“Alright,” he said. “This will do. From the sound of that we just took a pretty bad hit. You men get aft and see what you can do. I’ll finish up here.”
When they had gone he returned to the work, banana clipping wires to the warhead detonators and running a connection to a nearby wall panel. He managed to patch in to the ship’s fire control system and reroute the signal cables for the number ten P-900 missile silo to the warhead he had here on the test bench. Only now the pulse of energy would not command a simple missile launch, but instead order the detonation of the warhead.
The sound of men running to try and fight the fires aft was loud and harassing as he worked, and it was tearing him up inside. They were out there fighting for the ship—fighting for their lives. Here he was quietly clipping a wire on the life lines of each man aboard, and ready to incinerate them all.
Yeremenko had known Yeltsin for over fifteen years, and served on two other ships with him. He knew the man to be a sober, no-nonsense officer, with sound judgment and a fair hand. The Captain knew what was going to happen here. It was simple math, and the Americans had overcome the ships formidable SAM defense by sheer weight of numbers. My God, he thought, they flew right through that mushroom cloud, right around it to get at us! What kind of men are these?
They were the men who had just fought and won a long four year war that had inflicted 36 million casualties in the Pacific region alone. They said they would be coming, and here they were, fighting, dying, yet determined to put their bombs and torpedoes on the targets they were assigned. Yeremenko knew the ship would not last another fifteen minutes.
He walked to the ship’s command interlink to call the Captain. “I am ready, sir,” he said. “I have everything routed to the number ten missile on the P-900 system. To do this I had to disable that silo and route the firing command signal here to the test bench. But if you activate missile number ten on your board and fire…” The silence on the line spoke volumes as he waited. Then he heard Yeltsin’s voice. Low, weary, as if the weight of every man’s life on the ship, and all their successive generations was now on his shoulders.
“Standby, Yeremenko.”
The Engineering Chief waited, the lights suddenly flickering. If they lost power….What then?
* * *
Ziggy Sprague was on the bridge of Old Wisky, the battleship Wisconsin, really one of the newest ships in the fleet. But the men called her “Old Wisky” and that was well enough. It was spelled that way too, without the letter “h”, and sometimes they would capitalize the K so the last two letters would stand for Kentucky. That was also a ship slated for the Iowa class, BB-66, though it was never completed. Years later, the Wisconsin was fated to collide with the destroyer escort USS Eaton on a foggy night off the Virginia coast. The big battlewagon almost took the entire bow off Eaton, and Wisconsin had a 100 foot section of the bow made for Kentucky fitted at the Norfolk Naval ship yard to repair her damage. After that the ship had even more reason to bear a nickname composed of the abbreviations of two states. How the sailors of WWII came up with the name, as if they had some strange intuitive knowledge of the ship’s fated collision in 1956, no one really knew. Some said it was because the ship had some parts that had been originally machined for the Kentucky when it first put to sea.
Call it what you will, it was a mean and angry ship at that moment when Ziggy Sprague spied the low, burning silhouette of what looked to be a light cruiser or destroyer on his horizon. They had been sailing full out at 33 knots to catch the Russians when word came in that the Iowa had engaged. Then they saw it, the massive mushroom rising from over the far edge of the sea. It wasn’t long before he learned what had happened. The Russians had the bomb! He was still; astounded to think that was the case, but they had fired one across Admiral Halsey’s bow as a warning shot that morning. Now, as the long day ended, a second sunset appeared on the horizon, and Iowa was gone in a hot minute.
My God, this weapon makes a whole new thing of war, he thought. No matter how big and tough we build them, if you could drop an atomic bomb on a ship it was history. Another man might have been chastened by the sight of that mushroom cloud, and inclined to steer clear of an enemy that could wield such a weapon, but not Ziggy Sprague.
“God-damnit, they hit Iowa with the bomb!” He said aloud, and most on the bridge had no idea what he was even talking about. They had heard rumors, whispers passed from one hammock to the next below decks. They knew they were building the bombs bigger, the ships faster, the guns and planes better every year. Now they had something really big, and it was going to change everything. The Russians had been lobbing some mean ordnance our way, they said, but we have something even bigger.
“Damn Russians think they can back us off, do they?” Sprague was mad as a hornet. “Well they’ve got another thing to learn then. I’m taking Wisky up there and I’m going to blow the living hell out of anything left after ‘Big T’ gets finished.”
He could see that the boys from Ticonderoga were over the enemy now, swarming like angry hornets. Years later American carrier strike planes would be named exactly that, the “Superbugs” that had gone after Karpov and the Red Banner Fleet in 2021, but Sprague would know nothing of that.
He gave the order to announce his arrival with a salvo from his A and B turrets up front. The roar of the big 16 inch guns gave him great satisfaction.
“Helm, come right ten degrees and ready on all main guns.”
Ziggy was going to get his broadside in one way or another. “Save something for me, Big T,” he said under his breath. “I want a piece of these bastards.”
He would get his wish that day.
Chapter 6
Yeltsin was on the bridge, where any Captain should be in battle, when the second bomb came in. He had been maneuvering the ship, the speed reduced to just 20 knots now with the damage aft affecting his propulsion shafts. The fire there had finally been contained, but the damage was extensive. The Bat Bomb had taken a huge bite out of the ship with its thousand pounds of explosive. He had no idea what had actually struck the first blow, but it was fitting that it would be a fledgling missile, a guided missile developed by the Americans in WWII. The Allies had seen the weapon modeled for them throughout many hard engagements with the mysterious raider Geronimo, and ideas for weapons soon became deadly reality in time of war. Orlan, with Russia’s latest missile technology from the year 2021 had been punishing the American air wings fiercely, now she was struck a hard blow from a radar guided glide bomb. Tit for tat.
The second bomb was a standard 500 pounder delivered by a lucky Helldiver that had survived the Russian missile gauntlet, and it did the one thing that would now seal the ship’s fate, smashing down on the deck very near the Kashtan CWIS system and blowing it to pieces. Orlan still had another 18 SAMs in her forward deck VLS tubes, but now there looked to be about 140 planes bearing down on her from all compass headings. The math was simple and blunt.
It was over.
The Russian ship’s surface radar had also just spotted another large contact on the horizon, a second battleship from the looks of its tall main mast and superstructure on the long range imaging system. Yeltsin saw the ship fire its forward guns, blasting out a challenge in spite of what had happened to its sister ship. Minutes later they heard the wail and whoosh of the rounds coming in, and saw six big water spouts where they fell off the starboard side of the ship.
“CIC,” he said resolutely. “Activate ship-to-ship missile system, P-900 missile number ten please.”
“The young officer may have thought it odd to be enabling just one missile under these circumstances. They had seen what Kirov had done to the first American battleship, then he realized what the Captain was ordering—it was the number ten missile! They were going to blow this ship to oblivion as well!
“Sir, Aye, Aye. Your number ten missile is keyed and ready.”
Yeltzin walked slowly over to the CIC station, hearing a watch stander call out yet another warning.
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“Conn—torpedo wakes off the port bow! Spread of three!”
The Captain saw the horizon light up and knew the enemy battleship had fired yet again. “Steady as you go,” he said calmly. He had reached the CIC and was inserting his firing key. The men watched his deliberate action, as though he had all the time in the world, one man looking out to see the torpedo wakes that had been reported with obvious fear on his face.
“Helm, come left ten degrees.” The Captain ordered an evasive turn, winking at the young Lieutenant, which gave the man heart. He had seen the Captain avoid three torpedoes in the last five minutes, and now he turned his attention to his equipment with renewed confidence.
No man should die in fear, thought Yeltsin.
The sound of incoming heavy rounds loomed in the tense air, drowning out the drone of the aircraft overhead. Too bad for them, he thought. They made it through our missile umbrella only to die here, just as their spirits were rising with the heat of their attack.
He caught the first column of seawater as the rounds came in, very near the ship in what he thought to be an amazing feat of naval gunnery. Then he flipped open the missile fire toggle and pushed his thumb down hard.
* * *
“Make your range 28,000 yards and fire when ready!” Sprague turned to the Bridge gunnery officer. “Let’s blow the fuck out of them!”
“Sir, aye, aye!” The claxon sounded a warning and then Wisconsin fired, her full broadside lighting up the gathering evening with bright orange fire that glowed on the swells of the sea, beating down the waves with their fierce concussion. He counted the seconds as the rounds streaked out, arcing up and up and then tipping over to begin the dreadful downward plunge. The Admiral was looking at his watch as the rounds began to fall. Now was the time.
The horizon erupted with white fire, a searing flash of light followed by a rippling crack that shook the ship with an intense vibration. Everyone on the bridge shirked with alarm. There came a sudden wind, awful in sound and effect, as if some great portal had opened, the gates of hell itself yawning at the edge of oblivion.
The evil orange glow illuminated surrounding clouds, slowly fading as the fireball expanded outward like a star going supernova. The evening sky was bathed in the light for miles in every direction, and the golden fire of the explosion glimmered on the rising seas like molten gold. Soon the light deepened to a tawny shade of ocher, reddening like the early crimson light of sunrise. Clouds evaporated, to a fine steam above the roiling fireball, crowning it with pale smooth inverted dishes of fog. The shock wave radiating out from the erupting column raked the sea to lathered foam as it spread out in a perfect circle about the base, where a raging vortex of fire seemed to suck the ocean up into the reddening fist of fire above. High up, in the windswept heights above, ice clouds formed in a pristine nimbus that fell like gossamer veils to envelop the fireball in a shroud of mist. The great incandescent dome threw off a cascade of fire falls, which billowed down into the boiling ocean, causing it to hiss as the water fled to steam.
“Holy mother of God…” Ziggy Sprague was reaching for his field glasses, the intense light abated enough for him to see the broiling fireball churning up at the top of a seething column of seawater. He had seen ships go up before, but never like this!
“Looks like we hit the sons-of-bitches!” It was Captain John Wesley Roper, skipper of the Wisconsin, grinning from ear to ear.
“It does indeed,” said Sprague. “That looks like something a whole lot bigger than what we were firing.”
“We may have hit their magazines, Admiral. When Yamato went up she sent up a column of smoke and steam like that over three miles high.”
Sprague gave the Captain a look of agreement. “Well then,” he sighed. “I suppose that settles the matter. Radio Admiral Halsey. Tell him Old Wisky has evened the score. Tell him we just blew the Russians into the ninth level of hell.”
“With pleasure, sir.” Roper saluted, heading for the radio room with the good news. Some minutes later the reply came back from Halsey. It was simple, direct, and to the point.
“Sir, the Admiral sends his regards, and says he’ll get you a case a beer for that one.”
Sprague just smiled. It was finally over.
* * *
But it wasn’t over. The politicians weren’t done with it yet.
When word hit the papers on the fate of Iowa the nation was up like wailing banshees and wanting a rope around Stalin’s neck. The headline in the New York Times bawled out the sentiment:
RUSSIANS SINK BATTLESHIP IOWA WITH ATOMIC BOMB!
TRUMAN WARNS STALIN OF A ‘RAIN OF RUIN’
US Readies Atomic Weapons In Reprisal
Truman was on the radio at once, informing the nation:
“We have known the Russians have been working on these weapons for some time, as early as 1941, and before this war began for our great nation. Well, I am here to tell the Russians, and all of you today, that we have been working on them as well. Our friends in Great Britain have also been working, feverishly, day and night, to harness this great power, and we have succeeded.
“The weapons I now speak of are no ordinary bombs. They have more power than 20,000 tons of TNT; more than two thousand times the blast power of the British "Grand Slam," which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare…Until this dark day.
“It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against us in an act of utter depravity. It is our believe that the Russians thought they might frighten us, and so secure their claims to territories occupied on the European Front and in the Pacific where this dastardly crime was perpetrated.
“To strike at one’s enemy in war is expected. But to betray your allies in arms with an act of this magnitude is inexcusable, and it will not go unanswered.
“I can report this day that the Russian forces responsible for this attack have already been hunted down and utterly destroyed by elements of the United States Navy. Our own battleship Wisconsin, sister ship of the stricken Iowa, has had the final word at sea, but I will have yet one more word here today. The enormity of what the Soviet Union has done cannot be pardoned. It is treachery at its blackest root, perfidious betrayal of a wartime friend, and it shall be answered in no uncertain terms.
“I am today demanding, and ordering, that all units of the Red Army west of the Oder River must withdraw to Russian territory at once, and that no unit of the Soviet army will be permitted to land anywhere on the Japanese mainland, or on any islands in the Pacific that were the former territory of Japan.
“If the Soviet government does not accede to this order and ultimatum immediately, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air the like of which has never been seen on this earth. Behind this air attack will follow sea and land forces in such number and with such power as they have not yet seen…”
The Russians, of course, denied any involvement in the attack the President was speaking of, claiming Truman and Churchill sought to define the post war era in their favor and refusing to withdraw from any territory then occupied by Soviet forces. In truth, they had no idea what Truman was talking about, and said as much.
The Presidential order went out that same day, and it was answered by the 509th Composite Air Group on the island of Tinian. And so three days after the Second World War ended, the third war started, and it would rage for nine days of continued madness until the world had finally had enough.
* * *
Colonel Tibbets got the call two hours later. It was Go, Go, Go! The entire 509th would fly with him, as well as over a hundred other B-29s in a massive show of force intended to convince the Russians that any further deployment or use of atomic weapons would lead to their swift and utter destruction.
In truth, the United States was taking the gravest possible risk in hand with the order that Tibbets received that day. Yes, they had the bomb ready just as Truman had boasted, but there were
only two available, and both were in the Pacific. Operations at the ultra top secret Manhattan Project in New Mexico were ramping up as never before in a desperate effort to enrich more nuclear fuel and assemble more bombs should they be needed.
The US was already well behind in the race to atomic supremacy. Now they believed the Russians had tested their first bomb in the North Atlantic as early as August of 1941, though the Allies had first thought the Germans were responsible when the Mississippi went down. Years of intelligence work had slowly brought them to another conclusion—that it was a Russian ship, and not the Germans, who had attacked TF-16 in the North Atlantic. It was that conclusion that fed the fires of suspicion where the Russians were concerned for the remainder of the war.
The Russians had the bomb…Why they never used it again on the Germans remained a mystery, and it was eventually decided that the considerable resources, technical knowhow and time required to produce a bomb while under all out attack from Germany had prevented them from creating any more bombs until late in the war. By the time they were ready, Germany had already been defeated.
Yet now the Russians appeared again, with the same blighting footprint on the hallowed ground of peace as before. They used it not on their enemies, but on their friends, or so the Americans believed. They blasted yet another American battleship in a gruesome echo of the dastardly attack made in 1941. Only a very few knew of the fate of the Mississippi and TF-16, and of these no more than ten men alive on the earth at that time knew all of what had really transpired.
But none of that mattered now. Tibbets got the order, and the Enola Gay got the bomb. The planes were in the air the day after the Iowa was sunk, and not two hours after the Soviet authorities had issued a venomous denial of all charges leveled against them and a refusal to withdraw.
Kirov Saga: Devil's Garden (Kirov Series) Page 5