Kirov Saga: Altered States (Kirov Series) (33 page)

Fedorov said nothing.

* * *

Hoffmann
was on the weather bridge, eyes glued to his field glasses and standing like another tin man, his posture stiff and straight. He saw the dark shade stain the horizon and had an eerie feeling, as if he were looking at the shadow of death itself. It slowly fattened and extend and he knew the ship was turning. The squadron was at battle stations, running fast, their bows white with sea spray. He saw the big turrets turn, barrels elevating, and looked again.

“What do we have here?” he said aloud to himself. “That is no cruiser…” No. It was much too big, its bow high and the long foredeck strangely clean and empty. Then the superstructure rose, tier after tier to a high mast where something gleamed in the grey light, a blur of motion there. But he could see no guns, nothing more than a few secondary batteries. He thought this might be a large liner, another British auxiliary cruiser impressed into the ranks and forced to wear war paint, but it did not look like any passenger ship he had ever set eyes on.

This is a battleship…
Look
at it. It has an evil aspect, imposing, menacing. Look at its size! The bow is high and proud, and the bridge and main mast is well back. The ship looks fast, but they can’t be making any more than ten or fifteen knots, as if they had all the time in the world, heedless…or fearless…but where are the guns? There’s nothing on that long forward deck at all.

It was not
Nelson
or
Rodney
. This ship was much longer than either of those ships, by at least a third. It was easily as big as
Hood
, though it looked nothing like that ship. Could it be the British G# battlecruiser? But no, that ship had two prominent stacks. There were no stacks here. This ship is not making smoke at all, just sitting there, turning like some grey behemoth that has slowly taken notice of intruders, with bad intent.

There was a high standard on a mast amidships, but he could not make it out at this distance. It fluttered like a black ghost above the ship, indiscernible. They can clearly see us, but yet they do not fire, he thought. Perhaps this is some strange commercial ship, a big toothless tanker rigged out to look like more than it is.

The Germans had played tricks of their own like that. Their commerce raiders like
Orion, Thor
and
Komet
would carry false stacks, wooden and canvass facades to mimic new funnels, gun turrets, and change the ship’s superstructure and silhouette. Deception was as much a part of war as anything else, but this was the most mysterious looking ship Hoffmann had ever seen. It was time to break the impasse and send greetings and salutations. If the radio was jammed then he would do it the old fashioned way. If this ship was his dark and nefarious shadow, the source of the jamming that had confounded his radar and communications, then he would soon find out. There was nothing else in the sea around them that would be deemed a friendly vessel, except the
Hipper
, and he could recognize that ship’s silhouette easily.

He passed a brief moment of hesitation. What if this is a neutral ship, an American warship of some kind? So he decided to begin with a warning shot, the proverbial shot across the bow.

“Huber! Signal
Gneisenau
to hold fire for the moment. We will say hello with Anton and see what comes back.”

Anton was, of course, the forward “A” turret on the ship. He looked over his shoulder, craning his neck as the battle flags rose to communicate his message.
Gneisenau
winked her aft lamps to indicate they had received and understood the order. Satisfied, Hoffmann settled his cap firmly on his head and slowly raised his field glasses. ‘The praetorian’ was going to announce himself.

“Warning shot off the bow. Lead them, but make it close.”

The triple turret slowly rotated, three barrels elevating, wet with sea spray. Then they fired, the bright flash followed by a deafening roar, and heavy black smoke rolled out to port. It had begun.

Hoffmann watched the long fall of the shells, waiting for the geysers to mark the shot. He saw them plunge into the sea thirty seconds later, tall and white.

“Range?” He called in to Schubert, his gunnery officer.

“19,500 and closing. Those warning shots were short, but we’ll have the range soon enough.”

The Kapitan waited, observing the distant ship closely. They had not returned fire, but yet they were not running, still cruising sedately along as if they had no care in the world. Then he saw what looked like an explosion on the forward deck, and for the barest instant he thought one of the rounds had been under charged and was coming in late, hitting the ship square on the foredeck.

He could even see what looked to be a fragment of the deck thrown up into the air, then it exploded again, or so he believed until he saw something come hurtling toward them, soaring up and then diving for the sea.

The MOS-III was the fastest missile in the Russian inventory,
Zvezdnyy ogon',
the
Starfire
. It had a range of 160 kilometers, and could cross that distance at 1.7 kilometers per second after a ten second acceleration burn, five times the speed of sound. To Hoffmann as he watched it seemed as though the thin white stream stretching out behind the object was a javelin shaft of lightning.

The bright fire of its engine cast an evil glow on the sea as it raced in, right for
Gneisenau
, low over the wave tops. Then at the last it leapt like a flying fish in a programmed popup maneuver and smashed into the heart of the ship, right above the gunwales. There was a violent explosion as the missile delivered its 300 kilogram warhead, the same size as the UGST torpedo that had broken the back of
Altmark
earlier. The roar of the missile’s engines still followed, finally catching up just after it thundered against the ship.

Hoffmann gaped at the scene, seeing
Gneisenau
roll with the heavy punch, the broiling smoke and fire amidships burning fiercely hot from the excess fuel left in the missile. A secondary anti-aircraft battery was completely immolated. The missile had struck very near the funnel, just above the number four boiler room. The lifeboat there was completely devoured, and the blow had penetrated deeply into the ship, gutting mess halls, quarters, repair shops , storage areas and very nearly blasting its way out the starboard side of the superstructure. Everything in its fiery path was destroyed. The smoke towered up, heavy and black, three times the height of the ship.

“Mein Gott!”
Hoffmann was stunned by the sudden lethal violence returned by the distant intruder. This was a battleship, most certainly, but what in the world had it fired at them? Rockets! He knew that Germany was hard at work on them even now, but apparently the British were too! One shot, one hit, and look at the fire on
Gneisenau!

“Huber! Give them both turrets and then hard to starboard and ahead full. We have the devil to pay!”

It was his transgression, he thought, but
Gneisenau
paid the price so far.
Scharnhorst
fired, guns belching retribution, and then the ship wheeled hard right, churning up the sea with the violence of the turn.

Curiosity killed the cat. The Kapitan was heading for the armored citadel, his face drawn and set. The smoke from the fire on
Gneisenau
was lying heavy on the sea, the black smoky blood of a stricken steel ship. They had managed to see his turn, and now turned with him, but not before they let off a salvo from their aft turret.

The two ships were now racing away from the enemy, and quickly opening the range.
Gneisenau’s
speed was slightly off, which meant the fires amidships may have gotten to one of the boiler rooms. Hoffmann wanted no part of this mysterious British battleship. His only consolation was that the enemy seemed to have no speed. It could not follow and slowly receded, disappearing over the horizon.

If we hadn’t slowed to recover that
Arado
we would have been in the van and it would be my ship burning now, he thought grimly, my men charred in that fire. One thought seared his mind now, the dark smoke clouding his soul: this was something altogether unexpected. What was it? Why did we hear nothing of British naval rocket weapons? How many ships carried them? Were they all so accurate, so terribly fast?

“Come about and swing north as soon as we get over the horizon and out of sight. There is more here than we can chew right on now. With
Gneisenau
burning it’s no good heading south into the Atlantic to look for another tanker. The British will see us twenty miles away. We will have to find
Nordmark
instead. So as long as we have speed we must use it now to get north to find fuel. Notify Lindemann.”

Now he knew what had devoured
Altmark
in one swift blow as the survivors had told the story.

This will change everything…

Chapter 29

Denmark Strait ~ 17 June, 22:00 hours

The
Fairey III
spotter-reconnaissance plane had been flying for some time on a southwesterly course, seeing nothing. Then the rear .303 Lewis gun operator noted a column of smoke on the far horizon behind them, fisting up into the sky like a black thunderhead. For a moment he thought it was only weather, but then he remembered the evening forecast, clear with good visibility west all the way to Greenland.

“Something at five o’clock,” he reported, and the pilot craned his neck to see enough there to prompt him to bank right.

“That’s trouble,” he said. “Something burning, but it’s well off to the west. Probably a steamer that ran afoul of a Jerry U-boat. Signal
Hood
and ask if they want us to have a look.”

Holland was curious that day, so he vectored the plane off its intended search pattern, and had it work its way northwest to see what it could find. As they approached, it became evident that a ship was burning in the distance, and a second contact was spotted nearby.

“Have a look there at three o’clock, sir, another ship!”

“Can’t say I like the looks of that one. Could that be the
Bismarck?
Get off the sighting report and we’d better head home. The fog is rolling in and we won’t see a thing in ten minutes.”

Holland soon had the puzzle to solve. Three ships, two heading north at high speed, one burning and trailing heavy smoke, and a third ship about twenty kilometers to the west. All three looked to be fighting ships. Could one be the cruiser Fleet Air Arm had spotted earlier? The first two ships were undoubtedly the Twins. The third could have been
Hipper
. He decided as such, and then, realizing he was now heading in the wrong direction, he quickly came about and assumed a course to the northwest. Home Fleet was informed of the development at once.

* * *

Even
while Holland had been laboring north through the storm the previous day, Tovey had acted decisively, withdrawing the whole of his force and swinging back along the rocky coast of Iceland. There he lingered for some time, waiting for the new carrier
Illustrious
to arrive with the heavy cruiser
Devonshire
and three more destroyers.

By the time
Kirov
had put its missile into
Gneisenau
and sent the Twins off north, Tovey’s Home Fleet was consolidated off the cape near Vir south of the Katla Volcano and ready to continue west at high speed to effect the link-up with Admiral Holland.

The Admiralty had not been entirely happy with Tovey’s decision to withdraw, and the Prime Minister seemed to be exerting considerable pressure on the situation in the form of his eloquent displeasure. The fact that the newly appointed commander of the Home Fleet was sending them home HMS
Renown
with considerable damage from two 500 lb bombs did not go unnoticed. A message was sent expressing some obvious discontent over the incident, particularly on the part of First Sea Lord Dudley Pound.

‘We have sent you to find and sink German ships,’
came the cable
, ‘not to send our own home for the repair yards. The Prime Minister is of the opinion that you have shirked your duty to vigorously pursue and engage the enemy.’

Tovey read the message with some dismay, and a rising anger. He knew enough about the musty halls of the Admiralty to know that Their Lordships were now in some heated discussion as to his eventual fate. Yet for the moment the timely dispatch of HMS
Illustrious
with much need air support and another heavy cruiser gave him hope that someone there was still pulling for him. He did not know who, but suspected that it might be Third Sea Lord Admiral Bruce Fraser. The two men had seen eye to eye before concerning fleet dispositions in the Med and there was much mutual respect between them. Tovey had great faith in the man.

Yet the Admiral was ill tempered that day, and when young Lieutenant Commander Wells came in with a dispatch he was hastily dismissed.

“Not now, Mister Wells!”

Tall and stocky of frame, Tovey was an imposing figure in his wrath, and his temper was legendary. It was said his anger could melt a candle ay thirty paces when he really let it fly, and his displeasure had cowed and skewered more than one blundering officer in the past. Yet he was a fair man, aware of his own intemperate moods at times, and one to quickly set right any wrong unjustly delivered. He composed himself, looked up at Wells, seeing the man wilt a bit under his gaze, and spoke again.

“There you stand only recently mentioned in dispatches for gallantry, Wells, and here I sit under suspicion of being a shirker and slacker at the helm. Don’t you mind my bluster one bit. I tend to blow off steam on occasion, and sometimes I deliver a broadside at an undeserving soul simply because he comes within range. Now then… what have you for me ?” He eyed the dispatch in Wells’ hands.