Lions at Dawn (Kirov Series Book 28) Read online

  The witching hour was said to be the time when the borders between this world and other worlds were at their thinnest. Demons and spirits could pass through from one world to another, and that would be very close to the truth.

  Chapter 2

  Red Flight was up that day, November 1, 1952, and it was led by Lt. Colonel Virgil Meroney, taking three Republic F-84 G “Thunderjet” fighters high into the red dawn, towards the terrible wrath of the world’s first hydrogen bomb. The detonation itself had occurred about 90 minutes earlier, and now the massive seething mushroom cloud had ascended to heights well above his plane flight ceiling at 55,000 feet. He and his mates would enter the cloud at 40,000 feet, hoping they would not have any problem with the B-17s.

  If any had been close enough to see those planes, they would have thought a ghostly flight of old WWII bombers was lost at sea, wandering aimlessly through time to appear there in 1952. Had they flown close enough, Meroney and his mates would have seen the cockpits were empty, with no sign of any pilot or crew. They were drones, all radio controlled from another piloted B-17 that was guiding them into the great mushroom cloud. Their wings mounted special boxes with filter paper intended to capture tiny radioactive particles from the blast, stuff the world would come to call “fallout.” They were harvesting the last remnants of the island Harada and Fukada were staring at from the weather deck of Takami.

  “Red Flight, Red Flight, this is Convair Control, do you copy. Over.”

  Meroney toggled his radio and returned. “Roger that, Convair One. This is Red Flight Leader on final approach. Over.”

  “Roger Red Flight Leader. You are cleared for stem entry. Go with God. Over.”

  Stem entry…

  They were all going to fly right through the stem of the massive mushroom cloud. It towered up and up, over 57,000 feet, a mass of black char and pallid red orange clouds. Meroney had no idea what they would find within that column of doom.

  “Red Flight leader to group,” he called. “Follow me…”

  He looked over and saw his wingman, Captain Bob Hagan, and Captain Jimmy Robinson just off his wing on the right.

  “Lord almighty,” came Hagan. “It’s a dark boiling slice of hell on earth.”

  “Roger, Red Flight,” said Meroney, “Watch your temperature and infrared in there, not to mention that Rad counter. If either one gets too hot, break off and take evasive maneuvers.”

  Robinson would be the first man to get into trouble. Deep within the mushroom stem, he became disoriented, and then his temperature gauge warned him he was headed right into an inferno. He pulled on the stick, banking away from the heat mass, his plane stalling as he turned too tight, and soon he was plummeting down through the terrible mass of the column.

  “I’m spinning out!”

  Meroney heard Robinson’s distress call, and his was breath heavy as he struggled to regain control of his plane. It was a long tense moment, the Flight Leader listening to his mate struggling to survive, a fallen angel, felled by the power of that bomb. Then, Robinson’s voice came back reporting he had regained control at 20,000 feet. Meroney looked over his shoulder, seeing that Hagan was still there off his wing.

  “Hold on down there, Jimmy. We’re coming down to look for you. Over.” He gave Hagan the thumbs up, then banked to begin the descent. Even as he sent that last message, the radio call broke up with static, and he could see his navigational readouts were all messed up. They had been told to expect electromagnetic interference from the bomb, but it was most disorienting when it happened. There they were, lost in that massive red black cloud, unable to see the way out, or read their true compass heading, and unable to speak to one another over the static.

  Down at 20,000 feet they were going to eat up a lot more fuel, but there was a tanker down there somewhere, orbiting the stem of that mushroom, if they could find it. Meroney had lost contact with Hagan as they descended, but he was the first to break out in to the clear, having flown right through that mushroom stem. There was suddenly a clear spot in the static, the speaker wash fading out briefly, so Meroney ordered the other two pilots to get out of that cloud mass and head for home. He had decided he would continue to circle, looking for Robinson or that fuel tanker, though he never saw either plane.

  A long hour passed, with the Flight Leader nervously watching his fuel gauge. If he had his wingtip fuel pods on, he wouldn’t have had to worry so much, but they had mounted the cloud filter pods there instead, and all he was carrying was radioactive fallout. He imagined it glowing softly within those collection pods at the tip of each wing, not really grasping what radiation truly was.

  It wasn’t the first time his plane had flown a mission like this. There had been a whole series of tests before Ivy Mike lit up the skies over Eniwetok. The planes would fly through those mushrooms, much smaller than this one. Big Mike was the scariest thing he had ever seen in his life. Yet Meroney’s plane should have been towed into a pit, doused with kerosene and set on fire long ago. They would try to decontaminate it after every mission, washing down the wings and fuselage with “gunk” as they called it, but you couldn’t get at the insides of the engine. The air intake in the nose would suck in all that fallout as well, and it would be forever lodged within the long fuselage of the plane.

  He was flying a radioactive fighter, but Meroney was a very skilled pilot, first learning his chops as a fighter pilot on a P-47. He got nine kills with that plane in Europe, before a lucky flak burst took down his fighter, and he spent the rest of the war as a P.O.W. in Germany.

  After the war he served as a Flight Instructor at Luke Field, happy to trade in his P-47 Thunderbolt for the new F-84 Thunderjet. In 1952, he mustered out to Kwajalein Atoll, and now he was out there looking at Ivy Mike. His fuel low, now it was time to head for the field at Eniwetok, but he would later learn that one of his mates, Jimmy Robinson, never made it safely back to Kwajalein. Captain Hagan barely made it himself, coming in dry and flying by the seat of his pants as he glided the plane to a rough landing.

  But there was no sign of Robinson. One of the rescue helo pilots said he thought he saw a plane low over the water, its canopy off, as if the pilot was planning to eject. That would have been a hazardous adventure, shooting up out of that lead lined cockpit, wearing that lead vest and a pair of lead lined gloves to help protect him from all that radiation in the mushroom cloud. Hit the water with that vest on, and you would sink like a stone.

  But Robinson was never seen again, nor was his plane. If they hit the water off Kwajalein, they did not do so in the year 1952, and no one ever knew where Jimmy ended up—not even Robinson himself…. As for those B-17 drones, they were never seen by anyone again either, at least not anyone there in 1952.

  * * *

  “Con—Radar, Contact! Right on top of us!” Lieutenant Ryoko Otani gave Harada a wide eyed look. “It came from out of nowhere!”

  “The first thing that entered Harada’s mind was that it was a stealth fighter, but that was just reflex. There were no stealth aircraft flying the skies of 1943. Then he heard it, the drone of heavy engines, very low, a long distended hum. He ran out onto the weather deck and Fukada was spellbound with his field glasses.

  “American bombers!” he said. “Where the hell did they come from? They flew right over us. For God’s sake, are we still EMCON?”

  “No,” said Harada. “I fired up SPY-1D hours ago, but Otani says they just appeared.”

  “She had nothing on them earlier? Hell, we should have seen them half an hour ago.” Fukada was understandably upset. “Has to be a recon mission,” he said. “But from where?”

  “Well, they just got an eyeful…” Harada considered what to do. “With me, XO.” He headed for the bridge, seeing the crew there tense and alert. They had been languishing here in a backwaters region of the Pacific, far from any threat.”

  “Ensign Shiota—are we still getting static on the comm?”

  “Aye sir, but I can’t figure why.”

  Both h
is ladies were hard at work now, each one wearing a bemused expression. If his equipment was in order, there was no way Takami could have failed to spot those bombers inbound on their position. What was going on here? Where could they have come from?

  “Lieutenant Ikida,” he said sharply. “Look up the range of the American B-17 bomber. I want to know where they could have flown from.”

  He looked at Fukada. “Could this be a Doolittle thing?”

  “With a B-17? Not possible. No. They had to come from a land base somewhere.”

  “Sir,” said Ikida, looking at a map display. “Howland and Baker Islands are about 1400 nautical miles off, Midway is about 1500 and Johnston Atoll about 1660. If they were coming from any of those islands it would have to be a one way trip. The range on that plane was about 1700 nautical miles.”

  “We own everything else out here,” said Fukada. “This is damn odd.”

  “Sir,” said Otani. “Contact lost. I have nothing on my screen at all now.”

  Harada turned and walked over to her station. “Nothing? What about targeting radars? Is SPY-1 having a fit?”

  “Not from what I can see here, sir. I’m getting all sea level landforms bright and clear. But those bombers are gone. It’s as if they just flew through a hole in the sky.”

  “So they came from out of nowhere, and then just flew through a hole in the sky. Dammit, Otani, run a full diagnostic on that system—right now.”

  “Aye sir.” She gave him a sheepish look.

  Harada listened… The sound was gone. He stepped outside onto the weather deck again, squinting at the sky, but could see nothing. Then it happened, the faint shudder, a tremulous vibration that clearly shook his ship. The pulse of alarm quickened within him, and all he could think of was a torpedo, or an unseen bomb, his head looking forward and aft for any sign of an explosion. All was in order.

  He heard a sound, low and deep, like some dark beast growling at him from the edge of the distant horizon. It filled him with an unaccountable feeling of dread, and he backed slowly through the open hatch, seeking the relative safety of the bridge again. Everyone else could hear it, their faces wearing blank expressions, eyes searching, heads inclined, listening. Fukada looked at him, for the last time they had heard anything remotely like that sound was the moment they had shifted here, the moment that damn volcano had gone off in 1942, creating a hole in time so vast that it had literally sucked the ship and crew into the past.

  It was not Krakatoa they were listening to now, but a monster made by men like Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam. They were listening to Ivy Mike. Its sound was so deep and penetrating that it rolled back upon them like the thunder from an unseen storm, nine long years into the past, rumbling over the lagoon. They were drifting there in the stillness of 1943, no more than a kilometer from Elugelab island, which was ground zero on All Hallows Eve in 1952.

  Ivy Mike was shaking all the days and weeks between that moment and the instant it burst into fiery life, but the hole it was opening in time would stretch both directions, to the future as well as the past….

  * * *

  The situation in 2021 had gone from bad to worse, nine days of increasing tensions that deepened to open hostilities on both land and sea. An oil tanker had been targeted by terrorists in the Straits of Hormuz, a ship owned by one Fairchild Incorporated. US Marines had landed on Abu Musa Island in reprisal, and there had been another serious incident in the Gulf of Mexico. The massive Thunderhorse platform had been battered by the raging fury of a hurricane, but its demise was hastened by a torpedo off the Russian submarine Tigr, and that sub was then attacked by US forces and destroyed.

  The Red banner Fleet had sortied from both Severomorsk and Vladivostok, the latter led by the flagship of the fleet, the mighty Kirov under Captain Vladimir Karpov. There had already been naval skirmishes near the Diaoyutai / Senkaku Islands, as China and Japan tussled over those uninhabited rocks like dogs fighting for a bone. The Russians had moved out of the Sea of Okhotsk to make a show of force, where they encountered a Carrier Battlegroup from the US 7th Fleet under Captain Tanner. Sparks flew soon after a heated discussion between Karpov and Tanner, and then the planes and missiles flew after them.

  There in the midst of that terrible action, the Demon Volcano had rumbled to life, even as China sent its most advanced new missiles and planes in wave after wave against her wayward son, Taiwan. Ships and aircraft were moving on every side, but when Kirov and two other Russian ships suddenly disappeared near the site of that volcano, it created a mystery that would haunt the decades past.

  Kirov and Karpov had already wounded their enemy, CV Washington, but the Americans believed that they had sunk the Russian battlegroup. Now they were moving to rapidly reinforce their Pacific allies, with forces mustering at Guam, including strategic bomber groups that would soon be aimed at China.

  One of those replenishment operations was the transfer of fighter aircraft meant to reinforce the Japanese Navy. Japan now saw her position becoming more and more uncertain as the war began to escalate. Her first line of defense was the small yet highly professional Navy she fielded, and like her ancestors in the Second World War, there was a layer of shadow that masked some of the potential combat power of that fleet.

  The modern Japanese Navy had a number of small helicopter carriers in the early 21st Century, some with famous names. There were three small Osumi Class amphibious Assault ships at 14,000 tons, with deck space for eight helicopters and a pair of fast hydrofoil landing craft. Next came the Hyuga class, two ships named after the venerable old battleships Hyuga and Ise, but they were 19,000 ton Helicopter Destroyers instead, and capable of carrying 18 helos. Finally the next evolution of this line came with the commissioning of the full-fledged helicopter carrier Izumo, which could carry 28 aircraft. Officially, those aircraft were to be helicopters, but at 27,000 tons, Izumo had the size and stability to carry jet fighters as well, and by 2021 she had two sister ships with wizened and honorable names—Kaga, launched in the year 2017, and Akagi joining the fleet in 2020.

  Their deck coatings had been specially modified to resist high temperatures, and the elevators adjusted to receive some very special guests, the F-35B Lightning II strike fighter. Akagi already had good experience with fighter operations, and it had been a part of the skirmish with the Chinese days ago before being ordered to transfer all aircraft to the Izumo to clear her decks, and make this secret rendezvous.

  So Japan was pulling a little sleight of hand here again, just as it had done in the last war with the Shadow Fleet. It had carriers posing as helicopter destroyers, and now, all Japan needed were the planes the Americans were sending them.

  Both ships were out to sea that day, forming the heart of an eight ship task force that consisted of the carriers Akagi and Kaga, with the Aegis Class Destroyer Atago, the first ship in the class that had given rise to Captain Harada’s Takami. Two older guided missile destroyers, again with famous names, Kongo and Kirishima, were nearly as powerful as Takami, with 90 VLS cells each.

  They were joined by another of Japan’s newest destroyers, DD-120 the Takao, which was the second ship in the new Asahi Class. While not as powerful as the DDG class ships, it was a very capable close escort for the carriers, with 32 VLS cells firing a mix of Evolved Sea Sparrows and the RUM-139 ASROCs against subs.

  The big 25,000 ton oiler and fleet replenishment ship Omi was also in attendance, for they were going a long way from home waters, and that ship was escorted by the last member of the group, the smaller 7,500 ton helicopter destroyer Kurama. That ship was included to buck up ASW defense, because the two larger carriers had gone to sea deliberately light, with just six helos each.

  There was a reason for that. Akagi and Kaga had just made a secret rendezvous with a US carrier task force out of Pearl Harbor the previous day, and there they received a gift from the United States, two squadrons of the planes that would make all the difference, transforming the carriers from stolid though capable caterpillars
to soaring tiger moths.

  The fighter that would convert those ships to light strike and air defense carriers worth the name was the Lockheed Martin F-35B combat jet, and the US had flown in 18 Lightning IIs, nine for each of the two carriers. They were all planes that had been purchased by Japan in prior years and this was a perfectly good time to deliver on that contract, for the US would simply be bolstering a Pacific ally, and increasing overall capability in the region. The ships were also big enough to carry the USMV-22 Ospreys to allow for expanded amphibious and strike warfare missions—and they would get two of those each.

  So there was a good chunk of the Japanese Maritime Naval Defense Force out to sea that day, designated the Kaijō Jieitai. They had met the Americans at a very convenient half way point between Japan and Pearl Harbor, not the island of Midway, as it was thought that would revive memories of old wounds. Instead they chose an otherwise humdrum atoll in the midst of the Pacific, a former wartime base that had been used by both sides, Eniwetok.

  Chapter 3

  Vice Admiral Kita was now satisfied that his nation would have all the capability it would need to return to the home waters and provide for maritime security. Unfortunately, he would never get there. His line of fate would now become entangled with the fate of one of his wayward Captains, and a ship that had been reported lost the previous day in the Sunda Strait. The Americans would have everything to do with his dilemma, for the same hand that had empowered him, would soon be raised against him, albeit in another era, another world, as he would soon come to surmise.

  It had been all Hallows Eve, the 31st of October, 2021 when they heard the low rumble emanating from the sea. His task force had completed the rendezvous, receiving the much coveted F-35 strike fighters the previous day, and the American were now far to the south, bound for Guam. Before the war, he had little use for them, believing that it was high time for Japan to come out from behind the protective skirts of the US 7th Fleet. They Americans were, in his mind, a useful annoyance, though he could not fault their equipment and technology. Here they would offer Japan things that Toyota and Honda could not build, though the inverse was also true, as Japanese cards had dominated the freeways of the us for decades.