Kirov Saga: Darkest Hour: Altered States - Volume II (Kirov Series) (6 page)

“Was the ship damaged?”

“No sir. But the weapon struck
Sigfrid
and Böhmer thinks we may lose that ship.”

“Sigfrid?
Sunk?” This was
something else entirely now. Hoffman’s wild story of a fiery tailed rocket
striking
Gneisenau
still seemed unbelievable. He had not seen the damage
personally, but if he had, the news might have made more sense to him. Whatever
this weapon was, it must have tremendous striking power to be able to sink a
ship like
Sigfrid
in one blow. That was no ordinary destroyer! It was
nearly 6,000 tons in displacement.

Beyond that,
Graf Zeppelin
was far to the northwest, well over the horizon. There was simply no way the
British could have reached it with such a weapon from their present positions… unless…
unless the ships to his south were not the only enemy units now vectoring in on
the scene of the battle.
Nelson
and
Rodney
had been at sea for
some time, but he heard nothing from Wilhelmshaven as to their current
position. Suppose they continued west, following his own wake north of Iceland,
and were even now bearing down on the Denmark Strait from the north?

His mind was in a whirlwind of
possibilities now, and the sound of the battle seemed like a storm of steel all
around him, the guns were elevating, firing, belching out their anger in
tremendous salvos that shook the entire ship. The sea was a churning lake of
fire, with tall geysers jetting up as the ships continued on a slowly
converging collision course, the range diminishing by the minute. He had to
think!

Could that rocket have been fired
by a plane? Was it in fact a rocket weapon as reported, or might it have been a
bomb? Could it have been a torpedo from a submarine, or even a flying rocket
torpedo? He knew that Doenitz had toyed with that concept, a rocket that might
be fired from beneath the sea to cross a longer distance before falling back
into the ocean to approach its target as a torpedo. Naval Intelligence also
believed that Italians were trying to develop flying torpedoes that could be
dropped by parachute and then activated to circle and search for enemy ships.
The roar of
Bismarck’s
guns shook the ship again, rattling his attention
back to the moment with the jarring sound of battle.

“Ship sighted! Bearing 220
degrees true!”

Lindemann pivoted to search the
smoky red horizon, barely seeing the growing shadow of another ship on the sea.
It had been reported earlier by the air units, and now was making its prominent
appearance on the horizon. At that very moment Admiral Tovey was sending up his
battle ensign and remarking that it bore a lock of Nelson’s hair. Seconds later
Lindemann knew that his battle was evolving to something more than he expected.
He saw the bright flash of gunfire from the shadow on the horizon, heard the
low booming peal soon after.

That will be HMS
Invincible
,
he thought, perhaps the best ship the British have. He could see the high arc
of the shells catching the sunlight, a small spotting salvo to test the range,
but he knew this ship would soon follow with a full broadside if these shots
were close.

Now his mind raced on. An attack
on
Graf Zeppelin
from an impossible range… Could the British have
another battlegroup to the north that he did not know about?

“Send to Böhmer,” he said quickly.
“Ask if he has sighted any enemy ships to the north of our position. That
rocket had to come from somewhere. If the British are behind us…” He said
nothing further, but the concern was obvious in his voice.

* * *

The
missiles leapt up from
the forward deck of battlecruiser
Kirov
, the hatches snapping open and
the sibilant hiss of the declining jets orienting them to the correct angle of
fire. Then the roar of the main rocket engines ignited, and the deadly lances
were on their way. One by one the S-400
Triumf
missiles rose into the
sky, accelerating rapidly and scoring the ruddy sky with their long white tails
that seemed almost luminescent in the midnight sun.

They formed a great smoky rainbow
in the sky, arcing up, their tails bright with fire, the noise of their haste a
roaring howl that seemed to shake the air itself. They were a weapon that could
not have even been conceived in the minds of any man of that day, capable of
finding and hitting a supersonic target as much as 400 kilometers away, and
doing so with near pinpoint accuracy. And they could reach the mind numbing
speed of just over 4000 meters per second, which amounted to 14,400 KPH!

Aboard the battleship
Bismarck
,
every man on the bridge was staring at the sky. There came a lull in the
gunfire, and he knew that the British crews must be equally spellbound. There
were three, then five missiles clawing through the sky like shooting stars,
high up, and then descending like meteors, bright with fire to explode on the
heedless formation of
Stuka
dive bombers that was fast approaching the
scene of the battle. One by one they exploded, then they saw the flaming
wreckage of aircraft falling from the sky… one by one…

Lindemann was astounded by what
he saw, the inner voice of the skald chanting the demonic verse from the Eddas…

“The
hot stars down from heaven are whirled;
Fierce grows the steam, and the life-feeding flame,
Till fire leaps high about heaven itself.”

Till fire leaps high… What in the
name of heaven was happening? His eyes followed the long arcing trails through
the sky, tracing back towards the smoky red horizon to their point of origin.
There, he thought. Whatever blighted
Gneisenau
and struck at
Graf
Zeppelin
was there. He could feel the sinister presence of something dark
and unseen beyond that horizon, a fateful nemesis that lurked at the edge of
history itself, looming, brooding, a hidden menace on the high seas that was
wholly unaccountable.

This is not possible, he thought.
Not possible!

Then something jarred him to
action, the harried worry snapping at him from all directions like the snarling
teeth of a wolf pack. It was as if he acted on pure reflex, sensing a danger so
profound here that his only recourse, the only sane thing to do, was to step
back, to turn, to get his ships as far from that unseen danger as he could
until he could assess what was happening.

At that moment one of the fiery
streaks in the sky swerved and dove, racing down at breakneck speed and
plummeting to the sea. At the last moment, it pulled up and then came streaking
in, aimed right at
Bismarck
, just a meter or two above the water!

“Left hard rudder! Come round to
ten degrees north and signal all ships follow!” Lindemann’s voice was ragged as
he shouted.

“Rudder left and coming hard
about!”

The maneuver might have avoided a
slow moving torpedo, or even frustrated the aim of an oncoming plane—but this
was no plane. The rocket came hurtling in, right for the heart of the ship and
then struck home with jarring fury and fire. It was as if Thor had hurled his
hammer from the sky, the hammer of God striking his ship and igniting a horrid
hot fire on his starboard side.

Bismarck
wheeled off
course, just as a narrow spread of two more heavy rounds from
Hood
hissed
into the sea where the ship had been a moment before and exploded, magnifying
the sense of imminent peril the Kapitän now felt. Then Lindemann saw the distant
ripple of fire as the newly arriving British ship let loose with its first full
broadside.

Hoffmann tried to warn me. I
could see it in his eyes; hear it in the tone of his voice. There was fear
there, and awe, and now I know what he had tried to convey. Now I know what
killed
Sigfrid
. Yet Lindemann had not even seen the enemy ship that had
fired the terrible weapon at him!

The range opened at once, and
Lindemann looked to see that
Tirpitz
and
Prince Eugen
had both
matched his maneuver. The destroyer
Heimdall
was also churning about and
accelerating to its top speed of 36 knots as the German ships veered off angle
and began to break away to the northeast, guns still firing with wrathful
anger.

Now the situation had taken a
sudden and dramatic turn. Oels called up to the bridge saying he had red lights
across two full compartments on the starboard aft quarter, and a bad fire.
Gneisenau
had been hit like this, by this terror weapon with precision accuracy and
amazing range and striking power.
Altmark
obliterated,
Gneisenau
hit,
Tirpitz
hit, his own ship damaged,
Sigfrid
sunk and
Graf
Zeppelin
under attack! This was more than he bargained for when he strove
to persuade Raeder to allow him to engage here. Suddenly the lure of fat
convoys to the south no longer seemed promising. Now he could think of only one
thing he must do.

I must get these ships to safe
waters. We must disengage at once. Hoffmann was correct and I should have
listened to him.

This changes everything.

Chapter 6

“That
seems to have done
the trick,” said Rodenko, his face registering satisfaction. “The German main
battle group has turned on zero-one-zero. They look like they are breaking off,
Admiral.

“And the planes?

“We got all seven in the lead
group with that S-400 barrage. The rest are still near the carrier, but they
now appear to be circling.”

“Let me know if they proceed
south on a heading to make any further attack.”

The Admiral looked at his acting
Capitan now. “Well, we could not avoid the fireworks as you had hoped, Mister
Fedorov, but it appears we have made just a bit more of an impression than our
deck guns did when the British had a look at them.”

“Agreed, sir, and we will have
some explaining to do should we meet them again, but I suppose it could not be helped.
All things considered, it was a fairly economical cost to affect the outcome of
this battle. Those five SAMs and the two SSMs we expended may have saved
thousands of lives.”

“On one side of the equation,”
Volsky reminded him. “Remember that we may have also killed a good number of
German sailors with this intervention. Rodenko now believes the destroyer that
took our P-900 has now sunk.” He let that settle in for a moment, more for the
sake of the younger officers within earshot than to lecture Fedorov. He knew
his young Captain would have done even less if he could have found a way to
impose an outcome here with minimal violence. Where Karpov was heedless of the
human cost his actions levied, Fedorov seemed to count every soul lost on his
fingertips.

One man heedless and headstrong,
the other compassionate and overly cautious, yet daring in many ways. It was
Fedorov’s plan that safely rescued Orlov, and also his plan that put my bottom
in this seat again and pulled
Kirov
out of 1908. We may have just
arrived there aboard
Kazan
in the nick of time. Another hour and Karpov
would have destroyed most of Togo’s fleet. Who knows what the world would have
looked like then?

He looked at Fedorov, seeing a
distant look in his eyes, as if he was considering something, his mind
grappling with a problem of some kind.

“Your thoughts, Mister Fedorov?”

“Sir? Oh, I was just thinking
about our chances… of moving in time again before 1941.”

“You are still worried what will
happen come late July next year?”

“I am sir, in spite of what
Director Kamenski has said. He believes this to be an altered reality, separate
from the line of causality we left in 1908. That may be true, but it could also
simply be the same world, only one badly fractured by what happened that year.”

“But what did happen of any great
consequence, Fedorov? We do not know this yet. Yes, Karpov sunk several old
ships in Admiral Togo’s fleet, but then we spirited the ship away and no one
was the wiser.”

“Yet that had a significant effect,
sir. I spent two hours from my last leave with Nikolin listening to radio
traffic. That incident re-ignited the Russo-Japanese conflict. Japan repudiated
the Portsmouth treaty, and almost immediately occupied all of Sakhalin Island.
We could not get all the details, but there was a news item about Urajio, and
that was the Japanese name for Vladivostok. Japan now controls that city, sir,
and it is not any exaggeration to think that may also be the result of the
incident in 1908.”

“That certainly would have
changed the history in the Pacific.”

“Yes sir, and I have learned one
other thing. Josef Stalin died as a young man—in 1908. There was a broadcast
out of Orenburg that mentioned his death in Bayil Prison. Apparently he was
executed, though the narrator used the word assassinated. There is a statue of
him there in Baku, and his name was etched on a monument as one of the
instigators of the early revolution.”

“Yet you must see this as good
news, yes Fedorov? Think of all the millions sent to the death camps under
Stalin’s regime.”

“Of course, sir, but there is
another side to that coin. The strength of his will and personality was also a
decisive factor in building the Soviet Union as we knew it. Without Stalin,
Russia remained divided in a contentious civil war that apparently continues
even now. There is fighting today again at Volgograd. This world may simply be
the result of things that happened in that decisive year—in 1908. It was the
year Russia lost its only Pacific port, the year Stalin died, and one other
thing—it was the year something fell from the deeps of space at Tunguska,
something that found its way into Rod-25.”

“Suppose you are correct,
Fedorov. What then?”