Men of War (2013)

A publication of:

The Writing Shop Press

Kirov Saga: Men Of War,
Copyright©2013, John A. Schettler

The Kirov Saga:
(Military
Fiction)

Kirov
Kirov II
–
Cauldron Of Fire

Kirov III
–
Pacific Storm

Kirov Saga: Men Of War
Kirov Saga: Nine Days Falling

Mailto: [email protected]

http://www.writingshop.ws
http://www.dharma6.com

Discover other titles by John
Schettler:

Award Winning Science
Fiction:

Meridian
-
Meridian
Series - Volume I
Nexus Point
- Meridian Series - Volume II
Touchstone
- Meridian Series - Volume III

Anvil of Fate
- Meridian
Series - Volume IV
Golem 7
- Meridian Series - Volume V
Classic Science Fiction:
Wild Zone
- Dharman Series - Volume I
Mother Heart
- Dharman Series - Volume II
Historical Fiction:
Taklamakan
- Silk Road Series - Volume I
Khan Tengri
- Silk Road Series - Volume II

Dream Reaper
– Mythic Horror
Mystery

Kirov Saga

Men Of War

By

John
Schettler

“The
death of God left the angels in a strange position.”
 

―
 Donald Barthelme

Kirov Saga ~ Men Of War
By
John Schettler

Prologue

Part I –
Orlov
Part II –
The Watch
Part III –
Rod-25
Part IV –
Storm Clouds

Part V –
Rising Sun
Part VI –
Men Of War

Part VII –
Devil In The Details

Part VIII
–The Mission

Part IX –
Letters From The Dead
Part X –
Enter The Dragon
Part XI –
Siren Song

Part XII
- Standoff

Prologue

On
December 30, 1980 the
Baltiysky
Naval Shipyard in
Leningrad was a very busy place. It was the day the first of a new fearsome
naval surface action combatant, the nuclear guided missile battlecruiser
Kirov
was slated to be commissioned into the Soviet Navy, the first of four planned
ships in this class. It would be some time before the Western analysts and
intelligence experts who watched from a distance would really take the measure
of this awesome new ship. In its early months in the Baltic NATO planners had
taken to calling it BALCOM-1 for “Baltic Combatant 1.” Once they got a look at
the ship they hoped it would be the last they would ever see of this class, but
Soviet Russia would not oblige.

Bristling
with vertical launch missile ports, SAMs, and deck guns, the ship promised to
upset the balance of power in the Northern Seas and, for the Royal Navy, there
had not been a ship this feared and respected since the launching of the German
Bismarck
class battleships in the Second World War. One man who watched the
reports saw the satellite and high altitude U-2 photos was Captain Peter Yates,
British Naval Intelligence. The rumors of the ship had already set analysts
into worry mode since it first hit the Soviet naval designer’s drawing boards
in the mid 1970s. Yates had been one of the privileged few to see the drawings
and early photographs of the ship in the naval yards. Something about the scale
and design of the ship immediately set off a thrum of anxiety.
Kirov
would be over 827 feet long with a generous beam of 94 feet and displace 28,000
tons fully loaded. While half the weight of a respectable World War II class
battleship, she would have the power to confront and sink an entire fleet.

A
young man in 1980, Yates was recruited into a dark program hidden deep within
the wandering the hallways of the Naval Board at Whitehall. He would not even
learn what it was for some years, and then one day he would be escorted into a
windowless room handed a sheaf of files with photography and transcripts and
told he was to see the British Royal Navy Admiral Of The Fleet immediately
after he had reviewed the material. Captain Peter Yates, whose surname meant
‘dweller by the gate,’ or the gatekeeper, was about to receive a promotion and
become Commodore Yates. He would be admitted to a very select group of men
known only as the Watch, and told he would have more than his fair share of
long years to stand if he accepted the post, and be privy to intelligence
matters with the highest possible clearance. He accepted, and was soon
surprised to learn that his post would relate directly to the photographs he
had studied before the meeting. His watch would be on that very ship,
Kirov
,
and he would need to know its movements, whereabouts and status at all times.

On
December 30, 1980, he also got his first look at the dark history of this
vessel. There before him were photographs, gun camera footage, and other video
related to a top-secret event known only as the “
Geronimo
incident”
dating from World War II. To his great surprise that December the ship he saw
cruising quietly into the Baltic Sea was the image and likeness of the ship he
had seen in those secret files! The phantom that had haunted the opera of
British intelligence for the last forty years had finally taken shape in the real
world, built by the hands of men.

Yates
did not know then that this was not the ship that confronted the Royal Navy in
the North Seas in 1941, and again in the Mediterranean of 1942. There were
subtle differences, but it's lines and specifications were so close that the
first
Kirov
became the most watched ship of its era, with a British
submarine assigned to dog its movements for each and every second of its brief
ten-year active service life.

When
the ship finally suffered a reactor accident in 1990 during a Mediterranean
cruise, and was taken off the active-duty list, Yates released a sigh of
relief. Now the ship would at least be kept in one place for a time where
British Intelligence could keep a watchful eye. There it sat, rusting away in
the cold Arctic North while Yates watched the three others of its class
suffered similar fates. They were all given new names and one by one they fell
out of active service.

Admiral
Lazarev
sat in the Bay below Russian Naval Pacific Fleet Headquarters at
Fokino near Vladivostok, and
Admiral Nakhimov
sat in
Severodinsk
.
The last of the four, battlecruiser
Pyotr
Velikiy,
or
Peter the Great
, remained in active service into the
year 2015 when it was also retired. The dread battlecruisers were finally off
the world stage and no longer a threat until the year 2018 when the new Russia
resurrected its promise to refit and reactivate all four of these formidable
ships by the year 2020. They made the deadline, but produced only one such
ship, built from the bones of all the others that had come before it. And to
honor the original class they gave that ship back its old name and called it
Kirov
.

In
that year, forty-four years after its original design took shape and form, the
new updated battlecruiser
Kirov
returned to the northern seas, making a
brief training cruise in the year 2020 and then taking a proud place at the
head of the Soviet Northern Fleet as its new flagship. By that time, Commodore
Yates was now Admiral Yates, a man of sixty-four years, yet young for his age
with just a touch of gray at each Temple and the tall sturdy frame with sharp
dark eyes that seemed to notice everything when he entered a room. Yates was
now the senior officer in charge of the group known as the Watch, one of many
such men and women scattered throughout the world in key positions still
keeping a vigilant eye on world events.

2020
had been a jarring year.
Kirov
was back. That was the great worry once
again. Now that the ship had returned to active duty service with new
electronics, engines, and deadly new weapons,
Kirov
once again posed a
grave threat to the sea lanes Western navies and their vast fleets of commerce
ships depended on. But it was not what
Kirov
might do to a present-day
ship in the year 2021 that so bedeviled the Watch this time. It was what the
ship might do to the navies of an earlier time, for now this shadowy group was
convinced that this second rebirth of the dread battlecruiser was indeed the
ship their founders had come to call
Geronimo
.

Yates
knew that, one day, on some mission, perhaps a routine cruise for training or
simply to show the flag at distant ports of the world, this ship would simply
vanish. What it would do to the history of the world after that moment would
make all the difference between survival and the utter destruction of the
entire human race. So just like it's older brother before it, the ship could
never sail outside the purview of the Royal Navy. A submarine was assigned to
intercept and shadow the Russian battlecruiser at every moment, and a special
emergency communications device was installed on that sub that would
immediately signal level one critical alert should the sub ever lose contact
with the ship. The Royal Navy, and the men of the Watch, wanted to know the
exact moment in time that the ship was first displaced to a distant era where
now legendary figures like Admiral John Tovey and men like Alan Turing of
Bletchley Park had first grappled with the deep mystery of the ship's sudden
appearance in the middle of World War II. Now, at long last, they were to have
their answer.

On
a late summer night in July the telephone was ringing in a lonesome and largely
unknown office of Royal Navy Headquarters at the Maritime Warfare Centre, Whale
Island, Portsmouth. This was the old Coastal Command Headquarters that was
eventually expanded to take over joint operations for air/naval operations for
the United Kingdom and related NATO affairs. Home to a staff of 1600 men and
women, the main buildings were simple four story offices with long rows of
windows and little architectural appeal, but when something really dicey went
down, the deep underground secure bunkers were in operation to coordinate
events, as they soon were that day when the alert first came in.