Grand Alliance (Kirov Series) (28 page)

“My pleasure…” The two exited the
aft bridge hatch, with several crewmen looking over their shoulders as they
went, and Mack Morgan giving one a big grin until he heard Miss Fairchild’s
voice calling for him as well.

They moved out to the officer’s
wardroom behind the bridge, and Elena closed the door, folding her arms. “What
in god’s name are we doing, Gordon?”

“We’re screening the British
fleet. That’s what we agreed to do when we took up this post.”

“Where is the Russian ship?”

“Kirov?
They’re doing the
same for Admiral Tovey’s detachment, off to Benghazi. I can’t say as I like the
idea of dividing the fleet like this, but the ships we’re screening all took
hits in that air action, so it seems they want to get them safely to
Alexandria. It’s really my fault, Elena. I took a pot shot at a pair of destroyers
getting nosey, and put one under. Perhaps if I’d waited and used the deck guns
I might have driven them off and avoided the situation we’re in now.”

“Perhaps,” said Morgan, “but they
may have just come at you all the same. I put him up to it, Mum. I gave him a
good nudge in the ribs about letting those destroyers get too close.”

“True enough,” MacRae agreed. “But
the responsibility is still mine. I’m Captain of
Argos Fire,
and it was
my decision.”

“Well what about the British?”
said Elena. “They have battleships south of us in that detachment, correct?
They can defend themselves?”

“Aye, they’ve
Queen Elizabeth
and
Malaya
south of us, with three cruisers, and all with damage.
They’ll fight if it comes to it, but I think we owe them the benefit of anything
we can do.”

“What do you propose?”

“A sheep dog isn’t worth the hair
on his back if he’ll cut and run from the wolves, Elena. We started this, I
started it, and there it is. I can’t see as though I’d do anything different,
except perhaps ask the good Admiral if he’d mind assigning us a carrier. But it
seems they deemed the air threat low on this heading. I suppose he was correct,
until I stuck my thumb in it.”

“So now what? That doesn’t answer
my question, Gordon.”

“So now we fight, Madame. It’s
just that simple. A man in a bar got in my face and I gave him a good hard shove
on the shoulder. Who knew he’d come at us with half of windy Wales?”

“How many missiles can we afford
to use here?”

“I suppose that will depend on
how much backbone they have out there. We might hit them, and back them off if
we do it hard enough. Then again, they just might get their dander up and come
at us with everything they have.”

“That’s what it looks like now,”
said Morgan.

“Damn,” Elena swore. “Seventeen
missiles? Alright, Gordon. You can use seven. Those missiles are all that
stands between us and a re-commissioning of
Argos Fire
as a cruise
liner.”

“Well, it wouldn’t be that bad,
but I take your point.”

“What about the helicopters?”

“I was just going to get round to
that. We can put
Hellfires
or
Sea Skuas
on the X-3s, These are
smaller missiles that might hurt their lighter ships if we need them. And they’ve
a mean chain gun.”

“Use them if necessary, but keep
them safe. Those ships have flak guns, don’t they?”

“That they do, so the
Hellfires
may not be the best choice here, They range out only 5 kilometers.”

“What about my birthday present?”
said Mack Morgan.

“Birthday present?”

“Elena purchased a pair of
Hellfire
AGM-114N Thermobaric missiles from the Americans. They call them MACs.” He
smiled. “They’ll suck the bloody air right out of one of those destroyers.”

“Wonderful,” said MacRae. “Eight
kilometer range. No, we’d better use the
Sea Skuas
. We’ve four for each
helo, sixteen in all since we have missile stocks left over from the bird we
lost in the Caspian Sea. They’ll range out to 25 kilometers, which will be well
outside ship flak defense of this era.”

“Alright,” said Elena. “Two
helicopters, with four missiles each. The rest stay in the hold.”

“And so then what’ll we do if the
15 odd missiles you’re giving me won’t turn that fleet around? This is war,
Elena. When we fire people over there are going to die, and when they shoot
back there’s a chance people will get hurt or killed on our side as well. You
brought the ship here, What did you expect?”

“Have the British been warned?”

“Fifteen minutes ago.”

“Alright then…. Seven missiles.
Eight on the helos. That’s all we can do for them here. Understand?”

MacRae looked at Mack Morgan,
then slowly nodded. “As you wish. I know what’s in your mind. It was a bloody
long war, but if we beat these fellows now, we won’t have to face them again
later. It takes three or four years to build another battleship.”

“I understand, but we have to be
cautious. Signal the British that we will engage, but we’re just one ship, a
good ship no doubt, but we can’t win the whole thing for them. They’ll have to understand
that.”

Back on the bridge the crew was
silent as the three came in. They had seen Miss Fairchild in this mood before,
and knew she wasn’t happy. Yet the Captain took his seat and immediately issued
orders.

“Mister Dean, send down to the
helo deck. I’ll want two X-3s up with
Sea Skuas
in ten minutes. Ready on
the GB-7 system. Two missiles please. One minute delay between shots. Target the
center of their formation so the whole lot gets a good look at the results.”

“Aye sir. Ready on GB-7.”

“You may fire.”

Dean looked at his CIC officer
and seconded the order. The warning claxon sounded, the missile fired, and the
battle was joined at 15:40, with the enemy fleet at 35 kilometers range, not
far over the grey horizon.

* * *

“Sir!
Mainmast reports a
plane on the horizon. Very fast, sir, and dead ahead!”

“Sound General quarters,” said
Laborde, looking at his Captain. “A spotter plane? Are ours in the air yet?”

“We’ve only just launched, sir.”

“Shoot the enemy plane down.”

Several destroyers posted well
out in the van were already firing, but the effort was futile. They could
simply not sight on a weapon moving at Mach 3, or have any chance of hitting
it. Their only hope was to throw up such a wall of flak that the missile might
run into something, but with only this one target, the threat did not seem to
warrant such action. Thirty seconds later Admiral Laborde and Captain Martel
saw the new British weapon.

As if the men off the
Vautor
were cursed, the missile locked on to the ship they had been transferred to
after being fished out of the sea, the battlecruiser
Strausbourg
,
cruising off the port side of the
Normandie
. The missile had been programmed
for a popup and dive maneuver, or it might have blasted right into the forward
face armor of the A turret. Instead it struck the base of the conning tower,
but found a sturdy structure there, with 270mm armor, over 10.5 inches of steel
that had been designed to stop a shell weighing many times the 200kg warhead on
the missile. The resulting blast and fire were considerable, but the missile
did not penetrate that armor. That said, the fire from the fuel and the shock
of the kinetic impact were a severe blow to the ship, and on the bridge of
Strausbourg
,
the crew were picking themselves up off the deck and seeing the thick pall of
acrid smoke blinding their view forward.

The deadly duel of missile versus
armor had begun.

Chapter 24

It
was a battle that
Kirov
had learned to fight in the crucible of war, the ship’s missiles matched
against some of the toughest and most powerful battleships ever built. The
Russians had already dueled with ships like
King George V, Rodney
and
Nelson
,
fought the best battleships of Italy and then slugged it out with the Japanese
Behemoth
Yamato
—all in previous worlds that had now spun into the ether
with this latest revision of the history when the ship appeared in 1940. And
Karpov had also faced down the American Navy in two eras, with a massive battle
in 2021 against CVBG
Washington
, before displacing to 1945 to confront
Halsey, Ziggy Sprague and the most powerful fleet the world has ever seen.
There he dueled with the intrepid battleship
Iowa
, taking the most
extreme measures in the struggle to prevail.

In all of this combat, the
officers and crew of
Kirov
had learned hard lessons on the application
and limits of their power. They had retuned their ECM jammers to frustrate the
enemy radar and communications of this era, and reprogrammed their missiles to
rise and strike the superstructures of the ships they targeted, thus avoiding
the thick, heavy belt armor of the battleships. For some they had altered the
angle of the missile attack to hit from above, to plunge through the thinner
deck armor and into the heart of the enemy ship.

All these measures and tactics
had made
Kirov
invincible on the sea, the shock and power of those
supersonic SSMs stunning the unsuspecting Admirals and Captains of the 1940s,
the searing heat and fire of nuclear warheads becoming the ultimate hammer the
ship could wield. In these many duels,
Kirov
found that the one weapon
the enemy had in abundance, and one that posed the greatest threat to the
ship’s survival, was air power. It was the dogged, if suicidal attack of
Admiral Hara’s carrier pilots that scored the first telling blow against the
Russian ship, when Lieutenant Hayashi came screaming down to fly his plane into
the aft reserve citadel command bridge of the ship, braving a missile defense
that had sent so many of his comrades to their deaths.

And it was the massed air power
of Halsey’s fast carriers that rose to challenge Karpov, even with two other
modern ships at his side. The sheer number of aircraft the American Pacific
Fleet could put into the sky was like a great wave that threatened to swamp the
ship, depleting its missile inventories and leaving it open to destruction from
above, as so many other great ships had died.

Thus far,
Kirov
had
avoided serious harm. Yet the ship was wounded, by the shrapnel of enemy
shells, near miss torpedo explosions, and the raging attacks of enemy planes.
It had survived all these battles through the skill of its officers, the sheer
power of its weaponry, and at times pure luck. The U-boat Kapitan Rosenbaum had
caught the ship by surprise where he lurked in Fornells Bay off Menorca, and
the torpedo he fired came within inches of striking a devastating blow to
Kirov’s
hull. Even in 1908, the dogged attacks made by Admiral Togo’s fleet had managed
to put damage on the ship, and the mine struck there had forever destroyed
Kirov’s
forward ‘Horsejaw’ sonar dome.

Now
Argos Fire
was in the
same crucible of war that
Kirov
had faced, but they had not had time to
learn any of these lessons. They had great strengths relative to the enemy they
were facing. They could see them on radar over vast distances, and had the
speed to use that advantage to keep their distance and strike with long range
missiles. Yet they had not faced ships of heavy armor yet, and their missile
inventory was nowhere near the size of the one
Kirov
had brought to this
world.
Argos Fire
had only 24 Gealbhan
Sparrow
missiles under her
forward deck, and of these many had been used in the Black Sea. They had only
seventeen left now, and the first to strike the oncoming Franco-German fleet
had found a worthy target in the battlecruiser
Strausbourg
, sending fire
and wrath against her forward conning tower, but it was not a fatal blow like
the missile that had easily gutted the lightly armored destroyer
Vautor.

The thickness of the armor on the
ships they were now facing would make all the difference, as long as the
officers commanding them had steel wills and backbones for the fight that was
now unfolding.

Admiral Laborde saw the second
missile flashing on the horizon, and it looked to be heading directly for his
ship. “Hard to starboard!” he roared, as if he were attempting to outmaneuver
an enemy torpedo. The helmsman spun the wheel, turning the ship slowly as the
missile flashed in, low on the sea. Seconds later it was the
Normandie
that felt the shuddering impact and fire, which might have hit the long bow if
it had not been for that instinct to turn. Instead the missile struck low on
the side armor of the battleship, just beneath the massive B turret, and there
it made a glancing blow that looked far worse than the damage it actually
inflicted.

Bright orange fire blazed against
the side of the ship, but the armor held, and the fires caused by the residual
fuel were the worst of the damage, scorching the hull black from just above the
water level to the gunwales. Both hits had been shocking to all the men of the
fleet. The leading destroyers were amazed to see how the missiles had even
changed course to deftly avoid the screening ships and vector in on the heart
of the formation. But that shock was the worst of it, and it did not break the steel
in the men that day. They would fight.

Admiral Lütjens was steaming
three kilometers off the port side of
Normandie
, his flotilla of four
ships slightly separated from the French Fleet. It had been an uneasy alliance,
as the French were reluctant allies here, and he knew there may be many men on
those ships who still tasted the bitter bile of their defeat at the hands of
the Germans. He lowered his field glasses and looked at Kapitan Adler, a wry
smile on his face.