Kirov Saga Men of War

Chapter 8



Vladivostok was one of only four major ports serving the vast expanse of the Russian Republic. Sometimes referred to as the San Francisco of Mother Russia, the city is located at the tip of a long peninsula, clustered on the fringes of the beautiful Amursky Bay, where long new elegant bridges connected the isthmus to Frunzenskiy Island to the south and formed a kind of Golden Gate of their own where ships pass beneath them to eventually enter the “Golden Horn Harbor.” And like San Francisco, it also had a thriving and fast growing Chinese community mixed in with the city’s 700,000 residents, their shops and restaurants creating little china towns here and there near the harbor district.

Like many cities in Russia, it suffered from pollution, a reputation for corruption, and a struggling economy that saw over 25% of its citizens living below the poverty line. Those who could get jobs in the industrial sector there would often wait long months for a meager paycheck, and others became self-styled tour guides serving a slowly growing tourism industry. That said, the city and its vital port remained a crucial strategic hub for Russia in the 21st century, and the Pacific Fleet still berthed its guided missile cruisers, destroyers and submarines in the region, though all too few.

One Slava Class cruiser, the Varyag, would now bow and yield its crown as the Pacific Fleet’s Flagship to the newly arriving battlecruiser Kirov. There were a few aging destroyers, four in the old Udaloy Class, three Delta III submarines, an old Oscar, five Akula’s and even some rusting Kilo class diesel subs tied off at the wharfs and piers of the submarine base at Pavlovskoye, south of Fokino where the Naval Headquarters had been located. One new sub, the sleek new nuclear attack submarine Kazan was perhaps the most formidable boat assigned to the undersea fleet based there. It was hidden in the old underground submarine pens that had been dug through the north cape of Pavlovshoye Bay.

The navy rolled out the red carpet for Kirov when the big battlecruiser arrived, just as Karpov said it would. There were honor guards, a marching band, a flag ceremony and a lot of military rituals. Admiral Volsky had the entire ship’s compliment out in their dress whites, and he played up the ceremony for all it was worth. Yet through it all there was a kind of reserved shock when the other sailors and officers assembled on the quays saw the damage the ship had sustained. Kirov was missing her Top Mast radar sets, there was a raw gash on the aft quarter, and obvious damage to the superstructure behind the secondary mast where fresh paint and a canvass tarp now hid the worst of the wreckage inflicted by Hayashi’s D3A1 dive bomber.

The rumor that the ship had endured these insults when Orel blew up on sea trials provided little comfort, as it spoke only to the continued incompetence of the service, still struggling to reach the lofty goal set in 2011 of building 100 new ships before 2020. Most of these were to be smaller frigates, corvettes, and new submarines, accounting for about seventy of the planned additions. The remaining thirty would see some real new teeth put into the fleet, including two new nuclear aircraft carriers that had been planned, though neither had been completed. The fleet still had little reliable seaborne air power, and therefore could never hope to fulfill the long held Russian dream of becoming a real blue water navy.

China went shopping and bought up most of the older Soviet era light carriers. Kiev was now a floating hotel, and Minsk an amusement park. The second Kuznetsov class hull, named Varyag before it was sold to the Chinese, was now the Liaoning, the ship once fated to die at the hands of an American submarine in the growing squabble over Taiwan, as least insofar as one Australian newspaper had it. Russia’s only fleet carrier to speak of was this ship’s elder brother, Admiral Kuznetsov, which had also been moved east when the Russians had been quietly informed that China was planning a ‘major operation’ in the near future.

One relatively new frigate with the all new carbon fiber superstructure and stealth design had been assigned to the Pacific Fleet, the Admiral Golovko, laid down in 2012. Two more were expected soon. The Project 21956 destroyers were also still largely incomplete, though one such ship, now named the Orlan, or Sea Eagle, was proudly berthed at Vladivostok next to the new arrival.

Kirov was given a proverbial ‘wide berth’ off the concrete docks near Korabelnaya Street. Admiral Volsky knew, as Karpov had warned, that the Naval Inspectorate would be arriving within days, so he huddled with his Chief Engineer Dobrynin to see what could be done about the reactor control rod they now suspected as the cause of the strange displacement the ship had experienced—Rod-25.

“What can we do with it, Dobrynin? Can we risk leaving it here on the ship?”

“If we do, sir, then what might happen the next time we have to do rod maintenance?”

“Yes, it would be most disturbing if the ship were to suddenly disappear again while berthed in the harbor! Can it be removed safely? Stored somewhere?”

“That would take some doing, Admiral, but it might be transferred to the Primorskiy Engineering Center across the bay. We have a diagnostic rod test-bed facility there, and I could study it more closely. We would put it in a radiation safe container, then barge it across the bay to the commercial pier and truck it up the hill to the center.”

“I will cut the orders,” Volsky said quickly. “Anything you need will be provided. But I want this to seem routine. I want to avoid calling undue attention.”

“I understand, sir. I can just write up a standard rod replacement order—not unusual at all after a long cruise like this. In fact, I may have to replace rods five and seven as well. I can ask for a new spare to fill in for Rod-25. It is nothing unusual.”

“Good, Dobrynin. Get the damn thing off the ship as soon as possible, then, eh?”

“I’ll have it moved tomorrow, sir.”

“Perfect… But I think we should have a man there at all times, to keep watch on it. You know how things get shuffled around from one place to another. Someone comes in looking for something and things get moved. Some enterprising supply clerk looking for spare parts comes in and sends the damn thing off to another ship.”

“We wouldn’t want that to happen, sir.”

“Precisely. So leave a man there—on my orders. If anyone questions you tell them that this comes directly from me. That should take care of it. One advantage of carrying all this extra weight is that you get to throw it around once in a while.”

“That’s what Admirals are for, sir. I’ll put two men on it.”



* * *



Pavel Kamenski looked up from his book, staring over the rim of his reading glasses when he heard the commotion on the stairs. It was Alexi, his grandson, racing up the steps and shouting for him with that edge of eagerness in his voice that promised discovery.

“Grandpa! Grandpa! It’s here!”

Alexi ran in, all of twelve, his knees bare between long white socks and plain brown shorts, for the weather had been uncommonly warm that week in Vladivostok. He rushed in, eyes gleaming, cheeks red with his haste. “It’s here!”

“Just a moment, my good young man. What is here?”

“Kirov! It’s back Grandpa. It was all on the television a moment ago. Kirov is in the harbor! Can we go see it, Grandpa? Let’s go and see it, please?”

“Kirov? Here?”

“It was on the news. They say it wasn’t sunk after all, Grandpa—just on a mission, that’s all. And now it’s home again, and here! Can we go see it?”

Alexi was no different than millions of other young boys at that age. He had cut his teeth on plastic dinosaurs, slowly graduating to toy soldiers, and spent long hours playing with them in the dirt with his friends, developing some strange calculus wherein a triceratops could be traded for two machine gunners and a sniper, or one tank. In time he slowly traded off his herd of dinos to the younger boys, and built the root and stem of a Motor Rifle Division in their place. When he got a few years older he left these behind and moved on to model building. At Christmas he might be seen slowly flying his model Mig-31 fighter about the house, turning it this way and that in his hand as the plane banked to avoid decorations on the tree, and then swooped on Tamiko, the cat.

At eleven he had taken to reading stories of great battles at sea, and building models of his favorite ships. He had a model of the old German battleship Bismarck, and one of the famous Japanese battleship Yamato, the biggest of them all. He also had a big Shchuka-B type nuclear attack submarine, the boat NATO now called Akula. But of all his models, Kirov was his favorite, and he had spent long hours watching it sail the seas of his imagination, and thinking that one day he might join the navy himself, and become its captain.

“Who would win?” he had asked his Grandpa one day. “Could Bismarck have a chance against Yamato? I don’t think it could, Grandpa. It only has eight guns, and they aren’t quite as big.”

“I suppose you are right in that, Alexi. They were both very tough ships, but I think the Yamato, yes. It would win.”

“But what about Kirov? It could beat them both together, right Grandpa?”

“I would hope so. But look at those tiny guns on Kirov. How could it have a chance?” Kamenski had teased the boy, knowing he would soon explain about the missiles he had so lovingly installed beneath the removable forward deck cover. He was not disappointed. Alexi had pried the plastic deck open to reveal the innards of the model ship, pointing to the tips of the missiles in their canisters of eight, like deadly eggs all lined up in a basket.

“Don’t forget these,” the boy admonished. “They can fly—and very fast too! They can hit Yamato from way over there. The boy had pointed across the room to the corner where Tamiko was sleeping in a favorite spot by the heating vent on the carpet, oblivious to the world and mindless of anything that had to do with battleships.

“Yamato’s guns are big, but they can’t fire that far. And Kirov has these radars. It can find the Yamato, even if I took it downstairs to my bedroom.”

“Even in your room? Well in that case, Alexi, Kirov would certainly win.” Even a boy of twelve could deduce what Karpov had so clearly demonstrated in the Pacific.

“Let’s go this afternoon, Grandpa! Can we?”

Kamenski agreed, sending Alexi running off and down the steps to tell his mother, and then the old man quietly set his book down on the reading desk, a strange look in his eye. He got up, very slowly and walked to his voluminous library wall, squinting through his spectacles as he looked for a book, his finger running over the spines as he searched. There it was, The Chronology of the Naval War At Sea, 1939-1945, Russian Edition. He pulled it out, very slowly, as if there was some old, unfinished business within the volume that he was reluctant to revisit.

His weathered hand flipped through the well worn pages, as he squinted to see the dates for the year 1941. He saw his carefully underlined passage, with notes penciled into the margin. The date leading the passage was: 22 July – 4 Aug, Arctic, in dark bold type. The narrative began: “British carrier raid on Kirkenes and Petsamo cancelled when aircraft spot a lone ship in the Arctic Sea north of Jan Mayen.” It was the first appearance of a ship that the history had come to call “Raider X,” presumed to be a German heavy cruiser, and one using experimental naval rockets as its primary weaponry. It had been pursued and eventually sunk by British and American forces…Or was it? He puckered his eyes, reading the thinly scrawled notation he had written in the margin… “See also 23 Aug—1 Sep Atlantic.”

Kamenski flipped the pages to those dates and began reading:

‘Following reports received by commercial traffic at sea the British auxiliary cruisers Circassia from Freetown and the Canadian auxiliary cruiser Prince David from Halifax are ordered to intercept at the suspected meeting point a German auxiliary cruiser and a blockade-runner in the central Atlantic. On its way, Prince David sights an unknown vessel and reports it as a possible cruiser of the Admiral Hipper class. This leads to a big search operation.’

The old man ran his finger down the long column, noting how both the British and American forces in the region had scrambled to intercept this sighting. The British Battleship Rodney was immediately alerted, and joined with the American carrier Task Group 2.6 to hunt for the ship. Planes off the carrier Yorktown soon reported several merchant ships in the search zone, and then suddenly confirmed the sighting of a warship described again as a “possible Hipper class cruiser.”

A second US Task Group quickly formed around the carrier Long Island to expand the search zone. The British dispatched Force F with the carrier Eagle and the cruisers Dorsetshire and Newcastle, and pulled the battleship Revenge off of convoy duty, with three more fast cruisers. In all, the combined Anglo-US forces amounted to three carriers two battleships, twelve cruisers and twenty destroyers. But the suspected ship seemed to simply vanish again, and the Admiralty received good aerial photos of Brest to assure themselves that Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prince Eugen were all still quietly sleeping in their berths. Days later, however, a US coast Guard cutter, Alexander Hamilton, again raised the alarm with a report of a Hipper class cruiser near Newfoundland.

Thinking the Germans might be trying to sneak back to home ports, the US quickly dispatched a new Task Group from Reykjavík built around the battleship New Mexico to block the Denmark Strait. Yet nothing was found, and the watch slowly faded away.

But not Kamenski’s watch. He had been fascinated by these odd reports in the narrative, and spent much time ferreting them out. His next notation in the margin led him on to the odd “incident” in the Mediterranean at the conclusion of the Malta relief Operation Pedestal a year later. The British covering force with battleships Rodney and Nelson had engaged another mysterious ship, presumed to be a French battlecruiser out of Toulon…

But Kamenski knew for a fact that it had not been a French battlecruiser, for his father had once been involved with Soviet naval intelligence, and Kamenski had once been a boy just like Alexi, enamored by the sleek lines and threatening battlements of warships. One day his father told him something, well after he had retired from his service, and it always stuck in Kamenski’s mind. He had been reading this very book, for it was given to him by his father, and the man had come to this very passage and shook his head with a wry smile. “That was no French ship,” Kamenski remembered him saying. “We had a man there, on that very coast, and he saw the whole thing. No, it wasn’t a French battlecruiser, so you can figure out what it really was, eh Pavel?” But his father would say nothing more about it.

Pavel Kamenski had taken up that challenge, joining the intelligence services and quietly perusing the mystery that had begun with the odd appearance of “Raider X.” He had followed the trail for many years, through libraries, books and old dusty files, staring at grainy photos in black and white—the last one being taken by a seaplane out of Milne Bay that had photographed another strange ship in the Coral Sea.

Kamenski closed the book, but he carried it with him to his reading desk, and set it down next to a cold cup of tea. Now he shuffled slowly over to the table by the easy chair where Alexi’s mother, his own daughter Elena, would always leave the morning newspaper. He picked it up, the headline bold and strong, with a photo of a big ship in the harbor and crowds of jubilant people. It read simply:

KIROV COMES HOME!