John Schettler - Fallen Angels - 9 Days Falling, Volume II

“I understand how you feel, Admiral, but one thing in this report set my mind on this and prompted me to get over here and see you. Is it true that your reconnaissance flight reported the use of naval rocketry in that incident?”

“Rocketry? Like those Stooges you’ve been experimenting with?”

“Something of that sort.”

Halsey wondered what Fraser was driving at. He seemed to be nibbling about the edges of something, and the Bull was not one to be indirect. “Yes there was some mention of rockets in the radio intercept. Our radar picket was monitoring the flight when those ships opened up on our boys. You would think, Admiral, that if these were Russian ships, our allies , that they would be a little more discreet in picking their targets.”

“Might they have suspected your planes were Japanese?”

“You and I both know that’s a load of bull feathers,” Halsey brushed the notion aside. “We were flying big blue Hellcats with a bright white star of the wings. All five planes overflew the contact, so those ships must have gotten a real good look at them. Our boys came around for a photo run and they opened up on them, and that’s the end of it. Now, I don’t care if they have some kind of amphibious operation up there in the Kuriles or not. We have no interest in that. Hell, we even gave the Russians the goddamned troop transports so they could land on the islands! This is one hell of a way to say thank you. Nimitz thinks they have plans to land on Hokkaido, and I’m sorry to say that they will do nothing of the kind.”

Fraser realized that none of this was getting him where he needed to go. He’d come all this way to see if he could gain more information on this incident, and to possibly let the Americans know what they might be dealing with, but Halsey seemed as clueless about the situation as anyone else. He had to find a way to convey the real danger in the moment, and now he began to see that half truths and innuendo would simply not do. A man like Halsey wanted it straight and undiluted, like a good shot of whiskey. He decided he had better fill his glass.

“Admiral, suppose I told you that your Desron 7 had nothing whatsoever to do with the outcome of that incident in the North Atlantic. There was no heroic sacrifice by your gallant destroyers as reported in your newspapers. Suppose I told you that the ship you believed was a German raider was nothing of the sort, and that it wasn’t sunk that day—the day your Mississippi went down. Suppose I told you that you lost that ship, and the others in TF.16, when it was hit by a weapon of unimaginable power, enough TNT to take out an entire fleet if it was concentrated like that, or to obliterate an entire city. I think you know what I may mean when I describe a weapon like this. You Americans have been working on them; so have we.”

Halsey leaned back, arms folded, eyes narrowed under his wrinkled brow and heavy eyebrows. The British Admiral had unloaded quite a bit just now, one hell of a broadside. The look in his eye was quite different. He wasn’t mincing words any longer, which is just the way Halsey liked it. But what was he saying here?

“Are you talking about the bomb?”

That was what they called it now—the bomb. There were a hundred different kinds of bombs, and millions had already been dropped over Europe and Asia in the last seven years, but this one was so different, so frightening that it overshadowed them all. It was the bomb, the atomic bomb, and only a very few senior officers even knew it existed. It was hell in the belly of a B-29, waiting on an airstrip at Tinian, though thankfully it had not been necessary to use it in battle. The Japanese had come to their senses and finally surrendered.

“What else could I be talking about with that kind of power?”

“But we’ve only just deployed the damn things—though let’s keep that between the two of us.”

“Don’t worry, I’ve been fully briefed.”

“Well that was 1941 when Mississippi went down. Nobody had the bomb back then. And another thing…. what did you mean this was no German raider? What else could it have been?”

“That’s exactly what we first thought, Admiral. What else could it have been? It came out of the Norwegian Sea and ran the Denmark Strait, not two months after we sank the Bismarck . We thought it was Tirpitz at first, then Graf Zeppelin , but it was neither, because it wasn’t a German ship at all. And when it hit your TF.16 with that weapon we worried for months the next one would land right on London.”

“You’re saying this ship actually had an atomic weapon? In 1941?”

“Precisely.”

“And it wasn’t sunk? Then what happened to it? What happened to Desron 7?”

“If you were to nose around and dig deep enough you would find that five ships from that destroyer group reported back to Argentia Bay twelve days after they disappeared. The crews were interviewed, dispersed all over the fleet, and the ships were stricken from the register, repainted, renumbered, and are still in service today. It was covered up pretty well—even you didn’t know about it—and then the onset of the war pushed it under a fairly thick carpet. It’s still there if you know where to look, and I’m afraid there’s more to this story. It wasn’t until we ran into an unknown ship in the Med that we really found out the truth of the matter.”

“In the Med? This ship got clean away and ran east for the Med?”

“It turned up in the Tyrrhenian Sea, to be more precise. We got a good look at it, and some rather telling photos. Then it ran west for Gibraltar, and raised bloody hell the whole way.”

“It slipped into the Med without being spotted?” This was the operation Halsey had been wondering about. Fraser was getting down to brass tacks with him now.

“Apparently. But as I say, we got a very good look at it after that. In fact I was personally involved in that incident, on HMS Rodney . She was riding side by side with Admiral Syfret in HMS Nelson . Good ships, the both of them. Slow as molasses compared to a ship like your Missouri here, but well gunned with nine sixteen inchers. It was just our luck that we were well ahead of this raider and managed to cut it off as it ran west—or nearly so. There was a battle…”

“I heard about this,” said Halsey raising a finger, the light of interest in his eyes. “Something about a renegade French battlecruiser. You were there?”

“I was indeed. Though upon reflection I might say it was just our bad luck we caught up with this ship—and it wasn’t French. We learned that first hand. Our Admiral John Tovey took the wise precaution of reinforcing Gibraltar with Home Fleet the moment we got word of this ship in the Med, and it looked like it was coming down to one of your classic Western showdowns. Then the other side agreed to parley.”

“Amazing,” said Halsey.

“Indeed. Well our Admiral Tovey met with the commander of this ship on a small islet near Gibraltar. He was Russian! The entire crew was Russian, only they denied any affiliation with the Soviet government at the time.”

“This was the same ship you mixed it up with in the North Atlantic?”

“We are ninety-eight percent sure of that. The other two percent suggested it came out of the Black Sea and that these were actually two different vessels, but that was flatly contradicted by this Russian Admiral himself.”

“What happened?”

“We made an arrangement. They accepted quarantine at the Island of St. Helena in exchange for safe passage there. Then the ship simply vanished. We had two fast cruisers in escort, planes overhead, yet the ship sailed into a bank of low clouds and slipped away. We never saw it again, though we believe the Japanese did.”