Men of War (2013) (12 page)

“I
will cut the orders,” Volsky said quickly. “Anything you need will be provided.
But I want this to seem routine. I want to avoid calling undue attention.”

“I
understand, sir. I can just write up a standard rod replacement order—not
unusual at all after a long cruise like this. In fact, I may have to replace
rods five and seven as well. I can ask for a new spare to fill in for Rod-25.
It is nothing unusual.”

“Good,
Dobrynin. Get the damn thing off the ship as soon as possible, then, eh?”

“I’ll
have it moved tomorrow, sir.”

“Perfect…
But I think we should have a man there at all times, to keep watch on it. You
know how things get shuffled around from one place to another. Someone comes in
looking for something and things get moved. Some enterprising supply clerk
looking for spare parts comes in and sends the damn thing off to another ship.”

“We
wouldn’t want that to happen, sir.”

“Precisely.
So leave a man there—on my orders. If anyone questions you tell them that this
comes directly from me. That should take care of it. One advantage of carrying
all this extra weight is that you get to throw it around once in a while.”

“That’s
what Admirals are for, sir. I’ll put
two
men on it.”

* * *

Pavel
Kamenski
looked up from his book, staring over the rim of his reading
glasses when he heard the commotion on the stairs. It was Alexi, his grandson,
racing up the steps and shouting for him with that edge of eagerness in his
voice that promised discovery.

“Grandpa!
Grandpa! It’s here!”

Alexi
ran in, all of twelve, his knees bare between long white socks and plain brown
shorts, for the weather had been uncommonly warm that week in Vladivostok. He
rushed in, eyes gleaming, cheeks red with his haste. “It’s here!”

“Just
a moment, my good young man. What is here?”

“
Kirov!
It’s back Grandpa. It was all on the television a moment ago.
Kirov
is
in the harbor! Can we go see it, Grandpa? Let’s go and see it, please?”

“
Kirov?
Here?”

“It
was on the news. They say it wasn’t sunk after all, Grandpa—just on a mission,
that’s all. And now it’s home again, and here! Can we go see it?”

Alexi
was no different than millions of other young boys at that age. He had cut his
teeth on plastic dinosaurs, slowly graduating to toy soldiers, and spent long
hours playing with them in the dirt with his friends, developing some strange
calculus wherein a triceratops could be traded for two machine gunners and a
sniper, or one tank. In time he slowly traded off his herd of
dinos
to the younger boys, and built the root and stem of a
Motor Rifle Division in their place. When he got a few years older he left these
behind and moved on to model building. At Christmas he might be seen slowly
flying his model Mig-31 fighter about the house, turning it this way and that
in his hand as the plane banked to avoid decorations on the tree, and then
swooped on
Tamiko
, the cat.

At
eleven he had taken to reading stories of great battles at sea, and building
models of his favorite ships. He had a model of the old German battleship
Bismarck
,
and one of the famous Japanese battleship
Yamato
, the biggest of them
all. He also had a big
Shchuka
-B
type
nuclear attack submarine, the boat NATO now called
Akula
. But of all his
models,
Kirov
was his favorite, and he had spent long hours watching it
sail the seas of his imagination, and thinking that one day he might join the
navy himself, and become its captain.

“Who
would win?” he had asked his Grandpa one day. “Could
Bismarck
have a
chance against
Yamato?
I don’t think it could, Grandpa. It only has
eight guns, and they aren’t quite as big.”

“I
suppose you are right in that, Alexi. They were both very tough ships, but I
think the
Yamato
, yes. It would win.”

“But
what about
Kirov?
It could beat them both together, right Grandpa?”

“I
would hope so. But look at those tiny guns on
Kirov
. How could it have a
chance?” Kamenski had teased the boy, knowing he would soon explain about the
missiles he had so lovingly installed beneath the removable forward deck cover.
He was not disappointed. Alexi had pried the plastic deck open to reveal the
innards of the model ship, pointing to the tips of the missiles in their
canisters of eight, like deadly eggs all lined up in a basket.

“Don’t
forget these,” the boy admonished. “They can fly—and very fast too! They can
hit
Yamato
from way over there. The boy had pointed across the room to
the corner where
Tamiko
was sleeping in a favorite
spot by the heating vent on the carpet, oblivious to the world and mindless of
anything that had to do with battleships.

“Yamato’s
guns are big, but they can’t fire that far. And
Kirov
has these radars.
It can find the
Yamato
, even if I took it downstairs to my bedroom.”

“Even
in your room? Well in that case, Alexi,
Kirov
would certainly win.” Even
a boy of twelve could deduce what Karpov had so clearly demonstrated in the
Pacific.

“Let’s
go this afternoon, Grandpa! Can we?”

Kamenski
agreed, sending Alexi running off and down the steps to tell his mother, and
then the old man quietly set his book down on the reading desk, a strange look
in his eye. He got up, very slowly and walked to his voluminous library wall,
squinting through his spectacles as he looked for a book, his finger running
over the spines as he searched. There it was,
The Chronology of the Naval
War At Sea,
1939-1945,
Russian Edition. He pulled it out, very
slowly, as if there was some old, unfinished business within the volume that he
was reluctant to revisit.

His
weathered hand flipped through the well worn pages, as he squinted to see the
dates for the year 1941. He saw his carefully underlined passage, with notes
penciled into the margin. The date leading the passage was:
22 July – 4 Aug,
Arctic
, in dark bold type. The narrative began:
“British carrier raid on
Kirkenes and Petsamo cancelled when aircraft spot a lone ship in the Arctic Sea
north of Jan Mayen.”
It was the first appearance of a ship that the history
had come to call “Raider X,” presumed to be a German heavy cruiser, and one
using experimental naval rockets as its primary weaponry. It had been pursued
and eventually sunk by British and American forces…Or was it? He puckered his
eyes, reading the thinly scrawled notation he had written in the margin… “See
also 23 Aug—1 Sep Atlantic.”

Kamenski
flipped the pages to those dates and began reading:

‘Following
reports received by commercial traffic at sea the British auxiliary cruisers
Circassia from Freetown and the Canadian auxiliary cruiser Prince David from
Halifax are ordered to intercept at the suspected meeting point a German
auxiliary cruiser and a blockade-runner in the central Atlantic. On its way,
Prince David sights an unknown vessel and reports it as a possible cruiser of
the Admiral Hipper class. This leads to a big search operation.’

The
old man ran his finger down the long column, noting how both the British and
American forces in the region had scrambled to intercept this sighting. The
British Battleship
Rodney
was immediately alerted, and joined with the
American carrier Task Group 2.6 to hunt for the ship. Planes off the carrier
Yorktown
soon reported several merchant ships in the search zone, and then suddenly
confirmed the sighting of a warship described again as a “possible
Hipper
class cruiser.”

A
second US Task Group quickly formed around the carrier
Long Island
to
expand the search zone. The British dispatched Force F with the carrier
Eagle
and the cruisers
Dorsetshire
and
Newcastle
, and pulled the
battleship
Revenge
off of convoy duty, with three more fast cruisers. In
all, the combined Anglo-US forces amounted to three carriers two battleships,
twelve cruisers and twenty destroyers. But the suspected ship seemed to simply
vanish again, and the Admiralty received good aerial photos of Brest to assure
themselves that
Scharnhorst
,
Gneisenau
and
Prince Eugen
were all still quietly sleeping in their berths. Days later, however, a US
coast Guard cutter,
Alexander Hamilton,
again raised the alarm with a
report of a
Hipper
class cruiser near Newfoundland.

Thinking
the Germans might be trying to sneak back to home ports, the US quickly
dispatched a new Task Group from Reykjavík built around the battleship
New Mexico
to block the Denmark Strait. Yet nothing was found, and the watch slowly faded
away.

But
not Kamenski’s watch. He had been fascinated by these odd reports in the
narrative, and spent much time ferreting them out. His next notation in the
margin led him on to the odd “incident” in the Mediterranean at the conclusion
of the Malta relief Operation Pedestal a year later. The British covering force
with battleships
Rodney
and
Nelson
had engaged another mysterious
ship, presumed to be a French battlecruiser out of Toulon…

But
Kamenski knew for a fact that it had not been a French battlecruiser, for his
father had once been involved with Soviet naval intelligence, and Kamenski had
once been a boy just like Alexi, enamored by the sleek lines and threatening battlements
of warships. One day his father told him something, well after he had retired
from his service, and it always stuck in Kamenski’s mind. He had been reading
this very book, for it was given to him by his father, and the man had come to
this very passage and shook his head with a wry smile. “That was no French
ship,” Kamenski remembered him saying. “We had a man there, on that very coast,
and he saw the whole thing. No, it wasn’t a French battlecruiser, so you can
figure out what it really was, eh Pavel?” But his father would say nothing more
about it.

Pavel
Kamenski had taken up that challenge, joining the intelligence services and
quietly perusing the mystery that had begun with the odd appearance of “Raider
X.” He had followed the trail for many years, through libraries, books and old
dusty files, staring at grainy photos in black and white—the last one being
taken by a seaplane out of Milne Bay that had photographed another strange ship
in the Coral Sea.

Kamenski
closed the book, but he carried it with him to his reading desk, and set it
down next to a cold cup of tea. Now he shuffled slowly over to the table by the
easy chair where Alexi’s mother, his own daughter Elena, would always leave the
morning newspaper. He picked it up, the headline bold and strong, with a photo
of a big ship in the harbor and crowds of jubilant people. It read simply:

KIROV
COMES HOME!

Chapter 9

The
car
pulled up along the wide concrete quay a few days later, well after
sunset. The dim street lamps cast a wan light over the dull gray wharf, but out
on the bay the lights of the city shimmered on the calm water. The rear door
opened and a man stepped out, wearing a long dark overcoat and a black fedora
hat. He carried a thick brief case, and was followed by another man in a long
gray overcoat before the car drove quietly off. The two men stood for a moment,
staring up at the high battlements of the heavy guided missile cruiser
Kirov
where the ship rode at anchor, tied off to the long quay and now served by a
floating pier off the starboard side where several grey metal gangways climbed
up to the ship’s main deck.

The
man with the briefcase was Gerasim Kapustin, Chief of the Naval Inspectorate,
and fresh from the airport and a long flight from Moscow. The taller uniformed
man was Captain Ivan Volkov, Russian Naval Intelligence, and the two stood for
some time, their eyes searching the long, sharp contours of the ship, with
Volkov occasionally pointing at something. They noted the canvass tarps draped
over the wound to Kirov’s aft quarter, and the area that had once been her
reserve battle bridge. Kapustin’s eyes strayed along the tall main mast, up to
note the missing radar antenna there.

With
a shrug the Chief picked up his briefcase and started for the nearest gangway. They
were met by a Marine Guard, who saluted, noted their identification, and then
opened the gate to admit them to the ship. Their footfalls on the long metal
gangway had an ominous clatter as they went, and the Marine waited a few
moments before he picked up a phone from the gateway call box and rang up the
bridge.

“Gate
two,” he said in a low voice. “They are here.”

“Very
well. Thank you, Corporal.”
It was the voice of Captain Vladimir Karpov.

Ten
minutes later Karpov turned to greet the two men as they stepped onto the
bridge. He walked forward extending a hand. “Welcome aboard, Director…Captain.”

Karpov
had never met either man, and the Director removed his hat to reveal a crop of
curly grey, hair fringing an otherwise balding head, with sharp blue eyes, and
a well managed mustache and beard. He looked the part, a careful minded
professor of a man accustomed to long hours at a desk pouring over charts,
tables, reports and computer screens. The other man was taller, a grey wolf,
colder and more aloof.

“Things
appear well in order here,” said Kapustin.

 “Although
from the look of things that cannot be said of the ship in general,” put in
Volkov.