Tigers East (Kirov Series Book 25) Read online

  Kirov Saga:

  Tigers East!

  By

  John Schettler

  A publication of: The Writing Shop Press

  Tigers East, Copyright©2016, John A. Schettler

  KIROV SERIES:

  The Kirov Saga: Season One

  Kirov - Kirov Series - Volume 1

  Cauldron of Fire - Kirov Series - Volume 2

  Pacific Storm - Kirov Series - Volume 3

  Men of War - Kirov Series - Volume 4

  Nine Days Falling - Kirov Series - Volume 5

  Fallen Angels - Kirov Series - Volume 6

  Devil’s Garden - Kirov Series - Volume 7

  Armageddon – Kirov Series – Volume 8

  The Kirov Saga: Season Two ~ 1940-1941

  Altered States– Kirov Series – Volume 9

  Darkest Hour– Kirov Series – Volume 10

  Hinge of Fate– Kirov Series – Volume 11

  Three Kings – Kirov Series – Volume 12

  Grand Alliance – Kirov Series – Volume 13

  Hammer of God – Kirov Series – Volume 14

  Crescendo of Doom – Kirov Series – Volume 15

  Paradox Hour – Kirov Series – Volume 16

  The Kirov Saga: Season Three ~1942

  Doppelganger – Kirov Series – Volume 17

  Nemesis – Kirov Series – Volume 18

  Winter Storm – Kirov Series – Volume 19

  Tide of Fortune – Kirov Series – Volume 20

  Knight’s Move – Kirov Series – Volume 21

  Turning Point – Kirov Series – Volume 22

  Steel Reign – Kirov Series – Volume 23

  Second Front – Kirov Series – Volume 24

  Season 4 Premier: Tigers East

  Kirov Saga:

  Tigers East!

  By

  John Schettler

  Kirov Saga:

  Tigers East!

  By

  John Schettler

  Part I – Turncoat

  Part II – Fall Blau

  Part III – The Ghost Division

  Part IV – The Long Goodbye

  Part V – Fish in a Barrel

  Part VI – Tigers East!

  Part VII – Falling Star

  Part VIII – Ozymandias

  Part IX – The Kirov Gap

  Part X – Echoes of Fire

  Part XI – Awakening

  Part XII – Downfall

  Author’s Note:

  Dear Readers,

  Here we are, opening Season Four of the series where I last left you, with Gromyko, and with Fedorov’s bold decision to persist with his mission, in spite of Karpov’s order to return to the ship. You and I know just how determined, and how resourceful Anton Fedorov can be, but even he will be surprised by what happens next. We will get to that again before this novel ends, but first, there is a good amount of wartime action to relate.

  I have two theaters heating up now in late 1942. In the west we will return to Patton’s battle in Algeria, and the naval action off Algiers as Tovey attempts to command the seas between that port and the vital Allied supply port of Oran. And we will also revisit an old warrior, apparently beaten and brooding on his defensive lines at Mersa Brega—Erwin Rommel. The Desert Fox has a sudden awakening here, bent on recapturing his old glory again. Whether he can ever do so in the shadow of Kinlan’s Heavy Brigade remains to be seen, but there will be surprises ahead, and unexpected wrinkles in the fate line on Rommel’s palm.

  Then we must also take our Tigers East, and relate what has been happening with Operation Blue. There the Germans fight to secure two key objectives. The first will recount von Rundstedt’s drive to take Voronezh, sending Model and Hoth in a big pincer operation. The second follows Manstein and General Steiner’s SS Korps as they push into the lower Don bend towards Volgograd. Now Sergei Kirov and General Zhukov will have two new crisis points to handle, and desperate decisions must be made to try and prevent a general collapse, and survive until the winter of 1942.

  After these battles are fought, we return to Fedorov’s dire mission, where unforeseen visitors, and the strange hand of fate, lead him to a moment of real destiny.

  A word on the Battle Books…

  Many readers have written to tell me how much they enjoy the new Battle Books, which extract chapters forming a major subplot from the series and present them in one continuous narrative. So far we’ve had two released, Foxbane and Vendetta. The next book was going to involve all the East Front action, but I have decided to postpone that volume so it can include material presented here in Tigers East and also from the book following this one, which will be heavy on the great battle for Volgograd, Thor’s Anvil.

  Readers have also asked me what happened to other subplots that have not been given much ink in Seasons 2 and 3, notably the Keyholders Saga, the mystery involving Duke Elvington’s trip to 1815 on the eve of Waterloo, Paul Dorland and the Meridian Team in 2021, and many other related events, such as the planned raid on Gibraltar to discover what may be hidden beneath St Michael’s Cave.

  So there will be a new Battle Book coming August 1, (assuming I can get it edited!), and in it I will include a good deal of new material involving these other plot lines. In effect, it is going to present one major subplot story line, which will then be extended to include material that I haven’t had room to fit into the regular Kirov Series, all concerning the mystery of the seven keys. I’ve been focusing mostly on the alternate history of the war in recent main series volumes, but if you like those other subplots, the next Battle Book will present material that may not appear anywhere else in the main series. A more detailed announcement on the next Battle Book appears at the end of this volume.

  Enjoy!

  - John Schettler

  Part I

  Turncoat

  “Well, whiles I am a beggar, I will rail

  And say there is no sin but to be rich;

  And being rich, my virtue then shall be

  To say there is no vice but beggary.”

  — William Shakespeare: (King John, act 2, sc. 2)

  Chapter 1

  Gromyko did not have much time, and there were still so many questions unanswered in his mind. He had struggled to understand all the things Director Kamenski was telling him, but he was a submarine Captain, not a master of the arcane science of time travel. It was all still a great mystery to him, something he could not fathom, but yet something he could also not deny. He had lived it all thru, seeing that strange control rod shift his boat to the past, and at a most opportune moment in the heat of a fight with a combined Japanese and American ASW task force. After that, things only got more and more complex.

  Admiral Volsky had been his one contact point with reality, a sane and sensible man if ever there was one. Kamenski agreed that if he could get to Volsky again, or to his able confederate, Fedorov, that they could help him sort through this mess. But Karpov was another matter, and Kamenski told him that it was very likely that Karpov would eventually achieve his aim of getting control of the ship… Kirov.

  I was in this position once before, he thought. In fact, this mission was on my back when I first shifted to WWII with Volsky and Fedorov. They were dead set on trying to accomplish the same thing Kamenski wants me to do—get control of that ship and send it home, and that failing….

  Kill the ship.

  That would be a very hard decision, and perhaps even harder to accomplish. I can set my own scruples aside, but I would be asking a great deal of my men. Kirov was the flagship of the fleet, and it was all ready to lead us to war, the sad reality of the situation in 2021. It was going to be a most difficult fight. The navy had been given quite
a few new ships in the days leading up to that war, but we were still a shadow on the sea compared to the American Navy. My boat was counted on heavily to address that balance. The same for Kirov. If that ship has to die, then it should do so fighting for Russia—an honorable death—and not this dastardly assassination Kamenski has pushed upon me. I fought side by side with Kirov. Now Kamenski puts this bloody knife in my hands and asks me to stab my comrades in the back. It isn’t right, and yet, the consequences of failure here are difficult to contemplate.

  He shook his head, as if trying to clear the errant thoughts that troubled him, the endless nagging questions. Gromyko liked answers, not questions, but now they sat around him like fresh young crewmen that had been mixed up in a fight, and he had to lay down the law, sort things out, restore order.

  I’m to go back, he thought, but where will I end up? Kamenski says I’ll get where Time needs me, but that’s as much a guess on his part as anything else. Alright, let’s assume I get right back to the time I left after that scrap with that British sub. I still have no idea how it got there, or how it found my boat to launch that ambush attack. A good name for that sub, Ambush. But I’m to leave that one alone if I ever find it again, or so Kamenski tells me.

  Supposing I do find Volsky or Fedorov still in command of Kirov. That would make things so much easier. I just tell them all these things Kamenski told me, and they will certainly cooperate. I just deliver this nice shiny new control rod, and that Engineer of theirs will know what to do next. What was the man’s name? Dobrynin. Yes, I remember him now. We had tapes he sent over controlling our reactors, keying our men as to when the power had to be ramped up. It’s all Greek to me.

  Alright… I get that far, Volsky uses that damn control rod—then what? Where does Kirov go? To which world does it return? Does it go forward, or farther back, as it did once before? Does it get back to the world it came from—the world I came from when we first sortied with the Red Banner Pacific Fleet at the edge of that war? Does it get back to this world where my boat sits here getting a nice new set of very sharp teeth? Something tells me that won’t happen. We built Kirov from the bones of the Four Brothers, as Kamenski calls them: Ushakov, Lazarev, Nakhimov, and Pyotr Velikiy. They are still here, so I don’t think Volsky will suddenly appear here with the ship. In fact, the Admiral is probably here as well, clueless as to all of this. Strange how Kamenski knows of all these events, but he does, and that’s a fact.

  He tells me not to ponder these things, and to leave that part of the mission up to Mother Time. She will get me where I need to be, and she will then put Kirov where it needs to be. Sounds very tidy, but I’m old enough to know things will almost always go wrong if they can. The universe wants chaos.

  The missile launch was completed under the grey skies of Severomorsk. That was good. That would keep the prying satellite eyes from looking down and seeing what was going on here. Kazan was out in the long channel soon after, past the last buoy, rounding the rocky headlands as they turned east, and out into the cold of the Barents Sea. It was going to get much colder. There was a lot of ice out there now, and winter was coming again.

  Where would he go? A lot may have happened since he fired that last torpedo. Kirov was in the Atlantic then, and would most likely be found there, but he could not know that for certain. Then he realized that all he had to do was run the procedure with that damn control rod, right there, in the Barents Sea. First things first. He would find out whether Kamenski was full of shit or not. He’d run the procedure with Rod-25, and see where he ended up. Then it would be a simple matter to just get on the encrypted HF radio and find out where Kirov was, and who was in command. That would be risky, but it was certainly one way he could quickly locate the ship—he’d just phone home.

  His boat was soon under that dark water and taking a route that was well off the beaten path used by most Russian subs. The Americans always had boats of their own out here snooping about, lurking in the grey sea, looking to sniff out the trail of any Russian sub that tried to deploy. He couldn’t allow that to happen this time, and he would rely on the inherent stealth of his boat, and his own considerable skills, to see that he slipped away undetected. Besides, he thought, we aren’t sticking around here long. Even if an American boat did pick up our trail, we’d vanish soon after.

  He smiled at that, wishing he could see the look on the US Sonarman’s face when Kazan just flat out vanished, slipped into a hole in the sea and disappeared—back to a time before that young rascal was even born, before any of them were ever born. Even thinking of it now gave him the shivers. And so he would flee now, from the edge of this war to the heart and fire of the last one.

  Then he had one of those thoughts that always lurks in the back of every submarine Captain’s mind when he first puts to sea. If Time had issues with Kirov for meddling in the history, might she not also have issues with Kazan? Kamenski seemed to think that Time would cozy up to his boat, welcoming it with open arms. Things were all knotted up, he said, and I’m to be the scissors—and Kazan. He supposed that Time had no problem at all in using him like that—using him like a thief in the night, an assassin, a stealthy Ninja of death. Then that thought arose, like an untucked shirt, a loose shoestring. What will Time do with us after we do her dirty work for her?

  Yes, he thought. Suppose I do get Kirov home safely, wherever that might be, and failing that, suppose I kill the damn ship, and everyone aboard her. Then what? I’ll be the last loose end in the loom, the last dangling thread. What will Time do about that? What will that bitch do with Kazan?

  * * *

  Hauptmann Karl Linz was a daring man. He had seen what was in front of him on the rudimentary radar set aboard Fraenir. There were two big enemy airships circling about Ilanskiy like a pair of great white sharks. If I can see them, he thought, then it is likely they can see me. Did the Siberians have radar? He would find out soon enough.

  Those two sharks had names, Riga and Narva, and they had radar sets as well, though they were only the Topaz equipment Karpov had developed. The really good Oko Panel sets were few in number, and so they were only installed on the T-Class Airships, Tunguska and Baikal. They would see Fraenir in five minutes, and then a pair of fighters would be scrambled from the airfield at Kansk to get out and eyeball the contact. The garrison at Ilanskiy would go to full alert, and crews would soon be manning the heavy flak guns Karpov had set up there.

  The two fighters were actually IL-2 Sturmovik ground attack aircraft, a gift to Karpov from Sergei Kirov’s relocated factories in Siberia. The name literally meant “Storm Birds,” and this plane was produced in the tens of thousands during the war, exceeding the production of any other aircraft in history. Karpov liked them because they were relatively fast, compared to an airship, very hardy, with an armored box protecting the pilot spaces, and they could take MG fire from typical 7.62mm guns and still keep flying. It would take several 20mm rounds to really damage the plane, or a solid hit from a 37mm round, and while the enemy was trying to shoot them down, the Storm Birds would fire back with two 23mm cannons and a pair of wing mounted 7.62 MGs. There was also a bigger 12.7 MG manned by the rear cockpit gunner, and the plane could carry eight RS-82 rockets, or four of the larger RS-132s.

  “Enemy aircraft,” came the alert. “Bearing 195 degrees south.”

  The ship was already at action stations, all guns manned and ready, and Fraenir was a very well defended beast. The airship had three gondolas beneath the main body where its secondary batteries mounted sixteen Rheinmetall 7.5cm LG 40 recoilless rifles, with an effective firing range of 6,800 meters. There were also another eight Krupp 10.5cm LG 40s, with a range of 7,950 meters, and the 88mm guns were the main battery for long range engagement, four guns in all. There was one each in the nose and tail with 300 degree arcs of fire, and two on the main central gondola, one firing to port, the other to starboard.

  Against aircraft, there were three top mounted gun platforms, each with a twin 20mm AA gun. Similar mounts in th
e nose, tail and lower gondolas raised the count to 18 twin 20mm guns, and there were also twelve twin MG-42s mounted on small portals along the main canvas body on either side of the ship. The Sturmoviks would be too fast to be bothered by the 88s, but all those 20mm cannon were a severe threat.

  Both planes came streaking in from above, guns firing until the streams of red hot counter fire began to zero in on their line of approach, whereupon they split apart to divide the enemy fire. One got off without a hitch, but the plane that angled off the bow of the airship saw its wing riddled by a rake of 20mm gunfire, enough to cause serious damage and a fire. The two storm birds had sunk their claws into the behemoth, their own cannon perforating the big flanks of the ship, but the double lined Vulcan sealed airbags survived unscathed. The number six bag on the port side took the brunt of the enemy attack, where two crewmen were killed and a small leak started, but the engineers had it repaired in good time. Only one of the two Sturmoviks made it back to Kansk, the other pilot was forced to bail out and let his plane fall.

  Had there been a typical attack group of eight planes flying in their characteristic ‘circle of death’ formation, the Storm Birds might have put some credible damage on Fraenir. And if they had all come with RS-82 rockets, willing to brave those guns to get close enough to fire them, they might have done much more than harm. As it was, the Siberians had too few of these planes, being a backwaters front, with all the production needed so desperately on the real battle front to the west. But they had eyeballed the target, picked at it with their talons, and now the word went to the Captains of the Riga and Narva.

  They were big ships, both in the same class at 200,000 cubic meter lift capacity, all of 840 feet in length. They had ten 76mm recoilless rifles, and six 105mm rifles each, allowing them to combine their fire to outgun Fraenir 20 to 16 in the 76mm category, and 12 to 8 in the 105s. The edge for the Germans would be those deadly 88s.