Kirov III-Pacific Storm (Kirov Series) (46 page)

He smiled. “Don’t you understand?
We’re home! This is the year 2021 again, but
the war hasn’t started.
It
doesn’t have to start now. We can avoid the future we’ve already seen. We’re
home!”

Volsky remembered how they had all
felt that first time they shifted away from the past and into that bleak
future, seeing the ruin and destruction of Halifax Harbor. “It looks like we
stopped it this time,” he said. “That alarm clock bomb you talked about, Mister
Fedorov.” It looks like we heard it ticking, and reached a hand out to turn it
off just before that jarring sound could rattle our brains.”

 Karpov smiled. It had been his
hand that stopped it, pulling Samsonov’s away. It had been
his
hand.

Then they heard something that
astounded them all. It was Nikolin’s radio set, finally winning its struggle to
tune in a distant channel, and it was music. Nikolin’s eyes gleamed as he heard
it, rushing to the radio to adjust the dial  further and turn up the
volume as the song faded in and out. The beat was steady, and every man among
them knew the tune. It was the Beatles, beloved in Mother Russia for decades,
and they were singing
Back in the U.S.S.R.

“…Been away so long I hardly knew the
place
Gee, it's good to be back home.
Leave it till tomorrow to unpack my case,
Honey disconnect the phone!
I'm back in the USSR,
You don't know how lucky you are, boy,
Back in the US
Back in the US
Back in the USSR!

 Admiral Volsky was smiling ear
to ear, Fedorov broke out laughing. Nikolin started to dance. They were
home—but not in the U.S.S.R, they hoped. That old, reeking structure had
collapsed decades ago, and this was a new Russia. Yes, now there was
SinoPac
, the Sino Pacific alliance initiated by the
Chinese, and the spring of war was still coiled tight. But they knew what was
going to happen now, what
might
happen if the world kept steady on the
course it had been sailing, and they could do whatever they might to forestall
it. They were men of real power now. God may have died in this world, but this
was now a ship of angels.

Admiral Volsky smiled, an idea in his
mind. “Mister Nikolin,” he said in a calm voice. “When you have finished
crushing those grapes would you be so kind as to call that American submarine
on the radio? We were about to send them a nice, fat super-cavitating cigar,
but I think I would like to offer their captain a box of fine Cuban cigars
instead. If I can parley with Admiral John Tovey, then by God I can speak with
this man as well. Get them on the radio.”

And he did.

*
* *

The world
Kirov
left behind in 1942 had a
long time to consider the mystery of this strange interloper on the high seas.
The code word
Geronimo
was kept a quiet secret, but the mysterious ship
was never seen again. This time it had vanished for good. The British Admiralty
locked away the files in a deep, deep cellar beneath Hut 4 in Bletchley Park,
and few knew what happened to them once that facility was eventually closed
after the war. Admiral John Tovey was one of them, following the reports of
unaccountable engagements that week in the Coral Sea, and smiling to himself,
then crumpling the decrypts and putting them to the fire.

He spent the next years serving ably
in spite of Churchill’s desire to remove him for his transgressions, and was
eventually promoted to Admiral of the Fleet, retiring from service in 1946 to
pursue ‘other matters.’ Few ever knew what scope and scale of those matters
actually were, but those close to him said he had been
fond
,
in his later years, of reading novels by Jules Verne and the work of H.G.
Wells. No one ever really knew that he still remained in the hunt for the
mysterious ship that had once been code named
Geronimo
, keeping a
silent, vigilant watch on the world.

Alan Turing continued his amazing work
as a cryptanalyst, eventually trailblazing the development of the computer with
his “Turing Machine,” and laboring on in logic and number theory. His work on
artificial intelligence and encrypted speech transmission was also
groundbreaking and well ahead of its time—and for good reason. The startling
discovery that
Geronimo
had left one thing of great importance behind
when it vanished set him on a search that was to consume him for the remainder
of his days, and there were all too few left to him.

As for Novak and Osborne at FRUMEL
Headquarters in Melbourne, they kept chewing on the rind of the orange they had
been peeling that week. They did learn enough to know a great battle had been
fought off the coast of Papua New Guinea, a battle the Japanese had apparently
won, or so they read the tale when this strange enemy ship simply vanished,
presumed sunk. But they knew it didn’t go without a fight. A plane out of Milne
Bay had managed to get a photo of a large and dangerous looking Japanese
battleship, obviously bearing the scars of a major battle as it slipped by, escorted
by a gaggle of cruisers and destroyers. It was Admiral Yamamoto and
Yamato
,
bound for Rabaul and then Kure. The Americans never knew much about the
Yamato
incident, for they knew very little about the ship itself, or its sister ship
Musashi
,
 until many years later.

On the Japanese side, when the cruiser
Tone
made port at Rabaul, the crew was so distraught with the tale of a
demon ship from hell that they were relieved to a man, scattered throughout the
empire, and the ship was re-crewed. Yet ever thereafter the
Tone
was
whispered to be a ghost ship, and men reported seeing strange lights in her
dark and twisting corridors, and they had bad dreams. The ship would survive
until July of 1945 when she was sunk in Kure harbor by planes off the USS
Monterey
.
The final stroke was a rocket attack by planes from the resurrected carrier
Wasp
,
on July 28, 1945, exactly 76 years before
Kirov
had first vanished.

Captain Sanji Iwabuchi was sent to the
Philippines in some disfavor. He would never recant his story, that his ship
had finally found and rammed the phantom enemy they had come to call
Mizuchi
,
and sunk it that night. And he went on to stubbornly disobey his orders to
withdraw from Manila years later, leaving tens of thousands massacred in the
fighting there. No one else much believed his tale, though they never dared say
as much to Iwabuchi’s face. Yet the odd thing that no one had been able to
explain was the slightly crumpled bow of the cruiser
Tone
, damaged in
that first split second of her harrowing encounter with
Kirov
, before
the Russian ship slipped out of phase, sailing away on the cold drafty seas of
time.

The Japanese never knew what had so
bedeviled them in the Coral Sea. They sailed
Yamato
home, casting a
cloak of shame and secrecy over the ship again as they set about to repair
the  extensive damage. No announcement was ever made to the public about
the disaster, or the greater loss of three fleet carriers in the Solomons.
Strangely,
Kirov
had restored the balance of power to what it might have
been after the Midway battle that had never been fought. In some bizarre
calculus known only to herself, Mother Time had balanced her books.

A young Ensign named
Mitsuo
Ohta
had been deeply
impressed by the dreadful “suicide rockets” the enemy had deployed. Watching
them dance over the sea in their evasive maneuvers, and knowing nothing of
computer controlled guidance systems, he could only conclude that they were
piloted. He soon approached students of the Aeronautical Research Institute at
the University of Tokyo for help in designing a similar weapon. His plans were
submitted to the Yokosuka research facility, and the Navy Air Technical Arsenal
began to produce prototypes of a rocket powered piloted cruise missile they
would call the
Okha
, or
Cherry Blossom.
Its
only liability was that the three solid fueled rockets it used were not yet
powerful enough to launch it from a ship.

Instead the rocket had to be carried
by a twin engine bomber to within 37,000 meters, and then it could launch to
make its daring and final high speed run to the target, with a human pilot
standing in for the missing computer and radar controlled brain that had guided
Kirov’s
missiles. These developments saw the weapons deployed months
early in the Pacific, though they were too few and still too late to tip the
balance of power and salvage Japan’s lost war. The pilots who flew them damaged
and sunk several US Ships, the last cherry blossoms falling from the dying tree
of Japanese empire, but American gunners at sea came to call them by another
name:
Buka
, the Japanese word for ‘fool.’

And so the war, the long terrible
Second World War, played out much as it had in the old history that Fedorov
once knew. The  industrial might of the U.S. put one carrier after another
into the Pacific, and the steady advance of the Allies was once again a
certainty—only things ended differently this time. The Americans had seen
firsthand what the horror of nuclear weapons would be, though the public never
knew about it. The loss of the
Mississippi
and the  other ships in
TF-16 was not enough to prevent them from building their own bomb, but it was
enough to prevent them from eventually dropping it on Japan in 1945.

For his part, Admiral Yamamoto did not
die in a plane crash, shot down by P-38s in April of 1943. The soup of the
history was stirred just enough by
Kirov
to change his personal fate,
and it also changed the whole character of the war in the Pacific as well. When
Germany was finally defeated, Yamamoto had been instrumental in persuading the
Army and High Command, and the Emperor himself, that Japan should lay down its
sword, now and forever.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki never happened.
Task Force 16 had been enough of a peek inside Pandora’s jar. Instead the men
of that brave new world reached in and drew out that one last thing at
the  bottom of the jar,
Elpis
, the Spirit
of Hope.

Time had a way of smoothing over and
healing the wounds the ship had made in the history of WWII, like the endless
waves  on the shoreline slowly blotting out the footprints of a solitary
man. Only one thing remained to be done, or undone, and this time
Kirov
had passed the test. It was to be a new world now.

*
* *

Vladivostok
on the Sea of Japan was thousands of
miles away, giving Admiral Volsky and his officers a good long time to think
how they might explain the damage to the ship, her hull number and insignias
all painted over, her weapons inventory depleted, and the presence of old
twenty millimeter rounds in her hide, weapons that had not been fired for
almost a century. In the end it was determined that the rounds could be found
and removed, the hull number and insignia restored, and the ship would claim
damage from the accident that did, indeed, send the submarine
Orel
to
her death.

As for the missing missiles, Volsky
had his story well in hand: live fire exercises. That was what the ship had
been sent out to do in the first place, and then it was to have sailed to
Vladivostok in any wise to replace an old cruiser there and become the new
flagship of the Pacific Fleet. In fact, Admiral Volsky had been slated to
assume command there when the ship arrived in any case, replacing Admiral
Abramov.

Radio failure was a convenient icing
on the cake they baked to explain why they never called for help until they
arrived in the far east, a long month later. As to why they did not simply sail
their damaged ship home to Severomorsk, Volsky’s power and prestige was enough.
The Admiral passed it all off to the Russian Naval Command as a perfect
opportunity to train his crew under more exacting conditions, simulating
circumstances of a real wartime footing. He had simply chosen not to return,
and continue his mission to the Pacific. An Admiral at sea is second only to
God himself, and no one could question him and prevail. Suchkov could criticize
him roundly, and demand his resignation, but old “Papa Volsky” was too well
established to be easily pushed around, and too well loved and respected.

There was, however, considerable
mystery surrounding the fact that
Kirov
had managed to complete her
journey undetected by the normally vigilant forces of NATO. Volsky suggested
that they claim to have tested and deployed a new regimen of special jamming signatures
to hide the ship, but alas the system had been damaged in a small electrical
fire while they were in the Pacific. “They’ll probably end up calling us the
Ghost Ship,” said Volsky, “and it would not be too far off the mark.”

Before they returned to Mother Russia,
they had a long discussion about the reactor core, and Rod-25, and why it might
have caused the strange displacement in time. In the end it was left a mystery,
something they knew they could never determine on their own, and something they
definitely decided could never be revealed to the engineers back home. Admiral
Volsky told Dobrynin that he would stay in close contact with him on the
matter, and the engineer devised a plan.