John Schettler - Lions at Dawn

“ Doshitano! What’s that crazy Russian doing?”

“Brace for shockwave!” said Fukada. “Recommend all systems move to EMCON status.”

“A little late for that,” said Harada. Then they felt the palpable wave in the atmosphere, the much dissipated shock wave passing the ship, and the moan of a lonesome wind. They were over 75 nautical miles from the position of the detonation, and so they didn’t expect any effects beyond that shock wave, or perhaps some EMP damage.

“This guy is a lunatic,” said Harada.

“No, he’s just damn smart,” said Fukada. “All our planes off the Kaga reported safe bomb delivery, we had over sixty GBU/53s inbound on those bastards. They were toast. It was only a matter of time.”

“So Karpov threw a nuke at them?”

“Obviously,” said Fukada. “There was no way he’d knock down even half of those Vampires, but if he positioned that blast right, he could take out everything there on that northern attack axis. That’s exactly what he did.

Ryoko Otani sounded off, reporting her system was experiencing difficulty. “Just got a hard flutter through the whole board,” she said. “I thought we were going to lose power.”

“Could be the EMP pulse,” said Fukada.

They would not have any time to think about it, nor would they have solved the problem if they did. That flutter was not any part of the residual shock wave from that blast, which was very attenuated at that range; not even enough to roll the ship. Nor was it EMP effects. The ripple was a small temblor in time, or rather spacetime, as Einstein would have it. We didn’t live in space, with time being nothing more than a contrived metric we superimposed on all our doings. We lived in spacetime, and Einstein had already showed us that it could be warped and bent by mass. It could also be broken and even shattered.

200 kilotons was not much compared to the larger explosive events that had battered spacetime. The Demon Volcano that had sent Kirov and his flotilla careening back through time to 1945 had power equivalent to 200 Megatons, a thousand times greater than Karpov’s warhead. The same could be said for the massive eruption of Krakatoa that first brought Takami and crew to this time. So it was a relatively light tap on the fabric of spacetime, all things considered. Yet for Kirov , possessing some rather exotic materials lurking within her control rods, the effect was enough to phase the ship for the briefest moment for those aboard. For those stalking her, the ship would disappear from all their radar screens for over ten minutes before it reappeared.

“I’ve lost Kirov ,” said Otani. “The system is just guesstimating now.” SPY-1 was only reporting the last known location of the contact, and drawing an expanding area around it that encompassed all possible locations where it might have moved as the seconds ticked off—their electronic ‘farthest on.’

“Mister Nakano,” said Harada. “Do you still have that sub?”

“Aye sir, but it’s changing depth, climbing through 300 feet and reducing speed.”

Harada didn’t like the sound of that. Seconds later he heard what he had been fearing when his Sonarman called out: “Torpedo in the water! Bearing southeast, range 11 nautical miles and inbound on our position at 30 knots.”

“Helm, come hard right to 270 and ahead full!”

“Aye sir. Coming to 270 and all ahead full.” Harada was turning and running away from the torpedo. His ship could make those 30 knots easily enough, and those fish would never catch him… Surely that Russian sub Captain had to know that….

“Damn! Why you sly son-of-a-bitch,” Harada breathed. “He wanted to see if we had a fix on him! He wanted me to do exactly what I just ordered, and now he knows we had him in red. He’s coming up to run shallow at missile firing depth. That’s one cagey sub driver. Alright people, get everything hot, and I mean everything. Charge the laser and stand up the SM-2 system. We’re about to have unfriendly visitors.”

Kazan had finished firing at 11:41, and the missile warning had shaken the bridge to tense alertness. They were coming, blistering fast, and only seconds away at this range of just under eleven nautical miles. The air defense system was on full automatic, the aft deck cells on the SM-2 were already firing. The first missiles out would have a ghost of a chance at getting those Zircons, and in the first group of four, two of them would get hits.

But not a single missile fired after that would find its target. The Vampires were so close that they could not achieve their top speed in this short timeframe, but they were still coming very fast. A second after those first two kills, the ship’s Phalanx guns were grinding away at the incoming missiles, and had perhaps a 35% chance of hitting something in this equation, but they were not good enough that day. The Zircon was just too fast.

Three seconds later, Takami showed the Vampires some leg. The ship deployed its Mk 182 Chaff in an attempt to seduce the sensors on the incoming missiles. That had no more than a 10% chance of success, and it failed. They heard the laser fire and saw the bright explosion off the aft port quarter when it hit. There were three vampires left.

The SM-2s were still firing, but the Vampires weren’t going to be stopped by a missile now, they were too damn close. The J/NOLQ-2 ECM defensive jammer was trying to fry their brains, and it spoofed one of the missiles, causing it to malfunction, but the other two came ramming home. One hit the fantail, and they were lucky there was no Seahawk there being armed and fueled for operations. It came in a little high, the explosion a bright fireball that was mostly an air burst. It was as if the missile scudded right off the deck when it hit.

The other Zircon was fast and true, and it plowed right into Takami’s gut, achieving near 100% penetration. The explosion rocked the ship heavily, like a boxer being hit low. Takami rolled back through the black smoke, critically wounded. There was a flash on the bridge and then all systems went dark as the ship’s power failed. Heavy smoke obscured everything and the fire alarms were going crazy. Almost all the fuel that Zircon could have used to run out hundreds of kilometers was now feeding that fire.

The entire engagement had taken just twelve seconds, and the ship would not survive that hit. The destroyer listed heavily to port, shipping water from the enormous hole in the hull. The eight shiny new SSMs they had taken on from Omi would never be fired, nor would Fukada ever get to take a poke at his enemy with that rail gun at long range. Harada knew it was now only a question of trying to save as much of his crew as he could. He turned to Fukada, looked him in the eye, and gave the order: “All hands, make ready to abandon ship!”

Admiral Yamamoto’s Guardian Angel was out of the game.

“Admiral!” said Rodenko. “ Kazan has launched missiles on Takami! ”

“Show me.” Karpov rushed over, almost too late for Rodenko to point out the radar contacts.

“It’s about time,” Karpov breathed.

“Look how close he was, inside eleven miles. That’s an explosion, sir. They got at least one hit.”

“Excellent!” Karpov stood up, smiling and looking for Fedorov. “So much for this Captain Harada’s little game out here. Now he knows we mean business, if he even survived that. What did Gromyko throw at him?”

“Six Zircons,” said Rodenko. “Damn, sir. They were so close.”

“I think we can safely say that ship is dead. But what about these other bears out here north of Takami?”

Turkey 1 was still feeding them data, in spite of local interference as a residual effect of that nuke. They had seen three more contacts well north of Takami , effectively pegging the positions of Kirishima, Kongo and Atago . It was Takami three times over, and behind them there was still Admiral Kita with the carriers Kaga and Akagi , and that still left both the destroyer Takao and DDH Kurama in reserve.