Lions at Dawn (Kirov Series Book 28) Read online

  Kita had lingered just north of Eniwetok, completing refueling operations for his smaller destroyers before beginning the journey home. The real crisis point was now Taiwan, and the Americans were massing their carrier power to challenge the Chinese there. The Russian fleet was no longer deemed a threat, though there had been yet another incident involving a Russian Submarine in the Sea of Japan. It was engaged, and believe destroyed, though no one could be certain of that.

  After the Senkaku incident, both Akagi and Kirishima were rushed to join his task force bound for Eniwetok. Now he was ready to take those precious F-35’s home, but Ivy Mike had other plans for him that day. There would only be one consolation for the fate that befell him, and that would be the unexpected reunion with a ship the Navy had believed lost, one of their newest and best, DDG-180, the Takami.

  * * *

  Otani could not believe her eyes. She had been feverishly running her diagnostic routines, testing each panel of the SPY-1D system in, and then running full integrated four panel tests to verify all was in order. She had no fault readings of any kind, and could not surmise what could have gone wrong—until it happened again. Contacts—this time on the surface, and very close!

  “Con—Radar. Surface contact, bearing true north. Range…. Just 3000 meters!”

  “What?” Harada did not have to ask her what in the world she was talking about. All he had to do was turn his head and look. At that same moment, Lieutenant Commander Fukada came rushing in from the weather deck.

  “Captain! Ships off the starboard bow! They’re flying our colors.”

  “Damnit, Otani. I thought I told you to run a full diagnostic.”

  “I did, sir. Just completed it. I have no fault readings at all. My screen was clear, and then…”

  “What’s out there, Fukada?”

  His XO simply smiled. “Come have a look for yourself. They’re ours, all of them. Look there, that’s big fat Omi on fleet replenishment. And those have to be two Izumo class carriers! There’s our sister ship, Atago!” He gave Harada an elated look. “We’re home!”

  Harada was standing dumfounded, hands on his hips, his mind almost unwilling to believe what his eyes were telling him. Yet the distinctive lines of the ships were unmistakable. It was the Akagi, and undoubtedly her sister ship Kaga, but what in the world were they doing out here? Was Fukada correct? Did they shift again? Were they home at long last?

  Now the trembling vibration he had felt came to mind, the ominous low rumble that had everyone on the bridge on edge. It was much akin to the same sound they had heard when they made that impossible shift to the past. It must have happened again—who knew why—but they were home. There could be no other explanation.

  Then he looked over his shoulder, thinking to see other friendly ships about, but what he saw instead stole away all his joy. There, sitting it the serene silence of the Pacific, its white shores washed by gentle surf, was the island of Elugelab.

  “Number one….”

  Fukada turned his way, still grinning widely.

  “Are you certain about that story you told me?”

  “Sir? What story?”

  “About that big American H-Bomb.”

  “Of course. What of it?”

  “Well isn’t that the island you said the damn thing vaporized?”

  Now Fukada stood and stared himself. There it was, Elugelab, but that simply could not be. That island was destroyed, pulverized, blown off the face of the earth by Ivy Mike. If they were home, then all they should be seeing there now was a deep blue hole in the sea. He looked left and right, thinking the ship must have drifted, but the familiar landforms he had seen earlier were still there, and so was Elugelab.

  “But sir,” he said haltingly. “This can’t be correct. If that’s Eugelab, then—”

  “Then we haven’t moved after all,” said Harada. “We haven’t moved at all and it’s still 1943. Where’s the Kazahaya?”

  “There, sir.” Fukada pointed off their bow, where the WWII Oiler was still holding position at anchor near the edge of the lagoon.

  “By all gods and kami,” said Harada. “If we haven’t moved, and those ships are real…”

  “They came to us!” Fukada’s eyes were wide now. “Sir, maybe they found a way to get through to us. Who knows how? Maybe this is a rescue mission.”

  It wasn’t, as Admiral Kita was soon to find out aboard the Kaga.

  “Admiral, sir, we have two contacts off the port side of the ship. They just appeared on radar.” Chief of the Watch, Kenji Omani, pointed out the ships he was seeing, and Admiral Kita squinted, clearly unhappy.

  “Contacts? That looks like Atago is out of position. What are they doing over there?”

  “No sir. There’s Atago, maintaining station abeam of Akagi, just as she should be.”

  “Con—we have a secure radio transmission, and the ship ID is DDG -180. It’s Takami!”

  Admiral Kita was a no nonsense, professional officer, young at just 45 years to have the position he now held, but already graying at the temples. He was a rising star in the new Japanese Navy, the Kaijō Jieitai, and one who had seen the coming of this war with China as inevitable. When Takami was reported missing on her return voyage from those exercises with the Australians, he strongly suspected that she had been ambushed and killed by a submarine, though even after an extensive maritime search by units of the Australian and Indonesian fleets, not a single trace of the ship had been found.

  Then events had made it impossible to prosecute that search further. China was firing missiles at Taiwan, and it would only be a matter of days before they aimed them at Japan. The “incident” off the Senkaku Islands had confirmed his worst suspicions. A Chinese Submarine had fired on the light frigate Oyoko, and one of the ships here with him today had settled the score, the missile destroyer Kirishima, commanded by Captain Kenji Namura. He had destroyed the Chinese sub, which was later identified as the Li Zhu.

  Then the Chinese planes had come seeking vengeance, and his equally capable carrier Captain, Shoji Yoshida, had launched fighters from the decks of Akagi, the first group of F-35Bs ever to fly a real combat sortie for Japan. The Chinese air force had learned they were not quite a match for the Silent Eagles and hidden Lightning in the sky that day, though their reprisal sent the dread Dongfeng missiles into the sky to strike Naha airfield on Okinawa. It had been a limited but pointed attack, the first time a foreign nation had delivered ordnance against the Japanese homeland soil since WWII. Yet this was nothing compared to the escalating conflict with the United States.

  China had taken out an American spy satellite with lasers. The US retaliated with hypersonic missiles on the launch sites, an attack that had penetrated deeply into the Chinese mainland. The Great Red Dragon then took the unprecedented step of launching a missile over the west coast of the US, initiating an EMP attack that caused widespread disruption of the electrical system. While the real damage was not as serious as first believed, it struck a chilling note in the dark symphony that was now playing on the world stage. The weapons of this third war were more potent that anything mankind had ever seen. When the Americans had tested Ivy Mike, even as early as All Hallows Eve of 1952, they released more raw killing power than all the bombs and shells fired throughout the entire Second World War.

  And Ivy Mike had done one more amazing thing—it had sent Admiral Kita and his entire task force into the hole it time it had opened, a tunnel boring into the past even as it reached into the distant future. Kita’s ships just happened to be in exactly the right place, at exactly the right time, and something in the gravity exerted by one of their kinsman, JS Takami, pulled them inexorably back in time to the year 1943.

  The hour, day and year they would soon find themselves in would shock Admiral Kita to the core. There was Takami, looking well and alive, and the first thought that hit Kita’s mind was that the ship had been assigned some top secret assignment, and that had been the real reason for its disappearance. Now it had obviousl
y been ordered to make this rendezvous, but he would soon find out that the real truth of this situation was even stranger than he could possibly imagine.

  * * *

  “Sir, we’ve confirmed there is no equipment malfunction on our end. I have reports from Kongo, Kirishima and Atago, and all their equipment checks out. The problem has to be upstairs.” Lieutenant Hayata eyed the ceiling, but he was meaning to look well beyond it, beyond the atmosphere in fact, where the satellites they would communicate with would be making their silent orbits. “We’ve lost all command level links, sir—GPS is down too.” He handed the Admiral a status board, which Kita eyed briefly before nodding.

  Two ships had just appeared, seemingly out of thin air. One he knew and their own long lost destroyer, Takami, the other was as yet a mystery. At that moment, Captain Harada walked in through the main hatch to the bridge, saluting, and that mystery would soon become sheer madness. Fukada followed him like a shadow, for the two were the heart of all that had happened here, and the only men really responsible.

  Kita looked them over, then extended a hand to the Captain. “You’ve been missed,” he said with a warm smile. “And I hope you have some news for me about all that.”

  “Yes sir,” said Harada. “Might we meet in your stateroom?”

  “Very well.”

  They were meeting aboard the task force flagship, Kaga, and as they walked, the Admiral gave them a running briefing of their situation. “Strange,” he said, “but we’ve lost all comm-links with Yokohama. Can’t reach Sasebo either, and all our satellite connections are down—GPS, the works. How are your links?”

  “The same,” said Harada.

  “I don’t like it,” said Kita. “Things have been pretty wild the last few days, particularly after that tit-for-tat between China and the US. I can see how we might lose some of these links in an emergency, but all of them? We can’t raise anyone in Japan—Kure, Maizuru, Ominato—silent as mice.”

  Fukada was exhilarated with what had happened. Yet now he realized the difficulty of what they had to do here. In truth, even they did not really know what had happened, but there was Kaga, and here was Kita, a man both these officers knew well, and respected.

  “Alright Captain, what were your orders? No one told us to expect company. Where were you—lurking in a bank off fog out here somewhere? You just appeared on our screens a moment ago, and that’s damn strange. For that matter, what’s that other ship at anchor out there?”

  “Sir,” said Harada. “I’m afraid we’ve quite a tale to tell here. As you know, we were returning from that joint operation with the Australians, and had just passed through the Sunda Strait…”

  * * *

  “1943?” The Vice Admiral looked at Captain Harada, somewhat aghast that an officer of his experience and maturity would even suggest such a nonsensical thing. “This is no time for levity, Captain. The silence on all our comm-links is deafening. The homeland could be under attack at this minute.”

  “Sir,” said Fukada, “I can assure you, the homeland is safe here at the moment, at least for the time being. I know that what we’ve told you sounds fantastic, but you can have your navigator confirm all that sun and moon data Commander Fukada mentioned, and you’ll soon see that this isn’t October. It is in fact, January, and when he’s done with that, here’s a chart of what these islands off our port side should look like here. One look out that port hole will tell you something is amiss. That’s the island of Elugelab out there.”

  “What of it?”

  “Sir, that island won’t be on any of our charts. It was vaporized in 1952 during an American nuclear bomb test here. It no longer exists, but yet, there it is. Your Navigator will confirm that as well.”

  “Now you can’t stand there and tell me this task force has sailed off into Yomi.” The Admiral gave Fukada a hard look. “I want some answers here, and enough with the nonsense.”

  Yomi was the mythical Land of the Dead, the world of darkness in Japanese Shinto mythology, and Fukada passed a moment thinking how they were going to explain that the life and world the Admiral came from were gone, at least for now, if not forever. They had hoped the Admiral’s task force was a rescue mission, as farfetched as even that seemed. How could Kita simply lead his ships into the past to make this timely rendezvous with Takami. By what means would he have done so? Yet there he was, unaccountable, as much a surprise to Harada and Fukada as they were to him.

  “Admiral,” said Harada. “This is going to get worse before it gets better, and it’s going to take some time. My XO is correct. That is Elugelab out there, and there’s your first clue as to the truth of what we’ve just told you. The sun and moon data will back it up. You won’t raise anyone on normal comm-links here, but have your radioman tune in to a set of frequencies we’ll give you today. For that matter, just start monitoring the AM or FM bands. You’ll start picking up what you could only call ‘yesterday’s news.’ And right out there,” he pointed, “That’s the fleet oiler Kazahaya. We just took on fuel and we were about to escort it home to Yokohama.”

  “Kazahaya? Never heard of it.”

  “Of course, sir, because that ship was laid down in September of 1941… and it was sunk by a pair of US submarines in October of 1943. There it is. Board it. Go yourself with a detail of Marines. We’d be happy to accompany you, and when we’re done, send a helo up and overfly the main airfield at Eniwetok. There was a 6,800 foot bomber field built there by the Americans in 1944. You won’t find it there now, just a small airstrip. There isn’t much there at all now, just a small seaplane base on Parry Island. Go have a look, and on the way there, check our Runit Island. Look for the Fish Eye, and you’ll see that’s gone too. That ground is still radioactive in our time, but not now. It’s pristine. You won’t find the slightest hint of radiation anywhere in the atoll, and this place was hit with over eighty detonations after the war. It’s going to be a case of seeing is believing for you over the next few days, just as it was for us. But everything you see and hear—everything—is going to back up what we’ve just told you.”

  Part II

  Operation Phoenix

  “Up then, fair phoenix… Be thou a new star, that to us portends

  Ends of much wonder; and be thou those ends.”

  —John Donne

  Chapter 4

  General Dwight D. Eisenhower sat at the head of the table, looking down the line of personalities on either side. The British were there with Air Marshal William Welsh, a quiet yet competent man who had started in the Merchant Navy in 1910 before becoming a test pilot in the first war. Then he worked through various positions in the Middle East, leading Air Squadrons in Palestine and Syria, managing technical training and air supply operations. At his side was Middle East Theater Commander Wavell, one eye shielded with a patch, looking just a little more grey, and very worn. He had stayed at his post largely because of his secret knowledge of Kirov, Kinlan, and the true origin of both, though Churchill had seen that he was flush with a number of able subordinates now, like Auchinleck and Alexander.

  On his left sat the implacable and stolid figure of General Montgomery, Britain’s Rock, both east and west, always happy to wear such a moniker on his small round shoulders. Today, however, he appeared as a no-nonsense soldier, dressed in plain khaki kit with the telltale beret sitting on the table before him. Monty had been very busy, carefully managing the transfer of British forces from Spain, and receiving new units, equipment and supplies through the ports of Oran and Algiers. He glanced occasionally at Patton, who sat opposite him on the American side of the table, an amiable grin on his face in spite of his impatience to get on with this war. General Omar Bradley, sat on Patton’s left, another quiet and unassuming man that Eisenhower had cleverly sent to Patton to keep an eye on things. The colorful Brigadier General James Doolittle, Senior USAAF commander, rounded out the American delegation.

  “Alright,” said Eisenhower. “We’ve sat on things here long enough. It’s taken us the better
part of three months just to sort out the logistics here. Thus far, I would have to say that our operations in Algeria have violated every recognized principle of war, are in conflict with all operational and logistical methods laid down in textbooks, and will be condemned in their entirety by all Leavenworth and War College classes for the next twenty-five years! That stops now. This meeting is to coordinate the new offensive, and I’m told they picked a doozy of a name for it this time—BLADERUNNER.”

  There had been an advanced combined arms team called “Blade Force” composed of both British and American troops early on as the Allies pushed into Algeria, and the name had sprung from that.

  “Operation Torch succeeded in spite of the logistical mess,” said Ike. “We cleared Morocco, chased the Germans out of Spain, liberated Gibraltar, and pushed half way across Algeria before they dug in their heels and stopped us. They wouldn’t have stopped us if we had been able to move faster, but now we meet to address that shortcoming. At the same time, General’s Wavell and O’Connor cleared all of Cyrenaica and now they’re ready to push on for Tripoli. That’s his operation out east. For us here in Algeria, the aim is Tunis and Bizerte, and complete control of North Africa. But General Wavell, what in God’s name happened at Tobruk?”

  Wavell had expected the question, asked more for the benefit of other officers who had heard more rumors about it than explanations. He cleared his throat, smiled, and gave the stock reply that had been devised by the British to cover the debacle.