Halsey was watching him come across from the weather deck off the bridge, and had a welcoming committee of his own down on the lower deck in dress whites to receive him. Fraser had been there just a few days ago to deliver the thanks of his grateful nation to Halsey in the form of an official pronouncement admitting the Admiral to a very exclusive order. He was now officially a Knight of the British Empire.
Something tells me that Sir Bruce isn’t here for tea and company with a fellow Knight, thought Halsey as he watched. Fraser was a fighting Admiral too. He had fought in the Med and then went after the Germans again 1943 when he put the battlecruiser Scharnhorst at the bottom of the sea to finally avenge the loss of his old command, HMS Glorious, which met her end under the guns of that same German ship.
He had also heard that Fraser had been involved in some top secret Royal Navy operations over the years. Word gets around, even if it has to go all the way across the Pacific. Halsey had heard the British had a scrap with something in the Med, and Fraser was there. Then there was that intelligence out of FRUMMEL HQ down under about a battle the Japanese fought during the Guadalcanal campaign. FRUMMEL said it involved an entire Jap carrier division and a couple battleships, but the details were sketchy. What irked him about it was this: Halsey had been in nominal command of that campaign, even if he was laid up in sick bay. He nonetheless had reports of every action by US subs, ships, or carriers, and there was nothing at all about these engagements. Who were the Japanese fighting, he wondered? And who took a pot shot at Babe Brown up north? Who took down Ziggy Sprague’s recon flight?
It probably has something to do with the Russians, he thought, and he had the distinct feeling that the British Admiral was bringing him bad news.
He was correct.
Chapter 2
“Suffice it to say, Admiral, that we may be dealing with more here than meets the eye.” Admiral Fraser met Halsey’s eye now, a look of frank seriousness there, and a bit of a warning.
Halsey was of no mind to be frightened by anything his British colleague was saying here. Dour faced and well blooded in battle over long years of combat at sea, Bull Halsey was as hard as they came. His eyes had a sparkle in them, beneath bristling grey eyebrows when he smiled, but when he frowned in anger there was a steely resolve there that was a good part of the reason why his fleet was waiting to receive the surrender of the Japanese Empire.
“You’re telling me the Russians are behind this?” he said. “And you’re sure of this? What possible reason would the Soviet government have to pick a fight with us now?”
“This may not have anything to do with the Soviet government at all,” said Fraser, a bit delicately, as if tiptoeing around something more unsaid, and Halsey noticed it immediately.
“What do you mean by that? Are you saying this is a renegade ship responsible for this attack? I suppose I could believe the Russians might do something like this to get our attention and make sure they have a seat at the table next week. A stunt like that would be just like them, but a renegade?”
“That may very well be a good word for it, Admiral Halsey,” said Fraser. “In point of fact, we have some knowledge of this ship, if I’m not mistaken about it now. I saw the damn thing with my own eyes once. We gave it a code word back then. A word you Yanks will be familiar with I suppose—Geronimo—a renegade indeed.”
“Geronimo…” Halsey had heard rumors of a ship given that name. “Yes, I did catch something about that some years ago.” This was it, he thought. This was that secret operation in the Med.
“Indeed,” said Fraser. “Well, let me share a few things about it with you, Admiral. The first and foremost thing is this—the ship is dangerous. It’s fast, possesses advanced weaponry, and seems to have no qualms about using everything it has if it comes to a scrap at sea.”
“Any good fighting sea Captain would do the same,” said Halsey. “I don’t have to tell you that this ship is dangerous as well.” He was referring to the Fleet Flagship, the battleship Missouri, one of America’s superb new fast battleships.
Fraser considered what to say next, knowing there were limits to what he could discuss here. How to convince a man like Halsey that this situation needs a good long look and careful consideration—real caution? How to redefine the word dangerous for him here in a way that would make it stick?
“Admiral…” he began, still thinking. “I’m sure you recall the incident in the North Atlantic before Roosevelt declared war.”
“You mean that business with the Germans? Well, they caught us flat footed out there and jumped on the Wasp while she was ferrying unarmed planes to Iceland. You don’t forget something like that.”
“Yes, well if you were briefed on the incident then you’ll know what also happened to the Mississippi.”
Halsey frowned. “I was in the Pacific at the time, aboard CV Enterprise and worrying more about the Japanese. Yes, we heard Mississippi went down but, to be frank, I never knew the details. Thank God we got the bastard, that’s all. The boys of Desron 7 did us all proud, and one thing more. They got us into this war when most of the country was too blind to see it coming. So whatever happened out there it was all for the good in the end.”
“I see…” This gave Fraser pause. If the American government had not seen fit to inform a man like Bull Halsey of what really happened in the Atlantic, then he wondered if he was making a mistake here. Yet he knew that Halsey was the man on the scene now. It would be his word commanding the forces most likely to be involved if this was indeed another ‘incident’ in the making. Something told him to proceed with caution, yet at the same time there was an obvious urgency about the situation.
“May I ask if you have any further information on this incident with your scouting force?”
“You mean Babe Brown’s group? He’s back in the fold, Admiral, but hasn’t been able to tell us very much. I haven’t seen the full report yet, but those were a couple old cruisers on patrol up there, both of them ready for the scrap heap. He claims they were closing on a surface contact when they were hit by kamikazes, but we’ve seen no sign of Japanese activity off of Hokkaido since.”
“And your reconnaissance?”
“Bushwhacked on a photo run, and whoever did that is going to pay for it—Japanese, Russians, I could care less. You say it was the Russians, then I’ll believe you, but it won’t make any difference. I sent Admiral Sprague up to see about it, and we’ll settle the matter. If this is some kind of political hot potato, I’m afraid I’m not the sort to play those games, Admiral Fraser. Call me rash, even bull headed, but I’ve been called worse. The Russians don’t get a pass from me if they take to shooting down American planes.”
“I understand how you feel, Admiral, but one thing in this report set my mind on this and prompted me to get over here and see you. Is it true that your reconnaissance flight reported the use of naval rocketry in that incident?”
“Rocketry? Like those Stooges you’ve been experimenting with?”
“Something of that sort.”
Halsey wondered what Fraser was driving at. He seemed to be nibbling about the edges of something, and the Bull was not one to be indirect. “Yes there was some mention of rockets in the radio intercept. Our radar picket was monitoring the flight when those ships opened up on our boys. You would think, Admiral, that if these were Russian ships, our allies, that they would be a little more discreet in picking their targets.”
“Might they have suspected your planes were Japanese?”
“You and I both know that’s a load of bull feathers,” Halsey brushed the notion aside. “We were flying big blue Hellcats with a bright white star of the wings. All five planes overflew the contact, so those ships must have gotten a real good look at them. Our boys came around for a photo run and they opened up on them, and that’s the end of it. Now, I don’t care if they have some kind of amphibious operation up there in the Kuriles or not. We have no interest in that. Hell, we even gave the Russians the goddamned troop transports
so they could land on the islands! This is one hell of a way to say thank you. Nimitz thinks they have plans to land on Hokkaido, and I’m sorry to say that they will do nothing of the kind.”
Fraser realized that none of this was getting him where he needed to go. He’d come all this way to see if he could gain more information on this incident, and to possibly let the Americans know what they might be dealing with, but Halsey seemed as clueless about the situation as anyone else. He had to find a way to convey the real danger in the moment, and now he began to see that half truths and innuendo would simply not do. A man like Halsey wanted it straight and undiluted, like a good shot of whiskey. He decided he had better fill his glass.
“Admiral, suppose I told you that your Desron 7 had nothing whatsoever to do with the outcome of that incident in the North Atlantic. There was no heroic sacrifice by your gallant destroyers as reported in your newspapers. Suppose I told you that the ship you believed was a German raider was nothing of the sort, and that it wasn’t sunk that day—the day your Mississippi went down. Suppose I told you that you lost that ship, and the others in TF.16, when it was hit by a weapon of unimaginable power, enough TNT to take out an entire fleet if it was concentrated like that, or to obliterate an entire city. I think you know what I may mean when I describe a weapon like this. You Americans have been working on them; so have we.”
Halsey leaned back, arms folded, eyes narrowed under his wrinkled brow and heavy eyebrows. The British Admiral had unloaded quite a bit just now, one hell of a broadside. The look in his eye was quite different. He wasn’t mincing words any longer, which is just the way Halsey liked it. But what was he saying here?
“Are you talking about the bomb?”
That was what they called it now—the bomb. There were a hundred different kinds of bombs, and millions had already been dropped over Europe and Asia in the last seven years, but this one was so different, so frightening that it overshadowed them all. It was the bomb, the atomic bomb, and only a very few senior officers even knew it existed. It was hell in the belly of a B-29, waiting on an airstrip at Tinian, though thankfully it had not been necessary to use it in battle. The Japanese had come to their senses and finally surrendered.
“What else could I be talking about with that kind of power?”
“But we’ve only just deployed the damn things—though let’s keep that between the two of us.”
“Don’t worry, I’ve been fully briefed.”
“Well that was 1941 when Mississippi went down. Nobody had the bomb back then. And another thing…. what did you mean this was no German raider? What else could it have been?”
“That’s exactly what we first thought, Admiral. What else could it have been? It came out of the Norwegian Sea and ran the Denmark Strait, not two months after we sank the Bismarck. We thought it was Tirpitz at first, then Graf Zeppelin, but it was neither, because it wasn’t a German ship at all. And when it hit your TF.16 with that weapon we worried for months the next one would land right on London.”
“You’re saying this ship actually had an atomic weapon? In 1941?”
“Precisely.”
“And it wasn’t sunk? Then what happened to it? What happened to Desron 7?”
“If you were to nose around and dig deep enough you would find that five ships from that destroyer group reported back to Argentia Bay twelve days after they disappeared. The crews were interviewed, dispersed all over the fleet, and the ships were stricken from the register, repainted, renumbered, and are still in service today. It was covered up pretty well—even you didn’t know about it—and then the onset of the war pushed it under a fairly thick carpet. It’s still there if you know where to look, and I’m afraid there’s more to this story. It wasn’t until we ran into an unknown ship in the Med that we really found out the truth of the matter.”
“In the Med? This ship got clean away and ran east for the Med?”
“It turned up in the Tyrrhenian Sea, to be more precise. We got a good look at it, and some rather telling photos. Then it ran west for Gibraltar, and raised bloody hell the whole way.”
“It slipped into the Med without being spotted?” This was the operation Halsey had been wondering about. Fraser was getting down to brass tacks with him now.
“Apparently. But as I say, we got a very good look at it after that. In fact I was personally involved in that incident, on HMS Rodney. She was riding side by side with Admiral Syfret in HMS Nelson. Good ships, the both of them. Slow as molasses compared to a ship like your Missouri here, but well gunned with nine sixteen inchers. It was just our luck that we were well ahead of this raider and managed to cut it off as it ran west—or nearly so. There was a battle…”
“I heard about this,” said Halsey raising a finger, the light of interest in his eyes. “Something about a renegade French battlecruiser. You were there?”
“I was indeed. Though upon reflection I might say it was just our bad luck we caught up with this ship—and it wasn’t French. We learned that first hand. Our Admiral John Tovey took the wise precaution of reinforcing Gibraltar with Home Fleet the moment we got word of this ship in the Med, and it looked like it was coming down to one of your classic Western showdowns. Then the other side agreed to parley.”
“Amazing,” said Halsey.
“Indeed. Well our Admiral Tovey met with the commander of this ship on a small islet near Gibraltar. He was Russian! The entire crew was Russian, only they denied any affiliation with the Soviet government at the time.”
“This was the same ship you mixed it up with in the North Atlantic?”
“We are ninety-eight percent sure of that. The other two percent suggested it came out of the Black Sea and that these were actually two different vessels, but that was flatly contradicted by this Russian Admiral himself.”
“What happened?”
“We made an arrangement. They accepted quarantine at the Island of St. Helena in exchange for safe passage there. Then the ship simply vanished. We had two fast cruisers in escort, planes overhead, yet the ship sailed into a bank of low clouds and slipped away. We never saw it again, though we believe the Japanese did.”
“The Japanese?” Halsey felt like a boxer kept constantly off balance by a good stiff jab from his opponent. Each time he began to settle into some understanding of what Fraser was telling him, the story leapt ahead in some startling new direction.
“The Japanese. They ran across it very soon after it disappeared off St. Helena,” said Fraser. “It happened during your Operation Watchtower.”
“That was on my beat,” said Halsey. “I was in nominal command of that operation, but the truth is I was down for the count with a skin ailment that put me in the hospital for months. I didn’t get back in the saddle until October of…well that was 1942, Admiral. TF.16 was hit in late 1941 just before we got into this mess.”
“Quite so,” said Fraser. “There was a considerable time lapse before we found this ship again in the Med.”
“A year? I find that hard to swallow. How could a ship with that kind of attitude remain undetected for a whole goddamned year?”
“We don’t know, but as we learned this Russian Admiral claimed he wanted nothing more to do with our war, we concluded that the ship must have dropped anchor somewhere in the South Atlantic or Indian Ocean, well away from sea lanes in some isolated area. We’re not sure how it managed to slip into the Med undetected, but we do get some very foggy nights off Gibraltar, and this vessel has seemed a bit of a phantom at times. Well, to make matters short, it eventually turned up on the coast of Australia and ran into the Japanese.”
Fraser wasn’t telling Halsey the entire story now—that the ship was spotted off Australia not two days after it vanished at St Helena, a journey of thousands of miles that it could not possibly have sailed in that brief time. That had been the one salient clue that had led Bletchley Park, and a very select group of men, to some very startling conclusions about this ship and its true origins. That information might exten
d the bounds of credulity just a wee bit too far in this conversation, and he felt himself lucky enough to have dragged this bull out of the pen and into the field with what he had already revealed.
Halsey rolled his eyes, thinking. “Yes…we did hear that there was some kind of engagement in the Coral Sea, right smack dab in the middle of our operations against Guadalcanal. Yet I never got any report on the matter. None of our ships were involved.”
“Geronimo was the culprit. It gave the Japanese hell this time. They paid a very high price when they tangled with this ship. In fact, that may have worked to your favor. It seems at least two Japanese fleet carriers were involved in action with this ship, and therefore unable to reinforce the Japanese counterattack against your Guadalcanal landings. It also left a Jap battleship stranded like a beached whale on a coral reef, and after that it locked horns with Yamamoto himself on the Yamato.”
“Yamato? We didn’t even know the Japanese had that ship until very late in the war!”
“Yes, well British intelligence is very good, Admiral. We knew about it, but as it was laid up for extensive repairs there was no need to pass that on until the ship re-entered service.”
Halsey took that in for a moment, the conclusion obvious from what Fraser had said. “This ship—this Geronimo as you call it, it fought with Yamato and got the better of it?”
“That’s putting it mildly, Admiral Halsey. It beat the Yamato to a flaming wreck. The Japs managed to get it back to the home islands and it was in dry dock for two years before your Ziggy Sprague made the acquaintance again in that battle off Samar. Does the word dangerous say enough about this ship now, or must I look for another word?”
“A Russian ship beat Yamato…” Halsey shook his head. “That’s hard to believe.”
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