Kirov

Epilogue CONSEQUENCES

By the time Home Fleet reached the scene it was well past too late to save anyone in the sea. Admiral Tovey was out on the watch deck off the starboard rear of the flag bridge with his Chief of Staff, Daddy Brind, staring at the remnant of the great spray dome of vapor and mist that was slowly dissipating in the distance. He squinted through his field glasses, his face tired, eyes beset with an expression of pain and bewilderment. The grey swells of the ocean had settled, and they could still vaguely make out a gleam of wan light on the capsized hulk of the American battleship Mississippi, like a great behemoth that had been harpooned and now lay swamped in the misty grey seas.

The waters around them were awash with debris, the flotsam of Task Force 16, which had been crushed by a single massive explosion that the British had seen from nearly fifty nautical miles away. When King George V approached the scene, Tovey would never forget the angry steaming column he saw, as cool air and seawater were drawn upward over five thousand feet into a mushrooming cloud. What they saw now was mostly the dissipating plume of water vapor, and the silent grey rain of condensation falling at the edges of the detonation site like a shroud of doom.

“What was it, Brind? What could do this?”

The grey haired Chief of Staff was mute, his eyes glazed with shock and a strange tinge of sadness. He had no answer for the Admiral, and the two men just stared in silence. They had not felt such despair since the news of Hood’s demise had come to them, just a few short months ago. Then over a thousand men had gone into the angry sea, but this was far worse.

A white fog seemed to be settling over the scene, as they watched the fast cruisers of the American Task Force 19 arriving to join a group of destroyers searching for survivors. They had pulled 212 men out of the sea, but not a single man they found alive would live two weeks, so close were they to the rain of radioactive seawater that showered down on them after the passing of the enormous blast wave and base surge from the detonation. It rained for an hour after the blast, a deadly man made storm that continued killing the survivors days and weeks after.

Tovey saw a yellow lantern flash from his forecastle as King George V signaled to the distant American cruisers. She was ready and able to render any and all assistance, but flutter of the lamps winking back carried a stark, brief message that lay heavily on them both—no further survivors. The cruisers were passing north, slowly making speed as they set out to look for the enemy ship that had wreaked this havoc. As they turned one last message winked back at Tovey’s bruised battleships. Advise dispersal.

The Admiral looked at Brind. “I can’t imagine the weapon that did this Brind, nor can I believe the Germans could possibly have more than one aboard that demon ship, whatever it was. The Americans may have given us good advice, but I think I’ll keep Home Fleet just as it is for the moment.”

“Very well, sir,” said Brind.

“Signal the Yanks good luck,” Tovey looked at him, an ashen expression on his face. “And good hunting.”

“Word is the German ship has vanished, sir. American PBY’s out of Argentia Bay have been scouring the seas north of our position for some hours now. Ark Royal has had planes up as well. They reported some odd sea effects for a time, but no sign of this German raider, sir. No word from the American destroyer group that managed to get in close on the monster either.”

“Damndest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” Tovey lowered his field glasses. “Well then… We’ve orders to turn about and rejoin the Prime Minister,” he said sullenly. “And God help us the rest of the way on in this damn war, Brind. If the Germans have any more of these weapons….”

“God help us all, sir.”

HMS Devonshire sailed smoothly into Argentia Bay heading for the anchorage where the old battleship Arkansas rode quietly in the waning light. The ship executed a smart turn, then slowed to a gentle glide as she came along side the American ship.

Prime Minister Churchill was out on the main deck, his face set hard, yet a smoldering determination in his eyes. Admiral Pound was at his right hand, and when they saw the array of officers and staff on the deck of the Arkansas, and heard the band there strike up “God Save The Queen” he allowed himself the hint of a smile.

Churchill could see the tall, stiff figure of President Roosevelt standing in greeting, and he noted the sallow cheeks, deep set eyes and furrowed brow of the man, and how he leaned slightly on the arm of another young officer, which he took to be the President’s son. I’ll be leaning on your arm soon enough, he thought. We’re in this together now. I can’t do it without you.

The ships came abeam of one another, and pipes wailed over the sound of the band as able seamen ran to secure lines and tie them off. Soon a gangway was laid across from Arkansas to the smaller cruiser, and Churchill wasted no time making his way quickly to the side railing where he was piped aboard with a finishing flourish from the band. He saluted the American flag as he came aboard, smiling, then walked steadfastly on to greet the American President, taking his hand in a firm handshake, his eyes alight, yet his face set with an expression of deep concern and respect.

“Mister President,” he said. “My deepest condolences on the losses you have so grievously suffered at the hands of our enemy.”

“Thank you Mister Prime Minister,” said Roosevelt. “It seems we have a great deal to talk about, and I am honored to finally make your acquaintance.”

“The honor is mine, sir, and I can only regret that your nation has made the acquaintance of Hitler’s war machine in such a startling and unexpected manner.”

The cameras whirled, light bulbs flashing and recording images that would stand as the symbol of an new alliance in arms between Britain and the United States. The two men stood side by side as the anthems of both nations were smartly played by the band, then, one by one the senior British officers followed Sir Dudley Pound and crossed the gangway to greet the President and their American counterparts all lined up in dress uniforms, their dour faces warming to meet these new found allies. Even Admiral King, long suspicious and resentful of British influence in the Atlantic, allowed himself a grudging smile.

“I’m afraid Herr Hitler has kept us all in the dark for a good long time,” said Roosevelt.

“Indeed,” said Churchill. “When I first heard that the Germans had attacked your carrier Wasp I was of mixed mind, Mister President. On the one hand I was wrenched by the loss of life, and reviled by the ignominious nature of the enemy, striking at a neutral power as they did. Yet, on the other hand, I felt this would clearly demonstrate the nature of the foe, and make my appeal to you for active support in this war more likely to be heard and embraced. I was elated to think England might now survive this conflict, and indeed prevail with the United States at her side. Yet, after what we have now seen and learned, this terrible new weapon, I come to believe that it will take the whole blood, bone and sinew of both our nations to survive as free peoples. We must stand shoulder to shoulder, for we will most certainly face perdition if we fail.”

“Well said, Winston, if I may, sir.”

“If you please,” said Churchill with a smile.

“They’ve drawn up a few chairs here for us to sit before the cameras, and more likely so I can get off of these lead feet. I suppose we had best sit a while and indulge them. After that, I think we have very much to discuss. Will you graciously join me below decks here aboard the Arkansas? They tell me this is a sturdy ship, and a safer place than any billet ashore.”

“It would be my pleasure, Mister President,” said Churchill.

“Well, if I’m getting away with Winston, you had better call me Franklin. I suppose I could make it Sir Winston to satisfy protocol, but I’m not sure what you could tack on to my name in return.”

“Let me start with my good friend Franklin,” said Churchill, “and let us hope it is a long and fruitful friendship indeed.”

The band concluded, the cameras winked and the two great men smiled dutifully, then were solemnly escorted below decks while the band played on. Soon the they were comfortably below, exchanging gifts, a fine crafted pen for Roosevelt with a wish that it be used to mandate a new alliance and common purpose between the two nations. From Roosevelt came a box of the finest Cuban cigars for the Prime Minister. “I hope you’ll enjoy these, Winston,” he said, “because I think we’ll be making quite a bit of smoke together now.”

Nothing more was ever seen or heard of this dread German raider, nor was there any further deployment of the fearsome new weapons she had savaged the Allied navies with that fateful week in August of 1941. No ship of Kauffman’s Desron 7 came home, so Roosevelt put it out that the brave destroyers died to a man, but took the German ship down with them, and that was what the country decided to believe. David and Goliath was an old and comforting story.

Some in the Admiralty had grave doubts about the report. After the successful conclusion of the Atlantic Charter the British were particularly watchful, and the boys at Bletchley Park scrutinized any movement of suspected German replenishment ships. The obvious reasoning was that if the German raider had somehow escaped and was at large in the Atlantic, it would soon have to rendezvous for supplies. When an odd report crossed the wire later that month the alert went out to American and British Forces in the area.

Investigating a suspected meeting point hinted at by Ultra intercepts, the Canadian auxiliary cruiser Prince David out of Halifax sighted an unknown vessel, which it reported as a Hipper class cruiser. The British Battleship Rodney was immediately alerted, and joined with the American carrier Task Group 2.6 to hunt for the ship. Planes off the carrier Yorktown soon reported several merchant ships in the search zone, and then suddenly confirmed the sighting of a warship described again as a “possible Hipper class cruiser.”

A second US Task Group quickly formed around the carrier Long Island to expand the search zone. The British dispatched Force F with the carrier Eagle and the cruisers Dorsetshire and Newcastle, and pulled the battleship Revenge off of convoy duty, with three more fast cruisers. In all, the combined Anglo-US forces amounted to three carriers two battleships, twelve cruisers and twenty destroyers. But the suspected ship seemed to simply vanish again, and the Admiralty received good aerial photos of Brest to assure themselves that Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prince Eugen were all still quietly sleeping in their berths. Days later, however, a US coast Guard cutter, Alexander Hamilton, again raised the alarm with a report of a Hipper class cruiser near Newfoundland.

Thinking the Germans might be trying to sneak back to home ports, the US quickly dispatched a new Task Group from Reykjavík built around the battleship New Mexico to block the Denmark Strait. Yet nothing was found, and the watch slowly faded away.

After the war it was learned that the only two German ships that might have been in the area, the commerce raiders Komet and Orion, had already replenished and were nowhere near the sighting locations when the three reports of the suspected “Hipper class cruiser” ignited this flurry of naval activity. The allied forces did not know it at the time, but the day of the German raider was long over. No German capital ship would ever again break out into the Atlantic to threaten Britain’s vital convoy lifeline. The odd ship was never seen again, and no credible report has ever been put forward to explain the three separate sightings to this day.

Thankfully, nothing more was seen of the new German wonder weapons that year either. Bletchley Park concluded that Germany had been unable to enrich sufficient amounts of fuel to further develop these weapons. Yet the fear that Hitler would again unleash the terrible rockets and bombs kept Allied scientists busy in an all out effort to duplicate the weapon and deploy an atomic bomb, particularly when the V-1 and V-2 rocket bombs began to fall on London again. Each terrible missile saw the higher ups hold their breath, thinking this would be the one to ignite a holocaust in London—but it never came. The American Manhattan Project finished a full year early, in the autumn of the year 1944, and then the bombs fell on Germany instead.

Remembering the fate of the Mississippi, the Wasp, and all those other ships and men who had died with her, President Roosevelt ordered the deployment of the weapon in reprisal that very same year. The city of Hamburg was chosen, it being an important naval facility for the Kriegsmarine, a fitting return, or so the Americans thought, for the bomb the German navy had flung at them years ago.

Allied forces braced themselves for a German counterattack using an atomic weapon, but none came, convincing them that Germany possessed no further weapons of this nature. For her own part, the United States had only one more bomb in inventory, which they dubbed “Fat Man.” Roosevelt then directly warned Hitler that the Allied armies would not hesitate to use further weapons and destroy Berlin unless Germany surrendered. Hitler fled to a secret underground bunker, and saw the destruction of the city before he would countenance surrender. Yet his Generals, seeing the madness that had come upon the world, and their nation, finally prevailed and put an end to the matter. Hitler was assassinated in November of 1944, and Germany formally sued for peace shortly thereafter.

The Allies were on the Rhine, and there would be no “Battle of the Bulge” that December. The Soviets had entered Estonia, Latvia, East Prussia and Hungary, and were reorganizing on the borders of Poland. Roosevelt sent a personal message to Stalin asking him to stop the war. He refused, but settled for Poland before he halted hostilities on the eastern front. The cry “on to Berlin” abated when the Russians realized Berlin was no longer there. The war in Europe ended in late January of 1945.

Yet that early ending changed little else in the long, simmering standoff between the West and the Soviet Union that followed. Soon the Russians had the bomb as well, and both sides stood a long guarded watch on the years ahead, as relations continued to slowly erode between them. This time, however, they did not make it through the minefield of near run military standoffs and nuclear brinksmanship. This time something different happened.

Admiral Volsky, peered at Rodenko’s radar scope, his eyes pursed with concern. All of the contacts they had been tracking were gone on both radar and sonar.

“It could be a system failure, just as before,” Rodenko persisted. “It took us some time to recover full sensor integrity after that first incident.”

“I suggest we get a helicopter up,” said Fedorov, his new position loosening his tongue a bit and prompting him to voice his opinions without reserve. “They can get down to the last plotted positions on these contacts easily enough.”

The Admiral gave the order, and minutes later the KA-226 was heading south. As it did so the communications and telemetry contact weakened with distance, just as before, but they were able to maintain a hold on the craft. The Admiral soon heard what he expected, that there was no sign of the British or American task forces they had been tracking.

“Perhaps they made a rapid withdrawal south,” said Fedorov. “We could come about and steam to Newfoundland. If they are still active in the region we will likely encounter them. In light of the sea effects we encountered again, we must at least determine if our position is stable…In time that is.”

“I want no more fireworks,” said Volsky. “My instincts tell me to turn east into the Atlantic and head for that tropical paradise, but I will indulge you, Mister Fedorov. Bring the ship around and head south again. If the KA-226 has no contacts, have it precede us in the vanguard and overfly this Argentia Bay where Roosevelt and Churchill are supposed to be meeting. Yet at the first sign of a potentially hostile contact, I want that helo to withdraw to the ship at full speed.”

“Aye, sir.”

Nikolin radioed the orders and the helo pushed on ahead. It was not long before they lost radio contact with it, a tense period where Volsky worried that those planes they had seen were still up and about. The minutes stretched on and on, interminable. Then, at just after 17:00 hours, Rodenko picked up the helicopter again on his radar. Soon after it reported in on the radio. Argentia Bay was vacant and empty. The pilot’s voice seemed strained and worried on the radio.

“We overflew St. John’s en route to Argentia,” he said. “There’s signs of severe blast damage, and the whole town had been obliterated—not a single building still standing. We saw nothing moving on the isthmus, and Argentia Bay is completely empty. There are no ships anchored there of any type. We took HD video and can replay the file if you wish, Admiral.”

“Just tell them to return to the ship. We’ll view the files later.” Volsky looked at Fedorov. “Number One?” The question in his voice was obvious.

Fedorov shook his head. “There is no way the Americans could have sailed off that quickly,” he said. “I believe we have experienced another anomaly, sir. We may have moved in time again.” The words still sounded preposterous as he spoke them, but their experience the last week had opened their minds to the possibility, and it was easier to think and speak of now, yet no less disturbing.

“But we still haven’t answered our last two questions,” said Volsky. “Have we gone further back in time, moved forward? How far? And why is this happening now? There have been many detonations of nuclear devices at sea, and never once have these effects been reported.”

He thought for a moment, remembering what Engineering Chief Dobrynin had told him again. Each time this had happened the ship’s reactors had experienced a strange neutron flux. Could the detonations be triggering this effect? Was it being enhanced or enabled by the ship’s own reactor systems?

A moment of alarm came when Rodenko reported the sudden appearance of surface and air contacts on his screen—yet they vanished seconds later, leading them to believe it was nothing more than a glitch in the equipment.

“Well, sir,” said Fedorov with a shrug. “I suggest we cruise to the American coast, or perhaps Halifax in Nova Scotia. It’s just a day’s cruise away and it is a substantial city. I don’t like what the pilot said about the destruction of St. John. Let us get to a more populous region and do a reconnaissance. And Mister Nikolin should be monitoring all normal radio bands.”

“I have been, sir,” said Nikolin. “I can’t pull in anything—not even on shortwave. I should be able to hear most European stations, and anything broadcasting in the Americas, but I get nothing at all.”

“The signals improved after some time before,” said Fedorov. “Keep listening.”

They sailed south round the cape of Newfoundland, alert for any sign of activity in the sea and sky around them, but saw and heard nothing—no sign of human activity of any kind. The men were tired and hungry, and Volsky began rotating relief shifts at every station, and went so far as to order the ship’s galley to send up food and several pots of good hot coffee. They passed the Gulf of St. Lawrence and headed for the coast of Nova Scotia, making for Halifax. The closer they came, the more edgy the crew seemed to be, though the hot food and coffee helped a great deal.

Volsky slept in his chair, unwilling to leave the bridge, and refusing to have anything to do with Karpov and Orlov for the time being. He would talk with them later. Fedorov went below for a while, catching a few hours sleep before returning to stand another watch when Rodenko again reported clear airborne contacts close enough to be within sighting distance of the ship! This time Tasarov had similar readings on his sonar equipment indicating the presence of ships nearby yet, just as the ship’s new executive officer was ready to sound the alert, the contacts mysteriously vanished again, and the watch settled back into the long quiet hours at sea. It was a 300 mile journey, and even at 30 knots it would take them ten hours to reach Halifax.

Along the way the Admiral had Fedorov bring the ship in close to the shore on occasion, and they scanned the coast with field glasses and long range HD video cameras, yet saw no sign of activity there. The coast was a maze of small inlets, bays and islets, sprinkled with tiny fishing towns here and there, though they could not make out any buildings. They passed Mitchel Bay, Sheet Harbor, Sober Island and Taylor’s Head without seeing anything of note. There were no fishing trawlers out to sea, and no sign of life on the coast that they could discern, but they were still too far from shore to make out much, and Volsky did not want to expend any more aviation fuel to recon that area.

“Let’s wait and get down to Halifax,” he said. “Nuclear fuel seems to be getting us about fairly cheaply. Aviation fuel is another matter. We must conserve as much as possible.”

Some hours later they were again surprised by Tasarov’s report of screw sounds on his sonar. A few seconds later Rodenko confirmed the report on radar, very close, and Fedorov’s eyes widened when he thought he spotted the silhouette of a small cutter take shape on the foggy horizon. The contact vanished again, like a cloud changing shape and dissolving into the mist, but this time they dispatched the KA-226 scout helicopter to conduct a thorough search of the area, yet nothing was found.

“Are we imagining all these contacts?” Fedorov asked. For that matter, he wondered if the whole scenario was nothing more than a bizarre nightmare of their own making. When Dobrynin called up to the bridge to report more unusual flux activity in the reactors, the Admiral seemed very troubled.

“It comes and goes, sir,” he said over the intercom. “Three times now… But things have settled down again. I note no unusual readings.”

Fedorov was troubled as well. He slipped quietly over to his old navigation station to retrieve the copy of The Chronology of the War at Sea, and opened to August of 1941. His eye was drawn to the odd segment where the allied naval forces had come to full alert after three separate sightings of a “Hipper class cruiser” in the seas near Newfoundland. The ship was reported that way each and every time, yet it seemed to vanish, and no sign of it was ever found. His eyes betrayed the depth of his muse, and the confusion as he struggled to form a clear thought on what he read… was it possible? They had picked up the ghostly image of ships around them three times now—ships that vanished just as that Hipper class cruiser had vanished in August of 1941—three times… He set the book down and returned to his station, his eyes scanning the seas ahead with a look of grave concern on his face.

They caught sight of Devil’s Island and headed for the Inlet that would lead them up past McNabs Island to Dartmouth and Halifax Harbor. It was 04:00 hours before they were in the main shipping channel, expecting to see the lights of the city glittering in the hazy distance, yet a thick bank of fog was on the headlands, masking all. Halifax was one of the world’s largest and deepest harbors, and Volsky fully expected to find the answer to at least one of their questions here. He decided to sail boldly up the channel, fog or no fog. There was nothing but the coastline return on Rodenko’s screens, and Tasarov heard nothing on sonar. As a precaution, he stood the crew to action stations, and was fully prepared to use his formidable 152mm deck guns if they ran into anything hostile. He was taking the ship in.

Fedorov knew the place well. “McNabs Island is largely empty,” he said, “But it was heavily wooded, and I see nothing there at all now. Very strange, sir. We should be seeing something more at the harbor in a few minutes. This is a very busy port, particularly in 1941, as it was a major embarkation point for all the outbound convoys. The absence of shipping in this channel is ominous, to say the least. There should be steamer traffic, tankers, civilian craft all about us by now. I don’t have a good feeling about this, sir.”

“Helmsman, ahead one third,” said Volsky.

“Ahead one third, sir. Aye.”

“That damnable fog,” said Volsky. “We rely so much on our technology. Radar sees nothing, Tasarov hears nothing, yet I want the evidence of my own eyes before I can assure myself we are no longer entangled with the British and American navies. I don’t even trust those Tin Men with their video cameras any longer.” He waved dismissively at the HD video displays.

They passed McNabs Cove on their right and headed into the outer harbor. “We should see something there,” Fedorov pointed. “Just past Point Pleasant on the left, sir.”

The ship had slowed to a sedate ten knots, and drifted through the veils of fog, yet they saw no lights, and the morning was heavy and quiet, a stillness that conjured up an unaccountable fear in every man as the ship cruised closer to the harbor entrance. Then the fog lifted briefly and Fedorov caught a glimpse of the shoreline.

“Good god,” he breathed. It was a blackened wreck. No buildings were standing. The long commercial piers were completely gone, and the coast seemed a charred rubble pile. It was clear that something had been there, a harbor, a city, yet the whole scene was a mass of debris and wreckage. As the ship edged in closer they could see none of the high rise buildings that should have graced the harbor’s edge. In their place were masses of burned out rubble and twisted steel.

“Mister Rodenko,” Volsky said in a quiet voice. “Scan for residual radiation.”

“Aye, Sir…I’m getting a low background reading, elevated above normal, but nothing to be overly concerned about.”

Volsky nodded his head. “It looks like the entire city had been obliterated.”

George’s Island loomed ahead, a blackened, treeless cone, and Fedorov had the helmsman move the ship to the right of the burned out islet. “That should be the Imperial Petroleum tank farm and refinery sector,” Fedorov pointed, yet all they could see were piles of wreckage, stained char-black by fire and smoke damage. As they reached the inner harbor he could see that MacDonald’s bridge was completely gone, and the cities of Halifax and Dartmouth were both completely destroyed. A smoky fog and haze hung over the broken landscape, and shrouded their minds and hearts as Volsky ordered the ship to slow to five knots.

“We could sail on in to Bedford Basin, sir,” said Fedorov, but I don’t think we’ll find anything there either. What could have done this?”

“How many warheads did that maniac Karpov unleash?” asked Volsky, looking at Samsonov.

“Sir, we fired the number ten missile in the MOS-III bank. All the rest were Moskit-IIs with conventional warheads.”

“It is clear that we did not do this with our weapons then,” said Volsky. “Though we may yet be responsible for what we are seeing here.”

“Sir,” said Fedorov. “We need to ascertain our position in time. I think it is fairly safe to say this is not Halifax of 1941. I suggest we put a shore party in for a closer look. We might find something that could tell us the date, or at least give us some better idea of what happened here.”

“Correct, Mister Fedorov. I think this is a job for Sergeant Troyak. Let us answer this question of when concerning our position, here and now.”

“If I may, sir, I’d like to accompany the landing party.”

The Admiral sent down the order, and Troyak took five marines ashore with Fedorov in an inflatable boat. They would search for anything they could secure that would shed light on their situation, but there was not much to find. Clearly the entire region had undergone a severe trauma. The damage from blast, shock and fire was evident. Most anything that would burn was incinerated, and apparently some time ago. There was no residual heat coming from the rubble piles, largely heaps of metal and concrete that had survived whatever had happened here. In places Troyak even found stone that had apparently been broiled to a hard glassy state. They returned, disheartened and chastened by the experience.

Fedorov had a haunted, defeated look on his face. “There was nothing, sir,” he said. “Nothing intact. No sign of life—no bones in the rubble either, not even a bird or a fly. Whatever happened here was severe and utterly lethal. It was not a natural event either. No tsunami or earthquake could have accounted for what we saw there. Metal was melted—rocks heated to form glass! And I think it happened some time ago, sir. The radiation levels were very low, though they decay to near normal within a hundred days of a detonation. But this could have happened much earlier, perhaps even years.”

“Only a nuclear weapon could have caused destruction on this scale,” said Volsky. “So in that we have one clue. We have not slipped further into the past, correct? Halifax was an important harbor and naval center. If it came to war—who knows when it happened—then this was a likely target, and we would be right at ground zero here if a missile was targeted to take out this harbor infrastructure.”

“There did seem to be a crater, sir.”

“Not surprising,” said Volsky. “It would have been a low air burst, and I would guess that this target would have received no less than a 150 kiloton warhead—perhaps two. That could have been fired by an ICBM, or even one of our submarines.”

“One of our submarines, sir?”

“Who else? I don’t think the British or French would have any interest in destroying this harbor, nor even the Chinese if it came to war. But it has long been on the target list for our ballistic missile submarines. I have seen the information first hand.” He shook his head sullenly. “Borei class…We name the damn subs after the north wind, Boreas, but it is a hard wind that blew here to bring such destruction.”

“Then you are suggesting another war has broken out, Admiral? That we are back in our own time again?”

“Well that hard north wind has blown us clear of the Second World War, and now it seems we have landed in the Third! One day we will grow tired of counting them I suppose. But this is damage from a nuclear warhead, that much is clear to me.”

Fedorov had a distant, empty look on his face as he thought. The history had changed! Nothing was certain now. Nothing could be relied on from this moment forward. He glanced sheepishly at the small library of books on the shelf at his old navigation station. Much of the history in them was so much fiction now. Everything had changed, and it had come to war this time around. War was a ticking clock, he knew, remembering a poem by Kudryavitsky. Tick, tick, tick—then the Alarm clock bomb goes off taking you by surprise with its morning shock. “It’s better that you hear it…” His voice trailed off, disconsolate and forlorn in tone.

“Mister Fedorov?” The Admiral looked at him, brows raised.

“A Russian poet, sir,” said Fedorov, quoting the line in full: “Sometimes the alarm-clock looms up first, quietly ticking in the doorway. It’s better that you hear it…”

Volsky nodded. “Some men never listen,” he said quietly, musing. “If war came, and this city was destroyed, then I fear it was a general exchange between Russia and the West. It is my guess that we will find much the same level of destruction if we continue on this course and visit the American coastline. All those cities would have received multiple missiles in a general exchange.”

“But why sir?” Samsonov had a blank look on his face.

“Why?” Volsky gave him a long look. “You have to look no farther than this ship to answer that, Mister Samsonov. We build them, these war machines, these ticking clocks, and they do their job with lethal efficiency. Look how we savaged the British and American navies—this single ship—and we could have done worse damage if Karpov had his way. Yet we vanished from the scene of the crime, a thief in the night as it were. No doubt they looked for us for a very long time, but all for naught. We were here, in some black future we only now begin to surmise, here with the consequences of what we have done when we so blithely put to sea with our holds crammed full of missiles and warheads. Is that not what you were trained for?” His eyes softened a bit as he went on. “No—I do not put any blame on you, Samsonov. It is what we all were trained for. The uniforms, the salutes, the niceties of rank and protocol—all these are just ways we console ourselves as we drill in the making of war. In the final analysis, this is the end of it all, yes? These are the consequences. Who knows how much of the world is left out there for us now?”

“Then what do we do now, sir?” said Samsonov. The eyes of the entire bridge crew were on the Admiral now, for his words had seared them with the realization of what had happened, what they may have done, mindlessly, reflexively, and by simply following the orders of Karpov as was their duty at the time. Duty? What were they, wound up clocks, bound to strike midnight come what may, or men capable of stilling the hands and stopping that jangling sound of the alarm? Yet they had failed to listen. Yes, it was better if you listen…Did they change the history, or was this end as inevitable as the ticking of that clock? No man among them could answer that.

“What do we do?” Volsky clasped his hands behind his back. “We go and find that beach Doctor Zolkin was talking about. We go and find that island.”

The Admiral tapped Fedorov on the shoulder. “Mister Fedorov, the helm is yours. I think I had best walk the ship and talk with the men. They deserve to know what has happened, and for that matter, I think I will pay a visit to Karpov and Orlov as well.”

There was a moment of silence on the bridge until the Admiral gave a final command. “Helm, come about. Take us back up the channel and out to sea. Then ahead two thirds.”

“Aye sir, coming about and out to sea, sir.”

DD Plunkett finally righted herself, breaking through another great wave and out into a mottled sea of luminescent green. Kauffman had been holding on to a bulkhead beam for dear life, and he looked out, amazed to see that the seas had suddenly calmed and his ship was settling down, the bow still cutting through the diminished swells at high speed. He had taken a few hard blows from the enemy, but now he could see nothing on the horizon, the shadow of steel and fire they had been chasing was gone.

The Captain was out on the watch deck at once, field glasses in hand, scanning the seas in every direction. There was nothing left of his destroyer division. Benson, Mayo and Jones were gone, but off to the starboard side he caught sight of Division 14. They had been trailing behind his ships somewhat, and suffered less from the enemy guns. Hughes was leaving a wake of smoke, but Madison, Gleaves and Lansdale seemed alive and well.

“Well I’ll be damned,” he breathed. He kept scanning.

“Jimmy, signal Div-Fourteen and see if they have a sighting on that German ship.”

Word came back by lantern: clear ahead, and Kauffman had the other ships form up on Plunkett, a fistful of five destroyers, the proud remnant of Desron 7. They searched the area for some time, but there was no sign of the German raider, or of that awesome explosive geyser they had seen to their east. Kauffman decided to risk a radio call, and he put out a message, hoping to hear from TF-16 and the Mississippi. There was nothing but silence, and the odd green sea.

The Captain scratched his head. Thankfully the fires were out on his own ship, and Plunkett was still seaworthy. With three ships lost, and the enemy nowhere to be seen, he eventually decided to come about and head back to Argentia Bay. When he arrived there he would get the surprise of his life.