Able Sentry

by John Schettler

  The Americans were doing what Admiral Wu Jinlong feared, threatening to cut his lines of communication back to China, so he had posted another Yuan class diesel boat, number 17, right in the middle of that gap to bar the way. It was just sitting there, hovering at 456 feet, silent and waiting for intruders it knew were coming its way. The Chinese sonar operators could already hear the distant sound of the Enterprise Strike Group, some 120 miles off.

  * * *

  “Sir,” said Rodenko. “Enterprise is launching its morning AEW watch, and a flight of fighters.”

  “Comfortable back here,” said Karpov. “We never had the luxury of a carrier escort after we lost the Kremlin, but that was in another world.”

  “What’s the morning likely to look like,” said Fedorov.

  “There’s a gap up ahead that will certainly be defended,” said Karpov. “We have no surface contacts, so they will probably have a submarine there.”

  “Should we send Kazan forward?”

  “Not necessary,” said Karpov. “I realize it’s been a dull affair for Gromyko thus far, but the Americans have two subs forward, so we’ll keep Kazan on a leash for the time being.”

  “Will there be air operations soon?”

  “We’ve no communication from the Enterprise, and they are 550 miles from the Chinese fleet, so my guess is that they’ll want to clear that gap ahead first. Both sides will post watches and defensive patrols, but the Americans will wait until they’re about 400 miles out before launching a strike.”

  “What about the Chinese?”

  “Good question. By my count, their bombers would need another three hours or so to complete rearming. So things might begin to heat up again after 09:00. They tried to go after the American bases at Palau and Yap yesterday, and I’d expect another attack today.”

  Rodenko watched on radar as the Americans sent helicopters forward, guarded by F-35’s, and they began a slow ASW patrol in the gap, laying their web of sonobuoys. That proved to be fruitful, for several buoys landed uncomfortably close to the hovering Yuan Class boat. While a more experienced Captain might have sat pat, the active sonar pings this one heard spooked him enough to want to be somewhere else. He ordered his boat to creep away to the southeast at four knots, and a few seconds later, the two US subs had a Goblin in their midst.

  SSN Franklin was the closest, just 11 miles south of the contact, which was almost due north of his position. The boat had been advancing at 12 knots, while Nashville drifted to the northwest, listening. In time, the two subs would switch roles, one advancing, the other listening in a slow drift. But Jim Alvis, skipper of the Franklin had an itchy trigger finger that morning, and was eager to star his war. He had a good firing solution at eleven miles, and put two torpedoes in the water.

  That ruined the Chinese Captain’s day, as he had no choice but to run north at his best speed, and right into the web of sonobuoys the two helicopters had laid. They had gone Bingo and started back towards the US task force, so now the two US subs, having flushed out the quarry, were in the hunt.

  By the time the first Mark-48 reached the contact location, that data was five minutes old, but it kept on, with mindless diligence, still having fuel for another nine miles at 65 knots. Its brother was three miles to the east, searching the waters ahead with its sensors, at a depth of 300 feet. It had taken the Chinese sub time to turn and build up speed, so it wasn’t far away, just two miles ahead, which put it in the torpedo’s sensor range. It came right up into the baffles of the enemy sub, ignored a desperately fired decoy, and blew Yuan-17 to pieces.

  Captain Alvis notched his belt, and though neither US sub Captain knew it yet, they had just cleared the gap.

  * * *

  Fedorov could not put the disappearance of Markov out of his mind. It just seemed too much of a coincidence to him. Yes, he thought, fate is fate, but this is odd. Things would soon get worse when Orlov came to him that morning with another alarming report. Another man was missing.

  “Volushin, sir,” said Orlov. “He didn’t report to his work detail this morning, so I checked his quarters, but he wasn’t there.”

  “Have you checked with Doctor Zolkin?”

  “Yes sir, but he’s heard nothing about the man.”

  “I see…. Well, you know the ship, Chief. Ask around. See what you can turn up, and please let me know one way or the other.”

  Orlov nodded, and went off to do the hundred things he dealt with each day on the ship. When he had gone, Fedorov went to his service jacket, and he called up the journal he had kept, safely stored on the computer chips hidden in the coat. He connected the jacket to a pad device, and scrolled through the journal briefly, an uneasy feeling coming over him as he did so. These were events he logged from the original ship, the very first regression in time. He searched for the name Volushin, and there it was, a crewman who had taken his own life, hanging himself in his quarters.

  Markov…. Volushin…. Now Fedorov had the uneasy feeling that something very dangerous was happening. The same men, he thought. They are vanishing, just as they did before. They were all the men that had died, one way or another, during Kirov’s first regression in time, and now Fedorov realized that he was not the only one to keep a list of those names. When they first returned to Vladivostok, they had purged the ship’s logs to cover up what had happened to them. That was when Inspector Kapustin and that rat Volkov were aboard, prying into every nook and cranny on the ship.

  Zolkin, he thought. The Doctor kept a log of all the men we lost. Now he remembered when he had gone to Zolkin after he suddenly found himself on the ship again, just after the second regression of Kirov to the past. He was trying to convince Zolkin of what had happened in the first regression, as he had been the only many that remembered any of those incidents. He could hear himself, pleading with the Doctor in frustration….

  “God, I wish I could produce a log book, something tangible, but I’ve checked for that on the bridge with Nikolin. He keeps the logs, and there was no evidence there. Then I remembered why, because we purged the files.” Fedorov had a frustrated look on his face now, for he needed Zolkin to believe here, and the man’s own intelligence and training was working as an adversary to that. Zolkin had a strange look in his eye, as if he recalled something very important.

  “Fedorov… Log entries… I was wanting to speak with you, because I was consulting my medical logs the other day, and came upon something very odd.”

  “Tell me.” Fedorov’s eyes were dark and serious.

  “Oh, I was just reviewing my records, looking for something that might explain away an old bloodied bandage I found in my medicine cabinet. That may not seem like much, but I’m a very meticulous man, and somewhat of a creature of habit. So I wanted to see if I had made a log entry detailing an incident when that bandage might have been used. I couldn’t remember anything about it… then I found something very odd, an encrypted file. Apparently I put a strong password protection on it, because I tried several of my old favorites, and it eventually opened.”

  “I see… What was it, Doctor?”

  “A list of members of the crew… An Autopsy report on each name I found there.”

  That hit Fedorov like a wet fish in the face. Autopsy reports? Now he remembered what had happened in Vladivostok when the Inspector General came aboard, with that damn intelligence officer, Ivan Volkov. There had been a list of names, all the members of the crew that they had lost in combat during those first harrowing missions in time. Volkov managed to force Zolkin to surrender that list, and it was then found that Moscow had no record that any man on the list ever existed! His heart beat faster as he realized what this might be—that very same list, encrypted and hidden by the Doctor during that period before they made port, when the effort was made to erase all evidence of what had happened to them. Of course, that was why I could find no computer logs on the bridge. But Zolkin did not erase his files, he merely encrypted them!

  All this passed through his mind in a heartb
eat, and now his eyes widened as he looked at the Doctor, knowing exactly what to ask.

  “Doctor Zolkin… Did the list you found have a report on a crewman named Markov? Did it include a man named Voloshin? Another named Lenkov—the man from the galley?”

  Zolkin had a stunned expression on his face. “Yes! All of them. My God, the moment I saw that list I knew you were the one man I needed to speak with about it… I just knew… But how could you know this, the names of those men?”

  “Because I can tell you how each man died.” He went on about Markov, and how he was simply reported as missing in action while working at the Primorskiy engineering facility. Then there was Voloshin, found dead in his own quarters, an apparent suicide. There were others he remembered, men he knew who had died in the reserve battle bridge, or at some other station during the many hours of combat they had endured. He could not remember them all, did not even know some who had given up their lives, their very existence, though he felt responsible for all of them. Then he came to Lenkov.

  “He was found, half embedded in the galley floor, and then later the rest of his body, his legs in fact, were discovered in one of the Marine lockers…”

  Markov…. Volushin…. Lenkov….. The list was long, and now Fedorov felt the swelling of a quiet panic within. It had happened once already, and now it was happening again—the same men, vanishing as before. At first their disappearance was just a mystery, or a tragedy, as in Volushin’s case. Then came Lenkov, the galley worker who had suffered such a terrible fate. He concluded that had happened when Kirov started pulsing, phasing in and out of its temporal location. He had experienced those effects himself, at one point finding his thick soled boots stuck in the deck, and again on a ladder.

  The first time this had happened, he attributed it to the fact that he still had possession of that object Orlov had discovered out near the Stony Tunguska River, the thing Troyak called the Devil’s Teardrop. That had prompted Fedorov to cast it overboard when they buried the remains of Lenkov’s body at sea. Both went into a deep trench in the Atlantic west of Gibraltar, Peake’s Deep.

  He found himself moving, his pace quickening as he went, up stairways, down corridors, up ladders, through one hatch after another until, breathless, he heard Rodenko’s voice.

  “Captain on the Bridge.”

  Karpov had the conn and he was sitting in his chair, turning to the aft hatch as the announcement was made. He could immediately see that something was wrong. Fedorov’s eyes were wide, his breath coming fast.

  “Fedorov? Tired of the food today? I thought you were going to have a good meal.”

  “We need to talk,” said Fedorov flatly, and Karpov could see it was something serious.

  “Very well, in my ready room.” He got up, as Fedorov was already heading for the room, eager to close the door behind them when Karpov got there. Nikolin leaned over to watch them go, and then gave Tasarov a look.

  “We have a problem,” Fedorov began when the hatch was secured. “This thing with Markov was not happenstance.”

  Karpov knew Fedorov well enough to know that he had done some sleuthing before he would come to such a conclusion, so he simply nodded. “Tell me,” he said, waiting.

  “Orlov came to me this morning with another missing man report—Volushin. Does that name ring a bell?”

  Karpov inclined his head, but Fedorov would not wait. “He hung himself in his quarters after we returned to Vladivostok. After that, it was Lenkov, and surely you remember I told you about that.”

  “Who could forget something like that,” said Karpov. “Yes… The man who suffered that odd fate, stuck in the galley floor. Creepy. Well, I was in Siberia jousting with Ivan Volkov in airships, so I can’t say I knew much about it.”

  “Right, but it happened. The ship was pulsing, or so I came to believe. I thought it might have been caused by that thing Orlov found—the Devil’s Teardrop, so I threw it off the ship, along with Lenkov. But it didn’t stop there. The men kept vanishing, one after another. Then I discovered that their names were all on that list Volkov got his hands on when we first came back to Vladivostok. Zolkin kept it in an encrypted file—remember?”

  “Yes, I was on the ship for that.”

  “Well, it’s happening again, Markov, Volushin. It’s going to be Lenkov next, and Karpov, that list is pretty damn long.”

  “You’re saying the men who died during our first regression are all going to vanish?”

  “Yes, and more.”

  “What do you mean, more?”

  “Men who did not die in combat started to go missing as well, Orlov, Tasarov, Kamenski, and even Admiral Volsky!”

  That got Karpov’s attention in a rather shaking way.

  “You were witness to all that?”

  “I didn’t say much about it, but remember, I was Captain of the ship while you were in Siberia after that incident off Oki Island in 1908. We moved forward on the ship, but you weren’t with us. In fact, we believed you had perished. Well, that ship vanished—the original Kirov. I was aboard when it happened. We just seemed to be in this strange fog, very dense and so high that one of the helicopters couldn’t even get above it, and then men just started vanishing.”

  “Chilling,” said Karpov.

  “Yes, I remember Volsky summoning me to his quarters. He was urging me to do this or that for the crew, almost as if he could feel himself slipping, as if he knew that he was going to vanish soon.”

  “Yet there’s an explanation for Markov’s disappearance,” said Karpov. He got too close to that disturbance in the reactor room, the aberration Dobrynin reported. I checked with him this morning, all is still normal there now.”

  “That may be so, but the incident was a clear warning. And Dobrynin reported hearing it before the actual aberration appeared. This was also what happened on the ship before these men started to go missing.”

  “Alright, alright. Don’t get too bothered about it. We know Dobrynin can hear this sound or vibration before it manifests, so we can be alerted to the danger and take action.”

  “Don’t get bothered about it? Karpov, this happened to me too! Yes, my name is on that list….”

  Karpov gave him a long look. Then he removed his service cap, and set it slowly on the desk. One by one, he pulled off his gloves, and set them by the lamb’s fleece Ushanka.

  “Tell me,” he said quietly. “Tell me everything that happened….”

  The Saga Continues…

  As Fedorov and Karpov struggle to understand what is happening, the war will not wait. The ship and crew are soon drawn into the battle to turn back Admiral Wu Jinlong in the Celebes Sea.

  Meanwhile, with the Suez Canal reopened and passage through the Red Sea made possible, the Western Coalition now moves into offensive mode in the Middle East. Admiral Sun Wei must now face the combined might of two American Carrier Strike Groups in his desperate battle to retain control of the Gulf of Oman and prevent any incursion into the Persian Gulf.

  The General War Plan, Able Sentry, now transitions to the dramatic thrust east into Iraq, Able Fire, as the Coalition seeks to compel the Iraqi Army to withdraw from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. That campaign also has a hidden objective in Iraqi capital, where something of great importance lies hidden in the Baghdad museum.

  Reading the Kirov Series

  The Kirov Series is a long chain of linked novels by John Schettler in the Military Alternate History / Time Travel Genre. Like the popular movie “The Final Countdown” which saw the US Carrier Nimitz sent back in time to the eve of Pearl Harbor in 1941, in the opening volume, the powerful Russian battlecruiser Kirov is involved in an accident during live fire exercises that sends the ship back to the 1940s in the Norwegian Sea, where it subsequently becomes embroiled in WWII.

  Similar to episodes in the never-ending Star Trek series, the saga continues through one volume after another as the ship’s position in time remains unstable. The main 40 volume series is an alternate history of WWII, from 1940 to late
1944, showing the war as it is changed by the intervention of Kirov and crew. It is the most detailed fictional depiction of WWII ever written, covering most every major battle on land and sea.

  Getting Started:

  There are two key entry points to the series, the most obvious being Book 1, Kirov, where you will meet all the main characters in the series and learn their inner motivations. However, as the series describes a great loop in time, new readers can also enter with the current season 6 of the story, beginning with volume 41, Homecoming. The author is writing these final books to include all the necessary information new readers would need to know. This final season shows what would have happened to the ship and crew if they had not shifted to the past in book 1, and Kirov becomes embroiled in the outbreak of WWIII in the Norwegian Sea. At the conclusion of Season 6, new readers can then move to book 1 in the main series, and see what happens to the ship if it does shift back in time.

  Detailed information on the battles covered in each book, including battle maps, is available at www.writingshop.ws. A listing of books in all six “seasons” of this amazing series appears below.

  KIROV SERIES - SEASON 1: Kirov

  1) Kirov

  2) Cauldron of Fire

  3) Pacific Storm

  4) Men of War

  5) Nine Days Falling

  6) Fallen Angels

  7) Devil’s Garden

  8) Armageddon – Season 1 Finale

  KIROV SERIES - SEASON 2: Altered States (1940 – 1941)

  9) Altered States

  10) Darkest Hour (Naval Battles, Mers El Kebir)

  11) Hinge of Fate (Gibraltar & The Med)

  12) Three Kings (North Africa, Spain)

  13) Grand Alliance (North Africa, Syria)

  14) Hammer of God (Crete, Malta, North Africa)

  15) Crescendo of Doom (North Africa, Tobruk)

  16) Paradox Hour – Season 2 Finale