was written at the top
in a firm hand,
“My Darling Wife….”

He smiled to
think that if the Admiral had begun this letter earlier, when they were in the
heat of action in the Denmark Strait, the woman had not even been born yet! And
if he composed it in recent days it was clear that she could not have survived
the devastation they had seen as they cruised from one blackened shore to
another.

He was
touched by the moment, but his thoughts suddenly left him feeling very alone.
Every man finds his comfort somewhere within, he realized. Even the Admiral
needed someone to hear him out on the long, empty nights aboard ship, lost as
they were in this impossible dilemma, so he wrote to his unseen wife. Every man
held on to something—memories, places, people he had known and loved, all
wrapped up in that nurturing inner place he called “home.”

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.

 Nine other
cruisers and some thirty destroyers, including forces from the Eastern Med as
well, would combine in one of the largest sea operations ever attempted. All
these warships had been gathered to the defense of just fourteen precious
merchant ships, including the vital fast oil tanker
Ohio
that Churchill had
wrangled from the Americans after much exertion of his unique powers of
persuasion.

The five
carriers bore exalted names born of empire:
Indomitable, Victorious, Eagle.
Two others would join as well, the
Argus
and
Furious
, the latter
with a special assignment in ferrying thirty-eight Spitfires to Malta’s hard
pressed air squadrons. The cruisers were named for provinces and outposts of
that empire:
Nigeria, Kenya, Manchester, Cairo,
and others bore names of
the same ancient Greek Gods who had presided over the fate of men on these
waters in ages past:
Charybdis, Sirius,
and
Phoebe
.