Kirov (56 page)

“Admiral
on the bridge,” said Fedorov when he pushed through the hatch. The sharp
staccato of the forward deck guns added a measure of urgency.
Kirov
was
firing at something, which meant the enemy ships were closer than the Admiral
believed.

Volsky
looked back at Fedorov, and winked. “Sergeant Troyak,” said the Admiral. “Post
two marines here and secure this hatch. Then take the remainder of your squad
to the main bridge and force entry. Wait for the engineers, if necessary, but you
are to secure the main bridge and hold every man there until further notice.
Under no circumstances is Captain Karpov to insert his command key into any
system on the bridge. Understood?”

“Sir!”
Troyak barked out an order in his Siberian dialect, and his men rippled into
action.

The
Admiral straightened his cap, briefly surveyed the battle bridge, and then
turned to the group of young officers he had collected. “Velichko—sonar;
Kalinichev—radar; Gromenko—CIC; Kosovich—helm; Fedorov—navigation. He looked
and saw that Lieutenant Nikolin had joined his group, just coming off leave,
and graciously waved him to his post at communications. “Gentlemen, take your
posts.” And to the other yeoman and midshipmen that had followed his column,
drifting in from quarters and non essential duty stations he said: “Any man
trained may take a station. The rest return to your regular duty posts.” The
men moved eagerly to monitors, three filing into the Combat Information Center
to join Gromenko where he sat before a dark, lifeless monitor set.

Volsky
strode over to the CIC where a central module held a receptacle for command key
interface. He scanned the room, smiling when he saw Doctor Zolkin. “If you
please, Doctor,” and Zolkin came to his side.

The
Admiral flipped an overhead switch activating the ship’s intercom. “Doctor, if
you would be so kind as to inform the ship’s crew that I am well and certified
for duty.”

 “My
pleasure, sir,” said Zolkin. He found the microphone on the intercom and began
to speak. “Now hear this, this is Doctor Zolkin speaking. Admiral Volsky has
returned to his post, and I hereby certify him as fit for duty and commander of
the ship. That is all.” Even as he finished they could hear the sound of crew
members cheering below decks. The crew had been justifiably edgy under Karpov.
They did their duty, complied with orders, yet the taut, strained effort of the
man did not inspire confidence. Volsky, on the other hand, was loved by every
man aboard. Ever since he had taken ill, the crew had been restless, uncertain,
worried. It was hard enough for them to comprehend what had happened to the
ship. Many still refused to believe it, yet with Volsky at the helm, they had
some stable point of reference, and eagerly moved to their posts.

Even
as Doctor Zolkin returned the small round microphone to its cradle on the
intercom station, they heard yet another warning claxon, followed by the swish
of a missile ejection and a solid fuel rocket booster igniting. To Volsky the sound
was unmistakable. It was a MOS-III Starfire, one of the fastest and most lethal
missiles in the world.

“I’m
afraid the niceties will have to wait,” he said quickly, pulling out his
command key and hastening to insert it in the module. The interface lit up and
displayed the five LED windows for his code, which he entered as fast as his
thick finger could poke out the digits.

When
the missile jetted away it began to gain altitude and accelerate at a frightful
pace. Mid-way to its target, some 112 kilometers to the south, it would reach
the mind-numbing speed of Mach 8.0. He had 45 seconds before it would devour
that distance.

The
code was entered, and the Admiral punched a red button labeled ‘COMMAND
OVERRIDE.’ Recognizing the Admiral’s key, a second series of LEDs lit up, this
time displaying his name and rank: VOLSKY, LEONID, FLEET ADM, LEVEL 1 COMMAND –
ENGAGE?”

There
were two buttons, YES and NO, and Volsky answered in the affirmative. When he
pushed that last button there was an agonizing ten second delay during which
the Starfire traveled over twenty-seven kilometers. Then all the systems of the
battle bridge lit up, the screens coming to life, radars displaying contact
data, weapons systems noting status and active ordinance en route to target.
Gromenko took one look at his screen and could not believe what he was seeing.
“Admiral, that was the MOS-III system—the number
ten
missile!” It was
even now well past mid course and burning its way down to the designated
target. There were ten seconds remaining.

“Abort
the missile, Mister Gromenko,” said Volsky, but at that moment the power
wavered, winked off briefly, then back on. Volsky knew what had happened, his
face calm and resolved. When the battle bridge went active the systems on the
main bridge had all gone dark. Karpov must have realized what was happening and
rushed to the emergency reset. He was attempting to regain control of the ship’s
systems even as Gromenko pressed the missile abort, and that brief interval of
chaos, where two computer systems wrestled for control of the energy pulsing
through cables and wires all over the ship, was enough to interfere with the
abort action—almost enough.

The
missile received a pulsing command to interrupt its programmed flight path and
nose down into the sea. Its engines cut off abruptly, but it was still moving
at an incredible rate of speed. Three seconds later it would again be sent a
renewed order to abort as Gromenko frantically pushed the button on his panel,
this time to disable its warhead…but when the signal arrived the missile was
not there. Two seconds earlier it had plunged into the sea, some 500 meters
short of its intended impact point, and ignited.

~
~ ~

Aboard
DD
Plunkett
, Captain Kaufman was desperately shouting orders to his
helmsman to zigzag his ship forward into the teeth of the enemy gunfire. The
maneuver was futile, as the enemy guns were not trained and fired by men with
optical sighting. A computer had hold of them now in the hard electronic grip
of its radar. Lasers also targeted his ships for an added measure of accuracy. His
ship was hit and on fire, as were
Benson, Mayo, Jones, Gleaves
and
Hughes
,
and all eight destroyers of
Desron 7
were now making smoke in an attempt
to mask their brave charge and get within torpedo firing range, though the
smoke did nothing whatsoever to deter
Kirov’s
gunfire. Kaufman suddenly
saw what he first thought to be lightning on the horizon, then a bright wash of
white smoke and fire coming from the distant enemy vessel. At first his heart
leapt with the thought that one of his destroyers has scored a direct hit on
the enemy with a 5 inch deck gun, but he was only seeing the smoke and ignition
of the lethal MOS-III Starfire as it first launched.

Something
moved with terrible speed, a small fire in its wake, and a long yellow tail
fading to russet orange as it sped off to the east of his position. He took
heart for a moment, thinking TF 16 must be pressing in from the east. Then, a
long minute later, the sky itself seemed to ignite with light and fire, as if a
massive thunderbolt had struck the sea, flung down by an unseen angry god. The
light was so bright that he flinched, turning his head away and instinctively
holding up a hand to shield his eyes. What in God’s name were the Germans
firing now?

~
~ ~

On
the main
bridge Karpov
smiled inwardly when he heard the Starfire eject an ignite its motors. As it
rocketed away he allowed himself the barest edge of an upturned lip in a
restrained grin. Yet the enemy destroyers came to mind again, and he decided to
bring more guns to bear.

“Helm,
starboard thirty and come about on three-one-five! Samsonov, bring the two aft
152mm batteries on line and stop those destroyers!”

 
Desron
7
was still bravely charging through the smoke and fire, blooded but
undaunted, and closing on torpedo firing range.
Kirov
came about in a
tight turn, her aft deck guns now blazing away as she did so, pulsing out
shells at an alarming rate of fire. A few seconds later, however, the systems
on the bridge all winked, fluttered, and then went dark. Only the dim red
overhead battle lights remained on.

“That
bastard!” Karpov immediately knew what had happened. The Admiral was loose and on
the secondary battle bridge, a feature unique to
Kirov
, and unlike any
other ship in the world. He rushed to a wall panel, flipping open the clear
plastic casing for the emergency reset. There would be no time to re-enter his
command key and request dual control by code. He had to insure the telemetry
link to the missile remained intact, and he only needed a few seconds. The ‘Fire
and Forget’ guidance system on the MOS-III was disabled when the nuclear
warhead was mounted. It required a command link to the mother ship, the last
vestige of restraint as a fail-safe on the use of nuclear weapons.
Kirov
held the ever extending electronic rein on the weapon, with one last chance to
pull back and hold it in check.

Karpov
pulled heavily on the reset switch, yanking it down into the ON position and
seeing the immediate surge of battery backup power enliven the command systems
on his bridge, but it was the barest flutter. Somewhere, deep within the ship,
another computer sat as judge and jury on the matter.

It
was the Admiral’s ignition key that had initiated operations on the ship when
he first stepped aboard and took over official command for the scheduled
missile trials, and though Karpov’s command key had successfully ordered the missile
fire, it was the Admiral’s key that was now activating the secondary systems on
the battle bridge, and that command postdated the former. The computer saw the
reset request when Karpov threw his switch, yet it endowed Volsky’s keyed
command as a new and superseding order, dismissing Karpov’s plaintive action
with prejudice. It closed the switches that would feed power to the main bridge,
which remained dark, and it would stay that way until a second valid command
key was inserted and a request for dual operations was properly coded and
approved. Yet Karpov’s desperate attempt to wrest control from the Admiral had
been enough to impede the abort command….

~
~ ~

The
Starfire
fell
into the sea, and the momentum of the missile took it over a hundred feet
beneath the water before the 15 kiloton warhead exploded and sent a massive
wall of white seawater blasting up thousands of feet into the sky. It was
considered a small tactical nuclear warhead in
Kirov’s
day, but was
roughly the size of the weapons the Americans would drop on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki this very same week, just four years later. It fell just ahead of Task
Force 16 where the
Mississippi
lumbered forward into the battle, and the
leading destroyer Captains quailed at what they saw.

Upon
detonation the weapon ignited to a blast wave of highly compressed superheated gas
and vapor, which propelled millions of cubic feet of water straight up in an immense
geyser. Enormous fists of seawater surged out from this central core, rising
and then slowly falling, as if hammering down to smash anything that remained
on the sea. Then the base of the geyser thickened as a huge surge of water
radiated out in all directions, a wall of seething ocean hundreds of feet high
that rolled away from the detonation like a colossal pyroclastic flow from a
volcanic eruption. Above this, a steaming cloud spread out until it encompassed
a width of nearly five kilometers.

The
battleship
Mississippi
and the rest of the ships in Task Force 16 would
face surging waves from the first atomic weapon ever detonated on planet Earth.
The lead destroyers were swamped by the massive wall of water, tossed up and
about like bits of broken wood, so much flotsam on the raging seas. The massive
tsunami smashed into cruisers
Quincy
and
Wichita
, snapping the
former in half and rolling the latter over beneath a million of tons of water,
dragging her crushed and mangled hull and superstructure beneath the waves.
Lastly, trailing some distance behind the screen of five ships,
Mississippi
was ready to meet her fate.

Captain
Wright stared in awe at the gigantic column of water, 1500 feet in height, its
walls 200 feet thick at the base of the eruption. Then the much smaller tsunami
generated by the detonation careened over his ship, smashing into the
battleship and rolling her completely over on her starboard side. It was as if
a hurricane blast of wind and sea water had been conjured out of thin air and
sent roiling down upon the ship from heaven above. That was not too far from
the truth.

The
fifteen megaton tactical warhead was enough to wreak havoc on Task Force 16.
Not a single ship would survive. All three screening destroyers would be sunk,
along with both cruisers. Only the battleship
Mississippi
would remain
afloat, heeled over and tossed in the violent seas, her crew senseless or
wildly struggling to escape the watery coffin of the ship.

Volsky
had turned his key a second too late to stop the missile, but at least he had
managed to transfer command operations to the aft battle bridge, foiling
Karpov’s attempt to reset the system.