B00DSDUWIQ EBOK

by Schettler, John

  “I will do my very best, sir.”

  “I know you will, Dobrynin. Signal me the instant you return…And I hope to God we are all still here to greet you.”

  That thought was a sobering one, and it underscored just what was at stake with this mission. It was no longer the fate of a few officers and men, or even the three ships they were foolishly trying to bring home. Something much more was on the table now, for they all knew well what the world could look like if they failed. They had seen it with their own eyes in the devastation of one port of call after another. Now they had come to tempt the dark unbottomed infinite abyss of time and fate itself.

  Dobrynin sighed heavily, shook his head as he stared at the Mi-26, and then headed for the ladder down. By the time he made his way to the main operations center on the facility a young mishman rushed over with news from the radio room. The worry on his face was obvious.

  “Sir, we just received a call from Kaspiysk Naval Base. They say they have radar returns on airborne contacts to our south”

  “NATO planes?”

  “We don’t know, sir. They are coming in very low, and quite slow, so they may be helicopters. Kaspiysk is activating the 847th Coastal Missile Artillery detachment.”

  The young man’s worry was infectious. The war was now at their doorstep, but Dobrynin knew one thing about command that was an absolute necessity—a steady hand. The long years of patience and precision care in the operation of delicate and dangerous naval reactors would now stand him in good stead.

  “Very well, mishman, return to your post.” His voice was calm and reassuring. He walked slowly to the operations center and gave the order to conclude the maintenance routine. He looked at his watch. They had dipped Rod-25 into the neutron flux over an hour ago. It was already being slowly withdrawn from the reactor core, but it would take another ten minutes for full extraction. If NATO was coming for them now he might not even get the mission underway, but he would have to leave that with the defensive units Volsky had provided. His job was to get Rod-25 in and out of the nuclear borscht, and hope for the best. Yet now he had need for haste.

  “Increase rod withdrawal speed,” he said. “Use the number three rating.”

  “Aye, sir. Increasing withdrawal rate to three.”

  “Keep a sharp eye on those flux readings…” Dobrynin walked slowly to a chair and sat down, closing his eyes. He was listening to the music of the core. The score was different here, the harmonics and rhythm slightly varied from the music Kirov would sing to him, but the song remained the same. He could hear the subtle harmonies in the vibration of the system, and then he smiled. Yes…there it was…It was the same odd meter, the same rhythm and beat, He could hear Rod-25 conducting its nuclear chorus, and he knew the procedure would be a success, and very soon now.

  “Sir!” The mishman was back again, his voice strained and urgent. “Kaspiysk says we are under attack! They are engaging with missile defense batteries!”

  “Good for them,” said Dobrynin, slowly opening his eyes. “Let them do their work. We have already done ours.”

  * * *

  Lieutenant Ryan was not happy about his chances just now. They left one X-3 back at Baku as a reserve, as he had explained it. But he knew the real reason was that he did not want to risk losing all three helos and stranding the Argonauts there. Now his worse misgivings had come to pass. They had been spotted as they came in low from the south. The Russians were not sleeping as he hoped. His co-pilot Tom Wicks had just informed him the Russians had located his X-3s on radar.

  “They’ll be painting us red in another few seconds,” he said.

  “Bad manners, those Russians,” said Ryan. “Here we are just flyin’ in fast and low, and they get all miffed about it.” They were thirty kilometers out before they were seen. Yet they could not bring weapons to bear on the target ahead until they hit the 8 kilometer mark. Ryan had counted on speed and stealth to let him get in close to get the job done. The Russian radar system, code named Gravestone” was just too good.

  “What do you figure they’ll be shootin’ at us,” asked Wicks?

  “Missiles me boyo! Big fat missiles—probably S-300s, and maybe worse.”

  “Not a whole lot worse out there than that mean fire stick,” said Wicks, but he was wrong. There was a whole lot worse, and the X-3s were about to meet it.

  “Well you just get the jammers fired and be ready on ECM and chaff. That’s all we have between us and an early grave.”

  The 847th Coastal Defense battery was firing the new Russian Triumf missile system, a vertically launched missile using the deadly 9M96E medium range SAM.

  “There’s our target on radar,” he said. The two X-3s were riding very low now, right on the water, the churning wash of their rotors leaving a long mark on the sea as they came.

  “Right, and I think they’ve still got us on radar as well. I have missile lock!”

  “Evasive maneuvers and quick on those countermeasures!”Ryan pulled his X-3 up sharply as Wicks fired everything he had, the chaff littering the sky above them before Ryan dipped down low again. The first S-400 bought the ticket and they saw it streak high overhead and right through the chaff cloud like an angry shark attacking a school of fish.

  “Damn!” Wicks shouted. “Did you see how fast that monster was? If they fire a few more of those, we’re toast for sure, Ryan.”

  But the Lieutenant was so focused on his flying that he could not respond. He looked at his radar to check the position of his target…the signal was gone! The target should be clearly visible now on the horizon, but peering out the forward screen all he could see was a strange haze, like the shimmer of a mirage in a desert.

  “What’s up Tommy? Where’s my target?”

  Now it was Wicks turn to gape at the screen. “They must be jamming us,” he said quickly.

  “Jamming us? Well the damn thing should be right in front of us by now, big as a beached whale!”

  “Missile!” They saw a second SAM streaking up, then tipping over in a vicious high speed dive as it acquired a target. The two helos split apart, both firing chaff and blasting away with ECM countermeasures, but this time the missile was not fooled. It locked mercilessly on to the other X-3 and blew it to hell, striking the bird dead on and coming right in through the pilots cabin.

  “This is madness,” said Ryan. “God bless you Wilson,” he said of the other pilot, and the sight of the fireball that had taken down the helo was enough to make him reconsider this ill planned mission. “We’re out of here, Tommy. Leave a string of hot flares and chaff behind us, and if you have any favors left with the old man upstairs, now is the time to call them in. Whatever we were after has run for cover. That had to be a damn submarine. It’s gone!”

  It was no submarine, but Lieutenant Ryan was correct about one thing. The Anatoly Alexandrov was gone. Rod-25 had sang its song to infinity, and the big floating power plant had suddenly vanished.

  For Ryan, his only thought now was to save his helo and the lives of all aboard before the Russians fired another missile at them. He streaked away, so low that his landing carriage was actually skimming the sea, his hand steady on the stick and a quiet Irish song and prayer playing in his head. “Guard us now, Lord. We could use a little of that luck of the Irish. And if this be the end of our journey, may we be half an hour in Heaven before the Devil knows we’re dead.”

  The sudden disappearance of the Anatoly Alexandrov must have distracted the Russians at Kaspiysk. Or perhaps Ryan’s invocation was heard and answered, but no other missiles came for them that morning. The men at Kaspiysk had not been briefed as to the true nature of Dobrynin’s mission, and now they came to believe the enemy helicopters had gotten off a missile of their own and sunk the power plant. But they were wrong. Rod-25 had worked its magic again, and Anatoly Alexandrov vanished into the misty fog of time.

  The mission was on.

  Chapter 20

  When it happened, Bukin was on the bridge of the big hovercra
ft with Captain Malkin, number 609, moored off the port side of Anatoly Alexandrov. He was watching the battle unfold as the coastal defense battery began firing S-400 missiles. Something was attacking, coming in low from the south, and he saw that Captain Malkin was immediately engaging his short range SAM system as a last ditch defense. He quickly ordered a squad of Marines up to the roof of the facility with hand held 9K338 Igla missiles. The name meant “needle” and the needles were sharp. NATO called the infrared seeking missile the SA-24 Grinch, but by any name it was a very capable infantry operated SAM system. If NATO was coming for them, they would greet them rudely with a sky full of needles.

  Yet something about the moment seemed odd to him, the light breeze that had been blowing from the east suddenly halted and there came a breathless stillness. He heard a low pitched sound, descending even lower as if drawn into an unfathomable abyss until it was sucked beneath the range of human hearing to become a thrumming vibration, felt but not heard. The light seemed to waver around him, as if the day were fluttering in doubt.

  Off in the distance he thought he saw the oncoming attack, two aircraft very low on the sea and firing flares and chaff. A shore based missile found one and ignited it in an angry fireball, the other seemed to dance wildly in the sky for a moment…and then dipped away low, obscured by mist on the sea. Perhaps it, too, was struck by fragments from that explosion and went down. What was NATO thinking by sending in a few helicopters like this? They had no chance to get through a battery of S-400s.

  Then he heard a strange sound, high up, and growl of engines that were obviously aircraft, but very unfamiliar. In a split second he realized the attack must still be underway. He looked up to see the dark shapes falling like crows from the sky to attack…ships! A long column of what looked to be commercial cargo vessels sat in the dull gray light of the morning where the sea had once been completely empty. Could they have emerged from an unseen bank of fog in the distance? What were they doing there? These were restricted waters and Admiral Volsky assured him that no other traffic would be in the vicinity.

  “Malkin—look there!” He pointed out the surface contacts.

  Captain Malkin was equally surprised. A veteran in the Caspian flotilla, he had been charged with the command of the last remaining hovercraft for some years. It had mostly been a dull job of maintenance at the edge of the listless sea, with no more than one or two real live exercises per year. When he got news that he had been selected by Admiral Volsky to lead a special ops mission he swelled with pride. Then he heard the briefing and could not believe his ears. Vranyo was vranyo, a nice habitual stretching of the truth between Russians that was always part of the daily interchange of life. But Bukin seemed deadly serious.

  “Yes, I know it seems madness,” he had told him, “but if this mission is successful you will see with your own eyes. I know,” he nodded confidently, “I was on Kirov.”

  Now the madness was all around him, on the sea, in the sky above, and the natural shock of suddenly finding himself in completely different circumstances imposed a momentary paralysis as he gaped at the scene. Dark black aircraft were screaming down from the sky like birds of prey. What kind of planes were these? No…this was not NATO at all. This was what Bukin had warned him about. This was the Great Patriotic War!

  His shock and surprise soon gave way to the rush of adrenaline that imminent battle produced. He could hear the distant, urgent peal of ships’ bells ringing out the alarm, and the sound of machine gun fire. Bright tracer rounds scored the sky as the cargo vessels put up their pathetic air defense. Then he saw a tall geyser of water and heard the booming explosion of a bomb as the first plane swooped low and began climbing again. It was a very near miss.

  “Come on, Malkin! They’ll be after us next. Engage the bastards, Those must be German planes out there!”

  Thankfully the squad of Marines on the roof had the same idea. A second bomb hit one of the cargo vessels with an enormous explosion. Then, seconds later, Bukin saw thin streaks lace through the slate gray sky as the needles sprang up after the diving planes. One, then three, then five missiles fired. He heard a loud whistling scream from above and ducked reflexively as another bomb fell very near the Anatoly Alexandrov sending a wash of seawater up high enough to wet the props of the big Mi-26 on the roof deck.

  Malkin had finally shaken off the shock of the sudden transition and was rapidly engaging with the quad 9K32 Strela (arrow) missile defense battery on the 609 craft. It quickly put four arrows up to join the needles, and soon the sky was alight with flaming explosions as one missile after another found targets overhead and ignited them. The Germans got two hits on a single ship, but the missiles had thinned their ranks considerably and given them pause. The remaining planes were wheeling away to the west, heading for the perceived safety of the shoreline.

  Bukin smiled, clasping Malkin on his shoulder. “Welcome to World War Two!” he shouted over the noise of the battle. “We got here just in time to kick the Germans in the ass! Those were Stukas!”

  * * *

  Fedorov was out on the weather deck with Troyak and Zykov when he heard the first bells ring. Thus far the journey south had been uneventful. The Amerika was last out of port, sailing to rendezvous with three other ships out of Astrakhan and bringing up the rear in a line of four commercial vessels. He could barely see the lead ship, and had wondered about the names of the other vessels in the line, worried about their prospects on this voyage.

  When he inquired in the radio room he learned the bad news. The flotilla leader was Caspian tanker Kulibekov. Next came the Komitern, followed by Ubelikov and Amerika. He had made a point of studying the situation in the Caspian before they launched the mission. All these ships had been sunk by German air strikes! Kulibekov survived until November of 1942, but the other three, including their own ship Amerika, would go down in late October. He had double checked the dates of the attacks. The last two ships in the line would die together on October 26th. Komitern would be hit on the 30th and Kulibekov the following month. That was weeks away.

  Then came the sound of aircraft overhead, the warning bells, the chatter of the machine guns. He stood calmly on deck by a gunwale, watching the skies and confident that this attack would fail—until the first bomb struck Ubelikov just ahead of them.

  “My God!” he exclaimed. “It’s happening early. It’s happening now! If the rest of the history holds true, we’re next to be hit. We had better look to our lives, Troyak.”

  Troyak was looking at something else. He pointed, a big grin on his face. “Have a look there,” he beamed. “Those are hand held Igla missiles!”

  Fedorov looked to see the thin streaks of the missile tails threading the sky. They were coming from a point on the horizon ahead where he could dimly see the dark squat shape of something glowing with a wavering sheen like a mirage. “It’s Anatoly Alexandrov! They’re early! They’re here!”

  They watched as a salvo of four more missiles went up, and Troyak said they were the arrow system off one of the hovercraft. The sight of the missiles in the sky filled them with renewed courage. It had been a long, hard journey from Vladivostok. All along the way the prospect that they would be marooned here indefinitely was very real, and each man sat with that, wondering if Stalin’s Russia would be their new home for the remainder of their lives.

  “It worked!” Fedorov shouted over the sound of the growing battle. “Rod-25 did it again…Only they’re here early, or perhaps we’re late. I suppose there was no way we could really coordinate a mission like this. But one thing remains consistent—Rod-25—and those missiles are a welcome sight!”

  “We could have saved ourselves that long train ride, Fedorov. Why didn’t we just go with the Alexandrov?”

  “True, but we did not know that back then, Sergeant. All we knew was that we had a good chance of shifting back from the Primorskiy center reactor. We hoped our plan with the Alexandrov would work, but we could not be sure. Besides…” Fedorov paused, as if deep in thoug
ht now. “I think we needed to take that journey—that we were somehow meant to take it. That business on the stairwell at Ilanskiy was very important.”

  Even as he said that Fedorov revisited his feeling that the encounter with Mironov at Ilanskiy was fated. Things had played out in a haphazard way. Yes, Troyak was correct to point that out. We could just as easily be sitting over there aboard Anatoly Alexandrov now, and would not have had to trek over a thousand miles to make this rendezvous. But then I would not have found that rift in time on the stairwell at Ilanskiy. I would not have met with Mironov, with Sergei Mironovich Kostrikov—Kirov!

  Troyak was listening, still smiling, and already mounting his ear buds to use the radio set woven into the fabric of his service jacket. “Shall we give them a call to let them know we are here?”

  Fedorov considered that, then looked around for any sign of a small boat or life raft. He spied a weathered dinghy on the aft deck and pointed. “We’ll need that,” he said quickly. “I don’t think it would be wise if the hovercraft come steaming up to these ships. We’ll get off in that boat and head out to sea. They can pick us up there, without so many eyes to bulge.”

  “Very well, sir. Troyak nodded at Zykov, who immediately set off to secure the boat. A boatswain protested, but quickly silenced himself when Fedorov and Troyak came striding up. Fedorov decided to cover their tracks a bit.

  “This is far too dangerous,” he said to the boatswain. “Did you see those German planes? Did you see the Katyushas hit them? Amazing! We’re going ashore now, so get out of the way.”

  The man gave way, unwilling to challenge a colonel in the NKVD, but as they got the dinghy up on the winch and began lowering it, a few sailors whistled at them in rebuke.