Three Kings

Prior to this time the Royal Navy had sparred with the Italians at inconsequential engagements off Crete and Cape Spade andPassero, which had decided nothing in the balance of power in the Mediterranean. Now however, the enemy was sending out a well coordinated fleet. The Italians had the battleships Roma, Venetto and Littoro near Messina, sailing to join Andria Doria, Duilio and Conte Cavour from Taranto, with four heavy cruisers, six light cruisers and fourteen destroyers.

The Vichy French would contribute another powerful fleet led by the pride of their navy, the battleship Normandie, battlecruisers Strasbourg and Dunkerque, with two heavy and four light cruisers, and ten destroyers. And arriving from Gibraltar the Germans were sending the formidable Bismarck and Hindenburg, escorted by their light carrier Goeben and the new fast battlecruiser Kaiser, which the British did not even know about, mistaking it for a heavy cruiser in the Hipper class when it was first spotted. They now outnumbered the British 12 to 5 in capital ships, 6 to 3 in heavy cruisers, 10 to 5 in light cruisers and 24 to 12 in destroyers, almost a solid two to one advantage in every category… almost.

Those odds were about to round off almost perfectly as an ominous storm cloud began to form in the Aegean that day. It was a wholly unaccountable moment, yet strangely one that had been planned by Admiral John Tovey himself… in another life…

Admiral Volsky was glad to be at sea again, a maneuver that served two purposes. First, they would soon join the British fleet that had just sortied from Alexandria in the hunt for the Italian Navy. Second, he could launch his special services rescue mission more discretely at sea, far from the many eyes who might see the KA-40 rise from the aft helo deck. The missile fire was one thing, yet it merely confirmed rumors that the Russians had been able to develop advanced rocketry on this prototype vessel. The sight of KA-40 naval helicopter might start another new rumor chain, and he wanted to keep evidence of the ship’s capabilities quiet for as long as possible.

Once aloft Fedorov was going to move discretely out in front of the British fleet and do a quick long range radar scan to test the Oko panel installation while searching for the Italian fleet. Then the helo would swing south overMersaMatruh and make the journey south to begin the search for General O’Connor’s downed Blenheim. They had a fairly good idea where he might be, but the desert was a very big place.

It was to be a fateful mission, like so many other conceived in the fertile mind of Anton Fedorov. And in a strange echo of those earlier missions, another man would have a great deal to do with what happened that day.

Orlov stuck his nose around the hatch opening to the engineering section, looking to find Chief Dobrynin. He had something in his pocket he was still wondering about, and thought the Chief might be able to make some sense of it. He was greeted by the sound of system alerts and the rush of reactor engineers. Another man squeezed past him at the open hatch even as he stepped inside.

“Move, move, move!” he heard Dobrynin shouting inside the engineering section. “Norin-check those water feed levels. Osiniov — get on the reactor flux monitor. Tell me the instant you get any reading beyond yellow.”

Orlov stepped inside, aware that something was amiss, and soon seeing he would not be able to get the Reactor Chief’s attention. Yet he was ship’s Chief Operations Officer, so he stuck his thumb in the pie in any case.

“What’s going on here? Some kind of problem, Dobrynin?”

“Not now, Chief. Can’t you see that we have a flux event underway?”

Orlov looked at the monitors, but they made no sense to him at all, just as the radar and sonar stations made no sense to him on the bridge when he was lingering there. He shook his head. “Flux event? Someone had a bad egg for breakfast?” Even as he said that he was fingering the strange metallic egg he had in his pocket, the Devil’s Teardrop, as Troyak might call it.

Dobrynin was too busy to answer him, adjusting dials, looking at readings on the monitors, tapping a young engineer on the shoulder and pointing to a digital display. “Let me know the instant you see anything above thirty three on that monitor. Watch that thermal neutron flux very closely. See it rising? That had better settle down soon or we’ll have to insert another control rod.”

Orlov didn’t know it at the time, but if Dobrynin was forced to use one of his emergency control rods, the ship and crew might have other problems no one had counted on then. Both rods were the two new controls that had been shipped in, each from the same batch and field that spawned Rod-25. If he had to insert one now…