Kirov Saga: Devil's Garden (Kirov Series) (16 page)

“No,
Gordon. It’s not that. The oil doesn’t matter now. I said that before.”

“It
doesn’t matter? We’ve just spent the last 72 hours with our pretty behinds at
considerable risk, not to mention the assets of the entire company. Now it
doesn’t matter?”

How
could she make him understand? When he last pressed her on the order to send
the X-3s to attack the Russian operation in the Caspian she had only revealed
what was necessary—the Russians were planning an operation that would have
grave repercussions and they had to be stopped, if possible. She had said
nothing to him of the Watch, the long vigil on time and history that it
represented, the very notion of displacement in time itself—let alone the rest
of it—the things she had come to learn in recent years that were so unsettling.
How could she unravel the weave of a mystery so profound that she herself
barely had a hold on one single strand of that loom? The Red phone…yes, another
call had come in with a warning she had long feared. It was a brutally simple
message that every member of the Watch had been told to expect in the most dire
emergency, at the last extreme. The signal read “48 Hours.”

“Gordon,”
she began, feeling her way across an impossibly narrow bridge. “Something has
happened that we were told to expect in the event of an extreme emergency.”

“Did
Mack Morgan spike your martini with his talk about the Russian ICBMs?”

“No,
I haven’t heard that yet, but it doesn’t surprise me. It’s where all this
nonsense has been heading for decades. Well now we’re here. It’s time. We have
48 hours.”

“48
hours? Alright, explain that one to me, Elena.”

She
walked across the room, closer to him, and sat on the love seat near her desk.
He stood there, waiting, until she slapped the side of the couch beckoning him
to sit.

“Yes,”
she said. “You better sit down for this one. But before you do, I’d recommend
you pour us both a tote of gin.”

MacRae
could hear something in her voice that he had not perceived before. The doors
were opening, the guards that had kept some deep hidden secret from him all
these years were being dismissed. She wanted to tell him something now—needed
to tell him, and by God he wanted to hear it. The gin sounded like a good idea
and he quickly filled a couple shot glasses with Williams Chase, the best Gin
he had ever tasted.

“We
need to get to Delphi no later than dawn tomorrow.”

He
gave her a very long look. “Very well. It will be fourteen hours if we sail
north of the mainland.”

“That’s
too much time. We’ll have to go by helicopter.”

“Aye,
that’s the fastest way. The birds can have you there in ninety minutes, but
they just returned from that ferry mission out of Baku. The last helo hasn’t
even landed yet.”

“How
many do we have available?”

“Three,
as soon as Lieutenant Ryan lands, and he’s due back in about fifteen minutes.”

“Can
we get them ready to fly again as soon as possible?” She saw the look of
exasperation on his face, and knew he hated being left in the dark like this,
but time was running out. “Bear with me, Gordon. This is important. Order the
ship to Heraklion on Crete with the tankers. I’ve made arrangements there for
anchorage in the event things get worse—and they
will
get worse. I think
you and I both know that. In spite of that, we have business at Delphi. I’ll
want you, Mack Morgan, and a select group of men along for security—as many as
we can take.”

The
Captain stood up, wanting the answers to a hundred questions but knowing her
well enough to have patience now. He walked to the desk phone, punching up the
bridge. “Mister Dean,” he said firmly, his eyes on Elena as he spoke. “Set your
course for Crete, the port of Heraklion, at the best speed possible. Escort our
remaining tankers, and there will be further instructions for you when you
arrive. I will be with Miss Fairchild and we will be taking the helicopters, so
the ship is yours. Please let Lieutenant Ryan know we’ll be a little farther
west when he arrives. He can vector in by IFF.”

 “Very
well, sir. I have the ship.”

“And
Mister Dean, I want every X-3 available serviced, refueled and ready on the aft
deck by 04:00 hours. Three squads of Argonauts will deploy on this mission.
Tell Mack Morgan he has the pick of the litter.”

“Yes
sir. I’ll send down the order.”

“Thank
you, Mister Dean.” He hung up the phone, folding his arms, lips pursed, a look
of waiting concern on his face.

“Get
back over here with that gin,” she said quietly. “I’m going to tell you the
damndest story you’ve ever heard.”

* * *

My
God
, he thought. A ship
appearing out of nowhere in 1941—a ship from the future? To make matters worse
it was a Russian ship, and then she had told him the Russians had been playing
with the notion of time displacement as associated with nuclear detonations for
decades.

“It
was random at first, a kind of side effect, like EMP when they first discovered
that about air bursts. Now it appears they have determined how to control it to
some extent,” she told him. “This ship—we called it
Geronimo
once, and
still do for purposes of code—well, we now know it as the battlecruiser
Kirov
,
the new ship they commissioned just a few years ago.”

“But
Mack Morgan tells me the damn thing was blown to hell when that volcano erupted
in the Kuriles,” he protested. Yet the same impossible answer came in return.

“No,
Gordon, it wasn’t. It was displaced in time again, and this is the event we
were told to watch out for—the Demon volcano eruption and that ship vanishing
again. We’re on the eve of a grand transformation now. Something truly profound
is about to happen—something terrible.”

“What?
Is it somehow related to this ship?”

“Yes.
Kirov
has everything to do with it, but we aren’t exactly sure what to
expect. One thing we were told is this: it could be catastrophic—life ending—at
least life as we know it now. And the worst of it is that no one that survives will
know about it. This thing will happen and then it will all change—that is if
the missiles don’t finish off the world first.”

“How
can you know something like this? Is this all speculation? I can understand that
the world’s at the edge of oblivion now with this news from Morgan on the Russian
ICBMs, but you sound a whole lot more terrified than that.”

“I
am…And to answer your question, we know because we were warned about this very
moment—told what to expect.”

“Warned?
By who? Has some pointy headed scientist come up with this prediction or was it
a politician this time?”

“No,
Gordon. The warning didn’t come from anyone here…”

MacRae
cocked his head to one side, his eyes narrowing. “See here now. If you expect
me to believe in little green men from Mars...”

“No,
it has nothing to do with extraterrestrials either. I’m afraid our doom will be
kept all in the family this time around. The warning came from the one and only
place that
could
possibly know what would happen. It came from the
future.”

Chapter
14

From
the future? What in the world was the
woman talking about? Yet the more he thought about it the more it made some
crazy kind of sense in his mind. If was ever possible to perfect the science of
travel in time, it would be in the future. If it was true that the Russians had
been meddling with it, conducting strange experiments on the fringes of their
nuclear weapons tests all through the decades, then future generations would
know that and certainly do the same. If these experiments carried on through
the decades yet to come…

How
was that possible? MacRae couldn’t quite get his mind around it. Wasn’t this
the here and now—the only reality? They were creeping forward into the future,
second by second, and dragging the reality of their lives forward as they went,
but Elena made it sound as though the future already existed out there
somewhere, as if the next year had already happened, the next decade, the next
century.

From
the future? Who was it that came? How did she know they were from the future?
How could this group she was part of believe what they were told? What evidence
did they provide? One question followed another, filling up his mind until it
was crowded with doubt and confusion. Yet what if the rest of the story was
true? What if the Russians did discover strange evidence of time displacement
when they blasted the frozen north with the enormous Tsar Bomba? What did they
really find out about it? And how could they learn to control it to such an
extent that they could shift a goddamned battlecruiser into the middle of the
Second World War?

Then
he imagined what the men of that era might have thought and experienced when
confronted with this reality. If it came down to evidence of
Kirov’s
displacement in time, she had told him it was ample. The Royal Navy had photographs
of the ship sailing through the Straits of Gibraltar in 1942! He had seen one
with his own eyes when she pulled it from a hidden vault and showed it to him.
Then she spoke of changes, alterations in the flow of events, alternate
history.

“We
aren’t sure if the war played out as it might have after that ship arrived.
After all, operations were cancelled, ships, men and planes lost in action
against
Kirov
. The chance that the history was altered was very high,
but no one knew for sure. They looked at the world as if things had always happened
the way they were written in the library books, but that was not the case any
longer.”

“This
is fantastic…unbelievable!”

“Think
of it this way. History became editable right about the same time photography
and analog video footage went through the evolution to digital imagery.” That
was the way she had tried to explain it to him.

“Remember
the switch from analogue to digital? It was mandated right across the whole
nation. All stations moved to the new digital signals, and from that moment
anything broadcast was editable—not in the cutting room the old fashioned way,
which could always be found out. No. Not like Richard Nixon blundering about to
try and erase those Watergate tapes. Now they could edit pixel by pixel if they
wanted to, and they often did, with no one ever knowing about it. We got the
term WYSIWYG when computers revolutionized our society, but it seldom ever was.
Nobody could ever trust what they saw or what they got in digital video again.”

And
so they had put a watch on events, she told him, waiting for the ship to appear
and planning to muster the necessary resources to deal with it when that
happened.
Kirov’s
sudden appearance in the Pacific of 2021, and the
ship’s return to Vladivostok, was a shock. It was a warning sign. It was
something they had been told to expect and fear, and it had finally happened.

MacRae
heard his own voice asking the impossible questions now: “Who? Who gave that
warning? Are you saying men appeared from the future with information about
this ship and its doings?”

“Men?
No. Information…yes. That’s what appeared, Gordon. The Watch is a very select
organization. There are only twelve active members at any given time. Should
one die or be incapacitated, then another is briefed and appointed. We thought
we were one of history’s greatest secrets. There have been many secret
organizations through the centuries, but we thought we still had this one
nicely under our hats—until we started receiving information.”

“From
the future?”

“Yes.”

“How
do you know that?

“Well…
let me put it to you this way. We received a transmission containing video
footage on a Friday morning. It was dated four days hence, supposedly coverage
of an event the following Tuesday, and it was awful.”

“Awful
in what way?”

“Well,
Gordon, it was rather shocking to look at. Then we presumed it was just part of
the editable world out there, and a damn good video editing prank…Until the
following Tuesday when it actually happened.”

“What
happened?”

“One
of the most dramatic and memorable events of the early 21st century, the 9/11
attack in New York.”

“You’re
telling me you received video footage of the event four days before it
happened?”

“We
did, and it was chapter and verse identical to footage shot for the first time
that day by numerous news outlets covering the tragedy—pixel perfect.”

That
statement hit MacRae like a rock. He felt staggered, as though he might have
actually taken a physical blow. There were tons of conspiracy theories
surrounding the World Trade Center attacks, but this one trumped them all.
Video footage of the event four days before it happened?

“The
transmissions continued,” she went on. “We saw things that were yet to happen,
and soon the evidence was overwhelming. The only place it could be coming from
was the future. No one could engineer data that would so exactly correspond to
actual footage randomly shot at the events in question. It was truly chilling.”