Kirov Saga: Darkest Hour: Altered States - Volume II (Kirov Series)

by Schettler, John

  Lindemann was astounded by what he saw, the inner voice of the skald chanting the demonic verse from the Eddas…

  “The hot stars down from heaven are whirled;

  Fierce grows the steam, and the life-feeding flame,

  Till fire leaps high about heaven itself.”

  Till fire leaps high… What in the name of heaven was happening? His eyes followed the long arcing trails through the sky, tracing back towards the smoky red horizon to their point of origin. There, he thought. Whatever blighted Gneisenau and struck at Graf Zeppelin was there. He could feel the sinister presence of something dark and unseen beyond that horizon, a fateful nemesis that lurked at the edge of history itself, looming, brooding, a hidden menace on the high seas that was wholly unaccountable.

  This is not possible, he thought. Not possible!

  Then something jarred him to action, the harried worry snapping at him from all directions like the snarling teeth of a wolf pack. It was as if he acted on pure reflex, sensing a danger so profound here that his only recourse, the only sane thing to do, was to step back, to turn, to get his ships as far from that unseen danger as he could until he could assess what was happening.

  At that moment one of the fiery streaks in the sky swerved and dove, racing down at breakneck speed and plummeting to the sea. At the last moment, it pulled up and then came streaking in, aimed right at Bismarck, just a meter or two above the water!

  “Left hard rudder! Come round to ten degrees north and signal all ships follow!” Lindemann’s voice was ragged as he shouted.

  “Rudder left and coming hard about!”

  The maneuver might have avoided a slow moving torpedo, or even frustrated the aim of an oncoming plane—but this was no plane. The rocket came hurtling in, right for the heart of the ship and then struck home with jarring fury and fire. It was as if Thor had hurled his hammer from the sky, the hammer of God striking his ship and igniting a horrid hot fire on his starboard side.

  Bismarck wheeled off course, just as a narrow spread of two more heavy rounds from Hood hissed into the sea where the ship had been a moment before and exploded, magnifying the sense of imminent peril the Kapitän now felt. Then Lindemann saw the distant ripple of fire as the newly arriving British ship let loose with its first full broadside.

  Hoffmann tried to warn me. I could see it in his eyes; hear it in the tone of his voice. There was fear there, and awe, and now I know what he had tried to convey. Now I know what killed Sigfrid. Yet Lindemann had not even seen the enemy ship that had fired the terrible weapon at him!

  The range opened at once, and Lindemann looked to see that Tirpitz and Prince Eugen had both matched his maneuver. The destroyer Heimdall was also churning about and accelerating to its top speed of 36 knots as the German ships veered off angle and began to break away to the northeast, guns still firing with wrathful anger.

  Now the situation had taken a sudden and dramatic turn. Oels called up to the bridge saying he had red lights across two full compartments on the starboard aft quarter, and a bad fire. Gneisenau had been hit like this, by this terror weapon with precision accuracy and amazing range and striking power. Altmark obliterated, Gneisenau hit, Tirpitz hit, his own ship damaged, Sigfrid sunk and Graf Zeppelin under attack! This was more than he bargained for when he strove to persuade Raeder to allow him to engage here. Suddenly the lure of fat convoys to the south no longer seemed promising. Now he could think of only one thing he must do.

  I must get these ships to safe waters. We must disengage at once. Hoffmann was correct and I should have listened to him.

  This changes everything.

  Chapter 6

  “That seems to have done the trick,” said Rodenko, his face registering satisfaction. “The German main battle group has turned on zero-one-zero. They look like they are breaking off, Admiral.

  “And the planes?

  “We got all seven in the lead group with that S-400 barrage. The rest are still near the carrier, but they now appear to be circling.”

  “Let me know if they proceed south on a heading to make any further attack.”

  The Admiral looked at his acting Capitan now. “Well, we could not avoid the fireworks as you had hoped, Mister Fedorov, but it appears we have made just a bit more of an impression than our deck guns did when the British had a look at them.”

  “Agreed, sir, and we will have some explaining to do should we meet them again, but I suppose it could not be helped. All things considered, it was a fairly economical cost to affect the outcome of this battle. Those five SAMs and the two SSMs we expended may have saved thousands of lives.”

  “On one side of the equation,” Volsky reminded him. “Remember that we may have also killed a good number of German sailors with this intervention. Rodenko now believes the destroyer that took our P-900 has now sunk.” He let that settle in for a moment, more for the sake of the younger officers within earshot than to lecture Fedorov. He knew his young Captain would have done even less if he could have found a way to impose an outcome here with minimal violence. Where Karpov was heedless of the human cost his actions levied, Fedorov seemed to count every soul lost on his fingertips.

  One man heedless and headstrong, the other compassionate and overly cautious, yet daring in many ways. It was Fedorov’s plan that safely rescued Orlov, and also his plan that put my bottom in this seat again and pulled Kirov out of 1908. We may have just arrived there aboard Kazan in the nick of time. Another hour and Karpov would have destroyed most of Togo’s fleet. Who knows what the world would have looked like then?

  He looked at Fedorov, seeing a distant look in his eyes, as if he was considering something, his mind grappling with a problem of some kind.

  “Your thoughts, Mister Fedorov?”

  “Sir? Oh, I was just thinking about our chances… of moving in time again before 1941.”

  “You are still worried what will happen come late July next year?”

  “I am sir, in spite of what Director Kamenski has said. He believes this to be an altered reality, separate from the line of causality we left in 1908. That may be true, but it could also simply be the same world, only one badly fractured by what happened that year.”

  “But what did happen of any great consequence, Fedorov? We do not know this yet. Yes, Karpov sunk several old ships in Admiral Togo’s fleet, but then we spirited the ship away and no one was the wiser.”

  “Yet that had a significant effect, sir. I spent two hours from my last leave with Nikolin listening to radio traffic. That incident re-ignited the Russo-Japanese conflict. Japan repudiated the Portsmouth treaty, and almost immediately occupied all of Sakhalin Island. We could not get all the details, but there was a news item about Urajio, and that was the Japanese name for Vladivostok. Japan now controls that city, sir, and it is not any exaggeration to think that may also be the result of the incident in 1908.”

  “That certainly would have changed the history in the Pacific.”

  “Yes sir, and I have learned one other thing. Josef Stalin died as a young man—in 1908. There was a broadcast out of Orenburg that mentioned his death in Bayil Prison. Apparently he was executed, though the narrator used the word assassinated. There is a statue of him there in Baku, and his name was etched on a monument as one of the instigators of the early revolution.”

  “Yet you must see this as good news, yes Fedorov? Think of all the millions sent to the death camps under Stalin’s regime.”

  “Of course, sir, but there is another side to that coin. The strength of his will and personality was also a decisive factor in building the Soviet Union as we knew it. Without Stalin, Russia remained divided in a contentious civil war that apparently continues even now. There is fighting today again at Volgograd. This world may simply be the result of things that happened in that decisive year—in 1908. It was the year Russia lost its only Pacific port, the year Stalin died, and one other thing—it was the year something fell from the deeps of space at Tunguska, something that found its way into Ro
d-25.”

  “Suppose you are correct, Fedorov. What then?”

  “Then we have reason to fear our own coming, sir. I keep going back and forth on this. On the one hand I think that for us to be here on this ship, this very moment, then this saga had to begin somewhere—with that accident on Orel, and our displacement to July 28th of 1941. Then on the other hand I think that for any of that to happen it must result from a history that remains sufficiently intact so that this ship is built. The events that lead to the design and commissioning of Kirov, the placement of Rod-25 aboard—well they have to remain perfectly intact. It’s a house of cards, sir, and we are an Ace sitting at the very top. Anything that changes the history significantly in the past could easily affect our very existence. I wonder if the changes we see, and our presence here now, will prevent the ship from ever being constructed—or worse, Admiral. I wonder if these alterations in the history could even lead to changes in our own personal histories. Remember those men on Doctor Zolkin’s list. It could be that our names are written in that same ledger now, and that time is simply waiting for the right moment to make an end of us.”

  That was a fairly dark assessment, and it gave Volsky pause for a moment. “I know how you feel, Fedorov, and what you must fear. Sometimes I think of my wife, and I am sure many others here think of their own loved ones we left behind so long ago. It is 1940. The dear woman I married over forty years ago will not be born for another seventeen years! Believe me, to think I am now in a world where her soul does not yet exist has left me feeling very empty at times. This heart of mine was half filled, or more, with the love that woman gave me, yet she doesn’t even exist, except in my memory at this moment.”

  “Yes, and forgive me Admiral, but she might never even be born at all. This is what I fear now, and while it remains troublesome speculation and worry on my part at the moment, come July 28, 1941 we will be facing a dangerous paradox. We cannot be here, alive, the ship intact in this world at the moment Kirov is supposed to first arrive here. This is what I fear, and Director Kamenski’s reassurances have not yet been sufficient to allow me a good night’s rest here.”

  “Yet what can we do about that, Fedorov?”

  “We can leave, sir. Something tells me we must leave before that date. Call it a hunch, but I just have this feeling about it. So I have been looking at any possible way we could resolve our dilemma here, given the fact the this new control rod we used seems unreliable.”

  “So you have been brooding over volcanoes; looking for a way out of this world.”

  Fedorov smiled. “Yes, I suppose I have, sir.”

  “I know you too well, young man. You are scheming again, correct?”

  “Well sir, I thought I would see if there were any significant eruptions in this year or early next year, but I haven’t found anything useful. Most of the volcanic activity was in the Pacific—a few eruptions in Japan, the Kuriles, Kamchatka. Now that we are here in the Atlantic, we will miss a moderate eruption on Miyake-Jima off the southern Japanese coast. That will happen July 12th, and there will be another moderate eruption in Indonesia on July 20th.”

  “Well I don’t think it would be wise to try and spin the roulette wheel again and see if we end up in the Pacific.”

  “True, sir. But there won’t be anything else until Asama on Honshu, Japan on July 13th next year—that’s just two weeks before Kirov first appeared in the Norwegian Sea. They were all moderate eruptions—nothing like that Demon Volcano in 2021. The biggest event near us in time and space now would be Hekla on Iceland, but it isn’t scheduled to erupt until November 2nd, 1947.”

  “That is of no help to us.”

  “Perhaps,” said Fedorov. “But that eruption had been building for more than a century. Hekla is the most active volcano on Iceland, producing explosive eruptions on a fairly regular basis. The 1947 event was very explosive, though it was much smaller than the Demon Volcano, just a VEI 4.”

  “You have been digging, Fedorov. And you are thinking we have our own way of lighting a candle whenever we choose with our special warheads.”

  “I suppose so, sir. It’s something we may have to consider if we cannot sort our this control rod issue.”

  Volsky gave him a look of admiration. “Well I will consider this with you. But remember, these explosive events always send things to the past, not the future. That is a caveat we must not forget. We will discuss it with Kamenski and perhaps Zolkin as well. The Doctor always has some interesting insight on these matters. After all, it was he who suggested we simply have Dobrynin fiddle with the reactors to get us home, and that has worked for us more than once. Now, however, I think we have our foot in the door here, and we must look to what is happening with the Germans. It is in my mind to continue north now, for Severomorsk and Murmansk.”

  “You’re going to sail Kirov right into port, sir?”

  “Possibly. If the situation permits and it seems safe and prudent. You have told me that Sergei Kirov is leading the Soviet State now. I want to speak with the man—in fact, I think you should speak with him as well. After all, you two met years ago.” The Admiral smiled.

  “Do you think that is wise, Admiral? Look what happened after I met him in 1908. Just the slightest word form me may have caused all this.”

  “I told you to lay that burden down, Fedorov. You must not blame yourself. It may be that we vanish next July as you fear, but Kamenski could also be correct and we may simply be forced to live out our lives here if these new control rods no longer work. Oh, we will keep your volcanoes in mind, but we may be here for some time, and this ship will need a friendly port. There is no other way to say it. We’ll need food, water, supplies. Beyond that, I have the men to consider. Perhaps sight of home would do them some good.”

  “But you can’t be considering shore leave there, sir. Wouldn’t that be very dangerous?”

  Volsky remembered how Fedorov fretted in the Pacific when they had put men ashore. He wanted all his eggs safe in the basket where he could keep count. “I know you still hope we can avoid further changes, further contamination here, but that may not be possible.”

  Fedorov sighed. “I know that, sir. One night I was standing a quiet watch and seemed to be able to let all those concerns go and just accept the fact of my own existence here—that this was my life now, here, in this time and place. It was very liberating, far better than carrying these troubled thoughts around in a big burlap sack on my back.”

  “Yes? Well have you considered this, Fedorov? You say Sergei Kirov followed you up that stairway at Ilanskiy. It may be that he discovered what was happening there in some way, even as you did. He was a clever young man back then as well. Suppose he did discover that there were two different worlds joined by those stairs. Then what?”

  “I’ve thought about that, Admiral, but how can we know this?”

  “By speaking with Kirov, that’s how.”

  Fedorov was silent for a time, finally realizing what the Admiral was driving at. Yes, he thought, we could learn a great deal about what happened in such a meeting. For that matter, if we do make port somewhere, then I could get my hands on some history books and read all about it. This would clear up many questions, but it would also be very risky, and he said as much to Volsky.

  “Yes, yes,” said Volsky. “It’s risky to get out of bed each day. But we still get up. Breakfast is waiting. So we must take a few risks here if we want our eggs and sausages, eh?”

  “Or a good blini and jam, sir.”

  “Exactly. But there is one more reason I think we must speak with this man, and this is one you may have considered yourself. If what I have said is true, and Sergie Kirov did learn the peculiar nature of that back stairway, then he knows it still—to this day. There is one other way we can move in time, Mister Fedorov, and without control rods, nuclear bombs or volcanoes. That stairway may still exist, and if it does, it is the single most important place in all of Russia. You understand? The innkeeper at Ilanskiy may be the most powerful
man on earth and not even know it! But that said, only a very few people on this earth may know about this. Aside from a select club on this ship, Sergei Kirov may be one of those people.”

  “I see….” Fedorov suddenly realized that Volsky had been thinking a great deal about things, and had plans and schemes of his own. Then the Admiral held up a finger.

  “There is one other man who may know of what we speak, that Intelligence officer Kamenski told us about, the man who shares the name of the current leader in Orenburg—Ivan Volkov.”

  The name fell like hot coals hissing in a bucket of water. They passed a brief moment, with a palpable sense of dread between them, clearly evident in the eyes of both men.

  “So you see, Fedorov, we may have more to worry about here than this rendezvous with fate on July 28th next year. We have business of our own making to attend to first, and something tells me time has left us here for that very reason.”

  Part III

  Prodigal Son

  “The pattern of the prodigal is: rebellion, ruin, repentance, reconciliation, restoration.”

  —Edwin Louis Cole

  Chapter 7

  The madness that overtook him was a raging storm, yet something within him struggled to restrain it. End it! End it! The shame was too great, welling up like bile in his throat, and he raised the gun to his head. At that moment Admiral Tovey intervened, steady at the wheel of HMS King Alfred, bearing down on the ominous shadow ahead. A shell from his guns fell very near the ship, sending a hail of splinters up when it exploded, one scoring Karpov’s face even as he began to squeeze the trigger. The pain and blood shocked him to the realization of life, harsh, stunning blood-red life that was still pulsing in his veins.