Three Kings (Kirov Series) (27 page)

Those odds were about to round
off almost perfectly as an ominous storm cloud began to form in the Aegean that
day. It was a wholly unaccountable moment, yet strangely one that had been
planned by Admiral John Tovey himself… in another life…

* * *

Admiral
Volsky was glad to
be at sea again, a maneuver that served two purposes. First, they would soon
join the British fleet that had just sortied from Alexandria in the hunt for
the Italian Navy. Second, he could launch his special services rescue mission
more discretely at sea, far from the many eyes who might see the KA-40 rise
from the aft helo deck. The missile fire was one thing, yet it merely confirmed
rumors that the Russians had been able to develop advanced rocketry on this
prototype vessel. The sight of KA-40 naval helicopter might start another new
rumor chain, and he wanted to keep evidence of the ship’s capabilities quiet
for as long as possible.

Once aloft Fedorov was going to
move discretely out in front of the British fleet and do a quick long range
radar scan to test the
Oko
panel installation while searching for the
Italian fleet. Then the helo would swing south over
Mersa
Matruh
and make the journey south to begin the search
for General O’Connor’s downed Blenheim. They had a fairly good idea where he
might be, but the desert was a very big place.

It was to be a fateful mission,
like so many other conceived in the fertile mind of Anton Fedorov. And in a
strange echo of those earlier missions, another man would have a great deal to
do with what happened that day.

Orlov stuck his nose around the
hatch opening to the engineering section, looking to find Chief Dobrynin. He
had something in his pocket he was still wondering about, and thought the Chief
might be able to make some sense of it. He was greeted by the sound of system
alerts and the rush of reactor engineers. Another man squeezed past him at the
open hatch even as he stepped inside.

“Move, move, move!” he heard
Dobrynin shouting inside the engineering section. “
Norin
—check
those water feed levels.
Osiniov
—get on the reactor
flux monitor. Tell me the instant you get any reading beyond yellow.”

Orlov stepped inside, aware that
something was amiss, and soon seeing he would not be able to get the Reactor
Chief’s attention. Yet he was ship’s Chief Operations Officer, so he stuck his
thumb in the pie in any case.

“What’s going on here? Some kind
of problem, Dobrynin?”

“Not now, Chief. Can’t you see
that we have a flux event underway?”

Orlov looked at the monitors, but
they made no sense to him at all, just as the radar and sonar stations made no
sense to him on the bridge when he was lingering there. He shook his head.
“Flux event? Someone had a bad egg for breakfast?” Even as he said that he was
fingering the strange metallic egg he had in his pocket, the Devil’s Teardrop,
as Troyak might call it.

Dobrynin was too busy to answer
him, adjusting dials, looking at readings on the monitors, tapping a young
engineer on the shoulder and pointing to a digital display. “Let me know the
instant you see anything above thirty three on that monitor. Watch that thermal
neutron flux very closely. See it rising? That had better settle down soon or
we’ll have to insert another control rod.”

Orlov didn’t know it at the time,
but if Dobrynin was forced to use one of his emergency control rods, the ship
and crew might have other problems no one had counted on then. Both rods were
the two new controls that had been shipped in, each from the same batch and
field that spawned Rod-25. If he had to insert one now…

Seeing he was as useless here as
legs on a snake, Orlov shrugged and edged out through the hatch, thinking he
might need to get to the bridge and inform Rodenko of the problem. Then he
realized that Dobrynin would simply use his intercom, which would save him that
long climb all the way up to the citadel, so he started off towards the mess
hall instead.

Every step he took was a benefit
to Dobrynin and his badly spooked reactor crews. Every step he took carried
that thing in his pocket just a little farther aft, another few feet away from
the tempestuous fire of the nuclear core of the ship, and when he took a ladder
up, entering the helo bay level, the thick reinforced bulkhead there designed
to protect the ship from fuel explosions made things even better. He was
outside the armored core of the ship surrounding the engineering section, and
Chief Dobrynin’s morning would begin to settle down almost immediately.

Orlov thought he might go up yet
another level and grab a sweet bun with raisins and a nice black tea for his
mid-morning snack, but when he got to the mess hall he saw that a
mishman
had eaten the last bun. History would never record a moment like that, when a
young man’s appetite for sweet rolls, or Orlov’s appetite for something to cure
his boredom, would suddenly change everything again. When the ship’s bakery
chef spread the last bit of icing on that roll, he could not know that he was
sculpting the contours of the history of World War II from that moment forward.

The simple fact was that Pavel
Gavlik
took a second roll that morning, the last roll, and
Orlov found nothing left but the empty bakery bin. So he wandered one deck
higher, soon finding himself near the helo bay when he might have stayed right
there in the mess hall, munching his roll and drinking black tea for the next
half an hour—and that made all the difference. Was it the roll, or the Chief’s
restless curiosity when he saw the elevated energy level in the aft helo bay
that morning?

 “Hey, Zykov, what’s going
on? Why is everyone suiting up?” He could see a group of Marines donning
special light
camo
-suits, and the weapons lockers
were all open. Machine guns, grenade launchers, ammo canisters and other
equipment were being pulled out and checked by the men. Off in the distance he
heard the gruff voice of Sergeant Troyak riding someone for a sloppy rifle
cleaning procedure, and the whole scene brought back memories of those first
hours when he had been busted in rank and dumped here in the helo bay to join
the Marine contingent.

“Orlov!” Zykov seemed eager to
see him. “Just the man we need right now. Hey, Big K, the Chief is here!”

Troyak was Big K, at least to
Zykov, who called him that instead of using his rank as an easy handle, or his
real first name, Kandemir. The Sergeant stuck his head around the open door of
a weapons locker and gave Orlov a scowl.

“Orlov. Good man on the job! I
need you to get an
Oko
panel installed on the KA-40, with an infrared
sensor suite. Can you do it?
Kymkov
is in sick bay
and nobody else knows what they’re doing here.” He glared at his Marines, who
shirked away, tending to their weapons and packs.

Orlov had been wandering below
decks all morning, listless, brooding, thinking about that silly ride he had
taken in the zeppelin and musing on the fact that Karpov was still out there
somewhere doing the same thing. It seemed comical to him, that the once mighty
Captain of the world’s most powerful ship was now relegated to the status of an
airship commandant. Serves him right, he had thought.

Everyone on the ship seemed busy
that morning, except Orlov. All he had to do was roam about and kibitz with one
section Chief after another until his Bridge watch would come up in another six
hours. He was bored, but now he finally had something to do.

“
Oko
panel? You going
somewhere?”

“Never mind where we’re going,
Orlov. Can you mount the damn radar panel or do I have to collar a
matoc
to get the job done?”

“
Vse
zayebalo
!” said Orlov, swearing as he often did. “Of course
I can mount a stupid
Oko
panel. Just let me grab a few men to fetch it
from the bay.”

“I’ve already done that, but they
can’t sort out the damn cable connections. It’s over by the KA-40. See about
it, will you Chief?”

Orlov nodded. What the fuck, he
thought, sick of Troyak’s bluster. Where did he get off ordering me around, eh?
But it really doesn’t matter. I need something to do, and now I’ve finally got
something to keep my hands busy for the next twenty minutes. Who knows, maybe I
can work my way aboard and have some more fun with Troyak and his damn Marines.

Zykov grinned at him as he went
to the helo, and Orlov was sick of him too. But what were the Marines up to?
Why was everyone getting rigged out as if they were about to storm the
barricades? That was an idle curiosity that would soon change the lives of
millions… a man with a sweet tooth, a missing roll, and Orlov.

The Chief got to the helicopter
and he could see that it was already set up with a long range reserve fuel
tank, and two air-to air weapons pods on the short outer pylons. The KA-40 was
much bigger than its younger brother, the old KA-27 naval helicopter that had
been used for so many years. It could be rigged out for ASW combat with
torpedoes and sonar buoys, and also had the ability to mount short range
air-to-air missile pods. There it was, the fat blue pig, as Orlov often
referred to the KA-40 with its pale blue paint scheme. It wasn’t the sleek
fighting airframe that was used on the faster KA-50/52 series helos, but it had
twice the range, 1200 kilometers with those extra fuel stores, and it was a
very capable platform for many roles: transport, search and rescue, AEW, ASW
and more. The Chief wasted little time getting to the cables and configuring
the infrared sensor suite for the unit hookups.

Troyak came over to check on
things a minute later, frowning at the medusa cable clutter and shaking his
head. “Six cables for one damn radar panel?”

“And two more for infrared,” said
Orlov with a grin, glad that he could lord it over Troyak now, as he could
install an
Oko
panel in his sleep, while the gritty Sergeant did not
have the slightest idea what he was doing. The Chief fussed and cursed with the
last cable, remembering he had to attach a special data feed link under the
main cabin panels as a last step.

“What’s going on, Troyak. Why the
radar?”

“Mission.” The Sergeant was
characteristically curt. He had wasted too many words that morning trying to
get that panel mounted, and was just glad the job was finally done.

“Desert safari!” said Zykov as he
came up with a grin, his short cropped blonde hair soon disappearing under his
beret. “We have a search and rescue operation, or so I hear.”

“To the desert? What the fuck are
we doing on this ship? First we go floating off in that damn zeppelin, now it’s
Lawrence of Arabia.”

“Yes? Well we need a sensor suite
operator. You want the job, Orlov?” Zykov winked at Troyak. He was joking, but
Orlov obviously took him seriously. He thought for two seconds, realizing all
he would be doing here is wandering about with nothing to do, looking at
reports on stupid clip boards, nodding his head when a
mishman
requested
shift leave, rousting the
matoc
out of their
bunks for the next shift. He could leave that crap to the section Chiefs and
have some real adventure here. In fact, even though he deprecated the zeppelin
mission, he had been thrilled to get off the ship, and the ride he had taken in
the sub-cloud car was more fun than anything he had done since he decided to
jump ship, long ago, or so it seemed now. Here was another opportunity to get
out into the world and do something different, and he didn’t think long.

“Sensor man? Sure! I can read
these systems easily enough. It’s simple. One small screen, two digital
readouts—not like that stuff on the bridge Rodenko fusses over.”

“I was only kidding, Chief,” said
Zykov.

“Who’s kidding? You want a good
man on the radar? I can take that watch. It will give me a chance to keep an
eye on you two bilge rats and make sure the job gets done, eh? Where we going?”

Troyak gave Zykov a hard nudge in
the ribs. “Nobody knows yet,” he said. “And look, we can only take ten men,
so—”

Orlov was quick enough to see
that Troyak was trying to give him the brush off, but at that moment a most
unusual man came into the helo bay with Fedorov, and the distraction was just
what he needed to worm his way aboard the KA-40.

Chapter 23

At
that moment Fedorov
came up, talking with a heavy set, middle aged man in an odd looking uniform,
with a black fleece beret on his otherwise balding head. He wore baggy battle
dress trousers with wide thigh pockets, a thick canvass belt, and black dragoon
ammo boots. Orlov caught a flash of silver on his cap, where an odd looking
badge was affixed. It looked like a complex silver globe mounted on a stand,
but it was actually an astrolabe, the ancient instrument used for navigation
that Chaucer wrote about as early as 1391 in his treatise on the subject.
Ancient mariners would use it ‘to know justly the four quarters of the world,
as East, West, North, and South.’

“There you are, Sergeant,” said
Fedorov. “Allow me to introduce a most remarkable man here. This is Major
Vladimir Peniakoff.”

In spite of his Russian name, the
man was actually a Belgian, born of Russian parents in 1897, which made him
nearly 44 years old at that time. His unit was set up in Cairo in 1942 as
Fedorov had learned in his research. Yet here he was, already thick as thieves
with Wavell, who had a penchant for special operations types, and seemed to
find this man very useful.

Fedorov learned that “Popski,” as
Peniakoff was called, would associate with the famous John “Shan” Hackett, who
would fight in Syria, North Africa, and later raise and command the British 4th
Parachute Brigade for the big operation at Arnhem that would one day be called
“Market-Garden.” It was Hackett who would be instrumental in the formation of
the special unit designated Number 1 Demolition Squadron, PPA, and that last
bit would stand for “
Popski’s
Private Army.” It
served well as a long range reconnaissance and raiding group behind enemy lines
in Libya, and though it was not presently functioning in that role, Wavell had
encouraged Popski to “get some sand on his boots” and see what was happening in
the lower desert.