Kirov III-Pacific Storm (Kirov Series) (38 page)

“Fedorov…” he started, then paused,
thinking. “I never did tell you how wrong I was before. I thought you were a
wet nosed school boy, and I was…well, I was very stupid.”

“Forget about it, Captain. We all make
mistakes. We live and we learn. I’ve learned a great deal watching you these
last weeks, and one thing you have taught me is this: a man is always bigger
than he thinks he is, bigger than the burdens he carries that would want to
crush him, even bigger than his fear. Your service here has been something to
admire, and we are all grateful for it.”

*
* *

An hour
later, at 18:00 it was clear that the
two Japanese battleships to the north,
Mutsu
and
Nagato
, were now
on a good course to intercept.
Kirov
had opened the range on the
Yamato
group to 150 kilometers, but the fast screening force out in front of the
battleship was now inside 112 kilometers. His earlier turn had frustrated
Captain Iwabuchi aboard
Tone
, which was now left just over 200
kilometers to the south. But the slow approach of the two big battleships
forced a difficult choice on Fedorov. He could either turn west now, out into
the Coral Sea, in which case he would likely have to engage both battleships
and the fast cruisers of Iwabuchi’s force, or he could turn and run east, which
would put
Yamato
in a good position to try and cut him off as he
approached Milne Bay.

The odds seemed even no matter which
way he turned, but something pulled at him from deep within. If he turned east
he might just lay eyes upon the greatest battleship the world has ever seen,
the ship he had studied and admired for all these many years. Be careful what
you wish for, he mused. He couldn’t say that thought decided things for him,
but the fact remained….

He turned east at sunset, following
the night, the sky a brilliant smear of red and orange behind him. The ship’s
new heading was 68 degrees northeast, running for the southern coast of New
Guinea. The dogged seaplanes would have difficulty following the ship after
sunset, but they caught the course change in time to get warning to
Yamato
.
Some minutes later Rodenko reported that the battleship had altered course to
45 degrees northeast, and Fedorov kicked himself for not waiting until well
after dark before he changed his heading.

He looked at the ship’s chronometer,
biting his lip. When would they move again in time? The last change had taken
only a few hours, but it might be a long day before anything happened. He now
concluded that if
Yamato
was cagey, and her cruiser screen agile enough,
they might be able to catch
Kirov
somewhere south of Bona
Bona
Island on Orangene Bay, the south coast of New Guinea.
Yamato
would be right behind the cruisers. Karpov returned from his rest
period two hours later, clear headed and ready for battle, and he did not have
long to wait.

“Those cruisers are getting very close
now,” said Rodenko. “I make it about fifty kilometers. They’re moving at 36
knots, and there’s a small group of three ships about ten klicks behind them at
33 knots.”

“Most likely a destroyer group,” said
Fedorov.

“We can take them out now with
missiles,” said Karpov, raising an eyebrow at Fedorov.

“Would that be your recommendation,
Captain?”

“Our ability to strike at range is a
great advantage,” said Karpov. We should use it now and thin out the odds.
Otherwise it will be work for the deck guns in another hour, and they may get
those long range torpedoes in the water you talk about.”

Karpov was correct. The first factor
in the engagement was going to be range, he knew.
Kirov
could find,
target, and strike its enemy anywhere inside a 200 kilometer radius of the
ship. The cruisers would need to get inside 20,000 meters, just as before, and
that was the decisive difference.

Yamato
had to first close inside the 45,000
kilometer range of its main guns, and even then it would not be likely to
obtain any hits until it got inside 26,000 meters. It was Ali
vs
Frasier.
Kirov
could put one hard jab after
another on the lumbering hulk of her enemy, like a fast, lean champion dancing
around her foe.
Yamato
had to simply tuck in its chin and drive in for a
body shot, and in this instance, with the coast of New Guinea to the north, she
was hoping to eventually pin her elusive enemy to the ropes.

Unlike Ali,
Kirov
did not have
the armor to take much punishment. There would be no ‘Rope a Dope’ strategy if
that happened. So Fedorov was maneuvering east to avoid the land mass to his
north, but in doing so he would soon be skirting the effective range of
Yamato’s
big 18.1 inch guns. It would then come down to how long the battleship could
stay in any kind of effective firing range, for time was a factor in obtaining
a hit, in a very convoluted process that relied on the successful coordination
of numerous elements to get just one good result. One thing
Yamato
had
in her favor was durability. Her armor would let her take hits and keep
fighting as long as the Japanese had the will, and Fedorov would never
underestimate that factor.

“Very well,” he said. “Engage the
cruiser screen at long range. These are lighter ships. Their belt armor is little
more than sixty millimeters.”

“Then any of our missiles will hurt
them badly. I suggest we start with our smaller warheads and see if we can
break their speed advantage by lighting a few fires. Mr. Samsonov…”

“Sir!”

“Sound alert level two. Secure for
missile combat. Activate MOS-III missiles, a bank of three, please.”

“Aye, sir. Activating missiles seven,
six, and five. System reports ready.”

The warning claxon sounded, and
Samsonov keyed his missile prime toggles, waiting for targeting information to
be sent to his panel. A battle that had been talked about, ruminated, argued in
forums and naval colleges the world over was now about to begin, for the cloak
of darkness would prove to be only a thin veil of protection for
Kirov
that night, and a clash of titans was now almost inevitable—the most powerful
ships of two different eras facing one another in a final confrontation that
would decide the fate of nations and perhaps humanity itself.

Yet none of this entered the minds of
Fedorov, Karpov, Rodenko or the other men on the ship. Their only thought was
whether this battle would see them through to a good breakfast the following
morning. The world and time could wait. For them it was simply a matter of
surviving yet another day.

Chapter
29

 
They saw
it light up the
night, a bright fire against the dark, climbing up and then arcing slowly down,
growing more prominent with each passing second. The watchman on the light
cruiser
Jintsu
pointed to his mate, eyes wide, then called out a
warning. It looked like a distant plane on fire, plummeting down to a watery
death in the sea, but as it fell it suddenly leveled off and seemed to skim
right over the water, brighter, closer, impossibly fast! There was a second
fire in the sky, then a third following the very same path.

Jintsu
was the second of three
Sendai
type light cruisers, commissioned in 1925 and intended as fast destroyer
flotilla leaders. She had four stacks venting the steam from ten Kampon boilers
and four shaft Parsons geared turbines driving her at just under 36 knots. Her
seven 5.5 inch guns were waiting silently in their turrets, her four 610mm
torpedoes sleeping in their tubes. They would never get the chance to fire at
the enemy the ship was stalking that night, nor would those on the two ships
following her,
Nagara
and
Yura
, both fast three stack light
cruisers with similar armament. The supersonic missiles would find them some
fifty kilometers away, and come boring in on their side armor, a 1.5 ton
missile with a 300kg warhead flying at Mach 5, one of the fastest missiles in
the world
Kirov
had come from.

The damage was immediate and near
catastrophic.
Jintsu
was struck amidships, her armor easily penetrated
and the missile smashed through four of her ten boilers before exploding,
blowing away two of her four stacks in the process. She reeled with the hit,
her side ripped open, severe fires amidships and thick black smoke choking the
life out of her crew. The ship immediately fell off in speed, slowing to under
twenty knots and taking water fast.

Nagara
and
Yura
received equal
treatment, their side armor simply too thin to stop the missiles from
penetrating to do severe damage deep within the ship. Of the three
Nagara
came away the best, and she had turned to avoid the chaotic scene of
Jintsu
ahead, and the angle of the missile that struck her saw it scudding along her
side armor, detonating outside the ship, and buckling her hull badly, right at
the water line.

Karpov had used three, fast lethal
darts to skewer the cruisers, and they were suddenly out of the equation as
serious threats, their speed reduced, crews frantically struggling to fight the
fires and flooding.
Jintsu
would not survive the hour. Over 120 of her
450 man crew were dead after the missile impact, and the remainder would be in
the sea soon after when the ship keeled over in a rasp of steam and smoke, her
guts flooded with seawater hitting the hot boiler fires. She sunk in twenty
minutes.
Yura
was little better off, her fires threatening to consume
the ship.
Nagara
stood by, calling for help from the three destroyers in
the wake of the cruisers. There were too many men in the sea for her to
contemplate continuing in the hunt.

So it was that the lighter screening
forces Yamamoto had sent to find and harry his prey came to a desperate fate.
The destroyers would help in the rescue operation, and then bravely turn to
seek the enemy again, but they were of little concern to
Kirov
now. She
had bigger fish to fry, a 72,000 ton behemoth still bearing down on an
intercept course that Fedorov did not think they could evade. Yet the Russian
battlecruiser still had nineteen ship killers under her forward deck, more than
enough to deal with a single adversary, or so he thought.

The chronometer read 20:10, just an
hour after the waning gibbous moon rose, a hair off full, casting her pale wan
light on the sea. Rodenko reported the fast screening force had been decisively
stopped, at least on radar, and Karpov breathed a little easier.

“This shark still bites,” he said. “The
MOS-IIIs did the job well enough. Are there any other targets close in,
Rodenko?”

“There’s a seaplane getting a little
too nosey,” he said, “it’s been following our wake for some time, most likely
calling out heading and speed estimates. I now have a faint reading on those
other two battleships. They look to be just under 200 kilometers due west of
us, and they are losing ground. I make their speed no more than 25 knots, but
without the Fregat system up these are only approximate readings. There is
another fast contact southwest at 36 knots and closing slowly. It has turned on
a course that will take it very near the cruisers we just hit.”

“We probably put a lot of men in the
water just now,” said Fedorov. “They are vectoring in assets for the rescue
operation. I think we can leave it be for the moment. It’s
Yamato
I’m
more concerned about.”

“That ship has now increased to 27
knots and is on an intercept heading, about fifty kilometers off our starboard
bow.”

“You said this ship’s main guns can
range out to 45,000 meters, Fedorov? Then it could fire on us any minute now.”

“Don’t worry,” Fedorov held up a hand.
“They have to spot us first. Under good light conditions they might see us at
twenty-eight kilometers, but not at night like this, even with the moon nearly
full. We have some time yet. I’m looking up information on her radar sets now.
It looks like
Yamato
had only one tactical surveillance radar. It
operated on a wave length of 1.5 meters with an average range of twenty
kilometers.”

“Then they are blind,” said Karpov.
“We can hit them right now and perhaps put enough damage on that beast to give
it second thoughts.”

Fedorov hesitated… battleship
Yamato
…
Admiral Yamamoto. What was he about to do here? This ship and its Admiral had
glowed in his mind for many long years of blissful study and research. He had
built a model of it in his youth, admiring the sleek, powerful lines, the
massive guns, the tall proud superstructure. It was his love of great ships that
had seen him join the navy, and work diligently to gain his post on Russia’s
very best, the new battlecruiser
Kirov
. In those quiet hours alone at
his desk he had often imagined
Yamato
dueling with the American
Iowa
class, and contemplated how the course of the war might have been altered if
Yamamoto’s plane had not been caught by those American P-38s and sent to a
fiery death. And now he had to order the death of the thing he so loved, and
the demise of all these fond memories, realizing in the end that this was war
in its most cruel demeanor.