Kirov (50 page)

“What
will you do with them,” he asked flatly. “You can’t kill them. Kill Volsky and
you’ll have to watch your back for the rest of your life on this ship. The crew
love that man for a reason, Karpov. He’s not just any boss. They won’t like it,
believe me, and some will have the guts to do something about it when they
realize what you have done.”

“That’s
where you come in. Who’s going to back you down, Orlov? Don’t worry, they won’t
be harmed, of course not. Nobody is talking about killing anyone here—except
the British and Americans. They are the enemy, Orlov. Keep your mind in the
right place and just leave Volsky and Zolkin to me,” he finished, deciding to
say nothing more about what he had already done. When the Captain perceived
that Orlov still had reservations, he played out his last card. “I have spoken
with Troyak,” he whispered. “He and his men are ready should we need to call on
them.”

“You
got Troyak to actually speak?” Orlov forced a half hearted smile. “He will
support you? You are sure of this?”

“Troyak
is not a child. He knows an order when he hears one. He will do his duty. And I
also spoke with Martinov in the weapons bay. He is with us as well. The Captain
stretched the truth on both accounts, just a little
vranyo
, and he did
so with great skill and no qualms whatsoever. In his mind Martinov was with him
because he ordered it—Troyak as well. They would do what he told them to do, if
he could just keep Volsky out of the picture for the next few crucial hours or
days. After that, they might relent, and reach an arrangement, but by then his
business would be concluded.

“Martinov?
That bumbling idiot? All he does is root about counting his missiles and warheads.
What good will he do us?”

“Don’t
be stupid. He knows where the special warheads are stored, and I had a talk
with him this afternoon. Our forward missile bays will have a little more sting
in the number ten launch tubes.”

“You
ordered him to mount—”

Karpov
held up a finger, silencing the Chief, and the two men gave the door a sidelong
glance. The Chief suddenly realized that this was no longer a simple
discussion, Karpov had already acted! The Captain had stepped over a clear red
line, violating a direct order from the Admiral.

“But
Volsky gave us a direct order,” he rasped.

“If
you want to eat fish, you have to get in the water, Chief. Volsky is
indisposed.
I
am in command now, and I rescinded that order on my own
authority as Captain of this ship. I just need to know if you are ready to
stand with me when things come to a head—because they
will
come to a
head, Orlov, and very soon. Otherwise you and I will have to stand here
twiddling our thumbs, and saying ‘yes sir,’ and ‘excuse me sir’ while Volsky
runs the ship. How long will that go on? What is he going to do if he takes the
ship east? The crucial moment is here and now. The next three days will be the
heart of it. We either act now, or the moment slips from our grasp. We have
Martinov. We have Troyak and his marines, and there are others, Orlov. Don’t
think I am the only one fed up with Volsky’s vacillation. There are
men
on this ship, are you one of them?”

He
was lying now. This was not the gentle boast of
vranyo
. It was not mere
stretching and bending of the truth. No, this was
lozh
, pure and simple;
a straight-faced lie, and Karpov told it with all the skill and duplicity he
had cultivated so well over the years. “We can smash the enemy, here and now,
once and for all, and then no one will be able to bother us again. Come on,
Orlov. You can’t sit on two chairs. What’s it going to be here? We can
smash
them! Are you ready?”

The
Chief thought for a moment, looking Karpov directly in the eye, and neither man
blinked. Then he opened his jacket and angled his body to show the Captain a
sleek, grey automatic pistol tucked into his belt line. “Yes, I am ready, boss,
and so is Comrade Glock,” he said darkly. Then Orlov gave the Captain a hard
look. “But tell me, Karpov. What are you going to do? What is your plan? Are
you going to pay a visit to this secret little meeting with Churchill and
Roosevelt?”

Karpov
took a long breath. Something shifted inside him now, easing the burden he had
dragged through the ship from one station to another. He was no longer alone. It
was not just his fate on the line. Orlov was Orlov after all. He had seen
trouble looming and already prepared for it. Why did he ever doubt it?

A
deadly calm settled over him now, stilling the last plaintive inner voice of
warning. Yes, he was going to smash things, but at least now he had a hammer in
the strong right arm of his Operations Chief.

“We
are going to do a little more than that, I’m afraid,” said Karpov. “Yes, Volsky
was talking about this secret meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill. Perhaps
he thinks he can go there and negotiate, but that is like trying to divide the
pelt of a bear before you have killed him. We are going to
kill
the bear
first, Orlov—you, me, and Comrade Glock.”

Chapter
30

August
7, 1941

Secrecy
was soon found to be in short
supply. Too many men had seen the attack on
Wasp
, or heard about it, or
suffered from it, and one of them was a civilian reporter aboard
Mississippi
sent out to cover the occupation of Iceland. Somehow, word on the attack leaked
out, passing from pilot, to able seaman, and over cables and airwaves to
eventually reach the U.S. The headline in the New York Times that day, August
7th, was bold and pointed.

GERMANS
ATTACK! CV WASP SUNK! HEAVY LOSS OF LIFE
Fearsome New German Raider Still At
Large

Roosevelt
To Convene Emergency Session Of Congress
.

The
article referenced some of the events that had transpired, though it was
noticeably fuzzy as to where the attack had happened, what German raider had
attacked, and even more vague on just when the president would convene this
emergency session of congress and in fact where the president even was.

Reporters
quickly stormed the White House briefing room, but were held at bay and given no
further information. The president was consulting with his Joint Chiefs of
Staff, it was said, but nothing more was revealed, particularly the fact the
Roosevelt was not even in the country, and was quietly slipping into Ship
Harbor in Argentia Bay aboard
Augusta
by the evening of that same day.

Aboard
King George V
, Admiral Tovey was listening to a shortwave radio
broadcast out of New York when Brind came in from the radio room, a decoded
signal in hand and a puzzled expression on his face.

 “I’m
afraid I’ve given you some bad advice, Admiral,” he began. “Admiralty says
they’ve spotted the
Graf Zeppelin
near Stettin.” The implications were
obvious, and he said nothing more.

Tovey
rubbed his brow, troubled. “The cat is out of the bag,” he said. “The story had
leaked out to the press and the Americans are outraged. It’s to be expected, I
suppose, but we still have no idea what this ship is, and that I find difficult
to swallow.”

“Well,
an American PBY out of Reykjavík spotted the German ship a few days ago, sir,
and they got some photos.”

“Photos?
It’s bloody well about time. What do they show?”

“I’m
afraid the song is the same, sir. Bletchley Park says it’s a large cruiser, very
large, probably a battlecruiser in size. They were able to spot a crewman on a
foredeck and worked out the scale. The damn thing is all of 900 feet long, and
nearly a hundred feet abeam.”

“My
god, what a monster. That’s a bigger ship than
King George V.
In fact,
it’s bigger than anything in the fleet. It’s even longer than the
Bismarck!
”

“Yet
no sign of anything but a few small secondary guns, and a curiously empty
foredeck covered with a series of what looks to be cargo hatches. Given what
we’ve learned about this ship’s capabilities, they’ve come round to the
conclusion that these rockets must be stored there; possibly brought up on deck
for launching, or even fired from below decks through these ports.”

“Amazing,”
said Tovey. “I knew the Germans were developing a weapon of this nature, but
all our intelligence indicated it was to be an air dropped bomb.”

“Yes,”
Brind nodded. “The Fritz-X, or so the boys at BP call it. That was also
mentioned in the Admiralty report.” He glanced at his signal and read:
“Consider Naval deployment of guided Fritz type ordinance or possibly more
advanced Henschel Hs 293 guided rocket.”

The
Henschel 293 was a development led by the brilliant mathematician and aircraft
designer Herbert Wagner, Germany’s answer to the Bletchley Park genius of Alan Turing.
Wagner, along with notable physicists Schrödinger, Heisenberg, and designer
Wernher von Braun had been involved in the development and testing of new
German wonder weapons for some time. The Fritz-X radio controlled glide bomb
had been in development since 1938, and the Henschel 293 was a new approach
that was intended for use against British convoys. The Germans were already
building training and refit bases for the rocket at Cognac and Bordeaux on the
south Atlantic coast of France, in addition to numerous facilities around
Hamburg and Kiel, and bases at Bergamo and Foggia in Italy. It began as a glide
bomb, like the Fritz, then migrated into a liquid fueled rocket. As far as
Bletchley Park knew, however, it was still in the testing phase, unless this
was to be its coming out party, a deadly ship mounted version that could strike
with alarming accuracy and power.

That
was the one thing that still bewildered the British intelligence arms. How
could the Germans have achieved this level of accuracy and range on the weapon?
Everything they had been able to learn about the program indicated that it
still relied on a human operator, a man able to see the target and aim or guide
the missile in flight. And much of its expected range was delivered by the
aircraft that carried it, large German bombers. It’s actual range after firing
was very limited, yet this was contradicted by every report gathered thus far
from the ships that had been targeted. There had been no sign of any German
aircraft near the targets. The reports from ships at sea indicated that the
enemy was seeing and targeting them from well beyond the range of optical or even
long range radar detection!

Eventually
they came round again to the initial sighting of airborne contacts near the
German ship in the first days of the encounter. It was then suggested that the
Germans might be launching sea planes of the type often carried by cruisers and
battleships, and then using these as platforms to spot and vector the weapons
in. Bletchley Park suggested they had only to fire the rockets in the general
heading of the target, and perhaps the Germans had then rigged some kind of
homing device, even a small radar set in the nose of the missile, that would
enable it to hit with such precision. It was a remarkably accurate assessment,
but equally shocking to think the Germans had made these advances while similar
Allied programs remained at rudimentary levels of development.

“We
thought that from the very first,” said Brind. “But I’ll be damned. None of our
pilots have managed to get a look at these German planes…
except
for that
odd report we got from the weather station on Jan Mayen.”

“You
mean that helicopter report?” Even the word sounded odd to Tovey, let alone the
concept of a plane without wings. Yet ideas about helicopters had been around
since the time of Leonardo da Vinci, and he admitted to the possibility that
the Germans had again stolen a march on them and put such an aircraft into
service.

Tovey
sighed. “First we get news that
Tirpitz
is on the loose, then Bletchley
Park tells us it’s
Admiral Scheer
, then we think this ship is
Graf
Zeppelin
, and now this… We’ve run out of German ships, Brind. What do we
call this one? We don’t miss something on the order of a new ship design. I can
excuse the rest. These rockets could have been developed in underground
facilities, and kept very hush, hush. But a ship? To have anything like this at
sea now the Germans would have had to lay her keel years ago, and you and I
both know they only have so many dock yards capable of building a cruiser class
ship.”

Brind
was clearly perplexed. “There were two ships originally planned in that German
carrier program, sir. Ship “B” was contracted, but her hull was never
completed. The Germans halted construction on that one and scrapped her just
after the war began in September of 1939. We’ve had some inkling they might be
trying to convert a cruiser or even a civilian ocean liner to a carrier, but
these photos put an end to that speculation. The odd thing is that there hasn’t
been a whisper out of Berlin about this business either, sir. You would think
they would crow about their engagement with us, or perhaps make some statement
regarding this attack on the US task force. I may be climbing out on a limb
here, and I apologize for leading you up the bridle path about
Graf Zeppelin
….”