Kirov

by John Schettler

  On one level, he saw a glimmering of opportunity in this situation. Orel and Slava were both missing, and the Admiral was being far too lax in his assessment of the potential dangers here. This incident would be viewed harshly back home, and blame and scapegoating were sure to follow. The Admiral was responsible, he knew, but he would make sure that any fault found rested squarely on Volsky’s shoulders. He would let Severomorsk know exactly what he thought, and somewhere in his mind he was already launching missiles at the Admiral. The struggle for the first salvo was the essence of modern naval combat. The Captain wanted to be sure he had himself in the best possible position if it came to an inquiry on these events. A report would have to be written on the matter, and he was already hard at work, drafting copy in his mind, and thinking just who best to put on the distribution list.

  Yet for now, it was the silence that bothered him most. Who could he tell his stories to, his half-truths and darker lies, if no one was listening back home? What was going on? Why didn’t Severomorsk answer? He badgered Nikolin about his equipment—was it working correctly? When was the last time it was given a full maintenance check? Who had the duty here on the last watch? Was he trying the secure Satellite com-link line?

  “I have no satellite link, sir,” Nikolin explained. “I cannot establish links to any of our com-sat bands. It must be the interference, sir.”

  Karpov was wagging an accusatory finger at Nikolin, and frowning. “Keep trying, Mister Nikolin. I expect you to get this equipment sorted out!” Then he saw Nikolin had an iPod sitting off to one side, and he snatched it up, shaking it in the young Lieutenant’ face. “Perhaps you should spend more time focused on your duties, Nikolin, and less with this.” He took the device and strode away, like a strict school master chastening a wayward student.

  Nikolin, shrugged, deflated, harried, and trying harder than ever to get through to Severomorsk. He sighed with relief when the Captain finally wandered off, looking for Chief Orlov, though he hoped Karpov would not pass the matter on to the him.

  Orlov was a strong man, iron willed, and often too much of a disciplinarian when it came to running the ship’s schedules and training exercises, meting out swift punishment to any crewman who was lax in his duties. He was Karpov’s hard whip when it came to discipline and firm handling of procedures on the ship. The Chief was actually a Captain of the 3rd Rank, two rungs below Karpov, but stood as “Chief of Operations” and was therefore simply called the “Chief” by the men.

  He had fifteen years in the navy, most served by default because he never had the babki to do anything else, or so he claimed. The truth was, he was sent here after a stint in prison when running with the criminal element known as the blatonoy, the purveyors of blat in its most extreme forms. A man needed a little dough in life, the money to grease a few palms or open a few doors, like the small dough cakes called babki the Russians delighted on and gifted one another with at times. Orlov never made his big deal with the blatnoy, so he found himself in the navy, and then found that he enjoyed the rigors of the service, and his position of authority there was better than any life he could find ashore.

  Where Karpov was duplicitous, scheming and often indirect, Orlov was brutally straightforward. He would have made a proper drill sergeant in the army, and would often dress men down with a boisterous harangue when he found them easing off in their duty. He enjoyed throwing his weight around, and his muscle stood him in good stead when it came to matters of discipline. A good hard shove or a slap on the back of the head were par for the course when Orlov got hot, and if a man got him particularly angry things might go far worse.

  The men said Orlov’s father had done the same to him, with a hard “spare the rod, spoil the child,” attitude. Orlov made no bones about it, even bragged about it at times. “If my old man had found me doing something like that he would knock some sense into my thick head right off,” he would say. And then he would proceed to knock some sense into a junior midshipman just to illustrate the point. The men feared him more than they respected him. They jumped to order when Orlov growled, but there was no question that the Chief was disliked.

  Orlov bullied and cowed every crewman on the ship, save one, the steely sergeant of the marine contingent, Kandemir Troyak, a Siberian Eskimo from the Chukchi peninsula. He was a short, broad shouldered man, very stocky, yet all muscle. When the Chief had first met the man he had tried to impose his will on Troyak as well, bawling out an order with a derisive tone, and berating a member of the marine rifle squad. The Sergeant had taken two quick steps, squaring off to the big Chief and staring him right in the eye. “Sir,” Troyak had hissed out in his low, threatening voice. “Discipline of the marine contingent is the responsibility of the Sergeant Major.” He was so close to the chief that Orlov instinctively took a step back. Troyak was, in fact, the Sergeant Major, and he was letting the Chief know that he would not tolerate his usual brash and strong armed methods where his men were concerned.

  “Well, see that it gets done then!” Orlov rejoined, his neck reddening, but the Sergeant simply stood his ground, unmoving, an implacable silence about him that left the Chief feeling most uncomfortable until he dismissed the matter, looking around him quickly to spot a Maintenance Warrant Officer and wave him down as he lugged a tool kit through a hatch.

  “Hey, kudá namýlilsja? Where are you going with those, you idiot?” Orlov used the incident as cover to extricate himself from the standoff with Troyak, and he never bothered the Sergeant again. When he saw seaman Martok had turned his head from a work bench, noticing the confrontation, he cuffed him hard on the right ear and told him to keep his nose in his work or he would get worse. This was Orlov, a big, brooding, intolerant presence on the ship, quick to lord it over any man junior in the ranks, yet oddly quiet and deferring around senior officers.

  Karpov had seen an able confederate in the man, and often foisted off the unpleasant matters of the ship’s discipline on Orlov. So it was no surprise when he handed the Chief Nikolin’s iPod with a disapproving look on his face. “Mister Nikolin can’t hear anything on his radio. Perhaps he is deaf listening to his rock and roll.”

  Orlov responded with a sneering smile, and slipped the iPod into his pocket, giving the Communications Officer a hard-faced look.

  The Admiral noticed the incident, but overlooked it for the moment, his thoughts elsewhere where he sat in the command chair. The gray ice fog seemed to close in around the ship, isolating it, smothering it, choking off air and life. Leonid Volsky struggled to clear his mind and come to grips with the situation, and soon the claustrophobic feeling he had, drifting slowly forward through the frozen mist, his ship almost blind and deaf, prompted him to act.

  “If you gentlemen can keep your heads about you,” he said to his two senior officers, “I’m going to see the doctor. My head is killing me!” He slid off his command chair, and shuffled past Orlov, tapping his pocket. “I’ll take that,” he said quietly, and the chief handed him Nikolin’s iPod. “Let the matter go, Chief,” said Volsky. “The men are a little bewildered at the moment.” He would make it a point to return the device to Nikolin later.

  “Very well, sir,” said Orlov, and the Admiral was piped off the bridge as he went below.

  Karpov gave Orlov a knowing glance. “Gone to see the wizard,” he said. He was referring to the ship’s chief medical officer, Dmitri Zolkin, a big, warm hearted and amiable man, well suited to his role as physician and psychiatrist aboard Kirov. He was a healer in every respect, and one who knew a man’s psychological health had everything to do with the condition of his body. His remedies were many and varied, and sometimes would include along quiet talk over a cold beer, which might do more to set a man straight than anything he could inject with a needle or force down his throat with a pill.

  Zolkin could take a man’s soul right inside him through the portals of those open brown eyes, and give it back to him in the warmest smile anyone had ever seen beneath his ruddy red cheeks. The ship’s crew loved h
im, and the officers thought of him as a big brother in whom they could confide their deepest troubles. Like a great father confessor priest, he held them all in the palm of his hand, keeping every confidence and dispensing as much wisdom as he did medication from the ship’s infirmary where he held forth with the official ship’s mascot, the gentle green tabby, Gretchko the cat.

  When the Admiral arrived at the sick bay two crew members were just leaving the doctor's office, their heads lightly bandaged where they had apparently sustained minor injuries from the blast wave that had recently shaken the ship. They stiffened to attention, saluting the Admiral as he went through the door, then rushed back to their posts, casting a wary glance over their shoulders and wondering what was happening. They had experienced the concussion of the explosion, seen the odd effects in the ocean and sky around them, and although they still stood at action stations, no order to continue the exercises had been forthcoming.

  “Leonid,” said the doctor. He had been on a first name basis with the Admiral for years now, ever since they met and became good friends at the naval college, over twenty years ago. Zolkin smiled, his eyes alight, drying his hands on a towel near his first aid station as the Admiral came through the door. “Don't worry about the crew,” he said. “Just a few bumps and bruises here and there; nothing to be concerned about. But what is going on up topside, Admiral? The ship took quite a jolt there. Did we hit a mine?”

  “I wish it was something that simple, Dmitri.” It was plain the Admiral was quite distressed. He quickly shared details of the situation with his physician, tipping his head to one side when he had finished, and feeling better already just to have unburdened himself. “It is the strangest situation I have ever encountered. What do you make of it, Dmitri?”

  “What you suggest about Orel suffering the same fate as Kursk makes a lot of sense to me, assuming we go by the official story. But this business about Slava is somewhat puzzling, is it not? Neither ship responds to communications hails? Then you will have to conduct a thorough search. Better Slava than Orel. Easier to find a surface ship than a submarine, and also easier to spot any sign of flotsam.”

  “We’ve sent the KA-226 out, but they have seen nothing conclusive yet.”

  “I see,” said Zolkin. “And the explosion?”

  “I am thinking we have lost Orel,” Volsky said heavily.

  “An attack?”

  “Karpov believed this. I am not so sure.”

  “Any deliberate attack would not happen in isolation, Leonid. A surprise attack upon a Russian naval task force would be a major international incident, yes? It would have to have some context to make any sense.”

  “Things were getting very difficult in recent weeks, my friend,” the Admiral explained. “Why do you think we are out here for live fire exercises? This business in Georgia has the Americans all up in arms again. They want the place to keep the back door firmly closed on Iran, yet the presence of three of our motor rifle divisions just over the border is most unsettling for them. They rattle their sword, so we rattle ours.”

  “A little more talking and a little less rattling would be so much better,” said the Doctor. “Have you tried listening on shortwave to see if the world has gone crazy again?”

  That very simple idea had never occurred to Volsky. If there had indeed been a surprise nuclear strike upon his homeland then something as simple as a short wave radio might provide information he needed. Why not simply tune in civilian radio stations and monitor that traffic for a while? Nikolin had been on secured military channels all this time.

  “Good idea, Dmitri. Now…can you give me something for this headache?”

  “Certainly, but I don't think it's the headache that's really bothering you.” The doctor gave him a cursory examination to assure himself that the Admiral had not banged his head on the bulkhead. Then he looked at him with a warm expression on his face, puttering amongst his medication trays to fetch a couple of aspirin. “That's a lot of crew to be worried about now out there on Slava and Orel. It's a heavy burden to carry them on your back, but if this was an accident, Leonid, you can do little more than what you have suggested. Investigate the matter thoroughly, satisfy yourself as to the whereabouts of these two ships, and then report home to Severomorsk.”

  “Karpov is edgy again,” said the Admiral. “He is convinced this was a deliberate attack.”

  “Perhaps so, but why? The political situation was deteriorating, why else would we be here shooting missiles in the middle of nowhere like this, just as you say. But it was not all that bad. I do not think the world is crazy enough to start World War III. We are still really not over the scars left by the first two.”

  The Admiral nodded, forcing a smile.

  “Don't let Karpov get under your skin,” said the doctor. “He's your canary in the mineshaft. Listen to him, but use your best judgment. He'll fret and fume for a while, but things will settle down soon enough, you'll see.”

  “I had best get back to the bridge,” said Volsky. “This idea about the shortwave might allow us to get our bearings again. Have you looked outside? Did you see the ocean?”

  “Every crewman who has come in here in the last half hour was talking about the sea conditions. We should feel fortunate that Rodenko’s weather report was wrong today, that’s all. And perhaps it is merely an algae bloom. Such things are not that uncommon. The ocean is as temperamental as Karpov,” said the doctor. “It’s just a mood. It will pass.”

  Volsky nodded, heading for the bridge, but the doctor’s suggestion would soon raise many more questions than it answered.

  Chapter 5

  Back on the bridge ten minutes later, the Admiral asked his radioman Nikolin to tune in anything he could find on the short wave that might shed light on the situation, but the result confused them even more. There was nothing on the radio bands at all. Every wavelength was awash with the soft hiss of background static. This went on for another half hour until the stubby first Lieutenant sat up suddenly, his hand at an earpiece as he reported with a smile.

  “Signal! I have Moscow on long wave. Just heard the call sign ID. Very strange, Admiral. They signed off as Radio Moscow.” That station had been renamed ‘Voice of Russia,’ years ago.

  “Well, at least Moscow is still there,” said the Admiral.

  “But they are playing oldies but goodies! It reminds me of the old military music they would broadcast whenever there was a crisis. Here, have a listen…” He toggled a switch and the sonorous swells of Tchaikovsky’s violins played over his speakers. The sound touched a deep nerve in Volsky, triggering an old childhood memory. He was just a young boy at the time of the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962, but the radio had droned on and on with similar music for hours, and the deep memory carried a vaguely ominous undertone.

  “Surely there must be some news being reported,” he said. “Dial in a few more regional stations. Try Oslo or Reykjavík, or perhaps even the BBC in London.”

  Nikolin seemed more and more perplexed the longer he searched however. “It's very strange, sir,” he reported. “No commercials! Just music from Oslo, Beethoven this time…Nothing much of anything from Reykjavík, and the BBC is droning on with some old World War II documentary. They're playing speeches by Churchill and congratulating themselves over the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck.” Nikolin was skilled in three languages and could easily interpret the English. “It’s the same all across the band. Lots of commemorative radio traffic about the war. Is this an anniversary of some important event?”

  Volsky smiled. “Ask Fedorov. He’s the historian aboard ship.” His young navigator was a book worm of sorts, and a bit of an Anglophile in spite of the fact that Britain was a clear enemy of Russia in the year 2021.

  “Fedorov will tell you how much the British love their history,” said Volsky. “Well, keep listening to the BBC. When the documentary concludes perhaps we will get further news. But from what you have told me it does not sound like there's any major crisis underwa
y, much less a nuclear war. That news would be on every channel if it were so. The North Atlantic appears to be quietly sleeping under this damnable ice fog, or perhaps they are all at dinner, as we should be.”

  He started away, then remembered something, reaching into his coat pocket. “Good job, Mister Nikolin,” he said with a wink. Then he lowered his voice. “Put that in your pocket.” He handed him back his iPod.

  “The fog is breaking up ahead, sir,” said Karpov. “Seas appear to be rising again as well. Barometer is down twenty points from last reading, and falling.”

  “Confirmed,” said Rodenko. “I have clear readings on my weather Doppler returns now. The front I was tracking is there again… but it has moved, sir.”

  “Don’t surprise yourself to find the wind moves, Mister Rodenko,” said Volsky.

  “Yes sir. But the winds are out of the northeast now. It was tracking from the northwest before.”

  The Admiral waved at Karpov and Orlov, prompting the two men to approach. He settled back into the command chair and folded his arms thinking out loud. “We have found no evidence of Slava, nor the slightest whisper or sign of Orel. Severomorsk has not returned our signals, and we can tune in nothing but nonsense on the radio.” He shared Nikolin’s report with them and the three men huddled together speaking quietly with one another.