1943

Chapter 28

Word of the attack on Truk would spread like the fires ignited by those five missiles. That the enemy could strike them this way, unseen, unchallenged within 120 kilometers of Combined Fleet Headquarters, was most disturbing news to Admiral Yamamoto. He had been at Rabaul wanting to inspect the damage to the Soryu and Kaga more closely, and was pleased to see that it would be mended very quickly. Then came the news from Truk.

This was undoubtedly Mizuchi, he thought. I do not think the Americans are using these rocket weapons yet. Thankfully the damage was not heavy. The airfield is back in operation and they are now searching for this Siberian raider, but Zuiho was the only carrier there, and that ship is once again stricken from the active duty roll. It is amazing that they were able to hit targets with such precision, yet the officers from Takami warned me of this. Even Musashi was struck, but by only one missile. Clearly this was meant to send a message more than any real attempt to sink that ship.

Yet now what to do with the Shadō Butai? Their last reported position was still a thousand miles southeast of Truk. I am told the rockets came from the northeast. Should I allow those new carriers to continue north? No… If I permit this, the likelihood that they will be discovered by Mizuchi is very high. A pity that Takami is well on her way to Manila now, and from there, ordered to Yokohama as a prize Nagano wishes to gloat over in exchange for releasing all these new ships early. I could use that ship’s radars and missile defense shield now. If it were here, I would consider sending it to join the Shadō Butai to challenge Mizuchi, but now I think prudence demands that I order that carrier division west into the Solomon Sea.

Yes… The islands have a lot of sea planes that we can get up to provide us with a means of detecting this enemy. In the Solomons, the Shadō Butai will be alerted to any danger well before those rockets can find them. And they will also be close enough for us to support them with Hara’s group. He performed miracles on that last sortie, delivering a stunning performance. He put several enemy carriers out of action, and even sunk one of their fleet carriers. Admiral Halsey charged in like a mad bull after that, and drove off the Shadō Butai, but he did not seriously harm us. Hara was like a ghost. The enemy never discovered him, and he successfully covered the movement of all three regiments of the reserve 20th Division to the New Hebrides and Santa Cruz Islands.

Our battleships took the brunt of the American attack, and yet I am told Satsuma and Hiraga shrugged off the enemy bombs, which was very heartening news. A pity we lost one of the new super heavy cruisers in the surface action that followed, but I must also congratulate Kurita, for he faced three battleships and drove them off. They were undoubtedly coming to bombard our positions on Efate, but the latest reports had them moving east towards Pago Pago.

Yet now the question of how to face Mizuchi looms darkly in my mind. What if that ship is bold enough to come here, to Rabaul? This bay has really been the heart of our operations, being much closer to Noumea and the Fijis. All our remaining fleet carriers are here now. Had that ship attacked this harbor, it may have been a disaster for us worse than that inflicted on the Americans at Pearl Harbor.

So how do I fight this demon? Do I sortie with all these ships, and give battle? Do I attempt to overwhelm it with the full might of our navy, or do I disperse the fleet into smaller divisions, perhaps moving into the Coral Sea to interdict enemy communications with their bold operation against Noumea? Soryu will be available again in a matter of days; Kaga just a week later. Yet that is more than enough time for Mizuchi to navigate to these waters. It could strike both those vital ships while they are pierside for repairs here. I cannot permit that to happen, so I must find some way of luring my enemy into battle far from Rabaul.

We still have Akagi, Tosa, Taiho and the two light carriers Junyo and Hiyo. Admiral Nagumo reports he still has capability with his two dragons, Kinryu and Ryujin. Would that be enough force to face and defeat Mizuchi? How many ships might be sacrificed if I order this? We have an oiler very close to Nagumo’s position. What if I order him to replenish at sea, and then stand off the Solomons? I could then move Hara into position behind Bougainville Island, or even Choiseul. In effect, the Shadō Butai would be my bait, and if Mizuchi attacks Nagumo, then Hara can counterattack with everything he has, like an archer hidden behind the wall of those islands.

We have planes at Buka and Buin on Bougainville, seaplanes in the Shortlands, and at Tulagi. Surely we can ascertain where this ship is if it approaches Nagumo. And he has the new long range Saiun recon plane aboard his carriers, the Nakajima C6N. So yes, we will find Mizuchi if he comes, and then I will order Nagumo to engage. Even as his planes start on their way, Hara must begin launching from behind Bougainville, and we can also throw up all the land based bombers we have here at Rabaul.

Yet they are very clever. They may have means of finding Hara that I do not know of, and I must not allow them to attack our prized fleet carriers. So I will order Kong to use a much different deployment. He will break up the Kido Butai, and position our carriers all along the 150-mile length of Bougainville. They will stand like archers behind that wall, and this way, even if the enemy suspects their location when they see his planes coming, they will still not be able to hurt Hara’s carriers as they might if we operated in one heavy carrier division.

Yamamoto smiled. I will use all our strength, and yet it will be dispersed like the wind. When our planes launch they will be like a vast storm front, and yet there will be no central point the enemy can find to strike back at us, no eye in the storm. Yes… This is how we must fight, and we must do so immediately, before the Americans replenish and repair their losses, and Admiral Halsey sorties again.

He decided.

General Imamura leaned close to his confederate, General Hyakutake, as if confiding some great secret, and that was not very far from the truth. The information he was now disclosing was known only to a very few within Imperial General Headquarters.

“The Army will be instructed, in fact it will be ordered, to abandon all territory presently occupied in China south of the Yellow River. Only Shanghai, Canton and Hong Kong will be excepted.” Imamura lowered his voice to a whisper as he said this, though he knew the two men were quite alone, and there was no chance anything of their discussion could be overheard.

“Understand what this means,” he said. “The Army will soon have many more divisions available for deployment elsewhere. They are to withdraw all of the 11th, 12th, and 13th Armies from territory south of the Yellow River, 15 divisions. Many of these will be redeployed to the Siberian Front, but at least a third are to be made available to the South Pacific Army Group immediately. Look here… I received this coded message only yesterday.” Imamura handed General Hyakutake a message transcript, yet it contained only one cryptic phrase: The warrior is lucky, for the moon shines bright, and the hour of the festival has come.

The meaning of the phrase was immediately apparent to Hyakutake, a master of cryptanalysis, for there within that single phrase were the code names assigned to five Japanese Divisions.

“Do you see what I see in this?” asked Hyakutake.

“Of course!” said Imamura. “Five divisions. The Lucky Division is the 3rd, and that alone is worth its weight in gold. It is one of the most capable and experienced divisions in the Army, and I am told it will remain a square division. The Warrior Division is the 9th from Manchukuo, a very good unit that has been underutilized thus far. The Bright Moon brings us the 6th and 17th Divisions, and the festival Division is the 15th. Every one of these has seen combat in China. The Army is finally getting serious about the war here in the south. At last we will have the troops we need to fight the Americans and all their allies. In fact, there may even be forces to allow us to reconsider a limited invasion of Australia.”

He smiled, very pleased with himself, and all he had come to learn through means he would not discuss. He had many contacts in the Army web, chief among them being the irascible General Nishimura at Singapore. Together the two men had shared a growing curiosity about the strange ship that had appeared, the Takami, and the men who commanded it. They learned Ivan Volkov was also very interested in that ship, and that he had come to Japan to learn more about it, and to make the unprecedented request for an audience with Emperor Hirohito. Whatever else was discussed the “Yellow River Accord” as it was soon to be called, was going to change the face of the battle in the Pacific War. Japan was consolidating and limiting its position and operations in China, and the Army was looking more and more to securing the resources they had seized in those halcyon first six months of the war in the South Pacific.

Strangely, four of the five divisions Imamura had mentioned did eventually find their way to the Pacific Theater. Only the powerful 3rd Division had remained in China throughout the war, but now it was coming south. This could not help but have a dramatic effect on the campaign now underway.

The Americans had just transitioned from the strategic defensive to their first real offensive operations on both land and sea, and Halsey had learned that it wasn’t enough to simply operate against the Japanese carriers. Now he also had to cover the movement of troops and supplies to contested islands, and the Japanese had this same consideration to take into their planning.

As January ended, Halsey had only two carriers at sea, and was planning to head to Sydney to join Lexington and Yorktown. All the lighter carriers were back in Pearl, except the hybrids that went to Suva for emergency repair work there. He did have one of the new escort carriers, the Nassau, but it was built to be more of an aircraft ferry than anything else. This was going to leave a gap in carrier coverage that could span the first two weeks of February. As he considered the situation, it now appeared that both sides had reached a similar pause in ground operations on all of the islands being contested. The US had Noumea, but not the main airfield that was still being guarded by Colonel Ichiki.

On Efate, the 8th Marine Regiment had been challenged by the Japanese 79th Regiment of their 20th division just in time to prevent that island from falling. Now the US controlled the main anchorage at Port Vila, and the Japanese had Havana Harbor in the north.

On Fiji, Collins was mustering his division at M’ba, and slowly reorganizing to shift his weight to the left flank, eyeing that saddle in the highlands as his only route to pressing the attack further. The rains continued unabated, swelling the streams leading into the M’ba River and making that largely impassable, and the Japanese held that sugar mill overlooking both bridges, digging in behind the river in a very good defensive position.

To the south, Patch was just a few kilometers south of Nandi, and if anything could be done, it would be his division that would have to do it in the short run. To that end, another regiment of the 37th Division on Vanua Levu was now making ready to hop over to Suva and take Queen’s Road to reinforce Patch. This was the only expedient reinforcement at hand since MacArthur had sent the 41st to Noumea. It would give him five regiments to press his attack in February.

Elsewhere, the Japanese had taken Ndeni, called Nendo today, in the Santa Cruz Islands. The small airfield there had once been a lifesaving place for US airmen to land in the carrier duels fought around the New Hebrides, but it could no longer serve in that role.

With the 41st Division safely delivered to Noumea, Halsey met with MacArthur when he arrived in Sydney, and the two men discussed further plans.

“I told you we could take Noumea with no difficulty,” said MacArthur. “We should have done it long ago. Then our planes would have cut off the Japanese supplies to Fiji.”

“Should of? That horse never won a race,” said Halsey. “It was a matter of not having adequate carrier support. Now we’ve got the flattops back, and we’ll get results, I can assure you of that.”

“Yes… but I’m told the fleet had another bad round with the Japanese, and those two out there in the repair yards are evidence of that.”

“Yes, they hurt us,” said Halsey. “Wasp was the hardest blow. But we’ll have Yorktown and Lexington back in a week to ten days, then I can sortie with four fleet carriers again and conduct business. Anything I should know about?”

MacArthur lit his pipe, considering. “With the 41st at Noumea, our first order of business will be to get that airfield. We’ll take it this week. There looks to be only one good battalion holding it now, reinforced with engineers. We cut off everything they had south of the harbor, but a recon plane spotted them moving north up the eastern coast road. I can kick them out of Tontouta and get the engineers to work on that field. We’ll need secondary fields as well, closer to the harbor.”

“Then no major troop movements I need to cover?”

“Not for the time being. What’s the situation in the New Hebrides?”

“It looks like they’re going to fight for Efate and Luganville. So when I leave here, I head for Pago Pago to escort the 6th Marine Regiment to Efate. That will double team them there. After that, Nimitz says he’ll use the 1st Marine Division and hit Luganville with two regiments, the third being held in reserve.”

“What about Fiji? You were all dead set on clearing that before I went to Noumea.”

“That will take time. I intend to squeeze them hard, and I’ll damn well contest the movement of any supplies to that island from this point forward. They know that, and the Kido Butai isn’t finished with us yet either. So a lot of this planning with the Marines will depend on what the Japs do. In the meantime, there was an incident at Truk yesterday.”

“Truk? That’s their main Pacific support base.”

“Correct,” said Halsey, “and it got hit—but we had nothing to do with it, and it certainly wasn’t the British.”

“Well then who?” MacArthur tamped down his tobacco, and relit the pipe.

“Intel thinks it’s that Siberian raider, the ship that was covering their landings on Kamchatka and Sakhalin. They’ve tangled with it twice already, but haven’t put it under, which surprises me, given the carrier power they could use.”

“Interesting… How much damage did they do?”

“Just a knock on the door,” said Halsey, “but the fact that they could even do that much is pretty amazing. This is the ship that is using those hot new naval rockets. Japs have them too, which is worrisome, because they’re pretty damn lethal against our planes. The odd thing is that no one can figure out how the Russians and Japanese could get so far ahead of us with that stuff.”

“Russians?”

“Well, we figure they were the ones that really built this Siberian ship. There isn’t a shipyard worth the name in all of Siberia.”

“Well, it’s likely no more than a nuisance,” said MacArthur. “I don’t see how it could impact our operations here.”

“True,” said Halsey. “But that damn ship could start an arms race and we don’t even have a ticket to the stadium. If the Japs start popping off fireworks and put missiles on all their cruisers and battleships, this war could look really different. At the moment, the deployment of those weapons seems very limited. In fact, our pilots report they were fired from only one ship. But where there’s smoke, there’s fire. We need to be vigilant on this.”

That was to be an understatement.

Chapter 29

“Admiral,” said Gromyko. “It’s time we came to a decision as to what we will be doing on this sortie. I think the boat has settled down now.”

As far as they could tell, it had been September when they first arrived, making contact with Fedorov to arrange that rendezvous off the Dolphin’s Head. He never showed, but even if he had, Kazan would not have been found there. As it happened many times with Kirov, the shift back was somewhat bumpy. They appeared, then pulsed again, apparently vanishing into the ether. When the boat finally reappeared, months had passed. Their return to the past had been like a rock skipping on a pond, taking a short hop before it finally settled, and during that hop, they had taken on a new crewman, and a very important one—Admiral Volsky himself. 1942 was waning, and on New Year’s Eve, Volsky remembered everything.

Since that time they had been up under the ice for a good long while. Even though they had excellent charts of navigable channels from the Kara Sea to the Pacific, they all dated to the year 2021, where global warming had thinned out the ice considerably. This was 1943, and for some reason, the winter was unusually severe. Gromyko had consulted the historical records, and found temperatures much colder than those recorded, most likely due to the eruption of a volcano in the South Pacific. His radio man had picked up talk of that, but he could find no historical reference for it either. Clearly they history, as they once knew it, was no longer reliable—nor were their charts for submerged transit under all that ice.

Channels that should have been open were much narrower, and the ice was far thicker and deeper than they had believed it would be. This made for very slow going, easing along at five or six knots, and often slowing to a near crawl while sonar probed the way ahead. The only benefit of the process was that he would build all new charts for the ice in January 1943, though he did not see how he might ever use them again. So averaging no more than 120 nautical miles per day, it was going to take them over two weeks to make the transit. They would be under ice until they got all the way through the Norton Sound, and then down the coast of Kamchatka to the approach to Petropavlovsk.

Gromyko had a mind to consider stopping there to take on fresh food for the crew, but he needed to resolve a political problem first. He remembered very well the mission he had been given by Kamenski. When the Director first proposed it, they thought he would have to try and find Admiral Volsky after shifting back to the 1940s. He had disappeared well before Kirov’s final shift, and had no direct experience of the events that led Karpov to seize the ship in Murmansk after its second coming. There was a good deal this version of Kamenski did not know at that time, but as they continued the discussion, an idea came to him.

“A pity we can’t just send the man we have at hand here,” he said to Gromyko.

“Excuse me?” said Gromyko, not understanding.

“Volsky,” said the Director. “There’s a perfectly good version of the man right here, but he’s from this sequence of events, this meridian in time, and has no knowledge of anything that happened.”

That was one thing Gromyko could not quite fathom yet.

“Are you not from this same meridian of time, as you call it?”

“Yes, and I know what you are asking me with that. If I am from this timeline, then how is it I know all the things I’ve been talking about?”

Kamenski had given him a long and confusing explanation, and he had sorted through it in his mind for some time, remembering the Director’s words.

“Time is rather fastidious,” he had told him. “She doesn’t like wasting things, and is very fussy about that. I was almost certain that my lease on life had run its course. Heaven knows, I’ve been given more than enough time in this world. But it seems there are more worlds than we think, and this is just another one. Fedorov wanted to know where the missing men were going. Where was Orlov and all the rest? Then he became one of those missing men himself. Yet time takes away, and time gives back as well. She found a place for him, as she just found a place for me when I vanished aboard Kirov. You can feel it coming, you know. You tend to feel a bit… insubstantial. For the longest time I thought it was that little treasure I had in my pocket, the key. You know nothing of that, but let’s just say it was a kind of lucky charm. I thought it kept me safe and sound, but now I think it’s just something that helps time go about her business.”

“Director… I’m just not sure I’m following you here.”

“Ah, forgive me if I tend to ramble on. The older you get, the more things you have tucked away up here, and time keeps pouring more tea in my cup. One day it will run over, but for now, I still hold it well enough. Let me put it to you this way. Suppose you were writing a story. You think you have it just the way you want, then you get an idea that simply must be given form and shape in the narrative. So you do a little editing here and there, and write a new chapter. At the end of the day, you save it, overwriting the old file with the new. That’s what time is doing. Well now, you would think your characters would have the good manners to forget the old file—the way things were before you made all those changes and additions to the story—but it seems they don’t, at least in my case. I’m a file that has been saved and replaced a good many times, but I remember each version of the story I lived in before. Yes, each and every one.”

And that was the genesis of Kamenski’s plan. Gromyko had been told to put out to sea, run his control rod procedure, and leave things to time. Once he got back to the 1940s—if he did get back at all—he was to try and find either Fedorov or Volsky. The first thing he did was call on the secure channel Fedorov had given him, and lo and behold, there was Fedorov. He said he was in an airship, and arranged to meet with him, but he never made that rendezvous, and that seems to have changed everything—yet again.

Now Gromyko finally understood what Kamenski had been trying to tell him with his metaphors about teacups and editing books. He knew it in the most direct way possible, because it had happened to him. The Captain had clear memories of leaving Severomorsk, running his procedure, shifting safely back and having that nice little chat with Fedorov. Then he turned in, eager for the bunk after a long day’s operations, and when he woke up to assume his shift in the command sail, everything was different.

The boat was in a different position, the crew a bit confused, and they soon learned that the time had shifted on them as well. It was as if they had slipped again, some strange after effect from the magic worked by that control rod.

Even his head was different, for in it now was a completely different version of his transit to this place! As he thought about it, he realized it must have been spawned by that errant remark made by Kamenski about having a perfectly good Admiral Volsky at hand. Now he recalled that plan in clear detail. Kamenski had put Volsky aboard in Severomorsk, confident at last that if he did send that version of the Admiral along, Time would sort all the rest out.

“He’ll either get there, or he won’t,” Kamenski had told him. “If he turns up missing after you shift, it will most likely be because there is already another version of him there where you have arrived. Time won’t permit the two of them to cohabit that same milieu like that, and so the Admiral you take on board will simply not arrive with you when you shift.”

“You mean he’ll just vanish?”

“Something like that.”

“Where will he go?”

“Elsewhere. Never mind about that now Captain. Just worry about your mission. If he remains with you, all the better. Use the good Admiral to get close to Fedorov and that ship. If he vanishes, then look to find him at large somewhere in the world. Find him, or get to Fedorov. That’s the key.”

But there was Volsky that morning, right on his boat, and in Gromyko’s head he could now remember two versions of this mission, one where he left Severomorsk on his own, and a second where Kamenski put Admiral Volsky aboard. Apparently, something had happened, like a train being switched to a new track, and now he was sailing on the meridian where Volsky had boarded Kazan at the very beginning, and all the new memories of that were now in his head. But how? It must have been that little bump we took on landing here, he thought. The shift was not complete. We appeared, then vanished again, only to reappear with Volsky aboard. Very strange.

Gromyko didn’t know it yet, but something had indeed happened. Fedorov was behind it all. Instead of making his planned rendezvous with Gromyko, Fedorov’s airship overflew a hole in time, and he found himself back in 1908, right where he had intended to go in the first place. There he had the fate of all these meridians in his hand. The choice he made in that fateful encounter with Mironov, would cement the meridian that went forward from that moment. Time would allow many threads in her loom, but one day she must weave them all into one strand again and create the new Prime Meridian. Fedorov’s choice to spare Mironov, to spare Sergei Kirov, had decided the matter, and at that moment, a Heisenberg wave was generated that migrated forward, all the way to its real point of origin in the year 2021.

This tiny outlier of change was very small, just the first ripple in a series of waves that would eventually sweep forward like a tsunami. Only one man was even aware of the change—more tea in his cup, or perhaps just one more chapter in his inner book—Pavel Kamenski. It was like a song that had begun on one of those old record players the Director was still fond of, and then the needle skipped, encountering a flaw, and was bumped back. That brief segment of the song played again, and only Kamenski knew why. So he realized that his plan to send Admiral Volsky might actually work now, because things had changed again. Fedorov’s mercy had changed them, though he did not know that at the time.

So he sent the Admiral along, though it seemed that it would take some time for Volsky to wake up and have his own tired head filled with past lives—other versions of himself that had also taken this journey. To make sure that would happen, Kamenski slipped something into his pocket before he boarded Kazan—a small key. “Keep that safe for me, will you?” he had said with a smile.

And Volsky woke up as well, and he remembered—remembered everything, all the events that had been lived and experienced by any version of his own self that was entangled with the meridian in which he now found himself after Kazan shifted—the new Prime Meridian, the line of fate and causality that Fedorov had assured by failing to kill Sergei Kirov.

Now Gromyko had the whole thing tossed into his lap—the decision concerning the fate of another Kirov—not the man, but the ship. Kamenski had riveted that home….

“For now,” he told him, “we’ll start with the things we have control over—the men, the ship. We start with Kirov.”

“Well, what are we going to do?”

“Go back and get them out,” said Kamenski with a smile.

“Director, haven’t we tried that once already? Look what happened!”

“Yes, that’s a point well taken. We still have to try, because if we don’t…” Kamenski stopped, set his pipe down, and rubbed his eyes. “If we don’t, Mister Gromyko, then this is all going to unravel, this entire present moment I’ve called home for so long. It all depends on things that happened in the 1940s. Don’t you see? Well, they aren’t happening—at least not as they were supposed to. Things are changing, and we’re responsible. Never mind about trying to stop the war that is still on our doorstep here. Now it’s about something much more. If we don’t get back there and put a stop to all this, then everything, and I mean everything, is going to come flying apart. How did that poet put it? Yes… Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere, the ceremony of innocence is drowned. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming!”

He looked at Gromyko now, and in his eyes there was a profound sadness, and a vast silence of finality. “That’s what caused it, the second coming of that ship to 1941. It created a loop, and if that doesn’t resolve properly there, if anything should happen to displace that ship to a moment prior to the time of its first arrival, then we face down Paradox yet again. Do this once, and you court a good deal of trouble, just as we experienced it. Do it twice… Desolation, Mister Gromyko, that is what we are facing now, complete and utter annihilation. The cold frost of infinity is out there, and it’s a savage end, a futile end to the whole damn world. And do you know why? The second coming, that’s why. Kirov went back, and now it’s gone back a second time. Understand? If that happens again, and again, and again… See what I mean? The changes are already starting to ripple forward in time. We don’t notice them yet, but I can tell. They may seem insignificant—different missiles for your submarine and all. That doesn’t seem all that earth shaking, but I assure you, it is only the beginning.”

“You mean if we don’t get them back here safely…”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. The whole damn loop will spin out again, and each time it does, the changes become more and more catastrophic. Try getting a future like this one sorted out under those circumstances. Don’t you see? Normally it takes… time for the variations to ripple forward to the future. But soon the changes will become so pronounced that they will reach this time, even before events have concluded in the past. That’s Mother Time’s problem now, and it’s also our problem. We started it, and so we’ll simply have to finish it.”

“But wait a moment… Didn’t you say this was, well, a different world, a different meridian of time here. Is Kirov’s intervention in your history recorded here? Could I read about it in a history book in your library?”

“Very astute,” said Kamenski. “The answer to your last question is no—there is no mention of any of those events in the history of this timeline. But that hardly matters. You see, this isn’t the Prime Meridian. It’s just one of many possible alternative Meridians that could arise from events happening in the Prime Meridian. That’s where Kirov is now, but the Prime is badly warped, bent out of shape, contaminated by all those missiles, and yes, nuclear bombs as well. It will change things, Mister Gromyko, and rather dramatically. It will change the fate of each and every possible meridian arising from those events—including this one. Understand? Kirov sits on the trunk of the tree, this is just one of the branches. But if you cut through that trunk, they all go down together. That’s what Kirov is doing—cutting through the Prime Meridian like a buzz saw. So we have to go back, get them out, and that failing….”

He gave Gromyko those sad empty eyes again.

“We have to kill them,” said the Captain, understanding the darker side of the mission Kamenski was handing him now. “Kill Kirov, the ship—there won’t be any magic tricks with a control rod this time. That’s the only way we can really be certain this loop you speak of could not repeat—kill the ship and crew. That’s why you want to load all those nice new missiles onto my boat.”

“Captain, as I said, you are a very astute man.”

A very astute man…. Gromyko smiled to himself. Yes, this was the trunk of the tree now. This was the new Prime Meridian, not the world he first came from, and not the world he returned to, finding Kamenski waiting for him there with this mission. This was the Prime, and it was now his mission to decide whether it would stand, or whether it would fall, and that all depended on the life or death of that ship, Kirov.

At least I don’t bear the burden alone, he thought. Time shuffled the deck on me somehow, and I have an Ace in my hand this time—Admiral Volsky. It will be his choice, won’t it…. But what if he decides that Kirov must live? Then what?

Something told him this mission had many dark corners to get around before it would ever end. Here he was, and with Admiral Volsky at his side, and now they had to decide what to do.

Chapter 30

“So then,” said Gromyko. “What is our plan?”

He was sitting with Admiral Volsky in his cabin, a private meeting so none of the other officers and crew might overhear. Kamenski had briefed them both when they departed, yet Gromyko was still bothered by the jumble of memories in his head. Who was he now? He clearly remembered the secret rendezvous when the Admiral and Fedorov first came aboard, sneaking in on a submersible as his sub remained hidden in the still dark waters beneath the Admiral Kuznetsov.

He had been at war in 2021, his submarine already clashing with the Americans when Karpov took Kirov and the Red Banner Pacific Fleet out. Then Kirov vanished with the unexpected eruption of the Demon Volcano, and he had taken on these two other officers, hearing their impossible tale as to where the ship had turned up. It wasn’t dead as many in the fleet first thought. That volcano had sent Karpov’s flotilla careening into the past, and now Gromyko was to take his boat back and look for it. But how?

That was when he learned of the control rod they had brought aboard, and its amazing effects. He could still recall how hard it had been to internalize all of that, get his mind around what was happening and come to accept it. In time, the mind could embrace every impossible thing. He had seen the reality of the past, and used the power of his boat to fight there.

Then, while caught up in yet another duel at sea in the Atlantic, they had encountered a most unexpected challenger. Chernov had been at his station, as always, when he spoke those most unwelcome words.

“Con…. Undersea contact. Possible submarine…”

Gromyko turned, a question in his eyes. “An uninvited guest,” he said. “German U-boat?”

There was a moment’s hesitation as Chernov continued to toggle switches on the module he had been using to process the signal. “Sir… This sounds like a British sub.” His voice carried a note of alarm that surprised Gromyko, and he never liked surprises. “British? We were not informed they had anything out here.”

“Sir! This is crazy. It’s reading as Astute Class!” He gave Gromyko a shocked expression. “We got lucky and recorded one boat after learning its deployment date. It’s the only profile we’ve ever managed to get, but my readings are above a 90% match for this signal.”

“Impossible,” said Gromyko, but then a deeper instinct asserted itself, reptilian, a reflex born of many hours beneath the sea. “All stop!” he said. “Launch noisemaker sled number one. Then right rudder fifteen, down bubble fifteen! Rig for emergency silent running!”

Astute Class… And Director Kamenski was most curious about that when he heard about it, thought Gromyko. My own reaction was perhaps overblown. There I was, fighting the second World War, when suddenly I’m told we have a visitor from the third. In my mind, I had no way of knowing where I was. There was never any certainty on this boat from the moment they first brought that control rod aboard. I could have been anywhere. The boat could have shifted again for all I knew. Yet there was one sure thing that I could count on in those split seconds—Chernov. There was no way he would make a mistake and classify an old WWII boat as Astute Class. So I did what I would have done in 2021, fought as I would have fought there. We barely avoided that surprise attack, and when I threw my punch back at the unseen enemy, I wanted to make sure I killed him.

The next thing I know, the boat was somewhere else….

Now this.

Another mission with Volsky, and with the same objective as the first—find Kirov, bring it home, and that failing… kill the ship. Volsky looks tired, but he seems to have settled himself. Yes, he experienced the same thing I did, with memories of different lives all jumbled together in his mind, but now things have quieted, the shock of that receded, and he has been able to sort things through. I still don’t understand it—how could I be carrying all these memories in my head. Poor Volsky apparently has a good many more.

“Captain,” said the Admiral. “This is going to be a most delicate situation. Since Fedorov never kept his appointment with you, something must have happened to him—we know not what. But knowing that young man, I will bet he is still alive and well. We have remained radio silent up here for some time, but now I think we must contact the ship again. That would be the most direct way to address our problem.”

“It would reveal our presence here to Karpov,” said Gromyko.

“I understand what you are saying, but what else are we to do?”

“We could remain silent. If you might have to go to someone’s house and kill them, would you knock first? In that event, we must hit the ship the old-fashioned way. I don’t think it would be too hard to determine where they are. Karenin picked up some radio chatter just yesterday. Apparently, there was an attack at an important Japanese naval base.”

“That should not be surprising,” said Volsky.

“But it involved missiles….”

That got Volsky’s attention.

“Missiles? Then that must have been Kirov; Karpov. The man is fighting his own private little war with the Japanese out here. Such an attack would be very much in accord with the way Karpov thinks.”

“So we could just navigate to that sector and start the hunt there.”

“Suppose we do,” said Volsky. “I do not think we will just creep up on Kirov easily. You forget Tasarov.”

“Yes, yes, the best ears in the fleet. Our man Chernov is pretty damn good as well.”

“Yet one way or another, contact will occur,” said Volsky. “If we are to give Karpov the option of returning with us, then we’ll have to speak with him.”

“Frankly Admiral, I have very little hope in that. Didn’t we try to convince Karpov to return earlier? There he was, fighting the Japanese in 1908, and he was driven. I do not think he will be any different this time.”

“In that you may be correct.” Volsky shrugged. “He disobeyed a direct order from me to cooperate with us and return to 2021. Setting aside the fact that we have no idea whether or not we could even pull that off, Karpov will not want to cooperate this time either. He was quite determined to get control of Kirov, and now we see what he has in mind. He wants to fight the Japanese, and he will think that by doing so he can convince them to relinquish the territories they took from Russia after his last intervention failed in 1908. In fact, if we do contact him, he will throw that at us right from the beginning. He will say it was our interference that prevented him from settling things in 1908.”

“Then our only other choice is to do it on the sly,” said Gromyko. “Stealth is what this submarine is all about. I’m willing to bet I can get this boat into missile range before Tasarov hears us.”

“Which then presents us with the uncomfortable decision as to whether or not we fire.” Volsky was obviously bothered by that idea. “That is a good ship out there; a good crew. All of those men are like sons to me, which is why I suppose they came to call me Papa Volsky. The thought of killing them all is hard for me to even contemplate. But yet, Kamenski is convinced that we must do so as a last resort. I do not say I even understand the threat he sees so darkly, but I have been troubled by this for a good long while. When messages come from a future that we cannot even know, and they warn of our ship, it is more than troubling. It is deeply disturbing.”

“Messages?” Gromyko gave him a blank look.

“Signals that were aimed at this shadowy group founded by my good friend, Admiral Tovey. He called it the Watch, and I suppose we are the reason for that.”

“What did they say?”

“Beware of a ship… beware Kirov.”

There was a moment of silence, before the Admiral spoke again. “So it has something to do with everything Kamenski told you, and he went over it all again with me before I stepped aboard again. Well Captain, if it came down to it, how would you fight Kirov?”

“With everything I have,” said Gromyko. “It’s likely we’ll get into missile range, and they gave me a new set of some very sharp teeth.”

“Yes, the new Zircon MOS-III. How many?”

“Two full silos of eight missiles each. The remainder are the older Kalibr Class cruise missiles. I have another eight of the long-range 3M-14-K Series. That gives me striking power out to 2500 kilometers, and with a 450 kilogram warhead. But that is the land attack variant. The remaining sixteen missiles are the 3M-54-K, a shorter range variant out to 660 kilometers, but with the smaller 200-kilogram warhead. That was the dedicated anti-ship variant, though I suppose I could use the land attack missile against a water borne target as well.”

“It may interest you to know that Kirov also has the Zircon—ten missiles. They also carried older P-900s and there were 40 of the Moskit-IIs. I have no idea how many Karpov may have expended since he took over the ship. Fedorov would certainly know, assuming Karpov did not throw him into the brig.”

“The missiles don’t matter to me,” said Gromyko. “I won’t be firing from the surface. That’s where I have the real advantage. Their entire missile inventory is useless in this fight. All I have to worry about is their torpedoes.”

“Remember, they have three helicopters.”

“That is the real threat,” said Gromyko. “They expand their ASW search radius, and if they get a good idea where we are, they can drop sonobuoys to refine that contact and then we get trouble. It’s a pity that no one ever managed to put decent SAMs on a submarine. I’ve got the mast mounted 9k34 Strela 3, but its range is just a whisker over four kilometers. That might get a helo that was hovering right on top of us, but little more. Give me the S-400. That would really be a game changer. A few silos of those, and I would be virtually unbeatable against those helos or ASW planes. Then again, to see them I’d have to have my head above water, and for an old sub driver like me, that is the last place I want to be in a fight.”

“Yes, you would have to expose your sensor mast to target the helicopters,” said Volsky. “That would make your position known, particularly after you fire your SAM. All the helo has to do is fire their torpedo in response. You might shoot down that helo, but then you would have to deal with that torpedo in the water, and perhaps more than one. It would also tell the enemy mother ship exactly where you are, and Kirov has three helicopters.”

“So both sides have good face cards in their hand,” said Gromyko. “As it stands, they are vulnerable to my stealth and missile attacks, but we are vulnerable to those helos. The key is who finds the other first.”

Volsky shrugged. “It’s a pity that we even have this conversation,” he said. “Here we are, discussing our Assassin’s Creed. It is most unseemly.”

“So there is no way Karpov might be reasoned with?”

“I find that most unlikely.”

“Then if I had to kill that ship, I would start with a full salvo of those 3M-54-E Series missiles, but I would want a firing position that would mask their approach for as long as possible.”

“Explain,” said Volsky.

“If I could find the ship close to one of these islands—a nice big fat one—then I would fire from the opposite side of that island. If it had sufficient elevation, it would create a radar blind spot. I would fire right down that dark zone, and then they might not pick up the missiles until they start their final attack maneuvers. They would climb to avoid the land mass, and then immediately dive for the high-speed terminal run at sea level.”

“Do you think they would get through? Kirov’s missile defense shield is very good.”

“All we need is one good hit. I hesitate to bring this up, but if this was real war—the kind I trained to fight in 2021, then the last missile in that salvo would have a special warhead. If I see the first fifteen shot down, then we detonate the last one before they get it. The blast wave, shock and EMP will all have strong effects.”

“Yet there may be other exotic effects as well,” said Volsky. “Remember what happened to you in the Atlantic.”

“Only too well.”

“You know,” said Volsky. “This may sound odd, but there are three layers of memory in my mind. One is the life I led when we first left Severomorsk to go out for those live fire exercises. The ship was carrying a lot of older munitions then, just to get rid of them. We were going to double down on the Zircon after we reached Vladivostok. The second layer of memory is from the second coming of Kirov, and we had much the same in terms of overall weaponry, but better SAMs. Yet I also remember the life I was living in when Kamenski herded me into his little scheme here. In that world, the one that just serviced your ship, there was no Kirov, at least not any ship by that name. It was renamed Admiral Ushakov, just as the Frunze was renamed Admiral Lazarev. Both those ships had troubled reactors, and are scheduled to be scrapped. So only two of the Four Boys, as we called them, were still at sea.”

“And the other two brothers?”

“Oh, those were renamed as well and eventually put into deep modernization programs, the Admiral Nakhimov was finished in 2018, and Pytor Veliky in 2021. They got new teeth, ten 3S-14 vertical launch system modules that could each hold eight missiles. That dramatically increased firepower and endurance, from the 20 old P-700s we were carrying, to eighty SSMs. Pyotr Velikiy, for example, got all Zircon class missiles.”

“Formidable,” said Gromyko.

“You see, we never cannibalized those ships to build the new version of Kirov. They are still from the original class, yet vastly upgraded. Strange how in these other two life lines the ship seems to be different from the models we created in the world I come from.”

“Yet all three are dangerous,” said Gromyko. “Is Kirov carrying special weapons?”

“Of course. They will have at least three.”

“Would Karpov resort to using them?”

“He already has! In the first time loop, there was no Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor as a result. After the second coming, the ship went north to Murmansk instead of south into the Atlantic, and we have Mister Fedorov to thank for that. So, one turn of that ship’s rudder, and we get Pearl Harbor back. I can see how the men from the future might fear Kirov, and why they sent Tovey’s group those warnings. Captain, that is a clever attack plan, though one that would need Kirov to be in a particular spot to succeed. What if it fails?”

“After moving off axis to one side or another, I would then continue to close until I got inside Zircon range. Then I would fire all sixteen of those, and the last with a special warhead. If they manage to stop them, then I go to the Kaliber 3M-54-E1s, and when in range, I throw all eight. After that, it’s down to torpedoes, but I think I would have killed that ship before things got that far.”

“Yes,” said Volsky. “They’ll have to expend a lot of SAMs to get those Zircon missiles. They move too damn fast. They won’t be able to rely on one S-400 getting a hit each time. So it may come down to how many arrows Karpov still has left in his quiver, and whether or not we can achieve surprise.”

“He knows we’re out here somewhere,” said Gromyko. “Fedorov certainly knows.”