Grand Alliance (Kirov Series) (15 page)

A bell
rang, turning over the hour, and setting the new watch. He suddenly became
aware of his senses in the here and now, the smell of the sea, the light on the
water, the streaks of dark grey in the distant clouds that promised the threat
of rain.

My life
is wound about this Russian ship like a vine now, he realized. My God… I
believe I saw this ship decades ago, in the Straits of Tsushima, aboard
King
Alfred
, off Iki Island. Then boxes of reports and photographs appear, and
notes from the future, bearing my name. The Russian Captain came to the same
conclusion as Miss Fairchild did about all this. He could still hear Fedorov’s
voice…
“
How could images of events we lived through in 1941
and 1942 be here, a year before any of that ever happened, in the year 1940?
Unless—and this is the only possibility we could grasp at—unless they were
brought here, from some future year, and by someone we have yet to identify who
is also capable of moving in time.”

He smiled now, a strange light in
his eye. Someone planned it, the mission for this
Argos Fire
. The order
went out through the Watch, the organization I supposedly founded. The note
bore my name. Why feathers and fiddlesticks…. I think I may know who brought
these things here, and it wasn’t old H.G. Wells with his Time Machine as I told
the Admiral.

“Excuse me Admiral. Message from
the Russians.”

Tovey was again pulled from his
reverie into the urgency of the moment. He took the decrypted message and read
it quietly….
Argos Fire
had radar contact at long range on the Italian
fleet. CONTACT ON LARGE ENEMY FLEET REPORTED, BEARING NW AT 120 KILOMETERS. The
coordinate of the contact followed, and estimated composition. Many ships.
Steel in the water, and an impending battle at sea rising with the weather off
his bow. RECOMMEND YOU JOIN A.B.C. - HOSTILITIES IMMINENT.

That was an understatement,
thought Tovey.

“Mister Towers, send to Captain
Bridge on
Eagle
and have them reconnoiter this contact and ascertain
ship type and number. I want to know what we’re looking at.”

“Right away sir.”

* * *

That
was a question on
Admiral Volsky’s mind as well that morning. Rodenko had reported no less than
thirty separate contacts! At a range of 120 kilometers, the two forces were
closing the distance between one another by at least 40 kilometers per hour.
They would have the enemy on their horizon in under three hours time, and by
noon the battle would be fully engaged. Yet Volsky had no intention of waiting
for the enemy to get within gun range. He could have fired an hour ago, but
chose to take the time to coordinate his actions with the other fleet elements.

As with the air strike, it was
decided that
Kirov
would open the action, followed by
Argos Fire
.
Then they would observe the enemy’s reaction, take battle damage assessment,
and decide how to proceed.

“Well,” Volsky said to Rodenko.
“I was laid up in sick bay with Doctor Zolkin when we last faced the Italian
Navy. What kind of fight can we expect here, Mister Rodenko?”

“I suppose that depends on the
men commanding that fleet,” came the answer. “They didn’t like our missiles,
and we’ll again have the advantage of first shock. If we hit them hard enough
here, we just might drive this fleet off.”

“That is my hope,” said Volsky.
“We have thirty-two SSMs, correct Mister Samsonov?”

“Yes sir, nine Moskit-II, nine
MOS-III, and the new missiles we received from
Kazan
, fourteen P-900s.”

“Then let us begin with a salvo
of four P-900s. We’ll hit them and then see how they react. Can we target their
capital ships?”

“Radar signal processing is
fairly conclusive, sir,” said Rodenko. I can designate capital ship targets with
high confidence.”

“Then I see no reason to wait any
further. Fire your salvo, Samsonov. The ship will come to full battle
stations.”

* * *

The
man on the other side
was also a familiar face in these actions, one Admiral Angelo Iachino, the very
same man who had faced the wrath of
Kirov
off the Bonifacio Strait. When
Da Zara’s cruisers had encountered a fast enemy ship in the Tyrrhenian Sea, and
come off badly damaged near Calabria, Iachino was urged to sortie with his
heavy battleships from La Spezia.

The history was different then.
In that world the British attack on Taranto had occurred in November of 1940,
and the ships Iachino had at his disposal were those last survivors of that
very successful attack.
Cavour, Duilio
and
Littorio
had all been
damaged in that attack, but it had never happened. Iachino inherited the
command of the Main battlefleet from Admiral Campione, who was deemed too
cautious in the early encounters with the Royal Navy in 1940. Those battles had
been inconclusive, and Iachino was now in command of a force capable of settling
the entire issue of the war at sea in the Mediterranean, or so he believed.

“Wait for the Germans, wait for
the French.” He shook his head when Admiral Bergamini cautioned him in a
meeting they held aboard the battleship
Caio Duilio.
“I will do no such
thing!” We have the entire fleet here, Bergamini, six battleships. The British
have only four, and we match them in cruisers and destroyers as well. I’ll have
the entire matter settled before the French ever get to the Straits of
Messina.”

Iachino had every reason to be
confident, but it was a boast he would soon come to regret. He had no
conception of what was about to happen to his fleet, and he would soon face an
attack that would come completely ‘out of the blue.’ The weather was still
behind him, and ahead the skies were open and clear—until the first missiles
came. His watch reported something in the sky, a thin white contrail, and he reached
for his field glasses, raising them with a brown gloved hand. Iachino was a man
in his early 50s, yet grey haired beneath his officer’s cap. He was in the
second division, his flag aboard the new battleship
Littorio
, a ship
that had been built to counter the French
Dunkerque
design.

Where
Dunkerque
had eight 12.9-inch
guns and 225mm armor,
Littorio
would be built with nine 15-inch guns and
350mm of armor at the belt. Ahead of his ship, in the first battleship
division, Admiral Bergamini had placed
Conte Cavour
in the vanguard,
following with his flag on
Caio Duilio
, and with
Andrea Doria
rounding out that division. Iachino followed with the newer ships,
Littorio
,
Veneto
and
Roma
. Now Iachino spied the contrails in the blue sky,
thinking it must be high flying planes. But he soon saw that they were moving
much too fast. What were they?

“Enemy planes!” he shouted, with
the only explanation that would rightfully come to his mind. “Fast!”

“Look sir, they are diving!” The
watchman pointed, and Iachino could already see the AA guns on the battleships
well ahead of him starting to train their barrels skyward. He gave the order
for battle stations, the bells sounding as the men rushed to their weapons.
“Arrogant,” he said aloud, clearly seeing four contrails now. “These must be
fast reconnaissance planes. They think they can get down low and sneak in on
us, but don’t they ever look over their shoulder? Those contrails can be seen
for fifty miles!”

Then he heard a clamor from the
men, raising his field glasses again to see what they were fussing about. The
planes were swooping low—so low that it seemed they would crash right into the
sea! Then, to his amazement, they began a shifting maneuver, a dizzy dance as
they approached his leading battleship division. Some crazy pilots were
thinking to make themselves difficult targets today. What were they doing? Were
these torpedo bombers to be coming in that low? They were certainly not the
lumbering British
Swordfish
—my god! Their speed!”

It was then that he saw the first
dark fist of black smoke mushroom up from the ships ahead. The planes had
suddenly put on a tremendous burst of speed, flashing in at
Conte Cavour
and
Duilio
. They had hurled themselves right at the battleships in a
suicidal charge that sent all four to fiery deaths!

“What in god’s name has possessed
the British,” said Iachino. “Are they so desperate that they are willing to
sacrifice the lives of their pilots like this to get hits?”

Apparently so. But these planes
had come in so fast that the battleships had barely trained their flak
batteries before they struck home. No plane could travel at such speeds. He
soon got the alarming reports from Bergamini. Both his ship and his lead
battleship had been struck, and now a fatal flaw in the redesign of
Conte
Cavour
was exposed. The ship had been completed in 1915, given several
overhauls between the wars that extended her length and beam, upgraded AA guns,
and even bored out her main guns to 12.6 inches. Her deck and barbette armor
had also been thickened, adding weight that had caused her main belt armor to
be completely submerged at full load. So when the P-900s struck, they hit the
ship well above this heavy armor, and the 200 kilogram warheads moving at two
and a half times the speed of sound during the final high speed run, carried a
considerable impact.

Bergamini reported bad fires
amidships on
Conte
Cavour
, and the hull holed in two places with
gaping black tears, over ten feet wide, that were now belching torrid flames
with heavy smoke. His own ship
Duilio
had been struck at a different
angle, with one hit on the sturdy conning tower about thirty feet below the
bridge. The ship had not seen much of the fire of war. It had served only
seventy hours at sea in WWI, then went through extensive refits similar to
Cavour
.
She was nicked at Taranto, by the British attack there in the old history, but
missed altogether in this altered history, as that attack had never been
launched. Her initial wartime patrol had failed to find the enemy the previous
year, and so the ship’s first real taste of battle would be this hard slap in
the face from a P-900
Sizzler
, and a punch to the gut when a second
missile also struck her amidships.

In one hot minute a third of Iachino’s
battleships were hit and burning. He gritted his teeth, angry that he had not
insisted on fighter cover over the fleet. That would be something he would soon
have to correct. But if the British were going to simply crash their aircraft
into his ships like this… Was it desperate bravery on their part now? They knew
they could not face me ship to ship here. Or was it simply madness?

He would soon learn that it was
neither, for the missile attack had only just begun. It started with the fires,
bright and fierce, but they would soon become burning coals in the guts of his
battleships that would burn with unquenchable heat.

Part
V

Turnabout

“Turnabout is Fair Play.”

―
The Life and Uncommon
Adventures

of Captain Dudley Bradstreet

(1755)

Chapter 13

Johannes
Streich, commander of 5th Light Division, was at his wits
end. He had been ordered to move his battlegroup south yet again, in another of
Rommel’s wide enveloping movements. Bypassing Tobruk was one thing, and
something Streich had real doubts about. It was difficult enough to get fuel
and supplies up to the fighting units as it stood, and with the Australians
holed up in Tobruk, there was always a threat they would break out and raise
havoc if the Germans moved too far east.

For
some days now the British seemed to have no stomach for battle, withdrawing
first to Bardia and Sollum, and then yielding those positions to move further
east. Now the Germans had come up against a new division, the 2nd New
Zealanders, and they looked to be well dug in and prepared to make a stand.
They spent a day moving units up and reconnoitering the situation, seeing that
this was the place the British had determined to make their last stand. About
30 kilometers due south of Bug Bug on the coast, the long escarpment that had
formed Wavell’s castle wall in the desert made a dog led at its farthest point
from the sea, and then extended northeast in the general direction of Sidi
Barani.

Just
south of this dog leg the ground was very bad for armor and vehicles, with
numerous silted depressions in some places, and hard rocky ground in others.
There were also several hills and ridge lines that formed natural defensive
barriers, and it was here that the 2nd New Zealand Division had been placed on
defense. The remnant of 2nd Armored was held behind the lines of entrenched
infantry to act as a fire brigade, and the position looked very strong to
Streich. His troops were tired, his tanks needed maintenance, and there was
always too little fuel to go around.

“Move
south? Again?”

“I will
not be handed a battle of attrition at Tobruk,” said Rommel stolidly. “If the
enemy is there it is because that is where he wants me to attack him. Well I
will not oblige him. Instead I plan to swing around the flank of that division
like this.” He pointed to the map, his finger tracing out the route he had in
mind.