Opening Moves (The Red Gambit Series) (59 page)

Kalinin nodded to himself, devoid of any emotion even though he had probably just killed hundreds of unsuspecting sailors.

Messages of alarm flashed out from the escorting destroyers and HMS Dido as torpedoes struck home. There were actually seven destructive hits, which given the normal accuracy of Soviet torpedoes, or more importantly their inability to explode, was an unbelievable return as far as Kalinin was concerned. He did not realise that ShCh-303 had also joined the fight.

Above the water, all was blood, fire, and chaos.

HMS Devonshire was gone.

Three of Kalinin’s torpedoes had struck her starboard side but by the fickle fortunes of war it was one of those fired by K-56 which blew her up, striking precisely where the first of Kalinin’s weapons had hit and already caused damage, penetrating deep inside the stricken vessel and instantly exploding her ‘B’ Turret magazine.

Seven hundred and eighty-one officers and men perished within seconds as the ship erupted and sank immediately.

HMS Dido was dying and already down in the water. She had taken two hits, one port, one starboard, diametrically opposite each other between ‘A’ and ‘B’ turrets and her bow was already misaligned, nearly removed by the power of the explosions. Trapped within her jammed distorted front turrets men died, incinerated by the gathering inferno.

Two other torpedoes had ripped into her port side vitals and the large engineering spaces were already flooding.

Elsewhere on the stricken ship, the casualties were mercifully light. Her Captain, smashed and dying, gave the dreaded order and her crew moved quickly to escape the rapidly sinking vessel. Only three more men of her complement perished, two who were killed when other escapers dropped onto them in the water below the rising stern and the Captain, who observed naval traditions and stayed with his charge all the way to the bottom of the Baltic.

A few miles away, Kalinin was solely interested in self-preservation as angry escorts commenced their search for the underwater killers. They did not come near the silent submarine but instead started to prosecute other contacts to Kalinin’s north and northeast. Their misfortune spelt continued existence for ShCh-307 and her frightened occupants.

Some twenty-three days beforehand, four recently arrived submarines of the Soviet Baltic Fleet had quietly slid from their moorings in GdaDsk and disappeared beneath the waves, carrying the offensive hopes of the Soviet Navy. The crews had benefited from a few weeks of intensive training in their strange new craft before being sent far away on their respective missions. The submarines also contained some German technical experts, who were less than happy to be press ganged into going on combat missions with the Soviet navy.

The crew worked hard to learn how to properly handle the sleek thoroughbreds they had so recently ‘inherited’, and the unhappy Germans quickly reasoned that their prospects of survival were decidedly dependent on the newly acquired skills of their Russian ‘colleagues’. They strove hard to ensure their soviet pupils were the best that they could be.

Each pair of submarines was accompanied by two surface ships, one a minesweeper, the other a destroyer, whose jobs were to exactly mirror the movements of the submarines to ensure little chance of detection, provide minesweeping capability and to overtly travel into the North Sea on their way to Goodwill visits in faraway places.

To the experienced eye, the minesweepers and destroyers were not of Soviet design but of American origin. The former were small Admirable class vessels, being the T-112, ex-USS Agent, and the T-116, ex-USS Arcade respectively. Both carried mines hidden below decks but only those who knew what to look for would have wondered about the new openings towards the stern of both vessels. The latter were both old American WW-I vintage flush-deckers, subsequently British ‘Town class’ destroyers, worn out in the service of the Royal Navy under the lend-lease scheme and then sent onto the Soviet Union for further use.

The first of these, Doblestnyj, in its previous service known as HMS Roxborough, had orders to visit France, making landfall at Cherbourg, and then to steam to Portugal to take the well-wishes of the Soviet People to the Iberian peninsula.

The second, Zguchij, formerly HMS Leamington, was tasked to make a brief stopover in Londonderry then sail on to New York.

These venerable vessels were employed on the expectation that they were so old, and that allied naval personnel would be so familiar with them that they would brook little attention or investigation, and that sightseers would feel uninspired by their appearance.

They were also expendable.

Both ‘Townies’ had been modified by the Soviets in line with an idea by the British Navy used on other ships, removing torpedo tubes, one boiler room, and two of the four smoke stacks in favour of cargo stowage. A sensible measure for England at a time when every piece of cargo landed kept the country alive and the U-Boats were more interested in sinking merchant vessels. Now the two destroyers carried the consumables of undersea warfare. Fuel oil, mines, battery sets, spare parts, engineering repair equipment and torpedoes, torpedoes, torpedoes.

The Allied Naval Authorities had been approached and accepted the proposed cordial visits between allies, even providing up to date information on possible drifting mine locations and promising a warm welcome.

The real Soviet plan was to clandestinely land the stores and personnel, establishing secret supply facilities to keep the submarines operational for as long as possible.

Doblestnyj to use the dark of night to stock a covert base in an inlet on the south side of Renonquet Island, near Alderney, safe from prying eyes on an uninhabited shore.

Zguchij, using contacts born and bred before the start of WW2, was to meet with supporters from the Irish Republican Army, and establish another site in a sheltered bay just north of the isolated village of Glenlara, Éire. The IRA would ensure the security of the site and keep snoopers at bay. The ship would then sail with T-116 to the Americas. Fuel for the submarines destined for American shores was less of a problem, with Soviet agents in place to provide support. However, a place to create a suitable clandestine supply site on the East Coast had not yet been established, and the agents in place searched on.

Doblestnyj, with T-112, would sail on south from the Channel islands, after doing her brief flag-waving duties in France. Both would leave some mines behind outside the French harbour and then sail to a bay north-west of Malpica on the north coast of Spain, clandestinely creating another site similar to Glenlara, this time set-up and policed by communists sympathisers, staunch veterans of the Spanish Civil War. Both vessels would then proceed to Portugal where it was expected they would be interned when the war started.

Zguchij carried the engineers and service personnel who would maintain the secret bases, roughly the same numbers as were aboard Doblestnyj, but she also carried extra submarine crew. The IRA were so sure that they could provide a secure site that the Soviet planning even allowed for crew rest and substitutions, so that time on shore was available to sailors in facilities created by the Irish dissidents, which was hoped would ensure more time at sea sinking allied tonnage.

Doblestnyj’s subtle difference in cargo was a small group of dangerous men who were to slip ashore near Malpica and make their way into the heart of Spain for a mission of extreme vengeance close to Beria’s heart.

T-112’s Captain, Senior Lieutenant Vladimirov, had further orders known only to himself, but he doubted he would be able to proceed with them, as Gibraltar was such a long way and the time margins were thin.

Submarines B-27 and B-30, preceded by their surface consorts, swept through the Danish narrows and out into the North Sea. Both were intent on heading north between England and Norway, schnorkelling all the way to their operational assignment off the east coast of America, independent of their surface friends once open deep water was under their keel. Each also carried eight men to be put ashore on the continent of America itself, each group of four agents tasked with their own secret and important contributions to the Soviet drive.

The other two, B-28 and B-29, followed a similar route six hours behind but journeyed around the British Isles to position themselves on the approaches to the French ports.

The expectation was for two more submarines to join them in the coming weeks, once they had been passed fit for service.

All six were former Type XXI U-Boats, the so-called ‘ElektroBootes’. The four now at sea had been handed over by the Western Allies under the Yalta Agreements and the latter two were amongst those found in the shipping construction yards during the liberation of Danzig, as GdaDsk had been known formerly, both vessels in an almost seaworthy condition. Even in March 1945, it seemed Germany could still produce quality weapons of war.

Each submarine could cruise underwater for days at a time, recharging its batteries via a schnorkel. They carried twenty-three torpedoes and housed up to sixty crewmembers. They were the very peak of submarine development, potentially mass ship killers with excellent survivability prospects and had the Germans put their keels and those of their sister ships in the water two years earlier, the impact of these sleek and efficient killing machines would have been immense and could have changed the course of the western war.

It was the Soviet navy’s hope that they would get the chance to show exactly what the XXI’s could do and interrupt the flow of men and supplies that would inevitably come from America when the attack came and the reinforcements sailed for Europe.

Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war.

William Shakespeare

0522 hrs Monday, 6th August 1945, Headquarters of Red Banner Forces of Soviet Europe, Schloss Schönefeld, Leipzig.

In the Schloss’ salon, which he had taken as his personal office, Marshall Georgi Zhukov, Commander of the Red Banner Forces of Soviet Europe, sat in quiet conversation with his Chief-of-Staff Colonel-General Mikhail Malinin. The planning was long over, the orders all sent, so the only real business they could attend to was to hurry up and wait, which was ever the lot of those who were sending men to their deaths.

Occasionally a messenger would knock and enter with some piece of information for his attention, but orders prohibiting anything other than routine communications traffic meant he was little disturbed. All the usual messages would continue to be sent through Soviet-occupied Europe so that all appeared normal but no increase in volume of traffic was acceptable. Nothing was to warn the Allies of the impending storm.

One ‘normal’ report to fall beneath their gaze had been that referring to the Planá crash of a Li-2 transport aircraft and the death of a Lieutenant Colonel Potakov. Both men knew he was assigned to Zilant-4 and the loss was severe indeed but both men were also comfortable that Makarenko’s presence would ensure the success of the mission. In any case, the Zilant missions were not a priority for them, having been thrust upon them by the hierarchy. The greater shame was that the new requirement had meant the loss of 100th Guards as a valuable airborne reserve force.

Zhukov did not have the luxury of tobacco to fall back on to steady his nervousness; neither did he wish for alcohol by way of substitute. Instead, his orderly kept Malinin and he supplied with a steady stream of coffee’s, served strong and sweet.

As the young woman poured yet another cup for each, there was a knock at the door. Both men looked at each other, for the sound held something more urgent and promising than those that had preceded it.

Their eyes were then drawn to the French Ormolu mantle clock whose insistent ticking both had found calming during hours of planning and discussion.