Crescendo Of Doom (31 page)

That was the nickname they gave to the small light cavalry tank, the BT-7. Apparently there had been a troop of these at Kansk, and now they were also arriving on the road leading south from Sverdlova.

Six Betushkas, fifteen armored cars and a goddamned armored train in the rail yard! That will have 20mm guns, maybe even 37s. And we’ve nothing in the way of a good AT gun here at all. This attack was badly planned. The ground element was not equipped to do the job alone without support from fleet airships. I should have spoken my mind in the briefing, but it’s too late to have regrets about that now. The decision was made, and there’s no going back.

He considered what to do, his eyes narrowing as he studied his map. The only way to deal with that armored train will be to get even farther east, and fight our way to the railway inn from that side of the marshalling yards…. That is, if we even get anywhere near that rail yard. As it stands, my men are having a tough time making any real headway here.

He summoned a Sergeant, and sent him to call in his last two rifle companies off
Armavir
and
Anapa
. They had been watching the road to the west, but he thinned out that defense, leaving only the MG Platoon, and the men of the motorcycle platoon that had managed to make it to their bikes and speed away when the Tartars came charging at them. Then he heard the roar of a loud explosion, and the skies lit up with evil red fire. Something was dying in the throes of that explosion, and up beyond the rising thunderheads there was fire in the east.

* * *

The
RS 82s did not miss, at least not the target Karpov had been aiming at, not the fleet flagship of his enemy, but the tail section of his own beleaguered battleship, Big Red. The cold calculation of his mind had seen what happened to
Krasny
when that forward gas bag was blasted open, and her nose slumped downwards, losing too much buoyancy there. They would never be able to match
Orenburg
in a climb now, and maneuvering with that bloodied nose was going to be very difficult. He could see the
Orenburg
, just 300 meters above Big Red, and executing a turn to bring all her gondola mounted guns to bear. In his mind, hardened by so many difficult hours of combat at sea, Big Red was doomed.

He allowed himself one grace, sending the order to Captain Alenin to abandon ship, and waited breathlessly until he saw men leaping from the side hatches in the gondolas. Most of the command level crew, and perhaps the gunners might get to safety, he thought. As for the riggers, bag men and engineers…

This was war.

He waited that one tense moment, nosing
Tunguska
down as Bogrov flapped his jaws at him, too stupid to realize what the Admiral was doing. Then he gave the order to fire his RS82s, knowing they would just have the range to hit what he was aiming at, the tail of Big Red where those three sealed canisters of highly explosive coal dust and kerosene were stored. It would not be a wide area explosion. The weapon had been designed to have its greatest effect by dispersing the dust and fuel as an aerosol first, but that was not possible. Yet the sheer power in those three canisters were going to raise hell, right beneath the huge silver mass of the
Orenburg.

The resulting explosion was massive, a huge broiling flame that expanded in a hot yellow fire, deepening to crimson red and jet black smoke. The entire tail section of Big Red was obliterated, the duralumin frames there blasted to pieces, which shotgunned out in all directions as a deadly rain of metal shrapnel. They flailed against the siding of the
Orenburg
, tearing through the outer canvass, clanking against her metal bones and lacerating the
Vulcan
lined flesh of her gas bags. Some wounds would quickly re-seal, others were gashed too deep, and helium hissed out in fitful jets as the airship rolled with the shock of the explosion.

Big Red shuddered with the blast, men shaken from exposed inner girders and ladders, their lifeless bodies falling into the grey clouds below. The fireball bloomed with anger, flames eventually reaching the
Orenburg
, just as Karpov had hoped. He clenched his fist, his jaw tight as he watched Big Red die its agonizing death, the fires rippling from that shattered tail section, rolling forward, consuming all as they went. The men on the bridge of
Tunguska
stood stunned, eyes wide, jaws slack with disbelief. Bogrov was pallid with shock, and then his cheeks reddened with hot anger.

“By god! You’ve killed Big Red! You murdering bastard!”

Karpov turned to face him. “The ship was lost! You knew that as well as I did. But look now, Bogrov. Have a good look at the
Orenburg!”

The enemy flagship rolled with the shock of the explosion, fire now leaping from the torn canvass siding, and losing elevation fast from a hundred cuts to her gas bags. The broiling flames from the fire had licked one engine, and it still burned, even after the thermobaric blast had expended itself. Karpov knew that he had dealt his enemy a fatal blow. They were losing elevation, fighting fires everywhere along the ship, and now they had lost that engine as well. He could swing up over the
Orenburg
and blast it to hell with his gondola guns, and that was exactly what he was going to do.

They watched for one last agonizing moment, as Big Red lost all remaining buoyancy, and began to fall, her twisted metal frame still glowing red near that shattered tail. Karpov saw one of the
Mishman
cross himself, and gave the man a disgusted grin. Did he think god had anything to do with the fate of that ship out there, or the good men he had just sent to their miserable end? No! That had been decided by me, he thought, Vladimir Karpov. It was my order, and my hand on the tiller of fate in this hour, and god has nothing to say about it.

“Up elevator—ten degrees!” he shouted. “Ready on all main guns. Target the
Orenburg
and give them hell!”

The stunned crew reacted, jerking to life again, moving on reflex, driven by the hard lash of Karpov’s voice. Then the guns were firing, the black explosions puffing in the sky around
Orenburg
, with other shells ripping into the massive side of the ship.
Tunguska
had a 500 meter elevation advantage, and the battle would be short and violent.

Karpov took up his field glasses, his leather gloved hand steady as he peered at the savage fate of his adversary. Are you there, Volkov? Did you have the guts to come out here with the rest of your fleet? Then, as if in answer, he saw what looked like a round metal egg fall from the underside of the enemy ship. He followed it down, seeing a parachute deploy from its top, fluttering in the storm. Volkov! That bastard had an escape pod! It could only be him. He was fleeing his burning ship like a rat, probably hoping to get to his ground troops before my men find him. I’ve got to get down there!

He turned, seeing Bogrov still standing there like a blithering fool, staring at him with those big eyes, a look of shock and disgust on his face. Then he remembered what the Air Commandant had said to him, shouting at him when he had struck his fate shattering blow against the tail of Big Red. He lowered his field glasses, looking for the peg on the bulkhead beam where he hung them, then strode over to Bogrov his eyes hard. In one swift motion he raked the back of his leather gloved hand across the other man’s face.

“Get hold of yourself, Bogrov! See to the ship! And If you ever speak to me again like that, it will be the last words you ever say. Understand?”

Bogrov understood.

Part X

Fire In The East

“The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful, and unrelenting harshness. All officers will have to rid themselves of obsolete ideologies. I know that the necessity for such means of waging war is beyond the comprehension of you generals but . . . I insist absolutely that my orders be executed without contradiction.”

―
Adolph Hitler ~ March 30, 1941

Chapter 28

Vladimir
Karpov was not the only one acquainted with the harshness and cold reality of war. And the fires that burned Big Red and cast the fate of Ivan Volkov to an uncertain future were not the only flames being kindled in the east.

In a speech he delivered to officers of OKW, just months before this day, Adolf Hitler had set the prelude for what was now about to happen. It was to be the largest military operation ever mounted in human history, the practice of the dreadful art of war as it would seldom ever be seen again. By comparison, the American “Operation Desert Storm,” that defeated the Iraqi Army in just 100 hours of fast paced mechanized fighting, was only a small corps level affair. Barbarossa would be ten times bigger, a titanic clash along a line of fire and steel that would extend from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

As Hitler so darkly predicted, it would also see the practice of warfare become that unprecedented, unrelenting, and merciless fire that threatened to consume an entire continent. To say that it would be conducted with harshness was an understatement. Here men and machines would clash in a struggle where pain, misery, death and destruction were the order of the day—but this time the war in the east would be quite different.

In 1908, young Sergei Kirov had put an end to Joseph Stalin, long before he ever rooted himself in power. And with his death, much of the bitter, unrelenting harshness he visited upon his own people never happened. Yes, there were power struggles in the beginning, old rivalries. Molotov and Trotsky had to be cowed, Lenin embraced, and power centered on the one man who had been able to hold it in those tumultuous years, Sergei Kirov.

The long civil war that followed had been costly in lives, and seemed interminable. The fighting would flare up for two or three years, then quiet down, but it always left a contested boundary in the east of the Motherland, where Ivan Volkov schemed and maneuvered for power, and Kolchak and his Lieutenants held sway in Siberia.

There was misery, deprivation, and hunger that often became famine, fighting that became murderous at times, but Kirov held the Soviet state together, and kept the outlying provinces of Orenburg and Siberia at bay. He ruled, however, not with the steel hand that Stalin wielded, but by getting other men to believe in him, and to follow him out of a sense of loyalty and admiration. At times incipient conspiracies cropped up, and they were dealt with, but the vast archipelago of gulags, the prison camps in the cold hinterland of Russia that had been built under Stalin, never appeared in the Soviet state that Sergei Kirov forged.

In like manner, there was no “Great Purge” in 1934, initiated by Stalin after Kirov’s own assassination that year had been avoided. The repression and terror of the purges never stalked the land, and the Soviet Army itself was not decapitated with the arrest and execution of nearly 50,000 officers. Instead these men were still in their posts, and the long years of on again, off again fighting with the Orenburg Federation, had put a much sharper edge on Soviet steel. The military was well tried, hardened by this combat, and much more ready for the storm that was now about to be unleashed.

Divided as Russia was, Kirov’s Soviet state would not have the vast resources the combined Soviet Union had in Fedorov’s history, and particularly the oil it needed to fight a long war on the scale of the one that was now beginning. Soviet Russia had the manpower, with most of the big population centers, and a well established industrial base. Orenburg had the fuel but lacked strong industry to produce heavy weapons. Siberia had enormous untapped resources, tough, hardy soldiers, but little industry. It was also facing a three front war until Karpov reached an accommodation with Kirov. Yet the fighting with Orenburg continued, and the Japanese occupying Vladivostok were a growing threat in the far east.

When Germany began its wars of conquest, the long years of infighting in Russia suddenly changed when Ivan Volkov joined the Axis powers. The flow of oil to Russia, grudging trade that had been exchanged in periods when the civil war was dormant, now came to a halt. The Siberians had never presented much of a threat to the other two states, until Karpov arrived, pulled together the aging Siberian air fleet, began raising new divisions, and rapidly built up strength on the Orenburg frontier.

Volkov had thought to trade Omsk for peace, knowing the storm that was coming, but something in the personal rivalry that grew from his suspicions concerning Karpov and Ilanskiy led him to seek the destruction of the Siberian state. Yet Volkov was now also contending with a strong offensive in the Caucasus, launched by the Soviets in 1940 after Orenburg joined the Axis. Hitler and Germany were not then in a position to render assistance, and this forced Volkov to initially trade ground for time, and begin mustering new divisions from his own hinterland provinces in Kazakhstan.

By May of 1941, on the eve of Operation Barbarossa, the fighting in the Caucasus had reached Maykop, the one oil center closest to the Soviet borders. Volkov had already lost the vital Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, and the big supply center at Krasnodar on the Kuban River. The front then followed the line of the Kuban, through Kropotkin to Salsk. Orenburg held a fortified region around Elista, but from there the front was nebulous all the way to the Volga. The great industrial center of Volgograd had long been in Kirov’s hands, and it was never to be called “Stalingrad.”

Yet the lower Volga was occupied by the Orenburg Federation, and an equally vital center for supplies and industry had grown up in Astrakhan. Volkov had built two important railroads from there, one to Elista and then down to Stavropol, and a second running south along the Caspian coast through Kyzlyar, Makhachlkala and on to Baku. These vital rail lines, and the sea connection from Astrakhan to other ports on the Caspian, were the primary means of getting supplies into the Caucasus, and oil out.