Kirov Saga: Armageddon (Kirov Series) (2 page)

“Go! If you have escaped then you must get out of here. Head south
and hide in the woods! Quickly, or the guards will find you!”

Mironov moved, on instinct, for he had been a fugitive for years
now, the Okhrana always nipping at his heels. He started for the door but, as
fate would have it, three dark coated men were walking slowly toward the
weathered porch. So he turned and ran up the main stairway, thinking he might
get through a window and climb down a gutter pipe to find the woods beyond. Yet
no sooner had he made the upper landing when he saw more uniformed men coming
out of one of the rooms. This sent him rushing down the hall, turning off
quickly to the narrow back stairway, which was his only hope of escape now. As
he started down into the shadows, there came a dark rumble, as if thunder had
broken the sky with the threat of rain.

His boots were hard on the steps as he hastened down, and he hoped
no one had heard him. Reaching the bottom, he peered furtively around the edge
of the wall into the dining room. All was quiet and empty. There was a fire
burning softly on the hearth, and the smell of something cooking. He stepped
into the room, clearly confused and somewhat disoriented. There, he saw the
world as he might have expected it. There was no sign of the frenetic activity
he had seen outside in the rail yard, no soldiers, no trains waiting, no one
being herded into the cars.

He looked down at the weathered newspaper in his hand, astonished
by what he now read. Stalingrad…a city named after a man called Stalin, the man
of steel. Then another article, on Baku where they showed an image of the city
nestled on a wide bay at the edge of the Caspian Sea and surrounded by high
hills. Mironov had thought to find the revolution there, but the photo showed
the ruin and misery of war. The city looked like an industrial slum, yet the
article referenced a name.
“Kirov yet stands his brave watch on the city,”
it read.

There in the photograph he could see the prominent statue of a
uniformed man on a high hilltop pedestal of stone. His arm was raised in a
proud salutation, as if greeting the masses below while also beckoning to some
distant future with the promise of hope. Kirov… Who was that? Something about
the name was very appealing to him, and the longer he looked at that image the
more he was taken by the odd notion that he was seeing himself there, a distant
ghost in a bleak future where every hope had perished but the one he held in
his outstretched hand.

Mironov looked over his shoulder, his eyes darkly on the shadowed
entrance to the stairway…the stairway the stranger had come down. The stairway Fedorov
had insisted he go down again himself after he first followed the man’s
footsteps that day in late June of 1908. The stairway, and the warning
never
to use it again...

Yet curiosity is a powerful thing. He took two more bold trips up and
down those stairs, each one more harrowing than the last. There he learned of
the hideous world that was coming, dark and pitiless as the soul of the man who
would forge it from the steel of his own hand, Josef Stalin.

There he found another paper, this time a poster extolling the
leader of the great Soviet Union—Stalin. In a moment of strange déjà vu he
thought he had seen that face a thousand times before—the coldness in Stalin’s
eyes, the emptiness that yawned open, boundless as the night and darker than
perdition. It was as if he was looking into the eyes of death itself, come to
make a quiet appointment that would end his days forever. And he also learned why
the statue above the city of Baku looked so familiar to him, and the meaning of
the warning the stranger had whispered to him that day:
‘Do not go to St.
Petersburg in 1934! Beware Stalin! Beware the month of December!’

It was then that he finally knew the meaning of the stranger’s
warning, and what he had to do.

*
* *

The
prison was a dark and cheerless place, a place of terror, and
isolation and the misery squeezed from one man after another where they huddled
in the cold stone cells, behind heartless bars of iron. One man sat there,
brooding, yet scheming in his mind. He had been arrested for his persistent
criminal acts against the order of the state. The tall, fearsome agents of the
Okhrana had tracked him down and dragged him before a court of censure, where
he was lucky to have only been sentenced to 18 months in Bayil, the Black Hole
of Baku.

He was born 18 December, 1878 in a little town in the Caucasus
called Gori. His mother had been a simple housekeeper, his father a cobbler who
often drunk himself into a stupor and beat him cruelly in the early years of
his life, where the world also branded him with the scars of smallpox, and
physical ailments in his feet and left arm that would plague him in later
years. Yet he endured the abuse, as if he was nothing more than another piece
of stone beat upon by his father, and he grew to a handsome man in his
twenties.

His rebellious spirit soon found him in the activist circles and
hidden meeting rooms of the incipient revolution in Russia. He read forbidden
literature, the writings of men named Lenin and Marx, and soon began to agitate
on their behalf. He wrote and circulated papers condemning the wealthy oil
barons and bankers who had come to Baku at the edge of the Caspian Sea, and he
helped organize workers strikes against them there. He joined the Bolsheviks,
helped to print and spread their propaganda, and recruited new cells. He robbed
the bankers he saw bleeding the country dry and used their money to foment
further revolutionary activity…and he was tracked down by the Tsar’s secret
police and arrested.

Now he sat in the prison of Bayil, brooding on how he might soon
regain his freedom and continue with his revolutionary zeal. It was all
arranged. He would feign illness so he could be taken from his cell to the
infirmary, and there he would switch places with another patient being
discharged, and escape. He had secretly sent messages to his comrades outside,
and they would arrange a sleigh and driver to spirit him away into the cold
countryside where he would travel north and east, far away from the black hole
in which he now found himself. He would then change his name, assuming an alias
like so many other comrades in the struggle, and he would find another cell to
infect and breed the virus of revolution. The name would be a simple one,
easily grasped, and rooted in the Russian word that sounded much like his old
family name. He was Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, and Dzhuga meant “Steel”
in the old Georgian tongue. So he called himself by the Russian name for that
word—“Stalin.”

It was all set to happen as he planned it, except for one small
mishap. Three nights before he would set his plan in motion a man arrived at
the gate of the prison, dressed in the dark black garb of the Okhrana. He
presented his badge and papers, and was let in through the high metal doors, slowly
climbing the stone steps to the warden’s office. In his hand he held an order
concerning a certain prisoner, and soon the cold clap of his boots were echoing
in the long stony hallway that led to the cell where Stalin slept.

The prisoner was awakened in the night, squinting up through
bleary, sleepless eyes when a voice spoke from beyond the metal bars, saying
his old family name, a question in the inflexion.

“Yes,” he breathed, wondering who the shadow was that had come to
him in the dark of the night. The shadow was death—his own death—in the hand of
a man who held a steel pistol, aiming it right at the center of the heart that
would so blacken the world in decades to come. The shadow had a name as well, Sergei
Mironovich Kostrikov, though he never spoke it and he wasted not another second
as he squeezed the trigger and fired.

That one single act, the flexing of a finger in the night, would
change the lives and fates of millions, redraw the borders of nations, and
recast the entire political landscape of the world in decades to come. Was it
born in Fedorov’s plaintive and desperate whisper at Mironov’s ear, and given
life by his insatiable curiosity that day? Or did it spring from the hollow of
Orlov’s darkened soul when he leapt from that helicopter and set Fedorov off on
the long pursuit that followed. It did not matter. It was done.

Yet Mironov was not the only man to be shaken by their experience
on that narrow stairway at Ilanskiy. Captain Ivan Volkov had also taken that
journey and he soon learned where he was, the year and day, impossible as it
seemed. After the madness passed, the cold logic of his mind perceived the
opportunity at hand when his reason finally grasped the fact of his existence
in the year 1908. That impossibility soon became possibility, and he knew what
he
would do.

He would become the hidden face in the warning Doctor Zolkin had
desperately tried to hand Captain Karpov one day as the two men jousted in the
sick bay aboard
Kirov
.

“Face it, Karpov,”
Zolkin would say.
“Stalin will eventually rise out of the
fires of the civil war. What then? You want to face off with Stalin?”

“Don’t you understand, Zolkin? Knowledge is power too. I can know
all the history as it is about to unfold. Stalin? I did some reading the other
day. You want to know where Stalin is at this very moment? He’s in prison at
Baku! Why, if I chose to do so I could sail to the Black Sea and send
helicopters there and make an end of Stalin before he ever becomes a factor in
Russian history.”

“My God! Listen to yourself. Sometimes I really wonder if you are
serious about all this. Well… I’ll give you one thing, Captain. You have power
here, that much is obvious. You want to go kill Stalin? I suppose no one can
stop you. Do that, however, and another man may rise from the dark corners of
history to take his place. Your knowledge of future events will come unraveling
the moment he dies. Fedorov will tell you this. Anything you do here will have
dramatic repercussions. So this knowledge you think you can use will soon be useless
when everything starts to change. Yes, someone will rise in Stalin’s place, and
you will not know who that man is, or how to reach him. History may be far more
resilient than you realize.”

Mironov could not see that shadow rising as he stood over the
lifeless body Josef Stalin, watching the man of steel’s blood spread out in a
dark stain on the cold stone floor of the cell. He slipped the pistol into the
holster beneath his dark overcoat, turned on his heel and was gone. Ever
thereafter he would go by another name—
Kirov
.

Part I

The
Plan

“But
that's how it goes; you think you're on top of the world, and suddenly they
spring Armageddon on you.”

―
Neil Gaiman
, Good Omens

Chapter 1

It
was as good a plan as any they might have devised, risky,
impossible, yet the only way forward at that moment. Fedorov reached
Vladivostok with a heavy heart, the grey skies and late autumn mist still
folded about the hills that surrounded the city and the port of the Golden Horn
Bay. It seemed a lifetime or more since he had come here on the battered
battlecruiser
Kirov
, standing on the weather deck with Karpov as they
watched the shoreline grow closer. There they had tried to make sense of the
mystery that had taken them to the fire of past. Was it all a dream, a
nightmare? The scars on the ship dispelled that notion with their cruel mark of
war.

He had watched, dumbfounded, as the ship dueled with British
carriers and battleships in the North Atlantic, and he saw the awful fire of
atomic weapons unleashed on an unsuspecting foe. He had stood in awe at Admiral
Volsky’s side as he greeted the famous John Tovey, Commander of the British
Home Fleet. He stood astounded and shaken as the battleship
Yamato
burned
in the dark of the Coral Sea. Now all these memories and impossible experiences
piled one on another in his mind as he contemplated what they had to do.

“It’s the only way, Admiral,” he said, a sadness in his eyes. “We
started this, and now we must finish it. A submarine is the only way we could
get there and still have any authority. It’s already clear that Karpov will not
listen to reason, at least not from me.”

The men were meeting in the deep underground bunker at Naval
Headquarters Fokino, and the atmosphere there was now very tense. Fedorov had
come in with Chief Dobrynin, and it was a very happy reunion until they
realized the enormity of the situation before them now.

“Suppose I were to come with you,” said Volsky. “Yes, I think I
must do this. I could add the weight of my own authority to the situation. A
direct order to Karpov to desist and rendezvous with us may be all that is
required. What do you think, Director?”

Kamenski raised an eyebrow as he spoke. “Perhaps, Admiral. I was
thinking to invite you on a little vacation with me, but now it seems this will
not be the wisest course. Yes. I think you should go with this bright young man
here, and if you wouldn’t mind my company, I should like to come along as well.
Perhaps there is something I could contribute to the situation, another mind
and voice in the mix.”

“Very well, then it’s agreed, but this will be a very perilous
journey, Kamenski.”

“Most likely—are there any other kind when the world is at the
edge of Armageddon and it has come down to the four of us here to save it from
certain oblivion? Yes, that’s a tall order for any chef I know. I must be sure to
bring along my very best tea.”

Volsky smiled, feeling just a little more hopeful. Something in
the manner of this ex-KGB man was most disarming. He had a quiet inner strength
that might see him calmly lighting his pipe or brewing up tea as the world came
tumbling down in its final, terrible crash. That thought set Volsky’s mind on
the urgency of their situation, and he reached for the secure line to Moscow,
knowing their time could be running out, even as he spoke.

“I think we had better see if Moscow is getting ready to burn down
the house. I will put a call through to Suchkov, Chief of the Navy. He will
certainly be in on any final decisions to be made on this matter.”

It took time, as the persistent electromagnetic effects in the heavily
occluded atmosphere due to the Demon Volcano eruption were impeding normal
radio communications. In the end he had to switch to a land line.

“That monster in the Kuriles has everything fouled up.
Communications are spotty all through the region. The ash cloud is so massive
that it is generating its own weather! Imagine lightning in the midst of all
that. The only consolation is that the Admirals and Generals may have trouble
ordering their sailors and soldiers to kill one another.”

Volsky smiled wanly as he continued to wait on the line. Eventually
he was able to get through, and they all listened on speaker phone as he and Suchkov
spoke of the current situation, discussing the sudden escalation that was now
expected after the bold Chinese riposte in detonating a nuclear warhead over
the west coast of the United States.

“Listen Suchkov. You and I have had our disagreements in the past,
but there is no time for that now. Everything depends on what may happen here
in the next twelve hours.”

“Events are taking their course, Admiral.”
The voice of Suchkov was
thin and drawn on the speakerphone.
“The Chinese reprisal for those American
missile bomber strikes on their satellite facilities was unexpected, and we
both know the Americans will not let it go unanswered. We have brought the
strategic arm of our forces to a high level of preparedness as a signal to the
Americans. Perhaps they will be cautious now, or at least have second thoughts
before they lob a missile at Beijing.”

“Yes, but this could also force the Americans to their DEFCON One!
They will prepare all their missiles for launch as well. Then we stand on the
razor’s edge, and anything could tip the balance into utter chaos. You must do
whatever you can to
prevent
a strategic missile launch now, not start
one!” Volsky’s voice was strident with his effort to persuade the Navy Chief
and, as he finished, Kamenski leaned in, whispering something in his ear.

“Hold on, Suchkov,” said Volsky. “There is someone else here who
wishes to speak to you.” He gestured to Kamenski, who sat down slowly, leaning
forward heavily on the table.

“Greetings my old friend.”

“Pavel?...Pavel Kamenski?”

“One and the same, Suchkov. I am here with Admiral Volsky, and I
must concur with everything he says. We are going to try something here, and we
need time. You must do whatever you can to give us that time. Understood?”

There was silence on the line for a good long while, and they
heard other voices murmuring in the background. Then Suchkov’s voice returned,
more subdued now, yet edged with a tone of fatalism.
“What is it you are
planning? What are you going to do?”

“You must leave that to me, Suchkov, but rest assured, we have a
plan. There are others in the room with you that will know something of what I
speak of now, but I can say nothing more here, not even on this secure line. I
have come to learn in my day that things are seldom as secure as one might
believe. You must trust that Admiral Volsky and I will manage the situation.
Once the missiles launch they cannot be called back. So do everything in your
power to delay that final moment. Call Beijing at once.”

“But what about the Americans? What if they launch first?”

“Then you will have plenty of time to launch second. What
difference will any of that make if this happens, Suchkov? You have already
shown the Americans your fist. Now I advise you to stand down the missile
bastions for twenty-four hours, and tell the Americans you are doing this. That
will send another signal, yes? This too will give them reason for second
thoughts about answering the Chinese missile attack. As for Beijing, tell them
that unless they desist from any further actions of this nature they will not
have our support should the Americans target their homeland. They have seen you
readying your missiles, and this only emboldens them. Without us they could
never hope to prevail or even deter a strategic strike from the Americans. When
they see us stand down to a lower level of alert, that will give
them
reason for second thoughts as well. Then perhaps Admiral Volsky and I will have
the time we need to see what we can do here.”

Again the murmurs in the background. Then Suchkov returned to the line.
“Very well, Mister Deputy Secretary.”

“Deputy Secretary? I have not heard that old handle for a good
many years, Suchkov.”

“Yet that is how we remember you, Pavel. There are a good many old
grey heads in this room. Very well. We will do as you ask, but please keep us
informed.”

“You have my word on it,” Kamenski smiled at Volsky now as they
concluded the call. “It seems I still have a little bit of pull in Moscow,” he
said softly. “Now…Let’s get on with it. We have no time to waste. What about
this submarine?”

Volsky pursed his lips. “There are three diesel electric boats at
Pavlovsk Bay. Everything else is at sea.”

“That’s all?” Fedorov seemed concerned. “We certainly can’t use a
diesel boat. We’ll need something with nuclear propulsion.”

“We lost
Omsk
and
Viluchinsk
after that missile
attack against the American 7th Fleet, though we made them pay for those kills.
We think we may have a confirmed kill on
Key West
.”

“Key West?”
Fedorov was very surprised. “But that was the submarine Karpov
spared—the key trigger point for this war we’re facing.”

“Yes it was, but events have been shuffled like a bad poker hand,
Mister Fedorov.
Key West
was snooping for signs of our missing ships and
engaged by
Gepard
. That said, we have very little left, a couple
Akula
class boats and the diesel subs.
Kazan
is the only other missile attack
boat remaining, and I pulled it off the line for replenishment two days ago.
It’s in the Sea of Okhotsk with the
Admiral Kuznetsov
. That’s the last real
fighting ship we have—that, three
Uladoly
class destroyers and a couple
old NKVD frigates that should have been retired decades ago. I’m not even sure
how they got them running again. I’ve reformed a battlegroup with those ships,
but they will be little more than nice targets for the Americans if we sortie
again.”

“
Kazan
…That’s the new
Yasen
class boat,” said
Fedorov. “That will do, Admiral. It has a KPM type pressurized water reactor
and can make over 35 knots submerged. It’s just what we need, fast, quiet, and
very deadly.”

“This young man knows more about my ships than I do, Kamenski.”
The two older men smiled. “Very well, I will see what I can do about
Kazan
.
Yes, I think this will work out well. We can put the control rods on three
helicopters and fly them out to the
Admiral Kuznetsov.”

“Three helicopters? Why so many?”

“So that we can be sure at least one of them gets there! The
Japanese are on full alert now, though that damn volcano still has the skies
over Hokkaido covered with ashfall. That said, we should not risk losing all
three control rods in a single helicopter.”

“I agree,” said Kamenski. “Yes, this would be very wise.”

“Then after we reach the carrier we can transfer to a smaller boat
for the rendezvous with
Kazan
. We must do this at night. The Americans
have undoubtedly been looking for this submarine as well, and we must not allow
them to find it. I would not be surprised if they already have a submarine in
the Sea of Okhotsk by now. This war has not gone well for us. If not for the
fact that the Chinese are making such a fuss over Taiwan, and drawing off the
American carrier battlegroups, we would be out of business as a naval force in
the Pacific by now.”

“Ironic,” said Fedorov. “That is the very thing Karpov thinks he
is going to change in 1908.”

“Why is it we cannot simply know what has happened by now?” Volsky
looked from Kamenski to Fedorov, his two resident guides where the confounding
prospect of time travel was concerned.

“I understand what you mean,” said Kamenski, “but remember what I
explained about that still point in time? We are all there, the four of us, but
I think Karpov is there too, and with all the men aboard
Kirov
. He and
that ship of his are not where they belong. Their very presence in 1908 is
offensive to the flow of fate and time. Yes, they can act and work enormous
changes in the past, as we have seen, but I think they exist and sail in the
eye of the maelstrom. They are in the sea of time, yet in a protected spot, and
things cannot resolve until this whole situation works itself out.”

“But everything Karpov does should be concluded by now. He should
have been in his grave long ago.”

“It would seem that way from our perspective, but I do not think
time works that way. She must consider every point of view. Time is not the
nice straight line from point A to point B that you think it is. It is all
twisted and folded about itself and, in fact, any two points on that squiggly
line could meet and be joined. This is why I say we are all together now, in
one place, a nexus point where the lines of fate meet and run through one
another like a Gordian knot, and we sit here trying to figure out how to
untangle it. Karpov is there with us, and we have set events in motion here that
have a strong possibility of impacting what he does—deciding whether he does
anything at all! Therefore I don’t think things have changed yet. The
transformation has not yet occurred, though it might happen at any second. Can
you not feel the tension in the air now?”

He looked around him as if he could see what he was describing. “It
is not merely because of the looming war. I think time itself is waiting to pass
judgment and read our sentence for the crimes we have committed against her.
But until we resolve this business with Karpov, everything is still in play. All
we can do now is work out our plan, and yet I believe our very intention to do
so seems to hold time in abeyance. It must wait for us, and see what
we
might do.”