Kirov III-Pacific Storm (Kirov Series) (37 page)

The chase was on, but Yamamoto
reserved a measure of caution, even if he was in the most powerful ship in the
world, or so he believed. A wounded animal is most dangerous, he thought. This
ship has eluded our forces for days. It must be stalked carefully,
professionally, and dealt with mercilessly. And I will see it at the bottom of
the sea, one small flower I can take to the Emperor.

One small flower…

 *
* *

Captain
Sanji Iwabuchi received the order
with much excitement. At last, he thought. I am no longer chained to Hara’s
carriers. I am free to find and kill this enemy ship again, and avenge the
insult and shame I have suffered in losing command of
Kirishima
. Captain
Okada has been more than accommodating to have me here aboard
Tone
, and
I cannot dishonor him, or myself, any further.

When the
Kirishima
struck those
mines in the narrow waters of the Torres Strait, Iwabuchi had been ordered to
wait and escort Hara’s carriers through the narrow passage, to sweep the
channels so they could move east and do what he had abjectly failed to do.

Yet now old King Kong knows what it
feels like, neh? Hara’s neck is a red as mine! His entire carrier air wing was
nearly wiped out, and now he, too, was eager for revenge. With Yamamoto’s
orders to protect his carriers with everything he had left, I have little doubt
he would still have his hand on my waistband, keeping me close. But with the
arrival of two more light cruisers and three destroyers in the
Ryuho
group, he now has enough ships to screen his precious fleet carriers, and I am
once again unleashed, the rabid dog set loose again.

Tone
is a good ship, fast and with good eyes in the six
seaplanes she carries. True, she does not have the power I once commanded with
Kirishima
,
but at least I can catch this
Mizuchi
now. It can no longer edge away in
the night to set cowardly traps as it did in the straits. Yes, I can catch it,
but can I kill it?

He considered what had happened to
Haguro
,
and the damage that had been sustained by
Myoko
and
Nachi
. The 8
inch guns he had in front of him now were much weaker than the 14 inch guns on
Kirishima
.
No matter. He would use speed this time, get in close and run this sea dragon
through with his torpedoes. It was more than duty, more than his need to stand
for his comrades in arms here. Now it was personal.

 If I do not prevail, he thought,
then it is very likely that I will be relieved of my command when this is all
over and the children in the Naval General Staff start asking their questions
about what happened here. Before I stand accused of incompetence, and endure
their insults, I will first have a victory to hand them—to silence the whispers
behind my back, to make an end of the sullen eyes that follow me, and most of
all, to have my just vengeance.

He had been cruising almost due east
for the last hour and a half, on a course that would both screen Hara’s
carriers and race to cut off the advance of the enemy. This time things are
different, he thought, this time I am ahead of this beast. But soon he was disheartened
to learn that one of his seaplane scouts had reported the enemy had altered
course and was now steering due north. Now he was again behind the action, and
forced to run at his best speed to creep up on this demon. He gave the order to
swing round to a heading of five degrees north and all ahead full. In doing so
he knew he would begin to outpace both
Nachi
and
Myoko
, as they
could not quite match his speed. So be it.

Somewhere to the east he knew Admiral
Yamamoto was watching, and steaming even now to find and punish this
interloper. Captain Iwabuchi wanted to get there first, and with a nine knot
speed advantage over
Yamato
, he had a very good chance of doing exactly
that.

I may not be able to match this ship
on my own, he thought, but I can take hold of its ankle, and sink my teeth into
it nonetheless. He smiled when the bell rang out the course change, the
helmsman’s voice rising and falling in echo to his own.

Heavy cruiser
Tone
turned
smartly about, and surged north, her sharp bow cutting the seas with her haste
and a long white wake behind her for the other cruisers to follow.

The chase was on.

Part X

Clash Of Titans

“Now
shall I become a common tale,
A
ruin'd
fragment of a worn-out world;
Unchanging record of unceasing change.
Eternal landmark to the tide of time.
Swift generations, that forget each other,
Shall still keep up the memory of my shame
Till I am grown an unbelieved fable.”

—
Hartley
Coleridge, Prometheus

Chapter
28

Rodenko
watched the slow approach of the enemy,
wishing he had his Fregat system to get better data, but doing what he could
with the Top Mast antenna. The first two hours were the most difficult. He
could see the enemy task force to the east clear enough. It had been heading
about 247 degrees southwest at twenty-five knots on a course to intercept the
ship, but sometime after
Kirov
turned north he saw it come round on 292
degrees and by 15:00 hours it had closed to a range of 125 kilometers east of
their position.

When Dobrynin reported his maintenance
procedure was complete, Fedorov gave the order to go to full battle speed and
turned the ship on a parallel heading, running away from the
Yamato
group, but the Japanese had a surprise for them.

“My contact to the east is splitting,”
he said. It looks like they are sending out a faster ships to try and run us
down. He could see a group of contacts moving ahead of his primary, and to make
matters worse there was a very fast contact coming up from the south as well,
and moving at all of thirty-six knots.

“That would have to be the heavy
cruiser
Tone
,” Fedorov confirmed. It’s moving ahead of those other
cruisers we faced earlier. It looks like we have a bit of a foot race on our
hands now.”

“But where are we going, sir? This
course will take us back up to the Torres Strait.”

“Leave that to me,” Fedorov was
squinting at his charts. “There’s plenty of room in the Coral Sea for the
moment. We’ll give them a run for their money.”

“But what about those other two
battleships, Captain?”

“
Mutsu
and
Nagato
? They
cannot match our speed. They won’t get anywhere near us, but I plan on running
in their direction until I’m forced to turn on another heading. Hopefully that
will keep us well ahead of these other two faster groups to the east and south,
and buy time for the displacement to kick in.”

“Are you sure it will happen again,
Fedorov?”

“Who can be sure of anything? We’ve
stumbled on a possible trigger point for this madness, and I can only hope it
will work for us one more time.”

“What if it doesn’t?”

Fedorov gave him a long look. “Then we
fight, Rodenko. We fight—what else?”

They ran on that heading for two
hours, but Fedorov calculated a predictive plot that showed the cruiser
Tone
getting uncomfortably close if he persisted on 292, so at 17:00 hours he turned
north again, running away from the cruiser and nervously watching the ship’s
chronometer, counting the time since the reactor maintenance had been
completed. There had been no signs of anything unusual for the last two hours.
The sea was calm, Nikolin’s airwaves were steady, Rodenko’s radar was
functioning without interference, and the Japanese were still following,
bearing in on him from multiple headings. Three pesky seaplanes were marking
Kirov’s
position steadily now, growing a bit bolder and venturing nearer as they
shadowed the ship.

“Damn,” said Karpov, “I miss those
five S-300s we wasted on Orlov.”

“They may have been well spent,
Captain,” said Fedorov, “but I understand what you mean. It feels a bit naked
knowing we can’t do much of anything against an aircraft unless it gets in
close now. At least we still have some punch on the main missile deck.”

“Twenty-two missiles,” said Karpov.
“That was more than the original load for the first
Kirov
. The old ship carried
the big P-700 Granit missiles back then, but only twenty of them. They were
slower, big fat missiles weighing over 15,000 pounds, but they had twice the
range of our Moskit-IIs, and a huge 750kg warhead. The only problem was that
they made too good a target for enemy SAMs, but I wish I had a few of those as
well. Lob one on these Japanese cruisers and we could sink a ship with one
shot. Our NATO friends called them the ‘Shipwreck,’ and it was a good name for
them.”

Karpov folded his arms, gazing out the
forward viewports. “The sea is so calm,” he said. “Stare at it for ten minutes
and you could almost forget we’re in the middle of the greatest war ever fought
on this earth.”

“At least the greatest one we know
of,” said Fedorov. “Something tells me it wasn’t the last world war. We’ve seen
aftermath of the next one first hand.”

“You think it started in 2021 then?
Here in the Pacific?”

“Those newspapers seemed to indicate
as much, one of our cruisers got restless and took out that American sub. A
trigger point like that could have cascaded into a big crisis in the Pacific,
and then the Chinese got into the act over Taiwan. The Americans hit their
carrier, they hit back and sunk the
Eisenhower
. On and on it goes. Both
sides were just playing the same old game all along, a slow escalation of
tension that can lead to no good. What do you think we put to sea for? Live
fire exercises. They were getting ready for a war they saw coming, and we were
the tip of the sword.”

Karpov nodded solemnly.

“Then perhaps our presence here in the
past hasn’t really done much harm after all. Have you lost your fear of
disturbing the history, Fedorov?”

“Yes, Captain, I think I have, though
it still bothers me. Nations have put men in trenches, ships at sea facing off
against one another for centuries, but now I see what it comes down to in the
end. Very few fought for God or even the Rodina. They fought for the fellow
next to them in the line.”

“And to save their own damn skin,”
Karpov agreed. “Well, if we don’t move again, in time, then I’m going to have
to put some serious harm on anything that gets close enough to threaten us.”

“And you want to know what I’ll think
of that, yes?”

“It crossed my mind, Fedorov. After
all, if what you have told us is true, Admiral Yamamoto is out there this time.
He’s a bit of a demigod in your history books—his ship a legend as well.”

“He was…” Fedorov had a distant, empty
look in his eyes. “Yes, the ship was a legend once. In our day it was a broken
wrecked hulk, 1200 feet below the sea. That’s where legends end up all too
often, Captain, and the world forgets. This war practically destroyed all of
Europe and Asia, and yet they still build the ships and planes and missiles in
our day. The world forgets.”

Karpov nodded, a sudden melancholy
coming over them now, a taste of bitter
toska
, the old Russian yearning
for a better day. “I wonder if they forgot about us as well,” he breathed. “I
mean Severomorsk, Suchkov, the navy, the whole stinking mess of a country we
set sail to defend. From their perspective we simply vanished that day. I
suppose they blamed it all on that accident with
Orel
.”

“Most likely,” Fedorov agreed.

“Mighty
Kirov
,” Karpov smiled.
“We take on all comers, the British, Americans, Italians and now the Japanese.
And they probably don’t have the slightest inkling about us.”

“I’m not so sure,” said Fedorov. “The
British learned a great deal when the Admiral met with Tovey. If word of our
presence here has gotten back to the Admiralty by now, it will give them the
last clue they needed to come to the only conclusion that could possibly
explain who and what we are.”

“Clue? What clue?

“We vanished on August 23, 1942,
Captain. And then we reappeared just a day later, but over seven thousand miles
away. A ship doesn’t move in space that distance in a single day. If they do
spot us here, and put two and two together, then they could only conclude one
thing—that we moved in
time
. And they have a few people there in
Bletchley Park who are quite good at math, Mister Karpov. Quite good indeed.”

“Hard to believe,” said Karpov. “This
whole affair.”

Fedorov looked at his watch. “Why
don’t you get some food and rest, Captain. Something tells me we’ll be very
busy by sunset.”

Karpov gave him a knowing look.