Waiting until the big cruiser had crossed Dreadnought’s track some five hundred yards astern, Simon Collingwood brought the submarine about and slowly came up to periscope depth, around sixty feet, the depth being measured from the boat’s keel.
“Target One is turning!”
And so she was! For long seconds the big ship presented her elegant port silhouette to the clicking periscope camera.
“There’s a lot of traffic coming down from the north!” Max Forton reported as he watched the tactical plot updating. “At least one heavy! Maybe two!”
“Our Sverdlov has a big pennant number on her side,” Simon Collingwood reported. “One-zero-five!”
There was a short delay while files were hurriedly thumbed.
“That’s makes her the Admiral Kutuzov, sir!”
The next question was what on Earth was she doing this far south?
“What was her home port?”
“Sevastopol.”
Okay, but if one of the Soviet’s big ships was at sea when Sevastopol was blasted off the face of the planet; how many of her brothers and sisters were sent out to sea to keep her company?
A destroyer or a frigate could limp out of harbour within, say, a couple of hours of flashing up a single boiler? But a big ship like that cruiser out there? If she’d had her boilers lit, no time at all; but from a cold start? Hours, many hours. There was nothing modern about the machinery of these Stalin-era cruisers. The Soviets had been given a half-built heavy cruiser as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, later they had captured other German uncompleted or badly bomb damaged hulls and buildings full of blueprints. It was tacitly assumed they’d adopted the Germans’ pre-war overly complex and maintenance-intensive machinery layouts, as well as copied numerous other internal features of the Nazis’ Hipper class cruisers. Hence the striking resemblance of the Admiral Kutuzov with twenty year-old images of the Prinz Eugen.
Simon Collingwood watched as, some four thousand yards away, increasingly silhouetted against the setting sun, the handsome cruiser came to a virtual dead stop, with her bow pointed almost due north.
“What’s our range to the nearest land?” He asked.
“Two-two miles, sir.”
The Captain of HMS Dreadnought went on watching.
Nothing happened for about a minute and then, without warning, the cruiser’s side lit up like a long, violently iridescent, blinding firework. It was some moments before he realised the Admiral Kutuzov’s main battery had fired a broadside.
“The cruiser has just loosed off a broadside,” he intoned flatly. “Presumably, at the units coming down from the north.”
The Sverdlov class cruiser fired another broadside; this time the guns spat a little raggedly.
“Second broadside. Under local control this time.”
It was peculiar watching so much sound and fury and hearing nothing.
His hand closed on the camera button as the next broadside erupted from the side of the Admiral Kutuzov.
Moments later the sea between the periscope lens and the cruiser convulsed, huge columns of white water completely obscuring the fifteen thousand ton warship.
The darkness was settling now.
He waited for the cruiser’s next broadside.
A minute ticked by, and another.
Then far astern of the nearly stationary ship a huge tract of sea dissolved into a forest of shell splashes bigger than anything he’d ever seen other than in the movies, or a..
“Give me a range and bearing to the nearest northern contact please!”
He was already swinging the periscope around.
“Zero-two-one degrees!”
“Nine thousand years!”
Nothing. At first there was just the seemingly impenetrable grey dusk and the haze making it impossible to distinguish where the sky ended and the ocean began. Simon Collingwood raised the periscope to its maximum extension. Ships carrying out a full bore shoot weren’t worrying about detecting the radar ghost of a raised scope.
He was counting the seconds.
Almost two minutes passed.
He trained the lens down the bearing of the approaching contact.
Cranked up the magnification to maximum; imagining he could make out a low, dirty, smoking hull almost directly bow on to the Dreadnought.
Without warning the whole northern horizon seemed to momentarily flare like a bursting supernova as the fifty-three year old battlecruiser Yavuz — built as the SMS Goeben in 1912 to serve in the Kaiser’s High Seas Fleet — unleashed an eight-gun broadside from her eleven inch main battery.
“Gentlemen,” the Captain of HMS Dreadnought chuckled ruefully, “I think we are witnessing one of the most bizarre gunnery exercises in history. The Kutuzov and a World War One battlecruiser are trading offset broadsides.”
The light was gone.
“Down scope!”
“Make our depth two-zero-zero feet!”
Moving to the plot Simon Collingwood eyed the Cretan coast to the south waiting like a long, impenetrable barrier against which he had no intention of being trapped.
“We’ll work our way around to the east of these fellows up top,” he decided out aloud. “I’ll feel happier when we have a little sea room. I propose to delay our run south until we receive word from Malta. We’ll send off a flash report on the shenanigans topside and see what Fleet HQ wants us to do about it.”
Chapter 27
“This is a dreadful mistake, Margaret,” Iain Macleod hissed as he caught up with his Prime Minister on the steps to the Town Hall, having had to scurry madly around the car to continue their ‘debate’. Or rather, their politely ‘blazing row’. It was all very well for Airey Neave to assure him, and everybody else who would listen, that ‘the lady had made up her mind’ and that therefore, ‘there was nothing anybody could do about it’ but Airey wasn’t the Chairman of the Party, and in any event the poor man had, in retrospect, been in the Angry Widow’s thrall for many months.
“It is nothing of the sort, Iain,” Margaret Thatcher retorted irritably.
“The bloody man wins both ways!” The Minister of Information protested. “By sharing a stage with the bounder you give him credit he doesn’t deserve!”
“I don’t like what he’s been saying around the country any more than you do,” the woman snapped. “But he’s got a perfect right to say what he wants. Just as I have a perfect right of reply!”
The Chairman of the Conservative and Unionist Party of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland would have argued more but fresh snow had fallen that afternoon and the stone steps were slick with ice. He lost his footing and pitched forward, saving himself by throwing out his arms.
“Iain! Iain?” Margaret Thatcher demanded plaintively. “Are you all right? Was it your old wound?”
The strong hands of the nearest Royal Marine Commandos of the Prime Minister’s personal bodyguard raised the shaken Minister to his feet and started dusting him down, their eyes searching for danger, other men fingering the trigger guards of their Sten Guns. Many of the Royal Marines had been with Margaret Thatcher in America and during her ceaseless perambulations around the country, they had begun to form such an esprit de corps that already comrades and detractors alike had started calling them the ‘Angry Widow’s Praetorians’. The Prime Minister had been informed that some of the Commandos wore vests beneath their combat fatigues emblazoned with the motto ‘God Bless the Angry Widow!’