“American bombers!” he said. “Where the hell did they come from? They flew right over us. For God’s sake, are we still EMCON?”
“No,” said Harada. “I fired up SPY-1D hours ago, but Otani says they just appeared.”
“She had nothing on them earlier? Hell, we should have seen them half an hour ago.” Fukada was understandably upset. “Has to be a recon mission,” he said. “But from where?”
“Well, they just got an eyeful…” Harada considered what to do. “With me, XO.” He headed for the bridge, seeing the crew there tense and alert. They had been languishing here in a backwaters region of the Pacific, far from any threat.”
“Ensign Shiota—are we still getting static on the comm?”
“Aye sir, but I can’t figure why.”
Both his ladies were hard at work now, each one wearing a bemused expression. If his equipment was in order, there was no way Takami could have failed to spot those bombers inbound on their position. What was going on here? Where could they have come from?
“Lieutenant Ikida,” he said sharply. “Look up the range of the American B-17 bomber. I want to know where they could have flown from.”
He looked at Fukada. “Could this be a Doolittle thing?”
“With a B-17? Not possible. No. They had to come from a land base somewhere.”
“Sir,” said Ikida, looking at a map display. “Howland and Baker Islands are about 1400 nautical miles off, Midway is about 1500 and Johnston Atoll about 1660. If they were coming from any of those islands it would have to be a one way trip. The range on that plane was about 1700 nautical miles.”
“We own everything else out here,” said Fukada. “This is damn odd.”
“Sir,” said Otani. “Contact lost. I have nothing on my screen at all now.”
Harada turned and walked over to her station. “Nothing? What about targeting radars? Is SPY-1 having a fit?”
“Not from what I can see here, sir. I’m getting all sea level landforms bright and clear. But those bombers are gone. It’s as if they just flew through a hole in the sky.”
“So they came from out of nowhere, and then just flew through a hole in the sky. Dammit, Otani, run a full diagnostic on that system—right now.”
“Aye sir.” She gave him a sheepish look.
Harada listened… The sound was gone. He stepped outside onto the weather deck again, squinting at the sky, but could see nothing. Then it happened, the faint shudder, a tremulous vibration that clearly shook his ship. The pulse of alarm quickened within him, and all he could think of was a torpedo, or an unseen bomb, his head looking forward and aft for any sign of an explosion. All was in order.
He heard a sound, low and deep, like some dark beast growling at him from the edge of the distant horizon. It filled him with an unaccountable feeling of dread, and he backed slowly through the open hatch, seeking the relative safety of the bridge again. Everyone else could hear it, their faces wearing blank expressions, eyes searching, heads inclined, listening. Fukada looked at him, for the last time they had heard anything remotely like that sound was the moment they had shifted here, the moment that damn volcano had gone off in 1942, creating a hole in time so vast that it had literally sucked the ship and crew into the past.
It was not Krakatoa they were listening to now, but a monster made by men like Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam. They were listening to Ivy Mike. Its sound was so deep and penetrating that it rolled back upon them like the thunder from an unseen storm, nine long years into the past, rumbling over the lagoon. They were drifting there in the stillness of 1943, no more than a kilometer from Elugelab island, which was ground zero on All Hallows Eve in 1952.
Ivy Mike was shaking all the days and weeks between that moment and the instant it burst into fiery life, but the hole it was opening in time would stretch both directions, to the future as well as the past….
The situation in 2021 had gone from bad to worse, nine days of increasing tensions that deepened to open hostilities on both land and sea. An oil tanker had been targeted by terrorists in the Straits of Hormuz, a ship owned by one Fairchild Incorporated. US Marines had landed on Abu Musa Island in reprisal, and there had been another serious incident in the Gulf of Mexico. The massive Thunderhorse platform had been battered by the raging fury of a hurricane, but its demise was hastened by a torpedo off the Russian submarine Tigr, and that sub was then attacked by US forces and destroyed.
The Red banner Fleet had sortied from both Severomorsk and Vladivostok, the latter led by the flagship of the fleet, the mighty Kirov under Captain Vladimir Karpov. There had already been naval skirmishes near the Diaoyutai / Senkaku Islands, as China and Japan tussled over those uninhabited rocks like dogs fighting for a bone. The Russians had moved out of the Sea of Okhotsk to make a show of force, where they encountered a Carrier Battlegroup from the US 7th Fleet under Captain Tanner. Sparks flew soon after a heated discussion between Karpov and Tanner, and then the planes and missiles flew after them.
There in the midst of that terrible action, the Demon Volcano had rumbled to life, even as China sent its most advanced new missiles and planes in wave after wave against her wayward son, Taiwan. Ships and aircraft were moving on every side, but when Kirov and two other Russian ships suddenly disappeared near the site of that volcano, it created a mystery that would haunt the decades past.
Kirov and Karpov had already wounded their enemy, CV Washington, but the Americans believed that they had sunk the Russian battlegroup. Now they were moving to rapidly reinforce their Pacific allies, with forces mustering at Guam, including strategic bomber groups that would soon be aimed at China.
One of those replenishment operations was the transfer of fighter aircraft meant to reinforce the Japanese Navy. Japan now saw her position becoming more and more uncertain as the war began to escalate. Her first line of defense was the small yet highly professional Navy she fielded, and like her ancestors in the Second World War, there was a layer of shadow that masked some of the potential combat power of that fleet.
The modern Japanese Navy had a number of small helicopter carriers in the early 21st Century, some with famous names. There were three small Osumi Class amphibious Assault ships at 14,000 tons, with deck space for eight helicopters and a pair of fast hydrofoil landing craft. Next came the Hyuga class, two ships named after the venerable old battleships Hyuga and Ise, but they were 19,000 ton Helicopter Destroyers instead, and capable of carrying 18 helos. Finally the next evolution of this line came with the commissioning of the full-fledged helicopter carrier Izumo, which could carry 28 aircraft. Officially, those aircraft were to be helicopters, but at 27,000 tons, Izumo had the size and stability to carry jet fighters as well, and by 2021 she had two sister ships with wizened and honorable names—Kaga, launched in the year 2017, and Akagi joining the fleet in 2020.
Their deck coatings had been specially modified to resist high temperatures, and the elevators adjusted to receive some very special guests, the F-35B Lightning II strike fighter. Akagi already had good experience with fighter operations, and it had been a part of the skirmish with the Chinese days ago before being ordered to transfer all aircraft to the Izumo to clear her decks, and make this secret rendezvous.
So Japan was pulling a little sleight of hand here again, just as it had done in the last war with the Shadow Fleet. It had carriers posing as helicopter destroyers, and now, all Japan needed were the planes the Americans were sending them.