Armageddon

Chapter 6

“Well, Admiral,” said Captain Gromyko as he finished his tea. The easy route south would be to hug the coast all the way to Vladivostok, and then head south from there into the Sea of Japan.”

“Won’t the Americans expect us to take this route?” Volsky folded his arms over a well satisfied gut, the meal just concluded, along with the pleasantries, as the briefing began in earnest now. The Admiral was there, with Gromyko and his Executive Officer Belanov, along with Kamenski, Fedorov, Dobrynin and the others.

“I suppose they would, but it is still much safer than trying to go through the Kuriles and then transiting the Tsugaru Strait from the East. That area is very likely being watched by American submarines, and the strait itself could be mined. If we take the route I suggest, we will most likely only have to deal with the Japanese.”

“Yes, this is the only route that makes any sense. Captain, what do you think our chances are of getting well south without being detected?”

“ Kazan is very quiet,” said Gromyko, “as long as the crew itself is quiet. We have many new features built into this ship to make it one of the stealthiest submarines in the world. I will give you a tour after we finish, and you will see that our torpedo room is not forward as one might think. The tubes are mounted on the port and starboard side of the ship, on either side of the forward sail. This leaves the nose of the ship acoustically isolated for the new spherical sonar array there. We are the only sub in the world configured this way.”

“But can we break through the Japanese patrols undetected?” The Admiral pressed his question again.

“I give us very good odds on that, and if they should discover us by chance, then we can put those torpedo tubes to good use.”

Volsky nodded, though his heart was heavy with the thought of more combat, and more lives lost at sea. He had seen more than enough in recent months. Yet now he knew there was another matter at the heart of this mission that needed to be discussed, and he considered how to best broach the matter.

“Well then… Captain Gromyko, every man in this room is aware of something that must now be disclosed to you and your Starpom if you are to remain an able Captain of your submarine here. You may have been curious as to what this visit was for, and why you should have the Fleet Admiral and these other gentlemen here asking you about a stealthy trip out into the Sea of Japan.”

“That thought has crossed my mind, sir.”

“No doubt.” Volsky took a long breath. Where to begin? “Captain…as you may have heard I was aboard the battlecruiser Kirov last July when we went out for live fire exercises in the Norwegian Sea. What you have not heard is what actually happened to that ship, though I am sure there have been rumors.”

“We heard there was some kind of accident aboard Orel, sir. Those old Oscars have served their purpose and should be retired. They are all accidents waiting to happen.”

“That may be so,” Volsky agreed. “Well there aren’t many left. The Americans have recently retired the last two assigned to the Pacific.”

Gromyko made a grim nod now, waiting to hear more.

“Captain, that accident involved a nuclear warhead, and the detonation had a very strange effect on the ship-on Kirov. Perhaps mister Kamenski here can attest to these effects as they are associated with such detonations.”

Kamenski cleared his throat. “That I can, Admiral. But it would take much more time than we have to explain it all in detail. Suffice it to say that in 1961 we discovered that the detonation of a nuclear device caused some rather dramatic effects beyond the obvious physical chaos of the explosion itself. We knew about radiation since the 1940s, but it wasn’t until the high altitude tests between 1958 and 1962 that we discovered other effects, like the EMP burst that darkened parts of Hawaii nearly 1500 miles away and knocked out one third of low orbiting satellites with its residual radiation. The Chinese have just recently demonstrated their mastery of this same trick over the Pacific coast of the United States. Well, one other effect was discovered in October of 1961 with the detonation of the Tsar Bomba, and it was very strange indeed. The detonation ruptured the time continuum.”

There. He gave it to him plain and to the point, just like his example concerning EMP effects, but it took a while for the information to register on Captain Gromyko’s sonar.

“Excuse me, Director…Time continuum?”

“Yes, Captain, the fourth dimension. Time. You know the first three well enough as you move about them in this vast ocean here-length, breadth and height, or depth in the case of your submarine. Well you must also know that you move in the fourth dimension as well-in time. Until Tsar Bomba went off, everything moved in only one direction through time, from this moment to the next in that second by second journey we all take from the cradle to the grave. But Tsar Bomba showed us that journey could also be affected by very powerful detonations-and time itself could be breached. Physical objects could be blown through through that breach, and they would end up in the same spatial location, but in another time.”

Gromyko looked at his Starpom, raising an eyebrow to see how Belanov was following this, but he sat there with the same serious look on his face all the other men had.

It doesn’t sound all that crazy after all, thought Volsky as he listened to Kamenski explain it. Things move in space, and they move in time. In space they go forward and back again, why not in time? As the Director went on, the light of confusion and amazement slowly kindled in Gromyko’s eyes.

“And so you see, Captain, we have been experimenting with these effects ever since, and our great problem was how to control them and determine where an object might be displaced in time. We could not solve it, but accidents happen, and they sometimes contain hidden gems of discovery. The incident in the Norwegian Sea last July was enough of an explosion to rupture time, and Kirov sailed right through the breach.”

“Kirov? The entire ship moved in…in time?”

“It did.” Kamenski let that sit there, knowing what the next question was likely to be as the Captain looked from him to Volsky and back again.

“Where? Where did the ship move?”

“It was displaced approximately eighty years into the past.”

“Eighty years? To 1941? And you discovered this to be true, Admiral?”

“I was aboard, as was every other man here except your Starpom, and Mister Kamenski here. Yes, it took us some doing but we soon discovered what had happened, and we connected it to that detonation in our minds, but with one more problem. How to get back? I do not believe we have the time to go into all of that just now. But we did make it back, as you can plainly see. One strange effect of all this is that the ship itself became far less stable in any given time than it might otherwise have been. Between our Chief Engineer Dobrynin here and young Mister Fedorov, we were able to discover that a replacement control rod we were using in the ship’s reactor maintenance seemed to catalyze these effects on every occasion when it was used.”

“Kirov is quite the slippery fish now,” said Kamenski, “and suffice it to say that the detonation of that volcano, and possibly combat actions in the recent naval engagement with the Americans, have caused the ship to displace in time again.”

“Again? Where is it now?”

“Much farther back-to the year 1908.” Admiral Volsky folded his hands, realizing how difficult this revelation must be for a no nonsense naval officer like Gromyko.

“But… I don’t understand. How you can know this?”

“We know it by chance again, another gift of a random moment where something unplanned happens and you fall through to a great discovery. We were going to try and use these control rods in a test reactor to see if we could replicate the effects.” Volsky decided to simplify the long twisted tale and try and bring it to some graspable form. He would say nothing of how a missing reactor technician led them to launch Fedorov’s mission from the Primorskiy Engineering Center, or why they had first gone in the first place. He would mention nothing of Orlov, quietly shielding the man from any possible recrimination, a tact that the Chief did not fail to notice. The thing to do was to keep everything focused on Kirov.

“We wanted to mount a rescue operation, just as we would if your submarine were to get into trouble down here. Yet to do so we did not have to send men in one of those clever deep sea diving submersibles like the one that brought us to you here. No…we had to send men back in time. For reasons that remain unclear to us, they ended up in the same year where Kirov is now still marooned, and managed to make contact.”

“Amazing!” Now Gromyko had transitioned from confusion to awe. Here was a Fleet Admiral telling him a tale the like of which he had never heard in his life. How could he doubt it?

“Yes, very amazing indeed,” said Volsky. “Now comes an uncomfortable part of what we must discuss. As you may know, I gave command of the Red Banner Pacific Fleet to Captain Vladimir Karpov.”

Gromyko nodded. He had heard of Karpov, though he had never met the man. The things he heard were less than complimentary-that Karpov was aggressive, a climber, somewhat manipulative and not one to trust in any situation where the struggle for power was involved. So it was that he was not entirely surprised to hear what the Admiral told him next.

“We were trying to arrange delivery of one of these control rods to Kirov, to see if we might use it to catalyze this time displacement effect again and bring the ship back home. We did this successfully before when we returned from the first displacement. Now we hoped it would work once again, but I’m afraid our Captain Karpov has had second thoughts about it, and other ideas about what he should do.”

“Other ideas? What do you mean, Admiral?”

“I mean he has refused to coordinate a rendezvous with that rescue team and now seems intent on remaining exactly where he is.”

“What? In 1908? Why would he do such a thing?”

Kamenski leaned in again now. “Power. He is sitting there in the most powerful ship in the world-a very slippery fish indeed-and he has determined that he would prefer to use that power right where he is, in 1908.”

Fedorov spoke now. “To put it plainly, Captain, he believes he can cause some very strange effects of his own now-on all the history between that year and this one. His initial objective is to redress the Russian defeat in 1905 at the hands of the Japanese Navy.”

“This is unbelievable!” Gromyko looked to Belanov now, but what else could he say or do here? “And yet, you tell me all this with a completely straight face. This is either the best goddamned Vranyo I have ever heard or it is an absolutely shocking situation.”

“We all went through this same shock and surprise,” said Volsky. “Now we are a confederacy of a very few men who know these facts, and you two are the latest new recruits. I must caution you that this cannot be generally revealed to the remainder of the crew on Kazan, at least not yet. You must consider it a state secret and a highly sensitive matter, Captain.”

“I understand, Admiral.”

“I also realize that I may be asking a great deal of you here. The days and mission ahead will be very perilous.”

“You may rely on my ship and crew, sir. We won’t let you down.”

“Thank you, Captain. So…what are we doing here on your submarine with those odd containers? They are, as you may have guessed by now, the very same control rods that we have used to catalyze these time displacement effects aboard Kirov, and we intend to use them again-here, on this boat.”

“Use them again? You mean…”

“Correct, Captain,” said Kamenski. “We are going to mount yet another rescue mission, and your boat has been selected as one that might have just a little more authority in the situation we may soon find ourselves in. You see, our first attempt was able to put men on the scene, but we could only communicate by shortwave radio. This is why we have devised this new plan-to put your boat on the scene and then see what we can do.”

“So you wish to try to move Kazan in time as well-to 1908?”

“Correct. You must leave off how we can accomplish this for the moment. Our Chief Engineer Dobrynin here has some skill in this business, and he will be placed in charge of your reactor room. But the simple end to this is to understand that we are going to try to get there, with this boat, and then order Karpov to comply with the wishes of this Admiral.”

“I see…” The entire insane story suddenly had a dark shadow over it. He had known of several other “incidents” in the past involving Russian Captains that had disobeyed orders and gone off on renegade missions of their own, both in surface ships and submarines. In each instance the Navy had to hunt these men down and enforce the will of the state.

“So,” he said in a low voice now. “This will be something more than a rescue mission then, if I am not mistaken here. This Karpov may not wish to comply even if we do this impossible thing and appear in the sea beneath his ship. And what then Admiral Volsky? What then?”

The Admiral tightened his jaw now, obviously troubled. “It is our hope that when I arrive on the scene, with the full authority of the Navy, that this man will listen to reason and comply. If however he does not…Well, I said we selected this ship because it, too, has authority of another kind. I am sure you know of what I speak now.”

Gromyko was silent for some time, glancing at Belanov to gauge his reaction to all of this as well. “You are saying we may have to threaten a military solution to force this man’s hand?”

“That would be the first escalation, the threat, but we will also have to be prepared to carry out any such threat. We will have to be prepared to engage the most powerful surface action ship in the world with the most powerful undersea boat at our disposal, and we must prevail against a very wily and aggressive sea Captain with a particular hatred of all submarines. This means that our supposed rescue mission may be vigorously opposed, and soon become a red on red engagement. Nothing would be more unsettling to me, considering that these two ships represent the best of the fleet our nation was hoping to rely on in this day and time. Even if we succeed it will be a great sadness, because it will mean that I must engage and destroy the ship and crew I led to sea, and through many ordeals, and I must end the lives of men there that I have come to love. Yet failure is even more difficult to contemplate, because much more than the lives and fate of that single ship and crew are at stake now.”

“May I, sir?” Fedorov looked at the Admiral with wide eyes, and Volsky nodded, yielding him the floor.

“Captain Gromyko… the instant we do put this mission in play, and should we actually achieve our goal and displace to the time and place we target, then all the years between 1908 and the present lie on the butcher’s block, and our private little war with Captain Karpov and Kirov becomes the single most important event in modern human history. The outcome of that battle will decide what happens from that moment on. Should we fail, and allow Captain Karpov to do what he is now planning, then everything could change- everything. It could all change so radically that it might occur that your grandfathers were never born! That puts it personally, but there is much more at stake. The world itself, all that we know in this here and now, might never come to be. Should we fail, and survive to return to this year, we could find it all gone, all of it, everything that exists suddenly reordered so completely that the world is no longer recognizable. Indeed, we did this before, I think. That slippery fish Mister Kamenski spoke of did move forward again once, and when we leapt out of the dark seas of time all we found was the ash of an entire generation, on every shore and at every city and harbor where we hoped to lie at ease.”