B00DSDUWIQ EBOK (33 page)

They
were not going to negotiate. His fantasy of sitting at the table with MacArthur
and Nimitz and Halsey was now an insubstantial folly. These were men of war, and
their answer to his challenge had been to turn the full might of their navy to
engage him. Volsky was correct, at least on one point. Why would they negotiate
after the casualties they will sustain in this engagement?

He
shook his head inwardly, realizing that, for all their power, his flotilla was still
a small player on the board, a dangerous renegade knight, but one that could
not force a checkmate on its own. He had two choices now. One was to return
home to Vladivostok, and hope it could shelter him from the wrath of the allied
navies. The Soviets had nothing to speak of for a Pacific Fleet at this time,
he realized, but they had strong land forces. If the Americans wanted to get
pushy they would have to try to put ground troops on Soviet soil.

Then
his mind ran down a long corridor of thought, recalling the folded bureaucracy that
had greeted them in Vladivostok of 2021. Volsky won’t be there. It will be Stalin’s
Russia, and if I thought Inspector General Kapustin and his lap dog Volkov were
a nuisance, Stalin’s NKVD will be many times worse. Sail for home at your own
peril. You will end up having to flee from the Golden Horn harbor yet again,
this time a pariah to your own country, and not the proud warrior who led the
fleet out in 2021.

Yet
what else could they do? Rodenko has advised him to get some breathing room and
run out into the Pacific. Perhaps he could find a way to talk sense into the Americans
later. Now he felt what Lucifer must have felt after his challenge failed at
the gates of heaven. He would be an outcast if they ran east, wandering the
seas, forever hunted, pursued the world over. It all seemed so simple hours and
days ago, with the American fleets set to gather at Tokyo Bay. He thought he
could make that one decisive intervention and change everything, but now he
realized that this world would not submit to his will without a fight. It was
not so simple any longer.

“Mister
Rodenko, we will have to select a point in the enemy line and blow a hole. Then
we’ll make our best speed and punch through.”

“KA-226
can feed us the data now, sir, and the Fregat will have line of sight contact any
minute.”

“Good.
Signal
Admiral Golovko
. Tell Captain Ryakhin he is to prepare a salvo of
six missiles, two sets of three, and I want him to engage with the first set on
this ship here.” He pointed to the tactical board. “Can you feed him the location
data?”

“Yes,
sir. Nikolin has been reading ship to ship chatter. That is a heavy cruiser.”

Karpov
had fingered the
St Paul
.

Chapter 33

She
was everything a good heavy cruiser should
be, fast, reasonably well protected and with decent punch in her nine 8 inch
guns. The lavish addition of twelve 5 inch guns, forty-eight 40mm Bofors and
twenty-four 20mm Oerlikon cannons gave her considerable air defense capability
for her role in screening the fast carrier task forces that won the war in the
Pacific. Seventeen ships were built in her class, but only seven saw service in
the war.
St Paul
was one of them, slipping into the action in those
final days when Halsey’s carriers made their last raids on Honshu and Hokkaido.
The ship also got in close and bombarded industrial targets on the Japanese
mainland on two occasions, and had the distinction of firing the final salvo in
this role from any capital ship in the war.

The
enemy never laid a finger on her throughout this brief action, but
St. Paul’s
fate was about to change. Something was coming at her that all her lavish
anti-aircraft guns could not forestall. There was nothing but scrambled eggs on
the radars that day, and the lookouts barely saw the missiles coming.
Admiral
Golovko
had fired three
Oniks/Yakhont
sea skimmers on Karpov’s order,
and they came in at Mach 2.6, striking the ship at ten second intervals with
three hard punches that set her ablaze from stern to bow. And like so many foes
Karpov had engaged, the ship and crew never saw the enemy that had crippled her
in one swift blow.

Halsey
got the word just as he was consulting with staff on the battle bridge of the
Missouri
to lock in their best location for the enemy based on information relayed by the
radar pickets.
Iowa
, some ten kilometers on his starboard side, had already
turned on a new heading to intercept, and he was bringing Mighty Mo around
fifteen points to starboard, churning up the seas at 30 knots.

“Where
in hell did the Russians get these damn rocket weapons?” The ship’s Captain, Stuart
S. Murray was still trying to get his mind around the situation. “You would
think we might have known something about it.”

“Apparently
we did,” said Halsey. “Or at least the British did. That mushroom cloud we saw this
morning was the same thing they used to sink
Mississippi
in TF-16, and that
was before we were even in the war. Admiral Fraser says the Brits slugged it
out with these Russians more than once—a renegade ship from all we can deduce
now. There was only one before. Now we have three according to the picket
reports. They think there’s at least three enemy ships out there now. No one
knows where they came from or what they’re about. Even the Soviet government
claims they have no knowledge of these ships, but yet there they are, demons at
sea, and they just hit
St. Paul
hard. She never got off a single round.”

Admiral
Fraser’s words returned to haunt him now, biting harder with the news coming in
about
St. Paul
…
“The fact is, Admiral, this is no ordinary ship. As I
said earlier, it’s fast, it has advanced weaponry—naval rocketry in fact—and it
can strike from a great distance, even beyond the range of those big sixteen
inch guns out there. It looks like a battleship if you ever lay eyes on the
damn thing, as I did one black night. There wasn’t a gun on it bigger than a QF
five incher, but it could pound a ship like Yamato to near scrap.”

“Well,
Sunshine,” Halsey said to the Captain, using his nickname to put the matter on more
personal terms. “We’re about to see just how good the
Iowa
class battlewagons
really are. I think the enemy is trying to break out into the Pacific. They can
see what we’re doing and they’re trying to punch a hole in our line right
there—right where they hit
St. Paul
. So I think that’s exactly where they
are heading, and we are too. The good news is that we’re now in a good position
to intercept. The bad news is that those rockets may be heading our way soon
when this Karpov realizes that. I want damage control and repair crews doubled
on both
Iowa
and
Missouri
. Lay out extra fire hoses. Take men
from any watch you need to fill out the ranks. If those charts we’ve just
plotted are accurate and the enemy is where we think he is, then we could be in
visual range within the hour.”

“Still
good light for a couple hours,” said Murray.

“We’ll
need it. Pass the word. The gunners can’t rely on radar. I’ve got lookouts up on
every weather deck and mast I could find—even up on the radar mounts themselves.
We’ll have to do this the old fashioned way. Somehow they’ve managed to black
out and foul up every radar set on the ship.”

“This
just doesn’t add up, Admiral. How could the Russians be so far ahead of us? They
couldn’t even produce the trucks they needed early in the war. How could they
build ships that can do this, and then have the gall to stand there and deny
any knowledge of them?”

“A
lot of guff,” said Halsey. “Well I plan to have a real close look at these
ships, personally. See that the
Missouri
is trimmed for action.”

“Aye,
aye, sir.” Murray was only too happy to comply, then he looked over his shoulder.”
Suppose they throw another big one our way, Bull. Then what?”

Halsey’s
eyes were dark fire beneath those bristling grey brows. He gave the Captain a long
look. “We’ll coordinate our attack with the air wing,” he said. “Bastards tried
to sucker punch us there too, but we’ve got most everyone up now and they’re
heading our way.
Cowpens
got hit, but the fleet carriers came through
alright. Plenty of deck space there for further operations, though I’m ordering
the flattops to move further south.”

 Murray
noted that Halsey had not answered his question, but said nothing more.

* * *

A
thousand
miles away other men
were working to answer that question. North Field on the Island of Tinian was a
very busy place that day. The big silver B-29s of the Twentieth Air Force were
being rolled out of their hard stands and rigged for battle. The Americans had
taken the strategic island a little over a year ago, in July of 1944, and it
meant the big superfortress bombers now had a place to roost in range of the
Japanese homeland. North Field was originally Ushi Point, a Japanese runway for
recon planes until 1500 Seabees showed up and expanded the operation in a vast
quilt of new runways, tarmacs, and hard stations to house the planes.

To
do the work they moved thousands of tons of coral and earth to complete what soon
became the largest airfield in the world at that time, occupying the entire
northern end of the island as if it had been branded into the ground there. It
was now home to 265 B-29 bombers, which busied themselves in pounding Iwo Jima,
Okinawa and then blackening the major cities of Japan in the last months of the
war. The bombers were all set to continue with Operation Olympic, the planned
invasion of Japan, but the Emperor came to his senses and capitulated just days
ago.

But
it wasn’t over. Word was that Halsey was still fighting out there, though few knew
the details of what was happening. All they knew was what they were told. Tonight
all leave was cancelled, and every man was to be in their quarters. Units in
and around Runway A on the big airfield were rounded up and literally locked in
Quonset huts, watched over by MPs and dour faced Master Chiefs. Something was
up.

“What
gives JS? What do you make of this? Why they have us all locked up in here?” A couple
of Seabees were chewing the fat over the incident, wishing they would be out in
time for chow and hoping there was something special on the menu to celebrate
the war’s end. Something was on the menu, alright, but no one seemed to know
what was going on. It had been a long time since any of them had seen any sign
of the Japanese.

The
last JS had seen of them was during an air raid seven months ago. They had three
big towers set up, positioned at intervals from one side of the island to another.
He was out on the airfield finishing up some grading operations when the sirens
sounded, one tower warning another and passing the alert all across the island.
Then he saw them, a couple Jap
Zeros
tipping their wings in the sun and
diving in for a strafing run. He had never dug a hole so fast in his life, bare
hands scraping at the rough hard packed earth he had just smoothed out with
grey coral the last hour, trying to find some way to get low.

The
Zero
flashed right down the field, its machine guns rattling as it came,
and JS saw the lines of shells chew into the earthen runway bed. They went right
by him, to either side, a couple rounds within just a foot of his position.
Then the planes were gone, and the blue fighters were after them. It was the
last surprise raid the Japanese ever got away with on that island, and JS was
proud of telling all his kids that story after the war, all nine of them. Yes,
Johnny got busy after he came home from the war, and he told his pups that they
all had come within a foot or two of not being born if that Jap pilot had aimed
just a little better.

“You
know as much as I do,” he said. “But if you want my money I’ll say it has to do
with those new planes that came in for the 509th.”

Something
more than fresh food was on the menu that day. JS had it right. A couple very special
planes from the 509th Composite Air Group had been rolled out, and then moved
to a secret hanger. A couple days ago one was renamed the
Enola Gay
. He
had a look at it one morning and, the first thing he noticed was that there were
no gun turrets, and the bomb bays looked all wrong, but otherwise it looked
much like all the other planes in the 6th Bombardment Group, with that big
Circled R on the tail. All last month they had been loading big fat “pumpkin
bombs” into the plane for runs over Japan. He had no idea that they were
ballistically identical to another bomb, and that the
Enola Gay
was preparing
for a very special mission.

They
renamed the plane the other day, which was another tip-off that something was up.
JS had seen Alan Karl doing the new paint job, though it ticked off commander Robert
Lewis to no end when he laid eyes on it. You don’t go messing with the nose art
on someone’s plane! JS was Navy, a Seabee, but even he knew that much.

There
was a special bomb loading pit that the Seabees had to build for the 509th. No one
knew why, but no one cared either. They just got the job done and went about
business as usual.

Johnny
knew nothing more about it, but he would soon find out. That night the whole base
was going to come alive like a swarm of bees, just as if it was another war
day, with a big mission to fly. A couple hundred B-29s would take to the air
and head north. One of them would be that very special plane, surrounded by so
many similar targets that it would be a real crap shoot to get lucky and hit that
plane. Odds were that
Enola Gay
would get through to the target and deliver
her bomb…A very special bomb.

This
was how they planned it.

* * *

BB-61
,
Iowa
was now point man in the looming
battle, her sleek prow cutting through the sea as she sped northeast. Captain
Charles Wellborn had the scent and was hot for battle. The enemy had hit the
cruiser
St. Paul
to his north, and though dead in the water, they had
been able to report “three ships sighted, SSW our position, estimate speed
thirty.”
Iowa
was just as fast, and on a good angle to intercept now.
There was going to be a battle within the hour.

“The
Big Stick” was ready—all nine of them, 50 caliber 16 inch guns among the best in
the world. First of her class, Secretary of the navy Frank Knox called the
Iowa
“the greatest ship ever launched by the American nation.” That was true until
Missouri
,
Wisconsin
and
New Jersey
were launched as well, but as senior ship
in the class,
Iowa
enjoyed a special status.

Iowa
had stood a watch in the Atlantic, daring the
German battleship
Tirpitz
to make a showing that never came. Then she
was moved to the Pacific to run with men like Spruance, Halsey and Lee. In all
that time the only damage she sustained were a pair of hits from Japanese shore
batteries that she easily shrugged off. One seaman had a small cut on his face,
but no other man aboard was injured.

The
crew had been elated with the news of Japan’s defeat, and they celebrated with a
big feast the day Halsey made the announcement. 2500 mouths to feed took some doing,
but on that day the kitchens aboard
Iowa
served up 240 gallons of cream
of tomato soup, 240 pounds of saltine crackers, 2,849 pounds of roast Young Tom
Turkey, 18 pounds of cranberry sauce, 6 pounds of sage dressing, 1,500 pounds
of whipped mashed potatoes, 480 pounds of buttered peas, 4,500 hot Parker House
Rolls, 20 gallons of ripe olives, 20 gallons of sweet pickles, 1,200 pounds of
sweet cherries served up in the pies, and then a special treat: 2,800 packs of
cigarettes along with 2,800 packs of candy. Ice cream followed—200 gallons of
it, and to wash it all down the ship served up 640 gallons of lemonade. They
were going into battle well fed and content, with a confidence born of long
months at sea and a feeling of invincibility.