Devil's Garden

Chapter 27

It was a slow process, and the signal faded at times and was lost, but they were able to get a message through. Nikolin worked out the subsquare location on the grid from Fedorov’s signal.

“They are right in the Caspian Sea, sir. Just off the coast at Kaspiysk.”

“My God, they must have run their procedure with that damnable Rod-25 and then shifted back here even as we have-but why 1908? Our shift was caused by that explosive detonation. Why would they shift here as well, to this day and year? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“I’m getting a voice signal now. They’re using a frequency above 12MHz to improve integrity. Got him sir!”

“…Read me on this channel. Repeat, this is Anton Fedorov aboard Anatoly Alexandrov on location in the Caspian sea. Calling battlecruiser Kirov. Please acknowledge.”

Karpov nodded his head, giving Nikolin the go ahead to respond.

“Roger that, Anatoly Alexandrov. This is Kirov calling. Reading you five by five, loud and clear, Fedorov. Lieutenant Nikolin responding.”

“Ten Four — Nikolin! Am I ever glad to hear your voice! Where are you? Over.”

Karpov reached for the handset now: “Fedorov? What are you doing here? Do you realize what year this is?”

“Captain Karpov? Good to hear you, sir. To answer your question, we really have no idea why we are here. Dobrynin ran his procedure and here we are. I have just verified the date. Over.”

“Well, what in God’s name are you going to do here?”

“…Good question, Captain. We have Orlov! But when we attempted to use Rod-25 to return home, we ended up here instead. Now we must see what we can do about all this. Is Orlan with you?

“No. Orlan is not here.”

There was silence on the line for a time. Then Fedorov returned, his voice uncertain. “Orlan did not shift with you? And what of Admiral Golovko?”

“Neither ship shifted here with us. We are alone, and I have no idea what has happened to Orlan.”

“Might it still be trapped in 1945, Captain?”

This time it was Karpov that hesitated before he spoke. “That is possible, Fedorov, but given the circumstances we were facing, I doubt the ship survived…”

There was another pause that seemed interminably long, and Karpov realized that Fedorov must be reading between the lines of everything he was saying here. The man was not stupid. He would soon understand that there was combat, though the Captain had no intention of going into the details here. Yet Fedorov’s next question was very pointed, and touched on the heart of the matter.

“Captain….How did you shift here? Rod-25 is with us.”

“There’s no point discussing that, Fedorov. The fact is, we are here, and with no way to get home, or so I believed until I heard your voice.”

“I see…Captain, I don’t have to tell you how important it is that we do nothing to interfere with the history of this time period. We must work to rendezvous and get to you with a control rod. Over”

Karpov ignored the first half of what Fedorov said. “And how do you propose to get here? Do you expect us to sail into to the Black Sea and have no one here notice this ship?”

“We have an Mi-26 loaded with fuel and two more control rods that may work just like Rod-25. Our plan was to fly them to you on the Pacific coast, over.”

“Fly here? It’s a huge distance, Fedorov. Even for an Mi-26.”

“We may have the fuel…But perhaps you could sail our way and we could arrange a rendezvous some place closer. What is your present position?”

“We are in the Sea of Japan at the moment.” Karpov sounded impatient now, almost as if he resented this sudden and unexpected development and saw it as an interruption. It would certainly mean his planned operation here would end abruptly, and they would again be dipping an infernal control rod into the nuclear soup aboard Kirov. Who knew where they might turn up next? He was now at a decisive point in history, with exactly the right instrument to impose his will on time. Now comes Fedorov with another outlandish rescue plan.

“If you could get to the Arabian Sea, or even the Bay of Bengal it would give us much more safety margin on the fuel. I think we could get the Mi-26 there easily enough. Over.”

Karpov pursed his lips, his inner resistance to the plan obvious on his face. He stood up straight, noting Rodenko was watching the scene closely. He will argue that we must look to the welfare of the crew, he thought. He will want us all together again with one happy party here on the ship-including Orlov, eh? Somehow the thought of seeing the Chief again did not seem very appealing to Karpov. Now he needed time to think this over and decide what to do. He raised the handset.

“We will discuss this with the other officers here, Fedorov, and see what should be done. I will contact you again in 48 hours on this frequency at 18:00 hours.”

Again the long pause. “Two days? Why the delay?”

“It’s another long sea voyage and a risky plan, Fedorov. I will need time to consider it and make plans.”

“Very well, Captain. If you have an alternative plan, please let me know and we will do our best to try and reach you. If you come west you need only worry about the Singapore Strait. Make a night transit there and then you should be able to make most of the rest of the voyage without undue notice. In the meantime, try to be as inconspicuous as possible there. Over.”

“I understand, Fedorov. We will discuss this later. Karpov over and out.” He switched off the handset with a hard squeeze of his hand.

Fedorov! Intrepid, brave hearted Fedorov. He had come all the way across Siberia to find and rescue Orlov. Now he was trying to rescue Kirov and get them safely home, but to what end? They could not even get themselves there. How the Anatoly Alexandrov shifted here to 1908 was still an unanswered mystery.

I could sail half way round the world for this rendezvous and then what, Karpov wondered? Would those other control rods even work? If they did work, where would the ship turn up? Would we return to the future and find ourselves in the midst of a great war, a solitary ship to confront any enemy we encountered? Our twenty-one missiles would count for nothing back there. Here they represent enormous power, decisive power, the power to choke the breath from fate itself!

He stood up, deeply troubled. Then he remembered the engagement they had been fighting, and turned to Rodenko, who was still watching from across the room at the Plexiglas situation board.

“Report, Mister Rodenko. What is our status?”

“Sir, we are at 48,000 meters and opening the range. Those main masts looked to be several hundred feet high, as is our own radar mast here. But we should slip over their horizon in a few minutes.”

“Very well… Then take the ship south. Maintain 30 knots for the next ten minutes, then fall off to two thirds. No need to put stress on that hull patch.” The ship was still a wounded warrior, with a reinforced hull patch from that torpedo damage inflicted in the Mediterranean Sea by that German U-Boat.

Karpov shook his head, remembering the incident. That was a very crafty U-Boat Captain, he thought. He was hiding in that shallow inlet and when Fedorov finally realized it he still let the boat go. He did not want to upset his history books. That was Fedorov, so worried about the order of things, and trying always to set the broken china back in place in the cupboard. He did not see the big picture here, though he undoubtedly knew this history very well. His only concern was now arranging this rendezvous as quietly as possible.

“I will return to my rest shift, Rodenko. You have the bridge.”

“Very good, sir.”

“Captain off the Bridge!”

* * *

He went to Zolkin, though he did not know why. He knew what the Doctor would tell him, that he had no right to start his own private war here with the Japanese.

“What do you hope to accomplish, Captain? You will have to kill men to do it, that much is certain. How many more will have to die to satisfy your desire for power?”

“You may think I do this only for myself, Doctor, but that is not the case. I do this for Russia. You know the history. The revolution is festering even now as we speak. Men like Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin are all in the mix. Even the man this ship is named for is alive here, a young man somewhere. They will take some time with their revolution, but it is coming like a bad storm.”

“So what can you do about that? I think the Tsar is doomed. The First World War is coming as well. Nicholas will not survive that. It will bleed the country and make an end of his reign. How can you prevent it? And even if you could, would you prefer the house of Romanov to Stalin?”

“Yes, you are correct, Doctor. I cannot control all these events. But what I can do is establish Russia as a Pacific power again, and fend off all comers. There was an uprising in Vladivostok just after that disastrous defeat at the hands of the Japanese. They wanted to break away and look to their own fate, independent of European Russia. That is something we could do here.”

“What? Set up your own little empire? And you expect me to believe you do all this for the homeland? You have just said you would wash your hands of it all and leave the Tsar to his fate when the revolution comes. Well let me remind you that the revolution came here as well. The Bolsheviks defeated Denikin, and finally Admiral Kolchak, the last of the Whites.”

“Yes, but that wasn’t until 1920. There is much we could do before then. The Bolsheviks had very few enclaves in Siberia until late in the Russian Civil War.”

“So what do you propose to do, Captain? I have heard you announced yourself as Viceroy of the East. Kolchak tried that line as well. Didn’t he announce himself as ‘Supreme Leader of Russia?’ All that got him was an appointment with a firing squad.”

“Kolchak was not prepared to master the situation on land. He was a Navy Admiral, with little training in ground maneuvers.”

“And you are a Navy Captain with even less! I will warrant that you can take control of the seas here, Karpov, but Siberia is a very big place. No one will see Kirov sailing boldly over the taiga to enforce your will. Men like Denikin and all the others will soon realize that you are relatively powerless to affect events inland. Oh, I suppose you could control Vladivostok, and probably keep the Western powers from trying to intervene in the civil war. But you must realize your own limitations. You want to set history right for Russia? Well Russia may have other ideas about what it wants, and what will you do if Denikin, Kornilov and the other Whites tell you to go to hell? Your dream of a Far East Republic will vanish just as it did for Kolchak. And when they lose to the Reds, as they will you know, then what will you do?”

“A good speech, Doctor. Denikin was in the Caucasus worried about the Jews, and I need have no dealings with him. But if I choose to do so I can smash the Red Army and ensure a victory by the Whites.”

“How? Your cruise missiles will need a very long range to do that. The final big battles were fought well inland at Orel and Samara.”

The Doctor made a good point. The range of his Moskit-IIs was only 120 miles, and the MOS IIIs could reach only 90 miles. Karpov shrugged. He had not mentioned the use of nuclear weapons, but that was obviously what was on the Doctor’s mind.

“Power can be achieved by other means,” said Karpov.

“Are you going to start blowing things up again?”

“I know that is your great fear, Doctor, but that may not even be necessary. The mere demonstration of power can achieve dramatic ends.”

“Did that work with the Americans? All they did was come at you harder.”

“These are not the Americans of 1945. The men of this era have far less real power in their hands. Their ships are obsolete old rust buckets compared to Kirov.”

“Face it, Karpov. To achieve anything like the scenario I think you are creating in your head, you will need the close cooperation of these men. You will need someone like Kolchak, for example, and a White Army that can hold its own against the Bolsheviks. Otherwise they will prevail and Stalin will eventually rise out of the fires of the civil war. What then? You want to face off with Stalin?”

“Don’t you understand, Zolkin? Knowledge is power too. I can know all the history as it is about to unfold. Stalin? I did some reading the other day. You want to know where Stalin is at this very moment? He’s in prison at Baku! Why, if I chose to do so I could sail to the Black Sea and send helicopters there and make an end of Stalin before he ever becomes a factor in Russian history.”

“My God! Listen to yourself. Sometimes I really wonder if you are serious about all this. Well… I’ll give you one thing, Captain. You have power here, that much is obvious. You want to go kill Stalin? I suppose no one can stop you. Do that, however, and another man may rise from the dark corners of history to take his place. Your knowledge of future events will come unraveling the moment he dies. Fedorov will tell you this. Anything you do here will have dramatic repercussions. So this knowledge you think you can use will soon be useless when everything starts to change. Yes, someone will rise in Stalin’s place, and you will not know who that man is, or how to reach him. History may be far more resilient than you realize.”

Karpov shrugged. “This is all academic,” he said. “The question is what do we do about Fedorov?”

“Fedorov? Yes, he wants to try and rescue us. He’s a good man, Captain. You know that as much as I do. He will want to do everything possible to let sleeping dogs lie here. The world is going into the cauldron of the First Great War soon, and back home it’s about to go into the last Great War. Those dogs will soon be on the hunt without any help from us, in both eras.”

“Do you think this plan of his will work? I mean… well how did it come to pass that he appeared here, in 1908? What if those control rods just end up sending us even farther back in time? Fedorov devises all these plans and schemes, but he really has no way to control what happens, any more than you say I do.”

“Yes, Karpov. In the end we are all at the mercy of time and events. Call it fate, call it the will of God, but there is something bigger than you or me or Mister Fedorov at work here. We are like blind men in a dark closet looking for the right coat here. Whatever you decide, consider the men on this ship. They may not share your dream of conquest. Have you even bothered to consider asking what they might want to do? Well, here’s a thought you can put into your own scheming head. Suppose you do something here; something that changes everything. Suppose the grandparents of men aboard this ship don’t survive in the new world you create? What happens to the men then? Do they end up dead, never born, just like the men on that list Volkov was all worked up over, with no record they ever existed? Suppose your own grandfather dies. Then what?”