John Schettler - Kirov

“Mister Rodenko?”

Rodenko was already working his board. “I’ll need to make some adjustments,” he said quickly. 7.5 meters was at VHF in the range of 30 to 300 Megahertz. Some of his equipment no longer even included dial positions at those wavelengths, as they had not been used for radar signals for many years. Rodenko was working his T-181 data reception unit, and he could see that these adjustments would take some time. He put two men on the job, somewhat angry that they had not considered this probability earlier. “We’ll need some time, sir,” he reported.

“I trust there is nothing wrong with your MR-90 radars?” Karpov was referring to the ships medium range air defense guidance radar sets for the ship’s SA-N-92 Surface to Air Missile systems, (SAMs).

“Of course not,” said Rodenko. “But that SAM will only range out 30 to 90 kilometers depending on the elevation of the target. Can they see us before that?”

“Very likely,” said Fedorov. “That old radar was one of the longest range sets deployed in the war, out to 100 nautical miles. I am sorry we did not consider this.”

“Don’t worry, Mister Fedorov,” said Volsky. “We will adjust the equipment in time. For the moment, however, we will just have to use our long range SAM systems. Perhaps we can discourage this plane with a near miss detonation.”

“We would have seen the plane earlier if we had one of the KA-40 helos up,” Karpov admonished.

“True,” said the Admiral, “but how much aviation fuel do you think we are carrying, Captain? We should use our helicopters judiciously. Remember, we are going to also have to consider the German U-boats. They may think we are a British ship, yes? In effect, we are at war with everybody, the British, Americans and Germans alike. And these U-boats are very quiet, as Mister Tasarov will attest.”

“When submerged and operating on battery power they will be difficult to hear on passive sonar,” said Tasarov. “Even the Americans could not find some of our old diesel submarines on occasion.”

“Very well, we were caught unprepared at the outset, but when Mister Rodenko sorts out his equipment we will neutralize this British radar. For now…”

“Contact range one-eight-zero.” said Rodenko. “We can engage with the S-300s in a few minutes. They range out to 150 kilometers.” These missiles would streak out at a blistering speed exceeding Mach 6.0 and deliver a large 150kg warhead if it got anywhere near the target, sending a hail of withering shrapnel in all directions. They were so accurate that they could even be used against short range ballistic missiles.

If he fired, the Admiral had little doubt that he could shoot this plane down, yet he hesitated, a strange thought entering his mind, the echo of his good friend Dr. Zolkin’s warning. Who was the pilot? Did he survive this war, or was he one of the thousands that perished in the conflict? Was he married? Would he have sons after the war, and who would they be? If he killed this man, how many others might never be born in the years stretching out from this day forward? He realized this was war, yet he might not simply be extinguishing a single life here, but whole generations that would follow this man into the future. Yet it was impossible to know any of this, and an agonizing and debilitating torture to consider it all at a moment like this. He had to act.

“Contact approaching 150 kilometers,” said Rodenko. “They’ll have us on their radar soon, sir.”

“Mister Samsonov,” he said quietly. “Activate our long range air defense system and target the contact with a single S-300 and fire.”

“Aye, sir.” Samsonov had not the slightest inkling of regret or recrimination in his mind. He was a naval gladiator, trained to react and fight in the split second time spans of modern combat. It was as if he was no more than a human extension of the ship itself, one that could simply hear and execute the orders he received. He toggled his Air Defense System on, enabled the forward battery and pressed the button to fire a single missile. There was a loud warning claxon, and then they saw the missile fire and streak away, climbing loudly up at an amazing rate of speed to vanish in the low overhead cloud cover seconds later.

Over a hundred kilometers away, Fulmar N4029 of 800 Squadron off the carrier Furious had just noted a contact on their radar set. Lieutenant James Beardsley called it out to the pilot, Lt. Seymour Burke. “Looks like we’ve got her,” he said. “I’ll get a message off.” He began keying in the sighting through his code set… ‘Contact bearing two-nine-two, speed 20, course-’

At that moment the pilot saw something oddly out of place in the gray sky ahead of him, yet before he could even think to consider what it was the object flashed up through a bank of clouds and seemed to leap at the plane. “My god!” His instinctive prayer was cut short, along with his flying mate’s contact signal when the S-300 ignited its warhead and literally blew the Fulmar fighter to pieces.

Burke and Beardsley were dead. They were supposed to have flown off Furious this very day, escorting a flight of Albacore torpedo bombers in to strike the German occupied harbor at Petsamo on the North Cape of Norway. There they were to meet a group of German Me-109 fighters lying in wait and sustain damage that would see them ditch their plane at sea six miles off the coast. They would have been spotted, alive in a dinghy, by one of the Albacores they had been escorting, but they were never seen again, and were listed as KIAs a few days later.

So Admiral Volsky’s worrisome thoughts about them were of no consequence, though he could not have known that when he gave the order to fire. Burke and Beardsley had met their rendezvous with death after all, yet in a way neither of them could ever have imagined possible. All that was denied them were those last cold hours alone together in their dinghy on the frigid Arctic Sea, the hope they may have clung to in those first frantic moments as they struggled to inflate their raft, the words and thoughts they may have exchanged with one another, and the long, freezing death they most likely endured when they finally realized that there was no ship coming for them on that that grim morning. Instead they vanished from the continuum in a flash of violence with scarcely a second to know what had happened to them. Their lives had been checked off as scheduled on the ledger of Fate. Time was balancing her books.

August 1–2, 1941

“The message was cut short, sir,” said the signalman. “And we’ve heard nothing more.”

“Nothing more?” Captain Bovell on Victorious considered that for a moment. The plane could have suffered radio failure, or worse, some sort of engine trouble that forced her to ditch. Damn luck if that were the case. There would be no way they could get to the men in time, or even find them now in the wide Arctic seas. And there was no way this plane could have been shot down by the contact-not at that range. He considered the possibility that they may have come upon a German Kondor and exchanged fire, but yet there would have been some notification of that. In the end he decided it had to be a radio outage, and went to inform Admiral Wake-Walker, hoping the plane would find its way home.

“No range was reported on the contact?” asked the Admiral.

“The signal was cut off, sir. But that plane should have been about here when we got this signal.” He pointed to a navigation chart. “And considering its aerial set can range out no more than a hundred miles, on a good day, that would put the contact somewhere here, sir. Perhaps a hundred and fifty miles south by southwest of our present position. That’s well within strike range for the Albacores.”