B00DSDUWIQ EBOK (5 page)

“They’re
turning tail and running for home,” said MacRae. “But they’ve already done their
worst. Miss Fairchild won’t like the news tonight. We just lost twenty percent
of our oil, and a good ship and crew with it.”

“Aye,
sir. Lucky
Iron Duke
had its Westland Merlin helo up on ASW watch. They’re
vectoring it to
Princess Irene
for rescue operations. Chances are we’ll
bring a good many home.”

The
entire action had taken little more than an hour. It would end with three
Russian ships on the bottom of the sea, and both
Iron Duke
and
Princess
Irene
hit and burning. Captain Williams was on the radio from
Iron Duke
with his report.

“Well,
we took one on the fantail,”
he
said
“But it looks a whole lot worse than it is…. Sorry about Princess Irene.
We’ll get to the crew, but may have to send our Merlin your way until we sort
things out here. Those damn Sizzlers…We took down ten, but two got through.”

“Aye,
Captain,” said MacRae. “You’ve given your best, and we sent them home three ships
light with a fourth on fire. I don’t think we’ll see much more of the Black Sea
Fleet from here on out.”

“Seen
more of it than we needed already,”
said Williams.
“Damn bloody business.”

“If
you can still make way would you join us off the Turkish coast? We’re coming up
to give you just a wee bit more missile umbrella.”

“Much
obliged, Argos Fire. We can only make 20 knots at the moment, but that should get
us south well enough. Iron Duke over and out.”

That
night the survivors aboard
Admiral Grigorovich
lowered the body of Captain
Pomilov into the last launch and made way to join
Makarov
, the only ship
in the fleet that had come through the battle unscathed. The flotilla leader
would burn for another three hours before it keeled over and sank, joining the
two
Krivaks
that had already gone down.

Command
fell to Captain Tsukov on the
Essen
, senior officer in the fleet after Pomilov’s
death. His ship had taken significant damage, but was still seaworthy and could
make 25 knots. The flotilla had expended its entire SSM missile inventory in
the brief, violent action. So now he turned and led what was left of the Black
Sea Fleet home to Novorossiysk, his war over for the moment.

In
his wake, far to the south,
Princess Irene
would burn all night before her
hull gave way and she listed heavily into the massive oil slick blighting the
sea. Turkish ships were out on a rescue operation, trying to fish as many of
the crew out of the sea as possible. Half a million barrels of oil would go down
with her, and now the hopes of the Fairchild company rested on those two last
tankers, slowly creeping west along the Anatolian coast and soon joined by two
more Turkish Frigates in escort. NATO was late to the game, but they were welcome,
as were the flights of Turkish fighters up now to provide additional air cover.

By
dawn of the fourth day of the war,
Argos Fire
had but one last charge to
recover. The ship still had three of her X-3 helos and thirty Argonauts in the Caspian
Sea region, and each minute that passed extended the range and stretched the
tether of safe recovery thinner and thinner. Captain MacRae headed to the
Executive cabin to see the company CEO and explain what had happened. He was
determined to push for the immediate extraction of the Argonauts and a speedy
run for the Bosporus before the Russians could scrape up more aircraft for
another attack.

When
he got there the little nightmare of naval combat that had darkened his watch was
about to deepen to yet another shade of black.

Chapter 5

“Steady
on that winch!” said Dobrynin, hands on his
hips as he supervised the loading operation. They had a crane up on the upper
roof of the
Anatoly Alexandrov,
and they were hoisting up a long metal
tube that might resemble a missile canister to any watchful eyes. Cover of darkness
and overhead clouds would prevent satellites from looking in, but they had seen
NATO drones earlier, and it was obvious that someone was taking an interest in
the operation being mounted on the Caspian coast.

Dobrynin
watched until the tube was safely hoisted up and lowered into an ordnance mover.
It wasn’t a missile canister, but a radiation safe container housing some very
special cargo, a fresh delivery from Admiral Volsky that had been flown all the
way from Severomorsk up north. The Admiral had spoken to him an hour ago on a
very secure channel.

“Is
Rod-25 mounted, Dobrynin?”

“Yes
sir, and I have the reactor up and ready for operations.”

“Good
news. Well, I’m sending you a backup.”
The Admiral went on to explain the complex new twist in the mission they had planned,
and the longer Dobrynin listened, the more he began to silently shake his head.

“1945?”
he said incredulously. “How could it happen, Admiral? We had Rod-25 safe with us
here.”

Volsky
explained what he could, but the fact remained that it was all still a mystery.
Kirov
was gone, and so were
Orlan
and
Admiral Golovko
. Aside
from his submarines he now had no Red Banner Pacific Fleet to speak of, and the
Black Sea Fleet had just been gutted and largely neutralized as an effective fighting
force in a scrap with the British. Everything was now riding on this mission,
Volsky explained. It wasn’t only to try and bring Fedorov home again, or even
Orlov. Now there were three ships and over 1500 officers and crew to worry
about as well.

“I’m
sending you a big helicopter and a lot of extra aviation fuel.”

“But
Admiral, we can’t bring the ships home with that. What is this for?”

Volsky
explained, and Dobrynin’s eyes got wider and wider.
“As for your part,”
the
Admiral concluded,
“you just focus on Fedorov. Bukin is going to handle the
mission involving the Mi-26. My question to you is this—can the landing pad on
Anatoly Alexandrov hold up if we land the Mi-26 there?”

“Yes
sir. It’s a heavy, reinforced structure. In fact we used Mi-26 helos to load the
reactor elements and other equipment and supplies last year when we commissioned
the barge.”

“Very
good. Carry on, Chief. I’m counting on you. You may launch your mission when ready.
Remember our briefing. Your first task is to discover the year and date!”

Yes,
yes, Dobrynin remembered the briefing. The key dates were September 30 thru October
5, 1942. He was to secure the
Anatoly Alexandrov
, then get a scouting
detail ashore north of Makhachkala and begin his search. Troyak would be
broadcasting his position, and he had the exact frequency so he could monitor
it 24/7. Once a signal was received he was to put men ashore in force with any
of the equipment that made it back with him, and use any means necessary to
secure his objective and get safely home. Yet two more control rods had been
received, one from Vladivostok and this last one from Severomorsk. They were to
be loaded on the helicopter the Admiral mentioned. What was in the Admiral’s
vodka this time?

 The
Mi-26 had been used to move in the last of their equipment, and was now at rest,
its enormous bulk squatting on the roof of
Anatoly Alexandrov
like a
giant bug, the eight long props drooping toward the landing pad like enormous spider
legs. Bukin had been promoted from Corporal to Sergeant and he was now in
charge of a small detachment of Marines, five men. One was a pilot, and the others
stood in as flight engineers, but all were trained for combat, and armed to the
teeth. They had supplies consisting mostly of food and ammunition, and the
entire cargo section of the helo was packed with as much aviation fuel as the
Mi-26 could carry.

Wherever
they are going it must be some good long way, thought Dobrynin. He had enough to
worry about getting the reactor certified and ready for use. Let Bukin handle the
helicopter mission.

* * *

Now
Volsky sat in the deep underground bunker
beneath Naval Headquarters Fokino, a precaution given the steady buildup of
American bomber assets in the Pacific. That and the rain of ash fall from the
Demon volcano had cast a pall over the entire region, imposing a lull on operations
as nature revealed her awesome temper. It was humbling to look out and see the
titanic column of smoke and ash billowing up into the atmosphere, even to the
edge of space. The first night after the eruption had been black beyond
measure, as if the sky itself had been broiled to char. No moonlight could
penetrate the thickening air, and a muffled silence fell over the sea and land
as more and more material billowed up into the brimstone night. It created a
deeply ominous feeling in the gut, a sense of warning and desperate urgency settling
over the Admiral’s mind.

This
war was a ragged and haphazard affair, he thought, and a tempest in a teacup compared
to that Demon. Hokkaido Island is being inundated with ash, and the Americans
have pulled everything they had out of Misawa in northernmost Honshu for bases
on the main island further south. China seems single mindedly focused on
Taiwan, and now the North Koreans are launching missiles for the Americans to
shoot down.

The
great standoff with the American fleet was suddenly held in abeyance. CVBG
Nimitz
had altered course and was now steaming to join the stricken
Washington
strike
group in the Marianas. The third carrier, CVBG
Eisenhower
had also
diverted from its course and was heading east through the Sulu Sea and into the
Philippines, apparently also bound for Guam. They were moving their principle
assets to a secure forward base to reorganize prior to resuming operations.

Karpov
had beaten the
Washington
group with his daring and aggressive tactic of
getting in that all important first salvo. Volsky wondered what he might have accomplished
if he had carried out the remainder of his plan. After code
Longarm
sent
the last of their longer range missiles out after the carrier, the fleet itself
was going to execute a hard right and make a high speed rush south. Karpov
planned to use the initial plume from the smaller eruption of the volcano as
top cover, surging south beneath the pall to get his ships inside the 300
kilometer range. At that point he had P-900s on all three ships in the core fleet
for another massed barrage of 42 missiles. These would fire even as the fleet
continued south at their best speed, and if they got inside 200 kilometers the
Moskit-II
Sunburns
on
Kirov
would fire next, followed by the high
speed MOS-III
Starfires
, 30 more missiles with another eight P-800s on
Golovko
.
After that it would be down to deck guns.

Against
a single carrier battlegroup we had the force to prevail, he thought. But the US
Navy was not just a single battlegroup. They could bring that same force to the
battle five times over here in the Pacific. We have fleet enough to hold our
own credibly against only 20% of their real naval power here. Satellites were
already picking up movement west from the 3rd Fleet sector on the US Pacific
coast. CVBG
Ford
was coming.

Against
that I’ve got
Admiral Kuznetsov
hiding up in the Sea of Okhotsk to get away
from that ashfall and have the benefit of land based air cover. Perhaps I can
keep that ship afloat for another week. The two
Udaloys
that made it back
to Vladivostok are useless in an offensive role. All I have left are the submarines,
safe from the Demon’s wrath as they cruised deep beneath the sea.

Reports
there had been mixed. The Americans had found and killed an
Oscar
after the
Russian subs revealed their position when they fired at the carrier. The other
Oscar
fled north, and
Yasen
was also still alive, but running silent. He did
not know what the Americans had beneath the sea, but there were probably a
fistful of deadly hunter killer subs on the prowl by now. What to do next? The
battle was over for the time being, and his thoughts drifted to the operation
underway in the Caspian.

If
I had it to do over I would have put that control rod we found in Vladivostok on
a submarine. Then it would have been right here to find Karpov and surface to
deliver the rod. Perhaps it could have hovered beneath the ship and come home when
Kirov
shifted, but the more he thought about his plan the wilder it
seemed. How do we even know these new rods will work? Kapustin had been very
confident, and his revelation the previous night had been very telling.

“Because
I told you,” he told them with certainty. “I know everything there is to know about
these control rods, where they were manufactured, where they were shipped and
stored, and one thing more—where the materials used in their manufacture came
from…” He let that dangle, a teasing look in his eyes.

“Very
well,” said Kamenski, “enlighten us, Gerasim.”

“There’s
nothing unusual about the manufacturer,” Kapustin continued. “Rosatomica makes a
good percentage of our control rods, but I ran down the materials composition and
source data, and found something very interesting. It may be nothing, but then
again…”

“Yes,
yes, what is it?”

“Well
the materials are sampled for purity, of course, and any residual elements or minerals
are documented. That’s what caught my eye, because this Rod-25 seems to have a
higher reading for calcite and calcium carbonate particles.”

“I
don’t understand,” said Kamenski.

“I’m
not sure I do either,” Kapustin admitted. “But that reading led me to check the
materials source. These rods are basically steel tubes housing materials that
easily absorb neutrons without undergoing fission. They use lots of things,
silver, indium, cadmium, boron, cobalt and a witch’s brew of other elements,
many I’ve never even heard of. The Americans use something called hafnium in
their naval reactors—very rare—but we’ve been experimenting with some new
substances and alloys of various sorts, like dysprosium titanate. The engineers
note it has a much higher melting point and is very stable, producing almost no
radioactive waste. It’s a ceramic material, a kind of spin ice with magnetic
properties. And this is interesting, the readings that caught my eye were for a
material called Silverberg. It’s also called Iceland Spar because it was
originally mined in Iceland, and they called it silver-rock there. If you had a
lump in your hand it would look like a big crystal, and it has some very
interesting properties in addition to magnetic effects. It splits light! Some
say it was used as a navigation aid centuries ago.”

“A
navigation aid?” Volsky did not follow him.

“Yes,
yes,” said Kamenski. “I have heard of this. The Vikings called it Sunstone. They
could hold the crystal up under a completely overcast sky, and by moving it
across the sky and observing the stone they could find the position of the sun.
It can polarize light—even infrared. In effect, it’s a doubly refracting Calcite.
They use it with lasers in our day and who know what else.”

“You
mean something like a prism?” Volsky had some grasp on it now.

“I
think more like a doubling effect of the light. It takes the light rays and decomposes
them into two rays. Double or nothing, eh?”

“This
material is in Rod-25?” asked Volsky.

“Yes,”
said Kapustin, “and in very high residual quantities relative to other impurities
listed. And now comes the real surprise. I ran down the purchase orders to find
out where these materials were mined. This particular batch had a significant
shipment from a mining operation just north of Vanavara, a little strip mine
right on the river there.” He tapped his pen on the computer screen as if to
indicate the place.

Kamenski’s
eyes seemed to glitter, the light of his thinking doubled as the Inspector went
on, but the Admiral had a clueless expression on his face, and it was clear he was
not seeing the importance of any of this.

“Vanavara?
And the name of the river where this strip mine is located?” Kamenski asked the
question as if he already knew the answer, and Kapustin smiled.

“I
knew you would make the connection, Pavel.”

“What
river?” said Volsky.

“The
Stony Tunguska.” Kapustin folded his arms, a satisfied grin on his face.

“Tunguska?
You mean the place where that asteroid fell?”

“Correct,”
said Kapustin. “In fact, the mine is located right on the outer rim of the area
scientists have delineated as the perimeter of the explosion. They’ve been looking
for exotic materials there for some time now.”

“Very
interesting,” said Kamenski, the light of recollection in his eyes. “A team of Italian
researchers think Cheko Lake is the actual impact site there, and they have
been trying to take samples of compressed material beneath the lake that may be
from the asteroid itself. So what you are telling us is that this Rod-25 has a
high percentage of residual material—this Iceland Spar Calcite—and it was mined
along the Stony Tunguska River north of Vanavara?”