John Schettler: Devil's Garden

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?

* * *

ZiggySprague 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.

Yeltsinwas 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.