Men of War (2013) (11 page)

“We
talked to the men, in small groups. There’s a lot of comradery among the crew,
and a real spirit of élan now that we’ve come through the fire and reached safe
waters again.”

“Someone
is likely to slip up and say something stupid.” Karpov held up a warning
finger. “Of course if anyone told the truth they would be thought insane, and
laughed off the ship. But it isn’t the big truth I’m worried about. It’s the
little lie. Believe me Fedorov, I was a liar long before I was ever a Captain
in this Navy, and a damn good one. I’m not worried about myself, or the senior
officers, but some damn
matoc
from the fifth
deck is likely to be asked a question and let something slip.” Karpov acted out
a brief interrogation now.

“So
tell me how the aft citadel was damaged again,
Gavrilov
?
Oh, that happened when we were hit by that plane, sir. You mean the helicopter?
The KA-40? Oh, yes sir. Of course, sir.”

Fedorov
nodded, his lips pursed as he considered that there were over 700 men that
would have to hold to the same story for their
lozh
to stand up under
any scrutiny.

“All
it will take is three or four slips like that before some little prick in the
Inspectorate gets a hair up his ass about it. I can tamp some of it down if it
starts to flare up. You know me. I can throw my rank around pretty good. But if
they get real curious, things could take a different direction. If that happens
I think they will beach every last one of us.”

“You
mean you might lose the ship?”

“Very
likely, but I must tell you that it will not be so much of a loss in my mind
now. I’m tired, Fedorov, tired of missiles, and the rank and file of the navy
and all the rest of it. I think I may retire soon, after all this blows over,
assuming we still have a world left here. Then they can say or do anything they
want.”

Fedorov
was quiet for some time, thinking, until the Captain prodded him again. “What
about you?”

“I
know what you are saying, Captain. I was a navigator. Yes, I love military
history but, in truth, I’m not a fighting man. It hurt to know I was killing
men in those engagements. A lot of men died, and I’ve seen all I think I ever
want to know about battle at sea. But on the other side of it, if we stay in
the service, the Admiral, you, myself, then we might have some power to prevent
the war we know is coming.”

“You
think we could prevent it from ever happening?”

“We’ve
already kept it from starting when it was supposed to. If we stay in the
service for a while we could at least keep our hand on the tiller and try to
steer things away from conflict.”

“True,”
said Karpov. “We would have some authority, particularly if they do end up
giving us
Kirov
back again. If war does come, and starts here in the
Pacific as we discovered, then they will look to this ship to lead out the
fleet. It would be hard to go if that should happen, but just as hard to stay
behind, if you know what I mean.”

“Yes,
I do. But there is one other thing we have to worry about. There’s a lot we
have yet to learn about the world we’re coming back to. Things have changed,
Captain. There was no Pearl Harbor attack, no Battle of Midway, but the war
ended much the same, only no Hiroshima or Nagasaki this time. I haven’t had
time to look over everything after WWII, but I’m sure we’ll learn that quite a
lot of furniture has been moved around. We may even find that key officers have
been shuffled about in the navy. The world still looks the same. I’ll bet you
that all the pieces of that old puzzle are still here, but they may be in a
different order now, and the new picture may be a little unsettling.”

“What
do you mean?”

“Well
suppose a man takes his leave, rushes home, and finds his house was sold years
ago and is occupied by strangers. If the big things can change, then the
details can change along with them. We have no idea what we’re really going to
find here.”

“I
never quite thought of it that way,” said Karpov. “And I suppose we never will
find out what happened to Orlov, will we? Is that in your research, Fedorov?
Would it not be funny to see his face glaring at you from one of your old WWII
photo books?”

“I’ve
thought about that a good long time,” Fedorov frowned. “Orlov wasn’t likely to
do the world much good. I suppose he might have used his general knowledge of
the future to some advantage, but he wasn’t an educated man. He could probably
know that the Americans landed on the moon first, but could not tell you when
or very much else about it.”

“That’s
a blessing,” said Karpov. “Orlov’s ignorance may end up preventing a lot of
grief, but something tells me his temper is going to cause trouble, one way or
another. He’s cagey, Fedorov. It wasn’t all brawn and bad temper, and he will
think himself more than he really is, a wolf in the fold, if you will.”

“Well…
Now that we speak of this, I did find something that was a bit unsettling when
I went over the ship’s library computers. Someone made a big download a few
weeks ago, and they didn’t know enough to cover their tracks in the data logs.”

Karpov’s
eyes narrowed. “Orlov?”

“Perhaps.
Would he be that selfish and foolish to take something back with him?”

“Take
what?”

“Who
knows. Maybe he loaded data onto a cell phone or a pad device. He obviously
planned his escape very well.”

Karpov’s
eyes widened with sudden recollection. “His jacket!”

Fedorov
didn’t understand and the Captain explained.

“He
had a Computer Jacket, just like the Marines use for special operations. I
remember him talking about how he liked it because he could listen to things on
his earbuds while making the rounds, news, music, that sort of thing.”

“I
can’t say I like the sound of this,” Fedorov had a very disheartened look on
his face now.

“Don’t
be surprised, Fedorov. You had better check the history very closely when we
make port if Orlov downloaded data into that jacket.”

“I
plan to do exactly that, though I’m not sure what good it will do at this
point. Whatever Orlov ended up doing, it’s all over and done with now. He would
have to be dead by now. It’s history. But we will be living in the world he
helped build the moment we set foot off this ship. Yet if Orlov had that jacket
with him, we could learn that more things have changed than I expected. Its
very existence in the past would have to cause a major aberration. Computer
circuitry found in the 1940s could change a great deal!”

“Now
you have
me
wondering what else has changed.” Karpov had a distant, empty
look on his face. “But even if they did find it, they wouldn’t know what it
was, Fedorov.”

“Oh,
there were some very clever men back then, Captain. I would not be so sure.
This is very disturbing news.” He gazed at the distant land form of Primorskiy Province
as it reached south to Vladivostok. “We’ll make port in the next few hours. We
will soon see the peak of Eagle’s Nest Hill and the shores of Golden Horn Bay.
Count on both still being there. But who knows whether they still have that old
WWII Soviet sub on display at the Naval Museum, or if the Oceanarium was still
built here in the city.”

“I
won’t miss either one, but the food at
Zolotoy
Drakon
was always good, and so was the sushi at
the Yamato Bar on
Okeanskiy
Prospekt
.”

They
both smiled at that. “
Yamato
Sushi Bar?” said Fedorov. “I guess the
legend lives on after all, even if the ship is now on the bottom of the sea. At
least we didn’t put it there.”

“Oh,
but I tried very hard to sink that ship.” Karpov wagged a finger at him. “It
was a tough old warthog, that one.”

 Fedorov
looked at his watch. “About three more hours. Then I suppose we learn whether
home is still there for us, and what kind of a world we are living in now.”

Chapter 8

 
Vladivostok
was one of only four major ports serving the vast expanse of the Russian
Republic. Sometimes referred to as the San Francisco of Mother Russia, the city
is located at the tip of a long peninsula, clustered on the fringes of the
beautiful
Amursky
Bay, where long new elegant bridges
connected the isthmus to
Frunzenskiy
Island to the
south and formed a kind of Golden Gate of their own where ships pass beneath
them to eventually enter the “Golden Horn Harbor.” And like San Francisco, it
also had a thriving and fast growing Chinese community mixed in with the city’s
700,000 residents, their shops and restaurants creating little china towns here
and there near the harbor district.

Like
many cities in Russia, it suffered from pollution, a reputation for corruption,
and a struggling economy that saw over 25% of its citizens living below the
poverty line. Those who could get jobs in the industrial sector there would
often wait long months for a meager paycheck, and others became self-styled
tour guides serving a slowly growing tourism industry. That said, the city and
its vital port remained a crucial strategic hub for Russia in the 21st century,
and the Pacific Fleet still berthed its guided missile cruisers, destroyers and
submarines in the region, though all too few.

One
Slava
Class cruiser, the
Varyag
, would now bow and yield its
crown as the Pacific Fleet’s Flagship to the newly arriving battlecruiser
Kirov
.
There were a few aging destroyers, four in the old
Udaloy
Class, three
Delta
III
submarines, an old
Oscar
, five
Akula’s
and even some rusting
Kilo
class diesel subs tied off at the wharfs and
piers of the submarine base at
Pavlovskoye
, south of
Fokino where the Naval Headquarters had been located. One new sub, the sleek
new nuclear attack submarine
Kazan
was perhaps the most formidable boat
assigned to the undersea fleet based there. It was hidden in the old
underground submarine pens that had been dug through the north cape of
Pavlovshoye
Bay.

The
navy rolled out the red carpet for
Kirov
when the big battlecruiser
arrived, just as Karpov said it would. There were honor guards, a marching
band, a flag ceremony and a lot of military rituals. Admiral Volsky had the
entire ship’s compliment out in their dress whites, and he played up the
ceremony for all it was worth. Yet through it all there was a kind of reserved
shock when the other sailors and officers assembled on the quays saw the damage
the ship had sustained. Kirov was missing her Top Mast radar sets, there was a
raw gash on the aft quarter, and obvious damage to the superstructure behind
the secondary mast where fresh paint and a canvass tarp now hid the worst of
the wreckage inflicted by Hayashi’s D3A1 dive bomber.

The
rumor that the ship had endured these insults when
Orel
blew up on sea
trials provided little comfort, as it spoke only to the continued incompetence
of the service, still struggling to reach the lofty goal set in 2011 of
building 100 new ships before 2020. Most of these were to be smaller frigates,
corvettes, and new submarines, accounting for about seventy of the planned
additions. The remaining thirty would see some real new teeth put into the
fleet, including two new nuclear aircraft carriers that had been planned,
though neither had been completed. The fleet still had little reliable seaborne
air power, and therefore could never hope to fulfill the long held Russian
dream of becoming a real blue water navy.

China
went shopping and bought up most of the older Soviet era light carriers.
Kiev
was now a floating hotel, and
Minsk
an amusement park. The second
Kuznetsov
class hull, named
Varyag
before it was sold to the Chinese, was now
the
Liaoning
, the ship once fated to die at the hands of an American
submarine in the growing squabble over Taiwan, as least insofar as one
Australian newspaper had it. Russia’s only fleet carrier to speak of was this
ship’s elder brother,
Admiral Kuznetsov
, which had also been moved east
when the Russians had been quietly informed that China was planning a ‘major
operation’ in the near future.

One
relatively new frigate with the all new carbon fiber superstructure and stealth
design had been assigned to the Pacific Fleet, the
Admiral Golovko
, laid
down in 2012. Two more were expected soon. The Project 21956 destroyers were
also still largely incomplete, though one such ship, now named the
Orlan
,
or
Sea Eagle,
was proudly berthed at Vladivostok next to the new
arrival.

Kirov
was given a proverbial ‘wide berth’ off the concrete docks near
Korabelnaya
Street. Admiral Volsky knew, as Karpov had warned,
that the Naval Inspectorate would be arriving within days, so he huddled with
his Chief Engineer Dobrynin to see what could be done about the reactor control
rod they now suspected as the cause of the strange displacement the ship had
experienced—Rod-25.

“What
can we do with it, Dobrynin? Can we risk leaving it here on the ship?”

“If
we do, sir, then what might happen the next time we have to do rod
maintenance?”

“Yes,
it would be most disturbing if the ship were to suddenly disappear again while
berthed in the harbor! Can it be removed safely? Stored somewhere?”

“That
would take some doing, Admiral, but it might be transferred to the Primorskiy
Engineering Center across the bay. We have a diagnostic rod test-bed facility
there, and I could study it more closely. We would put it in a radiation safe
container, then barge it across the bay to the commercial pier and truck it up
the hill to the center.”