“Just translate!” This time Fedorov put some iron in his tone, and Popski shrugged.
“Tell him there is no further missile threat. Tell him I guarantee this absolutely.”
“You guarantee it?” Kinlan smiled. “Just who are you now, the Commander of the Russian Strategic Missile Troops? The Devil’s Apprentice, are you?”
Popski translated that, though he had absolutely no idea what it meant. The primary Russian ICBM was still the deadly RS-20B ballistic missile, called “Satan” by Western analysts. Their commander was known as the Devil’s Apprentice in intelligence circles, but Fedorov smiled.
“No sir, I am not that man. I am Anton Fedorov, Captain of the First Rank, battlecruiser Kirov, and I ask you to do one thing now. Send the closest vehicle you have to Sultan Apache. You will find the entire sector completely undamaged.”
“That’s because we got your damn missile,” said Kinlan quickly. “Battlecruiser Kirov? You mean that Russian ship that went missing out of Severomorsk last July and then turned up in the Pacific? We thought you tangled with the wrong people and went down off the coast of Japan some weeks ago.”
“No sir, the ship is sound, seaworthy, and at sea in the Mediterranean, as the presence of that KA-40 there testifies. We lifted off with my Marine contingent from the fantail of that battlecruiser.”
“Just as I thought,” Kinlan smiled. “Yet I find it hard to believe your ship made it into the Med. How would you get there? Our side would have seen any move like that easily enough.”
Popski could see that these two men seemed to share a common understanding of what they were talking about, but it was as if they were speaking an entire different language, so he just translated as well as he could.
“I will ask you to humor me, then,” said Fedorov, “because here I stand, and I am, indeed, the Captain of that ship. Now… will you send a reconnaissance to Sultan Apache?”
“What for?” Kinlan folded his arms, head cocked sideways, his battle helmet shading his eyes.
“Because I can tell you exactly what you will find there,” said Fedorov. “Nothing. There will be no perimeter wire. No guard towers, no roads, no buildings, facilities, oil drilling equipment-nothing. There will be nothing there but unblemished desert, and it will not be because anything was destroyed by another missile. You would have seen that, even through this storm. Do this, and you will have your hand on the beginning of an answer that will sort this whole mess out. Trust me, General, officer to officer, man to man, in spite of what has happened these last nine days. You’ll find nothing back there but blowing sand and desert scrub. Sultan Apache is gone, and once your people confirm this, I will tell you why.”
“Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
The fleet was a full day out of Alexandria, now steaming about 200 kilometers west of Crete. They could make only 20 knots at best, which was just under the full speed of the older Queen Elizabeth class battleships, and that stately warrior was in the lead position of the main column, followed by Warspite and Malaya. Invincible was 2000 yards off the port side, with the heavy cruisers in attendance, and Kirov bringing up the rear as an escort to the two British carriers.
A flight of Fulmar fighters was up providing top cover, though Admiral Volsky had told Tovey he could adequately defend the airspace over the fleet. “Use your fighters to defend any strike aircraft you may have,” he said. “If they get mixed up in a dogfight over the fleet, our missiles could find them in that confusion.”
So it was decided that, on spotting the enemy fleet, the two carriers would launch the 18 Swordfish as a fleet strike asset, protected by the bulk of their fighters. Kirov would provide early warning with her long range radars effective out to 300 kilometers, and Lieutenant Yazov was on radar that day watching his screen for any sign of enemy activity. He was suddenly surprised by a warning light on a subsystem that identified known incoming radar signatures, yet he thought it certainly had to be a false signal. His reflex was to tap the screen, as if this simple gesture would cure the problem, but it persisted, so he reported.
“Radar signature?” said Rodenko, who had the con. “On the IFF module?”
“Yes sir,” said Yazov sheepishly. “It is reading for a Marine Navigation radar on the I-Band, and NATO encoded E and F band as well. But look sir, I’m getting IFF identification now.”
