B00DSDUWIQ EBOK (36 page)

Now
he was about to throw that all away, burn it, remand it to the deepest level of
hell. We thought we could stop the war, he thought darkly. What we failed to realize
is that
we
were the war, and as long as the root and stem of that weed
still grows in our hearts, no place is safe from the ravaging fire. There was
even war in heaven…

He
stepped to Samsonov’s side, and reached down, slowly pushing his hand from the firing
toggle on the P-900 system, in an act of supreme irony. This time it was not to
stay his hand. No… It will be
my
hand on the button, not his, he thought.
I am responsible, the Dark Angel of perdition, and death is in my hand.

He
pressed his thumb hard on the toggle, and the warning claxon bawled. His eye strayed
to the forward deck where the P-900 ejected from the red open hatch, its nose
declined downward and the rocket motor fired. It looked just like any of the
other missiles they had fired, yellow fire in its wake with white hot smoke
behind it as the
Sizzler
climbed to its cruising elevation and bent away
to the south. Hell was on its way.

* * *

Captain
Wellborn was still looking through his
binoculars when the XO pointed out the contrail. “Here comes another one, sir;
dancing like a drunk sailor on the deck.”

The
P-900 had reached altitude for a brief subsonic cruise, and now descended to low
level as it approached the ship, swinging this way and that in a series of maneuvers
designed to defeat fast computer controlled gun systems.

“Just
one this time,” said Wellborn, watching it come. “All hands, brace for impact!”

It
was the last thing he said.

The
meal the crew had eaten that day was also their last, cream of tomato soup, saltine
crackers, roast Young Tom Turkey, cranberry sauce, sage dressing, whipped
mashed potatoes, buttered peas, hot Parker House Rolls, ripe olives, sweet
pickles, sweeter cherries served up in the pies…The missile suddenly popped up
as one trigger happy gunner on a 20mm gun took a shot, hoping to get lucky.

Then
it went off.

Chapter 36

Captain
Murray on the
Missouri
had been
looking north through his binoculars at the distant shadow of
Iowa
on
the horizon. It was the last thing he saw. The brilliant white light was searing,
many times the brightness and heat of the sun, and “Sunshine” Murray was
instantly blind.

Halsey
felt the flash as much as he saw it out of the corner of his eye, immediately knowing
what had happened. Any man who sees a nuclear weapon detonate once will never
forget the experience if he lives through it. The Russians had fired off one
bomb earlier that morning, and now the evening was ushered in with a second sun
on the horizon. They’ve hit us again, he thought. My God, they’ve hit Chuck Wellborn
on the
Iowa
.

Now
the words of Admiral Fraser came back to haunt him from that first meeting they
had together on the
Missouri
…
“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.”

The
blinding light was gone in a flash, and next came the shock wave, the awful racing
wind, and the low roar in the distance, like the bellow of an evil dragon. It
was much worse than before, and Missouri was far closer than the warning shop
fired that morning. Two suns in the morning, thought Halsey; two suns at day’s
end. He turned to see the mushroom rising where the battleship
Iowa
had
once been stalwartly firing her main guns at a distant, unseen enemy. The Big
Stick was gone, broken, hidden by a rising hollow column of seething water, its
walls some 300 feet thick. The temperature there at ground zero reached as high
as 7,200 degrees Fahrenheit in the first second of the detonation. Half a mile
away it was as hot as 3,200 degrees, but only for an instant. Initially the sea
was boiled away to vapor, but as the detonation quickly cooled it swelled up
into a massive spray dome that was soon wreathed by a thick mist that came to
be known as a “Wilson Cloud.” This slowly lifted to reveal the darkened hulk of
the once proud battleship, no more than a battered shadow on the sea now.

Then
the ocean itself rolled out with the onrushing wave, leaving a circle of frothy
white foam behind it as it went. The shock produced a huge swell in the sea,
and Halsey could feel Mighty Mo rise up, though she weathered the high tide
easily, surging down again until her bow cut into the sea. There had been over
a hundred planes in the air nearby when the detonation occurred, the flights
just reaching
Iowa’s
position. Every one of them within a kilometer of
the ship was incinerated. Flights as far as five kilometers out were swept away
in the raging wind as though batted from the sky, lashed with the terrible
blast wave. Farther out the aircraft wheeled and swooped, a few barely managing
to recover and avoid being swept into the sea. Between the missiles and the
bomb, 165 airmen lost their lives in those searing minutes.

Some
ten miles behind them the second wave of pilots raised their gloved hands, shielding
their eyes from the flash and light, and some felt the heat even that far away,
but they survived. Now the titanic mushroom cloud loomed before them, and they
were forced to veer left and right to avoid it, just as Tanner’s flights had
veered to avoid the wrath of the Demon volcano. Another Demon was at work that
day, but on they came. None knew of the radiation burning through their bodies,
and not one would care if they did. They saw the Big Stick die its agonizing
death and, as the shock abated, the hot fire of anger burned within them now.
There were a hundred planes from the Halsey group still in the air, and the
Sprague’s strike wing was only now starting to reach the scene.

One
pilot in the Sprague group was Rod Bains, bringing up the rear of the group, the
big ASM-N-2 BAT bomb anchored to his fuselage. He had seen the missiles hit the
carriers, watched
Ticonderoga
burning as he climbed to join his mates
above. Now he remembered Lowrey shaking his fist at him as he revved up his
engines for takeoff. Go get ‘em. Go give them hell.

He
opened the throttle up, hastening on and following the radio direction calls being
sent by Ziggy Sprague’s radio man on the
Wisconsin
. They had all seen
it. No one could have missed it, the mushroom cloud was thousands of feet high
already, and still boiling the sea up into the evening sky. Yet all around him
the planes kept on, and he caught one pilot’s eye, giving him the thumbs up as they
sped forward—
Hellcats, Helldivers, Avengers
all.

* * *

“The
ship is gone, sir,” said Rodenko. “Target
destroyed.”

Karpov
was staring at the mushroom cloud, his mind beset with images of what it must have
been like. They didn’t suffer, he said to himself. It would have been too quick.
One minute they were there, and the next minute they would be gone. Yet perhaps
this will shake the Americans at last, and they will see what they are up
against… Yes, look what they are up against, a raving lunatic with a single minded
bent for destruction, Vladimir Karpov, Commander of the Red Banner Pacific
Fleet. Did you really think you could rule these men, bend them to your will,
make them kowtow to your demands? What was it all for, vengeance for
Admiral
Golovko
, reprisal for the long years of enmity the West imposed upon Russia?
You thought you would settle accounts, and look at it now. Look!

“Are
you alright, Captain? What are your orders, sir?”

He
turned slowly to look at Rodenko, his eyes sallow and empty, as was his soul. There
was a God shaped hole in the man, thought Rodenko, but no God could fill it.

“Con,
Radar. Enemy aircraft now at twenty kilometers and closing at 400 kph.” The watch
stander’s voice was strident in the tense air and the warning finally roused Karpov
from his dark reverie. There was no time to scourge himself for what he had
done. There would be time enough for that later. The ship was still in danger.
Yet he moved listlessly, stepping back, away from the distant mushroom cloud
darkening the horizon, feeling strangely light headed.

“Captain?”

* * *

Yeltsin
would not have believed it if he had not seen
it with his own eyes. They had just come left in a hard fifteen point turn when
the detonation occurred. Karpov’s earlier demonstration had sent a missile over
a hundred kilometers south before it ignited. It was well over the horizon and
they did not see the detonation, but this time they were very close. It was the
first time he, or any of his bridge crew, had witnessed such a thing. They knew
they carried the weapons in the belly of the ship’s magazines, but had never
seen what they could really do when fired in anger. Everyone gaped at the
horizon, awe struck.

Yet
when it was over he was amazed to see that a second wave of aircraft was still coming
in from that same heading, the planes sweeping around the tall mushroom cloud
as it cauliflowered up into the gloaming sky. And further out to the west there
came another large group. Karpov had ordered him to cease fire so the P-900
carrying the tactical weapon would arrive safely on target. What was he planning
now? Was he going to swat these remaining planes from the sky with another
tactical airburst, or were they to resume conventional SAM defense?

He
steadied himself, shaking the horror of the moment from his mind and ordered his
radio man to contact
Kirov
for further instructions. There was no initial
response but the hail continued, sounding more and more plaintive with each
repetition…
“Orlan to Kirov. Come in, Kirov. Requesting battle orders. Over.
Orlan to Kirov. Please respond. Over. Where are you, Kirov? Please come in.
Orlan to Kirov. Where are you?…

Frustrated
and knowing the enemy planes were just minutes away, Yeltsin stepped out of the
enclosed armored citadel of the bridge and onto the weather deck, binoculars in
hand. They had been steaming about two kilometers in front of the big battlecruiser,
but when he scanned the sea in his wake, there was no sign of the ship.
Kirov
was gone! What had happened?

Yes,
they had felt the harsh wind from the explosion, the shock wave and swell from the
sea, but even his much smaller ship rode it out easily, and there were no enemy
planes in close. Could
Kirov
have suffered the same fate as
Admiral Golovko
,
struck by a late fired round from the stricken American battleship? No, there
was no sign of an explosion aft, and
Kirov
was a very big ship. If there
had been an incident, or even an accident aboard the ship itself, he would have
seen something. Yet what was that strange glow on the sea? He would not have
time to investigate further.

The
hard seconds ticked away, and now it struck him that
Orlan
was alone, and
soon to be faced by a massive air attack. Time was running out. He rushed back
into the bridge.

“Air
alert one! Resume SAM defense! Ready all close in defense systems!”

The
klaxon howled out the alert, and within seconds the first sleek SAMs were ejecting
again from the ship’s forward deck, streaking wildly into the sky to seek and
destroy the American planes. The roar of the missiles continued, one after
another, the skies streaked by ribbons of smoke as they sped away on hot white
tails. Then he heard the low, distant drone of many engines, saw the blue specks
in the sky drawing ever nearer amid the roiling explosion from his lethal SAMs

 They
were coming—
Hellcats, Helldivers, Avengers
all—and one man named Bains with
a big fat Bat Bomb under his fuselage was feeling very lucky that day. He saw
something on the sea ahead of him, squinting as the light gleamed on its odd
angles and lines. The sky around him was a chaos of fire and smoke. Planes were
being hit and going down in flames.

Hell,
he thought. I’ve got the range right now, and he pulled hard on the bomb release.
The Bat Bomb was on its way, one solitary rocket fired against the scores of
sleek weapons being fired by
Orlan
.

* * *

“Forgive
me, Admiral. I know you are a very busy man
these days, and I hate to impose on your time.” Kamenski settled into a chair,
cradling the thick volume under his arm.

“That
time may be running out,” said Volsky. “As you can see, the accommodations here
are not nearly so plush as our offices above ground. I’m afraid Moscow continues
to dig itself into a hole insofar as these hostilities are concerned. So we dig
too.”

“Is
it really that bad?”

Volsky
gave the old man a long look. “I have seen it, Mister Kamenski; seen it with my
own eyes. The past was not able to hold us long, it seemed. We kept bouncing back
and forth from some distant future, well after the war was fought, and then
into the hell of that last war again—out of the frying pan, into the fire. In
those strange intervals we learned the war was to begin here in the Pacific, and
so it has, in spite of our effort to prevent it. Perhaps it is not so easy to
change time and fate after all. We have also seen what was left of the world after
this current little disagreement was fought, and there was very little to speak
of.”

“I
understand,” said Kamenski. “As much as any man could, I suppose. Can we do anything
more?”

“I
have asked myself that a thousand times, but it is very frustrating. I still have
Marines at the Naval Logistics Building, you know. Perhaps, I thought, we will
get another letter.”

“I
see…Then you are still hoping Fedorov will appear from the ether and pronounce that
all is well.”

“Of
course! But that’s a fool’s wish now, isn’t it? We never knew how to control things—these
odd time displacements. I’m still not sure how we ever managed to get home.
Suppose Fedorov completes his mission, and he returns, but not until the year
2022, or 2025. This possibility crossed my mind. It would mean we wait here in
suspense, if we can dig a hole deep enough to survive what I know is coming
next. Well, we don’t have two or three years to wait. I would be willing to bet
that we may not have more than a few days left now before things get out of
hand. And what would I do, I asked myself, if these were the last three days in
the world we know? What would you do, Mister Kamenski?”

“Me?
Why, I think I would take a little trip. In fact, that’s exactly what I am planning
to do. If you could remove yourself from your duties here I would ask you to
come with me.”