Several destroyers posted well out in the van were already firing, but the effort was futile. They could simply not sight on a weapon moving at Mach 3, or have any chance of hitting it. Their only hope was to throw up such a wall of flak that the missile might run into something, but with only this one target, the threat did not seem to warrant such action. Thirty seconds later Admiral Laborde and Captain Martel saw the new British weapon.
As if the men off the Vautor were cursed, the missile locked on to the ship they had been transferred to after being fished out of the sea, the battlecruiser Strausbourg, cruising off the port side of the Normandie. The missile had been programmed for a popup and dive maneuver, or it might have blasted right into the forward face armor of the A turret. Instead it struck the base of the conning tower, but found a sturdy structure there, with 270mm armor, over 10.5 inches of steel that had been designed to stop a shell weighing many times the 200kg warhead on the missile. The resulting blast and fire were considerable, but the missile did not penetrate that armor. That said, the fire from the fuel and the shock of the kinetic impact were a severe blow to the ship, and on the bridge of Strausbourg, the crew were picking themselves up off the deck and seeing the thick pall of acrid smoke blinding their view forward.
The deadly duel of missile versus armor had begun.
It was a battle that Kirov had learned to fight in the crucible of war, the ship’s missiles matched against some of the toughest and most powerful battleships ever built. The Russians had already dueled with ships like King George V, Rodney and Nelson, fought the best battleships of Italy and then slugged it out with the Japanese Behemoth Yamato — all in previous worlds that had now spun into the ether with this latest revision of the history when the ship appeared in 1940. And Karpov had also faced down the American Navy in two eras, with a massive battle in 2021 against CVBG Washington, before displacing to 1945 to confront Halsey, Ziggy Sprague and the most powerful fleet the world has ever seen. There he dueled with the intrepid battleship Iowa, taking the most extreme measures in the struggle to prevail.
In all of this combat, the officers and crew of Kirov had learned hard lessons on the application and limits of their power. They had retuned their ECM jammers to frustrate the enemy radar and communications of this era, and reprogrammed their missiles to rise and strike the superstructures of the ships they targeted, thus avoiding the thick, heavy belt armor of the battleships. For some they had altered the angle of the missile attack to hit from above, to plunge through the thinner deck armor and into the heart of the enemy ship.
All these measures and tactics had made Kirov invincible on the sea, the shock and power of those supersonic SSMs stunning the unsuspecting Admirals and Captains of the 1940s, the searing heat and fire of nuclear warheads becoming the ultimate hammer the ship could wield. In these many duels, Kirov found that the one weapon the enemy had in abundance, and one that posed the greatest threat to the ship’s survival, was air power. It was the dogged, if suicidal attack of Admiral Hara’s carrier pilots that scored the first telling blow against the Russian ship, when Lieutenant Hayashi came screaming down to fly his plane into the aft reserve citadel command bridge of the ship, braving a missile defense that had sent so many of his comrades to their deaths.
And it was the massed air power of Halsey’s fast carriers that rose to challenge Karpov, even with two other modern ships at his side. The sheer number of aircraft the American Pacific Fleet could put into the sky was like a great wave that threatened to swamp the ship, depleting its missile inventories and leaving it open to destruction from above, as so many other great ships had died.
Thus far, Kirov had avoided serious harm. Yet the ship was wounded, by the shrapnel of enemy shells, near miss torpedo explosions, and the raging attacks of enemy planes. It had survived all these battles through the skill of its officers, the sheer power of its weaponry, and at times pure luck. The U-boat Kapitan Rosenbaum had caught the ship by surprise where he lurked in Fornells Bay off Menorca, and the torpedo he fired came within inches of striking a devastating blow to Kirov’s hull. Even in 1908, the dogged attacks made by Admiral Togo’s fleet had managed to put damage on the ship, and the mine struck there had forever destroyed Kirov’s forward ‘Horsejaw’ sonar dome.
