Altered States

Chapter 20

Denmark Strait ~ June 16, 17:30 hrs, 1940

Rodenko saw the action unfold on radar, calling Fedorov to his side so they could plot the positions on the electronic situation map.

“It looks like a pair of British cruisers have run into something to the north,” he said. “See these residual signal tracings? Those are gun shells in flight. There’s a battle underway.”

Fedorov had been reading up on the general situation, knowing that none of that history might matter, but it at least gave him a template of sorts. “My guess is that the Germans are trying to push a couple raiders through,” he said. “Scharnhorst and Gneisenau would have to move quickly to be here after the conclusion of the British evacuation of Norway. Nikolin and I have confirmed that happened roughly on schedule. In that event those two ships would have moved to Trondheim, and Scharnhorst was supposed to be meeting up with a repair ship to fix torpedo damage. Yet those details can’t be confirmed. They weren’t supposed to make their breakout attempt into the Atlantic until January of 1941, so if I am correct then things have changed here. How many contacts north?”

“Three. Two with a little more return integrity than the last.”

“Then I’m guessing two battlecruisers and a cruiser, most likely Admiral Hipper.”

“Note these two contacts coming up from the south.” Rodenko pointed out the position on the map. “They’re about 250 kilometers southeast of our position at the moment and making 30 knots.”

“Thirty knots? Then they will be fast cruisers or battlecruisers.”

“Their return characteristics would argue the latter,” said Rodenko.

“The British had Hood, Renown and Repulse capable of making that speed, but nothing else.” He turned to Admiral Volsky now, explaining their analysis and briefing him on the situation ahead.

“It seems we’re sailing right into the middle of a battle here, sir.”

“What is the situation with those two cruisers?” Volsky was seated in the Captain’s bridge chair, and now he swiveled to face the younger officers. Is the fight still underway?”

“I think the gunfire has concluded for the moment according to Rodenko’s signal analysis.”

“And how far off is that fight?”

“Just under 100 kilometers, sir. The British cruisers are moving on a heading of 260 now, running west towards Greenland, but that will bring them right across our bow if we stay on this heading. The German ships have gained on them slightly, but not by much. As things stand adding our speed and theirs we’ll encounter the British in an hour.”

“Plot a course to evade that encounter, Mister Fedorov.”

“We could run due east, sir. There’s plenty of sea room there as we are still at least 300 kilometers from Iceland on a heading of zero-nine-zero.”

“Make it so. I think we will watch this one from the gallery for the moment and then see if we can slip out of the theater unnoticed.”

“Very good, sir.”

The drama unfolding soon took another turn, however. Rodenko noted that the speed of the British cruisers suddenly fell off to 20 knots.

“There’s no reason for that,” said Fedorov, “other than battle damage.”

“It looks that way, sir. At their new speed I calculate the Germans are gaining on them at a rate of 10 knots per hour now. But what is interesting here is that they have just made a course correction to intercept the new British heading.”

“In this weather?” Fedorov folded his arms. “Your situation plot shows those cruisers in the thick of that oncoming front.”

“Correct. It looked to me as though the British were steering to try and side-slip the Germans and let them pass them by in the storm, but the Germans just came ten points to starboard. They could just be steering to take advantage of the weather front for cover, but something tells my radar nose that-”

“They are tracking them…very strange. The German ships had Seetakt radar on the battlecruisers. Both Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were equipped with two sets of that system on their forward and rear gun directors. They thought its primary use would be for gun ranging, not surface search.”

“They may have already put it to good use,” said Rodenko. “That initial action was at over 18,000 meters.”

“Seetakt sets could range from 14 to 25 kilometers depending on conditions.”

“If they are tracking them then they’ll catch those cruisers in less than an hour at this rate, Fedorov.”

“We could balance the scales a bit here and see about jamming that German radar.”

Volsky raised an eyebrow at that. “You are suggesting intervention, Mister Fedorov?”

“Well, Admiral. We are here for the short run, and possibly for longer than we may know, and we are right in the middle of the soup. We will have to discuss and decide that question, because I feel it will be decided for us soon if we do not act on our own.”

“Probably true,” said Volsky. “I would prefer to choose a friend here before one side, or both, make us an enemy. Karpov was of the mind that the British were our real enemy, along with the Americans. He lectured us at length about the cold war and its oppressive effect on Russia.”

“On Stalin’s Soviet Russia, sir. But we have still not heard a whisper of Stalin’s name. remember that now it is Sergei Kirov’s Russia.” He said that with an enlivened tone, as if he found hope in that prospect that the post war history could play out differently and that Russia and the West could become friends instead of enemies frozen in the chill of the long cold war. If anything that might be the one thing that could prevent the war they found themselves facing in 2021. Perhaps this was the only way to achieve what they hoped all along.

“I will say one thing,” said Volsky. “We certainly cannot side with Nazi Germany, so that narrows the decision here somewhat. Do you agree?”

“I would, sir.”

“Rodenko?”

“Admiral, if we must intervene in any way I cannot see the ship supporting Germany, particularly if they do attack Russia again in this war.”

“And if we are to make friends on these seas the Royal Navy would be a good place to start,” Volsky concluded. “Very well. See if we can assist these two cruisers and jam that German radar.”

“Any idea what frequencies I should target, Fedorov?”

“Give me a second…” He was already working on his pad device, calling up facts and figures from the war. “Here it is. The Seetakt radar operated at 368 megacycles, initially at 14 kW, though the sets were upgraded to operate at 100 kW on the 80 cm wavelength.”

“Good enough. They’ll be blind in ten minutes. Just let me recalibrate our jamming equipment.”

They turned on 090 east and soon found they had broken through the weather front where the British were hiding, though the lowering sun was still masked by the heavy cloud. The rising sea had a dull gleam of polished steel, and the tang of coming rain. Temperatures were dropping ahead of the front, promising a cold night ahead.

Admiral Volsky was out the weather bridge where he had been watching the sea alone for the last ten minutes. He could still see the stain of dried blood there, and made a mental note to have it cleaned, but the sight of it brought Karpov to mind again.

So, Vladimir, we have made a choice you may not have agreed with here, he thought. You were adamant that the British and Americans were our enemies, and every intervention you made was aimed at trying to defeat them. But as you have seen, these are nations destined to rise on the world stage, and not so easily cowed. Suppose now there is a man in Moscow that Churchill and Roosevelt might trust and not also fear as they did Stalin? Suppose that man is Sergei Kirov, and that he is there because of Fedorov’s lucky chance and his quiet whisper to the man at that railway inn? Suppose we save these two British cruisers from harm here and make amends with the Royal Navy? This war does not have to end with an Iron Curtain dividing East from West and fifty years of cold enmity. What if we see that does not happen by making a friend here, and not trying to crush the British as an enemy?

You may have had something to do with this all along-you and Orlov. Something tells me he bore you no good will after that first failed attempt to take the ship. I gave you my forgiveness and a chance to redeem yourself, but Orlov’s lot was demotion and a posting to the Marines on the Helo deck. I wonder what really happened on that KA-226? What was Orlov doing there? Was there really a fire, or was he trying to jump ship? One way or another, the dominoes fell. Fedorov went after Orlov and now look at us, and look at the world that resulted from that mission.

He breathed in deeply, smelling the rain coming, the cool texture of the air, a sailor’s rain. It would not be a bad storm. His tooth told the tale, and it was not throbbing as it might in a real cruel low pressure zone, with the wintery blast of an icy wind at the leading edge. No, this is around a thousand millibars. Just a typical low coming in from the west. But it will rain tonight, and the air smells fresh and clean, does it not?

The farther north they went, the more the air seemed to carry the scent of home. Kirov was like a salmon, swimming upstream again to the place it was spawned, returning home, battered, weary, but home. It was a last brave struggle to fulfill some unseen destiny, just as that salmon came home to spawn again. What will we give rise to if we keep to this course, he wondered?

He passed a moment thinking of his wife, not yet born in this reality, yet somewhere in a future he might never see again, sitting quietly by the fire at home with her tea and a book. We give up so much to go to war, he thought. So very much…

He came in through the hatch, his nose red from the cold, reaching in his pocket for a handkerchief. The bridge crew was quietly at work, selfless, dutiful, yet obviously having thoughts as he might. They, too, had left wives, children, lovers, girlfriends and everything else behind, sailing out to what they thought would be a routine cruise, just a simple live fire exercise and then a long pleasant cruise to Vladivostok. Well, we had to take a few detours along the way. God bless these men, he prayed, and help me keep them from harm.

Fedorov came up to greet him. “We’re running on a converging course to those two contacts coming up from the south, Admiral. I suggest we come either east or west to avoid a collision.”

“Use your best judgment, Mister Fedorov.”

“Then I will turn on 305 degrees, sir. That will take us into the storm and towards Greenland. The chance we might be sighted visually again would be much reduced.”

“Do so,” said Volsky. “Who might be on those ships of any note, Fedorov?”

“If you’d like to scout them with the KA-40 I could give you a much better answer, sir. They’re about a hundred kilometers southeast of us now.”

“Do they have radar as well?”

“Possibly, though we don’t know what ships we have there yet. If it’s one of the battlecruisers, then it may be a little early for them to have anything active in the way of radar. HMS Hood fitted out with the Type 279M, installed during refits at Rosyth in early 1941. Same for the Type 284 sets. The former was primarily for detection of aircraft, the latter for gun direction. The rest of the battlecruiser squadron was fitted out in that same time period, if that history holds true.”

“So there may be no reason to also jam the British radar.”

“I don’t believe that is necessary, sir. I think we might just skirt west and slip away here, even if we can only make 26 knots now.”

“We’ll have to address that condition and get some additional work done on the hull, and soon. I was looking at the map, Fedorov. Do you suppose we could sneak into a fiord near Iceland or Greenland and anchor for a day? It would give Byko some time to put divers down again to check on things.”

“There’s still a lot of sea ice west, sir, but I’ll see if I can find us something.”

“Admiral,” Rodenko came up. “I think the Germans may have sighted those British cruisers again.”

“Sighted them? How can you know this, Rodenko?”

“I’m tracking the arc and fall of gun shells.”

* * *

The Germans had found their quarry again. They had been steering 215 southwest and then adjusted ten points to starboard to follow a long range contact on the Seetakt radar. A short while after they made that turn their sets were all clouded over with interference, which they attributed to the oncoming storm front.

Kapitan Hoffmann was leading the way in Scharnhorst, setting the pace at 30 knots for the last hour. The ship’s boilers had been acting up again, with the super heaters doing their work too well, but thus far they had been running at good speed. Their brief encounter with a pair of British cruisers had encouraged them when Scharnhorst scored a hit, clearly setting one of the ships afire amidships. Now their blood was up, and they thought they would pursue.

Hoffmann knew his real mission was to evade these cruisers and get into the Atlantic to attack the convoys, but something about the sound of the guns and that beautiful long shot they had scored spurred him on. The British would likely slip away in the weather, he thought, but if I come upon them again, why not sink them?

At 19:00 hours they had turned to run directly into the wind of the oncoming storm, and their speed was down to 28 knots now, but whether it was by chance or fortune, the low clouds ahead seemed to split to offer him a long narrow valley of open sea and sky. The last rays of the falling sun pierced the edge of the clouds and painted the way in liquid gold. He sailed on, the fading light gleaming off the wet steel, the bow awash with the rising sea. Then the lookouts saw something ahead, just a glimpse of what looked to be two ships through a gap in the clouds-two cruisers.

Smiling, he gave orders to open fire with the forward turrets to stick a fork into this quail and see what they had in front of them. The sound and sight of his two triple turrets opening fire was bracing. Good to be in battle on the sea, he thought. Too bad we let that damn carrier slip away in the haze and smoke. Those god cursed super heaters! Something tells me we’ll need six months in dry dock to rip them all out and get the boilers right.

Enough of that. Focus on the guns. He imagined the cold metal rammers feeding the next shells into the yawning gun breeches. Soon he saw the barrels elevate again, looking for the range. The blast of the second salvo shook the ship, first Anton, then Bruno, the two turrets firing one after another.

“What do you make the range, Schubert?”

The ship’s chief gunnery officer, was quickly at his side. “Another long shot,” he said. “17,800 meters,” but we are gaining on them. It will only be a matter of time unless these clouds roll in on us and they slip away.”

“Good, we’ll have a pair of young pheasant for dinner this evening-”

There came a hard thunk, and Hoffman knew enough to realize the ship had just been hit, right on the side armor, but with a small caliber round.

“They are shooting back at this range?”

“Impossible,” said the Gunnery Officer.

“That wasn’t a gull blown in on the storm, Schubert. And he pointed forward out the weather ports where they could see the spray of two near misses”

“Damage control, Kapitan.” A midshipman came in with the message. “A small hit below B turret on the side armor. It did not penetrate, sir. No significant damage.”

“So they get their lucky shot as well.”

“We’re in this open trough between those two cloud formations,” Schubert suggested. “They can obviously see us much better than we can see them.”

When the next salvo came in spot on target, straddling the bow of the ship with two shells in quick succession, Hoffmann frowned. “They nearly hit us again, but look there, that other salvo of three fell at least three thousand meters short.”

“Two ships, two gunnery officers,” Schubert said matter of factly.

“Yes, well get to work, Schubert. Get to work!”