Three Kings (Kirov Series) (34 page)

The
Captain went forward with Elena Fairchild, carrying that small box they had
retrieved from the dig site at Delphi. They reached the executive suite, tired,
and somewhat confused. Morgan came in last after having stopped on the bridge
to confer briefly with Commander Dean.

“What’s
happening out there, Mack?” said Elena as she cast a worried glance at the
clock on the wall.

Her
intelligence officer, Mack Morgan, scratched his dark beard, a puzzled
expression on his face. “Well, Mum, there’s been nothing on the black line
while we were gone, so I’ve no hard intelligence over that channel. Funny thing
now is that Mister Dean says we’ve got some strange interference on all the
normal communications channels.”

“Interference?
Anything wrong with the equipment?”

“No,
Mum, they’ve checked it top to bottom. It’s very odd. We can’t even pick up
anything on either AM or FM bands, not a word, not a whisper. It’s as if
there’s just no one out there.”

At this
Elena’s eyes clouded over with a squall of fear. It has started. It’s already
underway. Captain Gordon MacRae was watching her closely as she stood up, slowly
walking to her desk to depress a hidden button that would open the rear
bulkhead to secret room harboring the red phone.

“Come
with me, gentlemen. There’s one more line we can try.”

Morgan
looked at MacRae, and the two men passed a knowing glance with one another.
This was the hidden inner sanctum of
Argos Fire
, and messages coming
across that line had been the seed of many missions in the past. Neither man
had ever been permitted to enter the room before this, and so it was with some
surprise and an equal measure of curiosity that they both stood now, quietly
following Elena into the small room.

There
was a single chair sitting before a small pedestal crowned by a Plexiglas dome
over the red phone. It had a keypad for code entry and Elena quickly used it to
re-enable her phone. MacRae set the box heavily down on the pedestal desk,
waiting while Elena seated herself on the chair.

“Well,”
she said, “protocol has it that I should report any red mission irregularity at
once. I never thought I would find myself sitting here in front of this damn
phone again. This is all quite unexpected.”

“What
was the failure?” MacRae folded his arms.

“You
saw yourself. The key would not operate, and there was no other passage or
door.”

“But there
was that box,” he pointed.

“Yes,
and now I’ve got to report that and see if I can find out why my key won’t open
it.”

“Try it
again,” MacRae suggested. “No sense making your call unless you’re sure it
won’t work.”

That
sounded reasonable, and so she nodded, drawing out the key again on its chain
and slowly inserting it into the hole. It turned! There was an audible click
and a quiet tone from some mechanism inside the box, and now the front side
tilted open, revealing a small drawer that held a rolled scroll. She glanced at
MacRae, perplexed, and then slowly reached for the scroll to open it.

There
was a brief message, addressed to her, and she read it aloud. “Should you read
this your mission will have concluded as planned. Keep this device within a secure
room aboard
Argos Fire
at all times and it will serve to hold you in a
safe nexus. As of this moment, you are now Watchstander G1. Godspeed.”

“Watchstander
G1?” MacRae did not understand.

“There
were nine of us left,” said Elena. “It seems I’ve been promoted.”

“What
does it mean, Mum?” said Morgan. “A safe nexus?”

She
turned, looking at him with a new light in her eyes, and then smiled. “It means
I know why you can’t raise anything on the radio now, Mack. It’s begun. It’s
happening right now, and we’re right in the eye of the maelstrom.”

“What’s
begun?”

“The
bloody war you’ve been feeding me information on these last nine days. The
missiles are in the air.”

“Athens
would surely be on the target list. It’s fairly thick out there with this
sudden squall, but we’d see a nuclear warhead if one went off.”

“Perhaps,”
said Elena. “Unless we’ve moved.”

“Moved?
Where?” Morgan didn’t understand. They were still in the strait northeast of
Delphi.

Elena
just looked at him, then back to the message on the scroll. She hadn’t read it
all to them, not the string of numbers there, nor the name of the man who had
signed off on the note.

A tone
sounded on the ship’s intercom, and Elena tapped the button to take the
message. It was the ship’s executive officer, Mister Dean.

“Bridge
reporting. We’ve got radar returns now, but can’t seem to get signal returns on
the tankers. Radio is clearing up, but nothing on the Black Line.”

“Forget
the Black Line,” she said. “Listen to AM bands. See if you can pick up any
local news. And you can forget the tankers as well.”

At this
Dean seemed to stumble, a brief silence indicating his confusion before he
spoke again.
“Excuse me, Mum… Forget the tankers? I thought we were to
escort them to
Heraklion
.”

Both
Captain MacRae and Mack Morgan were giving her the same look that had to be on
Dean’s face at that moment, a bemused look of worry and concern.

“Yes,
proceed to
Heraklion
, but I’m afraid the tankers
won’t be coming. I’ll explain everything later Mister Dean. Just get us
underway.”

“Very
good, Mum. We’ll get moving immediately.”

They
had shepherded the company’s tanker fleet through every hazard, all in the
service of securing the deal that could save Fairchild Inc. from certain
bankruptcy after the loss of
Princess Royal
in the Persian Gulf, and
secure vital oil supplies for Britain in the bargain. They had braved the
transit of the Bosphorus and dueled with the Russian Black Sea Fleet, losing
one of their three remaining tankers there,
Princess Irene.
Yet
they had managed to get safely through the Bosphorus with the last two tankers
and two million barrels of precious oil. Then, like a dog that had tussled for
hours with a rope and then suddenly lost interest, the Company CEO had told
them the oil no longer mattered.

MacRae pursed his lips, wondering
what was up here, and how they could have lost radar signals on the tankers.
“We’d best check that radar dome on the mainmast,” he said. “It may ‘
ha
been damaged in the storm.” His Scottish brogue rolled
like honey at times, and his reserve of calm was most welcome in the tension of
the moment.

Elena Fairchild took a long
breath. “Don’t worry about that, Gordon,” said Elena. “The tankers don’t matter
now. They’re no longer with us…”

MacRae scratched his head at
that. “Well they were five miles off our stern ten minutes ago,” he said, an
edge of frustration creeping into his tone.”

“Yes,” she returned, “they were,
and they’re probably still sitting there, god help them now that we’ve moved.”

“Moved? You’re not making sense,
Elena.” He used her first name, he realized, and in front of Mack Morgan, but
then he threw that aside. They were talking about the two million barrels of
crude oil he’d been shepherding the last nine days, and it was no time to worry
about the niceties of protocol. Mack wasn’t stupid. He could read the book that
MacRae and Ms. Fairchild had been writing together, and knew they had cross
that thin professional line between them and become something more than a
company CEO and her dutiful ship’s Captain.

“Sorry Gordon, but there’s no
other way to put it. We’ve moved.
Argos Fire
is no longer in the soup
the world was serving up in 2021. They key finally worked and it did its
job—only not the way I expected. We’ve moved in time, gentlemen. We haven’t
lost our tankers, but they’ve lost us, and god speed them both to safety now.
We’re somewhere else. Their fate is no longer our concern.”

“Somewhere else?” MacRae looked
at Morgan now to see how he was taking this, and he was just standing there,
stupefied, and looking to MacRae to sort things out. The Captain had at least
one anchor on the situation. Elena had made some startling revelations the
previous night, about the Russians, their experiments with an odd effect of
nuclear detonations that cause aberrations in the flow of time. Yet the real
stunner had been the business about the shadowy group that had been established
within the Royal Navy called the Watch.

Yes, the Russians were playing
with time travel, or so she had explained, and it all had something to do now
with that big warship that went missing last July in the Norwegian Sea, the
battlecruiser
Kirov
. The ship went missing alright, to another century!
It had apparently displaced in time to the 1940s, and became embroiled in the
Second World War! That was what she had told him, the goddamned Russians were
tampering with history, but the real revelation was how she had managed to find
that out. He remember the moment when her words had struck him like a
thunderbolt…

“Something truly profound is
about to happen,” she had told him, “something terrible.”

Chapter 29

“What?”
he had asked. “Is
it somehow related to this Russian 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.”

“What do you mean with talk like
that? What will happen that could be worse than a full on nuclear exchange? Is
another volcano about to pop off? And 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 remembered the look he had
given her, cocking 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.”

From the future… Yes, as
impossible as that sounded it held a kernel of sense that he could finally
grasp. If it 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 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…

“You’re saying they revealed this
event, this thing about to happen?”

“More or less. Look, Gordon, I
need you to
think
now. I’ve told you a good deal, but not everything.
Yet consider what I’ve said. The Russians have been playing with time. They’ve
sent a bloody battlecruiser back through time, and it’s been less than kind
about minding its own business. Things have changed, quite a few things. I’m
not sure about it all myself, but think about it. The world can take a poke now
and then and still hold together. We’ve learned that much. The history has a
kind of cohesive quality. It wants to hold true, but there are some events that
are too profound. The changes they introduce in the line of causality cannot be
smoothed over.”

MacRae and Morgan were trying to
follow her, but this was all fairly amazing and they could not quite grasp what
she was saying. Elena could see the looks on their faces, so she tried again.

“Let me see if I can make this a
little more concrete,” she began. “Yes… a man is laying concrete for a new
walk. He gets it all laid out, mixes everything with just the right amount of
water and all. Now he has only so long to trowel and smooth it all out before
it begins to dry and harden. Once it does, it can’t be changed easily, and any
blemish or misstep in the process sets in as it hardens. History is like that.
Events get sifted and mixed into the slurry of time, and it all gets laid out
nice and neat, hardening to the facts we take for granted as unchangeable. Well
that isn’t true. Find a way to go back in time and do things differently, and
you can change things quite easily. In this case that’s what the Russians have
done, and messed that nice fresh laid concrete up rather badly. That change
ripples forward. Break something there in the past, and things get broken here
too, in our time. Back then it might be just a seemingly insignificant change,
like a soft motion of the mason’s trowel, but here it could manifest like a
sledgehammer on the hardened concrete of the history we know, and it can be
rather terrifying. It’s called a finality—an event so important that it
must
change the history of everything that follows it. When that happens, things
do
change all throughout the continuum, suddenly and painfully. That’s what we
were warned of, and it’s about to happen—it may be happening even as we speak.
The only way to avoid the maelstrom of change is to be in the center of a safe
spot on the flux of time—a nexus point.”