Second Front (Kirov Series Book 24)

by John Schettler

  It would be weeks yet before the entire French Army would be completely disarmed, all airfields occupied, units taken under guard. As Kesselring had commented to Kurt Student, many wanted nothing more to do with the war, others were so determined that they fled into the countryside, hiding in the hopes of one day making contact with Allied forces. Some would again join the Free French under Giraud and De Gaulle, but most would simply become irrelevant, just as Darlan was in the end.

  Hitler had made the fateful decision to make certain that France would not become a problem. One Korps of the 7th Army under General Freidrich Dollmann was now in Vichy Controlled territory, and it was joined by the 334th Infantry Division arriving from Germany. Marshall Petain was given an ultimatum—he must either order all French units to stand down, or Germany would rescind the armistice and resume immediate hostilities in France.

  With Admiral Darlan already dead at the hands of Juan Alfonso’s diligence, and with Laborde in custody aboard the commandeered French Flagship, the plan to scuttle the French Fleet at Toulon failed. This time, the Germans had simply moved too swiftly, forewarned of this threat by Ivan Volkov. While several destroyer, a cruiser and three submarines were scuttled at Toulon, the bulk of the ships there were captured, and soon the Normandie would have a new name: Friedrich de Gross, and Axel Faust would have a new job.

  Case Anton and Operation Lila to seize the French Fleet had been a great success, but it did have one very negative impact on Kesselring. The French troops he had relied upon to help in the defense of Morocco would also go through the catharsis of choosing sides. Most all of them would simply cease resistance as Patton’s troops advanced. Some would join Free French Forces forming behind Allied lines, others would remain disgruntled and oppose to the Allied cause throughout the war, with some even fighting for Germany in Russia in Infantry Regiment 638. Yet for the most part, a transformation was now underway that would see the entire French Administration of their colonies in Africa collapse.

  In the chaos of those hours, Kesselring found that he had no choice but to cede Morocco to the Americans. He would blame it all on the French, say they sabotaged the defense, but in reality, his primary intention was to extricate Student’s precious Falschirmjaeger battalions from the sure trap they would be in if they tried to defend Tangier, and instead get them east to the Algerian border on the rail line from Fez. It seemed that the entire Western front had been thrown into chaos, and the whirlwind of change was sweeping over the desolate reaches of North Africa.

  If the Germans had waited another two weeks to put this plan in motion, it might have failed as the French came to see the fate that awaited them for their collaboration with Germany. Yet now, with their war just a few days old, the plan caught them by complete surprise. When he heard the news of what the Germans had done, Patton could not help a grin.

  “Audacity,” he said. “War is simple, direct, and ruthless. A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week. This time it was a German plan. Tomorrow it will be an American plan. I intend to take every advantage of the confusion this is likely to cause. The French out there won’t know which way to point their goddamned rifles! Now’s the time to move. Montgomery is already 40 kilometers from Gibraltar, so I’m going to take Tangier in the next 48 hours, come hell or high water.”

  Half a world away, it seemed to Anton Fedorov that he could feel that foreboding wind on the downwash from the rotors of a KA-40 as he boarded with a handful of other men. Soon that helo was rising up into the grey dawn, chopping its way west over Sakhalin Island and bound for a rendezvous with the airship Irkutsk, and soon after, Fedorov would meet with another version of the man he had been plotting with, Captain Vladimir Karpov, now filling the Siberian’s boots as Admiral of the Siberian Aerocorps.

  Part X

  Amok Time

  “In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing.”

  ― Theodore Roosevelt

  Chapter 28

  Fedorov was deeply worried. It wasn’t the sudden appearance of the Takami, which should have been enough to rattle him given all he knew. What else might the eruption of Krakatoa have shaken loose? Was Takami the only aberration that may have resulted from that massive explosive event? Beyond that, what further damage did it do to the integrity of the continuum as a whole? Time was very fragile now, he knew, though he also knew he was speaking metaphorically to think this.

  Time was a dimension, like length, height or depth in the three dimensions that defined space. How does one fracture depth, or length? The answer, of course, was that such a thing could not fracture in the normal sense of the word, but it could change. The length of something could be shortened, depth could be made greater or lessened. These dimensions were not simply concepts, they were physical realities, measurable, and subject to a creed of arcane laws that came to be called physics.

  Yet time did not sit apart from those other three dimensions. It was intimately woven together with them to produce what Einstein came to call “Spacetime.” While it still seemed strange for him to consider it, Einstein had theorized that spacetime could be warped, bent, curved, and in events like black holes, it might even break to the extent where movement from one point in spacetime to another was possible, vast distances covered with only minimal movement in time. Physics had proven all of this to be true, if anything mankind knew of the universe could ever be said to be a definitive truth.

  So it was that the location of a process in spacetime could also change, or so his presence here in 1942 seemed to declare. It could move forward, or slip backwards along the continuum of the line of causality, something conveniently perceived by humans with their predilection for order. For men, one thing led to another, one moment to the next, even if that was merely a convention of thought, and the notion of future and past were only ways to describe what the universe was doing at a point relative to what it was doing now, in the “moment” anyone might choose to call their present. Words did not easily describe any of this, nor could the mind clinging to words and logic easily grasp it, but there it was.

  All Fedorov knew was, that for the whole of his life, this progression from now, to now plus one, had been the slow sedate passing of the days… tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. Nothing had ever disturbed it, but that was no longer the case. Now things were sliding all over the continuum, and the stability of their place in any given “moment” was no longer certain. Nothing was solid or predictable, and so he thought of time as being cracked, broken, fragile, and tending to even greater fragility with every slip.

  The moment Fedorov was calling his present was now 1942, and he was deeply concerned over something. It wasn’t Takami, or the war, but time itself that he was musing on now. He looked about him, seeing a world that was clearly the result of actions he, himself, and others had taken in the past. Yes, there was Ivan Volkov and his Orenburg Federation, and here he was aboard Kirov fighting the Japanese in the Pacific—Japanese that now still occupied all of Primorskiy Province, including Vladivostok itself!

  Karpov was trying to correct that historical aberration. He had already taken back Kamchatka, and was now successful in covering his invasion of Sakhalin Island. Then came the unexpected challenger, the hot missiles flying in a duel of 21st Century ships—certainly surprising and very dangerous, but not even a shadow compared to the peril he was contemplating now.

  It came to him again, amid the jumble of things he dealt with each day, when Karpov had asked him whether there was any further risk of paradox ahead. He told him this seemed to be a safe time, because the ship did not vanish in August of 1941 as it had the first time around. He remembered how he explained it to Karpov.

  “We vanished in August of 1941, sailed through that broken future to the Med, and then reappeared a full year later, in August of 1942, right in the middle of Operation Pedestal. With Malta gone, that history isn’t likely to repeat, let alone the fact that we a
re still here in the Pacific. We never vanished last August like the first ship.”

  “Should we fear that date, August of 1942? Might there be another paradox there?”

  “No… I don’t think so….”

  Karpov nodded. “So then, if there’s no paradox to worry about come this August, what has you so spooked?”

  “Just what I discussed with you earlier. We could do something, cause a change here that would knock out a key supporting beam holding up the future that built this ship. I’ve been thinking about that, and trying to discover what it could be, where the key event is that we must not disturb, and I think I may be on to something.”

  At that point their discussion had disintegrated into a search for the real Prime Mover on all these events. Was he to blame, or was it Orlov, or Karpov? Everyone had an opinion. But what was time doing here? Orlov’s sudden awakening to the knowledge of events they had lived through in the Med was also disturbing, and as Fedorov considered those things, he lined up the dominoes in his mind, getting more anxious with each one he placed. Orlov jumped ship… I tried to kill him to erase him from the continuum, but he survived. Then, once we got back to Vladivostok in 2021, I tried to go back and rescue him, all with the aim of preserving the integrity of the history I knew.

  That was a story that spun off in entirely unexpected directions, and it all had to do with Ilanskiy. It was there that I fell through to 1908, the Tunguska event, and there that I met Mironov. I effectively killed Josef Stalin with a single whisper in Mironov’s ear. Volkov’s pursuit also brought him to Ilanskiy, and in that, the Orenburg Federation was born. All of that depended on Orlov jumping ship, but that won’t happen now, even though it was a root cause that gave rise to the world we’re sailing in here.

  Orlov jumped ship, and now he tells me how he leapt out of that helicopter, and I remember the ship’s logs on that clearly—18:30 hours, on the 13th of August, 1942. This entire world depended on him surviving that jump… and I put five S-300s in the air to try and kill him before he could leap to safety. My god, this is what happens when a missile fails to get its target. This whole broken world is the result. Now the real problem asserted itself in his mind.

  It’s already late September. Orlov should have already jumped ship by now, but the world is still here. If this history is re-writing the old, like the Mona Lisa painted over some older image on the canvas, then how can this world still persist? It depends entirely on Orlov’s jump, but that didn’t happen. Could I be wrong about the importance of that event? Then something struck him like a thunderclap. He was wrong. It wasn’t August 13 that mattered!

  His heart was racing, and a queasy feeling of utter peril clamped down on him. Orlov’s jump didn’t matter. That’s not where the history really changed. It was something he did after that, and something I did in response.

  I’ve been worried we would come to some essential pillar holding everything up, and then take some action to topple it, and this entire world along with it. But that’s not how it will happen. It will happen by inaction, by Orlov failing to do something he did in the past… by me failing to react. then all the dominoes that fell from his earlier act come tumbling down. There would never be a reason for me to go after him, to ever meet with Sergei Kirov, or for Volkov to ever pursue me on the Trans-Siberian Rail. There could never be an Orenburg Federation.

  His heart was pounding now, for time was creeping silently toward the real moment of truth. Tomorrow was the 27th of September, 1942. The world here held together until now because Orlov was just reveling in the bars and brothels of Spain this last month. He was picked up, put on a ship, and made his way to the Black Sea. But soon, in just a few days, he does something that truly matters, and when it is decidedly clear that can’t happen, then time is in a real quandary. Then the meridians of fate diverge, and the history of these events moves forward on a line that takes it farther and farther from the time line that created it. How far can it go before Time realizes it is an impossible dead end, a line of causality that leads nowhere—a world that must end? My god, I was wrong! I told Karpov there was no risk of paradox here, but I was wrong. We’re facing it all again—another Paradox Hour—September 30, 1942!

  What can I do? The question pulsed at his temples. What can I do to create a situation here, on this timeline, that might justify or underpin its continuation? Yes, that was the key. Where Orlov failed to act, I must act in his place. In fact, I’m the only one who can act now to preserve this line of fate. I’m the reason things haven’t already fallen apart here, because I know exactly what I would have to do. Time has been waiting for me to choose.

  With that thought he was off at a run, heading for the officer’s dining room where he knew he would always find Karpov at this hour. There was so little time, and so far to go, but if he failed to act, if he failed to get there in time….

  * * *

  “Settle down Fedorov, you’re working yourself up into a fit. Here, drink some wine and catch your breath. Now what is it that has you so upset?”

  He went over the whole thing with Karpov, his unreasoning fear, and then the desperate attempt to discover where the key lever was on these events. It was just days away now, on the 30th of September.

  “More of your crazy time theory? You are saying that this date is some kind of trip wire, and the whole world is about to blow up? How can I believe that?”

  “Yes, it is crazy, and I’m not sure what we can expect. All I know is that the last time we faced a situation like this, bad things happened. The ship itself vanished!”

  “I thought you said that was because of the imperative of its first coming. We don’t have that now in this situation. We steered north for Murmansk, not south into the Denmark Strait. That was a major point of divergence—yes? You see, I’ve thought about all of this as well. Remember, I faced the wrath of time alone aboard Tunguska, and… well… here I am, enjoying this nice cut of meat. You should try it, Fedorov. It would do you some good.”

  “Eat? With all this in the air? No, we’ve got to work this through—determine what we can do about it. I have a plan.”

  “A plan? Good Lord, Fedorov, I’ve heard that one before. It was your crazy plans that set all this in motion.”

  “I thought that once myself, but no longer. In one sense, yes, what you say is true. But a man must have a reason to take action, and without Orlov jumping ship as he did, I would have had no reason to go after him.”

  “Alright, I argued this myself when you were looking so glum the other day. So what are you saying—Orlov caused everything, and now he can’t raise havoc here by jumping ship?”

  “Yes.”

  “And because of this, the world we’re in has no basis to even exist? What? Do you expect it all to simply vanish tomorrow?”

  “Not tomorrow,” said Fedorov, settling down now, and taking Karpov’s advice to quaff down some wine. “In three days we reach a critical point in this whole story. It wasn’t simply Orlov’s doing, it was mine.”

  “There you go again.”

  “Hear me out,” Fedorov raised a hand. “Alright, Orlov jumps ship. I fired those five S-300s at him, on your urging, and we think we got him. So what reason did I have to take any further action at that point? None. It wasn’t until I was doing that research back in Vladivostok, and came across that letter he wrote, that I had reason to suspect he was alive.”

  “Letter? Ah… I remember now, the letter from a dead man. Orlov kept a journal, and somehow a page turned up on the Internet.”

  “Exactly! In that letter he talked about where he was, and what had happened to him. And he dated it—30 September, 1942. That was the critical act, the writing of that letter. On that day, Orlov created evidence of his existence in the past, and as fate had it, I found that evidence. We had other clues as well—remember what Nikolin said about that card game he played with Orlov before he jumped ship?”

  “Yes, yes—Nikolin, Nikolin, Nikolin, you lose.”

  “Correct. So
we got clues of his existence, but that letter was the real key. It gave us an exact time and place where we could find him—Kizlyar, on the 30th of September, 1942, and with that evidence, I hatched the plan to go rescue him. So you see, the key date is September 30. That’s the day I was convinced we had to take action, and we both know how that all turned out.”

  “Alright, so what are you saying now, that the world will end on September 30 if we take no action? Let me humor you and grant you the fact that we may be facing some kind of paradox here. How can you be sure anything will happen on the 30th of this month? Why not on the day you actually did take action, the day you put the plan in motion and shifted back from the Primorskiy Engineering Center? Even then, your arrival in 1942 was prone to any number of outcomes at that point. Anything could have happened. You might not have even stopped at Ilanskiy as you did.”

  “But I did stop there, and something tells me that was fated.”

  “It was mere happenstance, Fedorov.”

  “Was it? Think… What are the odds that Ivan Volkov also stops at that inn in 2021. I used the back stairway, and so did he, not once, but twice to reach the year 1908, just as I did. And why did the ship fall all the way back to that same year when that Demon Volcano erupted?”