Three Kings (Kirov Series)

by John Schettler

  That thought gave Gromyko a shiver. He looked at the other men, and he could see the same questions in their eyes as they looked back at him. He was the Captain. He was supposed to know, and the decision as to what he would now do with Kazan lay with him, feeling leaden in his gut as he mulled it over.

  Admiral Volsky had given him a quiet whisper before they parted company. “We’ve seen the world this war leaves us before, Gromyko. Believe me, you will not want to see it twice. If you should get there, and find Vladivostok a blackened hole at the edge of the sea… Then you will have quite a decision to make. If you don’t hear our beacon call, it may be that we are late. But it could also mean we are gone, Gromyko. In that instance, you will be the only man alive with the power to prevent what you see out there—the power to try and keep the world from ending. That’s a great deal to put on your shoulders, but you must know this. You can either sit there and watch the radiation count every time you get near the surface, or you can do something about it. With Rod-25 you have that chance—the chance to go back and change it all one more time—the chance to prevent that damn war from ever happening.”

  That reminded him to check his radiation monitors, quietly, with only Belanov noticing and knowing what Gromyko was up to. What he saw convinced him that they were the ones who had arrived here too late. The readings were dangerously high, and he gave Belanov a quiet order. “Take us down below 200 meters,” he said. “Make it look routine.”

  “Aye sir.” Belanov waited until Gromyko drifted away again, back to Chernov on sonar. Then he gave the quiet order to the helm. Ten degree down bubble,” said Belanov. “Ahead one third. Make your depth 200 meters.”

  The Captain stood by his sonar man, thinking the answer to their dilemma might be hidden in that darkness and silence out there, and waiting for Chernov’s keen ears to ferret it out. So now the question was before him.

  “What could I do?” Gromyko had asked of Admiral Volsky, even as he asked it of himself again now. What could I do? He knew the answer. Chief Dobrynin had told him this Rod-25 was very stubborn, aging now, but still set in its ways. It insisted on stopping off at the 1940s every time it was used. How would his own engineers know what to do in the reactor room?

  “Do not worry,” Dobrynin had told him. “I have every shift recorded on tape, the exact changes I made to the system, the timing, temperature, all the vibrations.”

  “But that was on Kirov,” Gromyko had protested. “What makes you think it will work aboard Kazan?”

  “Because it already has worked.” Dobrynin had given him a wry smile. “We’ve already visited the 1940s twice!”

  Yes we have, thought Gromyko. Now the only question was whether or not they would be making a third visit there, and it was now his to decide. The choice was before him at that very moment, waiting in the silence, in the darkness out there, and he knew what he was going to do.

  “Keep listening, Chernov. You have the bridge. Mister Belanov, walk with me please.”

  The Captain was heading aft, to the reactor room where his engineers had been working with two men sent over from Kirov, Chief Dobrynin’s minions with recorded digital files and procedures to be used with Rod-25.

  “What do you make of this, Belanov?” The Captain wanted to sound out his Starpom before he decided their course.

  “That radiation count says everything, sir. It’s certainly not all coming from that volcano.”

  “Shall we head for Vladivostok?”

  “That would be the logical play.”

  “And if we find it blown to hell?”

  Belanov had to think about that. It was something he had not considered, a reality that now loomed as a certain threat in his mind. What would they do if that were the case? They were a warship of the Russian Navy, pledged to the defense of their homeland.

  “Then we could see about getting some payback, Captain,” he said at last.

  Gromyko gave him a grim smile. “What good would that do? A little like poking the embers after the house has burned down.”

  “Then what else?” Belanov had not gone beyond this point in his mind. They were to try to get home, and that was what he had his thoughts set on. Now they were here, however, home was nowhere to be found.

  “You saw the radiation readings,” said Gromyko. “We can’t even get within 50 meters of the surface in that.”

  “What do you figure happened, sir?”

  “God only knows. Maybe the Chinese wouldn’t back off. Maybe they lobbed one of those ballistic missiles of theirs into the old Fukushima plant. That would be all it would take to finish off Japan. As for the Americans, I think it was coming to blows with them in any case. If Vladivostok is gone, then that was their doing.

  And it was gone.

  They spent the next hours making a stealthy approach to the place, creeping up on Naval headquarters at Fokino first and risking a close approach to the narrow bay there. No sign of life could be seen, and no signal came in answer to their coded calls. So they headed east, working their way around the islands at the base of the long peninsula. Gromyko would not risk navigating the narrower waters of the Golden Horn, so they maneuvered to approach the city from the west in Amur Bay.

  But the city was not there. Where it once sat glittering on the shore, there was only that darkness and silence now, and the eerie stillness that spoke of death. It was as if the sun had set on the life and world they knew, and would never rise again. Gromyko knew they could spend their days navigating the seas in search of any sign of life.

  “Yet we’re just as likely to run into another American boat doing the same thing,” he said to Belanov.

  “So what do we do, sir?”

  Gromyko gave him a long look, finally telling him what Admiral Volsky had said. “Who knows if they made it back,” he reasoned. “They told me that new control rod was untested. It may not have worked. They could still be right there in 1945 and wondering where the hell we are. Their Chief Engineer was certain that we could at least return there if we ran that procedure again with the reactors.”

  “Return? To the 1940s?”

  “That seems to be the ticket we’re holding, Belanov.”

  “But sir… the men… our wives and families…”

  “You think they’re here, alive out there in that radiation?”

  Belanov said nothing.

  “At least if we do go back, we’ll have clean air and water, and half a chance at life.” Gromyko reasoned it out again, but he knew it was more than that, more than their own fate and the lives of the men aboard Kazan. So he said it, the last part of what Admiral Volsky had whispered to him. “And we would have one more chance to prevent what we just saw,” he said with finality. “One more chance to change things.”

  “But sir… We’d end up right in the middle of the Japanese Empire here.”

  Gromyko smiled. “The Japanese? I can handle them. But we have no missile or torpedo that will do anything against the emptiness out there now. At least if we do go back, we can make a difference… somehow.”

  * * *

  And so they put it to the crew, explained it all, and sat for a long day and night beneath the sea while Chernov listened and the engineers poured over those digital recordings, huddling in the reactor room to determine what they might soon be asked to do. One of them was Junior Lieutenant Ilya Garin, a reactor Engineer that had worked with Chief Dobrynin, the devil’s apprentice. He had seen how the Chief controlled the use of Rod-25, and had been involved in the mission that sent Fedorov back from the Primorskiy Engineering Center test reactor, and then again when the Chief tool them all back to find him on the Anatoly Alexandrov. Now he was here, reassigned to Kazan, and working in the reactor room to see if he could duplicate the Chief’s magic.

  He did not have to worry. When the decision was finally made, the crew vote tallied, Rod-25 would do all the work for him. All he had to do was lower it slowly into the reaction, time it, pretend to listen to it like Dobrynin might do. Yet it was mere
theater, and he sensed that on some level. Rod-25 was, indeed, a stubborn thing. It would take them back to the 1940s as sure as rain follows the flash of lightning at the edge of a storm. But it was getting old, even as Dobrynin warned. It might have taken them to 1945, to the place they had only just escaped from, but it slipped a bit. The boat kept falling through the hole in time it created, just a little farther into the void.

  To the year 1941.

  They did not know that at first. They arrived in the green wash of eerie light, the frosty cold and strange static electricity that raised the hackles on the back of Gromyko’s neck. But they made it through. All seemed well, until Lieutenant Garin came up to the bridge.

  “Captain,” he said plaintively. “I think we have a problem.”

  “You think we have a problem?” Gromyko was not accustomed to anything less than precise certainty when it came to the workings of his submarine. “What is it Mister Garin?”

  “The control rod sir, Rod-25. Our systems are indicating damage to the rod structure. Radiation level is high. I’ve retracted it into the Rad-Safe containment and we’ll see what we can find after we take some pictures with the inspection camera.”

  “Is the procedure over? Did it run its course?”

  “Yes, sir. This happened right after final retraction, but I don’t think we can risk using that control rod again until we get a good look at it, and take some further readings.”

  “Very well. Carry on, and well done Mister Garin. Now all we have to do is find out where we are.”

  They went through it all one more time, the quiet wait while the boat’s systems seemed to slowly recover their sensibilities, the cautious approach to the surface. Radiation readings were normal, which gave them all some great relief, but what would they find when they raised the sensor mast and periscope again? Just to be on the safe side, Gromyko had returned to the relative safety of the Sea of Okhotsk, cruising off the Kuriles well north of the Demon Volcano. If they did appear in the 1940s again, he wanted to make sure they had some room to maneuver.

  Belanov’s remark about landing right in the middle of the Japanese Empire was good warning. While he didn’t think he had anything to really fear from the Japanese navy of the 1940s, there was always that first woozy hour after they shifted, when he might not have the advantage of his sensory suite or even the functional use of his weapons. And Gromyko was a very cautious man.

  So they waited. Chernov listened. Gorband had a look around on radar, and Karenin raised the communications antenna and sent off that coded signal.

  Silence followed, a place where every fear might grow if it lingered for very long. Gromyko became uneasy himself, pacing on the bridge, waiting. Soon Karenin began to hear voices in that silence, then pulses on the airwaves and the dot-dash chatter of coded messages from a telegraph system, a faint scratching of the airwaves that were otherwise clean and silent. Only one man on the boat spoke Japanese, a sailor named Genzo Gavrilov, his name a hybrid of Japanese and Russian, as he was born from the marriage of his Russian father to a Japanese woman. The crew called him GG for short, and he was pulled from his duty in the torpedo room and called up to the bridge, a bit intimidated to be in the presence of all the senior officers there.

  “Just listen in to any radio traffic,” the Captain told him. “Find out what’s going on up there.”

  GG listened, hearing what sounded like routine radio calls, ship to shore, merchantmen at sea. Then news came from Tokyo of the Japanese offensive in China. It was not long before he fished out the day and time from the stream of grandiose propaganda. It was 1941. January of 1941, the 11th day, to be exact.

  Gromyko was surprised to hear that. “Are you sure? 1941?”

  “It was right in the clear, sir,” said GG. Genzo Gavrilov was certain he had it correct.

  “Anything within range on radar or sonar?”

  “No traffic within fifty nautical miles in any direction, sir, and our systems seem to be recovering nicely now.” Belanov gave the report, waiting, an expectant look on his face.

  “Very well…” Gromyko rubbed the back of his neck. “I need some fresh air. Take us up,” he said quietly to Belanov, who nodded as he seconded the order.

  “The boat will surface. Watch Officers stand ready.”

  “Surface the boat, aye sir, and ready on main mast watch. Mister Levin, take your men up to the sail hatch.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Chapter 12

  The air was sweet, so clean and clear, untainted by the anger of that volcano that had been the only living thing in the world they had just fled from. Home was behind them, a cinder grey world of ash and smoke, humming with radiation in the fallout. Everything they ever knew and loved in that world was gone, forever gone, and they all carried that awful sense of loss.

  But there was life here, thought Gromyko as he took a deep breath of that cool fresh air. Yes, there was life, and time, and a chance to do something here. But what? That was his dilemma now. What should he do? It was January 11, 1941. Japan was at war on the Chinese mainland, but not out here in the sea. If this history was anything like the story of the Great Patriotic War that he knew, then it would be long months before Japan launched her offensive at sea. Pearl Harbor would not happen for nearly a year. So what should he do with all that time, and where was Kirov?

  Rod-25 had dragged both Kirov and Kazan from 1908 and into the middle of 1940 before they made their attempt to each return home on their own. Did the ship actually get back to 2021 as they had? Was it devoured in the holocaust they had found there, or had that new control rod failed to deliver? In that case the ship might still be foundering… Kirov might still be here!

  Karenin sent his coded message on the special channel they had arranged, using shortwave signals that could propagate over very long ranges, half way around the earth. Then he sat sullenly beneath his headset, still brooding over the loss of his girlfriend, knowing she was gone forever now. Yet here they were in the 1940s, and there seemed to be plenty of fish in this new sea. There might be a life here for them after all, and he did not have long to wait for his answer.

  “Captain!” he said, his eyes wide, but Gromyko was up on the weather bridge on the exposed sail, so he toggled his comm system for that station. Watch officers were standing by with headsets for any message he might send, and the news he delivered reeled in Gromyko in short order. The Captain was down from the sail, and onto the main bridge, his boots still wet and glistening with seawater from a new century.

  “Karenin?”

  “I have them, sir! I have Kirov on shortwave. I just received my green confirmation signal. They got our message and acknowledged. Now I’m negotiating a voice channel.”

  Gromyko breathed easy for the first time in hours, exhaling some of that good fresh air he had taken in topside. Karenin worked his system, tuning, filtering, decoding. Then he heard a voice come in over his headset.

  “I have Lieutenant Nikolin, sir!”

  “Put it on the bridge speakers.”

  “Aye sir.”

  “Kazan, Kazan, come in. Nikolin here on the battlecruiser Kirov. Where in God’s name have you been?”

  Gromyko took up a handset and spoke into the microphone. “Ahoy, Kirov. Greetings Mister Nikolin. We were just asking ourselves the same question.”

  Then came another voice, that of the ship’s young Captain Fedorov. “Good to finally hear from you,” said Fedorov, and he explained that their effort to move forward to 2021 had failed. “We’ve been here since mid June of 1940, listening for you the last six months!”

  There was a brief exchange, where Gromyko briefed them on everything they had experienced. The report concerning Vladivostok was somewhat grim, but not unexpected.

  “We were afraid that might be the case,” said Fedorov. “I have Admiral Volsky with me here, and I will turn you over to him. Standby.”

  Gromyko waited, glad to hear the Admiral’s calm reassuring voice again. Everyone on the bridge took heart now
, for Volsky’s tone and manner carried a note of home, an anchor to the authority that had send them all to sea in the first place, and a tether on some sense of purpose they might now have here in this new world. Volsky and Fedorov were mariners in time, and had navigated these waters before.

  “Greetings Captain Gromyko, and all the crew of Kazan,” came Volsky’s deep voice. “We have been waiting for you. It appears our new control rod is only a distant cousin to the one we lent you, and we were never able to leave here. So we did not have to see the desolation you describe again. We have all seen it before, and now we set our minds on how we can prevent it. You come to us at a most critical time, and it is good that you are here.”

  “Where are you, sir?” asked Gromyko.

  “Believe it or not we are now in the Atlantic off Reykjavik, and I think we must now find a way to meet at sea.”

  “That’s a long way off,” said Gromyko.

  “We will come south to meet you half way off the Cape of Good Hope. Fedorov says it will take you nearly 12 days at 30 knots. Is that a problem?”

  “I think we can manage it, sir. The boat is in fine shape.

  “Excellent. We cannot discuss matters here, even on this encrypted channel, but there is much to learn. Try to be as discrete as possible. We will sail south to meet you, and then we drink together here in my ready room!”

  “Very good sir. We’ll get underway at once.” Gromyko turned to his navigator now. “Get me an ETA on Cape Town by way of the Singapore Strait.”

  Two old friends were about to meet.

  * * *

  The night was black and the sea was uncommonly calm when the sail of Kazan broke the surface. The submarine emerged from the dark waters like a behemoth, a fighting Orca the like of which this world had never seen. Above, sailing just a few hundred yards to the east, the battlecruiser Kirov waited to greet its comrade in arms. It had been six long months for Volsky and Fedorov, yet only a matter of a few weeks for Gromyko. The Matador was finally back, and he made arrangements to visit Kirov in a launch sent over from the battlecruiser.