Kirov III: Pacific Storm k-3

by John A. Schettler

  Admiral Volsky smiled, an idea in his mind. “Mister Nikolin,” he said in a calm voice. “When you have finished crushing those grapes would you be so kind as to call that American submarine on the radio? We were about to send them a nice, fat super-cavitating cigar, but I think I would like to offer their captain a box of fine Cuban cigars instead. If I can parley with Admiral John Tovey, then by God I can speak with this man as well. Get them on the radio.”

  And he did.

  ~ ~ ~

  The world Kirov left behind in 1942 had a long time to consider the mystery of this strange interloper on the high seas. The code word Geronimo was kept a quiet secret, but the mysterious ship was never seen again. This time it had vanished for good. The British Admiralty locked away the files in a deep, deep cellar beneath Hut 4 in Bletchley Park, and few knew what happened to them once that facility was eventually closed after the war. Admiral John Tovey was one of them, following the reports of unaccountable engagements that week in the Coral Sea, and smiling to himself, then crumpling the decrypts and putting them to the fire.

  He spent the next years serving ably in spite of Churchill’s desire to remove him for his transgressions, and was eventually promoted to Admiral of the Fleet, retiring from service in 1946 to pursue ‘other matters.’ Few ever knew what scope and scale of those matters actually were, but those close to him said he had been fond, in his later years, of reading novels by Jules Verne and the work of H.G. Wells. No one ever really knew that he still remained in the hunt for the mysterious ship that had once been code named Geronimo, keeping a silent, vigilant watch on the world.

  Alan Turing continued his amazing work as a cryptanalyst, eventually trailblazing the development of the computer with his “Turing Machine,” and laboring on in logic and number theory. His work on artificial intelligence and encrypted speech transmission was also groundbreaking and well ahead of its time—and for good reason. The startling discovery that Geronimo had left one thing of great importance behind when it vanished set him on a search that was to consume him for the remainder of his days, and there were all too few left to him.

  As for Novak and Osborne at FRUMEL Headquarters in Melbourne, they kept chewing on the rind of the orange they had been peeling that week. They did learn enough to know a great battle had been fought off the coast of Papua New Guinea, a battle the Japanese had apparently won, or so they read the tale when this strange enemy ship simply vanished, presumed sunk. But they knew it didn’t go without a fight. A plane out of Milne Bay had managed to get a photo of a large and dangerous looking Japanese battleship, obviously bearing the scars of a major battle as it slipped by, escorted by a gaggle of cruisers and destroyers. It was Admiral Yamamoto and Yamato, bound for Rabaul and then Kure. The Americans never knew much about the Yamato incident, for they knew very little about the ship itself, or its sister ship Musashi, until many years later.

  On the Japanese side, when the cruiser Tone made port at Rabaul, the crew was so distraught with the tale of a demon ship from hell that they were relieved to a man, scattered throughout the empire, and the ship was re-crewed. Yet ever thereafter the Tone was whispered to be a ghost ship, and men reported seeing strange lights in her dark and twisting corridors, and they had bad dreams. The ship would survive until July of 1945 when she was sunk in Kure harbor by planes off the USS Monterey. The final stroke was a rocket attack by planes from the resurrected carrier Wasp, on July 28, 1945, exactly 76 years before Kirov had first vanished.

  Captain Sanji Iwabuchi was sent to the Philippines in some disfavor. He would never recant his story, that his ship had finally found and rammed the phantom enemy they had come to call Mizuchi, and sunk it that night. And he went on to stubbornly disobey his orders to withdraw from Manila years later, leaving tens of thousands massacred in the fighting there. No one else much believed his tale, though they never dared say as much to Iwabuchi’s face. Yet the odd thing that no one had been able to explain was the slightly crumpled bow of the cruiser Tone, damaged in that first split second of her harrowing encounter with Kirov, before the Russian ship slipped out of phase, sailing away on the cold drafty seas of time.

  The Japanese never knew what had so bedeviled them in the Coral Sea. They sailed Yamato home, casting a cloak of shame and secrecy over the ship again as they set about to repair the extensive damage. No announcement was ever made to the public about the disaster, or the greater loss of three fleet carriers in the Solomons. Strangely, Kirov had restored the balance of power to what it might have been after the Midway battle that had never been fought. In some bizarre calculus known only to herself, Mother Time had balanced her books.

  A young Ensign named Mitsuo Ohta had been deeply impressed by the dreadful “suicide rockets” the enemy had deployed. Watching them dance over the sea in their evasive maneuvers, and knowing nothing of computer controlled guidance systems, he could only conclude that they were piloted. He soon approached students of the Aeronautical Research Institute at the University of Tokyo for help in designing a similar weapon. His plans were submitted to the Yokosuka research facility, and the Navy Air Technical Arsenal began to produce prototypes of a rocket powered piloted cruise missile they would call the Okha, or Cherry Blossom. Its only liability was that the three solid fueled rockets it used were not yet powerful enough to launch it from a ship.

  Instead the rocket had to be carried by a twin engine bomber to within 37,000 meters, and then it could launch to make its daring and final high speed run to the target, with a human pilot standing in for the missing computer and radar controlled brain that had guided Kirov’s missiles. These developments saw the weapons deployed months early in the Pacific, though they were too few and still too late to tip the balance of power and salvage Japan’s lost war. The pilots who flew them damaged and sunk several US Ships, the last cherry blossoms falling from the dying tree of Japanese empire, but American gunners at sea came to call them by another name: Buka, the Japanese word for ‘fool.’

  And so the war, the long terrible Second World War, played out much as it had in the old history that Fedorov once knew. The industrial might of the U.S. put one carrier after another into the Pacific, and the steady advance of the Allies was once again a certainty—only things ended differently this time. The Americans had seen firsthand what the horror of nuclear weapons would be, though the public never knew about it. The loss of the Mississippi and the other ships in TF-16 was not enough to prevent them from building their own bomb, but it was enough to prevent them from eventually dropping it on Japan in 1945.

  For his part, Admiral Yamamoto did not die in a plane crash, shot down by P-38s in April of 1943. The soup of the history was stirred just enough by Kirov to change his personal fate, and it also changed the whole character of the war in the Pacific as well. When Germany was finally defeated, Yamamoto had been instrumental in persuading the Army and High Command, and the Emperor himself, that Japan should lay down its sword, now and forever.

  Hiroshima and Nagasaki never happened. Task Force 16 had been enough of a peek inside Pandora’s jar. Instead the men of that brave new world reached in and drew out that one last thing at the bottom of the jar, Elpis, the Spirit of Hope.

  Time had a way of smoothing over and healing the wounds the ship had made in the history of WWII, like the endless waves on the shoreline slowly blotting out the footprints of a solitary man. Only one thing remained to be done, or undone, and this time Kirov had passed the test. It was to be a new world now.

  ~ ~ ~

  Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan was thousands of miles away, giving Admiral Volsky and his officers a good long time to think how they might explain the damage to the ship, her hull number and insignias all painted over, her weapons inventory depleted, and the presence of old twenty millimeter rounds in her hide, weapons that had not been fired for almost a century. In the end it was determined that the rounds could be found and removed, the hull number and insignia restored, and the ship would claim damage from the accident that did,
indeed, send the submarine Orel to her death.

  As for the missing missiles, Volsky had his story well in hand: live fire exercises. That was what the ship had been sent out to do in the first place, and then it was to have sailed to Vladivostok in any wise to replace an old cruiser there and become the new flagship of the Pacific Fleet. In fact, Admiral Volsky had been slated to assume command there when the ship arrived in any case, replacing Admiral Abramov.

  Radio failure was a convenient icing on the cake they baked to explain why they never called for help until they arrived in the far east, a long month later. As to why they did not simply sail their damaged ship home to Severomorsk, Volsky’s power and prestige was enough. The Admiral passed it all off to the Russian Naval Command as a perfect opportunity to train his crew under more exacting conditions, simulating circumstances of a real wartime footing. He had simply chosen not to return, and continue his mission to the Pacific. An Admiral at sea is second only to God himself, and no one could question him and prevail. Suchkov could criticize him roundly, and demand his resignation, but old “Papa Volsky” was too well established to be easily pushed around, and too well loved and respected.

  There was, however, considerable mystery surrounding the fact that Kirov had managed to complete her journey undetected by the normally vigilant forces of NATO. Volsky suggested that they claim to have tested and deployed a new regimen of special jamming signatures to hide the ship, but alas the system had been damaged in a small electrical fire while they were in the Pacific. “They’ll probably end up calling us the Ghost Ship,” said Volsky, “and it would not be too far off the mark.”

  Before they returned to Mother Russia, they had a long discussion about the reactor core, and Rod-25, and why it might have caused the strange displacement in time. In the end it was left a mystery, something they knew they could never determine on their own, and something they definitely decided could never be revealed to the engineers back home. Admiral Volsky told Dobrynin that he would stay in close contact with him on the matter, and the engineer devised a plan.

  Then the Admiral sailed resolutely east to find his island, and the crew took a much needed shore leave on a mostly deserted speck in paradise, to their great satisfaction.

  Days later they made a careful inspection of the ship, held long discussions with the crew about what had happened, and let it generally be known that the whole event was to be forgotten and never spoken of again. They were a select legion of ghosts and goblins now, and the crew of Kirov became an elite and exemplary unit, never breaking ranks on the secret pact they had made with one another. What would anyone believe if they ever attempted to explain it with the truth of what had happened? They would be thought insane. As the ship approached Vladivostok they purged their logs, video footage and anything else that might have left an odd fingerprint of time on their intrepid ship. It was said to be a residual effect of the “Orel incident,” the files damaged by EMP burst that had darkened the ship’s systems for many days.

  Fedorov secreted away a digital copy of the log books in a small memory key, and also carefully removed the newspapers they had found on Malus Island. A clever man, with much foresight, he went to the ship’s library and quietly “took care” of any volume that might reveal a history that might not be in accord with the record written on the world they were returning to. He did keep a very few cherished volumes, however, in a dark and secret place. In particular, he coveted his old copy of the Chronology of the War at Sea, for he found its version of the history was markedly different from the narrative described in the very same book as published in the “new world.”

  Admiral Volsky thought he might retire some years after his return and lived out the remainder of his days on one of the Pacific islands he had yearned for all his life. Vladimir Karpov also found that idea appealing, tired in the service of war. He thought he might slip quietly away into a life of his own, a changed man, and some years later look for a wife, having finally found the capacity to love. Doctor Zolkin would leave the ship In Vladivostok, and take up a residency in the Naval hospital there. Many of the ship’s officers and crew also found they wanted nothing more to do with mishmanny, missiles and the military. They had seen all too much of the fire and heat of war, and now sought out the better things of life, meaningful work, good friends, good food and drink, a love if they could find one, and time with a good book, or in a garden.

  There was only one loose end that they could not account for, though Anton Fedorov spent many long hours trying. What had happened to Chief Gennadi Orlov? Where did he go? What effect, if any, did he have on the history that Fedorov could now spend long quiet years re-reading, re-learning, much to his delight? His curiosity and diligence would become a saving grace for the world, though he did not yet know that as he stood on the weather deck when the ship first returned to Vladivostok harbor. Kirov was coming home, but it would not be the last time she would see the fire of war.

  As it turned out, fate was not so kind to Orlov. Yes, he found a new life as well after he jumped from the KA-226 that day, yet it was not the life he had imagined. Time, fate, and the British Special Intelligence Service had other plans for him. But that, dear reader, is another tale.

  Thank you so much for reading this one!

  ~ John Schettler

  Illustrations

  The Japanese plan: Dotted lines indicate Operation FS as conceived by Japanese planners who failed to consider only one element in their strategy… the battlecruiser Kirov, a ship they soon come to call “Mizuchi” after the name of a legendary Sea Dragon.

  Admiral Isokoru Yamamoto leads the Imperial Japanese Navy as it confronts the USN and a strange phantom ship that has unhinged operational planning from Darwin to the Coral Sea.

  Battleship Yamato, involved in the final hunt for the phantom ship that had bedeviled Yamamoto’s navy.

  Her 18.1 inch guns had 26 inch armor and could range out to 45 kilometers! Her side armor was 16 inches thick, with 200mm deck armor.

  She is opposed by the most powerful battlecruiser ever conceived in the modern era, a clash of titans that spans three full chapters in the novel.

  Heavy Cruiser Tone.

  Kirov’s new AR-710 Gatling gun system in stealth turret.

  The older Kashtan integrated Gun/Missile system.

  Maps

  WARNING: Maps will reveal significant plot elements of the story. Spoilers dead ahead! They are included here as references for those wishing to follow the saga graphically as they read. But if you don’t want to know what’s coming up ahead, steer clear of these waters.

  The Main Japanese plan for the drive south. Then Kirov appears and begins to unhinge the entire operation.

  The Kirov Saga Continues…

  Men of War — By John Schettler

  It is late 1942 and the war rages on, but buried deep in the hidden rooms of Bletchley Park are files and photographs of a strange ship that bedeviled the world’s navies for two years, and then vanished. The men in Whitehall and Bletchley Park have not forgotten what they learned about this ship, which left behind more than nightmare visions and blackened ship hulls. There was a man, Gennadi Orlov, leaping to his freedom in a fit of jubilant violence—with a Glock pistol that would not be designed or produced for nearly 60 years…and one thing more…

  Now the true nature of the threat posed by the ship they had come to call Geronimo is finally revealed to the dogged analysts at Hut 4, and if one ship appeared to challenge the power of the British Empire, when might the next one come? A ‘Great War’ is coming, this they now know, a war so devastating and final that they must do everything in their power to prevent it. Men have died that should have lived, and others walk the earth who should have perished. What might they and their successive generations write upon the tattered pages of history shorn by Kirov’s private war on war itself? The realization is so startling, and so frightening, that a secret organization is established at Bletchley Park known simply as “The Watch.”

&n
bsp; Join the brilliant genius Alan Turing and Admiral John Tovey as they now lead the hunt for Kirov into darkened corners of history in an exciting intrigue of spymasters and sinister plots to control the course of all future history. In so doing they find that one other man has now become aware of their operations, in a future they can but dimly perceive—Anton Fedorov, who has become obsessed with the mystery of Kirov’s disappearance and the secret of “Rod-25.” Then something very strange begins happening to crew members who served aboard Kirov during that fateful voyage, and it changes everything.

  The Kirov saga continues as Anton Fedorov joins with Admiral Leonid Volsky, and Captain Vladimir Karpov in a desperate effort to solve the mystery and heal the breach in time that was torn by their own bloodied hands in the heat of naval combat.

  Men of War, by John Schettler

  Coming from the Writing Shop Press

  Please visit www.writingshop.ws for publication date.

  ~ ~ ~

  “Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.”

  ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

  ~ OTHER BOOKS BY JOHN SCHETTLER ~

  The Meridian Series