Grand Alliance (Kirov Series) (14 page)

His new radar man on the watch caught
his eye, and he knew they now have solid contacts with the Fregat system. So
Rodenko notified Admiral Volsky, and soon they were watching the first missiles
fire from the long, forward deck. Off they went, the five fingers of doom, a
fist of supersonic fire and steel that would soon catch the Italian bomber
formations well before they could ever expect to be targeted. The enemy learned
this lesson from us once, thought Rodenko. The British adapted fairly well, and
the Japanese too. Let’s see how the Italians learn. That air defense fire was
at fairly close range over the Suez canal when we arrived in theater. This time
we’re hitting them nearly 300 kilometers out. They are probably still forming
up after takeoff from their bases. The shock is going to be very telling here.

It was. They watched the digital
track of the five missiles as they traveled unerringly to the target zone.
Rodenko was counting down the range, until he saw Volsky raise a finger. So he
waited, allowing an interval of silence until the missiles were on target. Then
he leaned over the radar display, waiting for the system to refresh. He could
already see that the S-400 attack had the effect of poking a bee hive with a
sturdy stick. The once regular contact formations had disintegrated into a
confused scatter. He waited for the digital readout, then reported.

“Admiral, Fregat system now reports
42 contacts still airborne. The strike had taken down an astounding eighteen
planes. Perhaps not all of those were kills, Rodenko knew. The S-400 had a very
wide blast radius for its fragmentation rods. It likely damaged enough wings,
rudders and canopies to thin the herd, though he knew they had probably killed
half the planes that were now unaccounted for in the contact count. Some would
be limping back to base now, and outside our coverage zone. I wonder what they
will have to say to their wing leaders when they hit the ground?

“Contact reorganizing and
continuing on a projected intercept course,” said Rodenko. “Range now 220
kilometers at about 4500 meters altitude. Speed increasing to 400kph.”

The Savoia-Marchetti SM-79
Sparviero,
or “Sparrowhawk”
was a fast and durable three engine
airframe, often called the “Hunchback” by the men who flew it, because of its
distinctive dorsal hump on the forward superstructure near the canopy. Though
it looked awkward, it had set pre-war speed records, and was really a fast and
reasonably agile plane in combat. But its duralumin and plywood skin was easily
penetrated by the fragmentation warheads of a good SAM, and not one missile
fired would fail to find a target. It would simply come down to how many
missiles could be used here, and Volsky had decided he would only spare five of
the precious S-400s.

“Ready on Klinok system,” said
Volsky. “Twelve missiles please, three salvos of four each, and you may launch
at your best maximum range.”

They would wait until the enemy
formation was inside 80 kilometers before Samsonov caught Rodenko’s eye, his
hand hovering over the firing toggle.

“Effective range now,” said
Rodenko. “You may fire.”

The claxon rang, the deck erupted
with white smoke, and the missiles streaked away to find the unseen enemy. A
more selective weapon, each missile would vector in on a single plane, with a
much tighter fragmentation burst.
Kirov
would quickly trade those twelve
missiles for fifteen SM-79 bombers, and Rodenko reported the updated situation
report as before.

“Fifteen enemy planes confirmed
down, but our radar count now reports only 25 aircraft still inbound. I show
two other planes aborting, most likely with secondary damage.”

“Very well,” said Volsky heavily.
“Contact the British destroyer. Tell them we have thinned the herd as promised
and will now turn the engagement over to them. Let us see how their
Sea
Viper
does. We have already given the fleet a nice little spectacle.”

They would have to wait another
five minutes for the
Sparrowhawks
to come into what
Kirov
would
call a close defense range. To the British, it was the outer limit of their
Aster-15 missile at 30 kilometers. The Aster-30 could do better at 120
kilometers, but MacRae had waited to use his shorter range system. In truth, he
could have fired much sooner with his Aster-30 missiles, but had decided not to
speak of those in the briefing. The last time he had used that particular
missile, he had been firing at Russian SU-24s! Now here he was all chummy with
the Russian battlecruiser.

“No doubt they enjoyed lording it
over us on the range of those missiles,” he said to his Executive Officer Dean.

“That first salvo was most likely
their S-300 system,” said Dean.

“Or the S-400s. Damn impressive.
What was their secondary battery?”

“Most likely the SA-N-92 Gauntlet
system, sir. About 80 Kilometer range.”

“Good enough, but our Aster-30
will beat that, eh?”

“It will indeed, sir. Any reason
why we aren’t using them?”

MacRae gave him a wry smile. “I
told the Russians we would cover at 30 klicks, and said nothing of the Aster-30.
We’ve only 50 of those left. Our missile count on the Aster-15 is much higher. It’s
always wise to keep something under your kilts, Mister Dean. The CIC will activate
forward deck
Sea Viper
system, number fifteen please,
and standby.”

“Aye, sir,
Sea Viper
-15
activating and standing by. The ship is now at Air One.”

“Prosecute your contacts.”

“Sir, aye sir!”

“Mister Boyle. You will switch to
control guidance and feed target data to the
Vipers
from the Sampson system.”
Normally the Aster was an autonomous system that would use its own RF seeker to
find and prosecute its target. But Dean realized that planes of this era would
not be “emitting” on any of the typical spectrums the missiles would sniff. He
was turning the whole engagement over to Sampson. So where
Kirov
placed
the man by that name at the CIC, the British high domed radar set would be
coordinating their strike, in close cooperation with the CIC computers.

The missiles began to fire, lance
quick into the sky. They were extremely fast and agile, and there was no way
any plane was ever going to spoof them or out maneuver them, no matter how good
the pilot was. Twelve were fired, and they all found planes. The last baker’s
dozen left alive in the SM-79 strike had seen enough and finally lost their
stomach for the fight. They turned around and dove low for home.

“Enemy contacts breaking off and
now outbound.” Dean updated the sitrep and waited.

“Secure
Viper
system,”
MacRae ordered. “But the ship will remain at action stations. That may not be
all they throw our way. Signal the Russian ship and give them our kind regards.
How many more of those long range SAMs you figure they have, Mister Dean?”

“Full loadout would be 64
missiles, sir, but we’ve no way of knowing how many they’ve used up until now.”

No we don’t, do we, thought
MacRae, and that’s what bothers me. But he said nothing of this, turning the
bridge over to Dean to go below. He wanted to check on the situation below the
forward deck, and see how the crew was settling in to this full wartime status.
Yet the question still nagged at him like an itch he could not reach, so he
caught hold of Mack Morgan in a corridor and voiced it again.

 “We know this ship tangled with
the Americans in the Pacific, right? Well at the briefing we heard they mixed
it up pretty well here before they came to their senses and sided with us. Why
would we not know about those engagements? Wouldn’t they be history to us from
where we were back in 2021?”

Morgan did not quite know what to
say. He had never considered the question and had no immediate answer for
MacRae.

“Good point there, Gordie, if you
don’t mind my using the handle.”

“Not here, between the two of us,
but in front of the crew you’ll stick to Captain.”

“Aye, sir,” Morgan gave him his
toothy white smile. “Well what about that Nexus talk Miss Fairchild laid on
us.”

“What’s that?”

“Well the lady said we were in
some kind of Nexus point as I recall it. And to be honest, who had their nose
in the history books with all that was going on these last few weeks.”

“True,” said MacRae, “but you
haven’t forgotten who led the assault at D-Day, did you?”

“Good old Monty.”

“Yes, but the Yanks will say it
was Eisenhower.”

“Let them. Monty was the de facto
commander on the ground.”

“That’s the point I’m making,
Mack. If this damn Russian ship raised hell with the Royal Navy in 1941, then
why don’t I remember ever hearing about it in school?”

“You’d best ask her ladyship,”
said Morgan.

“I’ve missiles to look after for
the moment.”

But MacRae made it a point to ask
when he could, and was never quite happy with the answer he got from Elena.

Chapter 12

Tovey
was on the bridge of
HMS
Invincible
, watching the missiles score the blue sky with their
white tails. The spectacle seemed to stir a memory within him, and not of the
missiles he had seen in the recent North Atlantic engagement, or above Suez.
No. It was something deeper, that odd feeling again, just as he felt it welling
up when he heard the word
Geronimo
. Miss Fairchild’s mention of the Watch
also had the same effect on him, and he was thinking deeply about that note she
had handed him.

The woman seemed convinced that
this device, as she called it, had come from the future—not her own future, but
years even more lost and distant beyond her time. The conclusion they had come
to, that the fractures in time might extend in both directions, was most disturbing.
Yet that was not what bothered him, it was his name affixed to that note.

“
Should
you read this your mission will have concluded as planned…”
As planned? That suddenly had a rather ominous tinge, for
he realized that his name there implied he was most likely aware of that plan,
if not its author. Yet how could that be possible? How would I get hold of
something like that, a box from the future with something in it capable of
moving that ship in time. Why, the whole matter seems like it was designed to
bring that ship here, to this moment, to serve in this hour of need.

A
sudden thought occurred to him, and brought a smile to his lips. This whole
business with none of these people knowing about the Orenburg Federation is
rather telling, isn’t it? Why, it’s as if they all came from a completely
different world, a copy of this world, yet different. In fact, the Russians
fairly well confirmed this. The words of Admiral Volsky came to mind now, from
that fateful meeting aboard the Russian ship off the Faeroes
... “
Quite
frankly, the world as it now stands does not seem to be the one we left. This
will also be difficult for you to grasp, but the history we knew did not see
our homeland divided in civil war as it is…”

 
They
claim they met with me off Gibraltar in 1942, to parley, and the evidence of
that meeting was plain to see in the archive. Why, I even knew the name of the
place—Las Palomas. It just popped into my mind like I had lived all that
through in
this
life, a memory emerging from some hidden depth, like a
fish leaping from the unfathomable sea, and then it was gone…

Who’s
memory was that? Mine? It couldn’t be. The thought of another John Tovey out
there, interacting with the Russians, establishing the shadowy group that came
to be called the Watch… well it gave him a bit of a shiver. The more he thought
about things, the deeper the feeling became seated in him.

These
odd feelings and notions aren’t simply hunches or intuition, he thought. It’s a
powerful sensation, like déjà vu, a shadow of a deeply hidden memory
upwelling in my mind.
These must be remnants of those
other lives… echoes. In fact, Turing felt them as well, though Cunningham
seemed completely unaffected this way. He was properly astounded by what he
learned at that briefing, and I’ll have to keep a good eye on him now, but I
sense no deeper root in him like the one that seems to be growing within me—at
least not yet.

It was
more than memories, much more. There were
tangible things
from that
other world in this one, the intelligence files he had just told Fairchild
about, and the strange box aboard her ship—the device she mentioned. And what
about Turing’s watch! There was another little mystery that was as yet
unsolved. It went missing in this world, and then turned up in a box from some
other telling of these events. How could all these things from other times find
their way into this world? How were these memories emerging from within him?

A box
from the future—a device… Fairchild said she had instructions that led her to
Delphi. Someone must have a flair for the dramatic, he thought, hiding the damn
thing beneath the Oracle’s shrine. Now that I think of it, that young Russian
Captain intimated there were other places like this, where the rifts in time
caused by all these massive detonations had become permanent. Think on
it—gateways in time, portals to other worlds. Yet, from everything the Russians
have told me, things done in one world seem to have an effect on all the
others!

That
was why the Russians remained here, and why Admiral Volsky has thrown in with
Great Britain. They’re trying to prevent things that happened in their own
time, things they have seen, a great doom that comes upon the world in 2021. It
was a doom of our own making, or so they have led me to believe. These missiles
they fire, scratching the blue sky, driven on with relentless yellow fire, like
mindless sharks—that is what put an end to their world. Yet how ironic it is
that we need them now, in this war, to give us any hope of seeing they never
consume the world in the next one.