Armageddon

Chapter 23

“Follow me, gentlemen.” Gromyko led the way to the officer’s briefing room. Once inside Fedorov removed his hat, eager to speak.

“Admiral, I believe we now find ourselves in the year 1945. That could be verified if we surface for signals intelligence, but I am almost certain if that noise we heard was Japanese coastal defense units attacking a US sub. What else could it be?”

“What is all this noise? Can’t an old man get any sleep these days?”

They looked to see that Pavel Kamenski had come shuffling into the briefing room, and the Admiral greeted him with a smile.

“Please sit down and join us, Mister Kamenski. Fedorov here believes we are now in 1945. It appears that our Chief Dobrynin was not able to work his magic after all.”

“Oh? Or perhaps your Rod-25 simply has an affinity for the 1940s,” said Kamenski. “Remember those gopher holes I talked about. Maybe we must first arrive here before we can discover the hole that leads us deeper into the garden to 1908 where your Mister Karpov is still digging.”

“That is one possibility,” said Fedorov. “Yet if I am correct, here we find ourselves in 1945, the same year Kirov appeared after the eruption of that Demon Volcano. If we could determine the exact day and time here, we could possibly get to the last reported position of the Red Banner Pacific Fleet before that eruption happened. Then, when Kirov and the other ships appear here, we will be right there-and with three control rods-enough to get everyone safely home again!”

Kamenski gave him a smile. “Very clever, this young man.”

“Amazing,” said Volsky, considering this. The Admiral recalled his own internal muse as he struggled with the problem at Fokino headquarters, fretting over Dobrynin and his mission to rescue Fedorov. If I had it to do over I would have put that control rod we found in Vladivostok on a submarine. Then it would have been right here to find Karpov and surface to deliver the rod. Perhaps it could have hovered beneath the ship and come home when Kirov shifted… That seemed a better idea to him, but now he did not see how this could work.

“I don’t understand one thing,” said Volsky. “At this moment Karpov is in 1908. How could we possibly do this? Would not his very presence in that year mean that we fail to do what Fedorov suggests?”

“That could very well be the case,” said Kamenski.

“But we are here,” said Fedorov, and well before Kirov arrives. Doesn’t that trump anything Karpov chooses to do?”

Kamenski’s eyes narrowed. “I believe the Captain was sent here by chance,” said Kamenski. “He certainly did not choose anything. It was that volcano, or perhaps fate, that sent Kirov and the other ships to this time.”

“Then we should be able to intervene here.”

Kamenski sighed. “Captain, Gromyko, do you recall any of the history of this period-the end of the Second World War?”

Gromyko thought for a moment. “The Kuriles incident…The Americans claimed that Russian naval units engaged their forces in August of 1945, sinking surface ships, a submarine, and shooting down American planes. That led to Halsey’s Kuriles operation, where the Americans made the further preposterous claim that Soviet Russia deployed nuclear weapons against their fleet, sinking the battleship Iowa. Yes. Everyone knows that history, Mister Kamenski, and the terrible days that followed.”

“Indeed, what followed, if you will indulge us briefly here.”

“Why, the American bombing of Vladivostok, sir. It almost started a third world war right after the second one. Zukhov and Patton were eye to eye in Germany and nearly came to blows, but fortunately diplomacy prevailed.”

“And to this day Russia still denies it had anything to do with the sinking of the Iowa.” Kamenski smiled. “Now then, Mister Fedorov, you seem to be very well acquainted with the history of WWII. Do you recall anything about the Americans bombing Vladivostok in late August of 1945?”

“No I do not,” said Fedorov. “The war ended after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then we altered that and it ended when Admiral Yamamoto managed to persuade the Emperor to capitulate and avoid further destruction and bloodshed. I know nothing of what Captain Gromyko had just said.”

“There you have it,” said Kamenski. “I suppose if we took a poll most of the men on this boat will agree with Captain Gromyko here. Yet as for myself, the Admiral, Mister Fedorov, and all the other visitors on your submarine today, we all know a very different story of that period in history…In fact I know several versions. You get this way with the years, but the point I am making here is that time seems to have closed her books on that chapter of the history. Karpov did what he did, even if Stalin knew nothing about it and denied the whole affair. He was telling the truth, from his perspective, but it was still a lie. You see, gentlemen, time is not a straight line. One thing does not necessarily lead to another, like falling dominoes. Time branches out like a tree, and we are the gardeners.”

“Then you do not think we can still prevent what Karpov did in 1945? Why not?” Fedorov still believed they could trump Karpov’s hand here. “If we get to him before he arrives here, then we should be able saw off the limb he brought into being.”

“I cannot say why, but I have a strong feeling that we may be prevented somehow. Let us think of this from the point of view of Mother Time. We are here because Karpov is in 1908. Now we come up with an idea to prevent him from ever getting there! This is a paradox, yes? So we might go lie in wait as you suggest, and Mother Time might rebuke us by simply sending Karpov back to a different date and time here. In fact, that would be the only way she could avoid the paradox you create with this idea.”

“I see…” Fedorov thought deeply about this. “Then we have multiple alternatives. It isn’t one single thread of time.” The realization shook him somewhat.

Kamenski was correct. Call it a hunch, an inner sense of foreboding, or just a lucky guess. The intercom interrupted them at that very moment, and Chief Dobrynin had something to say.

“Admiral? Captain? Dobrynin here. Something is amiss.”

“A problem with the reactors, Chief?”

“Not exactly sir, but I do not think the event has concluded. I am starting to hear those strange harmonics again.”

“What do you mean?” said Volsky. “The time displacement has not concluded?”

“Well, sir… It doesn’t sound like it has. The song is starting up again. I think our position here is unstable. I will do what I can to control it, but I think we are going to shift again.”

“So, gentlemen,” said Kamenski. “I think we are about to fall through to another gopher hole.”

It was not long before Dobrynin’s song was playing at the heart of the reactor again, and like an aftershock to the main event, Kazan slipped again in time. Whether it was his skill in controlling the reactors at that moment, or a strange unexplained magnetism that was calling Rod-25 home to the year its matter first plummeted from the heavens at Tunguska, the submarine fell through to the year 1908. They rose to the surface to listen to signals traffic, and all they could hear was the dot-dash world of Morse code over wireless telegraph systems, a faint scratching of the airwaves that were otherwise clean and silent. So they sat there again in the briefing room, intent on deciding what they must now do.

“This was the answer to your question, Mister Fedorov. Perhaps we might have done something to re-write the history in Captain Gromyko’s head, but I think Mother Time had other ideas.”

“It appears so, Director,” said Fedorov. “Signals traffic gives every indication that we are now in the pre-radio age. The question is when? We do not have a handle on the correct date yet, but I believe that we must be here after Karpov has already arrived aboard Kirov.”

“Why do you say this?” asked Gromyko. “Why not months before he got here?”

“That is a possibility, though it would be very problematic for time to work out-and for us. You see, many here shifted back to 1908 aboard Anatoly Alexandrov. If we have just arrived here before that time, then what happens to us at the moment when we first shifted here on the floating power plant? There would be two of us, and something tells me that even in the midst of all these incongruous and astounding events, that would be impossible-two Fedorovs, two Dobrynins, two Sergeant Troyaks, two Orlovs, and so on. We cannot co-locate in any time period where we already exist. Time would not allow that shift, which would upset everything. The backwards shift of the Anatoly Alexandrov must happen for us to even be here! Understand?”

“Very wise,” said Kamenski. “That would create quite an accounting problem for time when that day rolled around.”

“Yes,” said Fedorov, “and so I think it is simply not possible for us to shift to an earlier day. We must be here after our shift home.”

“Alright,” said Volsky. “Let us assume that time wishes to impose some order on our shenanigans here. Let us assume we have arrived after that date. What day might this be?”

“The Anatoly Alexandrov arrived here August 17, 1908. We went ashore on the Caspian coast to verify that date. We were only there 48 hours, waiting for Karpov to decide what to do. It was August 19th when we shifted all the way back to 2021. So my guess is that we have arrived here from the 20th day of August, or later.”

“What if it is months later?” said Gromyko.

“Then we would be too late, and Karpov would have worked his mischief. We would have failed, and so we should have known about that before we left. No…I think we still have a chance to succeed. I think everything is still in the whirlwind. That is why we could not know what Karpov did before we departed 2021. The possibility of our success here existed and forced time to suspend judgment-is that not so, Director Kamenski?”

“This is the way I reason it. I believe the rifts in time are also very limited and specific-the gopher holes, as I call them. Clearly there was a tunnel from 2021 to the 1940s on that back stairway in the inn at Ilanskiy. Karpov may have broken into another borehole in time when his attack on the Iowa shifted Kirov here.”

“Yes,” said Volsky. “But I have never understood why Orlan did not shift as well, and why it suffered the fate I saw in that old photograph you gave me, swarmed over by a hundred American planes. Kirov shifted, but not Orlan.”

“ Kirov is the slippery fish,” said Kamenski. “It has bounced back and forth in time so often that its position in any given milieu is never certain.”

“I agree,” said Fedorov, recalling that awful moment on the bridge when the Japanese cruiser Tone came barreling out of the mist and appeared to sail right through the ship. “In the early stages the ship seemed to pulse in time, moving in and out before finally stabilizing. That was before we understood the controlling effects of Rod-25.”

“So in that light, given a situation where an event causes the fabric of time to break, Kirov has an affinity for slipping through the cracks. I suppose that may have happened to Orlan as well if it had survived that last battle. But our Sea Eagle falls in 1945, never to sortie on the waters of infinity again. Now, gentlemen, we must decide on how we handle Kirov — that slippery fish out there somewhere-before it slips away again.”

“As I see it we have only those same two choices,” said Fedorov. “We either persuade Karpov to come to his senses and rejoin us-we net the fish and then try to get us all home to 2021. The other choice is the hard one-we must kill the white whale-spear the fish and make an end of Karpov that way.”

There was silence for some time, then Gromyko spoke. “If I have to spear this fish, will I have tactical command of how I fight this battle?”

Admiral Volsky seemed weary now, his eyes heavy, brow furrowed, and a sense of sadness in his voice. “If we fight, then yes, Gromyko, you will command Kazan in battle. I do not know the first thing about how this submarine fights, and I have already witnessed your skills when you dueled with the Japanese and Americans to get us here. As to whether or not you actually engage, however, that will be my decision. I would hope it could be avoided. My first choice will be to try and persuade Karpov to rejoin us.”

“So we will surrender the element of surprise?”

“I can see no other way, and I know this presents us all with yet another possibility here, and a rather dark one. What if we fail, even with Kazan? What if Karpov is the one who spears this slippery fish?”

Gromyko folded his arms. “I will do everything possible to prevent that,” he said, “and I have every confidence we can prevail.”

“Mister Fedorov?” Volsky looked at his young Captain now. “What do you think?”

“I cannot say I am well versed in combat, sir. I learned a great deal from Karpov, and from watching Gromyko earlier. It will be a sad thing to watch, but one hell of a fight if it comes to it.”

“Well I will say one thing,” said Volsky. “I suppose the professors and instructors at the war colleges might also agree. All things being equal, the submarine had the edge if it comes to a duel with a single surface ship like this. How would you attack, Gromyko?”

“Well sir, we have a good array of weapons aboard. Torpedoes are perhaps our most deadly weapon. If I can get within 20 kilometers of that ship I can pose a dire threat with torpedoes. But we can attack with missiles as well. I have 32 VLS tubes armed with an array of P-800s and P-900s. The latter are 3M-54E variants with a range of 220 kilometers and a terminal attack speed of nearly Mach 3 on their final run to the target. A large salvo would be very hard for a single ship to deal with. The only trick is finding the ship before we fire. Our radar seems inoperative.”

“That is a residual effect from the time displacement. It will clear up shortly, and then I will contact Karpov and see what I can do to avoid further action. The ship has a formidable SAM defense, and Karpov knows how to use it.”

“I have seen Karpov in battle,” said Fedorov. “And I also believe I know how he thinks in battle. Perhaps I could assist you if it comes down to combat.”

“I would welcome anything you may have to say,” said Gromyko. “Were there helicopters aboard?”

“The normal loadout, two KA-40s and a KA-226. But again, I cannot say if they all survived to reach 1908 with the ship.”

“I must assume as much,” said Gromyko. “Well,” he sighed, “we have gamed this many times on maneuvers. I did trials against Pyotr Veliky before that ship went in for refit. It was the longest serving Kirov class ship, and very capable.”

“Yes,” said Volsky. “Well you will be fighting a piece or two of that ship should you face the new Kirov. We used parts of all four vessels in the original class.”

“There is one more thing,” said Gromyko. “We have special warheads…”

Volsky gave him a sallow look. “What is your inventory?” he said quietly, an uncomfortable edge to his voice.

“We have two RU-100 Veter torpedoes with 20 kiloton nuclear warheads. The rest are RU-40 conventional torpedoes, six of those with a range of 120 kilometers.” The Veter was a rocket assisted weapon that actually entered the atmosphere to cross much of that distance before diving into the sea again to become a torpedo in this new variant. Veter meant “wind” in Russian, and these lances carried a dark storm of anger on the wind if they were fired.

“We also have one 15 Kiloton warhead for the P-900s.”

“I must remind you that Kirov had a loadout of special warheads as well. There is every reason to believe that Karpov has already used one or more of these weapons-in 1945. So you see the Americans were correct after all. The Russians did attack them with atomic weapons, wielded by a madman. God help us all if it comes down to this again here.”

“Indeed,” said Kamenski. “We have been punching holes in time with our nuclear weapons for decades. Now we have made a veritable Swiss cheese of things. Let us hope this is the end of all that, but it may be necessary if push comes to shove here.”

“I fear as much,” said Volsky.