Suslov gave the order, and Angara cracked out a single round in reply, if only to say they were none too happy with what the other ship had done. There came an immediate reply, that hard distinctive crack, and then the hiss of a fast round coming at them, followed by the thump of canvas penetration, then a shuddering explosion.
“Mother of God!” Putchkin shouted. “They put that one right into our guts. Damage control, report!” He was on the voice tube now, but he already knew they had lost a gas bag, the high, whining hiss of the helium leaking was the telltale sound to worry about. That was from a hole in a gas bag that was just too big for the vulcanized rubber lining to reseal. A machinegun hit, even up to a 20mm round would sound more like a man letting air spurt out from the end of a balloon, fart like, and then come to a sibilant hissing kissing sound as the wound resealed.
God bless the Vulcan bag lining, but we just got hit with a bag buster, and a damn good one. The range has to be over ten klicks now.
“Captain, we’re losing buoyancy. I can’t climb now with just the engines. We’ll have to drop ballast.”
“Then piss it out man! Climb! Climb!”
The Elevator man sounded the claxon, and pulled the emergency ballast drop lever. Water would cascade from the nose of the ship, lightening it there and helping to get the nose pointed up quickly.
Crack, came another round, and another hit. By God, we’ve got to be twelve klicks away, well beyond rifle range. All they could possibly have up on top is a 105, but it’s one hell of a gun. They’ve blasted us again, we’ll lose another gas bag with that one.
“Captain,” came a watchman. “Damage control says that hit the reserve Oxygen. We’ve got a fire!”
Those were words that would freeze their blood of any airship Captain, no matter how salty he was. Fire was the last thing he ever wanted to see, for they carried limited amounts of water, due to its weight, and to fight a fire you had to be quick, and generous with whatever water they had. They would have to divert ballast water if this was serious, and something told him it was.
“God-damnit!” he swore. “Radio man, put out a distress call. Note we’re under fire and taking damage. Request immediate support—our position. Sevastopol had better damn well be up at elevation by now. Tell them there’s a big fucker from Fafnir out here, wherever the hell that is.” He was still thinking the ship’s name was a city. “By God, that looks to be a German insignia there. Can you see that, Suslov?”
Suslov leaned to peer through the lower gondola window panes again, squinting through his binoculars. Then the next round came right on through that window, and exploded.
That little disagreement was going to send alarms all through the Siberian Aerocorps. Three more airships were pulled off the Ob River line, and moved to the scene, but when they arrived, the mysterious ship, Fafnir, was long gone, it’s mission accomplished… For the moment….
A month later, and 3500 miles to the west in London, Admiral Tovey was thinking over the situation in Russia, and with worrisome thoughts. Things were not good. The Soviets had stopped the Germans, even drove them back in their Winter Offensive, but it was high spring now, and the Germans were on the move again. The Soviets desperately needed supplies while they struggled to re-establish their factories on Siberian Territory. There was really only one way to get them there in quantity by sea, and it would now lead to one of the hardest fought convoy sagas of the war.
“What’s next in the number sequence for Murmansk?” he asked a staffer when he reached the Admiralty.
“Sir?” The young man looked at a clip board, flipping up a page. “Number 17, sir. Teeing up now at Reykjavik. Convoy PQ-17.”
Part IV
PQ-17
“It’s not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It’s because we dare not venture that they are difficult.”
Chapter 10
The convoys to Russia had begun with all optimism, in spite of the ever present threat from the German Navy, and in the beginning it seemed the effort would prove fruitful. With Ivan Volkov sitting in the Caucasus, and the Japanese controlling Vladivostok, there was only one way to Soviet Russia, the icy northern route to Murmansk and Arkhangelsk. From there, Allied supplies and equipment could move by rail down to Leningrad, the one major city in Russia that remained secure from enemy attack. By May of 1942, twelve convoys had been sent, and with the loss of only one of 103 merchant ships, largely because the heavy losses at sea had prompted Raeder to keep his remaining capital ships in port.
Graf Spee and Graf Zeppelin were gone, along with Gneisenau. Hindenburg was at Gibraltar, and Bismarck laid up with extensive repair work at Toulon. In the north, that left only the Tirpitz as a threat powerful enough to challenge any Royal Navy ship it encountered, but that fact alone meant that each and every convoy to Murmansk had to be covered with a sizable force that would include at least one battleship and one carrier for air support. Admiral Dudley Pound lamented that the convoys were becoming a “regular millstone around our neck.” It was enough to have fast battleships available to watch the breakout zones to the Atlantic. Having to assign a battleship to convoy duty in the far north was indeed a regular added burden on the already strained resources of the Royal Navy.
Commander P.Q. Edwards was a very busy man as he organized this effort, and the code names for the convoys would steal his initials, PQ. For the first six months, the principal threat to the convoys was mounted by the U-Boats operating from bases in Norway. That long, ragged coast stretched the whole way along the eastern flank of the convoy route, and the U-boats would sortie like moray eels emerging from their dark hidden caves to strike at schools of slow moving merchant ships. Bombers at German controlled airfields also posed a grave threat, and in the late spring of 1942, the attacks began to ratchet up.
Admiral Tovey remarked that if the Germans ever added a credible surface threat, they might easily overwhelm the effort to escort and guard these precious supply runs. Yet the convoys simply had to get through. Soviet Russia had barely survived the winter of 1941, and every sign now pointed to an impending German summer offensive that might knock the Soviets right out of the war, a disaster that had to be forestalled at any cost. Russia needed munitions, food, oil, and most of all trucks and aircraft. The Murmansk Run was the only way to get those vital supplies through, and so that millstone had to be carried, no matter what the cost, and the escorts had to be found.
Tovey had been warned of one bloody choke point in the history that waited to be re-written—Convoy PQ-17. Fedorov had told him it had been savaged by the Germans, but as the numbered convoys were ticked off in the schedule, no German surface threat appeared. Then, spooked by faulty intelligence that the Allies were planning an invasion of Norway, Hitler ordered Raeder to strongly reinforce Norwegian ports and coastal defenses. With this order, the effort to build a strong bastion in the north for the Kriegsmarine was redoubled. Trondheim was selected as the best location, and the long planned naval air base there would suddenly be built out to a scale never seen in Fedorov’s history. It would be called ‘Nordstern,’ the North Star of the Reich, and so in May of 1942, Raeder ordered the cream of his surface ships in the north to sail from German ports for the cold waters of the north.