Men of War (2013) (2 page)

Admiral
Yates was in his office, working up fleet assignments for the new
Queen
Elizabeth
battlegroup assembling for deployment. He would have two of the
newer Type 45 destroyers in
Daring
and
Dragon
, the first of the
new Type 26 Global Combat Frigates,
Defiance
, and two more older Type
23s in
Lancaster
and
Somerset
. The new
Astute
class fleet
submarine
Anson
, the fifth in the series, would serve in escort to her
majesty, Britain’s newest and largest fleet carrier.

But
that night another sub in the same class, the
Ambush
, was living up to
its name as it silently stalked the Russian battlecruiser
Kirov
north of
Jan Mayen. Commissioned in 2015,
Ambush
was a superbly stealthy boat
with a hull coating of nearly 40,000 acoustic tiles. She also had a deadly
sting in her six 533mm torpedo tubes firing the
Spearfish
heavyweight
torpedo, a 21 inch diameter killing fish indeed with a 300kg warhead. Her
Tomahawk
cruise missiles were another long range threat out to 1240 miles, and accurate
to within two meters. At 30 knots submerged,
Ambush
was capable of
running with the fast Russian battlecruiser when necessary, and her real
underwater speed was still a highly classified secret. With a 25 year supply of
nuclear fuel, and advanced air and water purification systems, the sub could
technically circumnavigate the entire globe without ever once surfacing. Her
only limitation was a 90 day supply of food.

Ambush
had been following a small task group centered on
Kirov
, picking them up
as they left Severomorsk and drifting quietly as they passed in a stately line.
The old
Oscar
class submarine
Orel
led the procession, followed
by the aging cruiser
Slava
towing a large targeting barge, and then came
the bane of the West, the mighty
Kirov
out for live fire exercises with
the ship’s holds bulging with missile reloads. The formation was in no
particular hurry, making a sedate 10 knots until the
Slava
veered off
with her targeting barge and increased to 15 knots. The sub listened to the
whole scene, her sensitive sonar tracking the movement of each ship until the
Slava
was some 30 kilometers south of
Kirov
and the now submerged submarine
Orel,
which hovered nearby. Weather reports indicated a strong front was moving in
rapidly from the north, and it looked as though the Russians wanted to complete
their exercise before the sea conditions made operations impractical.

Then
it happened.

The
whole boat shuddered with a thrumming vibration as if a massive kettle drum had
been struck a mighty blow beneath the sea. The sonar operator ripped his
headset off in spite of the noise spike inhibitor, staring blankly at his CO.
No one on the boat knew it at that moment, but a strange loop in time had just
completed one full cycle.

The
first time it had happened there had been no Admiral Yates on the watch, and in
fact, no “Watch” mounted at all. The group did not exist when the
Orel
incident first sent
Kirov
careening through time to 1941. Yet actions
taken by the ship and crew changed history, and in the year 2000 a Great War
broke out on that altered timeline and devastated the world.
Kirov
never
saw it. Rod-25 snatched the ship away from the icy waters of the North Atlantic
and sent it home to the year 2021…Only home was no longer there!

 Twelve
days later an unknowing Chief Dobrynin and Rod-25 worked their magic again and
sent
Kirov
back to 1942, only this time she had moved in space while in
the future, and was now in the Med. Actions taken by the ship and crew again
altered history and caused the war to be delayed in that newly altered
timeline, but it happened in the year 2021. When Rod-25 sent the ship forward
again off the Island of St. Helena,
Kirov
once more found the world a
desolate and blighted place.

The
third shift into the past to 1942 gave the ship one last chance to change that
fate. After so many tries Time now seemed to know its own future, and cleverly
tipped off the principle officers on the ship by delivering a newspaper to them
with a warning before they made that last return trip to late 1942. The war
would start in 2021, it told them. Get busy.
Kirov’s
actions in the
Pacific of 1942 had been enough to win but a brief respite to that fatal
deadline, a matter of a few weeks delay, and not enough to prevent it from
occurring. Because the ship had left one thing, one man of great importance behind—Chief
Gennadi Orlov—a Man of War. It was something Orlov would do, or fail to do,
that would make all the difference where the two roads of time now diverged in
a yellow wood of infinity, and led to a future that only a privileged few now
knew.

When
Kirov
reappeared and made its way home to Vladivostok it was living in
the alternate history that the ship and crew had created, and on that timeline
a Watch had been waiting for long decades, ever vigilant. In late July, 2021 of
that altered history,
Kirov
vanished…right on schedule.
Orel
blew
up again, just as before on the original timeline, and a story a thousand pages
long was written in the new history. This time Admiral Yates was standing his
Watch.

A
telephone rang in Royal Naval Headquarters—a very special telephone. It flashed
signals to the deep underground operations bunker near Portsmouth, to a
solitary office in Plymouth, and its shrill alarm was relayed to locations, and
individuals all over the globe, all men and women of the Watch. It was just one
single word repeating in sets of three until a button was pushed on the
receiving end to indicate secure reception of the message:
Geronimo,
Geronimo, Geronimo…

It
had finally happened. The ship they had been waiting for since the 1940s,
watching since 1980, had finally pulled its disappearing act and was gone, and
it was now anyone’s guess where and when it might return. The Watch did not
have long to wait.
Kirov
was gone for all of a long, breathless month,
and then was suddenly spotted in the Pacific by an American submarine.
Key
West
was supposed to have been killed that day, but lived on due to a
moment of restraint that bought the world a few brief weeks of restless peace.

* * *

Vladivostok
on the Sea of Japan was thousands of miles away when
Kirov
finally
turned her bow north from the paradise island where they had made one final
stop. There was only one loose end that they could not account for as they
sailed for home, though Anton Fedorov spent many long hours trying. What had
happened to Chief Gennadi Orlov? Where did he go? What effect, if any, did he
have on the history that Fedorov could now spend long quiet years re-reading,
re-learning, much to his delight? His curiosity and diligence would become a
saving grace for the world, though he did not yet know that as he stood on the
weather deck when the ship first turned for Vladivostok harbor.
Kirov
was coming home, but it would not be the last time the ship would see the fire
of war.

Karpov
had stayed his hand at the last moment, and the curious American submarine,
Key
West
had lived to return to its home port in Guam, its captain happily
smoking a fresh Cuban cigar on the conning tower. Yet the reprieve that single
moment of sanity and restraint Karpov gave to the world was to be short lived.
Events in the Pacific were building up like tall storm clouds on the horizon,
their flanks darkening with rain, tops crowned with the lightning of the threat
of war.

In
a strange twist of events, the ship they left broken and stranded on the
shallow coral reefs of the Torres Straits would sire a brave young son to pose
a new challenge to the world.
Kirishima
would return, but it would not
be the old battleship this time, nor the stern presence of a man like Sanji
Iwabuchi. No, this time it was a sleek guided missile destroyer,
Kongo
class, built for the Japanese Maritime Self
Defense Force in the late 1990s. In an odd echo of the history they had just
lived,
Kirov
would soon come to hear the name of ship that had hunted
them, pursuing them through the long nights as they struggled to find safe
waters in a sea of war.
DDG Kirishima
was
now fated to have a
major part to play in the war that was still looming.

Men
no longer stood the watch from a high pagoda tower on this new ship. Instead
they huddled below decks their eyes fixed on the glowing screens of their
advanced
Aegis
Fire Control System. The big 14 inch guns of its distant
ancestor had been forsaken for deadly new
Harpoon
missiles. The AA guns
that once bristled from the superstructure of the old ship were now SM-2MR
Block IV radar homing SAMs. Yet one thing remained the same, the destroyer was
a ship of war pledged to bring her wrath and fire to any who might threaten or
oppose the interests of her nation on the high seas. The forms and shapes of the
ships had changed, and new men sailed within the hard metal frames plying the
waters of the misnamed Pacific, but the deadly game they played with one
another was still the same.

Escort
Squadron 6 was a part of Flotilla 2 assigned to the Sasebo Naval District, and
tonight DDG
Kirishima
led a group of three warships as they prowled the
dark waters near the disputed Senkaku Islands, called the Diaoyutai by rival
China. English sailors of old had called them the Pinnacles, deserted specks in
the sea that seemed to hold little interest before lucrative oil and gas fields
had been discovered on the seabed beneath them in the 21st century. Now the
largest of the tiny group, once called the “Island of Peace” would become a
terrible new flashpoint for war. History had a way of spoiling human
expectations with its cold ironic smirk.

Peace
was far away that night, a will-o the-wisp notion that had been laid aside in
the service of more immediate interests. The 21st century was starving for
energy. China has risen like a great fire breathing dragon, and her hot breath
now needed fuel to stoke those flames. Japan too, was hungry again, and the
same search for oil and natural resources that had sent her to war in the 1940s
now saw her slowly set aside the pledge of non-belligerence written into her
constitution at the end of that last great conflict. It was a new world, but
some things never changed.

Just
as fate brought the name
Kirishima
back from the dead that night, she
was also to start a new, cruel dance for the men who had served, and fought and
endured aboard another proud ship of war, the battlecruiser
Kirov
. For
that ship also seemed to return from the dead when the
Kirov
suddenly
radioed home to Vladivostok, and reserved a berth in the Golden Horn Harbor for
her weary crew….All but one.

As
it turned out, fate was not so kind to the man who had shirked his duty in a
wild leap of violent self-interest. Yes, Gennadi Orlov found a new life when he
jumped from the KA-226 that day, yet it was not the life he had imagined. Time,
fate, and the British Special Intelligence Service had other plans for him. And
Fate had plans for Fedorov, and Karpov, and Volsky too, their names written in
some bizarre ledger in the Book of Time, right next to the names of men like
Alan Turing and Admiral John Tovey, and many others you are now about to meet.
For this, dear reader, is that strange tale, and it began, quite unexpectedly,
with a couple of frustrated U-Boat commanders, the first one in the western
approaches to the Straits of Gibraltar on a dark night in September, 1942.

Part I

Orlov

“In
this, our age of infamy, Man's choice is but to be a tyrant, traitor, prisoner:

No
other choice has he.”

—
Aleksandr
Pushkin

Chapter 1

Orlov
knew exactly what he had to do, and how to go about it. His long years in
the dangerous Russian underground before he joined
the navy would now
serve him very well, for he knew when to speak, and when to keep his mouth shut
tight, and how to mix with every sort from beggar to brigand, and blend
inconspicuously into the riff-raff of the world. But he also had more than his
fair share of foibles and bad habits, urges that he was all too eager to
fulfill now that he found himself a wolf at large in a world of sheep.

That
was how he thought of himself, a big and terrible wolf that had fallen from the
sky like a demigod, pulled out of the sea by unknowing fishermen. He landed in
Cartagena, where he soon worked his way into the commercial district, ferreting
out one bar and whorehouse after another. There was always a need for a good
drink and some idle chat with a bar fellow when he could find one who spoke
Russian. Money was never a problem, as he could simply take from any
unsuspecting drifter he encountered, filling his pockets with ready cash. The
fishermen had tried to warn him to be cautious, but they did so in Spanish, a
language he found incomprehensible. Instead he got on with gestures, his
natural aggressive nature, and a goodly amount of sheer nerve.

A
big man, brawny and well muscled, there were few who ever wanted to cross him
in the bars where he drank and reveled in his newfound freedom. Occasionally he
would meet other Eastern Europeans there, Poles, Hungarians, Lithuanians, and
some even spoke his mother tongue, Russian. This was not unusual, for neutral
Spain had attracted more than its fair share of wandering souls in the region,
men tired of the war, or running from it, lost men of the world that no one
would miss or give a second thought to.