Kirov (3 page)

Volsky
crossed his arms and pursed his lips, clearly bothered by the delay. This was
supposed to be a simple live fire exercise, a routine that had been practiced
many times before, yet now it seemed to auger something dark and foreboding. He
had a strange feeling that there was something amiss, something slightly off
its kilter. It was not merely the impending onset of bad weather, or the
frustrating incompetence of Rudnikov on the
Orel
. There was something
more….He could not see what it was just yet, but some inner voice warned him
that this day would be far from routine. Call it intuition, or the barnacled
salt of many years experience at sea, but Volsky sensed something was wrong. He
found himself listening intently to the ship, the sound of its turbines, the
hum of the electronic consoles here on the main bridge, as if he might ferret
out the vague disquiet that had settled over him. Yet everything sounded normal
to his well tuned ear.

The
ship he sailed was the newest addition to the fleet, a miraculous resurrection
of one of the most imposing classes of surface combat vessels ever designed. Any
sailor worth his salt will tell you that it's bad luck to rename a ship, but
the Russians never seemed to bother with it. Most ships in the
Kirov
class had started with the name of the Russian city, and then been renamed
after a famous admiral or general. In
Kirov’s
case, the ship also bore
the name of the revolutionary hero Sergey Kirov. Sure enough, one by one, each
ship seemed to suffer some peculiar fate, an accident, a mishap at sea, then a
seemingly endless berthing at a lonesome port awaiting a promised overhaul that
never came.
Kirov
had suffered more than others. First launched in the
1980s, the ship
bedeviled Western naval planners for decades. She was
renamed
Admiral Ushakov
much later in her history, but had long since
been retired after an accident with her nuclear reactor made the vessel
unserviceable.

And
so went the fate of each ship in this unlucky class. The second ship,
Frunze
,
had been renamed
Admiral Lazarov
, and it lasted no more than ten years
in active service before being decommissioned.
Kalinin
, the third of
ship, was renamed
Admiral Nakhimov
and fared little better, being
retired in 1999. As if to avoid the curse, the final ship began as
Yuri
Andropov
and then was renamed
Pytor Velikiy
, (Peter The Great) in
1992. It continued to serve until 2014 before it, too, was berthed in
Severomorsk alongside the aging hulks of its sister ships. This last ship had
run afoul of the curse during an exercise much like the one Leonid Volsky was
organizing today. The
Pytor Velikiy
was coordinating live fire exercises
with an Oscar II class submarine, when the undersea boat suffered a tragic
misfire with one of her torpedoes and exploded taking the lives of all hands on
board. And now it seemed the same situation was repeating itself again.

The
Kirov
class languished for years, laid up and removed from active
service, the proud vessels wasting away in the cold northern harbors of
Murmansk while the Russians haggled over how to find the money to refit them.
But the money was never there. It was not until global circumstances forced the
Russians to finally modernize their Navy that the designers and architects
again began to draw up plans for an ocean going warship capable of standing
with any other ship in the world. One proposal after another was drafted, yet
each seemed too grandiose and far-reaching to ever be realized. In the end, the
Russians decided that, with four old
Kirov
class cruisers lying in
mothball, they would have enough raw material to refit at least one of these
ships by cannibalizing all of the others. And this they did.

Built
from the bones of every ship and its class, the new vessel had been given top priority
in the shipyards to form the heart of a blue ocean task force that was still
under development. Rather than rebuilding the ship from scratch, laying down
the keel and working their way up, the ship had been gutted and redesigned from
the inside out. The hull was extended and re-metaled, the superstructure modified,
up-armored, and fitted out with all the very latest equipment in terms of
missiles and sensors in the year 2017. Three years later, after extensive and
still costly refitting, it was time to christen the new vessel and commission
her into the fleet.

God
created the heavens and the earth in just six days, thought Volsky, and on the
seventh day he built
Kirov
. She was an awesome ship when finally completed.
Her designers thought it only fitting that she be given back her old name, and they
made her the flagship of the new Northern Fleet.

For
years the Russian shipyards had turned out little more than a few insignificant
frigates and corvettes. But after closely observing modern naval engagements from
the Falkland Islands conflict to the wars in the Persian Gulf, Russian planners
had decided it was necessary to revitalize their aging fleet with something a
little more formidable. The new
Kirov
was everything they hoped for and
more, like a proud old armored knight coming out of retirement in an hour of
greatest need. At 32,000 tons when fully loaded, she was one of the largest
surface action ships in the world, exceeded in size only by the American
supercarriers and the aging Iowa class battleships that were now no more than
tourist attractions and well past their day in any case. The Russians had
always had a fondness for building things big, and building them strong.
Kirov
was both.

Officially
designated a nuclear guided missile cruiser, Western planners referred to her
as a battlecruiser, and in size and scale she was really very much closer to
that ship type, which had first entered the naval lexicon during the First
World War—a ship with the speed of a fast cruiser, yet the fighting power of
something much bigger. At 32 knots,
Kirov
was as fast as any destroyer
or cruiser in the world. Yet her armament was considerably stronger, updated
with the very latest in new Soviet technology for both guns and missile
systems.

Her
primary armament was a potent array of anti-ship missiles that were carried on
her long forward deck section. Unable to compete with the West in terms of
aircraft carriers, Russia pursued an intensive development in the area of
missile technology, and now possessed some of most lethal and efficient
anti-ship missiles on earth.

Kirov
also boasted the latest in Soviet
naval gun technology, twin 152mm guns mounted on their new stealth turret to
help lower the radar signature. The gun was the equivalent of a 5.9 inch naval
battery, and could fire 30 rounds per minute at a range exceeding 25 kilometers.
The day of the big gun was long gone. Even these 152mm turrets would be thought
of as typical secondary armament on an old WWII battleship, or the primary guns
on lighter class cruisers of that era. Heavy cruisers might carry a bigger 8
inch gun, and the battlecruisers and battleships trumped this with guns firing
shells in the range of 11 to 16 inches in diameter. The Japanese behemoth
Yamato
carried the largest guns in the world at 18 inches, three times as large as
those mounted on
Kirov
. Yet, in her day, the year 2021, no ship mounted
bigger or a more potent array of weapons.

For
air defense, long-range SAM batteries were augmented by medium range missile
defense systems and an array of rapid firing Gatling guns should anything
penetrate this defense.

Finally,
the ship was also equipped with the latest UGST versatile deep-water homing
torpedo, a total of 10 firing tubes, five on each side. This was an extremely
dangerous weapon, able to range out as far as 50 kilometers and travel that
distance in one hour at its highest speed. As it approached the target, be it a
submarine or surface ship, or even the
wake
of a surface ship, it could
home in beginning at a range of 2 kilometers.

The
aft section of the ship was also a landing platform for three helicopters. Two KA-40
naval helos could provide over the horizon reconnaissance, radar picket duties,
and ASW defense carrying the APR-3 water-jet-propelled torpedo capable of
attacking submarines at a submerged depth of 500 meters and KAB-250PL guided
depth charges. One KA-226 scout chopper was a modified version of the rescue helo
built for the Moscow police, and carried a 30 mm cannon with provisions for
air-to-air or surface attack missiles on two stubby wing pods. With a flight
endurance of between 4 and 6 hours, the helo mounted HD-optical zoom and
infrared cameras, and also had laser range finding. All in all, the battlecruiser
literally bristled with weaponry, one of the most powerful surface combatants
in the world. Considering the chaos and contradiction of the nation all this
had come from, it was a miracle the ship was ever rebuilt.

Admiral
Leonid Volsky had sailed her throughout her trials and made two world cruises,
showing the flag in ports o’ call all across the globe and again troubling the
dreams of many Western naval analysts. Now, in the year 2021, increased
tensions had put the Russian Navy on a near wartime footing.

The
long fall had swept away Russia’s stilted Soviet political structures, leaving
a hard shell of dysfunctional autocracy in its place in the neo-Russia that
grew from the ashes. Her armies had diminished, just as the navy had been
broken up and sold off to scrap yards, third world countries and even China had
picked over the bones, purchasing one of Russia’s two large fleet aircraft
carriers from Ukraine after that country inherited the ship from the old Black
Sea Fleet. China was still rising, more powerful on the world stage than ever,
but Russia never regained her lost glory. She was kept at arm’s length by NATO,
shunned by the troubled European Union, and was a strange bedfellow in the new
Asian coalition she had tried to forge with China.

Only
her resources saved her from being relegated to the status of a third rate
nation now—the vast mineral deposits, timber and oil of Siberia. Yet American
oil companies, ever more thirsty for light sweet crude, had played hard ball
with the Russians of late. They had tried to squeeze her out of the Caspian
basin long ago, and the flow of aid and technology from the West had frozen in
the pipelines of Siberia. Now even the oil fields languished in decline, but as
Saudi Arabia failed, and the center of gravity shifted to the Pacific, Russian
leaders pushed back against encroaching Western influence and control, and went
so far as to embargo their oil, refusing to deliver it to British or American
terminals, or to traffic in US dollars. The tensions eventually saw the
deployment of Russian military forces near the breakaway republic of Georgia,
where the Americans still kept a guarded watch on Iran, and push too often came
to shove when the military was involved.

 American
carrier battlegroups still plied the oceans, largely unchallenged. Yet in
recent months,
Kirov
had led several extended training exercises in the Norwegian
Sea, an old hunting ground for the Russians, and the doorstep to the rich warm,
commerce laden waters of the Atlantic. This latest maneuver was designed to
simulate a raider breaking out into the North Atlantic accompanied by a single
attack submarine.

And
they were late.

As
he waited for Rudnikov to report, the Admiral could not help but perceive the
irony of his own situation. Here he sat in this waking zombie of a ship,
resurrected from a sure appointment with the scrapping yards and pressed once
again into useful service. Yet the uncanny echo of past mishaps still seem to
haunt him, and the ship itself. His exercise was off schedule, and another old
submarine was having trouble with its weapons.

Miles
to the south, the cruiser
Slava
was deploying a line of target barges
fitted with radar jammers to pose as a NATO task force in the Norwegian sea. If
they had been real enemies, thought Volsky, they would have acquired his ship long
ago and have missiles inbound while he still chafed and restlessly waited on Rudnikov
and his old submarine to fit the proper warhead on his missiles. The exercise
would have to be deemed a failure and replayed as soon as the approaching
weather front cleared. There was nothing else to be done.

“Where
is Rudnikov? Why hasn't he reported? What are they doing down there in that fat
Oscar II? This whole situation is ridiculous!” The Admiral vented his
impatience yet again.

Vladimir
Karpov, the ship’s Captain, and his Chief of Operations Gennadi Orlov were
listening, half amused, half embarrassed. This was all too typical of the fleet
these days, old rusty ships; misplaced men and missions. Volsky had been intent
upon changing that ever since taking his post as Admiral of the Northern Fleet.
He had insisted that
Kirov
be built, then assigned as flagship of the
fleet before he made it his own. It was a pity that there were not three or
four destroyers that could sail with
Kirov
today, but those ships were
still on the drawing boards.
Kirov
was alone in the cold, icy sea for
this exercise, and it was just going to get colder and more lonesome as the day
wore on.

Captain
Karpov shook his head, noting the admiral’s obvious displeasure. “We would be
better to wait, Admiral,” he said. A serious man, his eyes always seemed to
look swollen and bloodshot, bulging under his thick woolen cap emblazoned with
the gold insignia of the navy. A bit round shouldered from too many days at a
desk earlier in his business career, Karpov had taken to the sea when things
fell apart and the old Soviet Union dissipated.