Altered States

Chapter 16

“Good day, Captain. Good of you to get wet and come over in the launch.” Admiral Tovey returned the man’s crisp salute and gestured to the chair by his desk in the Admiral’s office aboard HMS Invincible.

“No bother, sir.”

“Yes, well I’ve received your sighting report, but thought I’d get it right from the horse’s mouth, if you will.” Tovey held up the message transcript, glancing at it briefly before he folded his hands on the desk and fixed Captain Partridge with a steady gaze. “Ship sighted. Well we heard their signal as plain as you did, I suppose. BCG Kirov bound for Severomorsk. Very odd, wouldn’t you say?”

“It was somewhat surprising, sir.”

“I’m not sure of that leading designation, but Kirov is a registered ship in the Soviet navy. That’s well known enough. The mystery, however, is what the ship was doing out here. All the information we have leads us to think it was still assigned to the Soviet Baltic Sea Fleet.”

“Indeed, sir. I wasn’t aware of that.”

“You had a good look at this ship, Captain?”

“I did, sir. Picked up the contact initially on radar and then lost it in interference. But I got curious and took a look down that bearing just in case. This one’s a big fellow, sir.”

“You say it was a cruiser or battlecruiser?”

“Yes sir, and unless my eyes deceived me I thought it to be just about the size of Hood.”

Tovey took note of that. “Certainly not a simple cruiser at that size, Captain.” Hood at 47,000 tons was more than four times the displacement of a typical County Class Heavy Cruiser, and well over 200 feet longer.

“No sir. And I’ve been up over the fleet on air cover for some good time now. This ship was big, Admiral, clearly a warship in every angle and line of her, yet lightly armed, or so I thought. I made out no more than three secondary batteries, and no main gun turrets on the foredeck. In fact the deck seemed relatively swept clean, sir. But she had good battlements, and some odd equipment up top side.”

Tovey’s eyes had narrowed as he listened, and he felt a haunting recollection rising in the back of his mind, of that strange encounter from his days at the China Station as a young Lieutenant. “Do go on, Captain.”

“Well sir, it was like a pair of window screens, spinning round and round, lights were winking up at me…I saw just a very few gun mounts that looked to be Ack-Ack batteries in the range of twenty or thirty millimeters. Yet no other visible weapons. It was quite extraordinary, Admiral.”

Yes quite extraordinary, thought Tovey, and heading our way from that last sighting report. He had a mind to send over a request for another air sortie to keep the ship under observation, and decided this would be the wisest course at the moment.

“Captain, you are welcome to a spot of tea before you hit the launch again. I think we’d better have another look at this ship. Your description does arouse some interest, and I’d like to keep an eye on this one.”

“I’d be happy to go up again, sir.”

“We’ll leave that to the Vice Admiral.”

At that moment there was a quiet knock on the door and Tovey looked up to see the young Lieutenant Commander Wells there.

“Excuse me, Admiral. Flag Lieutenant Villers has sent over this message, sir.” He saluted, handing off the message and starting to withdraw.

“Oh Mister Wells. See the Captain here to a good spot of tea, will you? He has a long wet ride back over to Ark Royal ahead of him.”

“Aye sir.”

“Thank you, Captain Partridge. You’ve given me just what I was needing, a good sharp eye. Please give my regards to the Vice Admiral.”

Both men knew enough to make a quiet exit and Tovey was left with the message in hand and some very troubled thoughts. He had heard of this Captain Partridge, and knew him to be a very steady hand, well experienced, and a combat veteran. His description of this supposed Russian ship was nonetheless quite odd, and equally disturbing.

Might he have misjudged the size of the ship? Yet he seemed to rivet that point more than once, and put in for his own credibility with that line about flying air cover over the fleet. I suppose it was no boast. Yet there isn’t anything the Russians could float to in any way measure up to HMS Hood. That remark about the equipment spinning up on the mainmast suddenly triggered a memory of those last moments with Captain Baker on King Alfred, and the whole scene flooded in, as fresh as a morning biscuit out of the oven.

“Have a look at that, Mister Tovey,” he said to his First Lieutenant of the watch. “Do you see any main armament forward?”

“Can’t see a thing, sir. Nothing more than those secondary batteries winking at the Japanese, but they can’t be anything more than six inchers, sir.”

“Indeed… Well then what is all the brouhaha concerning this ship? It looks to be no more than three twin turrets from the fire I’ve observed… What in blazes is that whirling about on her mainmast?”

What indeed? The description offered by Captain Partridge was chilling now in the cold light of Tovey’s recollection. He found himself immediately heading for the bridge to see Captain Bennett but diverted to the Flag Plotting Room to look at the map first. There he found his Flag Lieutenant still reviewing a chart of the Cape Farewell area.

“Mister Villers,” he said quickly. “Do you recall a sighting reported by HX-49 in recent days?”

“It must be in the message stack, Admiral.”

“Find it, please.” He was immediately at the latest map plot, seeing Ark Royal’s position as it was arriving, and Hood and Repulse farther south. Given the last reported heading of the contact seen by Captain Partridge, his ships were perfectly arrayed in a wide dispersal to net this fish.

“You have the sighting report from the air search as well. Kindly plot those two points, connect them, and then give me an intercept course for Invincible and Renown. I want to have a look at this Russian cruiser.”

Villers looked at the map. “If I recall, sir, Ark Royal made the sighting about here.” He moved a green neutral marker onto the map. “I’ll send all the information over to the navigator, but I should think if we stay right on 300 for the time being we can work into a reasonable intercept easily enough.”

“Good then.”

“What do you make of that last message, sir?”

“Message? Oh yes.” Tovey realized Wells had handed him the latest note from the Admiralty just before he led Captain Partridge out. He had been so completely absorbed with his muse on this Russian cruiser that he had almost completely forgotten about it. He looked down at the message in his hand, reading quickly.

“More fish in the kettle,” he breathed. “The Twins sighted that far east of Trondheim? And the Hipper has gone missing as well. This is getting very interesting.”

“Do you think they mean to make a run for the Atlantic, sir?”

“That is why we are here, Mister Villers. But this says nothing about Bismarck and Tirpitz.”

“No news on them yet, sir. Still socked in from Bremen to Kristiansand.”

“Which makes for just the perfect weather to move those ships. Let me know the moment anything comes in.” He looked at the clock, seeing it had just slipped past midnight and was now the 16th of June. “It looks like another 24 hours will make for a very interesting day.”

* * *

With the knowledge that a British aircraft carrier was close at hand, Rodenko and Chief Byko had been working feverishly to get new equipment installed to improve the ship’s situational awareness. The replacement Fregat system that had been installed at Vladivostok had good coverage against an airborne target out to 230 kilometers and missiles out to 50 kilometers, but being a line of site radar system, it was limited to between 26 to 30 kilometers on surface contacts. They had been relying on the KA-40 helos with Oko long range radar panels, but now they had only one aboard, and if it were to be lost or damaged the ship would lose valuable long range radar.

The Starpom, an old radar man by training and experience, had requested a Mineral-ME surface search radar set. With all that had happened, there had been no time to install the radar, but Byko had men up working on it now and the system was slowly being integrated into the ship’s formidable sensor suite. Once ready it would provide passive over the horizon radar coverage utilizing ionospheric reflection out to 450 kilometers, and an active search mode that could range out 180 kilometers. It was not as precise as the 3D Fregat system, but it could at least provide bearing and contact data for detection, and coordinate setting of surface targets. Several hours later it was the Fregat system, however, that again detected the approach of aircraft, this time at higher elevation.

“Three contacts this time,” he said. “And look at their bearing, Fedorov. I would guess that carrier is somewhere here.” Rodenko tapped the electronic map display with a light pen.”

“That last plane was a Blackburn Skua,” said Fedorov. “They can range out about 700 kilometers, so that puts the carrier inside 350 klicks from our present position. I would guess it is probably 200 klicks out.”

“We could pop up the KA-40 for a quick look,” Rodenko suggested. “Once we get that fix for the carrier’s course and speed, we can then use predictive plotting to estimate its position.”

“In due course, but I don’t want the helo up with incoming fighters. We can’t afford to lose the KA-40. For the moment this looks like nothing more than a follow-up search on the contact they made earlier. I think we should just stand pat. But if you can get that over the horizon system up any time soon I would rest a bit easier.”

Rodenko nodded, then asked the question that had been on his mind for some time. Fedorov obviously had different ideas about how they should handle the ship now, a relief after Karpov’s brazen and arrogant style.

“That carrier won’t be alone, Fedorov. What’s our plan?”

“We haven’t really decided. The Admiral seems quite willing to try and seek accommodation rather than confrontation here. But you are correct, there will be cruisers and possibly a battleship with that carrier. Once we get clear skies I think we will use the KA-40 to nail that down. In any case, the clock is ticking. They know where we are, and have to be wondering about us. We can get some sense of how close they are by the loiter time on this next group of planes. The longer they hang around, the closer that carrier is.”

“So what will we do if they intercept?”

“We’ll certainly see them coming, but given the situation with the bow, the ship is best left at no more than ahead two thirds. The Admiral is right, Rodenko. We need friends here now, not enemies. We can’t risk another shift attempt unless Dobrynin can sort out why this control rod failed, so we may be here a long while.”

“Strange that we even expected it to work like Rod-25,” Rodenko had a good point.

“True enough. We grew accustomed to the magic, and now we taste what it is like to be mere mortals again, still moving into the future, but only one day at a time.”

“We’ve at least proven that we can handle ourselves here. Karpov consistently overplayed his hand. We didn’t have to confront the Americans in 1945. I know we had to fight when we first sortied, and the Captain was superb in that confrontation with the US carrier battlegroup, but remember, we had the whole fleet there, and help from naval bombers and a good submarine bastion as well. When that volcano went off and we found ourselves back here again, Karpov was a fool to try and take on the entire American Pacific Fleet in 1945.”

“Pride goeth before the fall,” said Fedorov.

“Indeed. Well, finding ourselves in 1908 was quite a shock. We could not understand how it happened without Rod-25, but it really tempted Karpov. He simply could not see any way he could fail to defeat the forces of that day, though I cautioned him many times that our power was limited to the ammunition we carried.”

“I think he believed he could work a decisive intervention before he ran out of missiles, and from the look of things now, perhaps he did. Yet I may be as much to blame for what we’ve discovered here.”

“Don’t carry that too long, Fedorov. The world is a vast and complex thing. Who knows what really happened? And what if Kamenski is right and this is an altogether different world?”

“Then we get right to your question, Rodenko. With the history this badly fractured what does it matter what we do to the unseen future now? I think Admiral Volsky is beginning to see things this way. If it turns out we can’t shift forward again, then what do we do? Our situation is a bit like that of the French now.”

“The French?”

“France will capitulate and sign a surrender and armistice with Germany in just a few days if that part of the history remains intact. The French fleet was the odd man out. It was left under nominal control of the Vichy French Government, and in about two weeks the British confronted the French Fleet at Mers-El-Kebir, Oran, where a good part of it was anchored. They gave them several choices. One was to join them and fight Nazi Germany together. The others were not so palatable-either sail to a British or neutral port and be demilitarized, or scuttle in place. The thing is…we may get those same alternatives handed to us if the Admiral tries to get cozy with the British here. The Royal Navy is about all Great Britain has at the moment, and the wolves are at the door. Their very survival depends on control of the seas, and they will want every square on the board well covered.”

“We could be quite a stone in their shoe,” Rodenko put in.

“Exactly, but I don’t think the Admiral could accept any internment situation that might allow the British access to our weapons and technology.”

“He accepted internment on St. Helena.”

“Yes, but insisted the ship remain fully militarized and under our control with freedom of movement should that become necessary. All he gave Tovey was his word to stay out of things if left alone. The British would not give the French that latitude, and I doubt they will give it to us now either. Our only real card to play here is that naval ensign flying on our mainmast. Soviet Russia is a neutral state, and we must hope the British respect that.”