Lions at Dawn

Chapter 1

They moved north with as much stealth as possible. Captain Harada ordered all sensors except passive sonar to go into EMCON mode, as they wanted to be certain there was no chance they might be detected by the Russian battlecruiser. The news of the attack on Truk had not been well received. It underscored just how vast the canvas of the war was, and Takami could not be everywhere. Yet even when the ship was on station, they realized they had little real clout as their missile inventory had diminished considerably. The had only 30 SAMs left, enough for one more intervention that would likely just thin out the attacking enemy squadrons. After that, they were no more than well-educated observers in the war, with very good ears and eyes.

The Captain had been flipping through a copy of a magazine that had been found on Fiji by a Japanese soldier and sent up through channels, all the way to Yamamoto, who had then casually passed it to Harada at their last meeting. “I have become somewhat of a monster these days,” the Admiral had said to Harada. “Look at the dour and devious expression they attribute to me.”

It was the cover of Time Magazine, the December 22nd issue, in 1941, just after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The caption beneath Yamamoto’s caricature read: ‘Japan’s Aggressive Admiral Yamamoto.’ Inside, the cover story set the same tone as the image:

‘A humble wireless set trembled last week with quasi-divine vibrations as the Son of Heaven himself sent Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander in Chief of the Combined Imperial Fleets, congratulations for the daring execution of a brilliant treachery.

Congratulations from Emperor Hirohito fix upon their recipient an incredible joy; but also a certain uneasiness. This is because they not only bestow praise; they also adjure the congratulatee to continue the good work—or else.’

Or else… Harada knew the feeling now. They had made their bold approach, entered into this impossible scenario thinking they could make all the difference, yet every success made him feel the weight of that statement. Keep up the good work—or else you find yourself sent home to Yokohama.

The order to steam for Yokohama took both Harada and his XO Fukada by surprise. They thought that they would be recalled to Rabaul to provide fleet defense there, particularly after the raid on Truk. Instead they were called home, and ordered by Admiral Ugaki to report directly to Fleet Chief Admiral Osami Nagano.

“I don’t like it,” said Harada. “While we were operating down south, we at least had a lid on things. Steaming into Yokohama is going to get a lot of people talking. We’ll undoubtedly have visitors, which is the last thing I want.”

“When poisoned, one might as well swallow the whole plate,” said Fukada. An Englishman might well have said, ‘In for a penny, in for a pound. “You know it was inevitable that we’d draw attention here from the moment we fired that first SM-2 in the bay off Davao.”

“Yet so much for all our grand notions of influencing the course of this war,” said Harada. “We couldn’t persuade Yamamoto, we couldn’t handle the Russians, and now we can’t even protect the Kido Butai. We’ve been benched, Number 1, and I’m not immune to the great bane of most Japanese—shame.”

“We’d be wise to limit or prevent any more boardings by men from this era,” said Fukada.

“And what if we get a direct order from someone like Nagano? How does one say no politely to the only man in the Navy senior to Yamamoto?”

“With great caution. We’ll have to be very Japanese about it. Bow and scrape, smile a lot, say the arrangements will be made directly, delay, reschedule, ask for a postponement due to an issue with the ship. You know the drill.”

“That’ll only get us so far. We might delay a few days on a technical matter involving the ship, but not much longer. Perhaps we can say we want to make certain the ship is properly presented to his lordship. And now that we get into royalty, what if the Emperor himself is behind this request? Ugaki was very tight lipped when he gave me these orders.”

“That would certainly be something,” said Fukada, “an audience with Hirohito!”

“Be careful what you wish for,” said Harada. “How do we explain this ship to Nagano? That’s our first real problem. Are we going to tell him the truth?”

“That would be… difficult,” said Fukada.

“That’s half a word for it,” said Harada. He rubbed the back of his neck, as if he might rub away this whole nightmare, his mind haunted by second thoughts, regrets, and the realization that they were slowly becoming a little fish in a great steaming pot on the boil, and one he knew the end of only too well.”

“XO,” he said. “We’ve gone an hitched our wagon to a falling star,” he said.

“It isn’t over yet,” said Fukada, thinking to bolster the Captain’s spirits. “We still have some fight in us.”

“Not enough,” said Harada. “The Russians called our bluff and we had to back down. Kurita took our shame upon himself, and we’ve gone and made one dangerous enemy of that man. Now it seems that Yamamoto is losing faith in us as well. Mister Ikida, how soon do we make Eniwetok?”

They had initially planned to return to Japan via Manila, but Harada thought that route would expose them to far too many curious eyes, so he requested an alternate route, well out into the Pacific. They would meet with an oiler, and then proceed home.

“Six hours, sir. That was Bikini Atoll on Otani’s screen a few hours ago. We’re due west now and should be at Eniwetok by noon at this speed.”

“Then we fuel up and take a breather. Anyone want to stretch their legs? We’re meeting the Kazahaya right off Runit Island. What’s the story on that ship?” He looked at Fukada.

“First in its class, a new oiler laid down in September of 1941. It just launched this month, so this is their maiden voyage. In fact, it’s the only ship in its class, hull 304. Hull 306 was converted to a hybrid Tanker/Carrier. All the others were cancelled. This one was sunk in October of this year by a couple US subs.”

“No use mentioning that when we meet their Captain,” said Harada.

“Agreed,” said Fukada. “Though I think we should have warned Yamamoto about what might happen this April—Operation Vengeance. That was the successful American attack on Yamamoto’s plane in the Solomons.”

“You think that will happen?”

“Who can say? We convinced them to change their code, but the American Intel effort was very good. If they break this one, then they might get wind of Yamamoto’s itinerary in the Solomons.”

“Assuming he has one,” said Harada, unconvinced. “No, I think the deck is well shuffled here. We might rely on your birth and death stats as the ships are concerned, except for that lot we were screening down south. I never heard of most of those ships.”

“Me neither. They were all new,” said Fukada. “This war has more than a few surprises.”

“Right,” said Harada. “Including us.”

“Eniwetok…” Fukada was tapping a pad device now. “Yes… This was where the US tested a number of its nukes after the war in the early 1950s. In fact, they popped off nearly 80 detonations here, including Ivy Mike, the very first H-bomb test. That was the biggest detonation in this region, over 15 megatons, and it blew the islet of Elugelab right off the map. It no longer exists in our day, but we can see it here in a few hours. How’s that for a good shore leave destination? The island Ivy Mike ate for breakfast in 1952.”

The massive Eniwetok Lagoon stretched in a wide circle of coral reefs washed by white foam and pristine aquamarine and cobalt blue seas, about 20 miles wide and 25 miles long. The main island with installations and the principle airfield was in the south, on the eastern edge of the widest entrance to the lagoon. The island Fukada had fingered, Elugelab, was once in the far north, one of many that would vanish over the decades.

During the war, the Japanese navy would make the atoll a busy refueling base, and after they took it, the Americans used it as a forward base to stage hundreds of ships in the lagoon, nearly 500 ships there on any given day by mid-1944.

Takami made its rendezvous with Kazahaya, and the crews set about the process of transferring fuel oil. As usual, they could see the crewmen on the oiler gawking at their strange looking ship, but Harada had decided to limit communications to lamp or flag signals, and radio chatter. As they hovered off Runit Island, Fukada was out on the weather deck with his field glasses, searching the northern segment.

“What’s got your attention?” asked Harada.

“Just looking for the spot where they built that big concrete dome,” said Fukada. “I think it was right there,” he pointed. “In 1958 the Cactus ground burst test blasted a 350 foot crater into that spot. The ground was so radioactive that they poured 30 feet of cement over it in a massive dome. You can see it on Google Earth. It looks just like a big flying saucer sitting on the island. Locals came to call it the eye of the swordfish after they eventually returned. That spit of land was the blade of that fish, and the island its body. The dome looked like a big fisheye.”

“Very colorful,” said Harada. “Well, we’re topped off and ready to move. We’ll be escorting that oiler back to Yokohama, but let’s go see your phantom island first.”

In 2021 it was just a deep blue hole in the sea, two kilometers wide, one of many blasted into the reefs and islands that surrounded the atoll. Now, as Takami eased in close, it was a small green islet covered with a lush stand of palm trees. It was hard to believe that the entire island had been completely vaporized by the massive fireball and shock wave of Ivy Mike.

The project had been born as America’s answer to the “First Lightning” detonation by the Soviet Union, announcing to the world that the U.S. was no longer the only superpower that possessed these terrible weapons. Decades later, that arms race would make an end of both nations, but no one knew that just then, though they could feel the impending shadow of the event growing in the deepening gloom of relations between Putin’s Russia and the West.

It would be a test of two weapons, with big Mike to be the main event, followed two weeks later by a much smaller device, the “King” shot, which would only be 25 times as big as “Fat Man” at Nagasaki. King was a T “Super Oralloy Bomb,” abbreviated S.O.B. by the technicians, who came to call it the “Little Son-of-a-Bitch.” If it had been dropped on downtown San Francisco, it would have obliterated the heart of the city, killing 225,000 people instantly and injuring over 365,000 more. The thermal radiation from that blast would have covered the entire peninsula, coast to coast, singed the Golden Gate, and burnt the pastoral shores of Sausalito, encompassing all of Treasure Island in the East Bay.

The little King’s big brother was much larger. If big Mike had gone off over the financial district in San Francisco, the air blast radius alone would have extended out as far as King’s thermal radiation. Everything as far north as San Rafael would burn in the thermal radiation, along with everything to the east, including all of Oakland, Richmond, and the Berkeley Hills. The terrible heat would just be starting to dissipate when it reached Walnut Creek and Pleasant Hill. The fallout from that blast would be heavy over Sacramento, according to prevailing winds, reaching all the way to Reno Nevada with radiation between 100 and 1000 Rads per hour. 782,000 would have died instantly, and another 650,000 would be severely burned and injured. A weapon like Ivy Mike used in the 21st Century would literally be hell on earth wherever it fell.

One of the first men to know the massive hydrogen bomb had detonated successfully was Edward Teller, at the Berkeley facility in California. The bomb was his brainchild, using a special deuterium fuel within a uranium tamper. It would go off with a one-two punch, a smaller fission bomb exploding in the nose to compress the deuterium and uranium fuel in the body of the bomb. In effect, Teller was using the power of a nuclear fission explosion as his hammer to pound the fuel that would yield a hydrogen explosion. It was this design, perfected by Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, that would be used for most warheads wanting some real clout.

Had it gone off in San Francisco in 1952, Teller would not have survived it at his lab in Berkeley. Instead, it would detonate over that lonely isolated coral atoll in the Pacific, right where Captain Harada and Fukada were admiring the little island it vaporized. On All Hallows Eve, in 1952, it sat there in its 82 ton cylindrical cryostat thermos, called ‘the sausage’ by the technicians, a mindless supercritical mass waiting to live in the fire of that hydrogen explosion. When it went off, it was 500 times more powerful than either Fat Man or Little Boy at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The era of the Thermonuclear Hydrogen bomb had been born. It was October 31st, Halloween night in Berkeley, (07:15 local time on All Souls Day, Nov 1st in the Pacific). Teller’s people picked up the vibration half way across the globe in Berkeley, and he made a cryptic call to an associate seconds after, saying only: “It’s a Boy.”

The witching hour was said to be the time when the borders between this world and other worlds were at their thinnest. Demons and spirits could pass through from one world to another, and that would be very close to the truth.

Chapter 2

Red Flight was up that day, November 1, 1952, and it was led by Lt. Colonel Virgil Meroney, taking three Republic F-84 G “Thunderjet” fighters high into the red dawn, towards the terrible wrath of the world’s first hydrogen bomb. The detonation itself had occurred about 90 minutes earlier, and now the massive seething mushroom cloud had ascended to heights well above his plane flight ceiling at 55,000 feet. He and his mates would enter the cloud at 40,000 feet, hoping they would not have any problem with the B-17s.

If any had been close enough to see those planes, they would have thought a ghostly flight of old WWII bombers was lost at sea, wandering aimlessly through time to appear there in 1952. Had they flown close enough, Meroney and his mates would have seen the cockpits were empty, with no sign of any pilot or crew. They were drones, all radio controlled from another piloted B-17 that was guiding them into the great mushroom cloud. Their wings mounted special boxes with filter paper intended to capture tiny radioactive particles from the blast, stuff the world would come to call “fallout.” They were harvesting the last remnants of the island Harada and Fukada were staring at from the weather deck of Takami.

“Red Flight, Red Flight, this is Convair Control, do you copy. Over.”

Meroney toggled his radio and returned. “Roger that, Convair One. This is Red Flight Leader on final approach. Over.”

“Roger Red Flight Leader. You are cleared for stem entry. Go with God. Over.”

Stem entry…

They were all going to fly right through the stem of the massive mushroom cloud. It towered up and up, over 57,000 feet, a mass of black char and pallid red orange clouds. Meroney had no idea what they would find within that column of doom.

“Red Flight leader to group,” he called. “Follow me…”

He looked over and saw his wingman, Captain Bob Hagan, and Captain Jimmy Robinson just off his wing on the right.

“Lord almighty,” came Hagan. “It’s a dark boiling slice of hell on earth.”

“Roger, Red Flight,” said Meroney, “Watch your temperature and infrared in there, not to mention that Rad counter. If either one gets too hot, break off and take evasive maneuvers.”

Robinson would be the first man to get into trouble. Deep within the mushroom stem, he became disoriented, and then his temperature gauge warned him he was headed right into an inferno. He pulled on the stick, banking away from the heat mass, his plane stalling as he turned too tight, and soon he was plummeting down through the terrible mass of the column.

“I’m spinning out!”

Meroney heard Robinson’s distress call, and his was breath heavy as he struggled to regain control of his plane. It was a long tense moment, the Flight Leader listening to his mate struggling to survive, a fallen angel, felled by the power of that bomb. Then, Robinson’s voice came back reporting he had regained control at 20,000 feet. Meroney looked over his shoulder, seeing that Hagan was still there off his wing.

“Hold on down there, Jimmy. We’re coming down to look for you. Over.” He gave Hagan the thumbs up, then banked to begin the descent. Even as he sent that last message, the radio call broke up with static, and he could see his navigational readouts were all messed up. They had been told to expect electromagnetic interference from the bomb, but it was most disorienting when it happened. There they were, lost in that massive red black cloud, unable to see the way out, or read their true compass heading, and unable to speak to one another over the static.

Down at 20,000 feet they were going to eat up a lot more fuel, but there was a tanker down there somewhere, orbiting the stem of that mushroom, if they could find it. Meroney had lost contact with Hagan as they descended, but he was the first to break out in to the clear, having flown right through that mushroom stem. There was suddenly a clear spot in the static, the speaker wash fading out briefly, so Meroney ordered the other two pilots to get out of that cloud mass and head for home. He had decided he would continue to circle, looking for Robinson or that fuel tanker, though he never saw either plane.

A long hour passed, with the Flight Leader nervously watching his fuel gauge. If he had his wingtip fuel pods on, he wouldn’t have had to worry so much, but they had mounted the cloud filter pods there instead, and all he was carrying was radioactive fallout. He imagined it glowing softly within those collection pods at the tip of each wing, not really grasping what radiation truly was.

It wasn’t the first time his plane had flown a mission like this. There had been a whole series of tests before Ivy Mike lit up the skies over Eniwetok. The planes would fly through those mushrooms, much smaller than this one. Big Mike was the scariest thing he had ever seen in his life. Yet Meroney’s plane should have been towed into a pit, doused with kerosene and set on fire long ago. They would try to decontaminate it after every mission, washing down the wings and fuselage with “gunk” as they called it, but you couldn’t get at the insides of the engine. The air intake in the nose would suck in all that fallout as well, and it would be forever lodged within the long fuselage of the plane.

He was flying a radioactive fighter, but Meroney was a very skilled pilot, first learning his chops as a fighter pilot on a P-47. He got nine kills with that plane in Europe, before a lucky flak burst took down his fighter, and he spent the rest of the war as a P.O.W. in Germany.

After the war he served as a Flight Instructor at Luke Field, happy to trade in his P-47 Thunderbolt for the new F-84 Thunderjet. In 1952, he mustered out to Kwajalein Atoll, and now he was out there looking at Ivy Mike. His fuel low, now it was time to head for the field at Eniwetok, but he would later learn that one of his mates, Jimmy Robinson, never made it safely back to Kwajalein. Captain Hagan barely made it himself, coming in dry and flying by the seat of his pants as he glided the plane to a rough landing.

But there was no sign of Robinson. One of the rescue helo pilots said he thought he saw a plane low over the water, its canopy off, as if the pilot was planning to eject. That would have been a hazardous adventure, shooting up out of that lead lined cockpit, wearing that lead vest and a pair of lead lined gloves to help protect him from all that radiation in the mushroom cloud. Hit the water with that vest on, and you would sink like a stone.

But Robinson was never seen again, nor was his plane. If they hit the water off Kwajalein, they did not do so in the year 1952, and no one ever knew where Jimmy ended up—not even Robinson himself…. As for those B-17 drones, they were never seen by anyone again either, at least not anyone there in 1952.

“Con—Radar, Contact! Right on top of us!” Lieutenant Ryoko Otani gave Harada a wide eyed look. “It came from out of nowhere!”

“The first thing that entered Harada’s mind was that it was a stealth fighter, but that was just reflex. There were no stealth aircraft flying the skies of 1943. Then he heard it, the drone of heavy engines, very low, a long distended hum. He ran out onto the weather deck and Fukada was spellbound with his field glasses.

“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.

Both ships were out to sea that day, forming the heart of an eight ship task force that consisted of the carriers Akagi and Kaga, with the Aegis Class Destroyer Atago, the first ship in the class that had given rise to Captain Harada’s Takami. Two older guided missile destroyers, again with famous names, Kongo and Kirishima, were nearly as powerful as Takami, with 90 VLS cells each.

They were joined by another of Japan’s newest destroyers, DD-120 the Takao, which was the second ship in the new Asahi Class. While not as powerful as the DDG class ships, it was a very capable close escort for the carriers, with 32 VLS cells firing a mix of Evolved Sea Sparrows and the RUM-139 ASROCs against subs.

The big 25,000 ton oiler and fleet replenishment ship Omi was also in attendance, for they were going a long way from home waters, and that ship was escorted by the last member of the group, the smaller 7,500 ton helicopter destroyer Kurama. That ship was included to buck up ASW defense, because the two larger carriers had gone to sea deliberately light, with just six helos each.

There was a reason for that. Akagi and Kaga had just made a secret rendezvous with a US carrier task force out of Pearl Harbor the previous day, and there they received a gift from the United States, two squadrons of the planes that would make all the difference, transforming the carriers from stolid though capable caterpillars to soaring tiger moths.

The fighter that would convert those ships to light strike and air defense carriers worth the name was the Lockheed Martin F-35B combat jet, and the US had flown in 18 Lightning IIs, nine for each of the two carriers. They were all planes that had been purchased by Japan in prior years and this was a perfectly good time to deliver on that contract, for the US would simply be bolstering a Pacific ally, and increasing overall capability in the region. The ships were also big enough to carry the USMV-22 Ospreys to allow for expanded amphibious and strike warfare missions—and they would get two of those each.

So there was a good chunk of the Japanese Maritime Naval Defense Force out to sea that day, designated the Kaijō Jieitai. They had met the Americans at a very convenient half way point between Japan and Pearl Harbor, not the island of Midway, as it was thought that would revive memories of old wounds. Instead they chose an otherwise humdrum atoll in the midst of the Pacific, a former wartime base that had been used by both sides, Eniwetok.

Chapter 3

Vice Admiral Kita was now satisfied that his nation would have all the capability it would need to return to the home waters and provide for maritime security. Unfortunately, he would never get there. His line of fate would now become entangled with the fate of one of his wayward Captains, and a ship that had been reported lost the previous day in the Sunda Strait. The Americans would have everything to do with his dilemma, for the same hand that had empowered him, would soon be raised against him, albeit in another era, another world, as he would soon come to surmise.

It had been all Hallows Eve, the 31st of October, 2021 when they heard the low rumble emanating from the sea. His task force had completed the rendezvous, receiving the much coveted F-35 strike fighters the previous day, and the American were now far to the south, bound for Guam. Before the war, he had little use for them, believing that it was high time for Japan to come out from behind the protective skirts of the US 7th Fleet. They Americans were, in his mind, a useful annoyance, though he could not fault their equipment and technology. Here they would offer Japan things that Toyota and Honda could not build, though the inverse was also true, as Japanese cards had dominated the freeways of the us for decades.

Kita had lingered just north of Eniwetok, completing refueling operations for his smaller destroyers before beginning the journey home. The real crisis point was now Taiwan, and the Americans were massing their carrier power to challenge the Chinese there. The Russian fleet was no longer deemed a threat, though there had been yet another incident involving a Russian Submarine in the Sea of Japan. It was engaged, and believe destroyed, though no one could be certain of that.

After the Senkaku incident, both Akagi and Kirishima were rushed to join his task force bound for Eniwetok. Now he was ready to take those precious F-35’s home, but Ivy Mike had other plans for him that day. There would only be one consolation for the fate that befell him, and that would be the unexpected reunion with a ship the Navy had believed lost, one of their newest and best, DDG-180, the Takami.

Otani could not believe her eyes. She had been feverishly running her diagnostic routines, testing each panel of the SPY-1D system in, and then running full integrated four panel tests to verify all was in order. She had no fault readings of any kind, and could not surmise what could have gone wrong—until it happened again. Contacts—this time on the surface, and very close!

“Con—Radar. Surface contact, bearing true north. Range…. Just 3000 meters!”

“What?” Harada did not have to ask her what in the world she was talking about. All he had to do was turn his head and look. At that same moment, Lieutenant Commander Fukada came rushing in from the weather deck.

“Captain! Ships off the starboard bow! They’re flying our colors.”

“Damnit, Otani. I thought I told you to run a full diagnostic.”

“I did, sir. Just completed it. I have no fault readings at all. My screen was clear, and then…”

“What’s out there, Fukada?”

His XO simply smiled. “Come have a look for yourself. They’re ours, all of them. Look there, that’s big fat Omi on fleet replenishment. And those have to be two Izumo class carriers! There’s our sister ship, Atago!” He gave Harada an elated look. “We’re home!”

Harada was standing dumfounded, hands on his hips, his mind almost unwilling to believe what his eyes were telling him. Yet the distinctive lines of the ships were unmistakable. It was the Akagi, and undoubtedly her sister ship Kaga, but what in the world were they doing out here? Was Fukada correct? Did they shift again? Were they home at long last?

Now the trembling vibration he had felt came to mind, the ominous low rumble that had everyone on the bridge on edge. It was much akin to the same sound they had heard when they made that impossible shift to the past. It must have happened again—who knew why—but they were home. There could be no other explanation.

Then he looked over his shoulder, thinking to see other friendly ships about, but what he saw instead stole away all his joy. There, sitting it the serene silence of the Pacific, its white shores washed by gentle surf, was the island of Elugelab.

“Number one….”

Fukada turned his way, still grinning widely.

“Are you certain about that story you told me?”

“Sir? What story?”

“About that big American H-Bomb.”

“Of course. What of it?”

“Well isn’t that the island you said the damn thing vaporized?”

Now Fukada stood and stared himself. There it was, Elugelab, but that simply could not be. That island was destroyed, pulverized, blown off the face of the earth by Ivy Mike. If they were home, then all they should be seeing there now was a deep blue hole in the sea. He looked left and right, thinking the ship must have drifted, but the familiar landforms he had seen earlier were still there, and so was Elugelab.

“But sir,” he said haltingly. “This can’t be correct. If that’s Eugelab, then—”

“Then we haven’t moved after all,” said Harada. “We haven’t moved at all and it’s still 1943. Where’s the Kazahaya?”

“There, sir.” Fukada pointed off their bow, where the WWII Oiler was still holding position at anchor near the edge of the lagoon.

“By all gods and kami,” said Harada. “If we haven’t moved, and those ships are real…”

“They came to us!” Fukada’s eyes were wide now. “Sir, maybe they found a way to get through to us. Who knows how? Maybe this is a rescue mission.”

It wasn’t, as Admiral Kita was soon to find out aboard the Kaga.

“Admiral, sir, we have two contacts off the port side of the ship. They just appeared on radar.” Chief of the Watch, Kenji Omani, pointed out the ships he was seeing, and Admiral Kita squinted, clearly unhappy.

“Contacts? That looks like Atago is out of position. What are they doing over there?”

“No sir. There’s Atago, maintaining station abeam of Akagi, just as she should be.”

“Con—we have a secure radio transmission, and the ship ID is DDG -180. It’s Takami!”

Admiral Kita was a no nonsense, professional officer, young at just 45 years to have the position he now held, but already graying at the temples. He was a rising star in the new Japanese Navy, the Kaijō Jieitai, and one who had seen the coming of this war with China as inevitable. When Takami was reported missing on her return voyage from those exercises with the Australians, he strongly suspected that she had been ambushed and killed by a submarine, though even after an extensive maritime search by units of the Australian and Indonesian fleets, not a single trace of the ship had been found.

Then events had made it impossible to prosecute that search further. China was firing missiles at Taiwan, and it would only be a matter of days before they aimed them at Japan. The “incident” off the Senkaku Islands had confirmed his worst suspicions. A Chinese Submarine had fired on the light frigate Oyoko, and one of the ships here with him today had settled the score, the missile destroyer Kirishima, commanded by Captain Kenji Namura. He had destroyed the Chinese sub, which was later identified as the Li Zhu.

Then the Chinese planes had come seeking vengeance, and his equally capable carrier Captain, Shoji Yoshida, had launched fighters from the decks of Akagi, the first group of F-35Bs ever to fly a real combat sortie for Japan. The Chinese air force had learned they were not quite a match for the Silent Eagles and hidden Lightning in the sky that day, though their reprisal sent the dread Dongfeng missiles into the sky to strike Naha airfield on Okinawa. It had been a limited but pointed attack, the first time a foreign nation had delivered ordnance against the Japanese homeland soil since WWII. Yet this was nothing compared to the escalating conflict with the United States.

China had taken out an American spy satellite with lasers. The US retaliated with hypersonic missiles on the launch sites, an attack that had penetrated deeply into the Chinese mainland. The Great Red Dragon then took the unprecedented step of launching a missile over the west coast of the US, initiating an EMP attack that caused widespread disruption of the electrical system. While the real damage was not as serious as first believed, it struck a chilling note in the dark symphony that was now playing on the world stage. The weapons of this third war were more potent that anything mankind had ever seen. When the Americans had tested Ivy Mike, even as early as All Hallows Eve of 1952, they released more raw killing power than all the bombs and shells fired throughout the entire Second World War.

And Ivy Mike had done one more amazing thing—it had sent Admiral Kita and his entire task force into the hole it time it had opened, a tunnel boring into the past even as it reached into the distant future. Kita’s ships just happened to be in exactly the right place, at exactly the right time, and something in the gravity exerted by one of their kinsman, JS Takami, pulled them inexorably back in time to the year 1943.

The hour, day and year they would soon find themselves in would shock Admiral Kita to the core. There was Takami, looking well and alive, and the first thought that hit Kita’s mind was that the ship had been assigned some top secret assignment, and that had been the real reason for its disappearance. Now it had obviously been ordered to make this rendezvous, but he would soon find out that the real truth of this situation was even stranger than he could possibly imagine.

“Sir, we’ve confirmed there is no equipment malfunction on our end. I have reports from Kongo, Kirishima and Atago, and all their equipment checks out. The problem has to be upstairs.” Lieutenant Hayata eyed the ceiling, but he was meaning to look well beyond it, beyond the atmosphere in fact, where the satellites they would communicate with would be making their silent orbits. “We’ve lost all command level links, sir—GPS is down too.” He handed the Admiral a status board, which Kita eyed briefly before nodding.

Two ships had just appeared, seemingly out of thin air. One he knew and their own long lost destroyer, Takami, the other was as yet a mystery. At that moment, Captain Harada walked in through the main hatch to the bridge, saluting, and that mystery would soon become sheer madness. Fukada followed him like a shadow, for the two were the heart of all that had happened here, and the only men really responsible.

Kita looked them over, then extended a hand to the Captain. “You’ve been missed,” he said with a warm smile. “And I hope you have some news for me about all that.”

“Yes sir,” said Harada. “Might we meet in your stateroom?”

“Very well.”

They were meeting aboard the task force flagship, Kaga, and as they walked, the Admiral gave them a running briefing of their situation. “Strange,” he said, “but we’ve lost all comm-links with Yokohama. Can’t reach Sasebo either, and all our satellite connections are down—GPS, the works. How are your links?”

“The same,” said Harada.

“I don’t like it,” said Kita. “Things have been pretty wild the last few days, particularly after that tit-for-tat between China and the US. I can see how we might lose some of these links in an emergency, but all of them? We can’t raise anyone in Japan—Kure, Maizuru, Ominato—silent as mice.”

Fukada was exhilarated with what had happened. Yet now he realized the difficulty of what they had to do here. In truth, even they did not really know what had happened, but there was Kaga, and here was Kita, a man both these officers knew well, and respected.

“Alright Captain, what were your orders? No one told us to expect company. Where were you—lurking in a bank off fog out here somewhere? You just appeared on our screens a moment ago, and that’s damn strange. For that matter, what’s that other ship at anchor out there?”

“Sir,” said Harada. “I’m afraid we’ve quite a tale to tell here. As you know, we were returning from that joint operation with the Australians, and had just passed through the Sunda Strait…”

“1943?” The Vice Admiral looked at Captain Harada, somewhat aghast that an officer of his experience and maturity would even suggest such a nonsensical thing. “This is no time for levity, Captain. The silence on all our comm-links is deafening. The homeland could be under attack at this minute.”

“Sir,” said Fukada, “I can assure you, the homeland is safe here at the moment, at least for the time being. I know that what we’ve told you sounds fantastic, but you can have your navigator confirm all that sun and moon data Commander Fukada mentioned, and you’ll soon see that this isn’t October. It is in fact, January, and when he’s done with that, here’s a chart of what these islands off our port side should look like here. One look out that port hole will tell you something is amiss. That’s the island of Elugelab out there.”

“What of it?”

“Sir, that island won’t be on any of our charts. It was vaporized in 1952 during an American nuclear bomb test here. It no longer exists, but yet, there it is. Your Navigator will confirm that as well.”

“Now you can’t stand there and tell me this task force has sailed off into Yomi.” The Admiral gave Fukada a hard look. “I want some answers here, and enough with the nonsense.”

Yomi was the mythical Land of the Dead, the world of darkness in Japanese Shinto mythology, and Fukada passed a moment thinking how they were going to explain that the life and world the Admiral came from were gone, at least for now, if not forever. They had hoped the Admiral’s task force was a rescue mission, as farfetched as even that seemed. How could Kita simply lead his ships into the past to make this timely rendezvous with Takami. By what means would he have done so? Yet there he was, unaccountable, as much a surprise to Harada and Fukada as they were to him.

“Admiral,” said Harada. “This is going to get worse before it gets better, and it’s going to take some time. My XO is correct. That is Elugelab out there, and there’s your first clue as to the truth of what we’ve just told you. The sun and moon data will back it up. You won’t raise anyone on normal comm-links here, but have your radioman tune in to a set of frequencies we’ll give you today. For that matter, just start monitoring the AM or FM bands. You’ll start picking up what you could only call ‘yesterday’s news.’ And right out there,” he pointed, “That’s the fleet oiler Kazahaya. We just took on fuel and we were about to escort it home to Yokohama.”

“Kazahaya? Never heard of it.”

“Of course, sir, because that ship was laid down in September of 1941… and it was sunk by a pair of US submarines in October of 1943. There it is. Board it. Go yourself with a detail of Marines. We’d be happy to accompany you, and when we’re done, send a helo up and overfly the main airfield at Eniwetok. There was a 6,800 foot bomber field built there by the Americans in 1944. You won’t find it there now, just a small airstrip. There isn’t much there at all now, just a small seaplane base on Parry Island. Go have a look, and on the way there, check our Runit Island. Look for the Fish Eye, and you’ll see that’s gone too. That ground is still radioactive in our time, but not now. It’s pristine. You won’t find the slightest hint of radiation anywhere in the atoll, and this place was hit with over eighty detonations after the war. It’s going to be a case of seeing is believing for you over the next few days, just as it was for us. But everything you see and hear—everything—is going to back up what we’ve just told you.”