Three Kings (Kirov Series)

by John Schettler

  “My,” said Volsky. “History can be a stubborn mule at times. Must this happen, Fedorov? Might it not change?”

  “It might if I could do one thing, sir.”

  “What is that?”

  “Warn General O’Connor, so the British will not be deprived of his brilliance. We must warn them, sir. Information is as much a weapon as anything else in this war, and that we have in abundance, no matter how many missiles remain in our magazine.”

  “Admiral Tovey has sent word that there will be a meeting in Cairo to plan the defense of Egypt and the future course of the war. We are invited as observers and agents of the Soviet government. It is either that or we sail for Murmansk to arrange these convoys, but Admiral Golovko can handle that for the time being. These old bones are starting to feel the cold up here. Warmer waters would be most welcome. Would you like to go?”

  “Of course!” Fedorov was elated.

  He thought it would be a perfect time to discretely offer the British the benefit of his foreknowledge of what was to come. Nothing was certain, but he might help them avoid some key blunders, like the ill fated and futile effort to reinforce Greece. He might also let them know how important Malta will become to the future war in the desert.

  As he pondered this, another event was about to happen that would now weigh heavily in the balance. It would begin with a simple coded signal, heralding an arrival that had been long expected, and one that would change the entire course of the war.

  Part IV

  Arrivals

  “One must pass through the circumference of time before arriving at the center of opportunity.”

  ― Baltasar Gracian

  Chapter 10

  The periscope mast broke through the placid sea, leaving a quiet frothing wake behind it. There, cruising like a great whale just beneath the surface, was the massive shadowy form of the hidden submarine. On the bridge of the boat, its commander had hoped to see the gleam of moonlight on the water, a glimmering trail that would lead his eye over the stillness of the sea, but there was nothing. The night was thick, the darkness so solid that it seemed a tangible thing. Then he saw the strange luminescent light, just as before, a soft pale glow swelling away from the sub in all directions. He sat eyeing the charts of the region, his hand slowly rubbing the back of his neck to chase away the tension there.

  “Anything?” he said quietly in the taut stillness of the bridge.

  “Nothing sir. Clean in all directions, but my coverage seems very limited.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m getting the peninsula, but not much else beyond fifteen to twenty kilometers.”

  The Captain leaned over his radar operator’s position now, eyeing the screen, then glancing furtively at the digital displays from the sub’s mast cameras. “Fifteen kilometers?”

  “Range seems to be increasing now sir, but very slowly. It’s as if there’s a bubble expanding around us.” Lieutenant Gorban pointed to his screen as he spoke. “That’s the tip of Cape Aniva, and this is the peninsula stretching up to Korsakov, but I can’t see across Aniva Bay to Cape Crillon. It’s as if it wasn’t even there!”

  “No surface contacts?”

  “Nothing, sir. Absolutely nothing. But who can say with the equipment acting up like this?”

  Gromyko ran his hand over the short close cropped hair on the back of his head. “They said this was likely,” he said quietly to his executive officer, Belanov. “We should have full sensor coverage within the hour, but what about Kirov?” He turned to his communications officer now, Lieutenant Alexi Karenin.

  “Get that message off.”

  “Aye sir, initiating beacon signal now as programmed, but—”

  “But what, Mister Karenin?”

  “Well my equipment doesn’t seem to be functioning properly either.”

  Gromyko gave him a frustrated look. “Chernov?” The Captain looked to his able sonar man now, Lieutenant Andre Chernov.

  “There’s a lot of noise, sir, a very deep rumble. I have no contacts but with the sound field this distorted I would have to go active to be sure.”

  “Belay that for the moment. Sit tight and keep listening, Chernov. Until we know where the hell we are I’m not moving a muscle.”

  “Sir,” said Belanov, “has it happened? Have we moved?”

  “Take a look at those screens,” said Gromyko, pointing to the digital displays from his mast cameras. “One minute we had decent moonlight, the next it’s pitch black, so something has obviously happened to us.”

  Even as he said that he recalled the words of Director Kamenski when he was with them on the boat, first trying to explain the impossible truth that was now before them. It was very strange indeed. He had told them they discovered odd effects related to nuclear detonations, effects beyond the blast, radiation, and EMP pulse.

  “The detonation ruptured the time continuum,” said Kamenski, but it took a while for the information to register on his own internal sonar.

  “Excuse me, Director… Time continuum?” The recollection of his own plaintive question was the only meager protest he had offered. It was incredulous, preposterous, unbelievable, but here was a former Director of the KGB, certainly not a man given to flights of fancy, and he was giving him this story with plain faced candor evident in every aspect of his tone and manner.

  “Yes, Captain, the fourth dimension. Time. You know the first three well enough as you move about them in this vast ocean here—length, breadth and height, or depth in the case of your submarine. Well you must also know that you move in the fourth dimension as well—in time. Until Tsar Bomba went off, everything moved in only one direction through time, from this moment to the next in that second by second journey we all take from the cradle to the grave. But Tsar Bomba showed us that journey could also be affected by very powerful detonations—and time itself could be breached. Physical objects could be blown through that breach, and they would end up in the same spatial location, but in another time.”

  It was all so wildly impossible that if he had not seen it happen with his own eyes he would not have believed it. In fact he did not quite believe it now. He had half a mind to surface the boat and put those human eyes to the test. Might his digital readouts and screens be lying to them? In the world of 2021 they had all grown so accustomed to believing the digital image of a thing was reality. But what if it was all wrong? What if all those ones and zeroes in the data stream between the mast camera’s lens and his monitors here was as befuddled as the radar seemed to be now? He knew that was very unlikely, but there was still something in him that wanted to break to the surface, wanted air, the smell of the sea, a look at the night stars overhead. But that would not happen—not until he knew what their tactical situation was. Gromyko was a very cautious man. That was a good submariner’s first order of business—caution.

  “Very well,” he said still rubbing the back of his head. “We wait. Down periscope. The boat will run silent.”

  “Aye sir, main mast down and the silent running lights are on.”

  Now Gromyko looked at his sonar man. “Your game, Mister Chernov. Until you can certify the sea is clean around me, we’ll sit here like a hole in the water and wait.”

  Chernov vanished beneath his headset, using the ship’s powerful sonar to listen at high amplification to all the sounds around them now. The deep, threatening rumble he heard filled him with a sense of dread. Then he realized that he had heard something very like this before. Following that thought, he reached over, toggled on his signature bank, and looked for a pattern match. There it was!

  “Captain… That background noise I reported—it’s geothermic.”

  “Geothermic?”

  “It’s that damn volcano sir, the one we were trying to get away from when the Chief Engineer on Kirov reported it was muddling up his procedure.”

  “Yes,” said Gromyko. “And that led us on quite a merry little adventure.”

  Kazan had moved south through the Sea o
f Japan to a point very close to the North Korean port of Wonsan. There they had stumbled upon an operation by the North Korean Navy, and an accident in the engine room had created a sudden noise on a squeaky bearing that gave their position away. It had plagued them ever since, on the run down past Ullung Do Island, and during that encounter they had with a combined Japanese American ASW group. Then the Shadow Dance had begun, the stealthy undersea duel where the slightest failure of nerve and technique could have finished them.

  That had been a very close thing. There was little margin for error with the odds stacked so heavily against him. They had been engaged by at least three enemy subs, one of them a good American boat, and a Japanese surface action group with helicopters. They had been fired upon, more than once, and it took all his considerable skill to evade the deadly undersea lances aimed his way, though his boat and crew performed admirably.

  By any measure they should all be dead now, fish food on the bottom of the sea, but they came through intact. They ran that infernal procedure on the reactors, dipping a strange control rod into the mix—Rod-25 as they called it. Just as things were winding up to the breaking point in that tense undersea duel, a hole had opened in time, and the submarine slipped right through!

  It had been so close that one of the enemy torpedoes came right through that hole in time with us! But fortunately, it was as punch drunk as our own systems seem to be now, thought Gromyko. Damn thing lost its hold on Kazan. Either that, or it was fooled by the large mobile decoy I launched. One way or another, the boat had come through without a scratch.

  Yet there were other contacts in the region, and they did not get off so easily. The American torpedo’s systems must have gone into reset mode, and it circled, looking for a new target when it heard a lot of surface noise overhead—Japanese ships from World War Two! They never knew what hit them. A Japanese freighter went down that day, killed by a torpedo fired at Kazan nearly eighty years in the future! It had sealed the fate of that unfortunate ship, and also made good on an appointment the USS Bonefish had with doom, the last of “Pierce’s Polecats.” The American sub had been lurking in the vicinity, and it was found by Japanese ASW ships and sent to a watery grave, though Gromyko never knew that.

  Now he smiled, wondering just how the Japanese and Americans must have felt about that little maneuver they pulled with Rod-25. One minute we were there, and they thought they had our position pegged due to that damn noisy bearing in the engine room. The next minute we’re gone—decades gone—all the way to 1945!

  That was enough to swallow in one gulp, but it hadn’t ended there, the boat’s position in time remained unstable, and they fell through another gopher hole in time, as Director Kamenski had put it. This time they went all the way back to 1908, drawn there as if by some magnetic force, or perhaps by the skill of that reactor engineer, Chief Dobrynin. That had been their target date all along, but it took two hops to get there. They just had to switch trains in 1945.

  There, in 1908, they began their real mission, the stalking hunt for their own comrades aboard the battlecruiser Kirov, now deemed a rogue ship under a rogue Captain with delusions of grandeur, and a plan to unhinge all recorded history from that day forward. It was coming down to the missiles, he knew, and he had little doubt that if he got off the first shots he would prevail, even when facing the most powerful surface ship in the Russian Navy. Instead they had launched a desperate plan to sneak up close to the ship and run that control rod procedure again, and amazingly, it had worked!

  We were right on the razor’s edge there, thought Gromyko. If their sonar man had heard us and they put a Shkval torpedo into the water, we were all dead men. But Kirov had struck an old mine, not powerful enough to damage the ship seriously, but enough to wreck the big Poilinom Horse Jaw sonar in the underwater bow bulge. That may have been their salvation, the devil’s horn on the antiquated old mine that Karpov had blundered into.

  Gromyko had no idea what was going on at that time on the bridge of Kirov, how the ship was in a state of near deadlock with the struggle for control between Captain Karpov and his Starpom Rodenko. The ship’s doctor, a man named Zolkin, had boldly stepped forward to Rodenko’s side, taking a bullet from Karpov’s revolver for his trouble. Then, one by one, the junior officers of the ship’s bridge crew stood up, defiant to a man. They would no longer follow a Captain who would do deliberate harm to one of their own.

  And that is where it had ended, or so he thought. Now they were trying to get home, and Rod-25 had pulled both vessels forward in time again, but the load was just too heavy. That was how the Chief Engineer Dobrynin had described it. He had been with Fedorov on another impossible journey to the past using that same control rod, this time on that new floating nuclear power plant, Anatoly Alexandrov. The two men had spawned this whole mission, pulling Gromyko, and now his boat and crew, into the incredible vortex of this amazing saga.

  It seemed his part in the story was not yet finished. He had been briefed by both Fedorov, Dobrynin and then Admiral Volsky, and his orders were clear. They were all trying to get home, back to 2021 where they belonged, though he knew that world was perhaps the most dangerous place they could ever wish to go. They had left it in the midst of that tense undersea engagement, just one more minor naval action that was part of the ever widening blast wave of a new war, the final war, the war the officers and crew of Kirov had come to dread, and one they were desperately trying to prevent. Something told Gromyko that they had finally returned to that blighted time.

  “Geothermic?” He said again. “You mean it’s the Demon Volcano you’re hearing out there?”

  “I believe so, sir. The geothermic signature is matching patterns I recorded earlier, just before we…”

  “Before we went into the Bear’s cave,” Gromyko finished. “Then we’re back. We’ve returned to our own time. That may explain the darkness on those digital screens. It’s the fallout from that damn volcano.”

  “Or something else,” said his Starpom, Belanov.

  “It’s just a little over 400 kilometers east of our present position,” said Chernov. “That is if we’re still in the same place we were when we…”

  “When we moved in time,” said Gromyko again. “Get used to saying it aloud, son. It will help all the rest of us believe it. Mister Gorban, did you get a fix on our position?” He looked at the boat’s radar man and navigator.

  “No GPS data came in over the mast, but using those initial radar returns I have us right where we were before.”

  “Yet still no sign of Kirov?” The Captain looked at Chernov on sonar.

  “Nothing sir. I would hear them if they were close, even through this background noise.”

  “Karenin? Any return on our beacon signal?”

  “No sir. The channel is silent.”

  “Did you get the signal off?”

  “I believe so, Captain.”

  “What else do you hear out there?”

  Karenin gave him a sallow look. He was a young Junior Lieutenant, and this was his third cruise with Gromyko, a man he admired greatly. He had been in on the wartime channel traffic when Kazan had participated in the general sortie by the Red Banner Fleet under Karpov, and he was thrilled when they had successfully ambushed the American CVBG Washington battlegroup. Everyone had heard of this Karpov, and knew he was a hard fighting Captain, a dangerous man. The news that they were now ordered to go after Kirov, flagship of the fleet, had shaken him, as it had many others on the crew. The thought that they were going up against Karpov and Kirov was scary, but if anyone could, it would be Gromyko, the Matador, as all the men in the silent service called him now. The Captain was a master of undersea warfare, the most experience sub Captain in the whole fleet.

  Then came the startling truth of what was really going on. He was still somewhat dazed by it all, even as the ship’s equipment seemed dazed, unbelieving, unwilling to admit what was happening. When Gromyko asked him that last question he realized it was another thing that had been
bothering him—the silence. He could not hear the deep, ominous rumble of the volcano in his headset like Chernov, but the silence on the communications bands was just as dreadful. He should be hearing fleet signals from Vladivostok and Naval Headquarters Fokino. He should be picking up the cold encrypted chatter of the enemy as well, but there was “Nothing sir.” He said it aloud even as he thought it. “I get no signals traffic of any kind.”

  Chapter 11

  “Nothing?” Gromyko thought it must be due to the time shift, as he had been briefed. The boat’s systems might take several hours before they were normal again, or so this Fedorov had told him. But as soon as they could, they were to activate that coded signal beacon and try to make contact with Kirov. Ten minutes had passed in that silence. Young Karenin had not heard a whisper back.

  That could mean nothing, thought Gromyko. The ship could be out there, adrift in the silence and enfolded in that black soot from the volcano. Then again… It might mean Kirov had not made it to this time and place with Kazan. Admiral Volsky had warned him this was likely to happen. One ship or another might arrive first—perhaps we’re the first ones home, he thought… or the last. What if Kirov appeared here earlier, and the ship and crew were all now a part of that silence out there, all a part of that inky darkness he saw through the periscope cameras? He didn’t want to think of that just then, but he remembered the training he had received in submarine school, so long ago it seemed.

  “You men in the undersea boat service will most likely be the only survivors if we ever have to ask you to do your jobs.” He could still hear the warning his instructor had given the class upon graduation. “So don’t be surprised if you poke your periscope mast up one day and find there is no one else—nothing there—all the world gone to hell while you were chasing other enemy submarines beneath the sea.”