Kirov Saga: Devil's Garden (Kirov Series) (31 page)

A DX specialist was a shortwave operator who focused on receiving
and identifying the location of distant radio signals that could propagate for
thousands of miles around the earth at times. Fedorov was astounded! He
immediately recognized what the call sign prefix was, the four character
identifier for
Kirov!
The sender name was obvious as well. NIK was the
handle Nikolin would always append by sheer habit to any message he encoded. As
for the location, as a trained navigator he was also very familiar with the
Maidenhead locator map, which bisected the world map on a grid and assigned
letters to each column for longitude and each row for latitude. By cross
indexing the two letters you could get a general idea of the approximate
location of the signal, and this message had been coded PN. He immediately knew
that latitude was in the Pacific, and very near to Vladivostok!

He rushed to the radio room, eyes alight to get a Maidenhead map
and confirm his assumption. “My God!” he said. “How is this possible?” The
signal is coming from a map box centered on Korea, with the Yellow Sea on one
side and the Sea of Japan on the other. He had seen a hundred messages handed
to him by Nikolin to plot ship traffic, and they always ended the very same
way. He would triple hyphen, then append the Maidenhead locator code followed by
his own operator’s code, NIK. One fact tumbled upon another in a wild moment of
realization.
Kirov
…
Here
…
In 1908
…In the waters off Korea
or Japan!

“Get another transmission off at maximum power. Boost the signal
any way you can! Give our call sign, Maidenhead coordinates and append the
operator code FDV. Send it on our military shortwave band. Do it now!”

*
* *

It
came in loud and clear, rising above the low band transmissions,
though Nikolin was surprised to see it was on a higher military transmission
band. The call sign did not mean anything to him at first, though he wrote it
down to look it up. ANAV. Then the message transitioned into a standard
military hail call, and it was giving a specific target, the operator the sender
was hoping to contact. To his great surprise it was him!

“Captain…”

Karpov was in the Captain’s chair, watching the HD video feed from
the Tin Man. “Have they changed their minds, Mister Nikolin?” He assumed
Nikolin had received a message from the Japanese. He had been pounding their
cruiser squadron with all three of his twin 152mm batteries for the last several
minutes. The lead ship, which he presumed to be the flagship, had fallen off
the battle line, burning badly amidships after three more hits had shattered a
tall mainmast there and blown away one of the cruiser’s three smoke stacks. Jet
black smoke enveloped the ship from the truncated stack.

“No sir…I’m receiving a coded message on the military shortwave
band. It’s from another ship, sir.”

“What ship? Rodenko. Are there any other contacts on radar?”

“No sir, we have only the eight contacts we are presently
engaging”

“Captain, I have the ship call sign prefix now. ANAV. It’s a
Russian ship, the
Anatoly Alexandrov.”

That gave Karpov a moment’s hesitation, his head turning sharply
to the communications station.

“What did you say?
Anatoly Alexandrov
?”

Karpov raised an eyebrow in surprise. “That’s a floating nuclear
power facility stationed off the Kaspiysk naval base. Volsky was going to use
it in that operation to rescue Fedorov! Are you certain that was that callsign?”

“Yes sir! It can’t be anyone else. The first shortwave long
distance calls weren’t made until the early 1920s. And the operator code on this
one was FDV. That’s Fedorov, Captain. He always signs that way. He’s trying to
contact us via shortwave! Those signals can reach virtually any location on
earth using skywave propagation.”

The Captain passed a moment of complete confusion. It was as if he
had been caught right in the middle of an elaborate crime, with the authorities
bursting in to apprehend him. He felt a sudden jab of guilt at the thought
Fedorov was trying to signal them, pulled back to that first meeting with Admiral
Volsky when the young navigator had put forward his plan to find Orlov.
Fedorov! What was he doing here…in 1908?

Suddenly the crack of the ships 152mm deck guns was a jarring
distraction. Karpov felt light headed, strangely bothered, and then quickly
turned to Samsonov. “Secure deck guns,” he said sharply. “That will suffice for
the moment. Mister Rodenko!”

“Sir?”

“Resume evasive heading and maneuver to break off from this
engagement. Head west if you must, and get us beyond their visual horizon. Then
turn the ship south and resume course 180 at your earliest opportunity. I’ll
need to work closely with Mister Nikolin at the moment, and I think we have
taught these ships a lesson. This message now has top priority.”

Chapter 27

It
was a slow process, and the signal faded at times and was lost,
but they were able to get a message through. Nikolin worked out the subsquare
location on the grid from Fedorov’s signal.

“They are right in the Caspian Sea, sir. Just off the coast at
Kaspiysk.”

“My God, they must have run their procedure with that damnable
Rod-25 and then shifted back here even as we have—but why 1908? Our shift was
caused by that explosive detonation. Why would they shift here as well, to this
day and year? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“I’m getting a voice signal now. They’re using a frequency above
12MHz to improve integrity. Got him sir!”

“…Read me on this channel. Repeat, this is Anton Fedorov aboard
Anatoly Alexandrov on location in the Caspian sea. Calling battlecruiser Kirov.
Please acknowledge.”

Karpov nodded his head, giving Nikolin the go ahead to respond.

“Roger that,
Anatoly Alexandrov
. This is
Kirov
calling.
Reading you five by five, loud and clear, Fedorov. Lieutenant Nikolin responding.”

“Ten Four – Nikolin! Am I ever glad to hear your voice! Where are you?
Over.”

Karpov reached for the handset now: “Fedorov? What are you doing
here? Do you realize what year this is?”

“Captain Karpov? Good to hear you, sir. To answer your question,
we really have no idea why we are here. Dobrynin ran his procedure and here we
are. I have just verified the date. Over.”

“Well, what in God’s name are you going to do here?”

“…Good question, Captain. We have Orlov! But when we attempted to
use Rod-25 to return home, we ended up here instead. Now we must see what we
can do about all this. Is Orlan with you?

“No.
Orlan
is not here.”

There was silence on the line for a time. Then Fedorov returned,
his voice uncertain.
“Orlan did not shift with you? And what of Admiral
Golovko?”

“Neither ship shifted here with us. We are alone, and I have no
idea what has happened to
Orlan
.”

“Might it still be trapped in 1945, Captain?”

This time it was Karpov that hesitated before he spoke. “That is
possible, Fedorov, but given the circumstances we were facing, I doubt the ship
survived…”

There was another pause that seemed interminably long, and Karpov
realized that Fedorov must be reading between the lines of everything he was
saying here. The man was not stupid. He would soon understand that there was
combat, though the Captain had no intention of going into the details here. Yet
Fedorov’s next question was very pointed, and touched on the heart of the
matter.

“Captain….How did you shift here? Rod-25 is with us.”

“There’s no point discussing that, Fedorov. The fact is, we are
here, and with no way to get home, or so I believed until I heard your voice.”

“I see…Captain, I don’t have to tell you how important it is that
we do nothing to interfere with the history of this time period. We must work
to rendezvous and get to you with a control rod. Over
”

Karpov ignored the first half of what Fedorov said. “And how do
you propose to get here? Do you expect us to sail into to the Black Sea and
have no one here notice this ship?”

“
We have an Mi-26 loaded with fuel and two more control rods that
may work just like Rod-25. Our plan was to fly them to you on the Pacific
coast, over.”

“Fly here? It’s a huge distance, Fedorov. Even for an Mi-26.”

“We may have the fuel…But perhaps you could sail our way and we
could arrange a rendezvous some place closer. What is your present position?”

“We are in the Sea of Japan at the moment.” Karpov sounded
impatient now, almost as if he resented this sudden and unexpected development
and saw it as an interruption. It would certainly mean his planned operation
here would end abruptly, and they would again be dipping an infernal control
rod into the nuclear soup aboard
Kirov
. Who knew where they might turn
up next? He was now at a decisive point in history, with exactly the right
instrument to impose his will on time. Now comes Fedorov with another
outlandish rescue plan.

“If you could get to the Arabian Sea, or even the Bay of Bengal it
would give us much more safety margin on the fuel. I think we could get the
Mi-26 there easily enough. Over.”

Karpov pursed his lips, his inner resistance to the plan obvious
on his face. He stood up straight, noting Rodenko was watching the scene
closely. He will argue that we must look to the welfare of the crew, he
thought. He will want us all together again with one happy party here on the
ship—including Orlov, eh? Somehow the thought of seeing the Chief again did not
seem very appealing to Karpov. Now he needed time to think this over and decide
what to do. He raised the handset.

“We will discuss this with the other officers here, Fedorov, and
see what should be done. I will contact you again in 48 hours on this frequency
at 18:00 hours.”

Again the long pause.
“Two days? Why the delay?”

“It’s another long sea voyage and a risky plan, Fedorov. I will
need time to consider it and make plans.”

“Very well, Captain. If you have an alternative plan, please let
me know and we will do our best to try and reach you. If you come west you need
only worry about the Singapore Strait. Make a night transit there and then you
should be able to make most of the rest of the voyage without undue notice. In
the meantime, try to be as inconspicuous as possible there. Over.”

“I understand, Fedorov. We will discuss this later. Karpov over
and out.” He switched off the handset with a hard squeeze of his hand.

Fedorov! Intrepid, brave hearted Fedorov. He had come all the way
across Siberia to find and rescue Orlov. Now he was trying to rescue
Kirov
and get them safely home, but to what end? They could not even get themselves
there. How the
Anatoly Alexandrov
shifted here to 1908 was still an
unanswered mystery.

I could sail half way round the world for this rendezvous and then
what, Karpov wondered? Would those other control rods even work? If they did
work, where would the ship turn up? Would we return to the future and find ourselves
in the midst of a great war, a solitary ship to confront any enemy we
encountered? Our twenty-one missiles would count for nothing back there. Here they
represent enormous power, decisive power, the power to choke the breath from
fate itself!

He stood up, deeply troubled. Then he remembered the engagement
they had been fighting, and turned to Rodenko, who was still watching from
across the room at the Plexiglas situation board.

“Report, Mister Rodenko. What is our status?”

“Sir, we are at 48,000 meters and opening the range. Those main
masts looked to be several hundred feet high, as is our own radar mast here.
But we should slip over their horizon in a few minutes.”

“Very well… Then take the ship south. Maintain 30 knots for the
next ten minutes, then fall off to two thirds. No need to put stress on that
hull patch.” The ship was still a wounded warrior, with a reinforced hull patch
from that torpedo damage inflicted in the Mediterranean Sea by that German
U-Boat.

Karpov shook his head, remembering the incident. That was a very crafty
U-Boat Captain, he thought. He was hiding in that shallow inlet and when
Fedorov finally realized it he still let the boat go. He did not want to upset
his history books. That was Fedorov, so worried about the order of things, and
trying always to set the broken china back in place in the cupboard. He did not
see the big picture here, though he undoubtedly knew this history very well.
His only concern was now arranging this rendezvous as quietly as possible.

“I will return to my rest shift, Rodenko. You have the bridge.”

“Very good, sir.”

“Captain off the Bridge!”

*
* *