Grand Alliance (Kirov Series) (27 page)

Morgan nodded, leaning close so
only MacRae might hear him now. “Look Gordon, are you going to let every ship
we run into out here get within gun range to satisfy your proprieties?”

“I see what you mean,” said MacRae.
“Very well, air contacts have been clean for a good long while. Let’s get an
X-3 up to have a look. I was just on the helo deck and the birds are all oiled
and ready for action.”

“Suit yourself. But they have got
to be destroyers, and if I can get the first good punch off in a bar fight I
always feel I got my money’s worth.” He smiled, and MacRae sent the order down
to the helo deck. His caution turned out to be unwarranted. Twenty minutes
later the X-3 helo reported in that they had long range cameras on the
contacts, two fast destroyers, flying the tricolor of France, and they were
beating to quarters.

This wasn’t the Georgian Coast
Guard, thought MacRae. Mack Morgan is right. I’ve got to re-set my watch to war
time. It’s no good thinking I can back down a potential combatant with a
warning or the simple flash of our deck gun. These ships undoubtedly mean
business, just like the Russian Black Sea Fleet did, and so that’s what we’ll
have to get down to here.

“Mister Dean,” he said stiffly.

“Sir?”

“Stand up the Gealbhans, a single
missile to begin. Target those close contacts. You may take your pick as to
which ship you hit. I want them to know what we’re capable of.”

“Aye sir.” Dean spun on his heel,
ready for action. “You heard the Captain. Light up the forward cell and sound
deck claxon.”

The blaring warning came and the
forward deck was cleared as the covering plates opened to expose the missile
cells. Seconds later the missile was away, fast on its way to find a pair of
troublesome birds in the two French destroyers.

Agile
and
Vautor
were the uninvited guests that day, the
Eagle
and
Vulture
. They
had been coming at their top speed, all four stacks darkening the sky with
smoke, with crews at the ready on their five 138mm guns. Their mission was to
find the ship reported by the German reconnaissance plane out of Greece, and to
ascertain whether the British fleet was on a parallel course south of the main
Franco-German force. MacRae did not know it at that moment, but he was about to
tell the enemy exactly what they wanted to know.

The missile came in low and fast,
a sleek sparrow out to challenge the bigger birds of prey.
Vautor
was
the ugly duckling that day, its crews spying something bright and low on the
horizon. The missile came so fast that the ships barely had time to swivel their
AA guns on the heading before it pulsed in to find its target, a silver streak
of death. At just a little over 3000 long tons, full load, and no armor to
speak of, the
Vautor
was exactly the kind of ship the missile had been
designed to kill. It penetrated the hull easily, and the resulting explosion
set off the big 22 inch torpedo tubes, with catastrophic results.

Captain Degarmo aboard the
Agile
stared with disbelief at the chaos when he saw the other destroyer erupt in angry
fire and smoke. A rocket, just as he had been warned. He did not believe the
tales circulating about these new British naval weapons, until he saw the skies
laced with the ragged remnants of the winding white contrails from the aerial
missile defense. Yet he had not actually seen any of those rockets in action,
and the thought that one could come at him like this, so fast and low over the
sea to unerringly strike his squadron, was most unnerving. He found himself
spinning this way and that on the weather bridge, field glasses pressed tight
against his eyes in a vain attempt to spot the enemy who had fired upon him.

Nothing was to be seen.

Mon Dieu! Could they have hit us
from beyond the horizon? Was this fired from an unseen aircraft that sped away
after delivering its weapon? He immediately sent a signal to the main fleet,
warning him that he was under attack by rocket weaponry, and the die that would
decide the fate of many on the sea that day had just been cast.

Admiral Jean de Laborde received
the message with some concern, turning to his aide, Lieutenant Giroux. “Rocket
weapon? Then the British do have these things as reported. Notify the Germans.
It seems the enemy is south of us, and on a parallel course as we suspected.”

This had implications for the
planned German attack against the harbors and airfields of Crete. They would
have to move north of Crete into the Aegean to strike the main harbors, which
would allow the British to steam north and try to seal off the roughly 100
kilometer passage between Kithira and the main island. This would either force
a battle there, or compel the Axis fleet to take the longer route around the
eastern tip of Crete before moving west again. So a quick conference with
Lütjens resulted in a most unexpected decision—they would turn south now and
face the enemy full on.

IF AIR COVER POSSIBLE, WE ARE
READY TO PROCEED, Laborde signaled to seal the deal. The plan had been to
always operate under the protection of land based aircraft from Sicily, Italy
and Greece, but Lütjens was not concerned. German intelligence had also counted
the planes on Crete, and they were not deemed a major threat. So they would go
hunting, and the fleet turned, riding high seas from the passing storm front,
and surged south through the grey squall lines in search of their prey. What
they would find, if they stayed on that heading unimpeded, was the flotilla of
wounded warriors,
Queen Elizabeth, Malaya
and the damaged cruisers.

Aboard
Argos Fire
, MacRae
watched the signal returns on the radar change their track and head south.

“They’ve come round to 170,” said
Healey as he watched the radar screen. “Speed has increased to 28 knots.”

Morgan gave the Captain a look.
“Well it seems we’ve invited more trouble than we needed,” he said.

“Aye, that we have. In for a
penny, in for a pound. How many ships in that battlegroup?”

“I’m reading 22 separate
contacts, with at least five or six large capital ships based on signal
strength and density. They all just executed a well coordinated turn, and they
move like silk. I don’t think we’ve seen all the speed they’re capable of yet
sir.”

“The ship will come to full
battle stations. Signal the British and advise them of the new heading and
speed. Let me see the situation on a map, Mister Healey.”

“Aye sir, this is the position of
the enemy fleet…” Haley pointed to the digital map screen to the left of his
main station. “And this is the British fleet bound for Alexandria.”

“A pair of old battleships, three
cruisers and five destroyers, and all of them at 16 knots. Be sure those ships
are notified of the new threat.”

“It won’t do them much good,”
said Morgan. “I do have good ears still, and I’ve been in on all the signals
traffic between the British fleet units.
Queen Elizabeth
has a problem
with her turbines, and she’s lost a boiler due to that bomb hit. Warning or
not, that ship isn’t going to make any more speed than those sixteen knots, and
I doubt any of the other ships will leave her behind.”

“I don’t like the looks of that,”
said MacRae. “The enemy has more than enough speed to intercept the British if
they get wind of them.”

And they did.

Chapter 23

There
was trouble on the
wind that day, swift before the spinning storm as the Franco-German fleet
turned south. The long, grey bow of the
Normandie
was breaking the
swells easily, the massive bulk of the ship taming the heavy seas as the
squalls slowly dissipated. Admiral Jean Laborde was on the bridge with the
ship’s Captain, Charles Martel, a man with a very famous name. He was a tough,
disciplined officer, and ready for battle at any time, so it was no surprise
that Captain Martel was also quickly given the nickname
Le Marteau
from
his namesake, Charles “the Hammer’ Martel, the man who had stopped the invasion
of the Moors into Europe at the Battle of Tours.

Now the hammer was eager to fall
on his perceived enemies, the British fleet that had so boldly and
ignominiously attacked the French off Mers el Kebir. They had moved south to
find the two destroyers that had been detached, seeing that the
Vautor
was a total loss, with heavy casualties among her crew of 125 men. It was just
one more slap in the face insofar as Martel was concerned.

“The British certainly gave the
Italians a lesson they will not soon forget,” he said to the Admiral.

“And they will likely sit in La
Spezia now for the rest of the war!” Laborde shook his head, his eyes following
the rise and fall of the distant silhouette of the
Dunkerque
. “But I
seem to recall that we gave the British a little lesson ourselves off Dakar.
Yes?”

“We did indeed, sir.”

“Tell me, Captain. What do you
make of all this talk of these new British rockets?”

“Hard to make any sense of it,
Admiral.
Agile
reports it was a rocket, low on the water and very fast,
and there is no mistaking its effectiveness. One hit and
Vautor
was a
flaming wreck, or so I was told.”

“How many men were rescued?”

“Sixty-three, most all
transferred to the
Strausbourg
now. She’ll be coming up to take her
station on out port side in due course.”

“Naval rockets…
Agile
saw
nothing else?”

“No sir. No sign of an enemy ship
on any horizon.”

“Then it must have been a plane.
I have heard the Germans are working on weapons like this—radio controlled
bombs.”

“They saw no aircraft, sir.”

“Probably ducked into a squall
line. How could any ship fire at a target it could not see? Captain Degarmo on
the
Agile
is not blind.”

Laborde could not be faulted for
the assumptions he was making. Over the horizon radar was not something that
would have come readily to his mind as a possible solution. French investment
in radar technology was sparse at best. By 1935 a single French ship had been
equipped with a “collision avoidance device,” and on land the French had
tinkered with the “barrage electronique.” They had purchased a few radar sets
from the British, and one of these was installed on the
Normandie
, but
amazingly, it was disregarded as a useful device, and switched off.
Strausbourg
had an air warning set installed and operational, but saw no threats.

“There is one thing I do not
understand, Admiral.” Captain Martel was adjusting the fit of his gloves. “If
the British have these weapons, why is it we saw nothing of them at Mers el
Kebir or Dakar?”

“Possibly a new development. It
may be limited in deployment, and only available on a few ships. The British
flagship is here, or so say the Italians. It was HMS
Invincible
that
caught the Italians as they withdrew, but it used the good old fashioned way of
doing battle at sea, those nice big 16-inch guns.”

“Perhaps we’ll get a crack at
that ship today, sir. I’ll match our twelve 15-inch guns against her nine any
day and come off the better man.”

“Undoubtedly,” said Laborde.
“Well with this weather clearing, let’s get spotter planes up and verify the
position of this enemy fleet. Notify the Germans that we will launch at 15:00.”

“Very good sir.”

* * *

MacRae
was pacing on the
bridge, his deliberate, steady movement from one side to the other like the motion
of a pendulum.

“Keep that up and you’ll wear a
path in the carpeting,” said Morgan, but he turned his head to see that Elena Fairchild
had come up to the bridge to see what was going on.

“Greetings, Mum,” he said
politely.

“I heard the alarm,” she said.
“What were we firing at this time?”

MacRae drifted over, speaking in
a calm, quiet voice. “A pair of French destroyers were thinking to get cozy
with us a while back. I sent them a message to discourage that thought, but it
seems my strategy backfired.”

“In what way?”

“We’ve another 22 ships heading
our way now, and here we are between the wolves and the sheep, just one little
sheep dog on the watch.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The British are about 20
kilometers south of us, and we’ve taken up the radar and air defense picket for
this detachment. They’re heading for Alexandria—the ships that took damage from
that air strike.”

“That was unfortunate,” said
Fairchild. “Why couldn’t we stop that attack?”

“Oh we might have—that is if you
don’t mind my using damn near every SAM we have aboard. The Russians took a bite
out of them as well, but it was clear they were trying to husband their missile
inventory as well.”

“And what about the destroyers?”

“It looks as though we put one
under, and that has the rest of the lot a wee bit bothered. They’ll be on our
far horizon in fifteen minutes at the speed they’re making. So I sent down a
message to let you know we may have to do some serious shooting, and very
soon.”

“Well how are we fixed for
missiles ourselves?”

“On the SSMs, we’ve seventeen Gealbhans
remaining.”

“Seventeen?”

Twenty two enemy ships… Seventeen
missiles. The mathematics did not give her any comfort.

“What about the deck guns?” She
folded her arms, clearly unhappy.

“Oh, Aye, we’ve plenty of
ammunition for those. But Mister Haley there says we’ve a good number of heavy
ship sin that formation, and a 4.5-inch gun won’t make much of an impression on
their battleships. We can use it to fend off a destroyer rush, should it come
to close quarter action like that.”

“A destroyer rush?” She gave him
a long look. “Walk with me, Captain, if you please.”