Three Kings (Kirov Series) (13 page)

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.