Kirov III-Pacific Storm (Kirov Series) (43 page)

“Helm, port twenty and all the speed
you can give me!” The young captain wanted an immediate course change, this
time in the same direction he had turned earlier instead of a
ziz-zag
back to starboard. He wanted to get the ship off
the range line that now must surely be plotted by the enemy.

“There was a second contact bearing on
our position from the southwest,” said Karpov. “We were looking at it just
before we lost the radar scan.”

“Sir….” Tasarov spoke up now. “I can
hear it on sonar.” He had been listening closely to the battle, both his
equipment and inner ear sorting out the chaos in the sound field. When the big
rounds came in so close he thanked God that his system was capable of detecting
and muting sound spikes to protect his ears. It was state of the art, and among
the best surface sonar systems in his world of 2021.
Kirov’s
own screws
were a loud wash over everything, but Tasarov had that signature well profiled
and he was filtering it well. He also had a good read on the deep thrum of
Yamato’s
screws, but there was a third contact, faint but growing louder, higher in
pitch, more distant, with a unique signal pattern, and he had been listening to
it for some time now.

“That will be the heavy cruiser
Tone
,”
said Fedorov.

“I last marked it at about a hundred
kilometers and closing fast at the angle we’ve been running on.” Tasarov
confirmed the estimated range, then noticed something more.

“The screw pattern for the
Yamato
contact has changed significantly, sir. I think they’re slowing down too.”

Tasarov had very good ears.

*
* *

The torpedoes
found their target easily enough
after their long seventeen minute run. One activated its wake homing mode,
easily profiled the big ship’s frothing footprints, and rode them right into
the rightmost screw, demolishing it with its powerful explosion. The second
followed, slipped a few hundred feet wide and then detonated to damage the
ship’s hull very near the end of her underwater torpedo bulwark protection.
There was an immediate hull breach and
Yamato
started shipping water
across three compartments. The ship also reeled to starboard, her rudder batted
violently by the explosion of the first torpedo, and also damaged.

The sudden movement threw off all the
carefully plotted calculations that had enabled the guns to straddle their
enemy moments ago, and now officers and crews were struggling to re-plot, as
one new sighting variable after another was shouted down to the fire control
operators, new roll, new speed, new bearing, new declination. They were
essentially starting from scratch, with only a decent handle on the probable
range to the target. The bugle sounded and the aft turret fired its two good
barrels again, but the shots were now well off the mark.

“We are losing speed, sir,” the
helmsman reported. “Twenty knots…eighteen knots… I’m having difficulty getting
back on our heading, sir.”

The flooding had surged into two
boiler rooms, and was now entering a third.
Yamato
quickly lost 25% of
her steam and the engines slowed, the grinding of the damaged screws now
clearly evident as a rumbling vibration.

Yamamoto realized that the ship had
been hit by torpedoes. So this demon has yet another sting, he thought. Their
torpedoes are as good as our own! Now he had lost the speed he needed to stay
in the chase and close the range. His guns were already at an ideal range now,
but the ship’s new heading had taken the forward turrets out of the action.

“Sir,” said Rear Admiral
Takayanagi
, the ship’s assigned commander. “I believe we
have jammed our rudder with that explosion aft. We are circling. The gunners
will have fits trying to plot solutions now. We will need to put divers in the
water to clear the damage, and that flooding will cause us to list to starboard
in time if it is not corrected.”

Yamamoto looked at Kuroshima, the
gravity of the moment apparent to them both. The ship could no longer continue
the engagement. The fires fore and aft were one thing, now they also had
flooding, loss of speed, and a damaged rudder. He could no longer maneuver
adequately, and was, for all intents and purposes, at the mercy of his enemy
now if they continued to fire those terrible rockets. When would the next
torpedoes come?

“Begin counter-flooding. We will
continue firing to harass the enemy as best we can,” he said resolutely,
knowing the situation was a lost cause. “There is no other course we can take
for the moment. Do what you must to manage the ship
Takayanagi
,
but this battle is over. Our concern now is saving the ship and any man left
alive aboard her.”

“Aye, sir.”

She had taken hits from two P-900s,
six Moskit-II missiles, but the two torpedo hits had been the telling blows.
Yamato
would not sink that night, but she could no longer fight effectively, and it
was only the similar gravity of the damage control situation aboard
Kirov
that would end this battle in a draw, though Karpov would count the victory on
Kirov’s
side nonetheless. It was clear to him which ship had administered the greatest
punishment, and which had endured. Yet
Kirov
had come within a hair’s
breadth of having her back broken by an 18 inch shell, and the memory of that
would not soon be forgotten.

The Russian battlecruiser was also
taking water, her earlier wound opening to the sea again. A torpedo was jammed
in her port Vodopad number three tube, her Top Mast radars blasted away, her
ventilation conduits riddled with 20mm rounds and a slowly rising heat situation
in her reactor was beginning to cause Dobrynin more concern. He asked the
Admiral, still at his side, if the ship could keep speed moderate, and Volsky
was soon hastening to the bridge.

Both fighters seemed exhausted for the
moment, and a brief interval of relative calm settled over the scene,
punctuated only by the distant thunder of
Yamato’s
aft turret, firing in
protest, yet widely off the mark. Fedorov steered a course to open the range,
wanting nothing more to do with the wounded behemoth that was still growling at
them on the restless seas. He hoped the battle was finally over and that they
could slip away into the night to lick their wounds, but these hopes would soon
be dashed.

Off to the south a man stood stiffly
at the forward view ports on the bridge of the cruiser
Tone
, his eyes
pressed tightly on his field glasses as he noted the distant amber glow on the
horizon. He heard a faint rumble, like thunder, and knew that a great battle
was underway ahead of him, and that ships were burning, men fighting and dying
on the heartless sea. His scout planes had been unable to contact him for some
time now, the airwaves garbled with a strange wash of static, but he knew he
was close. Battle stations had been sounded, the crews tensely alert, and all
of
Tone’s
four twin 8 inch gun turrets forward of the bridge were ready
for the fight. Behind him came two more heavy cruisers,
Nachi
and
Myoko
.

He was Captain Sanji Iwabuchi, and he
was marching boldly forward to the sound of the guns.

Chapter
33

It is hard
to say what keeps a man in a fight
when he knows he has already been beaten. Heavyweights had been beaten
senseless by their opponents and yet still fought on, answering the bell with
bloodied faces, swollen eyes, and broken ribs. In war it was much the same. Men
fought on in one desperate lost battle after another, all through human
history. They strove and grunted and charged their enemy under impossible
circumstances, willing to die first before they would ever admit defeat.

Half way around the world the Russians
and Germans would begin their grueling five month battle for Stalingrad this
very week, and in a few months time, on that cruel December after the 6th Army
had been encircled, the surrounding Russian troops would see something that
amazed them on Christmas Eve. Every section and platoon in the surrounded
German Army fired tracer rounds up into the sky, lighting up the massive
perimeter in celebration, spending badly needed ammunition to also say, ‘here
we are. We are still here.’

The Japanese character was easily set
to this mind, and though their navy had taken a severe beating in the last
twenty-four hours, it fought on. No captain or admiral at sea in that era had
ever faced steeper odds or a more powerful foe in a surface engagement. Had
Kirov
been in her prime, unblooded by weeks of combat at sea and still with full
magazines, she would have fought the battle quite differently.
Yamato
would have never seen her, and never once been in a position to fire those
massive guns. A salvo of ten or more missiles would have found her in the
night, one single, lethal barrage that would have ravaged her superstructure
and caused uncontrollable fires.

This is how Karpov might have
preferred to fight his battle, with the struggle for the all important first
salvo uncontested, the sole prerogative of the powerful ship beneath his feet.
All the long discussions in the naval forums would mean nothing when those
missiles hit home. End of story. Discussion over. Yet, given their strange
circumstances, and the fact that he could not know what he might be facing in
days ahead, he had to throw his punches in a slow and measured way, beating
down his enemy by degrees, and hoping he could use as few missiles or torpedoes
as possible in the process.

That said, the skill and determination
of the Japanese Navy had seen them harry and hound the battlecruiser across a
thousand miles of ocean, and to within a hair’s breadth of destruction. And
there would be no discussion about that either, no meeting of the minds between
Yamamoto and Volsky to find another way.

Yamato
had taken every punch, every hit, and
yet still fought on. Karpov watched it now, his head shaking in near disbelief
as the ship continued to fire in frustrated anger, though its guns could not
find their target as
Kirov
slowly slipped away. My God, he thought.
There’s something to be said for armor after all. That ship took eight missiles
and two torpedoes, beaten, but not broken. I could put more torpedoes into it
from my port side Vodopad tubes, but we desperately need every weapon we have
now. There’s no point in continuing this madness any further.

He turned to Fedorov. “I think we can
safely move out of range now. Then we’ll need to see to our own damage and
determine what to do next. That cruiser will be up on us soon enough, and
Rodenko saw ships behind it earlier, before we lost the Top Mast radar.”

“Very well, Captain,” Fedorov had a
distant, empty look in his eyes. “We’ll steer 45 northeast until we put some
sea room between us and the enemy.”

And so it ended.

Karpov turned slowly to the
mishman
at the log and spoke quietly, an almost solemn expression on his face.

“Let the log read that at 21:40 hours
battlecruiser
Kirov
disengaged from her action against battleship
Yamato
,
after achieving ten hits on the enemy and leaving a badly damaged ship in her
wake. Report damage sustained by this vessel by referencing Chief
Byko’s
log entry for this date. Anton Fedorov Commanding;
tactical executive officer, Vladimir Karpov.”

“Sir, the log entry has been
recorded.”

“As you were,
mishman
.”

The Captain looked over at Fedorov,
and saw his eyes had glassed over, a hidden pain there as he stared at the HD
panel above them, watching
Yamato
burn on infrared. Karpov stepped to
the young Captain’s side and spoke in a lowered voice .

“It will get easier,” he said quietly.

“I’m not sure I want it to,” said
Fedorov, and Karpov knew what he meant, nodding.

“Admiral on the bridge!”

Volsky huffed in through the main hatch,
closing it behind him as he struggled to catch his breath. He wasted no time,
his eyes quickly finding Karpov and Fedorov where they stood by the navigation
station.

“We’ll have to slow the ship again.
Byko reports damage to the hull patch and renewed flooding near the reactors.”

Fedorov nodded, “Ahead two thirds,” he
said “and steady on 45 degrees.” He seemed a bit listless and sullen now.

“So the ship is in one piece after
all. My God, is that what we did to the enemy?” He pointed out the forward view
ports, seeing the dark silhouette of
Yamato
crowned by the wild dance of
flame and fire. “Well done,” he said. “Both of you. But I have more news. It’s
started.
Dobrynin is seeing the same odd spikes in the core flux readings. He can hear
it. There was also a vibration just now as I came up the stairs. Did you feel
it? I think we may be shifting…moving somewhere else.”

“That would be most welcome at the
moment,” said Karpov. Then they all felt yet another odd vibration, and a
palpable smell of ozone in the air. Karpov instinctively looked about him,
thinking a panel may have shorted out and they might have an electrical fire,
but the crew sat attentively at their stations, and no one else seemed alarmed.
For a brief moment he saw the glowering hulk of
Yamato
seem to dim and
fade on the horizon, and assumed she had been masked in the billowing black
smoke of her own fires.