B00DSDUWIQ EBOK (24 page)

“What
the hell is this guy talking about?” Halsey said aloud, clearly annoyed. “A bit
long winded, isn’t he? Well let me make it clearer.” Halsey thumbed the radio send
and spoke again.

“You
will heave to and be boarded or I will sink you. Over.”

“You
may try to do so, Admiral, but I will give you fair warning here. We have weapons
unlike any you have ever seen. I am capable of destroying your entire fleet.
Understood? Please do not force me to take actions that you and the men you
command will dearly regret. I will offer to negotiate with you in person, or
with fleet officers of command level rank, to resolve the situation without bloodshed,
but if attacked I will defend my fleet and destroy yours in the process, and
that is not a bluff or brag.”

Halsey
shook his head. “Now you listen here, you son-of-a-bitch.” His cheeks betrayed his
obvious anger. “You’ll meet with me on a cold day in hell. You will do exactly
as I ordered in my first transmission, and that immediately. Signal your
surrender now and this will end amicably. Otherwise you can go to hell, and
I’ll be happy to send you there myself, personally.”

“You
are making a mistake, Admiral Halsey. Very well, before things get out of hand I
invite you to look to your starboard bow in ten minutes time. Karpov out.”

“Look
to my starboard bow? What’s this idiot talking about?”

Halsey
handed the microphone to the nearest radio man. “Issue the following fleet order
and have it sent through flag and lantern as well. Don’t use the 24 MC circuit,
just send it in the goddamned clear! Attention all ships, all carriers…” He
looked out the porthole noting a pendant flying stiffly in the breeze to
determine the wind direction.

“The
fleet will come to three, four, zero degrees north and ready for battle. All carrier
commanders…Let’s get turned into the wind.”

He
turned and stormed out, heading for the bridge.

Chapter 24

They
saw something on the Sugar Charlie (SC-2)
Radar on the
Missouri
, but the pip was moving so fast on the screen that
the radar attendant thought it was a glitch. It was there, then gone, but it
was off the starboard bow of the ship, and so anything seen was reported.

“Flag;
Sugar Charley One. Reporting bogie, north by northwest, bearing true, single plane,
pip wavering.”

The
officer of the deck took the handset to acknowledge.

“Sugar
Charley One; Flag. Single bogie aye, aye. Watchstander G1, confirm sighting. Over.”
The OOD wanted eyes on the contact to both confirm and identify it if possible,
and he was not disappointed.

“Flag;
Watchstander G1. Bogie in sight, bearing zero-one-two, range twenty, incredible
speed! Designate bogie one.”

“Watchstander
G1; Flag; bogie one bearing zero-one-two, range twenty and very fast, aye, aye.”

Halsey
was listening closely, arms folded, eyes scanning the horizon to the northwest.
Something was out there, and he reached for a pair of binoculars to have a closer
look when the sky was suddenly lit up like an exploding sun. The flash was so
bright that Halsey was fortunate he wasn’t focusing on the bogie with
binoculars yet, and had his back to the view port, or he would have been
blinded. As it was, every man on the bridge shirked and instinctively shielded
their eyes. Seconds later there came a strong vibration and the entire ship
shuddered as a hard wind struck it from the north. Then they heard it, the
awful ripping explosion and deep angry thunder that followed.

As
the brightness faded Halsey squinted off his starboard bow to see an enormous explosion
mushrooming up to the northwest. It looked as though the sea itself was on
fire, and being sucked up into the sky as the mushroom towered up and up,
billowing out at the top in a roiling yellow orange fireball.

“Brace
for high seas!” a voice shouted, and then he saw the water coming at the fleet in
a great wave, perhaps eighty feet high. Amazed at the sight, he saw a distant
destroyer in the outer screen lifted by the wave and tossed about like a toy.
As it rolled on through the formation all he could think of was that terrible
hurricane they had faced a few months ago, but soon he saw the bigger and
heavier ships were riding out the heavy swell intact, and he could feel the ocean
lift
Missouri
, see her bow find air in the wild sea spray as the big
battleship crested the wave, and then Mighty Mo settled back into the water,
rolling slightly but sea keeping well.

Look
to your starboard bow in ten minutes time…
Halsey saw the evil white halo above the explosion in the sky, as
though a demon from hell had been crowned with white fire. He had told the
Russians to go to hell, and now they had served up a slice of the real estate
for him to survey at his leisure. It was the most awesome thing he had ever
seen.

He
had heard the rumors from the 1941 incident in the North Atlantic—that the Germans
possessed a terrible weapon based on atomic power. He didn’t understand it.
Splitting something like an atom seemed an impossible thing to do, but he had
been briefed in recent months on the existence and deployment of similar weapons
now in the US arsenal, and they were very close at hand.

Halsey
turned to Captain Stuart S. Murray, an old misplaced submariner who had been serving
at the Annapolis Naval Academy since 1943 and was taken out of mothballs to be
given a prime command on the battleship in May of that year.

“What
in God’s name do you make of that?” The searing light was finally dim enough to
be viewed without discomfort, but the big, amiable Captain, dubbed “Sunshine” by
his peers, seemed dumbfounded.

“Get
a message off to Admiral Nimitz,” said Halsey. “Tell him we have just witnessed
what appears to be a large explosion—belay that—tell him the Russians have the goddamned
bomb, and they’ve just detonated one after warning me to look out for it ten
minutes ago. That ought to make his day, because it sure as hell just spoiled mine.”

* * *

When
the news reached Admiral Fraser he was with
Chester Nimitz on Guam, preparing to board a plane to rejoin his Task Force 37
in the Sea of Japan. Now he was certain of what would happen if the Americans
attacked. He had not been present in the North Atlantic when that first bomb
went off, but Admiral of the Fleet, John Tovey had seen it with his own eyes along
with his Chief of Staff, Daddy Brind. He remembered all too well what Brind had
told him about it.

“Vast
and threatening,” he called it. “Threatening in a way that you simply cannot describe—and
that was well after the detonation by the time we got within sight of it. I
would hate to see one actually go off. Seeing one in a lifetime was more than
enough.”

In
1942 when Fraser had advanced to second in command of Home Fleet, Admiral Tovey
took him into his confidence on a very delicate matter after the incident in the
Mediterranean, one concerning the true nature of the ship
Rodney
and
Nelson
had tangled with, and what had really happened after Gibraltar, a story that
few men alive had ever heard. Fraser was now one of an elite inner circle known
simply as “The Watch” and his code signal was Watchstander G3, number three in
the overall chain of command within the group that stretched back to Tovey.
Ahead of him in those shadowed ranks were only two men: Admiral Tovey himself
and the eccentric but brilliant Alan Turing. He was amazed that Turing would be
privy to matters where Churchill was not informed, but Tovey convinced him that
bringing the Prime Minister in, and the government, would be no easy task.

Ever
since the
Geronimo
raider had disappeared off the Island of St. Helena, the
Watch had come to believe it reappeared in the Pacific soon after, a matter of
days in fact, and that was a clear impossibility that had led to the startling
conclusion that the ship was not from their time. Beyond that, its weapons were
simply too advanced. The Watch had been set on every active sea lane of the
world to look out for this ship, and now it had returned, two years later in
1945, back with the bomb.

Where
was it going in those intervening years? How did it manage to evade detection? These
were questions the Watchstanders had toiled with for long years. Turing was of
the opinion that the ship was continually moving in time, perhaps marooned,
perhaps under deliberate control. Either way, its continued reappearance was
deeply troubling and Fraser had just had a long conversation with Admiral
Nimitz about it. Try as he might, he could not persuade the Americans to belay
the planned attack being assembled at that very moment by Admiral Halsey.

“The
ship is dangerous,” he had argued. “It is unlike any warship afloat, with weapons
that can do grave harm in an instant. You could be sacrificing a good part of
your Pacific Fleet if your lock horns with this ship and it decides to use the
same weaponry it just demonstrated. I strongly advise we parley with this
Russian Captain, just as our Admiral John Tovey did. We had four battleships at
risk and ready to engage, the core of the entire Home Fleet but—”

“But
what did it get you?” Nimitz said quietly. “They reneged on their pledge and slipped
away.”

“Yes,
but they went to fight the Japanese! Your invasion at Guadalcanal succeeded largely
because of their intervention. Yamamoto had another full carrier division
heading your way, and this ship stopped it single handedly—at least this is
what we have surmised after a couple years good intelligence work.”

“Hard
to believe,” said Nimitz. “But the Russians didn’t use anything like that weapon
on the Japanese. Hell, if they had the bomb back in 1941 , then why didn’t they
use it on the Germans?”

“We
don’t know…” Fraser could not reveal the whole truth, not even to Nimitz. “But
they didn’t need to. The ship beat the
Yamato
to a near hulk, and that
was with its conventional naval rocketry alone. You can’t beat this ship in anything
like a fair fight, Admiral. It will require overwhelming force, and my great
fear is that if we concentrate to attack, they will answer with what we just
saw—an atomic bomb, just as they did in the North Atlantic when we closed in
for the kill.

“So
now we’ll have to deal with it on our terms. You British were entirely too accommodating.
Is this thing Russian, Admiral? We’ve had the Russian Ambassador on the hot
seat for hours and he swears on his first born son that the Soviet government
knows nothing whatsoever about this ship.”

“He
may be telling the truth, Admiral. That was, in fact, what the commander of that
ship asserted when he met with Admiral Tovey.”

“Well
how in the world is that possible?” Nimitz sounded irritated now. “They design and
build the damn thing, and now you’re telling me they claim to know nothing about
it? Sorry, Admiral, but I just can’t buy that line. I think Uncle Joe is blowing
smoke in our face, and I put that lightly. I’ve also been advised that President
Truman has authorized us to respond in kind if the Russians do actually deploy
an atomic weapon in combat against us. We’re drawing a proverbial line in the
sand here. The feeling back in Washington is that the Russians have to be
reigned in, and quickly. Patton is itching to go after them in Europe right
now. They may have the bomb, but they can’t have very many.”

“But
don’t you see, Admiral. They’re trying to warn us off. They offered to negotiate.
Why not take them up on it? If you attack now they will escalate with more
atomic weapons. I’m sure of it.”

“Then
that’s exactly what they’ll get in return.”

“But
this is insane! How many bombs do you have?”

“That’s
not the question we need to ask now, Admiral Fraser. The question is how many do
they
have.”

“Well,
if they can expend one to make of demonstration like this what does that tell you?
Our intelligence believes they may have many of these weapons, and that creates
a whole new calculus here. It isn’t simply a matter of ships and planes,
Admiral, though if you do attack this ship be prepared to lose very many of
both in that effort.”

Nimitz
took a deep breath. “Admiral Fraser. We just won the Second World War. Now the Russians
seem intent on starting another one. So be it. We have the force to win this
one too, and atomic weapons in theater if they escalate. I will tell you now
that I have been authorized to use them.”

The
silence between the two men was thick now. What more could Fraser say? Revealing
the true nature of this ship would seem incredulous. Negotiation bought time
for the Watch to get more valuable information. Where exactly did the ship come
from? Why was it here? What did its officers and crew really want?

But
to Nimitz this was just a ship—one of hundreds that had gone to the bottom of the
sea in the last four years. It was just a ship with the bomb, and that was all
the more believable now because he had planes with the bomb, out there in the
Pacific somewhere on one of those tiny islands. One last attack would settle
the matter, or so the American point of view was evident now.

The
Yanks had been the senior service from the moment they first entered the war on
Britain’s side. They were like a well muscled work-horse in the beginning, and one
that needed to be broken to the plow harness if they were ever going to get the
job done. Thankfully the more seasoned and experience British officers had been
there in the beginning. In time, however, the dash and fighting ability of Men
like Patton, the dogged perseverance of Omar Bradley, Hodges and so many others,
had made all the difference in the war. England could not have prevailed
without the United States at her side. Montgomery could not have won without
Patton and the others.

“Well
then…” Fraser cleared his throat. “Where do you want me with Task Force 37?” He
folded his arms, resigned.

“Swing
up north of Hokkaido, Admiral Fraser, and cut the bastards off from Vladivostok.
Make sure nothing comes out to reinforce this Captain Karpov. We’ll handle the
rest.”

“Very
well. Admiral Nimitz, you know me to be a well seasoned officer of the line. If
you won’t take my advice on not picking this fight, then allow me to suggest how
you might win it. The Royal Navy has faced down this ship twice before, and here
is how you must deploy…”

* * *

Fraser’s
primer was well reasoned, and Nimitz listened
intently. All carriers should move to the rear in a widely dispersed formation.
Aircraft must launch and assemble only to begin the operation. Thereafter they
must disperse and come in from all compass headings on the target, and at
layered altitudes. Sub flights were to break formation and scatter to make
individual attacks the instant they were fired upon by aerial rocketry. It
would be every man to himself from that point on. Coordinated air strikes were
useless, but if the fleet air arm could keep consistent and constant pressure
on the enemy, it was hoped some planes would penetrate the fearsome
anti-aircraft defense and score hits.