Kirov Saga: Devil's Garden (Kirov Series) by John Schettler

last another fifteen minutes.
    He
walked to the ship’s command interlink to call the Captain. “I am ready, sir,” he
said. “I have everything routed to the number ten missile on the P-900 system.
To do this I had to disable that silo and route the firing command signal here
to the test bench. But if you activate missile number ten on your board and
fire…” The silence on the line spoke volumes as he waited. Then he heard
Yeltsin’s voice. Low, weary, as if the weight of every man’s life on the ship,
and all their successive generations was now on his shoulders.
    “Standby,
Yeremenko.”
    The
Engineering Chief waited, the lights suddenly flickering. If they lost
power….What then?
     
    * * *
     
    Ziggy Sprague was on the bridge of Old
Wisky, the battleship Wisconsin , really one of the newest ships in the fleet.
But the men called her “Old Wisky” and that was well enough. It was spelled
that way too, without the letter “h”, and sometimes they would capitalize the K
so the last two letters would stand for Kentucky . That was also a ship
slated for the Iowa class, BB-66, though it was never completed. Years
later, the Wisconsin was fated to collide with the destroyer escort USS Eaton on a foggy night off the Virginia coast. The big battlewagon almost took the
entire bow off Eaton , and Wisconsin had a 100 foot section of the
bow made for Kentucky fitted at the Norfolk Naval ship yard to repair
her damage. After that the ship had even more reason to bear a nickname
composed of the abbreviations of two states. How the sailors of WWII came up
with the name, as if they had some strange intuitive knowledge of the ship’s
fated collision in 1956, no one really knew. Some said it was because the ship
had some parts that had been originally machined for the Kentucky when
it first put to sea.
    Call
it what you will, it was a mean and angry ship at that moment when Ziggy
Sprague spied the low, burning silhouette of what looked to be a light cruiser
or destroyer on his horizon. They had been sailing full out at 33 knots to
catch the Russians when word came in that the Iowa had engaged. Then
they saw it, the massive mushroom rising from over the far edge of the sea. It
wasn’t long before he learned what had happened. The Russians had the bomb! He
was still; astounded to think that was the case, but they had fired one across
Admiral Halsey’s bow as a warning shot that morning. Now, as the long day
ended, a second sunset appeared on the horizon, and Iowa was gone in a
hot minute.
    My
God, this weapon makes a whole new thing of war, he thought. No matter how big
and tough we build them, if you could drop an atomic bomb on a ship it was
history. Another man might have been chastened by the sight of that mushroom
cloud, and inclined to steer clear of an enemy that could wield such a weapon,
but not Ziggy Sprague.
    “God-damnit,
they hit Iowa with the bomb!” He said aloud, and most on the bridge had
no idea what he was even talking about. They had heard rumors, whispers passed
from one hammock to the next below decks. They knew they were building the
bombs bigger, the ships faster, the guns and planes better every year. Now they
had something really big, and it was going to change everything. The Russians
had been lobbing some mean ordnance our way, they said, but we have something
even bigger.
    “Damn
Russians think they can back us off, do they?” Sprague was mad as a hornet. “Well
they’ve got another thing to learn then. I’m taking Wisky up there and I’m
going to blow the living hell out of anything left after ‘Big T’ gets finished.”
    He
could see that the boys from Ticonderoga were over the enemy now, swarming
like angry hornets. Years later American carrier strike planes would be named
exactly that, the “Superbugs” that had gone after Karpov and the Red Banner
Fleet in 2021, but Sprague would know nothing of that.
    He
gave the order to announce his arrival with a salvo from his A and B