Grand Alliance (Kirov Series) (8 page)

The
General stared in utter amazement when the driver and gunner spoke of their
respective duties.

“We’ve
25 of these at the ready,” the gunner explained, pointing the ammunition.
“Another 25 stowed within easy reach.”

It was
as if O’Connor had been swallowed by a behemoth, and when he emerged, he had a
dazed, bedraggled expression on his face, Jonah expelled from the whale,
senseless at what he had experienced. He got down from the tank, then stood
there in complete silence, just looking at it.

“Start
the engine,” he said at last. “Let me hear it.”

The
driver inside accommodated him, and the deep low rumble of the big engine
filled the air, thrumming with an expression of sheer power. O’Connor closed
his eyes, listening to it, an almost frightening sound with overtones of doom
in the lower registers. If Troyak had been there, he would have known it at
once, a sound not unlike that deep, bone penetrating vibration they had heard
in Siberia, only clearly audible this time. It had the same effect, and spoke
of one word that it would put into the soul of any enemy it faced—fear.

O’Connor
turned to the other men, and smiled. “It’s the bloody Hammer of God,” he said,
and that was not too far from the mark. “This is… well its quite extraordinary!
I had no idea a tank like this was even in development.”

Now he
realized why this unit might be here, far from spying eyes, a new secret weapon,
perhaps sent here to a remote proving ground for training. But Lord, he could
only imagine these tanks in action now, thundering in at 40 kilometers per hour
and firing as they went. There was no way they would ever hit anything, he
thought, until they showed him how the tank could rotate its main body while
the turret maintained a rigid and stable position aimed at a potential distant
target.

“That’s
what a stabilized gun system can do,” said Kinlan. “We can hit like lightning,
move like a wildcat, and we’ve very sharp teeth. General,” he put his hand on
O’Connor’s shoulder now. “This tank is all but invulnerable to anti-tank
weaponry of this day. You could roll up one of your Matildas, park it right
there and fire, and you might do nothing more than disturb the paint job on
that armor. I have sixty of them sitting here, and woe betide anyone who gets
in my way when I turn them loose. Now… What were you saying earlier about us
having trouble holding off that Italian Infantry heading for Siwa?”

“Gentlemen,”
said O’Connor. “I’m not much of a drinking man, but I’ll have a nip of anything
you’ve got, just so I can stay on my feet.” He turned to them now, his
astonishment becoming a broad smile. “Bloody marvelous!”

It
was
marvelous, and yet incomprehensible. O’Connor just kept staring at the tank,
not one, but sixty of them! Behind the dazzle, a strange feeling came over him.
The tank was extraordinary, its size and design astounding but, more than
anything, he was flabbergasted at the things he had seen in the interior
compartment. The whole space was immaculate, and looked like the dash board of
an aircraft in places. Yet there were no typical needle gauges and dials. In
their place the interior of the tank glowed softly with a strange light.
Colored panels were lit up with numbers and symbols, and in one place he saw
what looked to be a map glowing softly on a glass pane! The driver merely
touched it with a finger and the whole image expanded and changed! He was so
taken with it that he was almost mesmerized. He was seeing things here that
boggled the mind. Look at that armor! The Lieutenant had said something about
it that stuck in his mind.

“What
did you call this armor, Lieutenant?”

“Third
generation Dorchester Chobham, sir.”

“Dorchester?”

O’Connor
knew the place. It was a small market town on the southern coast, just above
Weymouth, with a population of about 10,000 people who chiefly traded local
produce three or four days a week. The ladies there had taken to organizing for
the coming war early on, setting up the local “Women’s Voluntary Service” or
WVS, which was soon called the Widows, Virgins and Spinsters. The town, like
many others after Dunkirk, had also set up the LDV troops, or “Local Defense
Volunteers,” many armed with little more than broomsticks. After the people
took to calling them the “Look, Duck and Vanish” squads, they changed the name
to the “Home Guard” last July. He had a relative there, and she had written
some time ago to say they were all busy making concrete anti-invasion blocks to
drag off to the beaches, “Dragon’s Teeth” as they were called. Yet here this
man was telling him they had also been hard at work on Dragon’s scales for this
monstrous tank!

“Dorchester
Chobham…” O’Connor repeated the words, an unaccountable feeling rising in him
now. We could barely equip the troops that struggled home after Dunkirk. There
weren’t even enough simple rifles in the country to re-arm the men! How in the
world did we go from broomstick militias and concrete blocks to this?

“Third
generation?”

“Yes
sir, the process is hush, hush, but I understand that they’re using more exotic
materials now in the composites—carbon nanotubes and all.”

O’Connor
heard the words, but was oblivious to their meaning. He suddenly felt daft as a
brush. Third generation? That implied two earlier models or versions of this
armor. He suddenly felt something was very odd here. Secrecy was one thing, but
hiding the design, development and testing of a weapon this sophisticated was
quite another. There was simply no way these new vehicles could have been built
and deployed in a fully combat ready status without thousands of men knowing about
it, people in the factories, testing sites, dockyards, merchant marine, and
anyone at Alexandria when they arrived. And he simply could not imagine that
Wavell, with his back to the wall at Sidi Barani, would have blithely ordered a
unit of this size and obvious value south into the heart of nowhere like this.
It simply made no military sense. He turned to General Kinlan with a strange
look in his eye.

“Just
who in bloody hell are you people?”

Fedorov
saw it now, behind the awe and surprise, a look of profound doubt, and he knew
the time was ripe to move O’Connor to a new understanding. The awakening had
begun.

“Excuse
me, sir,” said Popski on Fedorov’s behalf. “The Captain suggests it may be time
to take the General aside for a more detailed briefing.”

Part III

Seeing the Elephant

“It was six wise
men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.

―
John Godfrey Saxe

Chapter 7

HMS
Queen Elizabeth
was in the vanguard of the fleet that day, her bow awash with rising seas as
the grand old lady led the way at 16 knots. Laid down in 1912 and commissioned
two years later, the ship had seen extensive service in WWI, with most of her
combat hours logged near the Dardanelles until a troublesome turbine sent her
home for repairs. She missed Jutland, eventually returning to Scapa Flow, but
was nonetheless honored to present the terms of surrender to the German Admiral
von Reuter after the armistice in 1918. After the war she went through two
major refits, and first saw duty in the warm waters of the Mediterranean in
1925. Her latest refit was completed in the shadow of impending war at
Portsmouth, where the ship had her guts torn out when 25 old boilers were
removed to be replaced with 8 of the new high pressure boilers. New AA armament
was installed, and her guns were modified to elevate just past 30 degrees,
improving their range to 32,000 yards. Even the bridge structure got a
facelift, and her distinctive tripod mainmast was finally crowned with the
oddments of radar fittings, technology that had not existed when she first went
to sea.

All this work kept the ship in
the dockyards through most of 1940, and she had been scheduled to visit the powder
room at Rosyth one last time before doddering out to sea for duty. There the
Queen would have received her new Type 279 and Type 284 radars, but it was not
to be. In this altered reality, the pressing need to reinforce Admiral
Cunningham sent her off to Alexandria instead. Old but proud, she remained a
stout hearted warrior, out now on her first real sortie of the war with the
intent to find and hurt the enemy. Behind her two other old warriors sailed in
stately review,
Malaya
and
Warspite
, both ships in this same
class, and veterans of Jutland.

Captain Claud Barrington Barry
was on the bridge that hour, a bit restless, as the fleet had been ordered to
circle in place while the Admirals detached for an unusual rendezvous to the
northeast off Crete aboard HMS
Invincible
. Cunningham had been aboard
when the fleet left Alexandria, more to tour the ship and hearten up the crew
than anything else. He had set his flag on
Warspite
, where his staff
still waited, and would return there after the conference.

So Captain Barry was enjoying the
last moments of calm he might know for some time. The fleet knew what they were
in for, knew the odds were steep. The arrival of HMS
Invincible
and the
strange Russian super destroyer, as the men called it, had been a welcome
reinforcement, but that aside, the enemy outnumbered them two to one in capital
ships. None of them really knew just what the Russian ship could do at sea,
though they had heard rumors that it had played a vital role in turning back
the Kriegsmarine north of Iceland. The aerial rocketry it displayed on arriving
at Suez had given everyone quite a surprise, most of all the Italians, but you
couldn’t sink a battleship with fireworks like that, or so the men thought.

The fleet had sailed west along
the coast, all the way to Tobruk where the big guns cleared their throats
lending fire support for the besieged garrison. They lingered there for a day
until Admiral Tovey signaled that he would detach for an urgent meeting at sea,
with no further details. Cunningham left in a hurry, boarding a destroyer and
slipping off into the night, leaving Barry and the other fleet Captains in the
dark as to what was causing the delay.

That night, on the 30th of
January, they sailed north to a position well screened by British submarines.
Since that time they had been sailing in a wide circle, attended by cruisers
and destroyers just in case an Italian sub might get curious. They had been
overflown by recon planes from Greece on the 31st, even while Fedorov was
having his most unexpected first meeting with Brigadier Kinlan.

It was hard to keep up morale in
these circumstances. Gibraltar had fallen, Malta was battling for its life, and
the British army had just been chased halfway across Libya into Egypt again,
wiping out all the gains O’Connor had delivered with his remarkable campaign.
Captain Barry had a restless, worried feeling now, and the long slow circles he
was sailing did little to calm his mind. Anything would be better than this, he
thought. The men are as worried as I am, and it’s plain enough on their faces.
We should be charging off to Malta now, guns at the ready, but instead here I
am idling north of Derna, twiddling my thumbs and reading reports from the
Chief of Engineers.

There had been an odd clicking
sound in one of the turbines when they left Tobruk and started north. The
engineers noted it, and were rousting about to see what it might be, but it did
not seem serious. Probably just needs a little grease, he thought. The ship had
been too long abed, and she was bound to have some creaks and squeaks now that
she was up in her slippers and shuffling about again. That was all…

* * *

 
Cunningham
had been
welcomed aboard HMS
Invincible
, curious as to what this meeting was all
about. It seemed very odd to be detaching like this, and politics were now
uppermost in his mind as he sat down with Admiral Tovey for a briefing. He had
assumed this meeting might have something to do with organizing fleet
operations aimed at covering an evacuation of Greek forces, possibly to Crete, as
they were sailing for Chania Bay. Andrew Browne Cunningham, old “A.B.C.” as he
was called from his initials, had been disappointed when the planned attack on
Taranto could not be teed up. He finally got hold of a pair of aircraft
carriers, and now they were relegated to fleet air defense and anti-submarine
patrols. His bid to even the odds and catch the Italians napping in port had
been tabled with the news of the attack on Malta.

Now it was down to the real brass
tacks, he thought. If we lose Malta the whole central Med goes with it. It was
our unsinkable aircraft carrier, battered and beaten up daily by the Italian
air strikes, but defiant. He knew the airfields at Ta’qali and Luqa would not
hold for long. The Luftwaffe had come in droves, adding its considerable weight
to Regio Aeronautica, and there was simply no way the threadbare squadrons on
Malta could survive. They did their best, he thought, but we would have needed
to get another thirty
Hurricanes
out there to make a fight of it. The
carriers were here, and now I’ve a mind to see what we can do. Cunningham had a
great deal on his mind that day, but he would soon learn things that would send
him spinning like a top. The knowledge he was about to be handed, like an apple
picked from the tree in paradise, was forbidden fruit. He would not be the same
man when he returned to the fleet.