Kirov III-Pacific Storm (Kirov Series) (24 page)

The report made no sense. Hara’s force
was as seasoned and skilled as any in the fleet. They had savaged the Americans
just months ago and assured a victory at Port Moresby. That thought set his
mind to that airfield, where he knew several squadrons of G3M2 and G4M1 bombers
were mustering. But those planes had only a modest capability against naval
targets at sea, particularly a fast moving capital ship as this one was
reported to be. It was given the code name
Mizuchi
, and the word was
flashed from one fleet command to another. Where was it heading? Was it merely
fleeing for a friendly port, trying to escape the Japanese trap sprung at
Darwin, or did it have a darker purpose? How could intelligence have missed its
presence in Darwin in the first place? There were too many unanswered
questions.

Yamamoto thought hard that night,
aboard the massive solid presence of the battleship
Yamato
. He could
send Yamaguchi’s carrier division after this enemy ship, but that would mean
confronting the American carriers at Guadalcanal with only his own force under
Nagumo. Something warned him not to dilute his naval air striking power,
particularly after the loss of the airfield at Lunga. So he made a decision
that he believed adequate to the requirements of both tasks before him.

“Send to Yamaguchi. He is to detach
the light carrier
Ryuho
, two cruisers and two destroyers and send them
northwest towards the Torres Strait to operate in conjunction with Admiral Hara
in pursuit of this enemy ship. The remainder of his task force, including
Hiryu
and
Soryu
will proceed immediately to Guadalcanal to coordinate air
strikes with Admiral Nagumo’s force. I am taking my heavy units due west into
the Solomons and will position the invasion force northwest of Guadalcanal off
New Georgia pending the destruction of the American carrier task force covering
their invasion. Admiral Nagumo will proceed to Guadalcanal from our present
position, and the two carrier task forces will crush the Americans between
them. After that is accomplished we can proceed with the invasion of
Guadalcanal in force, but this cannot be risked with American carriers at
large.”

It was to be a fateful and decisive
moment in the newly written history of WWII, a good plan considering the
agility with which it had been surmised. The loss of only one light carrier to
reinforce Hara’s group seemed insignificant, though somewhat embarrassing
considering that Hara already commanded a full fleet carrier division! It would
lead to a disaster that was simply impossible for Yamamoto to see in the
confident light of his own military mind at that point.

Chapter
17

Novak
had to say it was one of the most
unusual happenings of the entire war, an informal meeting to review routine
photo intercepts from coastwatchers that had blossomed into a major “incident,”
as he ended up calling it. The meeting was being held at FRUMEL Headquarters in
the Monterey Apartments of Queens Road, Melbourne Australia. FRUMEL itself was
an acronym for Fleet Radio Unit
MELbourne
, one of two
major cryptanalysis units still active in the Pacific, the other being Fleet
Radio Unit H or ‘Hypo’ in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. There had once been three such
units, but the third had been hastily evacuated from Manila Bay as the Japanese
closed in on that city in February of 1942. Many of the specialists that once
staffed that unit had slipped away on the submarine
Sea Dragon
, along
with 1.5 tons of equipment and materials vital to their operations, and now
they served to augment the vital intelligence work here at FRUMEL. Novak was
one of them.

The unit occupied most all of the
third floor of the posh Monterey Apartments, and he looked lazily out the window
at the green lawns and breezy foliage of the trees as he waited for his
associate to review the dispatch.

“British have something in the Coral
Sea we don’t know about?” The question was tossed across the desk like a piece
of loose paper, by Commander Oscar Osborne, another specialist in cryptanalysis
called in to review some very unusual photography that morning. Sometimes
called “Ozzie” by his associates, or simply “The Wizard” after the popular 1939
movie ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ he had been part of the group ever since the
submarine
Sea Dragon
made it safely away from their old intelligence
unit on Corregidor.

“Waters got his hands on that photo
yesterday,” said Novak. “He’s one of our boys up at Darwin. God knows what’s
happened to him by now. Probably half way to Katherine on that hell of a road
if he managed to get out. Lucky for us these photos made it out on a plane.
Funny thing about this one…It went right to the very top. A journalist, fellow
named Longmore up there on a whim, well he kicked it all the way up to the PM’s
office. Looks like he was an old friend of John Curtain.”

“Curtain is an old newspaper man,”
said Osborne. “The two were probably thick as thieves.”

“Well good for that. Have you taken a
look at that photo?” Novak gestured to the packet that had come in on the
morning motorcycle run from the airfield, and Osborne obliged.

“What the devil is that?” Osborne was
staring intently now, and looking around for a magnifying glass. “Get the
British silhouette book over there.”

Novak smiled. “Don’t bother,” he said.
“It’s not British. I went through the whole Royal Navy this morning and even
called Perth as well to talk to their liaison officer. They assure me they had
nothing at sea on the Kimberly Coast when that was taken—nothing at Darwin either
before the Japs hit the place—nothing they
know
of, that is. This fish
is something else entirely.”

Osborne was looking at the image
closely now. “Good size ship,” he said in a low voice. “Not much in the way of
big guns.”

“Well this tale becomes quite a
riddle, Ozzie,” said Novak. “This ship isn’t British, but apparently no one
bothered to tell the Japanese that. They’ve been after the damn thing hammer
and tongs ever since they spotted it. Those are Jap torpedo planes in those
photos. It seems the ship ran afoul of their operation against Darwin. Coast
watchers have had the show of a lifetime up there. They say the Japs hit this
thing with every plane they had. One report says he counted over sixty planes
attacking this ship, and there was a hell of a lot of fireworks.”

“I see…” Osborne kept staring at the
photo. “Did they sink it?”

“They hit the damn thing, but it
slipped away. So the Japs went after it with their screening force for the
Darwin operation. Coastwatchers reported a surface action too. Japs have a fast
battleship and several cruisers out after this ship, and it’s running for the
Torres Strait, should be there tonight and into the Coral Sea if it managed to
survive. Radio intercepts have picked up a name that seems to repeat every time
they reference this ship, so we think it’s a convenient handle, or code word
they’re using for it:
Mizuchi
.”

“What does it mean?”

“Sea dragon.” Novak smiled, the
reference to the submarine by that same name that had brought them all here
obvious and glaring.

“Sea dragon?” Osborne allowed himself
a smile, then looked closely at the photo again. “Well it’s not a British
ship.” Osborne finally realized the importance of that simple fact. “It’s
certainly doesn’t belong to the U.S. Navy either, that much I can tell you from
this photo alone.”

“I followed up on that one too,” said
Novak. “You’re correct. And the Dutch haven’t got anything in the area either,
in fact they haven’t got anything that big at all. It’s every bit a battleship
from the looks of it.”

Osborne raised his eyebrows. Every so
often the tedious routine of radio intercepts and decoding actually morphed
into something really interesting. But this was more than that. It had an air
of downright mystery about it, and a thrum of excitement stirred in him as he
looked at the photo. Then he recalled something he had gotten wind of through
channels…something about a ship that had given the British fits just days ago
in the Med.

“Say Novak…” he was reaching to recall
the information. “I heard talk about a ship in the Med that raised quite a
ruckus last week. It seems everyone and their mother was after it. Italians
tangled with it up near Bonifacio Strait, and then it ran west for Gibraltar.”

“Yes I caught that rumor too,” said
Novak. “It had to be something out of Toulon. A French ship, more than likely.”

No, thought Osborne. It wasn’t a
French ship, though he kept that to himself for the moment, not sure of what
Novak may have known. There was much more to that incident than they first
thought. Yes, official word was that a disaffected French battlecruiser had
made a run out of Toulon as Novak suspected, and it eventually surrendered to
the British at Gibraltar for internment at St. Helena. But Osborne had heard a
few other things about it, that Bletchley Park had been very wrapped up in the
matter…that the British Admiralty was throwing a thick, black overcoat over the
whole incident…that someone was supposedly en route to FRUMEL HQ at that very
moment to brief them on the matter. The Brits were apparently willing to share
a few secrets with their friends after all.

“
Mizuchi
,” said Osborne. “Japs
are out after a sea dragon, eh?”

“Yes, and mad as hell about it from
the sound of the radio traffic.” Novak scratched his head. “I decrypted some
traffic this morning in that batch we sent over to Halsey. The operation
against Guadalcanal must have caught Yamamoto flat footed. They’ve had to
improvise on their planned attack against Espiritu Santo.”

“You mean they’ve re-targeted the
whole thing at Vandegrift’s 1st Marines on Guadalcanal.”

“Exactly. But I caught one odd order
in the mix—a small detachment, light carrier and a few cruisers and destroyers.
They sent it north from their Western task force.”

“North? What for?”

“Take a look at that photo again,
Ozzie. North to the Torres Strait, eh? They want a bite of this sea dragon too.
”

“I’ll be damned,” Osborne breathed.

Then the phone rang and the lives of
Novak and Osborne were about to get much more interesting that morning. Mystery
was not half a word for it.

 *
* *

Kirov
raced east for the Torres Strait, and
behind her, chastened but undeterred, the enemy task force kept doggedly on
their heels. The senior officers traded shifts on the bridge, each snatching an
hour or two for some much needed sleep. Fedorov ran the ship at thirty-two
knots for three hours, and managed to extend their lead by another twelve miles
to just over twenty-seven nautical miles, or about 55,000 yards. Then, as they
approached the reef infested waters of the strait, he was forced to slow the
ship to twenty knots. If the enemy kept on at the twenty-eight knots they had
been making, they would get into firing range again in an hour and forty-five
minutes.

The Torres Strait was a very hazardous
body of water, and shipwrecks littered the seafloor there as silent testimony
to the dangers hidden beneath the aquamarine sea. In centuries past, the local
natives on the islands in the strait had a nasty habit of massacring stranded
sailors, so the place had a dark and well justified reputation as being
perilous. It was, in fact, one of the most dangerous stretches of water in the
world. With strong tidal currents and a five-meter tidal range on the eastern
side, navigation was a slow, careful affair, and Fedorov knew he would soon
have to reduce to ten knots or less.

“These waters are very shallow,” said
Fedorov. “No more than thirteen meters and our draft is just over nine meters.
Ahead one third and I want sonar active for the next hour Mister Tasarov,
lookouts to port and starboard, please. There are no pilotage channels
designated here for us, as in our day.”

“Aye, sir,” said Tasarov. “Going to
active sonar now.”

“I’m taking us through the Prince of
Wales Channel, just north of Hammond Island. It’s only 800 meters wide at its
narrowest point. And has strong tidal surges. I’ve spent the last half hour
working out our tidal window for a draught of nine meters, and we won’t have
much water beneath us when we transit.”

“My radar propagation is also being
affected by this sea mist,” said Rodenko. “But I’ll still have decent returns
on any aircraft.”

They knew this would be a perfect
place for enemy aircraft to make a strike, but thankfully, the scope seemed
clear of air contact for the moment. They navigated the narrow channel without
incident at ten knots, then Fedorov steered the ship for the North East Channel
towards Bramble Cay to enter the Coral Sea through Bligh Entrance. The passage
was slow going, past many hidden shoals and submerged reefs and rocky outcrops,
and the time ticked away.

Soon they could clearly see the
pursuing enemy ships on HD video fed by the aft Tin Man, and when the range had
closed to under 28,000 meters again, they heard a distant boom of thunder and
then the whine of incoming shells.

“Damn annoying,” said Karpov when the
first two rounds fell off their aft quarter, short by at least a thousand
meters.