Somebody was still shooting, he could hear the regular fall of shot a mile, perhaps less distant. Nobody was shooting at Talavera at the moment; that was the main thing. The ship beneath his feet was broken. He could feel it, and he shared the old destroyer’s pain. Whatever happened one fought until one could not fight any more; that was the tradition, the legacy that Nelson had handed down to generations of Royal Naval officers and men.
But HMS Talavera’s fight was over.
Talavera’s first torpedo had porpoised and run away at an oblique angle missing both enemy ships. Neither the old battlecruiser nor the Sverdlov class cruiser tracking half-a-mile in her wake had attempted to take evasive action until after Talavera had launched the last of her fish. The destroyer’s second torpedo had not found a target either. The Yavuz had started to turn away from the destroyer when a giant geyser of water had erupted thirty or forty feet inboard of her swinging stern. Within seconds the smoke from her coal-fired boilers had filled the gap between the two ships. Then, about twenty seconds later there had been a very heavy underwater explosion.
‘Captain!’
Peter Christopher had turned and looked in the direction that the wounded yeoman clinging to a twisted stanchion which had once supported the starboard signal lamp was pointing.
At first he did not quite believe what he was seeing.
The Yavuz was steaming in a slow circle to starboard and visibly down by the stern. Beyond her the Sverdlov class cruiser was dead in the water, settling by the bow. The cruiser’s entire fo’c’sle was bent down at an unnatural, impossible angle just forward of her first turret.
One Mark VIII with a contact detonator had hit the Yavuz in her most vulnerable area — her propeller shafts and rudder — and a Mark VIII with a magnetic warhead had gone off beneath the keel of the cruiser. The water under the Yavuz’s stern stopped churning.
It was already too late.
It was exactly like watching a car crash in very, very slow motion, albeit on a grand scale.
‘Oh, my God!’ Peter Christopher had muttered.
The sound of the Yavuz’s straight-stemmed ram bow burying itself forty feet deep into the armoured steel flank of the Sverdlov class cruiser — just behind her bridge — carried loudly across the mile of open water between the two doomed giants and the sinking British destroyer.
“ONE-ZERO-FIVE!” A man shouted from nearby. “I can see the number on her side. That makes the cruiser the Admiral Kutuzov, sir!”
The Captain of HMS Talavera would have liked to have savoured the moment. But war is Hell and all that. His half-scrambled wits registered the scream of plummeting shells only after the salvo had turned the seas around the destroyer into a maelstrom.
Both main battery turrets were out of action.
His ship was dead in the water.
Talavera had just been bracketed by a ranging salvo from another big ship.
“If it’s not one thing it’s another!” Miles Weiss, the destroyer’s bloodied Executive officer complained irritably, picking his way across the wreckage of the bridge to join his friend by the binnacle.
Peter Christopher quirked a wan smile at the other man.
“Very true, Number One,” he agreed amiably.
Chapter 67
“The range is clear, sir!”
Captain Anderson Farragut Schmidt looked at the plot. He did not know if he ought to be humbled and awed by what the lone British destroyer had done; or incredibly pissed off that it had done most of his work for him. He had ordered the two Charles F. Adams class guided missile destroyers under his command to proceed north and to interpose themselves between the Soviet cruiser coming down from that direction and, if it was still afloat, the surviving British destroyer. In the meantime, he was going to give his main battery gun crews have a little much needed target practice. He had adjusted the battleship’s course by a few degrees to starboard to open her ‘A’ arcs so as to allow her entire broadside bear on the enemy.
“Your targets are the two Soviet heavies bearing approximately zero-three-zero! Broadsides! COMMENCE FIRING!”
The firing bell clanged.
There was a short delay.
Travelling through the water at over thirty knots the leviathan seemed to halt for a moment as her nine great naval rifles fired. In that instant over thirteen tons of steel and high explosive belched forth on a one-and-a-half minute twenty mile long arcing trajectories towards targets as yet invisible to the naked eye, but painted for destruction by the USS Iowa’s fire control radars high above her bridge.
Chapter 68
The two American destroyers had surged between Talavera’s sinking hulk and the doomed leviathans locked together in a death embrace some two thousand yards farther out to sea to the east. The long lean greyhounds had had bones in their teeth, creaming enormous bow waves under their clipper bows, their guns firing with regular, fast, THUMPS! Those men on Talavera’s deck who were able had raised a ragged cheer.
And then the forest of shell splashes had risen around the Yavuz and the Admiral Kutuzov. Not so much geysers of water the size of a small office block, these geysers were veritable giant Redwood trees. The second salvo straddled the two helpless ships, three shells from the third found their targets. Red flames splashed across the Soviet cruiser, sending debris flying mast high, and falling into the water hundreds of yards away. Over a mile distant Peter Christopher could see smashed pieces of the cruiser’s superstructure cart wheeling through space. Fires belched evil black smoke shot through with crimson. There were two hits from the fifth broadside, another from the seventh. The cruiser was on fire, settling fast. The Yavuz’s superstructure seemed to have been blasted flat and one of her amidships turrets suddenly vented a plume of dazzling iridescent white fire.
The old dreadnought and the Soviet cruiser drifted apart, the Admiral Kutuzov instantly lurching to starboard. The fifteen thousand ton cruiser capsized a minute later, her upturned hull floating briefly before sinking by the bow. Her stern hung in the air for some seconds, suspended a hundred feet in the air before her amidships compartments filled with water and the cruiser slid into the oily, flotsam-fouled sea.
The Yavuz trembled under a rain of shells.
The old battlecruiser wallowed deeper and deeper in the water as a deluge of huge 2700-pound super-heavy Mark 8 armour piercing rounds fell upon her. Some carved right through the ship and exploded in the water around and beneath her, while others wrought untold mortal carnage within her thickly armoured carapace.
Nobody on HMS Talavera actually saw the Yavuz turn turtle, or linger capsized on the surface for another minute as one last dreadful broadside lanced down upon her from the darkling, lightning bolt illuminated squall like blows from Thor’s mighty hammer. There was one final great explosion, her boilers filling with sea water or a magazine igniting, and then the dinosaur was gone, her death agonies mercifully concealed by a veil of smoke and steam.
With her engines silent Talavera’s surviving electric generators struggled to power the pumps.
Presently, the destroyer’s bow was awash.
Peter Christopher’s last act as Captain of Her Majesty’s Ship Talavera was to order: ABANDON SHIP!