Altered States -Volume III. Hinge of Fate

Chapter 25

Kirov was out to sea, cruising in the Denmark Strait after setting up the Ice Watch with an Oko panel radar team at Hornsrandir, the northernmost cape of Iceland in the Westfjord region. Fedorov coordinated the mission, seeing to security and the movement of adequate supplies to the outpost. The Americans will have a similar outpost here in the future, he thought as he finished up and returned to the ship on the KA-40. Yet the moment he was back aboard Kirov his mind returned to the impossible news he had received. Troyak had succeeded! His Marines got through to Ilanskiy and demolished that back stairway-but how? How was that possible given what Kamenski had told him?

He recalled his words from their earlier conversation, the discussion that was so daunting that it had prompted Admiral Volsky to take a sip from his vodka flask.

“Don’t hold your breath, Mister Fedorov,” Kamenski had said quietly, as he took another long slow drag on his pipe.

“Sir?”

“Well… If your Sergeant Troyak destroys that railway inn in 1940, then how in the world did you go down those steps in 1942, to eventually end up here and get the idea for this little mission? For that matter, how did Volkov go down those stairs in 2021?”

But he did it! Kamenski was wrong. Troyak had reported mission accomplished. To put it more bluntly, he radioed that he had blown that stairway to hell. That sent Fedorov off to the bridge to check their present situation and see if there was any unusual news on the airwaves. Were things still the same? Out here on the sea, isolated in the ice fog of the Denmark Strait, they would have seen nothing if it changed.

The first thing he checked on were the two British cruisers Admiral Tovey had assigned to this watch, placing them directly under Admiral Volsky’s command. He soon learned that they were still there, Sheffield and Southampton, on what they believed were forward radar picket duties. Shiny Sheff, as the Sheffield was called, had been one of the first British ships fitted with the Type 79Y early warning radar, effective out to about 50 kilometers.

The two cruisers were still there, right on station as Kirov’s own radar had them. So nothing must have changed, thought Fedorov. Nikolin also confirmed that news of the Orenburg Federation was again on the wires, with renewed fighting reported at the Siberian city of Omsk. Apparently the “Omsk Accord” as it had been called earlier, had fallen apart. So if Orenburg remained, and the civil war continued, then Volkov must have taken his trip down those stairs. Sergei Kirov’s name was also prominent in the news items that continued to follow the treaty now being signed with England.

Fedorov now wondered if he had been wrong about the importance of those stairs. What had happened? How could the history here remain inviolate? Were the changes so subtle that they had not yet been noticed? He could not help but think that Troyak’s mission had created some great contradiction, and was again dogged by the feeling that it would be his fault if it did. Kamenski’s voice returned again.

“Yes, the edge of paradox is a very dangerous precipice to hike along. We must be very careful here. I cannot say how that problem might resolve itself, Mister Fedorov, but something tells me that time would find a way. Yes. Mother Time does not wish to have her skirts ruffled any more than necessary. She would find a way.”

Time must have found a way, thought Fedorov. But how? If Sergei Kirov was still safely alive and in power in the Soviet Union, then he must have used that stairway as before, and in 1942. If Ivan Volkov was alive now then he must have also used it safely in 2021.

Then the answer struck him like a wet fish in the face, so obviously simple that he was surprised he had not considered it earlier. Troyak may have just destroyed the stairway, but he obviously did not destroy the time rift itself! So the only solution to his problem was that someone must have rebuilt those stairs. Could this be done?

This had to be the answer. The inn was restored, sometime between this moment and that date in 1942 when he first discovered the rift. Then the darker implications of what he had concluded struck him. Was the restoration done by someone who knew what they were about-someone who knew that rift in time existed? If so, who might that person be? He realized that any number of people might have inadvertently gone up or down those stairs, and now he wondered if that inn had a history of these events, the people who may have boarded there and unwittingly stumbled through that rift as he did. Some may have returned to their correct time, even as Fedorov returned when he retreated back up those stairs. Yet others may have been trapped in some other time, like Volkov.

Then he realized that there was a record of everyone who had ever boarded at that inn-the guest register! Boarders would sign in on a routine basis, and there might also be billing records. Did the innkeepers know about the strange effects on that stairway? Could they be the ones behind this restoration, or was it someone else?

That thought led him to one dark name that might be on the list of possible suspects, and one of the primary reasons he sent Troyak on that mission in the first place-Vladimir Karpov. The threat that stairway represented may have only been temporarily forestalled by Troyak’s mission. Yet there might be no way he would ever know who rebuilt the inn, or when they might do this, which would make any future operation difficult to plan.

Yes, Mother Time had found a way, and he could at least know that he was not responsible for creating another insoluble paradox with his mission plan. That thought gave him little solace.

“Admiral on the bridge!”

Fedorov turned to see that Volsky had returned to take up his post after a long eight hour shift below decks.

“Good day, sir,” he said, but Volsky took one look at his face and knew something was wrong.

“You do not look so happy today, Mister Fedorov. Is something troubling you?”

“No sir… I was just thinking how we will recover the mission team.” Fedorov did not want to burden the Admiral again with more talk of paradox and time theory that neither of them really understood in the first place.

“Ah,” said Volsky. “I have sent a message to Admiral Golovko on this while you were busy setting up the Ice Watch team. The Narva has safely returned to Murmansk, refueled, and is already on its way to rendezvous with us here. Along the way they can reconnoiter to see if the Germans are up to anything.”

“A very good idea, sir.”

“Yes, and how was the deployment of the Oko panel? Any problems?”

“No sir. We laid in a month’s supply of food, fuel and other items for the six man team there. They are on-line now and feeding data to our main radar display. Contacts will display on our navigation board in blue.”

“Is there adequate security? We must not allow this technology to fall into the wrong hands, which is why I hesitated to release it to the British unless necessary.”

“The Ice Watch is very isolated, sir, and the team would certainly see anything coming by air or sea in time to warn us. I’ve also given some thought to the risk of sharing technology. Perhaps we were too paranoid earlier with the fear that nothing must ever fall into enemy hands.”

“Oh? Why do you say this, Fedorov?”

“Well sir, there is simply no way any of our technology could be reverse engineered in this era. Think about it for a moment. Take the Oko panel radar set, for example. It uses a powerful 6m? radar antenna with 360° azimuthal coverage. The processing power in a single unit exceeds that of all computational devices that will be made on planet earth through the 1980s! It has integrated micro-circuitry, millions of transistors, and wafer thin digital circuits, exotic materials and other components that no power on earth could even begin to duplicate until the 1990s. The technology could be used by men from this era trained to do so, but there is no conceivable way it could ever be reverse engineered or duplicated. In many ways the same can be said of our missile technology. Our engineers could certainly improve existing models of rocketry here, but face it, you could gather the very best of the missile scientists of this era into one project, and they could not reproduce a functioning Moskit-II if they worked round the clock for ten years! It simply requires advances in too many technological areas. Our computer technology is quantum leaps above anything of this era, and it is an essential integrated component in all of our systems. Computers handle all radar and infrared detection, inertial navigation, guidance and targeting. Without them the missile is just a very efficient and deadly unguided bomb, and no power on earth could ever duplicate our computers in this era. It simply could not be done.”

“Now that you explain it this way, I must agree with you. In fact, one day the shoe may be on the other foot and we may wish these people could manufacture just a little more 30mm ammunition for our AR-62 close in defense guns.”

“That might be possible, but all our missiles and munitions benefit from decades of advanced metallurgy. We might get a 30mm round from them that we could fire, but certainly not with the performance of our own munitions.”

“Which is why we must be very stingy about using them,” Volsky admonished, though he knew Fedorov would be the last to use unwarranted force in battle.”

Nikolin interrupted them, saying he was receiving a radio message from Operations Chief Orlov on the Airship Narva. In the next few minutes they learned that the Germans had finally stirred again from their cold northern outposts on the Norwegian coast. The Narva was flying high, and could not recognize exactly what they were seeing, but they had spotted two large ships out from Narvik and on a course that might take them very near the Island of Jan Mayen.

“There’s one more thing, sir,” said Nikolin. “I’ve been monitoring long range signals traffic and pattern filtering. The volume has taken a sudden increase, and when I listened in I discovered those letter sets again.”

“Letter sets?”

“Yes sir. A stream of letters in sets of five, and quite of bit of that now.”

“Do you have any of it?”

“I printed out this latest message, but there’s a good deal more.” Nikolin handed Fedorov the message, and he noted the telltale letter sets that indicated this was a special message being sent in the German Naval Enigma code. NVXCO TYQUY BTURS OVWPD VPVKZ UPZGH, and on it went. Fedorov wasted no time getting to his pad device with the Enigma decoding application. Using that day’s date, he soon established that his rotor position should be set at IV–V-III, with a rotor start position KXU and the rings set at VQG. Ten letter pairs were also set on the plugboard, and when he decoded the message he soon had his answer. It read: ‘Activate Plan Fimbulwinter, Stage I, with Alfargruppe, effective immediately. Fleet commander to execute Stage II, with Jotnargruppe, at his discretion. Plan Felix to follow.” The Admiral was watching him closely, noting his intense concentration with some admiration.

“Trouble, Mister Fedorov?”

“What else? These are fleet movement orders, Admiral. These words here are ship units being ordered to sea-a major fleet movement, sir. The shocking thing about it is that there are only two ships on that list which might have been active at this time in the war, Scharnhorst and Bismarck. Unless they are code names, there are others listed that I’ve never even heard of. They must be code for something else, because the Germans could not possibly have this many ships operational in 1940.”

“I suppose we should not be surprised, Fedorov. Admiral Tovey has a new ship. Yes? So the Germans may have been busy in the shipyards as well.”

“Indeed sir. But it’s this last word here that I’m worried about.” He pointed to his application screen. “Felix.”

“A new German battleship?”

“No sir. The battleships on the list are Bismarck and Hindenburg, more than enough to worry about. But this last word comes later, after a series of movement orders. It refers to an operation name-Operation Felix. That was the German plan to attack Gibraltar! But it never happened in the real war.”

“The real war, Mister Fedorov? This one isn’t convincing enough for you?”

Fedorov forced a smile at that. “This would indicate a major point of divergence, sir. At this time the Germans had three options for prosecuting the war. One was to strike directly at Great Britain with Operation Seelowe. That plan was discarded when Goering failed to break the R.A.F. and secure airspace over the Channel. The second option was to open hostilities against Soviet Russia with Operation Barbarossa, but that did not happen until 1941. The third was to pursue a Mediterranean strategy, striking indirectly at Britain by driving a wedge right through the heart of her empire. Remember our discussion when we were down there, Admiral?”

“How could I forget it? I still get headaches from that fall I took.”

“Yes, well there are three places Britain needs to hold to have any chance of prevailing in the Mediterranean and eventually knocking Italy out of the war. Suez in Egypt is the heart of their operation in the east, Malta is the lynchpin in the center, and Gibraltar the key outpost in the west. It’s the gateway to all future offensive plans there-Operation Torch, the landings in North Africa, the Tunisian campaign and invasion of Sicily and Italy-these all depend on Gibraltar standing as a viable British base of operations. Up until now the war in the West has followed a fairly familiar course. The campaigns in France and Norway have turned out much as they did in our history. But if Gibraltar falls we could be looking at a radical change in the entire course of the war. It would have to mean that Spain is either invaded by Germany or that it becomes an active belligerent against England. If this is so the Germans will have access to ports from Tromso to Gibraltar.”

“These German ships plan to sail all that distance? That does not make good sense to me.”

“Agreed. But I don’t think that is their objective. These orders simply indicate the Germans are planning to put battlegroups out into the Atlantic. Operation Felix would be undertaken by the army, but a sudden sortie by the Kriegsmarine like this would certainly strain British resources. It would mean Admiral Tovey could not send reinforcements to Force H at Gibraltar.”

“That at least makes sense. Does it say where the Germans are planning to break out?”

“No specific locations are mentioned, but there are references to rendezvous points. The names for battlegroups appear to be Jotnar and Alfar. I looked those up. They refer to giants and elves in Norse mythology. And the whole operation is being called Fimbulwinter.”

“Codes within codes.”

“It appears so, sir, but I do not have to think too hard to interpret this. Fimbulwinter was the name of a harsh north wind that comes before the end of the world. Jotnargruppe would probably be the heavy battleships, Alfargruppe the lighter supporting ships.”

“I see…” Volsky pursed his lips, considering all this. “A cold wind blowing from the north… We had best pass all this on to the British, Mister Fedorov.”

“With your permission, I will have Nikolin send a report to Sheffield, and they can transmit to the Admiralty on their normal channels.”

“Agreed,” said Volsky. “And we should notify the Ice Watch that the weather in the Denmark Strait may be taking a turn for the worse. They may soon be picking up this contact the Narva spotted. In the meantime, let us steer to the southern end of the Denmark Strait. We may have unexpected guests for dinner, though I do not think they will like what we have on the menu. If the Germans bother my watch, I’ll be serving up missiles in short order.”