“Set missile for manual detonation,” said Karpov, and Samsonov toggled a switch, his thick finger poised, eyes on the Admiral, the first glimmer of fear awakening there. The CIC Chief knew exactly what Karpov was doing, and if his commanding officer had to resort to such measures, Samsonov knew the ship was now in the gravest possible danger.
The seconds ticked off, the Sunburn raged into the sky. Karpov took a deep breath and looked at Rodenko, who was watching him closely now. “EMCON,” he said. “All systems dark.”
“All systems dark, aye sir.” Rodenko repeated, instinctively knowing what Karpov was doing. If the weapon produced an EMP burst, the chance their electronics would receive damage was lessened when they were toggled off. For good measure, Rodenko put the system into Shield Mode, cross circuiting to a different set of relays that were highly shielded against EMP.
Then Karpov watched the Plexiglas screen, seeing the fast track of his killer missile about to reach the long string of inbound ordnance. He looked down at Samsonov and gave the final order.
“Detonate warhead.”
Chapter 35
Everyone on the bridge shirked when it went off. Karpov instinctively raising a hand to shield his eyes. He had fired the Moskit II with a 200 Kiloton warhead at the northern group of Wolfhounds, and the massive fireball, even fifty nautical miles away, dominated the entire seascape now. The blast was sufficient to destroy or divert the entire group of 32 smartbombs, consumed by the shock and fire of that terrible nuclear detonation.
There came a quavering sound on the air, and a little later the shock wave hit the ship, rattling equipment all over the bridge. The crew were now mesmerized by the display in the sky, and Karpov realized it was the first time they would have seen such a thing. That was not the case for him. He had thrown his first warhead at his enemies long ago, in the cold north Atlantic, the end of the American battlegroup that had been centered on the battleship Mississippi. Having seen what such a blow could accomplish, he fired his second special warhead in 1945, destroying, among other things, the vaunted battleship Iowa.
The quavering sound became a wind, dark, soulless, passing over the ship like a banshee. A strange glow surrounded them, and for the briefest moment, Karpov, looking at Fedorov, saw the other man vanish. An instant later Fedorov was still there, his face pallid and eyes wide as he looked around, struggling to determine what was happening.
There came a groaning sound, a low counterpoint to the last missile sent off by Kirov before Karpov turned to Samsonov and ordered him to cease fire. Now all of Fedorov’s dire warnings presented themselves in Karpov’s mind. Time was fractured, unstable, prone to increasing damage by the power of massive detonations like the one Karpov had just set off, twenty times bigger than the bombs at Hiroshima or Nagasaki The sound deepened, descended, and Karpov seemed to feel as though he were riding a fast moving elevator. Slowly, the feeling subsided. He needed to know what was happening.
“Rodenko. Light us up again. I need to know what’s out there.” He looked at Fedorov, then tapped Grilikov’s arm, nodding his head to the man as if to say “at ease.” He walked slowly towards Rodenko’s station, one eye on Fedorov. Both men would have information he needed, but Rodenko’s status report was his first concern.
“I have nothing, sir,” said Rodenko. “I cross circuited to shielded systems before the detonation, and so I’m certain my system is functioning, but I read no contacts—not even the two KA-40s. We’ve lost our data link.”
“I neglected to have Nikolin put them into EMCON mode,” said Karpov. “They might have suffered EMP damage, and as our primary line on Takami was being fed by their radars, that could account for this situation.”
“But we should still be reading those Wolfhounds at 45 degrees,” said Rodenko. “Fregat could see those clearly enough inside sixty miles.”
Yet they were gone. Karpov had killed half the Wolfhounds with his 200 Kilotons of nuclear rage, but the others had simply vanished.
“Could they have been affected by the detonation?”
“They were well to the east, sir. Over 50 nautical miles, just as we were. For that matter… Where’s the goddamned fireball…” Rodenko was staring out the forward viewport, away from his screen now as he just realized his system wasn’t even seeing that fireball any longer. Then, even as he looked, he saw a soft glow in the distance, burning brighter, second by second, and by degrees, the fireball reappeared. He could see it in the sky, using nothing more than the old reliable Mark 1 Eyeball. Yet the top of the cloud had been sheared off by prevailing upper winds, a long ocher smear in the sky.
Rodenko’s systems fluttered briefly, then his screens seemed to light up again with fresh data, the colored symbols repopulating the Plexiglas conference screen between the CIC station and his own. Karpov looked at it, his eye going first to the 45 degree track that Samsonov had last been firing along. Those smartbombs might be getting very close by now… but they were gone. Could they have lost their hold on them? He squinted, looking through the forward panes, eyes searching for information stubbornly withheld by his electronic systems. He drifted over to Fedorov, a question in his eyes.
“Well,” he said in a low voice so the others could not hear. “Any idea what just happened?”
“What just happened? You lost your damn head again, that’s what happened.”
“Don’t get all bothered,” said Karpov quickly. “I did what was necessary. You have no idea what was coming for us, but you heard Rodenko’s report. There were sixty-four warheads out there looking for us, and it was almost certain that some of them were going to hit home. I’ve simulated it a hundred times at the academy. We could never stop more than thirty incoming Wolfhounds in a single saturation attack. This ship was dead, so I did what I had to do in order to even the odds. That warhead took out everything they threw at us to the north, allowing me to concentrate only on the bombs coming in at the 45 degree axis. Even then, it would have been a very near run thing, and it is likely we would have been hit by at least one GBU/53.”
“What’s that?”
Karpov smiled. “American smart bomb, slow, completely unpowered, but very accurate, even in hostile ECM environments. Those planes threw a fist full of hailstones at us, and believe me, it isn’t easy to get them all in the very few minutes we had. So I did what was necessary, and you can thank me that we aren’t all dead. We should be. Their attack was perfectly planned and executed, and that damn F-35 was so stealthy that the KA-40s never even saw the last two strike groups until they had already launched. They must have had something externally mounted on that first group, which made them a better radar target. We came this close to perdition, all of us.” Karpov held up his thumb and index finger to measure out the slim interval of time that had saved the ship.
“We got the northern group of 32 bombs with that special warhead,” he said again. “But what happened to the others?”
“Look at that fireball,” said Fedorov. “See how the cloud has sheared off. That takes time, perhaps ten or twenty minutes. I think we phased when that detonation went off. You know what I said about time being so fragile now, and how we used to pulse and slip earlier on the first sortie.”
“Yes….” Karpov breathed. “That makes sense. If we did phase, then those bombs may have come right in on us but—”