Kirov III-Pacific Storm (Kirov Series) (32 page)

“This is strike leader Sakamoto,” he
shouted through his microphone. “All planes form on me. This Shadow Dancer has
slipped beneath the sea. We’re going home…”

 *
* *

Aboard
Kirov
they braced themselves
for the attack. Karpov saw the AR-710 Gatling guns jerk to life and spit their
lethal flaming fire at the oncoming torpedo planes, two were found and quickly
flamed. There came a third shudder, so noticeable now that every man on the
bridge instinctively reached to brace themselves, and the Captain wondered if
the ship had already been struck by a bomb. He saw another bomb fall off the
starboard side, a tall geyser exploding upward in the sea, but the whole scene
seemed veiled and strangely out of focus. The
Kashtan
system was now
firing its twin Gatling guns, almost straight up in a snarling rattle of
violence and flame. Then the planes he had been squinting at on the horizon
seemed to blur and waver in his field glasses and he reached to adjust the
focus. As he looked again, he saw the planes were gone, then there again,
driving through the smoke of a fallen comrade downed by the AR-710s.

Then the ship seemed to quaver, the
lights winking on the bridge, a strange ozone smell was in the air and a
crackle of static. Rodenko pushed back away from his radar screen, thinking
that a power surge was shorting out his board. They heard an awful, distended
roar that seemed to stretch thin to a terrible wail. Something was coming in at
them from above, like a shadow of death, and it suddenly seemed to pass right
through the ship wailing like a banshee. Two men on the bridge actually
cowered, reflexively shielding their heads and crouching low, but it was all
sound and shadow, then an eerie calm, and complete silence.

The guns had ceased firing, their fire
control radars spinning fitfully as they searched in vain for targets that were
no longer there. Rodenko’s system winked on again as the bridge lights quavered
to life. He saw nothing on his screen and thought that his radar was down, the
delicate phased array system shorted out by the static charge they had
experienced.

Karpov was standing by the foreword
viewport, shifting his field glasses this way and that, up and down, yet he saw
nothing, heard nothing.

The enemy was gone.

 *
* *

“We
must have shifted again!” Fedorov said excitedly. “Right
in the middle of that attack! I wasn’t aware that Dobrynin had completed his
maintenance procedure.”

Admiral Volsky was on the bridge with
them now, smiling broadly. “From the sound of things we were in the thick of
it,” he said. “I could hear the missiles firing, but the sound of the planes
just kept getting closer and closer. Believe me, it was very worrisome.”

They explained what they had discussed
with Dobrynin to Karpov, who listened with great interest “Amazing,” he said at
last. “Nikolin told me something about Dobrynin, but I had the ship’s defense
on my mind and could think of nothing else. It’s a pity! We fired every last
missile we had at those planes. Had I known we were going to pull this
vanishing act, I would have saved us the missiles.”

“No, Karpov,” said Volsky, “it has
been a hard lesson these many weeks, but I think we have learned to shoot first
and ask questions later.”

“It was astounding,” said Rodenko. “At
the very end I thought I saw something pass right through the ship—just like
those shells came through the citadel when we first appeared in the Med, yet
caused no damage.”

“We were pulsating for a while again,”
said Fedorov,”

“Yes!” the Admiral put in. “I was down
with Dobrynin, and he reported those strange flux events in the reactor core
again. This time I could hear it myself, when he pointed it out, and sure
enough, the data stream monitors recorded the event as well.”

“It’s shuddering to think that one of
those planes must have plunged right through the ship,” said Fedorov “but we
were just enough out of phase with that time frame that there was no substance
to us then. We were here, but
not
here, not in the exact moment the
plane was. And I think that we would have be exactly in phase with the plane in
time for it to strike us physically.”

“This is all more than I can fathom
for the moment,” said Volsky. “The only question is this: where are we now? Are
we back in the future again? If that turns out to be the case I think we will
stay for a while. The world there was empty and bleak at times, but at least no
one was shooting at us.”

Nikolin spoke up, saying he had
nothing at all on his radio set now. “The bands were virtually jammed with
radio traffic earlier,” he said, “not only with the local traffic from those
planes, but also with more distant signals. I think there was a big battle
underway somewhere.”

“And thank God we are no longer a
target,” said Volsky. But he spoke too soon, his elation quashed by another
call from engineering. It was Dobrynin.

“It’s back again, sir. I can hear it,
and I have the same confirming flux data sets on the recorders, except this
time the line is below the median, not above like the others. Very strange,
sir.”

The Admiral set down the receiver,
listening, his senses keenly alert, looking around him as if to see signs and
effects of what Dobrynin was talking about there on the bridge, but all seemed
calm and quiet. He walked slowly to the forward view pane to look at the sea,
thinking he felt a slight shudder, and a ripple of movement underfoot.

“Did anyone else feel that?”

“Yes sir,” said Fedorov. “It was very
subtle, and I felt the same thing before those planes came in.”

Nikolin was suddenly alert again, his
head cocked to one side, and a perplexed look on his face. “Admiral I… I think
I’m hearing something again.” But the signal was gone, an echo lost in the wash
of static.

Fedorov had a grim expression on his
face. “It isn’t over,” he said. “We’re still moving, pulsing again. Perhaps we
have not yet settled into a new timeframe.”

They felt it a second time, a deeper
thrum, followed by a slight roll of the ship, as though it had hit an unseen
wave and was jostled about, though the seas were still and calm. Nikolin heard
much more now, voices and signals quavering in his headset. Rodenko’s Top Mast
radar screen seemed to trace out cloudy contacts, but when the line swept
around to that point again, the scope was clean. Then his scope seemed to come
to life, the signals clear and sharp. Nikolin confirmed that something had
happened as well.

“I have heavy radio traffic again,” he
said. “Just as I did earlier.”

“Conn…Airborne contact at ten thousand
feet and descending. Strong signal!”

Everyone instinctively looked up, as if
they expected another Japanese dive bomber to come barreling through the roof
of the citadel at any moment. Then Rodenko blinked at the screen. “Wait a
second—it’s the KA-40! I just got IFF telemetry and it’s reading green.”

“I had almost forgotten about the
helo,” said Karpov. “I saw it fire its air defense load-out at those dive
bombers!”

“Contact that helo, Mister Nikolin.”
The Admiral came shuffling over to his radio man’s station.

“Mother one to KA-40, do you copy,
over?”

They had an answer seconds later.

“KA-40 to Kirov, thank God we’ve found
you! Where have you been? We’re running low on fuel. Request permission for
immediate landing.”
It was Lieutenant
Alexie
Rykov
.
He had been top of the duty list for helo operations that morning and had seen
the show of a lifetime as he watched the Japanese planes come in for that last
attack. He fired off the only four air-to-air missiles he had, then could do
little else. When his telemetry link to the ship faded out, his first thought
was that
Kirov
had been hit, but he could see no sign of an explosion
below, and the Japanese planes still seemed to be buzzing about like agitated
flies. Yet there was no sign of the ship, visually or on his radar. In one
heart-rending moment he thought
Kirov
had sunk, and he had been
searching for the ship ever since, long hours, putting sonobuoys in the sea and
using dipping sonar in the water, but finding nothing.

‘Tell him to land immediately,” said
Volsky. Then he looked at Fedorov.

“Well our little experiment worked,
Fedorov, yet not for long. The presence of that helicopter out there tells us
we must have shifted back again, yes? Back to the same point in time we have
just come from. Surely it did not move with us.”

“I have no further contact on those
Japanese planes,” said Rodenko. “My screen is clear.”

“Your radar always acts up when we
move,” said Karpov. “The ship is still at alert one. Let’s leave things that
way.”

“Probably best, Captain,” said
Fedorov, “but I don’t think we have anything more to worry about from those
planes. Look at the sun!”

For the first time they noticed that
the sun was high in the sky, well past its zenith for the day. The entire
morning had passed in less than an hour, lost in the welcome peace and calm of
some other era, and they would never know exactly where they had been. Only one
thing was certain. The KA-40 could not have moved with them to that other time.
It was simply too far away from the ship. But if they were now watching it land
on the aft fantail deck, they must surely be back on the date and time they had
come from.

It was August 27, 1942, yet they had
reappeared seven hours later, at 12:30 hours, and the noon day sun was already
falling towards the sea.

Chapter
24

At a
meeting of the senior staff in the officer’s briefing
room Yamamoto listened quietly to the report made by Kuroshima, his face a
mask, eyes set and distant. Events to the east near Guadalcanal had not gone
well that morning. The American carriers had been found easily enough, but they
had put up a ferocious fight. Admiral Nagumo had been first to reach strike
range at dawn, approaching from the deep Pacific but there had been a strange
radio communications failure just after sunrise. He had been unable to ascertain
the exact position of the Western pincer under Admiral Yamashiro, and even
communications at short range to his forward screening force had proved spotty,
the airwaves broken up by an undulating wave of static.

Frustrated, he had come to conclude
that the Americans must be using some new kind of jamming equipment, and paced
nervously on the bridge of his flagship
Kaga
, trying to decide what to
do. He was approaching the northernmost region of the Santa Cruz Islands and,
unbeknownst to him, the Americans had been operating several seaplanes from
Graciosa
Bay off
Nendo
Island
there. His task force had been spotted and a signal sent before his fighters
could get to the seaplane and shoot it down. Now he realized that the Americans
must know exactly where he was, and that it would be imperative that he get his
planes in the air as soon as possible.

The Japanese knew where the Americans
were as well, northeast of Guadalcanal, just as Genda had argued. And he had
also emphasized the importance of striking first. Yet the two arms of the
Japanese pincers were coming from different directions, widely separated from
one another, and Yamashiro’s warning to coordinate their operations was also in
his mind.

At 05:20 hrs, Nagumo decided he could
wait no longer. No matter where the Western Group was, he had to strike now,
lest he see the morning skies filled with American planes, catching his own
strike wave flat footed on the decks of
Kaga
and
Akagi
. It was a
fateful decision. Just after his formations finished their launching operations
and began winging their way southwest, the alarms rang out. A large enemy air
strike was heading his way, and the A6M2s were already scrambling to intercept.
But they would not be enough.

The Americans had emptied the decks of
all three of their fleet carriers grouped in a tight fist northeast of
Guadalcanal. There
Enterprise, Hornet
and
Saratoga
stood a
worrisome watch over the second day landing operations for Vandegrift’s 1st
Marine Division at Guadalcanal. Their strike wave was massive and well
coordinated, and in spite of a gallant defense mounted by Nagumo’s fighters, it
blew through the combat air patrols and soon the air was filled with the
gleaming of Dauntless dive bombers as they swooped down on the Japanese task
force.

Ten minutes later both
Kaga
and
Akagi
were on fire, the latter listing heavily from two torpedo hits
amid ships. The heavy cruiser
Chikuma
had also taken two bomb hits, and
two destroyers were sunk. The
Kaga
was still seaworthy, but her flight
deck had been ripped apart by three bombs and the fires had proved difficult to
control. It was soon clear that
Akagi
could not correct her list, and
the carrier began to slowly capsize at 06:30 hours, hastened to her doom by a
torpedo fired by one of her escorting destroyers. The Americans would not be
permitted to take her as a trophy.