John Schettler - Fallen Angels - 9 Days Falling, Volume II

As the action proceeded Karpov finally began to take the full measure of his foe. The Americans were not going to back down. They were going to persist with this attack with everything they had at their disposal, just as the British had. Wouldn’t I do the same, he thought? Shouldn’t I do the same now? I’m letting the ghosts of Volsky and Fedorov convict me here, and Zolkin was no help either. This is war now—yes, a war of my own making, but war nonetheless.

He turned that over in his mind, and made an inner resolution. If he could not retain sufficient combat power to insure future operations, he was a good as dead, the ship sunk, and this whole thing over. Before he would let that happen he would show the Americans that his massive shot across the bow was no bluff. Yet given the deployment he was now facing he realized they might easily punch through the American battle line with conventional weapons and head out into the Pacific.

They were not going to negotiate. His fantasy of sitting at the table with MacArthur and Nimitz and Halsey was now an insubstantial folly. These were men of war, and their answer to his challenge had been to turn the full might of their navy to engage him. Volsky was correct, at least on one point. Why would they negotiate after the casualties they will sustain in this engagement?

He shook his head inwardly, realizing that, for all their power, his flotilla was still a small player on the board, a dangerous renegade knight, but one that could not force a checkmate on its own. He had two choices now. One was to return home to Vladivostok, and hope it could shelter him from the wrath of the allied navies. The Soviets had nothing to speak of for a Pacific Fleet at this time, he realized, but they had strong land forces. If the Americans wanted to get pushy they would have to try to put ground troops on Soviet soil.

Then his mind ran down a long corridor of thought, recalling the folded bureaucracy that had greeted them in Vladivostok of 2021. Volsky won’t be there. It will be Stalin’s Russia, and if I thought Inspector General Kapustin and his lap dog Volkov were a nuisance, Stalin’s NKVD will be many times worse. Sail for home at your own peril. You will end up having to flee from the Golden Horn harbor yet again, this time a pariah to your own country, and not the proud warrior who led the fleet out in 2021.

Yet what else could they do? Rodenko has advised him to get some breathing room and run out into the Pacific. Perhaps he could find a way to talk sense into the Americans later. Now he felt what Lucifer must have felt after his challenge failed at the gates of heaven. He would be an outcast if they ran east, wandering the seas, forever hunted, pursued the world over. It all seemed so simple hours and days ago, with the American fleets set to gather at Tokyo Bay. He thought he could make that one decisive intervention and change everything, but now he realized that this world would not submit to his will without a fight. It was not so simple any longer.

“Mister Rodenko, we will have to select a point in the enemy line and blow a hole. Then we’ll make our best speed and punch through.”

“KA-226 can feed us the data now, sir, and the Fregat will have line of sight contact any minute.”

“Good. Signal Admiral Golovko . Tell Captain Ryakhin he is to prepare a salvo of six missiles, two sets of three, and I want him to engage with the first set on this ship here.” He pointed to the tactical board. “Can you feed him the location data?”

“Yes, sir. Nikolin has been reading ship to ship chatter. That is a heavy cruiser.”

Karpov had fingered the St Paul .

Shewas everything a good heavy cruiser should be, fast, reasonably well protected and with decent punch in her nine 8 inch guns. The lavish addition of twelve 5 inch guns, forty-eight 40mm Bofors and twenty-four 20mm Oerlikon cannons gave her considerable air defense capability for her role in screening the fast carrier task forces that won the war in the Pacific. Seventeen ships were built in her class, but only seven saw service in the war. St Paul was one of them, slipping into the action in those final days when Halsey’s carriers made their last raids on Honshu and Hokkaido. The ship also got in close and bombarded industrial targets on the Japanese mainland on two occasions, and had the distinction of firing the final salvo in this role from any capital ship in the war.

The enemy never laid a finger on her throughout this brief action, but St. Paul’s fate was about to change. Something was coming at her that all her lavish anti-aircraft guns could not forestall. There was nothing but scrambled eggs on the radars that day, and the lookouts barely saw the missiles coming. Admiral Golovko had fired three Oniks/Yakhont sea skimmers on Karpov’s order, and they came in at Mach 2.6, striking the ship at ten second intervals with three hard punches that set her ablaze from stern to bow. And like so many foes Karpov had engaged, the ship and crew never saw the enemy that had crippled her in one swift blow.

Halsey got the word just as he was consulting with staff on the battle bridge of the Missouri to lock in their best location for the enemy based on information relayed by the radar pickets. Iowa , some ten kilometers on his starboard side, had already turned on a new heading to intercept, and he was bringing Mighty Mo around fifteen points to starboard, churning up the seas at 30 knots.

“Where in hell did the Russians get these damn rocket weapons?” The ship’s Captain, Stuart S. Murray was still trying to get his mind around the situation. “You would think we might have known something about it.”

“Apparently we did,” said Halsey. “Or at least the British did. That mushroom cloud we saw this morning was the same thing they used to sink Mississippi in TF-16, and that was before we were even in the war. Admiral Fraser says the Brits slugged it out with these Russians more than once—a renegade ship from all we can deduce now. There was only one before. Now we have three according to the picket reports. They think there’s at least three enemy ships out there now. No one knows where they came from or what they’re about. Even the Soviet government claims they have no knowledge of these ships, but yet there they are, demons at sea, and they just hit St. Paul hard. She never got off a single round.”

Admiral Fraser’s words returned to haunt him now, biting harder with the news coming in about St. Paul … “The fact is, Admiral, this is no ordinary ship. As I said earlier, it’s fast, it has advanced weaponry—naval rocketry in fact—and it can strike from a great distance, even beyond the range of those big sixteen inch guns out there. It looks like a battleship if you ever lay eyes on the damn thing, as I did one black night. There wasn’t a gun on it bigger than a QF five incher, but it could pound a ship like Yamato to near scrap.”

“Well, Sunshine,” Halsey said to the Captain, using his nickname to put the matter on more personal terms. “We’re about to see just how good the Iowa class battlewagons really are. I think the enemy is trying to break out into the Pacific. They can see what we’re doing and they’re trying to punch a hole in our line right there—right where they hit St. Paul . So I think that’s exactly where they are heading, and we are too. The good news is that we’re now in a good position to intercept. The bad news is that those rockets may be heading our way soon when this Karpov realizes that. I want damage control and repair crews doubled on both Iowa and Missouri . Lay out extra fire hoses. Take men from any watch you need to fill out the ranks. If those charts we’ve just plotted are accurate and the enemy is where we think he is, then we could be in visual range within the hour.”