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

“The Japanese?” Halsey felt like a boxer kept constantly off balance by a good stiff jab from his opponent. Each time he began to settle into some understanding of what Fraser was telling him, the story leapt ahead in some startling new direction.

“The Japanese. They ran across it very soon after it disappeared off St. Helena,” said Fraser. “It happened during your Operation Watchtower.”

“That was on my beat,” said Halsey. “I was in nominal command of that operation, but the truth is I was down for the count with a skin ailment that put me in the hospital for months. I didn’t get back in the saddle until October of…well that was 1942, Admiral. TF.16 was hit in late 1941 just before we got into this mess.”

“Quite so,” said Fraser. “There was a considerable time lapse before we found this ship again in the Med.”

“A year? I find that hard to swallow. How could a ship with that kind of attitude remain undetected for a whole goddamned year?”

“We don’t know, but as we learned this Russian Admiral claimed he wanted nothing more to do with our war, we concluded that the ship must have dropped anchor somewhere in the South Atlantic or Indian Ocean, well away from sea lanes in some isolated area. We’re not sure how it managed to slip into the Med undetected, but we do get some very foggy nights off Gibraltar, and this vessel has seemed a bit of a phantom at times. Well, to make matters short, it eventually turned up on the coast of Australia and ran into the Japanese.”

Fraser wasn’t telling Halsey the entire story now—that the ship was spotted off Australia not two days after it vanished at St Helena, a journey of thousands of miles that it could not possibly have sailed in that brief time. That had been the one salient clue that had led Bletchley Park, and a very select group of men, to some very startling conclusions about this ship and its true origins. That information might extend the bounds of credulity just a wee bit too far in this conversation, and he felt himself lucky enough to have dragged this bull out of the pen and into the field with what he had already revealed.

Halsey rolled his eyes, thinking. “Yes…we did hear that there was some kind of engagement in the Coral Sea, right smack dab in the middle of our operations against Guadalcanal. Yet I never got any report on the matter. None of our ships were involved.”

“ Geronimo was the culprit. It gave the Japanese hell this time. They paid a very high price when they tangled with this ship. In fact, that may have worked to your favor. It seems at least two Japanese fleet carriers were involved in action with this ship, and therefore unable to reinforce the Japanese counterattack against your Guadalcanal landings. It also left a Jap battleship stranded like a beached whale on a coral reef, and after that it locked horns with Yamamoto himself on the Yamato .”

“Yamato? We didn’t even know the Japanese had that ship until very late in the war!”

“Yes, well British intelligence is very good, Admiral. We knew about it, but as it was laid up for extensive repairs there was no need to pass that on until the ship re-entered service.”

Halsey took that in for a moment, the conclusion obvious from what Fraser had said. “This ship—this Geronimo as you call it, it fought with Yamato and got the better of it?”

“That’s putting it mildly, Admiral Halsey. It beat the Yamato to a flaming wreck. The Japs managed to get it back to the home islands and it was in dry dock for two years before your Ziggy Sprague made the acquaintance again in that battle off Samar. Does the word dangerous say enough about this ship now, or must I look for another word?”

“A Russian ship beat Yamato…” Halsey shook his head . “That’s hard to believe.”

“I’ll agree with that, but we have the intelligence. I can see that you receive a copy of the file if you wish. The fact is, Admiral, this is no ordinary ship. As I said earlier, it’s fast, it has advanced weaponry—naval rocketry in fact—and it can strike from a great distance, even beyond the range of those big sixteen inch guns out there. It looks like a battleship if you ever lay eyes on the damn thing, as I did one black night. There wasn’t a gun on it bigger than a QF five incher, but it could pound a ship like Yamato to near scrap. Needless to say, this is an extraordinary vessel, and so are the men that built and crew this ship.”

“There are no extraordinary men,” said Halsey, “just extraordinary circumstances that ordinary men are forced to deal with.”

“Well I’m afraid that we have exactly that on our hands here—extraordinary circumstances—very extraordinary. The only question now is how do a pair of ordinary blokes like us deal with the matter?”

“We deal with it the same way we dealt with the Japanese, Admiral. We put more steel and fire in the sky and on the sea than the Russians could possibly imagine. I don’t care how good this ship of theirs is, or even how they managed to build it for that matter. Old Uncle Joe Stalin may have been holding some cards close to his chest, or he may have even stacked the deck. None of that matters. No matter how big and tough they build them, ships sink. You just ask the Japs what they know about that. They floated a couple of real monsters in Yamato and Musashi , and we put both of them at the bottom of the sea. Now, I’ve got Sprague’s TF.38.3 up there looking for this ship. In fact he’s probably got planes in the air at this moment.”

“Planes in the air?” Fraser had a worried look on his face now. “They’re going up after Geronimo? Admiral, you must recall them, at once!”

“Recall them? What for? The Russians asked for it. Now they’ll take a few lumps and we’ll finish all this hubbub over Hokkaido once and for all.”

“It’s not the Russians I’m worried about, Admiral. It’s your planes. Get them out of there—before it’s too late!”

Theplanes were forming up over Sprague’s fast carrier group, mostly off Ticonderoga and Wasp . The “Big T” was sending 18 Hellcats , 24 Helldivers, and 12 Avengers , 54 planes in all, with 30 in reserve. These were joined by 15 Helldivers and an equal number of Avengers off CV Wasp from Air Group 86. They were escorted by another 24 Corsairs, the F4U-4 model, to bring the total formation to 108 planes. It was only about 40% of his total air wing, but Sprague deemed this more than sufficient for a show of force, and the planes were already on their way. If need be he could throw another 60 aircraft up off Ticonderoga and Wasp , and then he still held another 90 planes split between the two smaller carriers in his group, Bataan and Monterey . Both these ships were converted light cruisers that had become the Independence class carrier that played such a vital role alongside their bigger Essex class fast fleet carriers.

Chuck Malkasian was on his way to his duty shift in the Wasp’s engine room that morning as a water tender. He was passing a couple of seamen putting the final touches on the carrier’s “scorecard” for its effort thus far in the war. It was mounted on the forward bulkhead, of the hangar deck level, just behind the forecastle, and laid out the tally. CV Wasp had destroyed 14 enemy planes in the air with her own gunfire, and her air groups had taken down another 230. They also caught 405 on the ground and put them out of action, a total of 649 planes.

“Let’s hope they get one more,” said Malkasian. “650 is a nice round number.”