Three Kings

Chapter 10

The periscope mast broke through the placid sea, leaving a quiet frothing wake behind it. There, cruising like a great whale just beneath the surface, was the massive shadowy form of the hidden submarine. On the bridge of the boat, its commander had hoped to see the gleam of moonlight on the water, a glimmering trail that would lead his eye over the stillness of the sea, but there was nothing. The night was thick, the darkness so solid that it seemed a tangible thing. Then he saw the strange luminescent light, just as before, a soft pale glow swelling away from the sub in all directions. He sat eyeing the charts of the region, his hand slowly rubbing the back of his neck to chase away the tension there.

“Anything?” he said quietly in the taut stillness of the bridge.

“Nothing sir. Clean in all directions, but my coverage seems very limited.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m getting the peninsula, but not much else beyond fifteen to twenty kilometers.”

The Captain leaned over his radar operator’s position now, eyeing the screen, then glancing furtively at the digital displays from the sub’s mast cameras. “Fifteen kilometers?”

“Range seems to be increasing now sir, but very slowly. It’s as if there’s a bubble expanding around us.” Lieutenant Gorban pointed to his screen as he spoke. “That’s the tip of Cape Aniva, and this is the peninsula stretching up to Korsakov, but I can’t see across Aniva Bay to Cape Crillon. It’s as if it wasn’t even there!”

“No surface contacts?”

“Nothing, sir. Absolutely nothing. But who can say with the equipment acting up like this?”

Gromyko ran his hand over the short close cropped hair on the back of his head. “They said this was likely,” he said quietly to his executive officer, Belanov. “We should have full sensor coverage within the hour, but what about Kirov?” He turned to his communications officer now, Lieutenant Alexi Karenin.

“Get that message off.”

“Aye sir, initiating beacon signal now as programmed, but—”

“But what, Mister Karenin?”

“Well my equipment doesn’t seem to be functioning properly either.”

Gromyko gave him a frustrated look. “Chernov?” The Captain looked to his able sonar man now, Lieutenant Andre Chernov.

“There’s a lot of noise, sir, a very deep rumble. I have no contacts but with the sound field this distorted I would have to go active to be sure.”

“Belay that for the moment. Sit tight and keep listening, Chernov. Until we know where the hell we are I’m not moving a muscle.”

“Sir,” said Belanov, “has it happened? Have we moved?”

“Take a look at those screens,” said Gromyko, pointing to the digital displays from his mast cameras. “One minute we had decent moonlight, the next it’s pitch black, so something has obviously happened to us.”

Even as he said that he recalled the words of Director Kamenski when he was with them on the boat, first trying to explain the impossible truth that was now before them. It was very strange indeed. He had told them they discovered odd effects related to nuclear detonations, effects beyond the blast, radiation, and EMP pulse.

“The detonation ruptured the time continuum,” said Kamenski, but it took a while for the information to register on his own internal sonar.

“Excuse me, Director… Time continuum?” The recollection of his own plaintive question was the only meager protest he had offered. It was incredulous, preposterous, unbelievable, but here was a former Director of the KGB, certainly not a man given to flights of fancy, and he was giving him this story with plain faced candor evident in every aspect of his tone and manner.

“Yes, Captain, the fourth dimension. Time. You know the first three well enough as you move about them in this vast ocean here — length, breadth and height, or depth in the case of your submarine. Well you must also know that you move in the fourth dimension as well — in time. Until Tsar Bomba went off, everything moved in only one direction through time, from this moment to the next in that second by second journey we all take from the cradle to the grave. But Tsar Bomba showed us that journey could also be affected by very powerful detonations — and time itself could be breached. Physical objects could be blown through that breach, and they would end up in the same spatial location, but in another time.”

It was all so wildly impossible that if he had not seen it happen with his own eyes he would not have believed it. In fact he did not quite believe it now. He had half a mind to surface the boat and put those human eyes to the test. Might his digital readouts and screens be lying to them? In the world of 2021 they had all grown so accustomed to believing the digital image of a thing was reality. But what if it was all wrong? What if all those ones and zeroes in the data stream between the mast camera’s lens and his monitors here was as befuddled as the radar seemed to be now? He knew that was very unlikely, but there was still something in him that wanted to break to the surface, wanted air, the smell of the sea, a look at the night stars overhead. But that would not happen — not until he knew what their tactical situation was. Gromyko was a very cautious man. That was a good submariner’s first order of business — caution.

“Very well,” he said still rubbing the back of his head. “We wait. Down periscope. The boat will run silent.”

“Aye sir, main mast down and the silent running lights are on.”

Now Gromyko looked at his sonar man. “Your game, Mister Chernov. Until you can certify the sea is clean around me, we’ll sit here like a hole in the water and wait.”

Chernov vanished beneath his headset, using the ship’s powerful sonar to listen at high amplification to all the sounds around them now. The deep, threatening rumble he heard filled him with a sense of dread. Then he realized that he had heard something very like this before. Following that thought, he reached over, toggled on his signature bank, and looked for a pattern match. There it was!

“Captain… That background noise I reported — it’s geothermic.”

“Geothermic?”

“It’s that damn volcano sir, the one we were trying to get away from when the Chief Engineer on Kirov reported it was muddling up his procedure.”

“Yes,” said Gromyko. “And that led us on quite a merry little adventure.”

Kazan had moved south through the Sea of Japan to a point very close to the North Korean port of Wonsan. There they had stumbled upon an operation by the North Korean Navy, and an accident in the engine room had created a sudden noise on a squeaky bearing that gave their position away. It had plagued them ever since, on the run down past Ullung Do Island, and during that encounter they had with a combined Japanese American ASW group. Then the Shadow Dance had begun, the stealthy undersea duel where the slightest failure of nerve and technique could have finished them.

That had been a very close thing. There was little margin for error with the odds stacked so heavily against him. They had been engaged by at least three enemy subs, one of them a good American boat, and a Japanese surface action group with helicopters. They had been fired upon, more than once, and it took all his considerable skill to evade the deadly undersea lances aimed his way, though his boat and crew performed admirably.

By any measure they should all be dead now, fish food on the bottom of the sea, but they came through intact. They ran that infernal procedure on the reactors, dipping a strange control rod into the mix — Rod-25 as they called it. Just as things were winding up to the breaking point in that tense undersea duel, a hole had opened in time, and the submarine slipped right through!

It had been so close that one of the enemy torpedoes came right through that hole in time with us! But fortunately, it was as punch drunk as our own systems seem to be now, thought Gromyko. Damn thing lost its hold on Kazan. Either that, or it was fooled by the large mobile decoy I launched. One way or another, the boat had come through without a scratch.

Yet there were other contacts in the region, and they did not get off so easily. The American torpedo’s systems must have gone into reset mode, and it circled, looking for a new target when it heard a lot of surface noise overhead — Japanese ships from World War Two! They never knew what hit them. A Japanese freighter went down that day, killed by a torpedo fired at Kazan nearly eighty years in the future! It had sealed the fate of that unfortunate ship, and also made good on an appointment the USS Bonefish had with doom, the last of “Pierce’s Polecats.” The American sub had been lurking in the vicinity, and it was found by Japanese ASW ships and sent to a watery grave, though Gromyko never knew that.

Now he smiled, wondering just how the Japanese and Americans must have felt about that little maneuver they pulled with Rod-25. One minute we were there, and they thought they had our position pegged due to that damn noisy bearing in the engine room. The next minute we’re gone — decades gone — all the way to 1945!

That was enough to swallow in one gulp, but it hadn’t ended there, the boat’s position in time remained unstable, and they fell through another gopher hole in time, as Director Kamenski had put it. This time they went all the way back to 1908, drawn there as if by some magnetic force, or perhaps by the skill of that reactor engineer, Chief Dobrynin. That had been their target date all along, but it took two hops to get there. They just had to switch trains in 1945.

There, in 1908, they began their real mission, the stalking hunt for their own comrades aboard the battlecruiser Kirov, now deemed a rogue ship under a rogue Captain with delusions of grandeur, and a plan to unhinge all recorded history from that day forward. It was coming down to the missiles, he knew, and he had little doubt that if he got off the first shots he would prevail, even when facing the most powerful surface ship in the Russian Navy. Instead they had launched a desperate plan to sneak up close to the ship and run that control rod procedure again, and amazingly, it had worked!

We were right on the razor’s edge there, thought Gromyko. If their sonar man had heard us and they put a Shkval torpedo into the water, we were all dead men. But Kirov had struck an old mine, not powerful enough to damage the ship seriously, but enough to wreck the big Poilinom Horse Jaw sonar in the underwater bow bulge. That may have been their salvation, the devil’s horn on the antiquated old mine that Karpov had blundered into.

Gromyko had no idea what was going on at that time on the bridge of Kirov, how the ship was in a state of near deadlock with the struggle for control between Captain Karpov and his Starpom Rodenko. The ship’s doctor, a man named Zolkin, had boldly stepped forward to Rodenko’s side, taking a bullet from Karpov’s revolver for his trouble. Then, one by one, the junior officers of the ship’s bridge crew stood up, defiant to a man. They would no longer follow a Captain who would do deliberate harm to one of their own.

And that is where it had ended, or so he thought. Now they were trying to get home, and Rod-25 had pulled both vessels forward in time again, but the load was just too heavy. That was how the Chief Engineer Dobrynin had described it. He had been with Fedorov on another impossible journey to the past using that same control rod, this time on that new floating nuclear power plant, Anatoly Alexandrov. The two men had spawned this whole mission, pulling Gromyko, and now his boat and crew, into the incredible vortex of this amazing saga.

It seemed his part in the story was not yet finished. He had been briefed by both Fedorov, Dobrynin and then Admiral Volsky, and his orders were clear. They were all trying to get home, back to 2021 where they belonged, though he knew that world was perhaps the most dangerous place they could ever wish to go. They had left it in the midst of that tense undersea engagement, just one more minor naval action that was part of the ever widening blast wave of a new war, the final war, the war the officers and crew of Kirov had come to dread, and one they were desperately trying to prevent. Something told Gromyko that they had finally returned to that blighted time.

“Geothermic?” He said again. “You mean it’s the Demon Volcano you’re hearing out there?”

“I believe so, sir. The geothermic signature is matching patterns I recorded earlier, just before we…”

“Before we went into the Bear’s cave,” Gromyko finished. “Then we’re back. We’ve returned to our own time. That may explain the darkness on those digital screens. It’s the fallout from that damn volcano.”

“Or something else,” said his Starpom, Belanov.

“It’s just a little over 400 kilometers east of our present position,” said Chernov. “That is if we’re still in the same place we were when we…”

“When we moved in time,” said Gromyko again. “Get used to saying it aloud, son. It will help all the rest of us believe it. Mister Gorban, did you get a fix on our position?” He looked at the boat’s radar man and navigator.

“No GPS data came in over the mast, but using those initial radar returns I have us right where we were before.”

“Yet still no sign of Kirov?” The Captain looked at Chernov on sonar.

“Nothing sir. I would hear them if they were close, even through this background noise.”

“Karenin? Any return on our beacon signal?”

“No sir. The channel is silent.”

“Did you get the signal off?”

“I believe so, Captain.”

“What else do you hear out there?”

Karenin gave him a sallow look. He was a young Junior Lieutenant, and this was his third cruise with Gromyko, a man he admired greatly. He had been in on the wartime channel traffic when Kazan had participated in the general sortie by the Red Banner Fleet under Karpov, and he was thrilled when they had successfully ambushed the American CVBG Washington battlegroup. Everyone had heard of this Karpov, and knew he was a hard fighting Captain, a dangerous man. The news that they were now ordered to go after Kirov, flagship of the fleet, had shaken him, as it had many others on the crew. The thought that they were going up against Karpov and Kirov was scary, but if anyone could, it would be Gromyko, the Matador, as all the men in the silent service called him now. The Captain was a master of undersea warfare, the most experience sub Captain in the whole fleet.

Then came the startling truth of what was really going on. He was still somewhat dazed by it all, even as the ship’s equipment seemed dazed, unbelieving, unwilling to admit what was happening. When Gromyko asked him that last question he realized it was another thing that had been bothering him — the silence. He could not hear the deep, ominous rumble of the volcano in his headset like Chernov, but the silence on the communications bands was just as dreadful. He should be hearing fleet signals from Vladivostok and Naval Headquarters Fokino. He should be picking up the cold encrypted chatter of the enemy as well, but there was “Nothing sir.” He said it aloud even as he thought it. “I get no signals traffic of any kind.”

Chapter 11

“Nothing?” Gromyko thought it must be due to the time shift, as he had been briefed. The boat’s systems might take several hours before they were normal again, or so this Fedorov had told him. But as soon as they could, they were to activate that coded signal beacon and try to make contact with Kirov. Ten minutes had passed in that silence. Young Karenin had not heard a whisper back.

That could mean nothing, thought Gromyko. The ship could be out there, adrift in the silence and enfolded in that black soot from the volcano. Then again… It might mean Kirov had not made it to this time and place with Kazan. Admiral Volsky had warned him this was likely to happen. One ship or another might arrive first — perhaps we’re the first ones home, he thought… or the last. What if Kirov appeared here earlier, and the ship and crew were all now a part of that silence out there, all a part of that inky darkness he saw through the periscope cameras? He didn’t want to think of that just then, but he remembered the training he had received in submarine school, so long ago it seemed.

“You men in the undersea boat service will most likely be the only survivors if we ever have to ask you to do your jobs.” He could still hear the warning his instructor had given the class upon graduation. “So don’t be surprised if you poke your periscope mast up one day and find there is no one else — nothing there — all the world gone to hell while you were chasing other enemy submarines beneath the sea.”

That thought gave Gromyko a shiver. He looked at the other men, and he could see the same questions in their eyes as they looked back at him. He was the Captain. He was supposed to know, and the decision as to what he would now do with Kazan lay with him, feeling leaden in his gut as he mulled it over.

Admiral Volsky had given him a quiet whisper before they parted company. “We’ve seen the world this war leaves us before, Gromyko. Believe me, you will not want to see it twice. If you should get there, and find Vladivostok a blackened hole at the edge of the sea… Then you will have quite a decision to make. If you don’t hear our beacon call, it may be that we are late. But it could also mean we are gone, Gromyko. In that instance, you will be the only man alive with the power to prevent what you see out there — the power to try and keep the world from ending. That’s a great deal to put on your shoulders, but you must know this. You can either sit there and watch the radiation count every time you get near the surface, or you can do something about it. With Rod-25 you have that chance — the chance to go back and change it all one more time — the chance to prevent that damn war from ever happening.”

That reminded him to check his radiation monitors, quietly, with only Belanov noticing and knowing what Gromyko was up to. What he saw convinced him that they were the ones who had arrived here too late. The readings were dangerously high, and he gave Belanov a quiet order. “Take us down below 200 meters,” he said. “Make it look routine.”

“Aye sir.” Belanov waited until Gromyko drifted away again, back to Chernov on sonar. Then he gave the quiet order to the helm. Ten degree down bubble,” said Belanov. “Ahead one third. Make your depth 200 meters.”

The Captain stood by his sonar man, thinking the answer to their dilemma might be hidden in that darkness and silence out there, and waiting for Chernov’s keen ears to ferret it out. So now the question was before him.

“What could I do?” Gromyko had asked of Admiral Volsky, even as he asked it of himself again now. What could I do? He knew the answer. Chief Dobrynin had told him this Rod-25 was very stubborn, aging now, but still set in its ways. It insisted on stopping off at the 1940s every time it was used. How would his own engineers know what to do in the reactor room?

“Do not worry,” Dobrynin had told him. “I have every shift recorded on tape, the exact changes I made to the system, the timing, temperature, all the vibrations.”

“But that was on Kirov,” Gromyko had protested. “What makes you think it will work aboard Kazan?”

“Because it already has worked.” Dobrynin had given him a wry smile. “We’ve already visited the 1940s twice!”

Yes we have, thought Gromyko. Now the only question was whether or not they would be making a third visit there, and it was now his to decide. The choice was before him at that very moment, waiting in the silence, in the darkness out there, and he knew what he was going to do.

“Keep listening, Chernov. You have the bridge. Mister Belanov, walk with me please.”

The Captain was heading aft, to the reactor room where his engineers had been working with two men sent over from Kirov, Chief Dobrynin’s minions with recorded digital files and procedures to be used with Rod-25.

“What do you make of this, Belanov?” The Captain wanted to sound out his Starpom before he decided their course.

“That radiation count says everything, sir. It’s certainly not all coming from that volcano.”

“Shall we head for Vladivostok?”

“That would be the logical play.”

“And if we find it blown to hell?”

Belanov had to think about that. It was something he had not considered, a reality that now loomed as a certain threat in his mind. What would they do if that were the case? They were a warship of the Russian Navy, pledged to the defense of their homeland.

“Then we could see about getting some payback, Captain,” he said at last.

Gromyko gave him a grim smile. “What good would that do? A little like poking the embers after the house has burned down.”

“Then what else?” Belanov had not gone beyond this point in his mind. They were to try to get home, and that was what he had his thoughts set on. Now they were here, however, home was nowhere to be found.

“You saw the radiation readings,” said Gromyko. “We can’t even get within 50 meters of the surface in that.”

“What do you figure happened, sir?”

“God only knows. Maybe the Chinese wouldn’t back off. Maybe they lobbed one of those ballistic missiles of theirs into the old Fukushima plant. That would be all it would take to finish off Japan. As for the Americans, I think it was coming to blows with them in any case. If Vladivostok is gone, then that was their doing.

And it was gone.

They spent the next hours making a stealthy approach to the place, creeping up on Naval headquarters at Fokino first and risking a close approach to the narrow bay there. No sign of life could be seen, and no signal came in answer to their coded calls. So they headed east, working their way around the islands at the base of the long peninsula. Gromyko would not risk navigating the narrower waters of the Golden Horn, so they maneuvered to approach the city from the west in Amur Bay.

But the city was not there. Where it once sat glittering on the shore, there was only that darkness and silence now, and the eerie stillness that spoke of death. It was as if the sun had set on the life and world they knew, and would never rise again. Gromyko knew they could spend their days navigating the seas in search of any sign of life.

“Yet we’re just as likely to run into another American boat doing the same thing,” he said to Belanov.

“So what do we do, sir?”

Gromyko gave him a long look, finally telling him what Admiral Volsky had said. “Who knows if they made it back,” he reasoned. “They told me that new control rod was untested. It may not have worked. They could still be right there in 1945 and wondering where the hell we are. Their Chief Engineer was certain that we could at least return there if we ran that procedure again with the reactors.”

“Return? To the 1940s?”

“That seems to be the ticket we’re holding, Belanov.”

“But sir… the men… our wives and families…”

“You think they’re here, alive out there in that radiation?”

Belanov said nothing.

“At least if we do go back, we’ll have clean air and water, and half a chance at life.” Gromyko reasoned it out again, but he knew it was more than that, more than their own fate and the lives of the men aboard Kazan. So he said it, the last part of what Admiral Volsky had whispered to him. “And we would have one more chance to prevent what we just saw,” he said with finality. “One more chance to change things.”

“But sir… We’d end up right in the middle of the Japanese Empire here.”

Gromyko smiled. “The Japanese? I can handle them. But we have no missile or torpedo that will do anything against the emptiness out there now. At least if we do go back, we can make a difference… somehow.”

And so they put it to the crew, explained it all, and sat for a long day and night beneath the sea while Chernov listened and the engineers poured over those digital recordings, huddling in the reactor room to determine what they might soon be asked to do. One of them was Junior Lieutenant Ilya Garin, a reactor Engineer that had worked with Chief Dobrynin, the devil’s apprentice. He had seen how the Chief controlled the use of Rod-25, and had been involved in the mission that sent Fedorov back from the Primorskiy Engineering Center test reactor, and then again when the Chief tool them all back to find him on the Anatoly Alexandrov. Now he was here, reassigned to Kazan, and working in the reactor room to see if he could duplicate the Chief’s magic.

He did not have to worry. When the decision was finally made, the crew vote tallied, Rod-25 would do all the work for him. All he had to do was lower it slowly into the reaction, time it, pretend to listen to it like Dobrynin might do. Yet it was mere theater, and he sensed that on some level. Rod-25 was, indeed, a stubborn thing. It would take them back to the 1940s as sure as rain follows the flash of lightning at the edge of a storm. But it was getting old, even as Dobrynin warned. It might have taken them to 1945, to the place they had only just escaped from, but it slipped a bit. The boat kept falling through the hole in time it created, just a little farther into the void.

To the year 1941.

They did not know that at first. They arrived in the green wash of eerie light, the frosty cold and strange static electricity that raised the hackles on the back of Gromyko’s neck. But they made it through. All seemed well, until Lieutenant Garin came up to the bridge.

“Captain,” he said plaintively. “I think we have a problem.”

“You think we have a problem?” Gromyko was not accustomed to anything less than precise certainty when it came to the workings of his submarine. “What is it Mister Garin?”

“The control rod sir, Rod-25. Our systems are indicating damage to the rod structure. Radiation level is high. I’ve retracted it into the Rad-Safe containment and we’ll see what we can find after we take some pictures with the inspection camera.”

“Is the procedure over? Did it run its course?”

“Yes, sir. This happened right after final retraction, but I don’t think we can risk using that control rod again until we get a good look at it, and take some further readings.”

“Very well. Carry on, and well done Mister Garin. Now all we have to do is find out where we are.”

They went through it all one more time, the quiet wait while the boat’s systems seemed to slowly recover their sensibilities, the cautious approach to the surface. Radiation readings were normal, which gave them all some great relief, but what would they find when they raised the sensor mast and periscope again? Just to be on the safe side, Gromyko had returned to the relative safety of the Sea of Okhotsk, cruising off the Kuriles well north of the Demon Volcano. If they did appear in the 1940s again, he wanted to make sure they had some room to maneuver.

Belanov’s remark about landing right in the middle of the Japanese Empire was good warning. While he didn’t think he had anything to really fear from the Japanese navy of the 1940s, there was always that first woozy hour after they shifted, when he might not have the advantage of his sensory suite or even the functional use of his weapons. And Gromyko was a very cautious man.

So they waited. Chernov listened. Gorband had a look around on radar, and Karenin raised the communications antenna and sent off that coded signal.

Silence followed, a place where every fear might grow if it lingered for very long. Gromyko became uneasy himself, pacing on the bridge, waiting. Soon Karenin began to hear voices in that silence, then pulses on the airwaves and the dot-dash chatter of coded messages from a telegraph system, a faint scratching of the airwaves that were otherwise clean and silent. Only one man on the boat spoke Japanese, a sailor named Genzo Gavrilov, his name a hybrid of Japanese and Russian, as he was born from the marriage of his Russian father to a Japanese woman. The crew called him GG for short, and he was pulled from his duty in the torpedo room and called up to the bridge, a bit intimidated to be in the presence of all the senior officers there.

“Just listen in to any radio traffic,” the Captain told him. “Find out what’s going on up there.”

GG listened, hearing what sounded like routine radio calls, ship to shore, merchantmen at sea. Then news came from Tokyo of the Japanese offensive in China. It was not long before he fished out the day and time from the stream of grandiose propaganda. It was 1941. January of 1941, the 11th day, to be exact.

Gromyko was surprised to hear that. “Are you sure? 1941?”

“It was right in the clear, sir,” said GG. Genzo Gavrilov was certain he had it correct.

“Anything within range on radar or sonar?”

“No traffic within fifty nautical miles in any direction, sir, and our systems seem to be recovering nicely now.” Belanov gave the report, waiting, an expectant look on his face.

“Very well…” Gromyko rubbed the back of his neck. “I need some fresh air. Take us up,” he said quietly to Belanov, who nodded as he seconded the order.

“The boat will surface. Watch Officers stand ready.”

“Surface the boat, aye sir, and ready on main mast watch. Mister Levin, take your men up to the sail hatch.”

“Aye, sir.”

Chapter 12

The air was sweet, so clean and clear, untainted by the anger of that volcano that had been the only living thing in the world they had just fled from. Home was behind them, a cinder grey world of ash and smoke, humming with radiation in the fallout. Everything they ever knew and loved in that world was gone, forever gone, and they all carried that awful sense of loss.

But there was life here, thought Gromyko as he took a deep breath of that cool fresh air. Yes, there was life, and time, and a chance to do something here. But what? That was his dilemma now. What should he do? It was January 11, 1941. Japan was at war on the Chinese mainland, but not out here in the sea. If this history was anything like the story of the Great Patriotic War that he knew, then it would be long months before Japan launched her offensive at sea. Pearl Harbor would not happen for nearly a year. So what should he do with all that time, and where was Kirov?

Rod-25 had dragged both Kirov and Kazan from 1908 and into the middle of 1940 before they made their attempt to each return home on their own. Did the ship actually get back to 2021 as they had? Was it devoured in the holocaust they had found there, or had that new control rod failed to deliver? In that case the ship might still be foundering… Kirov might still be here!

Karenin sent his coded message on the special channel they had arranged, using shortwave signals that could propagate over very long ranges, half way around the earth. Then he sat sullenly beneath his headset, still brooding over the loss of his girlfriend, knowing she was gone forever now. Yet here they were in the 1940s, and there seemed to be plenty of fish in this new sea. There might be a life here for them after all, and he did not have long to wait for his answer.

“Captain!” he said, his eyes wide, but Gromyko was up on the weather bridge on the exposed sail, so he toggled his comm system for that station. Watch officers were standing by with headsets for any message he might send, and the news he delivered reeled in Gromyko in short order. The Captain was down from the sail, and onto the main bridge, his boots still wet and glistening with seawater from a new century.

“Karenin?”

“I have them, sir! I have Kirov on shortwave. I just received my green confirmation signal. They got our message and acknowledged. Now I’m negotiating a voice channel.”

Gromyko breathed easy for the first time in hours, exhaling some of that good fresh air he had taken in topside. Karenin worked his system, tuning, filtering, decoding. Then he heard a voice come in over his headset.

“I have Lieutenant Nikolin, sir!”

“Put it on the bridge speakers.”

“Aye sir.”

“Kazan, Kazan, come in. Nikolin here on the battlecruiser Kirov. Where in God’s name have you been?”

Gromyko took up a handset and spoke into the microphone. “Ahoy, Kirov. Greetings Mister Nikolin. We were just asking ourselves the same question.”

Then came another voice, that of the ship’s young Captain Fedorov. “Good to finally hear from you,” said Fedorov, and he explained that their effort to move forward to 2021 had failed. “We’ve been here since mid June of 1940, listening for you the last six months!”

There was a brief exchange, where Gromyko briefed them on everything they had experienced. The report concerning Vladivostok was somewhat grim, but not unexpected.

“We were afraid that might be the case,” said Fedorov. “I have Admiral Volsky with me here, and I will turn you over to him. Standby.”

Gromyko waited, glad to hear the Admiral’s calm reassuring voice again. Everyone on the bridge took heart now, for Volsky’s tone and manner carried a note of home, an anchor to the authority that had send them all to sea in the first place, and a tether on some sense of purpose they might now have here in this new world. Volsky and Fedorov were mariners in time, and had navigated these waters before.

“Greetings Captain Gromyko, and all the crew of Kazan,” came Volsky’s deep voice. “We have been waiting for you. It appears our new control rod is only a distant cousin to the one we lent you, and we were never able to leave here. So we did not have to see the desolation you describe again. We have all seen it before, and now we set our minds on how we can prevent it. You come to us at a most critical time, and it is good that you are here.”

“Where are you, sir?” asked Gromyko.

“Believe it or not we are now in the Atlantic off Reykjavik, and I think we must now find a way to meet at sea.”

“That’s a long way off,” said Gromyko.

“We will come south to meet you half way off the Cape of Good Hope. Fedorov says it will take you nearly 12 days at 30 knots. Is that a problem?”

“I think we can manage it, sir. The boat is in fine shape.

“Excellent. We cannot discuss matters here, even on this encrypted channel, but there is much to learn. Try to be as discrete as possible. We will sail south to meet you, and then we drink together here in my ready room!”

“Very good sir. We’ll get underway at once.” Gromyko turned to his navigator now. “Get me an ETA on Cape Town by way of the Singapore Strait.”

Two old friends were about to meet.

The night was black and the sea was uncommonly calm when the sail of Kazan broke the surface. The submarine emerged from the dark waters like a behemoth, a fighting Orca the like of which this world had never seen. Above, sailing just a few hundred yards to the east, the battlecruiser Kirov waited to greet its comrade in arms. It had been six long months for Volsky and Fedorov, yet only a matter of a few weeks for Gromyko. The Matador was finally back, and he made arrangements to visit Kirov in a launch sent over from the battlecruiser.

Admiral Volsky was there at the gunwale when the Captain came aboard with his executive officer Belanov, giving him a hearty handshake.

“We are well met,” said Volsky. “The last time we gathered like this was to determined how we would plot the demise of this very ship, and our wayward Captain Karpov. Now we have other matters to decide.”

“Well Gromyko,” said Fedorov. “I must say that your submarine is a most welcome sight. We have been listening for you all these many months.”

That was hard for Gromyko to grasp, as it had only been a few days time from his perspective. The two vessels had decided to meet at sea off the southern coast of the Cape of Good Hope. Gromyko had surfaced and come aboard Kirov for this initial meeting, glad to see the Admiral again and feel the burden he had been carrying on his shoulders lighten a bit.

“This is home now, Gromyko,” said Volsky. “We have sailed here before; fought here to try and prevent what you saw when you returned to our old world. It seems we have more to do.”

“It does, sir.”

“First I must commend you for coming back for us.”

“That was an easy choice, Admiral. The radiation count was very bad. We had to get below 200 meters to feel comfortable.”

Volsky nodded gravely.

“Well this world has not yet suffered the blight of nuclear weapons. They are all busy enough using the conventional ones. This is World War Two, Gromyko, the Great Patriotic War, but things are considerably different now. Our homeland is fractured, and the only part of it that resembles anything I would fight for now belongs to Sergei Kirov, the man this ship is named after.”

“Sergei Kirov?”

“The living man,” Volsky smiled. “We have even met with him. He has agreed to give us a permanent base at Severomorsk, or at least the place where the base was built in our day. It isn’t much yet, but we are working on it. At least we have warm quarters there for shore leave, good food, a taste of home.”

“All of my men will be looking forward to that,” said Gromyko.

“Yes, but there is much we have to discuss. A great deal has happened since we last parted company. Mister Fedorov here can brief you in detail, but the short end of it is that we are stuck here, and so we have decided to stay put for a while and see what we can do to prevent the destruction you have just come from.”

“That was our thought as well, sir, and the reason we tried that control rod again.”

“I am glad you chose this course, Gromyko. I had hoped you would see this as your only option. That said, this is no paradise. As to this war, we have decided we cannot just sail about and try to avoid contact here. This war consumed the entire world, well named, so we have taken sides. I have kept the missiles in the silos of late, but that may soon change.”

He told Gromyko of the meeting with Sergei Kirov, and what was decided there, and the newly formed alliance between Russia and England. The news that their homeland was fragmented and locked in civil war was jarring enough, but then Volsky lowered his voice, his tone dark and serious.

“I must also tell you that we are not the only men from our time at large in this world.” The name Ivan Volkov was soon on his lips, and the Admiral had Fedorov explain the situation concerning Volkov, and how he must have made his way down the stairwell of Ilanskiy to 1908, even as Fedorov had, to find himself a witness to the dreadful Tunguska event. The Orenburg Federation was the result, and now Fedorov also revealed that the man they had stalked together, the former Captain of Kirov, was also at large.

“Karpov? Here? He’s alive?”

“Very much alive,” said Volsky. “And true to that man’s nature, he has wormed his way into a position of power in the Free Siberian State. Both of these men are dangerous, and even more so in the positions they now hold. Our only consolation at the moment is that they appear to be squabbling with one another.”

“Amazing,” said Gromyko.

“Indeed. But we are dangerous men as well,” Volsky held up a finger. “Together we can make a real difference here. Fedorov will brief you as to what has happened. The war, Gromyko. That is the issue now. This damn war will lead to the next as sure as winter follows autumn. We thought we could do something about it, and we have undertaken a few operations to prevent the German navy from mischief up north. I must also tell you that we have established a firm alliance with the Royal Navy of England. We fought against them the first time we found ourselves here, largely because they became our enemy after this war ended. Yet if the friendship and alliance between Russia and the west can be preserved, perhaps that is the key to saving that future we have come from. We have made contact with a good man here in the British Admiral Tovey, and we are coordinating with him to see what we can do. But the war, Gromyko. Things have taken a sudden turn for the worse. Fedorov?”

“The British have lost Gibraltar,” said Fedorov. “The Germans launched an operation that had been planned in our history, but never executed. It succeeded. The place is now in German hands. They’ve moved in artillery, placed heavy guns to cover the straits, and they have just moved troops to Morocco. They will undoubtedly build airfields there. That threat, plus the presence of German U-Boats operating from Gibraltar has effectively closed the Western Mediterranean to British shipping.”

“And what about Russia?”

“Hitler did not invade us until later this year, and so far that history seems to be holding. There is an ongoing buildup on the Polish frontier, but after Gibraltar, the Germans launched operations into the Balkans. They have invaded Yugoslavia, and the Italians have attacked Greece. Under threat of German invasion, Bulgaria has joined the Axis, and there is fighting in Greece. This will open that entire southern front and the enemy will surely deploy there, ready to go into the Ukraine if so ordered later this year.”

“What can we do about it?” Gromyko folded his arms, asking the obvious question.

“That is the dilemma. Our power is redoubled now that you are here. On the sea, we are a force unmatched, but your question points out the other side of that coin. We cannot stop German armies when they move on land, not unless we opt for the final solution with our heavy warheads, and that we have not yet decided. The thought of trying to prevent an all out nuclear war by starting one here is somewhat unpalatable to me.”

“I understand, sir.”

“That said, Hitler must be confronted, somewhere, and we must do what we can to stem the Nazi tide if possible. I have kept a watch on the Atlantic, discretely, as the Soviet Union and Germany are not yet at war and we are not eager to change that just yet. But we have been following the news of the German advance into the Balkans, and we know where it will inevitably lead.”

“Istanbul,” said Fedorov. “The Bosporus. Ivan Volkov and the Orenburg Federation has all the oil and the resources Hitler needs, and once he is finished in the Balkans only Turkey will stand between him and what he most desires. Germany prevailed in their attack on Gibraltar, and it has had the effect of bottling up the British in the Middle East, with a supply line by sea that now must go all the way around the Cape of Good Hope here, over 12,000 miles long. The war is shifting that way now, at least for the foreseeable future.”

“And so we will shift with it,” said Volsky. “The British are set on relieving our watch on the Atlantic. In fact, they have already done so. The Germans managed to slip a few heavy ships through — not on my watch — but what does that matter. They now have battleships based in the French Atlantic ports. Fedorov?”

“Bismarck at Brest. Hindenburg at Saint Nazaire. They broke out some months ago and evaded the British pursuit, but they have sat there for some time now, and have not sortied again. The threat they pose is enough of a danger to the British convoy routes to the Middle East, but they also have help from the French Navy, which is still operating from Casablanca.” He told Gromyko how both France and Spain were now active members of the Axis.

“I thought the Allies took Casablanca during the war,” said Gromyko.

“In 1942, and only with the support and assistance of the United States. As it stands, Great Britain has neither adequate assault shipping, or manpower available to mount an operation like the Torch offensive that knocked Vichy France out of the war.

“Yes, I suppose that’s a tall order for Great Britain,” said Gromyko.

“That it is,” said Admiral Volsky. “Particularly when the Germans hold Gibraltar. There could be no landings at Oran or Algiers, so the old Operation Torch as we knew it will probably never occur in this war.”

“Perhaps the British may launch a limited offensive against French West Africa,” said Fedorov. “But that remains to be seen.”

“We will learn their immediate plans for future war operations soon,” said Volsky. “In the meantime, we must make plans of our own. Germany must not be allowed to build up forces in North Africa that could pose a grave threat to Egypt, and by all means, they must not be allowed to secure the Bosporus. They may take Istanbul by land, but they must never cross that channel into Turkey, nor will any ships be allowed to carry Ivan Volkov’s oil to the German Reich.”

“Who controls the Crimea?” Gromyko asked. The place had long been a bastion of Russian naval power, one of three kings in the hierarchy of the Russian Navy: Murmansk in the north, Sevastopol in the Crimea, and Vladivostok in the far east.”

“Sergei Kirov and the Soviets still hold all of Ukraine and the Crimea. In fact, he has invaded the Caucasus, and there is fighting at Novorossiysk. Volkov has his hands full there, but the Germans have Bulgaria now, which brings them to the Turkish frontier. They must not be allowed to establish an overland link with Volkov through Turkey, and I am afraid that the Turkish Army may not be able to prevent that, which is where we come into the picture.”

“How so, sir?”

“You can take your boat into the Mediterranean Sea easily enough. Yes?”

“From here? Through the Suez Canal?”

“That would mean you would have to surface to make that transit, and we feel it essential to keep the knowledge of your presence here a secret at the moment.”

“Agreed,” said Gromyko. “Well I can go by way of Gibraltar, no matter what the Germans have there.”

“Good enough. We will have to part company again, but we will stay in coded communication with you.”

“You will not take that route?”

“We could fight our way through, but at great expense to our SAM inventory if the Germans decide to throw their Stukas at us. Thankfully that is not a problem you have with Kazan. I see no point in taking that course when we can just as easily sail north from here and go up through Suez. This, after all, is our objective, to protect the British position in Egypt. We will defend the Suez Canal.”

“Alone?”

“With the assistance and support of the British fleet,” said Fedorov. “At present, however, they have little in the way of anti-aircraft defenses, limited air power there, few searchlights, and only one radar. The Germans and Italians are about to finish up in Greece, much sooner than they did in our history. Once Greece falls, then the Germans will have good airfields from which they could strike at Crete, North Africa, Suez, Palestine and the coast of Turkey. With Kirov positioned near Suez, we could put our radar and SAM defenses to good use and make sure the canal is kept safe.”

“And once you join us in the Eastern Med, you will hold the Bosporus closed,” said Volsky with a smile. “Two fat fingers in the dike, and let us hope we can stem the onrushing tide. Come, let us join Director Kamenski for a good meal. Then we toast and I have one more request to make of you before we part.”

That request was for more missiles, which Kazan still had in abundance. Kirov had fired four of the of the P-900s Kazan had given them earlier, and Volsky was hoping he could have those replaced to bring them up to 27 SSMs.

“We had a full complement of missiles,” said Gromyko. “I’ll send you another group of P-900s and bump you up to 32! That will still leave us the entire Onyx system, and all our torpedoes. Consider it done, Admiral.”

“Good enough,” said Volsky. “Because we may have to use them sooner than we think.”