Kirov Saga: Devil's Garden (Kirov Series) (6 page)

The
sound of a siren blowing in the distance pulled their attention to the command
barracks at the other end of the field. Tibbets looked to see something odd
there. They were lowering the flag to half mast. The only other time he saw
something like that was when FDR died. What was going on? A jeep was racing
across the field right towards their hanger, and the two men stepped outside as
it came rolling up in a billow of dust. The driver was an Army Air Corps
Sergeant, who saluted crisply.

“Colonel
Tibbets, sir?”

“Yes,
I’m Tibbets.”

“I’m
to tell you your mission is on, sir, and the pre-flight briefing has been moved
up.”

“Moved
up? When is it scheduled?”

“Right
now, sir. I’m your wheels to the briefing bunker. Haven’t you heard, sir?”

“Soldier,
I’ve been locked up in this hot house of a hanger here for the last five hours.
Heard what?”

“The
Iowa
, sir. The Russians dropped the bomb on the Big Stick. She’s gone,
sir.”

Tibbets
gave him an incredulous look. “Gone?” He looked at Parsons. “Come on, Deak,
we’ve got a briefing to go to. Let’s get a move on.”

The
two men were up and on to the back of the jeep and it sped away, across the
wide airfield for the command bunker. Tibbets folded his arms, jaw set, and
looked over at Parsons.

“Secondary
target? What do you figure this is all about, Deak?”

“Well
I thought about that when I heard the rumor, and I could only come up with one
name on the list of potential targets.”

“How
do you call it?”

“Vladivostok…”

* * *

After
Airman Bains pulled the firing lever
he felt an sudden lift as the heavy ASM-N-2 BAT bomb fell from the fuselage of
his
Helldiver
and ignited its rocket engine. Lord almighty, he thought
as he watched the ponderous weapon surge ahead. He had lined it up right on the
target, and the radar was supposed to do the rest.
Kirov
would have seen
to it that the radar was useless—but
Kirov
was gone, and the technicians
aboard
Orlan
had not had time to reprogram their jammers for the odd
frequencies the Allies were using. The Bat Bomb had eyes, and it forged on
beneath the flights of dark blue planes, its radar seeking the slippery target
ahead.

Even
lined up on the ship when fired, it was still hit and miss. The system was in
its infancy, the first radar guided missiles ever deployed. The odd contours
and radar scattering coating on Orlan’s hull and superstructure made it very
difficult to acquire, but in a strange quirk, it locked on to a low flying
Avenger
coming in to make its torpedo run on
Orlan
, and was homing right on its
tail!

As
the weapon approached, the skies above and around the ship were bursting with
fire, scored by missile wakes as the shorter ranged
Kashtan
system
engaged with its combined missile/cannon close in defense. Yeltsin had been
correct. The enemy planes in Halsey’s second wave had been heavily engaged by
their medium range SAMs, their ranks thinned appreciably with over seventy more
kills. But now the missile count ran down to just 24, and the last of Halsey’s
brave wing was overhead, diving on the ship even as radar reported another 160
aircraft at twenty kilometers and coming at 400kph. In three minutes they were
swarming over the ship as the
Kashtans
fired full out.

The
missiles found two dozen planes, the cannons snarled at one after another,
dropping six low flying torpedo planes off the starboard side. They saw the
single
Avenger
hurtling in low some twenty degrees aft and the system
rotated quickly, its great robot arms swinging the six barreled Gatling guns
around to spin out a hail of 30mm rounds. They hit the
Avenger
, and it
fire-balled before plummeting into the sea. The gun shifted quickly to the next
target, its barrels steaming as they lifted up to fire at a swooping
Hellcat
trying to deliver a 500 pound bomb. The burning
Avenger
briefly masked
the Bat Bomb, and it came barreling in to smash
Orlan
on the aft
quarter, blasting the thin composite and aluminum hull with a 1000 pound bomb. Bains
never saw the weapon hit. He had already turned for home, but he heard the
radio chatter of his fellow aviators call out the hit, and crossed his fingers,
hoping it had been his bomb that scored the kill. His luck was still good that
day.

* * *

Orlan
shuddered with the hit, a billowing
cloud of dirty brown smoke enveloping the aft quarter of the ship when the bomb
went off. The ship rolled with the impact, listing to the port side and then
rolling back again, and speed fell off noticeably. The bomb had blown right
through the hull, immolated three compartments there, ruptured the main deck,
blasted away the helicopter on deck, and now a raging fire started. The speed
deficit resulted from thick shrapnel blasting downward and striking the
propulsion drive shafts, many decks below. They had almost blown completely
through the ship. Another ten feet and the bottom of the hull would have been
breached.

It
was a near mortal blow but the Sea Eagle was still alive. Chief Engineer
Yeremenko felt the blast as he was working in the engineering bay. He had
managed to get one of the special warheads mounted on a test bench and was
performing a manual arm routine with three technicians when the ship jolted
with the impact of the Bat Bomb. It was agonizing work. The technicians with
him thought the Captain had ordered the warhead made ready to use in the
growing fight, but Yeremenko knew the worst. It wasn’t for the Americans this
time. No… This time it’s for us. All of us.

He
found it difficult to look the other men in the eye, and was increasingly
nervous. There was just one further step he needed to perform. He would have to
hot-wire the warhead on the test bench to a live fire control system on the
ship, but he did not want to do this in front of the other men, for obvious
reasons.

“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.