9 Days Falling, Volume I k-5 Read online

  “Switching to Kashtan system at ten kilometers,” said Samsonov as Karpov looked on. There was much more tension in the room now. Those last mass attacks by the Japanese had raised more than a few hairs on the back of the crew’s necks, but this was something altogether different. The missiles were three to four times faster than the planes they had faced, and they were locking on with active radar. The electronics were so good the Russian jammers had no appreciable effect on the Harpoons. We’ve got range, mass, speed, thought Karpov, but they’ve got top notch electronics. We’ll see which side prevails.

  Out in the screen brave Shaposhnikov fired its own CADS-N-1 Kashtans, missiles streaking away and skipping down towards the sea as they acquired the Harpoons. The cruiser Varyag got into it with a salvo of OSA-M missiles as well, and the skies above the turbulent sea were soon a spaghetti of missile wakes as they danced away to find targets—and find them they did. Eleven more Harpoons were swatted down by the close in missile defense barrage, and now the mini-guns were spitting fire and steel at the oncoming survivors, their hot barrels spinning furiously as the 9000 round magazine fed them shells. They got four more harpoons, but the final three were going to cross the finish line and find targets.

  Admiral Vinogradov was hit first on her aft quarter and then on the number two deck gun when one of the Harpoons executed a popup maneuver and slammed the forward deck. The one two punch wracked the ship from bow to stern, and it was soon enveloped in thick black smoke. The last Harpoon was heading for Kirov, but in the heat of the action the Varyag had put on thirty knots and moved out off the big battlecruiser’s starboard side. Now her Captain Myshelev executed a high speed turn and drove his ship right into the path of the oncoming missile, heroically sacrificing his cruiser to protect the fleet flagship.

  The bridge crew were awed by the maneuver, elated at first until they saw the explosion on the cruiser’s bow. Had the ship been quicker the missile would have struck her loaded missile tubes, arrayed in four sets of two on each side of the ship. As it was, the Harpoon struck the hull above the water line and blew right through the narrow angled bow.

  Karpov grimaced when he saw the hit, though he knew the missile had not struck a vital spot. There would be a fire, casualties, but the ship would survive. He was soon on the radio to assess the situation.

  “Falling on your sword, Myshelev?”

  “Someone had to take the hit,” Myshelev’s gritty voice came back. He was a career officer that Karpov knew and respected, heavy set, gruff, and a hard taskmaster at sea. “Don’t worry, we’ll have the damage controlled in fifteen minutes. Most of the explosive force went right through the bow! We’ve got a broken nose to go with the one I already have, but we got lucky today.”

  “We’ll toast you at officer’s mess,” said Karpov. Then his voice lowered to a more serious tone. “No more heroics, my friend. I need your Vulkans. Can you execute Long Arm?”

  “Ready and able, Captain. Just say when.”

  Karpov smiled. He had no idea what was happening with his submarine bastion. The boats had all gone silent after their initial barrage. They had orders to sprint to a new location, but he knew that American subs were out there as well, and the hunt was on. Fleet HQ Fokino had messaged him to indicate a second squadron of bombers was on the way, compliments of Admiral Leonid Volsky, but Karpov looked at his watch, knowing it could be another forty five minutes before the bombers were in position.

  “What’s happening on our other flank, Rodenko?”

  “Two squadrons off the American carrier are mixing it up with Kuznetzov’s fighter screen, sir. The fighting is intense! We’ve lost eight Mig-29s, but we hurt them as well. If anything gets through, they could be in firing position in twenty minutes.”

  “Then we fire first,” Karpov said firmly. “How far away is that American carrier?”

  “I’m reading its position at about 512 kilometers from the satellite data link, sir.”

  Karpov turned to the communications officer. “Mister Nikolin, signal fleet message ‘Long Arm One.’ Execute at zero 10:40.”

  “Aye, sir. Messaging all fleet units.”

  He really only had to message two ships, Varyag and Kuznetsov farther north. They were the only fleet assets with the reach to fire and hurt the enemy now at this range. The carrier was packing twelve P-700 Granit Shipwreck missiles with a range of 625 kilometers. Varyag had the last of the P-1000 Vulkans, the only ones remaining in service on a surface ship now, sixteen big missiles that could reach out 700 kilometers.

  The Russians had parried the American left thrust over Hokkaido, largely through the effectiveness and range of their long range SAMs. Now Kuznetsov’s fighters were embroiled in the fight, a strong shield holding off the other two American squadrons. Karpov knew the two groups had planned to time their strike together, but the attack had come unhinged, like a fighter who had tried to follow that left with a big right hand, but it was blocked. It was time to counterpunch.

  The minutes ticked away. They watched Varyag bravely turn and point her crumpled bow at the distant horizon where the enemy waited. Then the missiles began to fly, long white javelins launching from angled firing tubes on either side of the cruiser. They fired in pairs, two at a time, their wings deploying after ejection and engines roaring with anger as they sped away. Developed in the late 1980s, little was known about the Vulkan for many years. In fact, NATO was not even aware that it had secretly been deployed on Russian surface ships. Now it made its debut in combat for the very first time before slipping into the mists of obsolescence, the last of the Mohicans.

  The titanium nose of the missile was slim and long, and housed an Argon system radar that allowed it to scan and select specific targets, with a bias toward big lumbering carriers. Behind this was a 1000kg warhead, big enough to do some serious damage, and one of the largest conventional warheads on any anti-ship missile in service. It came from the Soviet mindset where longer, bigger and faster was deemed better, and it was all three, nearly 10,000 pounds of murder on wings, with bad intent. As the salvo completed, one of the sixteen missiles would rise as leader, using its altitude to acquire the distant target. It would pass this data on to the other fifteen at lower altitude, and if this missile were taken out, another would automatically rise to the position of salvo leader as the attack progressed.

  Behind the Vulkans came the P-700 Shipwrecks, fat supersonic flying busses that had already challenged the American Task force when fired by the Oscars. Karpov was sending a nice concentrated barrage of twenty-four missiles at the Americans to keep them dancing while he dealt with their final thrust against his fleet coming in from the east.

  Then it happened. Another Vulkan got into the fray on the high peak at the northern tip of Iturup Island. SVERT, the Sakhalin Volcanic Eruption Response Team began to register intense seismic activity at 10:40 hours. The Demon had slumbered for 10,000 years in a quiet glacial valley, and no one knew when it had last erupted. Yet over the centuries a massive pool of deep magma had migrated up towards the submerged caldera that formed the gap between the islands, and the area had been restless and grumbling in the last several years. Now the Demon awoke.

  Another deep rumble was heard, and Karpov turned to look off his port quarter where the distant silhouette of the island could still be seen on the horizon some thirty kilometers away…until it exploded.

  An enormous plume of fire and ash rose into the sky, larger than any eruption in the long island chain since the dawn of the present Holocene epoch, nearly 12,000 years ago. It was to be the largest eruption in recorded history, with fire and ash spewing from the 1.5 kilometer wide crater at the top then blowing it wide open. It was bigger than any geologist believed possible for this region, though they had not fully measured the huge magma chamber building for generations beneath the Kurile subduction zone. Other volcanoes of this type like Vesuvius, Krakatoa, Mt. St. Helens and Pinatubo had demonstrated the vast explosive potential of a stratovolcano. The Demon would trump them all, e
ven besting the massive eruption of Mt. Tambora in 1815.

  Karpov covered his ears as the raging sound of the explosive eruption intensified. They felt the ship roll with a blast wave, as though a massive nuclear detonation had ripped the top off the island volcano with an explosion exceeding 1000 megatons of TNT. The roar would be heard throughout all of Japan and Northern China as far away as Beijing, Taipei, and even Manila, over 2500 kilometers to the south. The broiling mass of ash and pumice was seared by tall geysers of molten lava cascading up and then down again to hiss into the boiling sea. Massive volcano bombs, rocks the size of a bus, were hurled up into the atmosphere, some falling like meteors as far as twenty or thirty kilometers away. A steaming red and black column of smoke would eventually climb to a height of fifty-seven kilometers and eject nearly fifty cubic miles of pyroclastic ash and pumice.

  Rodenko stared at his radar screen and could not believe what he was seeing. They felt the ship shudder, as much from the wrenching sound as anything else, and Rodenko reported a large signal return wave approaching at nearly 500kph. Karpov turned his field glasses north and saw it coming, a rise of seawater glistening in the morning sun, and all he could think of at that moment was the Mississippi, the old American battleship, the ‘Black Lady’ that he had swamped with a thousand feet of radiated ocean in the North Atlantic.

  “All hands! Brace for heavy seas!” His voice seemed high and thin over the welter of sound and fury that was surging at them as the horizon itself seemed to rise up in a massive seething dome. And then the Demon showed its real face, and the whole northern tip of Iturup island, and much of the submerged caldera, exploded in a titanic upwelling of seawater and molten earth.

  The shock wave was so powerful that it blew out windows in buildings as far away as Vladivostok, two days sailing time to the west. At Fokino headquarters Admiral Volsky was nearly thrown from his chair. He turned, awestruck, as he saw the angry red glow on the horizon and what looked like a massive mushroom cloud out where the fleet had deployed. His first thought was that the Americans had struck with nuclear weapons.

  “My God,” he breathed. “It’s begun.”

  Day 3

  “Woe unto you, ye souls depraved!

  Hope nevermore to look upon the heavens;

  I come to lead you to the other shore,

  To the eternal shades in heat and frost.”

  ~ Dante Alighieri, The Inferno — Canto III

  Part IX

  Hunter’s Moon

  “Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter.”

  ~ Ernest Hemingway, On the Blue Water

  Chapter 25

  Orlov sat in back the truck, thinking what he would do next. The flight east away from the Germans north of Kizlyar had been a quick rumble as the trucks sped along the hard packed earthen road. Half way to the coast, however, the good road ended, and they were forced to turn southeast along narrow tracks that fringed brown muddied fields. They crossed small streams over stone bridges that barely had the width to accommodate the vehicles, and the going was slow. The terrain forced them east towards the Caspian their way south blocked by a sprawling series of marshes, fen pools and salt barrens. Below this, the Terek River wandered lazily over the flat landscape, losing itself in many fingered runs into the marshland.

  Orlov was watched by two guards, both with sub-machineguns, but he soon engaged them with his devil may care attitude, and even had one man laughing at one point, before the soldier steadied himself with a sergeant staring at him from the back of the truck bed. He had been all set to blow the Colonel who confronted him to hell; then the Germans attacked and everything became chaos. With six NKVD soldiers around him they were all hustled into a truck and on the road north, leaving a cloud of dust behind them—until they saw the armored cars advancing, with squads of German infantry on their flanks.

  The column had to make a hard right turn and head east. The road to Astrakhan was now cut, at least for the time being. Now Orlov wondered what had become of his grandmother. That part of the column was also cut off, so it must have turned south, he reasoned. Good. We’re all going south. The Germans did me a favor after all. Now all I have to do is figure how to bust a few heads, get hold of one of those machine guns and settle affairs here. That Sergeant is the only real threat. He’s a sallow faced bastard, like all sergeants, eh? I’d better figure a way to get him closer. The others will be no problem.

  “Hey… Tovarich, I’ve been to Baku already. Why in hell are we going back? I thought you were here to fight the Germans. They’re behind us! Or are you sucking on that Colonel’s teat, eh?”

  “Watch your mouth,” the Sergeant growled.

  “You watch it, asshole!” Orlov was in no mood to be pushed any further in spite of the circumstances. Amazingly, no one had searched him in the heat of the moment, and he still had the pistol in his pocket!

  “Look,” said the Sergeant. “We’ll deal with you when we get down south.” He pointed a threatening finger Orlov’s way. “Nobody seems to know you, but you’re wearing an NKVD uniform. What unit are you? What are these orders you say you have for the Commissar? Do you think we are stupid here?”

  “No, I just think you look stupid,” Orlov jibed. “I’ll tell you why the Germans are kicking our ass in this war. Because we can’t seem to sort out who we’re fighting against! If it were me, I’d be back there in Kizlyar in a trench on the river line with the fighting NKVD, not out rounding up innocent girls and old ladies for Molla and his comrades. Which do you like, Sergeant—the little girls or the old babushkas? That’s why we’re losing this damn war, eh?”

  The Sergeant waved him off, and craned his neck to look outside, but the look on his face told Orlov that last remark had hit a nerve. Orlov grinned, and he saw two of the other men suppress a smile as well.

  They finally found the river, narrowing to no more than a hundred meters or so, a silty brown flow heading toward the sea. They followed the north bank for some time, but there were no bridges, so the trucks kept on. The dry land was slowly squeezed between the thinning stream of the river and the thickening marshes to the north. In time they came struggling along a narrowing track until the lead truck simply ground to a halt, its tires sunk deep in a bog. The column stopped, and Orlov heard the harsh voice of the Colonel up ahead, shouting orders. There was a rustle of men and equipment, the sound of women’s voices mixed in, and then the Colonel stuck his head into the back of their truck.

  “Out! We walk from here. The trucks can go no further. It’s just a kilometer to the bridge at Kazgan. Then we’ll find new vehicles on the other side. Keep a close eye on him,” he pointed at Orlov, frowning. “He wants to see Comrade Molla? Very well, he will see him soon enough.”

  The Colonel meant that as a threat, but it gave Orlov heart. Good, he thought. They’re taking me to Molla! What could be better? I’ve a revolver with six bullets in my pocket and all the time in the world.

  He had the heady feeling that he was invulnerable, like a demigod that had fallen from the heavens into this world of stupid little men. He was omniscient as long as he kept hold of his service jacket and could listen to Svetlana whispering in his earbuds. He could tell them what would happen tomorrow, next week, next month, next year. No man among them would believe him, though the sailors on the Soviet trawler, T-492 had learned to believe him. Too bad for Kamkov. He should have listened and gone below to get some sleep, but every man makes little decisions, little choices like that, and they sometimes make the difference between life and death.

  He settled into the bench, a silent smirk on his face. What did these maggots know? They knew nothing! He would have to go about slapping them upside the head and straightening things out, or so he believed. And he would start with Commissar Molla.

  ~ ~ ~

  The roads were much better south of the river than they were on the north bank. Captain John Haselde
n and his small commando team had humped it on foot for some time before they came to the river south of the town and decided to swim across. By the time they got to the other side they were tired, wet, and cold, but after edging down towards the outskirts of a hamlet denoted as Kurtanaul on their map, they found an old American Studebaker Lend-Lease truck that had been abandoned as lost. Sergeant Terry was familiar with them and managed to get it cranked up and running again after spending a half hour under the hood. It had just enough fuel left to get them the distance they would need to cover, if they could remain undetected.

  The evening deepened to night and they decided to continue on while they could, using cover of darkness to get them as far east as possible. The map showed several small farms south of the river, and one decent road that ran east, eventually hugging the southern bank of the river. The bridge they were looking for was a little over forty kilometers from Kizlyar, and driving was slow on the muddied roads in the dark with headlights off. Thankfully, they encountered no one else on the journey, as most people in the thinly populated area were likely indoors for warmth and security by now. The night was theirs, and they reached the bridge site in good time, pulling the small truck off the road for concealment.

  “We’ve been under a Hunter’s Moon all this way from Fort Shevchenko,” said Haselden. “Now it’s half worn away.” The half moon was now entering its last quarter, and would be sliced away to darkness night after night for the next week.