Three Kings (Kirov Series) (4 page)

The trick was how to deliver it
on target, an enemy ground force threatening his lines, without having his
airships shot to pieces by heavy caliber flack guns. The answer was to drop or
parachute the weapon over the battlefield from high altitude, and he drilled
his zeppelin bombardiers hard on delivery even while the engineers were
feverishly putting the weapons together. They tested for wind, altitude,
potential drift off target. In time he had a deliverable bomb, and one of
considerable power that had been tested to create an intense shock wave over an
area of 600 meters in diameter.

Karpov had his hammer.

Big Red was soon rigged out with
three of the new bombs, and Karpov assembled a small flotilla of zeppelins to
make his first strike against the advancing forces of the Orenburg Federation.
Volkov’s 9th Infantry, 22nd Air Mobile, and 8th Armored Cavalry Brigade had
formed the right pincer of his attack against Omsk. Two other divisions
invested the town, encircling Karpov’s 18th Siberian Division there, but these
other three pressed on towards Novosibirsk, hoping to quickly storm the
defenses.

There Karpov had positioned his
crack 32nd Siberian Guards, blocking the way east behind their Ob River defense
line. Volkov’s men would have a tough fight ahead, with an opposed river
crossing being the least of it. It was the perfect opportunity to test out his
new weapon. If the enemy was able to cross here, then they could maneuver to
stage a crossing north of the city, and cut the main road and rail connections.

Big Red was up and approaching
the river crossing zone, where Volkov’s forces were massing near a smaller
tributary about 5 miles west of the main river. One advantage Karpov had was
that he would not be opposed by enemy zeppelins here. He had amassed all the
air power he could get his hands on and sent the fighters to the airfields in
and around Novosibirsk. Volkov’s single zeppelin accompanying the attack, the
Pavlodar
,
was finally forced to withdraw to avoid the ceaseless duels with Karpov’s
fighters.

Fighter squadrons were now in
dutiful escort, and
Abakan
was there should any other airship return to
challenge the action. Karpov had rehearsed the maneuver five times, each time
doing no more than high level reconnaissance, and this had the effect of
dulling the enemy’s concerns, thinking the real attack was nothing more than
another high level observation run. Now, in the pre-dawn hour, Big Red drifted
ominously above the battle zone, accompanied by Karpov aboard the
Abakan
.

He could see that bridging
equipment had been brought up the previous day, and knew the enemy crossing was
imminent. But they did not expect the surprise Karpov had waiting for them that
day.

“Well, Bogrov,” he said to his
airship Captain. “Today we teach Volkov a lesson he will not soon forget. You
will see what the real application of power is here. Mark my words.”

Bogrov marked them, though he
inwardly felt there was something cowardly in the action. He had seen the test
dropping of the weapon near the coal mines, and he knew there was not a flock
of sheep down there, but men, human beings. Yes, they were enemies, but
something in him preferred the more equal duel of airships, gun to gun, man to
man, and not this dastardly attack. Karpov could see that he had reservations,
though the Captain had said nothing.

“You have issues with this,
Bogrov?”

“Sir? Well, war is war, I
suppose, but they won’t know what hit them, will they.”

“Volkov will know when he gets
the news. This war is just getting started, Bogrov, and the gloves have not yet
come off. This is strategic bombing. Before this war ends both sides will adopt
this tactic, mostly the allied powers. Entire cities will burn in a single
night. You will see.”

There it was again, thought
Bogrov, that odd way the Admiral had of talking about the war as if it had
already happened, as if it was something he had read about once in a history book.

“And what will Volkov do when he
gets the news, sir? That was on my mind.”

“Hopefully he will take a hard
lesson from what happens here today, and realize who he is dealing with when he
raises his hand against Vladimir Karpov.”

Bogrov thought he had raised it
against the 18th Siberian Division encircled at Omsk, but he said nothing of
that. “I suppose I meant that Volkov might think to do the same thing to us,
sir. He has a lot more airships than we do. Suppose he were to rig out his
zeppelins with these new sub-cloud car bombs as well. Then what?”

Karpov thought about that. What
would the Japanese have done if they could have gotten their hands on an atomic
bomb after being hit at Hiroshima?

“Perhaps you are correct,” he said.
“He may think to fight fire with fire, unless I can talk some sense into him
after this. But first, the lesson, the hard lesson of war—retribution. We’ll
see how keen he is to cross the Ob after I get finished with his 9th Infantry
Division down there. It’s a pity he hasn’t moved up all of his 8th Armored
Cavalry yet, but we must go today. The weather will not hold, and today it is
perfect. Signal Big Red. They may begin their bombing run.”

The massive zeppelin maneuvered
out in front, and ten minutes later Karpov saw them fall, one, two, three,
sailing down through the grey dawn to awaken the troops below when they ignited
in a blinding flash and broiling fireball that carried a tremendous shock wave.
Eardrums burst, the very breath of a man was literally squeezed from his chest
as the shock wave thundered over the scene with terrible force. Yet more
terrible was the searing fire that came after, devouring anything exposed, and
literally sucking the oxygen right out of the air. Indeed, when the first small
charged burst the weapon open to disperse the deadly contents, the liquefied
coal droplets relied on the oxygen in the air to increase the potency of the
detonation.

Karpov heard the three loud booms
from far below, saw the bright red-yellow fireball ignite with their fury, and
a slow smile crept onto his face. It worked! One of the three fireballs was
slightly off target, very near the tributary, but that was also good, for it
smashed a pontoon bridge under construction there. The other two had fallen
amid the encamped enemy division, and thousands would not awaken that morning
for reveille—a wakeup call that was never to be heard.

“Excellent!” Karpov said aloud.
“Now! Signal
Kalmenikov
to start his attack!”

That night, the thick woods to
the north of the site had been slowly infiltrated by Karpov’s tough 2nd Cossack
Cavalry Division. The men moved like shadows on their grey white steeds,
emerging from the tree line like a sweeping fog. They moved out at the
canter
, the mass of horsemen slowly gaining speed until the
bugler sounded the attack. Then the Cossacks drew their cruel curved swords and
came charging south toward the main road that led back to Omsk.

There were elements of the 2nd
Armored Cavalry, armored cars, motorized infantry, who had also been roused by
the thunderous explosions to the east near the river. The Majors told the
Captains, and the Captains told the Sergeants, with orders shouting the alarm
as the charge came in. The Sergeants told the buglers, and the buglers thought
to raise their horns to rouse the sleeping men, but the Cossacks told them all.

The cold swords flashed in the
grey dawn, and the thunderous sound of ten thousand horseman shook the ground.
At one point in the column, six armored cars put up a gallant defense, the machine
guns in their armored turrets taking a fearful toll. But they could not stem
the tide, and the Cossacks swept by, some hurling Molotov cocktails at the
light armored vehicles, and adding more fire and torment to the morning. Others
threw grappling hooks and the horsemen literally toppled two of the armored
cars by dragging them onto their side, rendering them useless.

Soldiers shaken by the terrible
explosion, yet still alive on the outer fringes of the detonations, were dazed
and confused, some barely struggling to their feet only to be cut down by those
flashing sabres. The carnage was terrible to behold, and soon the chaos of
panic began to spread, from one platoon to another until the encampment became
a rout. The Cossacks swept through like a tide of death until they reached the
village of
Kochernevo
, just south of the main road.
There the hard shorn horsemen galloped through the cobblestone streets, setting
fire to every building they could reach with Molotov cocktails and
torches—fighting fire with fire. This was the site of the enemy headquarters,
and now all the Majors and Captains were put to the test of war, and they fled
in all directions, many ridden down and slaughtered by the last waves of the
cavalry.

There had been many battles like
this throughout the long history of the bloody Russian civil war. Tartar and
Cossack cavalry units prowled the Siberian woodlands, but were seldom deployed
en mass like this against formed units of a modern army. Yet here they had
caught their foe completely by surprise, shocked and stunned by Karpov’s deadly
new weapons.

High above, Karpov was watching
the battle with his field glasses, as he often did on the ship. He had become
accustomed to thinking behind the protective cups of the eye pieces, and
watching the action unfold, as if he was seeing it in a movie. It brought him
closer to it all without having to go there himself and actually enter the
fray, which is just as he preferred things. Combat was for stupid soldiers. He
was a General, an Admiral, and soon to become a head of state. These soldiers
were merely things he used to achieve his ends, as he had thought to use the
awesome power of
Kirov
.

He saw the gallant and deadly
charge, the carnage it inflicted, and was elated. But soon, he knew, the enemy
would respond by bringing up armor from the heart of that mechanized cavalry
unit. The shock of his attack had done its job, completely unhinging the enemy
river crossing operation, and so now he turned and gave another order to
Bogrov.

“Signal
Kalmenikov
.
Tell him to pull his Cossacks out and proceed to the rally point. And be
certain they leave behind those gifts!”

The late Christmas presents
Karpov was delivering were thickets of hand deployed mines, that were being
dropped all over the ground as the horsemen withdrew. Now, when a more
organized column of armored cars came barreling up the main road into
Kochernevo
, they got another nasty surprise, running right
over the mines, which exploded to send the lead vehicle hurling up and then
crashing down onto its side in another fiery wreck.

“Begin regular bombing now. Let
them taste our conventional munitions.”

Abakan
was high up, but a
hovering zeppelin was a near perfect bombing platform, with unequaled
stability. The long rack of 100 pound bombs were deployed from each gondola,
and the rain of evil metal fell unerringly to the scene below, the bomblets
erupting with more fury, setting off many of the mines and leaving the whole
target zone a hell of fire and shrapnel. The last touch were the barrels of another
mixture Karpov had devised with his engineers, a makeshift napalm that he sent
careening down into the entire mix, ending the attack with the hideous assault
of fire, even as it had begun.

The hammer had fallen. The lesson
had been taught, but it now remained to be seen whether Volkov would get the
message Karpov was delivering that day. He would soon learn that the heart and
soul had been burned out of his 9th Infantry Division, and his 8th Armored
Cavalry Brigade had been gutted. There would be no river crossing operation
that day, and by nightfall the remaining units were beginning to withdraw down
the long road west to Omsk.

Karpov monitored their slow,
steady progress, content. Now he contemplated what he might say to Volkov after
his little victory on the
Ob
here. Should he offer
the man a truce, demand the return of Omsk and withdrawal of all his divisions
on Free Siberian territory to the south of Novosibirsk? He knew that Volkov had
three big zeppelins operating there, the units Symenko had told him about, but
thus far, only the 15th Division had been seen to cross the border zone. It was
probing toward his defenses on the lower Ob.

“Signal Big Red. We return to
Kaa-Chem
. But we will take a roundabout course to throw off
Volkov’s spies, and navigate there tonight under cover of darkness.” He was
looking at his map as the operation concluded, well satisfied.

“Yes Bogrov, war is war. You can
either be the one on the delivering end of an attack like the one you just
witnessed or you will one day end up on the receiving end. War is war, and we
do what we must. But doing it first is the best way, before your enemy gets his
stinking hands on your throat. We could have fought a hard defensive battle
here. An opposed river crossing would have been very costly for Volkov’s
troops. But the best defense is a good offense, and I have just demonstrated
that clearly enough.”

“Aye sir,” said Bogrov. “That you
did.”

Part
II

Strategy

“The essence of strategy is choosing
what not to do.”

―
Michael
E. Porter

Chapter 4

 
Far
away to the
north, other men were hidden away in tunnels as they pondered the fate of
Gibraltar, weaving the tangled web of war. The lights burned late at Whitehall.
In the Admiralty bunker, the lights had first been turned on 27th of August,
1939, and they would burn continuously with their own stalwart glow of
resistance for six years, until finally turned off on the 16th of August, 1945.
Admirals Pound, Tovey, and Fraser were present that day. As Tovey seated himself
at the table, he had the fear that he might soon be scapegoated for the
disaster of Convoy HX-69, and the escape of the German battlegroup that had
slipped past his guard. To his great surprise and relief, Admiral Pound took
full responsibility upon himself for the debacle.