Kirov (42 page)

That
got the Captain's attention immediately. He moved quickly to Rodenko’s side
looking at the scope, his eyes dark and serious. “Chief Orlov, bring the ship
to battle stations. Mister Samsonov, ready on the S-300 SAM system.” This was
the same long-range missile-defense system that the Admiral had used so
effectively against the first British strike launched by
Victorious
and
Furious
three days ago. The Captain thought to get off a missile barrage as soon as
possible, before the enemy had a chance to close with his position. There would
be no repeat of the near run torpedo that had nearly struck the ship.

As
he gave the order, Fedorov turned, the anxiety clear on his face. He had been
reading more about the American presence in the North Atlantic and knew what
these planes were and where they were bound. “Excuse me, sir,” he called, but
Karpov waved him off.

“Not
now, Mister Fedorov, this is a man's work.”

Fedorov
ignored the insult, for he knew he had to speak. “Sir, this is not a strike
wave!” he said emphatically. “These are the American P-40 fighters that I told
you about earlier. They are simply being transferred from the carrier to their
bases in Iceland. They are unarmed, sir!”

Karpov
scowled at him. “And how might you know this? Simply because it is written in
that book of yours? You expect me to put this ship and its crew at risk? The
British may have contacted the Americans and advised them of our position. The
history you are reading may have changed, Mister Fedorov. You were just
worrying about that a moment ago. So don't bother me with these silly details,
we have another battle to fight. If you are afraid of wolves, don’t go to the
woods, but that is where we find ourselves.”

The
Captain ordered Samsonov to begin programming his barrage, locking acquisition
radars onto the targets. “This is a large group of planes,” he said. “I want no
mistakes here. I assume you have completed your maintenance checks on these
missiles?”

“We
have, sir,” Samsonov was sitting upright in his seat, his back and shoulders
taut, eyes bright, his hands quickly adjusting the dials and switches of his
Combat Information Center. He turned and gave an order to a junior
mishman
,
watching until he was satisfied the command had been carried out properly.
Karpov could see the heat of battle was on him, and it was exactly why Samsonov
was the perfect warrior for a situation like this. He didn’t think, he simply
acted. He was like a spring in a well crafted mechanism, and would do his job
the instant Karpov pushed on the right lever.

Rodenko
interrupted, calling out a new target. “Con, I have surface contact, extreme
range, reading four ships bearing two-two-five, speed approximately 20 knots.”

“Captain—”
Fedorov tried again, but Karpov spun about, pointing at him.

“There,”
he said starkly. “What are these ships doing, Mister Fedorov, delivering milk?”

“That
will be the carrier
Wasp
and her escorts. They should be turning about
soon and heading south. They pose no threat, sir.”

“They
most certainly will pose no threat when I have finished with them,” said
Karpov.

“But,
sir, you cannot attack these ships! Remember what the Admiral said? What if the
Americans react by entering the war early?”

“Mister
Orlov…” Karpov turned to look for his dour Chief of Operations. “Please escort
Mister Fedorov from the bridge. He is relieved.” Karpov had other plans for the
Americans. Whether they entered the war now or four months from now was no
longer his concern. He would see to it that they never reached the Rhine River
before Russian troops got there first. This was only the beginning.

“Aye,
sir.” Orlov’s looming presence was a shadow over Fedorov a moment later, and
though he knew the Captain was about to make a terrible mistake, there was
nothing more the navigator could do. Orlov would make a point of making his
life miserable for the next month, he knew, if any of them lived that long. He
gave the Captain a long, sullen look, then started for the rear hatch of the
bridge citadel, receiving a not so gentle nudge in the back by Orlov as he
went. The Chief looked over his shoulder, grinning at the Captain. “I’ll send
up Tovarich,” he said. “He’s not so talkative.”

~
~ ~

The
33rd
Pursuit
Squadron was a part of the larger 33rd Fighter Group defending the East Coast
of the United States. Its pilots proudly wore the shoulder patch of a blue
shield with a flaming sword above the moniker, “Fire From the Clouds.” Yet they
were to encounter exactly that as they flew in formation, when the barrage of
eight S-300 missiles suddenly clawed through the morning sky in front of them.
2nd Lieutenant Joe Shaffer saw them first, calling out the sighting on his
radio.

“Hey,
what’s that coming up at twelve-o-clock?” It looked for all the world like a
flaming sword, long, sleek and burning in the sky with a fiery tail and fuming
exhaust. He only had a second to think this, however, for the high speed
missiles closed the distance at a frightful rate and soon the sky ignited with
fire and a hail of lethal metal fragments ejected from a series of tightly
packed metal rods in the exploding warheads. Shaffer was dead before he could
say another word, his plane riddled with shrapnel. So were Dunks and Bailey,
his two wing mates. His sub-flight of three planes extinguished by a single
missile.

Far
back in the formation, Lt. Commander Boone watched with amazement and horror as
six more violent explosions took down the old P-40s as if they had been flies
swatted from the sky. Six, then eight more were flaming their way down towards the
sea, Meeks, Hubbard, Walker, Huntsdorf and Freeman dead as they fell; Bethel,
Bradley and Riggen all unlucky enough to still be conscious as their planes
crashed. The Warhawks, the famous planes of the Flying Tigers, were falling.

Boone’s
only instinct was to push hard, open the throttle, and put the plane into a sudden
dive. There was no way he would ever out climb the fiery streaks that had
devoured his fellows, so he would get down as low as he could. Only those who
had the same idea in those frantic first few split seconds would survive.
Anyone who thought to bank left, right, or to put on power and climb was caught
up in the wild spray of searing razor-like shrapnel that had gutted the heart
of the formation, just as the missiles had skewered the planes off
Furious
.
At least then, the British pilots may have had some expectation that they were
flying into danger. For the Americans, their sunny morning, after having had
the thrill of taking off from an aircraft carrier, was suddenly transformed
into a blazing nightmare.

Eighteen
planes were destroyed by the missile salvo, with six others damaged so badly
that they also went down into the sea. Of these only one man would be rescued.
The remaining six, who had thought to dive hard to the deck along with Boone,
were the only planes to make it back to the carrier
Wasp
. Not knowing
what was ahead of them, they wisely turned back towards the naval Task Group,
shaken with fear and alarm, and careening low over the wave tops. Boone had the
presence of mind to get on the radio and shout out the only warning
Wasp
would receive. “Mayday! Mayday! We’re under attack!”

Along
the way back there was one last harrowing moment when he looked over his
shoulder and saw yet another fiery contrail streaking in toward his position,
high overhead, yet it went on by, ignoring the tiny fighter planes below,
intent on other prey. Another followed it, then a third, and when he and his
hapless comrades finally saw the distant silhouettes of the task force he could
see the anger of fire and smoke darkening the horizon. What had happened? His mind
had no reference point for the things he had seen in the sky that morning, and as
he drew near the task force and began to pull up to gain altitude, he could see
that the cruiser
Vincennes
and destroyers
O’Brien
and
Walke
were spitting out flak from every gun they had—at him! A moment later he saw
why. Behind them the carrier
Wasp
was a mass of broiling flame and
smoke.

“Hey,
lookout you navy rats!” he shouted into his radio set. “We’re friendly!” The navy
was taking no chances, he knew. They had been hit, saw incoming aircraft, and
they were sending up a wall of flack in reprisal. The destroyers were up at high
revolutions, dropping depth charges in their churning wakes, but Boone knew
this was no U-boat attack. The cruiser was lighting up the sky with all of her eight
.50 caliber machine guns, two 37mm AA guns, and even her 5 inch secondary
batteries, which doubled as AA guns, were getting into the fray. Friendly or
not, he wasn’t sticking around.

Boone
banked sharply away, a few of the other planes tailing after him, and he headed
away from the navy ships until cooler heads could prevail. He’d get on the
radio and find out what to do later. He reasoned he could head west and reach
the coast of Greenland soon enough, or just ditch his plane later near a friendly
ship if it came to it. One look at
Wasp
told him he wasn’t going to get
a chance to complete his carrier qualification ticket and make a landing there.
He looked over his shoulder and saw the ship heeling over to one side in a bad
list, and thought he saw men jumping from her flaming decks into the sea.

God
almighty. It wasn’t the Japs, and it certainly wasn’t the Brits that had
attacked them. It had to be the Germans, but with what? When he had gained a
little altitude he saw them again, angry red sharks streaking in and diving for
the navy ships. One came in on the deck, accelerating to an impossible speed,
another just dove in from above, both knifing into the cruiser
Vincennes
with pinpoint precision, igniting a shuddering explosion.

He
watched the orange fire ignite amidships on the cruiser, a black fist of smoke
punching up into the sky above her. What was the enemy firing? It looked like
torpedoes were streaking through the sky, but this was no U-Boat, he knew. He
had never seen anything like it in his life.

“God
Almighty!” There was nothing else he could say.

His
presence over the ships was a cause for much alarm and confusion. The sailors
thought they were being attacked by enemy planes until one finally spotted a
white star on the wings of the last plane high tailing it off after Boone.

“Hey,
that’s one of our P-40s,” he said. “Hold your fire!”

~
~ ~

Fifteen
miles
to the
southwest, Task Force 16 plodded along at a sedate 15 knots, a fan of five
destroyers out in a wide forward arc followed by the cruisers
Quincy
and
Wichita
. Behind them came the lumbering hulk of the old battleship
Mississippi
leading four other steamers in columns of twos, the transports bearing
equipment and supplies for the newly established garrison on Iceland.
Mississippi
led her four steamers on like a fat mother goose, not realizing that what they
would come to call a deadly “Nazi raider” was moving south like a bad weather
front, bringing the rumble of thunder, lightning and war with her. The men on
the bridge had heard the frantic radio calls of the P-40 pilots. Now they
looked anxiously forward, scanning the horizon until they saw a pillar of dark
smoke, far too large to be coming from a ship’s stacks.

“Sound
General Quarters,” said the Captain. “That’s a ship on fire ahead. Better get
the destroyers revved up. There could be U-Boats about.”

Captain
Jerald Wright had tipped his hat to the new light carrier
Wasp
when she
pulled away some time ago, and now he looked through his field glasses to see
the carrier burning on the near horizon, a long column of charcoal smoke
staining the sky ahead. Whether they knew it yet or not, the Yanks were at war.

Part IX

Dilemmas

“It
would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new
step, uttering a new word is what they fear most… Power is given only to those
who dare to lower themselves and pick it up. Only one thing matters, one thing;
to be able to dare!”

—Fyodor
Dostoevsky

Chapter
25

When
Samsonov
reported
that the American planes had been decimated, and their carrier struck by three
Moskit-II Sunburn missiles, the crew in the CIC cheered loudly. Karpov stood
proudly on the bridge, his arms clasped behind his back, a satisfied grin on
his face as the Weapon’s Chief finished his report. In all their maneuvers and
war games the
Kirov
had been pitted against their one great nemesis, an
American carrier task force. They had finally sunk one, or so they now
believed.

Admittedly,
this was a far more scaled down version of that threat, an old light escort
carrier compared to the massive nuclear strike carriers
Kirov
had been
built to oppose. It was little wonder, then, that the Russian ship dispatched
her easily enough. The Americans had been steaming blithely along, without the
slightest inkling that any threat was near. They had received no official word
of the British dilemma concerning this new German raider until it was too late.
Their P-40s had carried nothing more than a standard load of machine gun
ammunition, and the main attack squadrons assigned to
Wasp
had been left
behind in Norfolk. The carrier had only 3.5 inch side armor, and so Samsonov
was able to use sea skimmers in the final approach to easily penetrate this and
wreak havoc deep inside the ship. The explosions erupted up through the unarmored
flight deck, igniting fires the length of the whole ship. Four of her six
boilers were destroyed and the remaining two were off line within minutes due
to the heat of the fires, which were so hot that bulkheads protecting undamaged
areas around them were glowing red.