Breakout (Kirov Series Book 38)

by Schettler, John

  “It’s clearly not ours,” said Fedorov. “And I don’t think the Americans would be up there at that altitude, even though they do employ airships in the ASW role near Iceland.

  “Right,” said Karpov. “You climb high to avoid enemy fighters, and to remain hidden from ground observers. Fedorov, those have to be German airships. We know they’ve been delivering thermobarics over London.”

  “Radar—what is their heading?”

  “Sir, I have them at 280 degrees.”

  “Fedorov, can you get me an intercept course? We’d better see what this is all about.”

  “What about the storm.”

  “We’ve plenty of time to get down there—48 hours or more before it was supposed to occur.”

  “Very well…” Fedorov went to his chart and made some quick calculations after looking over the radar contact data. A moment later he returned to the bridge.

  “Assuming they hold their present course, if we steer 250 southwest, we should get close as we approach the coast of Greenland near the Gunnbjorn Ice Field. But we’ll have to run full out to make the intercept. We’re lucky that the wind isn’t up now, because otherwise we’d have a headwind to deal with.”

  “Very well. Bogrov, all ahead full and come to 250 degrees. Take us to 13,000 meters.”

  “Aye sir. Helmsman come about. Make your heading two-five-zero. Elevator up five degrees. Engines ahead full.”

  They would be some time reaching that elevation, but as there was no immediate threat, Bogrov knew he did not have to vent ballast for a quick ascent. He took to the ship’s PA system, and ordered the crew to rig for high elevation.

  “The German airships are fast, Fedorov. Can we catch them?”

  “If he holds to his present course, he has to go a little over 1000 kilometers to reach the planned intercept point. For us, that range is only about 750 kilometers, so that makes up for any speed advantage they might have.”

  “We can match their 100KPH,” said Karpov, “on a good day. But those new German ships can run at up to 130KPH.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Fedorov. “I’ll watch them on radar and make adjustments so we can get ahead of them. But what are they doing out here?”

  “That isn’t too hard to reason,” said Karpov. “We know they’re bombers, and delivering the best weapons the Germans have. This could be nothing more than a long range recon mission into the Denmark Strait, but it might be something much more dangerous. They might be headed for the east coast of the US, and with something the Americans won’t like.”

  “Thermobarics? But three airships won’t have much throw weight. They would do better to mass their fleet on London, in conjunction with the V-1 strikes as they have been doing these last two weeks.”

  “Yes, that is true, but they are clearly up to something else. We can divert to find out what it might be, and still have time to get to our planned station off Stornoway eight hours before the storm.”

  “Three airships….” Fedorov thought. “Karpov, that would just be a tap on the chin if they’re headed for the east coast as you suggest.”

  “The Doolittle raid over Tokyo was just a tap on the chin,” said Karpov, “but it had a dramatic effect.”

  “True. Alright, but that’s three airships out there, all dreadnought class. Are you sure you want to risk an engagement? After all, we have bigger fish to fry.”

  At that moment the ship’s radio man was picking up an open air broadcast out of Berlin. Normally he would not bother with monitoring that traffic, but in this instance, he caught the announcement, and as he spoke German, it seemed to translate into something quite ominous.

  “Sir,” he said. “Traffic on Radio Berlin. A special announcement by Heinrich Himmler. Should I translate?”

  “Very well, what does the old bastard have to say, Comrade Ivanov?”

  “One moment sir… Retribution… just retribution for the criminal acts of the Allied powers…. Do not think that we are powerless to avenge what you have done over Hamburg…. Before this sun has set, London will feel the burn of our reprisal, and a taste of much greater things yet to come…. It’s fading out sir. Difficult to read now.”

  “The burn of our reprisal,” Karpov repeated. “That certainly sounds like another thermobaric attack is headed for London. But why would they telegraph their punch like that?”

  “Because it might not be a thermobaric weapon this time,” said Fedorov. “We know the Germans already used a small warhead over London.”

  “Atomics? You think this is what is underway here?”

  “What else? That announcement was very irregular. Himmler has been warning the British of greater reprisals if they don’t cease their strategic bombing. So how do you go one up on their Hexenkessel ?”

  “I see your point,” said Karpov.

  “Right,” said Fedorov, “and I don’t have to tell you that it isn’t just the RAF that has been bombing Germany. All the daytime raids are conducted by the Americans. Thus far they have done so with impunity, but now this airship flight, particularly on that heading after an announcement like this, begins to look a little more ominous. Karpov, you were right to turn and intercept. If need be, let’s forget the damn Channel Storm. We’ll find another. I’ve got this odd feeling that we’re headed for a storm of another kind here, and I hope the ship and crew are ready. We may have to kill all three of those contacts, and that could be a tall order.”

  “Perhaps,” said Karpov. “But I’ve never shirked from a good fight. This is going to be very interesting. If you were going to pull a Doolittle on the Americans, where would you go?”

  “Easy enough,” said Fedorov. “Either Washington D.C. or New York City. But those three airships aren’t going to pack much punch, even with thermobarics. Their reprisal will look rather feeble compared to a 1000 plane raid over Berlin.”

  “Unless they’re carrying something else,” said Karpov. “Don’t forget Leningrad….”

  Fedorov looked at his watch. “On this course, you have your intercept in ten hours—assuming they hold steady. I’ll keep an eye on the Oko Team readings. It’s going to be a long, cold ride. Perhaps the crew should get their rest now, and then we can go to battle stations an hour before the intercept.”

  “Right. I’ll have the galley serve battle food. A full belly for a fight is what’s required, and a little sleep. Comrade Bogrov, let’s rotate the crew relief in shifts for food and sleep. You can get some rest yourself as well. I’ll take this watch on the Bridge.”

  “Aye sir. I’ll just make my rounds and clue the men in, if you have no objection. This will be a good time to test our new deck plate armor.”

  That was an innovation Karpov had devised some months before they made their last abortive sortie to 1908. He had been thinking to take the ship into battle against the German fleet, and had special armored plating installed on the floor of the main axial corridor. Normally, that floor was a see-through metal grid, but he had full armored plating, one inch thick, placed there, and on hinges at either side of the corridor. Before battle, the plates could be unlatched where they met at a seam in the center of the corridor, folded up and then secured to vertical duralumin beams. In effect, the central axial, the most important corridor on the ship, would then become an armored tunnel. It wouldn’t stop a heavy AP round, but it would protect men in that corridor from shrapnel, and most MG fire.

  Karpov’s mind was already looking ahead to the battle he might have to fight. He had a good array of weapons, but he knew the Germans had 88’s that could range out ten kilometers. His 105mm rifles would max out at eight kilometers, and his smaller 76mm rifles were good for a little over five kilometers. Up on top, he could deploy Marines with the Kornets, and that was an advantage that could trump the German 88. He still had a couple Kornet-EM missiles with the thermobaric warhead that could range out ten kilometers. While normally mounted on a vehicle, this was a special lightweight version for ground troops.

  If I get in close, he though
t, I can also use the missile racks in the nose. The RS-82 is good for at least six Kilometers, and the 132’s over seven. The sheer mass of a missile strike like that could tear one of those airships apart… But that is assuming I can get past those damn 88’s. How many hits can we take from those and still stay in this fight? Are we trying to be heroes here, racing off to stick our nose in this fight between the Germans and Americans? Fedorov is correct in one thing, we do have bigger fish to fry. If we lose Tunguska , then what? Am I being headstrong here in rushing into this engagement? Thus far, my luck has been helped by a lot of grit and skill. Will that luck hold?

  He realized that this was the fight he had signed on for inwardly, and long ago. There was no sense in getting squeamish now, not on the eve of battle. So he would do his thinking, see the battle coming in his mind’s eye, and soldier on.

  Chapter 33

  Karpov seemed deep in thought as he sat in his heated chambers aboard Tunguska . He was thinking about everything he had seen and done since that first strange mishap in the Norwegian Sea. He remembered how headstrong and brash he had been in those early days, long before he ever had his fall from grace, and the slow resurrection to the head of the Free Siberian State. Since that time, the old Naval Captain had become a beast of the earth and sky, and a traveler on the shifting currents of time itself.

  He recalled how jealously he had defended the inn at Ilanskiy from his arch enemy, Ivan Volkov, and how he bristled and boiled at the thought that his own intelligence chief, Tyrenkov, would betray him as he did. That had set him on a mission to avenge that betrayal, but look where he was now, back in the same world that he had been instrumental in building with all of his machinations and schemes.

  What had really happened when Tyrenkov went down those stairs? He and Fedorov had been aboard Tunguska when they first perceived the change, and Fedorov had tried to explain what occurred, because they both saw the same astounding thing—the railway inn was gone. That was the clue that Tyrenkov had done something in the past, perhaps deliberately burning his bridges after using that back stairway, to prevent anyone from coming after him to 1908.

  That was where he and Fedorov thought they would solve everything, in those breathless hours before the damage they would inflict on the continuum of events became fatal. Fedorov thought it was his errant whisper in the ear of Mironov that had been the mortal blow, but now they knew otherwise.

  “How, Fedorov?” he remembered asking his old Navigator, now a Captain in his own right, a rank he had earned twice over in Karpov’s mind. He could not understand just what was going on. They clearly saw the inn was missing, and perceived the strange shudder in the air at that moment. When they used the radio system to probe the world around them, there came that odd stern voice speaking of the imperium, which sent a chill up his spine, and spoke coldly to him of Tyrenkov.

  They had concluded that Tyrenkov was responsible, and that he must had destroyed the railway inn himself, as far back at that pivotal year of 1908. But if Tyrenkov thought that would protect him, Karpov had been determined to show him the error of his logic. He did not underestimate his chief spymaster, for he had seen how ruthlessly efficient Tyrenkov was. Indeed, the first thing they had to do was root out a plot involving sabotage and assassination by poison, clearly something Tyrenkov had planned.

  So what was he up to? What other great mischief had he planned when he slipped into that darkened stairwell? The missing railway in was just the first clue. That cold voice on the radio led the way. The imperium…. Karpov now realized that at that moment, Tunguska had been floating in the troubled airs of an entirely new and different world. Fedorov agreed.

  “If Tyrenkov did make a drastic intervention in 1908, then he would have introduced a catastrophic change,” Fedorov had explained. “That change would have rippled forward through time, overthrowing all the history between 1908 and the point of Kirov’s first intervention. It would have rebuilt the world as Tyrenkov would have made it, just as Sergei Kirov’s assassination of Josef Stalin had such a dramatic effect, and Volkov’s presence created the Orenburg Federation.”

  They had just had the barest taste of that world, slipping away to the far north to find that secret spot on Fedorov’s charts that would take the ship back to the time of its own namesake—Tunguska. Yet they had arrived before that event, quite unaccountably, and were it not for Fedorov’s quick wits, they might have flown into a headlong collision with whatever it was that came out of deep space that morning. By turning away, and running at top speed, they barely averted that disaster, but not without sustaining significant damage to the ship that had forced them to stop and make repairs.

  Was it merely coincidence, or the hand of Mother Time that had stayed them? Was that yet another assassination attempt, Karpov wondered? Was time trying to get rid of them both by sending them to that deadly rendezvous, putting an end to their meddling once and for all? If she tried, thought Karpov, she failed. He still thought of himself as some invincible force in all these events, surely a Prime Mover. Even Fedorov agreed with him in that regard, to the point where they now believed that their combined intent, their will power alone, would take them precisely where they wanted to go when they set sail on these fathomless currents of infinity.

  Yet the damage to the ship delayed them just long enough to prevent their timely arrival at Ilanskiy. Because of that, Karpov could not put his own plan into motion, collaring Tyrenkov just as he came down those stairs, and forestalling all his dastardly plans. That was the least of their worries. When they finally did arrive at Ilanskiy, they found, to their great amazement, that they had slipped right back into their old timeline, returning to the 1940’s, just a few days after they had departed on their dangerous mission to 1908. Karpov thought he knew what had happened.

  “Chunskiy,” he told Fedorov. “The arsenal just east of Balturino. That would have made a nice fat target for a missile in 2021. Yes… they were hitting our conventional and nuclear arsenals. I saw the naval arsenal near Kansk get hit myself, when I first went up the stairway at Ilanskiy.”

  “What are you saying—that an event in 2021 was responsible?”

  “We know what nukes do to the continuum, yes? And you are correct, this airship moves in time. It’s got the fairy dust of the Tunguska Event in its duralumin bones. I was even able to do so with a little kick in the pants from a severe thunder storm once. There we were, hovering right where that arsenal would have been in 2021. We were under ten klicks from the river, and due east. That’s exactly where that arsenal was. If I’m correct, and they did get hit, that whole area could be unstable, insofar as time is concerned. And since that bitch has quite a bone to pick with us, time may have conspired against us here. She certainly foiled our mission. We’ll never find Tyrenkov now.”

  Events in 2021, in the war that was slowly building to a deadly climax, were now possibly delivering the last death blows to the whole fabric of Time. This is what Fedorov now came to believe. The Tunguska Event was the first blow, shattering the mirror of Time, but since then, they had been chipping away at it, and now the hammer blows of World War Three were striking that weakened glass and threatening to shatter it completely.

  But that still did not explain how they could have seen that railway inn vanish, and how they could have slipped into a world that may have been built by Tyrenkov’s treachery. Fedorov thought he had the answer.

  “Remember how the ship would pulse in those early days? We would move in and out of the time frame we occupied. That may have happened to Tunguska as well. If Tyrenkov did introduce a major change, that would have rippled forward, and when that Heisenberg Wave struck us, we may have slipped right into the world he created. Thankfully, the hole in time near the site of the star fall on the Stony Tunguska was an imperative. It was still there, and when we entered that breach, we returned to the Prime Meridian again.”

  “The Prime Meridian…” said Karpov. “Yes, the world as it was before we started destroying it. Then Tyrenkov
’s intervention meant nothing?”

  “No,” said Fedorov. “I think he just may have succeeded in building his imperium, possibly with the help of others. Remember, we never did get to Volkov, and he would have been right there in 1908, and we never did find out what happened to Orlov either. But if we could get back to the same Ilanskiy that we departed from, railway in and all, then that could only mean one thing—the world Tyrenkov built is on a completely different meridian of time, another branch of the tree.”

  Fedorov had a theory, that the lines of time spread out like the twisted branches of a tree. “We were handing time too many insoluble paradoxes with our meddling,” he had concluded. “So her response has been to simply split the time line off in all these different threads. I can grasp that, but now I think my view of each time line as being inviolate, and free of contamination from another, may be wrong.”

  At first Karpov had been elated, free from the shadow of Tyrenkov’s treachery, and eager to get back to his war, but the more Fedorov explained things, the more his mood darkened. If Tyrenkov was off on his meridian, and they were here in the world of their own making, then nothing seemed to matter. Both stories would exist side by side, and neither Tyrenkov nor Karpov would ever get the satisfaction of avenging the other’s actions. Fedorov had used that old saying from the medieval assassin cult to sum it all up: “Nothing is true; everything is permitted.”

  “Now you’re saying we’ve had it all wrong,” Karpov told him. “If we do something in the past that would cause a catastrophic change, time just fragments and produces a new meridian. If nothing I do here truly matters, then what’s the point?”

  “Ah, I see,” said Fedorov. “You want your decisions and choices to count for something. You were laboring under the illusion that you would fix the world yourself, just the way you liked it, and with your own self installed in a very prominent position. That started with your line about getting a fair deal for Russia, and you were willing to take on all comers with Kirov to make that happen, but now we finally see the game time has been playing with us all along. We’ve been fools. I wish we had never left Severomorsk on those live fire exercises….”