Kirov Saga: Darkest Hour: Altered States - Volume II (Kirov Series) by John Schettler Read Free Book Online Page A

gentlemen,” said Volsky.
“Time for the fireworks.”
     
    * * *
     
    Aboard Bismarck ,
Lindemann was exhilarated with the excitement of the battle, until he felt the
hard impact of an enemy shell, the sea erupting as a 15-inch round from HMS Hood plummeted in to strike the ship’s heavy side armor. Seconds passed, then he
received the call from Oels, who had gone down to his damage control post. The
armor had stopped the shell, and the ship had not been hurt.
    “A little higher and we would
have lost one of the secondary batteries, Kapitän. The hit was very close to
one of the 5.7 inch gun magazines, but it did not penetrate our side armor.”
    “That is good,” said Lindemann,
smiling. But the Kapitän did not have time to savor his good fortune. Hood had found the range, and he immediately altered course ten points to try and
throw the British gunnery off. The message that came next was as puzzling as it
was disconcerting.
    “Kapitän—a message from Böhmer on Graf Zeppelin . They have come under fire from what appeared to be a
rocket of some kind!”
    Lindemann had been too focused on
his firefight with Hood , lost in the fire and smoke of battle now, and
he had not seen the solitary P-900 rise and fall in the sky as it arced over
the scene, racing north another 150 kilometers to where Graf Zeppelin was cruising in the rear.
    “A rocket?” Now Kapitän Hoffmann’s
words returned to haunt him. Rockets… fired by a mysterious British cruiser—a battlecruiser—a
ship the size of Hood itself. He tried to warn us all that the British
had these new weapons. But clearly Hood has nothing of the kind. No.
They rely on good artillery, as we do.
    “Was the ship damaged?”
    “No sir. But the weapon struck Sigfrid and Böhmer thinks we may lose that ship.”
    “Sigfrid? Sunk?” This was
something else entirely now. Hoffman’s wild story of a fiery tailed rocket
striking Gneisenau still seemed unbelievable. He had not seen the damage
personally, but if he had, the news might have made more sense to him. Whatever
this weapon was, it must have tremendous striking power to be able to sink a
ship like Sigfrid in one blow. That was no ordinary destroyer! It was
nearly 6,000 tons in displacement.
    Beyond that, Graf Zeppelin was far to the northwest, well over the horizon. There was simply no way the
British could have reached it with such a weapon from their present positions… unless…
unless the ships to his south were not the only enemy units now vectoring in on
the scene of the battle. Nelson and Rodney had been at sea for
some time, but he heard nothing from Wilhelmshaven as to their current
position. Suppose they continued west, following his own wake north of Iceland,
and were even now bearing down on the Denmark Strait from the north?
    His mind was in a whirlwind of
possibilities now, and the sound of the battle seemed like a storm of steel all
around him, the guns were elevating, firing, belching out their anger in
tremendous salvos that shook the entire ship. The sea was a churning lake of
fire, with tall geysers jetting up as the ships continued on a slowly
converging collision course, the range diminishing by the minute. He had to
think!
    Could that rocket have been fired
by a plane? Was it in fact a rocket weapon as reported, or might it have been a
bomb? Could it have been a torpedo from a submarine, or even a flying rocket
torpedo? He knew that Doenitz had toyed with that concept, a rocket that might
be fired from beneath the sea to cross a longer distance before falling back
into the ocean to approach its target as a torpedo. Naval Intelligence also
believed that Italians were trying to develop flying torpedoes that could be
dropped by parachute and then activated to circle and search for enemy ships.
The roar of Bismarck’s guns shook the ship again, rattling his attention
back to the moment with the jarring sound of battle.
    “Ship sighted! Bearing 220
degrees true!”
    Lindemann pivoted to search