Kirov III-Pacific Storm (Kirov Series) (45 page)

All the officers gathered round
Nikolin’s radio station as he struggled to tune in the distant signal. Would
they hear the heartless stream of coded signals flashed between men at war? He
was hearing words now… English…. And with sinking hearts they first thought
they were they back in it once again, in the merciless waters of the South
Pacific of 1942, fated to meet the American fleet this time, their arsenals
badly depleted and their luck surely running low as well.

Then Tasarov’s elation suddenly became
shock and surprise. He had his beloved sonar back again, and he immediately had
closed his eyes, listening to the song of the sea, letting its sounds and
rhythms and distant tempos enfold him again. He had been like a fish out of
water as the ship sailed east, hearing nothing, knowing nothing of the sea
around him, alone and struggling with the memories of that awful phantom ship
and the reality of his own immediate uselessness. Now he could hear again, even
as Rodenko could see again, but what he heard sent a rising pulse of fear
through his system, and he was tensely alert, sitting up straight as he always
did when he had hold of something, one hand on his headset, the other on his
newly awakened sonar controls.

Karpov caught the movement out of the
corner of his eye, turning his head quickly, watching the sonar man closely.

“Conn… Sonar contact… Possible
submarine… No! Definitely a submarine, sir. Confidence high! He’s very close.
Two thousand meters off our stern and deep. Sir, I think this is an
American
boat—”

“Alert one! Rig for ASW defense!”
Karpov reacted like a coiled spring, suddenly snapping and releasing all the
pent up energy and tension that had been stored in the trial of their recent
battles. A submarine!
Another damn submarine!
They were back in the
thick of it again, and this time it was the Americans, even as they had feared.

The claxon sounded its shrill warning,
and weary men rushed to battle stations, their brief reprieve in the silence
and emptiness of the  open sea now over.

“We will not give this bastard a
single moment to breath,” said Karpov tersely. “Can you see it yet, Samsonov?
Shkval!
Put it right up his ass the minute you have a firing solution!” The Captain
rushed to the CIC, Volsky in his wake, leaving Nikolin suddenly abandoned with
his radio again.

Then Tasarov spoke up in a loud voice.
“I have acoustic profile readings! A hull number resolution!”

Karpov was a single minded fist of
anger now. “Feed that data to the CIC. Let’s get him before they have a chance
to fire. Ready on my command, Samsonov.” He was all business, a deadly serious
look on his face now, and his God of War was moving quickly, with clock like
precision, opening toggle guards, enabling warheads, keying the lethal
super-cavitating torpedoes for battle.

As Karpov watched he was suddenly
shaken by the memory of that awful face, the ghostly visage of Sanji Iwabuchi
as the dour commander had passed right through him, the dreadful sense of doom
he had felt when the man’s mind touched his, and the hopelessness of living in
a world where such men were at large and at war with one another. Something
broke through his fear, tugging at his mind with a certain desperation, a voice
of warning and caution and alarm. My God! He thought, seeing how he had reached
his own hand towards the firing switch even as Samsonov was fingering the kill
button. His hand shook, his eyes widened, and then in a sharp instant he
grabbed Samsonov’s hand and yanked it away from the controls.

“Wait!”
he said. “Belay that order!”

Three words had penetrated the blind
surge of anger and thrum of fear in his chest, stopping the reflexive urge to
fight and kill. They leapt in his brain past that reptilian root of his mind
and up to a higher place where beast became man, and man became reason and
choice.
Hull number resolution!
That meant they had the ship in their
database!

Fedorov suddenly realized what was
happening as well. A hull number resolution! Tasarov had listened to this ship
before, and its unique signal return patterns and acoustic characteristics were
already stored in his computers. It could not be an American submarine from
1942. It had to be from another time. But when?

“Hull number? What, Tasarov? What boat
is it?”

“Boat 722, sir.
Los Angeles
class American attack sub.”

“My God, said Volsky.
Los Angeles
class
? Then this can’t be 1942. We have moved forward again, back into
the world this ship once knew, and it has just remembered a long lost friend.”

“Or an old enemy,” said Karpov darkly,
his hand still poised near the firing button, hovering over the switch, shaking
with the realization of what he was just about to do, what he might yet
have
to do if this boat was hostile. But his mind was working now, the well honed
tactical sense in his head telling him that the sub must have acquired them
long ago when their systems were still dark, and it had crept up on them in a
silent, stealthy watch that was all too typical of the old cold war days. It
could have easily fired and killed them in those long, dark hours, and yet it did
not.

Fedorov was at his station with a
book, his hands a blur as he flipped pages to look up the reference. His eyes
were wide as he looked at the line he had thumbed:
Boat 722, Los Angles
Class Attack submarine. USS Key West out of Naval Forces Marianas. Home Port:
Apra Harbor, Guam.

 With a sudden energy he leaned
over Tovarich, shoving navigation charts aside to get at something he had
stored in a drawer at that station. It was the newspaper the Marines had
brought back from those abandoned bungalows on Malus Island. He had it, rushing
to the  CIC, his face alive and excited.

“Key West!”
he said. “Look! That’s the boat
mentioned right here in this article. Nikolin, get over here! Translate this
again.”

Nikolin, eased away from his radio,
still struggling to tune in a distant, undulating signal, and then took the
newspaper again, looking to the  lines where Fedorov was pointing.

“The attack followed the controversial
sinking of the sole Chinese aircraft carrier
Liaoning
on September 7th—”

“No,” Fedorov pointed. “Farther down…
Here!”

“Alright…Analysts believe the attack
may have been a reprisal for the sinking of the American attack submarine USS
Key
West
by a Russian cruiser on August 28th in the Pacific, as well as a
warning to the Chinese not to press their demands for full integration of
Taiwan—”

“USS
Key West!
The sinking of
that boat by a Russian cruiser in the Pacific was the trigger point that set
the war off. Look at the chronometer—
this
is August 28th! And by God, if
this isn’t a Russian cruiser, then I’m a donkey.” He smiled broadly, his
astonishment giving way to relief.

“You mean to say…” Volsky raised a
finger, equally surprised.

“Yes! It has to be. Later in that same
article I remembered they said something about a Russian ship lost in the
Arctic Sea. We were so busy I forgot about it. Look for that, Nikolin.”

“Here it is, sir.” Nikolin read again.
“Tensions between
SinoPac
and the West have been high
since the loss of a Russian ship in the Arctic Sea in July and several
incidents involving both Russian and British planes in the waters around
Iceland.”

“Why didn’t we see it before? A
Russian ship lost in the Arctic Sea..
in July of 2021
. That was
us,
sir. That was
Kirov!
Our live fire exercises were scheduled for July 28.
Then
boom
. We find ourselves back in 1941, eighty years in the past on
that very same day. We thought
Orel
exploded, and that
Slava
was
sunk as well. But don’t you see? From their point of view it was
Kirov
that vanished—vanished just as we have been pulling that same damn disappearing
act every time Dobrynin ran his maintenance routine on the reactors! And we end
up here, exactly one month later in our time.”

“And
we
start the war…”Admiral
Volsky’s face was grave and sad, realizing that it had been
Kirov
all
along. His ship, his crew, his weapons of war.

Karpov’s hand slowly eased away from
the weapons firing switch, and it was shaking. His face had a look of pain and
agony on it now, eyes wide and glazed over with tears, cheeks taut.

“Then I did it….” He struggled to
control his breath now. “I was going to do it
again
, just this very
second! I was going to blow that submarine to hell without a second thought. I
did it! The war, those burned out cities all over the world,  the whole
damn thing!”

Volsky’s face reflected the Captain’s
pain and distress, and he stepped forward, his big arms taking Karpov’s
shoulders, drawing the other man closer. “No, Karpov,” he said quietly, softly,
as a father might comfort his own child.
“We
did it. This ship; this crew.
You have no idea who may have given the order. For all you know you could have
been sleeping in your bunk and it may have been my fat finger on the trigger,
or Fedorov’s order. You can’t take this on yourself. We are all equally
responsible.” He released the Captain, and Karpov struggled to compose himself.

Yet even as he did so he knew Volsky
was wrong. It
was
him. He did it—in some other iteration of this same
terrible journey they had all been on. Or perhaps he was set to do it, set like
a coiled spring given the man he was back then, where a merciless and callous
reflex for battle still dominated his mind; set like a clock about to jar the
world awake to the terror and destruction of yet another world war.  In
some other life and time he had fired that nuclear warhead at the Americans
without a moment’s hesitation or regret. He had fired it with anger, and yes,
with hatred too. When it came to war he had been a man without scruples,
whether it was the petty infighting in the chain of command or the grander
sweep of battle at sea. He did what they had to do, what they
must
do,
what a man like Sanji Iwabuchi would have done to them all if he had ever been
given the chance to really get his cruiser in position to ram the ship.

But something had grown up around that
twisted root of violence in his mind, even while he commanded the ship in
battle. He fought for another reason now,  to protect his ship and crew
and no longer with the ruthlessness that had driven him in the past. And that
thing, that flower that had bloomed on the vine of death and war in his soul,
had been the one saving grace that had enabled him to stay his hand this
time—and it saved the world.

He saw the eyes of the bridge crew on
him, but there was no reproach in them, no hint of blame or recrimination. All
he saw on the faces of the others was relief and understanding, a quiet
sympathy and a silent awareness that they had finally come to the end of the
terrible mystery and nightmare that had haunted them all these many months.
Fedorov, God bless him. Fedorov had always been a guardian angel too, yet not
so quick to the flashing sword of battle; restrained, thinking, feeling.
Fedorov had been a real man, and now Karpov finally had the hope that he was
going to be one as well.

 He saw the young officer smiling
at him now, and a surge of relief flooded through him. It was as if he had just
set down a burden he had carried all his life, so alone, even as he walked
through the crowded ranks of the ship, shunned by the men, never spoken to, always
at the cold edge of any group that may have gathered and hiding behind his
Captain’s stripe. Now he saw the one thing he had always yearned for in the
eyes of the men, comfort, understanding, acceptance, and yes, even admiration.
They were his brothers now. They were all his brothers.

He knew, deep down, that as he fought
these last
weeks
it had not been to strike a blow for
Mother Russia, or to even the score of history, wrong perceived injustice in
the wayward course of events. No, he had fought for
Kirov
, for the ship,
for these men around him, and the crew struggling on below decks in surely the
most impossible situation any sailors at sea had ever faced. He had fought for
his brothers in arms.

“Yes,” Fedorov explained, still
excited by his discovery. “We did it, or rather we were going to do it just
now. But I  think that has all changed. We may have done it once before,
and we have seen the result, but perhaps that was in some other life, some
other universe, some other time. We may have done it a hundred times for all we
know. Yes,
we
did it. The ship vanished on July 28, 2021, and then
appeared here in the Pacific one month later, the Russian cruiser that killed
Key
West
and started the holocaust. But something sent us sailing through time
and the fire and madness of war so we could have this one second—this one brief
chance to ask a question before we fired our weapon this time. Here we are,
battered, lost and right in the curious sights of an American
Los Angeles
class submarine—boat 722, the
Key West.
And with reflexes honed sharp by
a thousand hours at battle stations these last months, we killed it. Then
everything went to hell. But not this time. Not this time!”