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  As for Gunner’s Mate 3rd Class Alfred J. Lewis, he made it to his bunk, and also made it off the ship with his plank. In fact, it kept him afloat until he could be picked up by a destroyer, and he held on to it for dear life—all his life, along with his certificate of ownership.

  The hit to Bataan was not as bad, though they did lose five Hellcats on the flight deck there. That said, Ziggy Sprague was shocked to realize that he had suddenly lost a fleet carrier and was watching another escort carrier burn, and this without even knowing who or what it was that had attacked his task group! He was furious and on the radio to Halsey at once.

  “Goddammit Bull! We just got hit up here! Wasp is a burning wreck and I think we’ll lose her. She’s listing bad and they can’t seem to correct it. Windy Switzer is giving the order to abandon ship. What the hell’s going on? Why are you coming out to the mound now when we’re right in the middle of this thing?”

  “Sorry, Ziggy. It has nothing to do with you, but I’ve got two more task groups in the bullpen, if that’s what you mean. Recover your strike wave and hold tight. I’m bringing the whole shit and shebang up north to reinforce you. Admiral Fraser has opened my eyes on what this threat may be up north. Apparently it’s a fast battlecruiser with advanced rocket weapons, and it’s been giving the Brits nightmares.”

  “Yeah? Well I’ve got some bad dreams to deliver as well. There’s nothing wrong with the rest of my group, particularly North Dakota and South Carolina. Suppose I let the big guns roll on up north for a closer look? And I’ve still got ninety planes in reserve—at least until we got hit just now. We can recover our first strike wave, refuel and rearm in a couple hours and be ready to rumble again.”

  “Did you see what hit Wasp?”

  “Hell if I know. Didn’t see but a blur just before she went up in smoke. We had nothing on radar either. It just came out of nowhere.”

  “That’s what Admiral Fraser told me. Look, Ziggy, this varmint has one hell of an anti-air defense too, and you have to swarm it to get anything through—just like we did with Yamato. We threw 380 planes against that ship. We do the same with this one when I get there. Fraser is bringing TF.37 up around the other side of Hokkaido as well. Between the three of us we’ll have damn near a thousand planes, and more behind them if we need to get Ballentine, McCain or anyone else up there. I’ve got over 300 ready aircraft right now. More coming.”

  “Well don’t be all day about it. How far out are you?”

  “We make it to be just under 150 miles south of you, and we’re coming fast. Look Ziggy, get your destroyers in tight on the carriers. Fraser laid a boatload on me as to how the Brits planned to fight this ship. Screen the carriers. Send your battleships northeast. We’re going to form a fast battleship task force and ram it down their throats while we hit them with every goddamn plane we have.”

  “Now you’re talking,” said Sprague. “How’s my namesake doing?” He was referring to the odd quirk that had seen two men rise through the ranks to command fast carrier task groups, unrelated, but both bearing the surname Sprague. The second was Rear Admiral Thomas Sprague in carrier division three, also a part of Halsey’s fleet. The two ‘Spragues’ had also graduated from the same class at Naval Academy, and both served with distinction.

  “We’ll call on Tom Sprague’s carriers if we need them,” said Halsey. “He’s replenishing now with Ballentine.”

  “What in heaven’s name do the Russians think they’re doing, Bull? Are they flying these damn suicide rockets like the Japanese?”

  “We don’t know. Which is why I want you and the other task group commanders aboard Missouri for a powwow ASAP. I’ll send you the details later. In the meantime, hold tight until we reinforce. Fraser says if you go in piecemeal this damn ship will cut you to pieces.”

  “Our air group took a pretty hard knock, and the planes never even got close enough to the enemy to let them have it. Now it sure looks like we’re going to lose Wasp.”

  “Plenty more coming,” Halsey reassured him. “I won’t let you down this time, Ziggy.”

  Halsey was referring to that disastrous battle Sprague had fought off Samar when he commanded Taffy 3 while Halsey had the fleet carriers off on a wild goose chase. It wouldn’t happen that way this time. The Bull was lowering his head, snorting loud, and pawing the ground hard before he charged. But when he did go in, Halsey planned to raise hell over Hokkaido, one way or another.

  Chapter 9

  Karpov received the report from the radar man with some gratification. His message had been delivered. Rodenko looked over the contacts and noted that they struck two ships in the core, most likely both carriers. The strike wave had turned back just inside the thirty kilometer mark and was withdrawing south. Karpov ordered all ships to cease fire at once, wanting to conserve as much ammunition as possible.

  “Now perhaps they will listen to me when I contact them, and I can get someone senior to this ‘Iron Mike’ on the radio.” Karpov grinned.

  “What do you plan to do, sir?” Rodenko was with the Captain in the briefing room off the main citadel bridge.

  “A good question. I’ve given it some thought, but as you can see, these are dangerous waters. We’ve let events push us into action sooner than I might have desired. I heard what you said about those early engagements with the Americans in the Kuriles. Perhaps I was rash, particularly with the heat of the fight with CVBG Washington still getting my blood up.”

  “I understand, sir. That Demon Volcano shook us all up as well. How did the other Captains come to grips with what has happened?”

  “That remains to be seen. They performed well just now, particularly Orlan, but I can imagine they are all still scratching their heads and trying to figure this whole situation out. At the moment, they are doing their duty under extraordinary circumstances, but this last engagement was mere target practice. We aren’t facing supersonic jet aircraft and fast moving missiles now. The planes here are like drones—slow and witless. They have no ECM to speak of, and we can start jamming their radar in the next few hours, for all the good it does them now.”

  Rodenko thought about that. “They came because of what they didn’t know,” he suggested. “Their scouting detachments ran into trouble, and this seemed more like a reconnaissance in force. But sir, Nikolin picked up some radio chatter. The American attack was called off by their Fleet Commander.”

  “Yes, Admiral Halsey. You’ve heard the name. Halsey, Nimitz—these are the men they name ships for, even as we choose our old admirals to do the same. Well, they’re up against more than they realize now. At least they came to their senses and called off that attack. This gives me hope that we might be able to talk some sense into them now.”

  “But what will we say, sir? Are you going to present yourself as affiliated with the Soviet government here?”

  “Another good question,” said Karpov, quickly. “The Soviets would deny this, of course, unless we contact them first and come to some arrangement. But I do not think we could be very persuasive to the powers that be in Russia now without putting in an appearance. We would have to sail to Vladivostok, and it would be just like the nonsense we went through earlier. They would send officials to look us over. They’ll want to ‘interview’ us; find out who we are, where we came from. Our ships would certainly raise some eyebrows, eh? We would have to reveal everything to gain their full cooperation. It could take months and I’m not about to stand for that any longer.”

  “I still don’t understand what we are doing then, Captain.”

  “Perhaps I don’t either, Rodenko. But my guess is that the Soviet government will not believe a word of what we might tell them. They will only believe what they see. They understand power, and they definitely understand how to use it to get what they want. I can show them power unlike anything they can imagine. The same may be true for the Americans here. We just showed them that they can’t send in a wave of strike planes and win the day. We showed them how vulnerable their precious carriers
are now. They are dealing with something extraordinary, a force to be reckoned with, as they might put it. I want them to stew in that borscht for a while, and we might have to make a further demonstration of our power before we can get them to back down here and listen to our demands.”

  “Our demands, sir?”

  “In the end we will have to support the Soviet government in this post war environment. How can we do anything else? It’s our country. Stalin may be the great dark shadow on the land at the moment, but Russia survives Josef Stalin, and all the others. The question is this—will Russia survive NATO and that damn war we found ourselves in before that volcano sent us back here again? What do you think the allies were doing when we first showed up here? Churchill and Roosevelt were planning a secret meeting at Argentia Bay that would end up forming the basis of the NATO alliance. They called it the Atlantic Charter, and you will take note that Stalin wasn’t invited. And what are they doing now? At this very moment the Allies are getting ready to set their watch on Russia and stand behind the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall until they come tumbling down and they finally go after us in our day. I’ll tell you this, Rodenko. The world once thought we built those walls to keep people in and control them. The fact is that we built them to keep the Americans out! We’ve seen it, Rodenko. We know what they’re going to do—all of it. There will be the big standoff over Cuba until Khrushchev backs down, and then they’ll bleed us in Afghanistan, ride us and harry us until the old Soviet system finally collapses. But now we have the power to change all that.”

  “Do we, sir? I mean no disrespect of course. This ship certainly has power unlike anything in the world. But that power has limits as well as potentials. Orlan took the burden and fired thirty missiles in that engagement. They have 150 SAMs left in inventory. We fired sixteen medium range SAMs just now and that leaves us with 168. After using those four P-900s we have 30 SSMs remaining. Those aboard Golovko and Orlan combine for 32 more. We may have hit and badly hurt a ship just now. But it took multiple hits. And remember what happened during that fight with the Japanese battleship?”

  “Yamato? Yes, that was quite a battle.”

  “We hit that ship with eight missiles and two torpedoes, and it still survived the battle to fight later in the war! Well I think the Americans have battleships here too, Captain. There are at least two in this task group approaching us.”

  “Yes, the obvious limitations of our conventional weapons will begin to weigh on us if this thing draws out much longer. We can hit them before they even know where we are, and very hard, but only for a limited time. So we are faced with the very same decisions we debated earlier. We either run out to sea and try to get away from the allied navies here and hide somewhere, or we do something with the power we have in hand at the moment, limited as it may be. We have what the American President Theodore Roosevelt might call a very big stick. I intend to speak softly in the beginning, but if I have to raise my voice to be heard, or use that stick, I intend to do so.”

  “Yet look what happened before, sir,” Rodenko suggested plaintively. “We even used a nuclear warhead, and I say we used it, not you alone, sir. I was on this ship—on the bridge here, and I did nothing to impede that. I’m as responsible for what happened as you are, so I don’t raise this point with any recrimination in mind.”

  Karpov wasn’t sure he took much solace in that, though it seemed that Rodenko was saying it that way to sweeten the tea they were now drinking together. “So what is your point?”

  “Well sir, we used a warhead and it got us nothing, geopolitically that is. The war actually started early, and the Americans gained an even better position in Europe, or so Fedorov tells me. But by and large our action had little real effect.”

  “Oh, it had an effect, Rodenko. I’ve thought about this for some time, and discussed it with Fedorov too. He’s of a mind that the world we returned to in Vladivostok was not the same one we left. Our actions in the past changed things, and our foreknowledge of the third world war to come also gave us a decided advantage. And I’ll tell you another thing…” He lowered his voice now, implying the information he would now disclose would be confidential. “We lost men on our little safari through the Second World War. Well, it turns out that in the world we returned to they never lived!”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “They never lived, Rodenko. They were never even born. Think about that for a moment.” He told Rodenko what he had discussed with Fedorov and Admiral Volsky, and his new Starpom was finally impressed.

  “So something we did changed the history enough to affect men on this very ship?”

  “It appears so, and it also appears that time found a way to account for that. We did something—who knows what? We killed men that may have lived, and spared others that should have died. It was enough to affect the personal lines of fate for crewmen on this ship—every man that died in action, except Orlov.”

  “Orlov?”

  “That’s the big deal now. Fedorov’s mission involving that floating nuclear reactor ship. It was all to go back and find Orlov. But now they have much more than the former Operations Chief to worry about. We’re here, with nearly 1500 souls aboard these three ships and no way to get home.”

  Rodenko was silent for a time, considering this, and trying to sort the puzzle through in his mind. If this were true, if they had already changed history more than once, then what might happen this time?

  “What if we change things again, sir?”

  “That’s the point of this discussion, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but what if we do something that also affects our personal fates, like those men you say were never born. You said time got rid of them somehow. Is that why they died in battle?”

  “Fedorov thinks this is so. I, for one, do not think Grandfather Time is up there somewhere keeping score on everything we do. Call it God, or Fate, or whatever you choose. We speak of heaven and hell, Rodenko, but figuratively. Those places are simply the ends of our own desires, or our own mistakes. What we really know, deep down, is that we make our own heaven or hell by the choices we take in the here and now—right here on this earth. Every time we make a decision we affect our own personal time line—our own fate. I can’t live my life wondering whether something I do, or something I fail to do, will make an end of me one day. This world will make an end of us all. None of us asked to be here, but here we are, unless something happens as it did before.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I used that warhead, we vanished to a distant future soon after. I was in the brig at the time, but I learned what happened. I saw what was left of the world, I could see it from the port hole.”

  “But I thought we moved because of the control rods in our own reactor system.”

  “Yes, that’s the way Fedorov figured it out with Dobrynin. But we really don’t know. First we thought it was the nuclear detonations blowing a hole in time. Perhaps it was. Look what that volcano just did to us! Then we thought it was simply a matter of time, and no pun intended. Volsky and Fedorov saw an interval of twelve days between each time displacement. It was only then that Volsky and Dobrynin remembered those odd flux events in the reactors and mated that time interval to Dobrynin’s maintenance routine. So we came round to thinking this control rod was responsible—Rod-25. It suddenly became our own personal magic wand, except we never knew what would happen—where we would move in time if we used it. Then Fedorov began to take note of the fact that we always seemed to return to the approximate same time period in the past. It was his guess that Rod-25 would then allow him to go back to the 1940s and by god, his plan worked!”

  “You mean the mission with Troyak and the others?”

  “Yes…Fedorov got back safely. He left a letter for Volsky in an old storage bin, just as we did a few days ago.”

  “Then the Admiral knows we’re here!”

  “I hope so. He may get that letter, but who can say?”

  “Well if he does, si
r, wouldn’t he be trying to find a way to help us get home again?”

  “I’d like to think so, Rodenko, but what could he do? They shipped that control rod to the Caspian to try and rescue Fedorov and Orlov. Then we pulled our latest disappearing act and I don’t think they could send Rod-25 back to us again. We’re in 1945! How would they find us? Even if we still had it aboard at this moment there’s no guarantee that we could move all three ships back home again. But that is irrelevant. We don’t have the damn thing any longer, and if we need that control rod to move in time, then we’re stuck here. This is what I tell myself now. We’re stuck here in the middle of the Pacific in 1945 with the American fleet at our throats. We get to fight the battle we just started in 2021 all over again here, though I like our odds much better now.”

  “Who knows, sir? The allied navy had enormous resources at this time in the war.”

  “I’ve read all about it. Well it will come down to fight or flight, the same primal instincts that have influenced human choice since we clawed ourselves up from the jungle floor and learned to stand on two feet. I’ll tell you one thing I’ve decided. I’m going to fight.”

  “But what if they see what they’re up against and combine their forces for a massive attack, sir? They may even be doing that at this moment? Why would this Admiral Halsey call off that attack?”

  “Who knows? But you are probably correct, Captain Lieutenant. Do you like how that new title sounds, Rodenko? Well let me tell you something…You could be very much more than that in due course. We all could. With the power we have at our fingertips we can be real men of war now, not mere pawns in the game. We can re-write history, and put our names in those books where Fedorov always had his nose buried. We have only to make that choice, and then figure how to use the power we have to achieve the most decisive result.”