Nemesis

by John Schettler

  “Agreed,” said Kirov, without hesitation.

  “And then I want one more thing.”

  “Name it.”

  “My ship.”

  There was a long silence as Kirov slowly reached for a cube of sugar, pouring himself another cup of tea. “Your ship?” he said, raising an eyebrow. “And here I thought you’d be happy with a pair of new airships.”

  “Not quite. As you have said, I’m a navy man at heart, just like Kolchak, and I want my ship. You know what I’m talking about.”

  “What makes you think I have any control over that ship?”

  “Because if you asked Admiral Volsky or Fedorov to come home to papa, they would,” said Karpov. “You know damn well they would.”

  “I would hope as much,” said Kirov. “Yet I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. The ship vanished. It was reported missing six weeks ago, and hasn’t been seen since.”

  “It’s back,” said Karpov. “It’s in the Norwegian Sea.”

  “Your intelligence chief told you that? I’ve had no report on that from Berzin, and he’s very good.”

  “Berzin doesn’t know a thimble full of what I know,” said Karpov. “So let me be as frank and direct with you here as you were a moment ago.” Karpov leaned forward, knowing this was the time to deliver the coup de grace.

  “Yes,” he said, “I came out of nowhere, and I’m a bit of a devil at heart. I know this to be true, but better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven, or so the old saw goes. And yes, that ship is back, because it had to come, just as it did before.”

  “Before? You mean when it appeared last June?”

  Karpov realized he had slipped here, for he did not want to reveal the real truth to Kirov, that the ship had originally appeared in July of 1941, just days ago.

  “My intelligence is very good, Mister General Secretary. Trust me, the ship is back, and it’s in the Norwegian Sea, but it may not be there for long. I want you to order it to Murmansk, and as soon as possible.”

  “Order it there?”

  “I can tell you what channel to use to get through, if you don’t already know, and you can use all that sugar in your tea to convince them they need to come see you in Murmansk, just like before. But I am the rightful Captain of that damn ship, and I want it back. Give me that, and I’ll send you all the men you need. You can build five shock armies, and yes, you can give them to Konev. And you’ll get my full and complete support for the duration of this war. That’s your little deal with the devil now. You give me my ship, I’ll give you the manpower you need—real fighting men. It’s either that or you can continue to raise raw recruits from the peasant farmers, and see how well they like dancing with Hitler’s SS.”

  Chapter 2

  “Why in the world would you need that ship?” Kirov shifted in the chair, squaring off to Karpov. “The last time I consulted a map, Siberia had no viable ports.”

  “For the moment.”

  That gave the General Secretary pause. “Vladivostok? You are thinking to try and take back that port from the Japanese?”

  “You and I both know that will have to be done,” said Karpov. “Why bandy words about it here? Of course I want it back, and with that ship I’ll have the power to take it.”

  “The Japanese have at least five divisions in Primorskiy Province. I’m told that ship has some marvelous weapons—rockets that are very powerful, but it can’t win a land battle like that. Surely you must know this.”

  “It can, and it will. A moment ago you were telling me how I could put the troops Kolchak has in the Trans-Baikal to good use. Taking Vladivostok is a good choice. If I do this it will make the position of their Kwantung Army untenable. For that matter, we should take back Port Arthur as well.”

  “We? You are expecting Soviet support for these operations?”

  “Of course, just as you are expecting Siberian support for the building of these new armies. Face it, Kirov. I don’t know what you saw when you went up those stairs at Ilanskiy, but at least you had the good sense to know what to do about it. Once this war is over, and that is a matter of just a few more years, then Russia must be re-united as one state. There can be no Orenburg Federation, and no Free Siberian State either. There must be only one nation. Correct? Otherwise we will not survive the challenges that come after this war. History does not end in 1945, even if this war may end that year.”

  Now Kirov realized that there was another dimension to this man that he must never forget. Yes, he was a devil, just as he had said to the man’s face, but he was also from another time, a future time, and the knowledge of all that might happen in the decades ahead was a very powerful thing. Now he indulged a moment of weakness that he had tried to resist before, even with a man as amiable as Admiral Volsky there to confer with him.

  “You spoke of that future time when we first met. Tell me more,” he said quietly, his tone suddenly very serious.

  Karpov saw his moment had come, and knew he needed to take every advantage of it. “Long years of enmity fall between Russia and the West—yes, your nice loyal allies, with all their talk of cooperation, Lend-Lease trucks, and a second front against Germany. After this war ends, a chill falls on Europe, and the frost line runs right through the heart of a divided Germany. They called it the Cold War, because we seldom ever fired a shot in anger at one another, but it was war nonetheless. It was waged with politics, covert operations, spies, economic oppression, and a long, guarded watch was set on all our borders.”

  “The British did this?”

  “They were just the devil’s adjutant. No. It was the United States that became our real nemesis. Great Britain was just their cute little shadow puppet after the war. They never survived as an empire after 1945. They lose India, and most every other outpost of note, forsaking all colonies East of Suez, as they called it. But they didn’t even hold Suez for very much longer, or any of their hard won territories in the Middle East. Oh, their oil companies continued on, but there was no longer any real power beyond the exchange of oil for pounds sterling. That was what Great Britain became. In my time their vaunted Royal Navy, unrivaled at the start of this war, was reduced to no more than twenty active ships. But the Americans? That is a completely different story.”

  “They become our enemy?”

  “Our chief opponent on the world stage, until their meddling and grinding finally wore us down. The Soviet Union, as we called it, collapsed, and formally dissolved in December of 1991, fifty years from now. After that, the entire state disintegrated into not three, but fifteen separate nations. We lose all the Baltic States, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Belarus. We lose all of the Ukraine, and the Crimea with it, and everything Volkov now controls disintegrates into a patchwork of six or seven separate states. We manage to hold a little slice of the Caucasus, for the oil, of course, and the heartland of Russia itself, and all of Siberia, remain united. Yes, Kirov, Siberia remains loyal. And the nation I will soon lead even had all of Primorskiy Province under its control, and a nice deep water port at Vladivostok. It wasn’t until another man named Vladimir decided to do something about this sad state of affairs, that we began to get back on our feet, but that took us nearly twenty years.

  “I… I had no idea…”

  “Of course not. You went up those stairs at Ilanskiy from 1908, and they took you to this war, did they not? You saw enough of a disaster underway here—the gulags, concentration camps that killed millions, and forced millions more into slave labor. Hitler gets busy with that soon as well. He has a particular dislike of the Jews, and starts rounding them up and literally gassing them, and burning the bodies in brick ovens.”

  “This I have seen,” said Kirov, his face drawn and hard now. “And just a little more... Once I went up the stairs twice, and I think I may have reached your time. Things were very different, particularly the rail yard. There were books on a shelf near the window, and I saw it was about the history of the war, this war! So I took them, and hastened back down those stai
rs. It was a very eerie feeling, to think I had reached some far off future, and I never went back again.”

  “Then you know what the Nazis have planned,” said Karpov. Few knew about it in the beginning, but by the end of the war they called it the Holocaust, Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’ gone awry. And realize that is exactly what he will do here if he wins this war. But we can stop him, Mister General Secretary. We can stop him. In fact, we will be the two men most directly responsible for doing that. You have seen the history. Yes? So you know that the British and Americans will liberate France and the Low Countries, and knock Italy out of the war as well, but the rest is our task. Germany fields about 330 divisions in this war, and at any given time, eighty percent of them are fighting us, here on Russian soil, until we eventually grind them under our heel and drive all the way to Berlin. We beat the Americans there, but just barely. After that, the ‘Iron Curtain’ falls and divides Europe for the next 50 years… Until we fall…”

  The silence in the room was broken only by the slow ticking of a great Grandfather clock that stood imposingly on one wall of the stateroom. Its steady tick-tock marked out the moments, and Kirov suddenly realized that far more was at stake now than the resolution of this war. That clock would strike out the hours, year after year, and here was a man who had knowledge of all that might happen, a window on the decades that would transpire long after he, himself, was dead.

  “In truth, I have been so beset with the immediate crisis of this war that I have given little thought to things like this.”

  “That is understandable,” said Karpov. “You are a time traveler too, Kirov, only you come to this moment from the past. A choice you made in that past has served to shape the world we now stand in, the moment you killed Stalin. It was a wise choice, for otherwise he would have done the same to you.”

  Kirov nodded gravely, a look of anxiety on his face now as he remembered that moment when his finger clenched the cold trigger of that pistol, and changed all future history.

  “I told you how I came to that decision at our first meeting,” he said. “Though I had no idea things would turn out this way. My part, I controlled easily enough. But Ivan Volkov was quite a surprise. He was never mentioned in any of the material I found on my forays up those stairs at Ilanskiy. Yes. You know I have read the history of this war, but it only takes us so far before it becomes useless. Things are happening now that never occurred. I should have all the Caucasus, and all of the Orenburg Federation under my belt when I face the Germans.”

  “And all of Siberia,” said Karpov. “And yet it was still a nightmare when the Germans came, and four bloody years of fighting that have only just begun.”

  “If we can survive,” said Kirov. “We are fighting hard, in fact even doing a little better than we once did, according to what I have read. We’ve been stubborn in the north, but the Germans are raising hell in the south. If we lose there, and they get through to link up with Volkov’s troops, then we lose the oil. Yes, I can build tanks, but soon the factories will run out of fuel for the machines, and what will those tanks run on?”

  “Don’t worry about that,” said Karpov. “I told you I am presently sitting on massive reserves of oil in Siberia. But it will take some effort to get at it. I know exactly where it is, at Perm, Emba, in the Western Urals, and in the Far East on Sakhalin Island and Kamchatka. You see why we will need to run the Japanese out of those territories soon? So don’t worry about oil, my friend, I can get you all you need. But first I want that ship—my ship—so I can deal with the Japanese Navy. I would have done all this earlier, but for the stupid interference of Volsky and Fedorov. They are the reason Japan now sits on the Golden Horn Harbor, and I intend to reverse that, but I need my ship. Do we have a bargain?”

  For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul, thought Kirov? Here I sit, dickering with the Devil. Everything he says sounds so reasonable, for even the Devil can cite scripture for his purpose. Yes, I have read Shakespeare along with all the great Russian writers. He had a good deal to say about this man … a villain with a smiling cheek. A goodly apple rotten at the heart…

  Yet what if all he says about our future is true? Do my allies here turn on me as he describes? Will that reoccur this time around, or can I forge a different understanding with the West, as Volsky hopes?

  “Something tells me it isn’t just the Japanese Navy you are worried about, Karpov,” he said, voicing his inner concern. “It’s the American Navy too.”

  “It is any navy that would set itself in opposition to the rightful interests of Russia,” said Karpov flatly. “You think I do this for personal aggrandizement? I am not so foolish, or even so selfish. No. I act in the interest of the nation I swore to serve—the nation you have been struggling to re-unite, after it broke like bad china. Well, you have heard what I said about the future. If you think three separate states is difficult now, try fifteen after 1991. I know you cannot know whether this is all true, because you haven’t seen it. Yet I give you my word that what I have told you actually took place. You could even ask your newfound friend—Fedorov. He will tell you the same.”

  “And you think we can prevent that? How? Buy facing down the American Navy in the Pacific? You forget that I was a young man when that incident occurred in the Tsushima Straits that re-ignited the old Russo-Japanese war. I saw that history unfold in slow motion. At one point I thought I might go east and fight the Japanese myself, but the Revolution, and then the sudden appearance of this man Volkov, compelled me to stay in St. Petersburg and fight for the Bolshevik movement. Things did not turn out so well the last time you had that ship there in the Pacific, did they?”

  “You can thank Volsky for that. That man is a traitor to his own nation. Do you know he came for me with another warship? Yes. He managed to find a way to bring one of our most deadly fighting ships back to get after me—a submarine. He thought he was going to slink up on me and stab me in the back!” Karpov’s anger got the better of him now, and he restrained himself, reaching for his cup, and sipping the cold tea.

  Kirov perceived that flash of anger, and the darkness behind it, and he knew the danger he would court if he did what this man asked of him now. “I’m told that ship has certain weapons,” he said in a hushed tone. “Weapons far more powerful than the rockets you have used on other ships. We spoke of this before.”

  Karpov thought for a moment, realizing Kirov must have learned this from Admiral Volsky. How much did he know? Is he aware of the fact that I used those weapons? Kirov knew of a mysterious ‘incident’ in 1908 that served as a trigger point for renewed war with Japan, but he could not know I used a nuclear warhead on the Americans, because that happened August 8th of this very year, a week from now…. Unless Volsky told him…

  “Yes,” he said, “the ship can do more than many realize. It has power to decide any engagement decisively in our favor. You have probably read of what the Americans did at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is why I know I can prevail in the Pacific, but I do not even have to consider the use of these weapons. I can beat the Japanese Navy by simply using the conventional weapons that ship will now possess. I have been rash in the past, Kirov. I’m sure Volsky told you as much, and I will be the first to admit that. Yet everything I ever did was for Russia. Now I see things differently. I know the measured use of power can achieve the best results. Yet I also know that unless you are willing to use the power you have, then you can achieve nothing. So give me back my ship, and I will give you all our eastern provinces in return, and the oil the Japanese now unknowingly sit on at Sakhalin Island and Kamchatka. I will give you back the only port on the Pacific Russia ever had, and, if need be, I could even sail to the Black Sea and help you keep the Crimea and Sevastopol.”

  “The Black Sea? That would mean you would have to pass the Bosporus and Dardanelles. The Germans control that, or at least they think they do, though it is still nominally under Turkish authority. How would you get through?”


  “The Germans control the Straits of Gibraltar, do they not? Yet that ship sailed right on through. I can do the same and become a terror in the Black Sea that will freeze Hitler’s blood. You have Novorossiysk now. Yes? You want to hold it? I can make that happen. I can save Sevastopol and the Crimea, and your entire Black Sea Fleet, which would be lost as soon as those ports fall. You would have to surrender those ships, and all while listening to Ivan Volkov laughing at you from Orenburg. Then he’ll come for Volgograd…”

  “Damn that man,” said Kirov, thinking. Yes, there was so much Karpov could do. His armies could fight for me, and I’ll need every man he can send me. He says he has the oil I’ll need, and how can I doubt it? It is clear that I won’t get much from Maykop before the Germans get there. And yes, I’ll lose all of the Crimea, and possibly the whole of the lower Volga as well. I may even lose this war….

  Yet the warning whispered to him by Admiral Volsky when they met at Murmansk was still in his mind. He had been discussing all of this with the Admiral and Fedorov…

  “The British are hanging on by their fingernails,” he had said to Volsky. “If they go, then we are surely next. Then the whole world comes under the shadow of Nazi Germany.”

  Volsky was clear and direct in his reply, and Kirov could see it in his eyes. “That cannot be permitted to happen. Mister General Secretary, this has been an hour of many revelations. We sit here discussing the impossible fates we have both suffered, and now this news of Karpov chills my blood if this is, indeed, the man we lost. He is a man of great ambition, and could prove a grave danger. Now, however, I think that Russia’s only chance at survival is in a speedy alliance with Great Britain and the United States… but without their support, and the supplies and equipment that flowed to us through this very port, we may not have survived the onslaught Germany unleashed upon us. At this moment, all is in play. These years are the most dangerous of the entire war. Unless you get sound footing, the Germans could stampede all the way to Moscow, and now, with this Orenburg Federation and Volkov at your back, you have no refuge in the east as Stalin had when hard pressed.”