Armageddon

Chapter 8

Karpov was watching the distant rise of Dogo Island, one of several small outcrops forming the Oki Island group, about 40 miles north of the coast of the main island of Japan. A thin column of smoke was rising from the far shore, and he imagined that some hunter was up in those hills, lighting his mid-day fire for a good meal. Now he walked to the clear Plexiglas map of the Sea of Japan, considering his next move in a brief conference with Rodenko.

He had made a cursory review of the mail obtained from RMS Monteagle, and was now satisfied that this could be no other year than 1908. Every letter was postmarked with that date, and he had the mail distributed to the crew for souvenirs, as much as to cement in their minds that they were now sailing the waters of the early 20th Century.

Soon after he had Nikolin transmit his edict on the Naval quarantine over wireless telegraphy. It was sent: “All ships — all ships — all ships bound for ports on the Yellow Sea and China coast. A naval quarantine is now imposed on the Sea of Japan, Tsushima Strait, Korea Strait, East China Sea and Yellow Sea where all shipping of Japanese origin is concerned. All Japanese registered shipping is prohibited, hereby designated fair prizes of war to be attacked on sight. International shipping will be warned to leave the quarantine zone, and attacked upon non-compliance.”

“That is a fairly ambitious declaration,” said Rodenko. “There is no way we can impose it on all these waters. The minute we leave the Sea of Japan, it will fill up with normal shipping again.”

“Perhaps, but I have no intention on lingering here now. My real intent is to begin the strangulation of Port Arthur and other Japanese interests in Manchuria as a prelude to persuading Russia to re-enter that region. We don’t have to control the Sea of Japan, Rodenko. It’s the Yellow Sea that we need to close. To do that I plan take up a patrol station here.”

Karpov pointed at the digital map to the gap between the Shandong Peninsula and North Korea. It was a natural choke point, and all shipping bound for Port Arthur would have to pass through those waters.

“That is the spot we take and hold. From there we become quite a thorn in Japan’s side. It’s really only the Bay of Korea and Bohai Sea that we have to scour, and nothing can enter those waters unless they move through the Yellow Sea and this gap.”

“Agreed, sir, but to get there we will have to transit the Tsushima Straits ourselves, narrow waterways that are easily patrolled and interdicted.”

“That is what I expect,” said Karpov. “As we move south I want the KA-40 up with an Oko panel and returning long range radar data feeds so we can pinpoint the location of every ship in the Sea of Japan. I want this tactical board lit up and notated by color. Designate commercial traffic as green, but any warship identified will be denoted in red.”

“You know what they’ll do, sir. Sasebo and Kure are their principal naval bases in the south. The bulk of their entire fleet is there, and it will be more than enough to cover the Tsushima and Korea Straits. Granted, those waters span 175 kilometers, but the Japanese also have a base on the central island group. It may not be as easy to slip through as you believe.”

Karpov smiled, shaking his head. “You still don’t understand, Rodenko. I have no intention of trying to slip through. I’m going to simply sail through, and destroy anything in my path that attempts to impede me.”

Rodenko hesitated, then spoke his mind. “That may strain our available ordnance, sir.”

“We will use the missiles sparingly, and I have had work crews busy preparing our remaining SAM inventory so it can be re-targeted at surface ships. Many of those systems have an engagement envelope with a fairly low altitude threshold. The Klinok system can engage at 10 meters, and be switched to manual guided mode. We used only 28 missiles and have 100 remaining. They are small HE warheads, but I imagine a salvo of six or eight against a capital ship would be most disconcerting. Our remaining P-400s are an even better long range weapon, and I have made it a top priority. They can hit targets as low as 5 meters and those missiles have a 180 kilogram fragmentation warhead which could riddle the superstructure of these old ships with lethal shrapnel. It won’t penetrate armor, but the kinetic impact at speeds from Mach 8 to Mach 12 will be considerable. Think of them as shrapnel laden fire arrows.”

“I see… You’ve given this considerable thought, Captain. But are you truly prepared to engage the entire enemy fleet?”

“Why not? There is no undersea threat, no air threat, just ponderous old ships in a line, like sitting ducks. This will be much easier than you may think.”

“And what about Fedorov, sir?”

“Fedorov? How he appeared in this same time is a mystery. If he’s still here he will be in the Caspian Sea, and after we conclude this business we may find an occasion to sail to the Black Sea and rescue his party if it remains stranded here.”

“But what if they use that control rod again and manage to return home?”

Karpov shook his head. “The man isn’t even thirty years old. Even if we lead long lives here we’ll both be dead well before he is even born.”

“If he is born, Captain.”

Karpov gave his Starpom an odd look now. “What do you mean by that?”

“I’m not sure, sir, but I think this is what Fedorov was all steamed up about. From here, in 1908, anything we do to change the history will have a much greater effect on future years.”

“Yes, yes, he was always worried about his history. Well, how do the American say it? You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.”

“I think he fears something more than that, sir. We could cause a change so radical that it might affect the lives of millions yet to be born. Some that were fated to live may come into the world, others not. Many fated to die may survive and sire descendants that were never supposed to exist.”

“Yes, Fedorov tried to explain all that to me once. He used the example of a mirror, and each change we have worked in the history is a crack in that mirror. In places it remains as smooth and unblemished as it always was, in others it is badly cracked.”

“And if we look into that mirror our own image may become unrecognizable, sir. This is what I think Fedorov worries about.”

“It is all useless speculation, Rodenko.” Karpov batted the argument aside, but even as he did so he could hear Zolkin admonishing him: “Well, here’s a thought you can put into your own scheming head. Suppose you do something here; something that changes everything. Suppose the grandparents of men aboard this ship don’t survive in the new world you create? What happens to the men then? Do they end up dead, never born, just like the men on that list Volkov was all worked up over, with no record they ever existed? Suppose your own grandfather dies. Then what?”

He considered that for some time, worried about it at first. The missing men had all died in combat. That was how time accounted for the fact they had never been born. If the warnings from Zolkin and Rodenko proved true, and many others on the ship suffered the same fate, then that would mean they might die in combat as well. That thought shook him for a moment, yet he could not see how he could fail to master the situation here. As long as he kept his wits about him, Kirov was invincible. So he decided Zolkin’s warning would be an impossible event. How could he do something here to prevent the birth of his grandfather? That man would have to be born for him to even be here and do anything at all!

“Look, Rodenko, I don’t know how you voted on the question of staying here or trying to get home, and I don’t care. All this nonsense about doing something that will alter our own fate is a waste of time. We can’t control what may happen in years to come. We may try to shape that world to our liking, but things will happen there that are beyond our power to influence. All we can really do is shape the day before us now, and then stack up one day after another in the shape of our desire. This worry over future generations is useless.”

Is it, sir? It was my thought to mention it as a way of personalizing this whole matter. What would we do if the lives of the crew-if our own lives depended on the outcome of our decisions?”

“That is so any time you lead men into battle,” said Karpov. “The ship and crew are always in the equation, and your own life as well.”

“But what about the men on the other side, Captain? They have a yearning for life as well. Alright… I looked in a few of Fedorov’s books on my last shift. We’ll most likely be up against Admiral Togo, regarded as one of the world’s top three fighting Admirals.”

“Accolades he won by defeating his peers in this era. Well this man can in no wise be compared to me, any more than his flagship can be compared to Kirov. What would Admiral Togo have done when faced with a hundred Super Hornets off CV Washington? Do you think he would have led his fleet out of that engagement intact as I did? It wasn’t until that damn volcano blasted us into the past again that our luck turned bad and we lost Admiral Golovko. Togo is out of his league here now, Rodenko. I will master him as easily as I master his ships.”

“You mean to kill him, sir?”

Karpov seemed annoyed now. “You make it sound like a personal vendetta, but my motives are far broader here. I have no desire to see the man to an early grave, but if he opposes me, and will not submit, then he must be prepared to accept his fate. We all must face the possibility that death will come calling on us one day in the heat of battle. We have faced it many times, but thus far we have cheated death and prevailed.”

“Well you saw what happened to Admiral Golovko, sir. All it took was a single critical hit.”

“True, but that was a fluke, and a massive round fired by a much more powerful ship than anything we face here. Think of this in military terms. Mikasa is not the battleship Iowa. None of these ships are even truly worthy of the name battleship-not while Kirov sails these waters.”

“What I meant was that battle often presents the unexpected, sir. I don’t think Captain Ryakhin expected his ship would be hit at that range by a random shell, but it was, and we both saw the result. I don’t think Captain Yeltsin on the Orlan expected to look over his shoulder and find us missing in the heat of that last engagement in 1945, but there he was, alone on a sea of fire, unless he also shifted somewhere else. Who knows? What if he’s been blown to another year-1905-1912?”

“We would know it if he arrived earlier than this time period. As for the rest, what you say is true. War is uncertain, battle is inherently risky. But the timid make bad warriors, Rodenko, and you will find the graveyards littered with more of them than the brave men who fell in battle by acting boldly. I intend to fight here and survive. If fate has other plans for us, then let her try me in battle as well.”

Rodenko raised an eyebrow at this, but said nothing more.

They steamed almost due south now, slowly approaching the Japanese mainland, and the ship was preparing to send up the KA-40 for a general survey when the Fregat radar system made contact with a small detachment of surface ships near the Oki Islands.

“Con. Radar. Contact bearing One-Five-Zero degrees. Three surface ships. Speed twenty. Range 28,000 meters. Designate Alpha One. Second contact bearing One-Seven-Four degrees south. Two surface ships. Speed twenty. Range 30,000 meters. Designate Alpha Two.”

“Feed data to the tactical board,” said Karpov. “Twenty-eight thousand meters? How was it they got this close without the Fregat system picking them up earlier?”

“They were probably behind those islands,” said Rodenko as the data began to wink on the tactical board. “Yes, the Alpha One contact would have been masked by Dogo Island. They’ve just come into our line of site now. The Alpha Two contact was probably behind these smaller islands here.”

“Give me a Tin Man feed. High resolution please, and magnification level four.”

Nikolin activated the robot-like camera system and fed the data to the wide panel display. The familiar silhouettes of Japanese armored cruisers appeared on the screen, chugging forward and leaving a column of darkening smoke that was now clearly evident in the skies above them.”

“Why didn’t we see their smoke earlier?” Karpov was not happy.

“Well, sir,” said Rodenko, “our men are here with the faces poked into these computer terminals, not out on the weather decks looking for smoke on the horizon.”

“I don’t like surprises, gentlemen. There’s no excuse for us not picking up these ships before they were in our line of sight like this.”

“Yes, someone should have seen their smoke long ago. It can only mean that they were lying in wait, sir. Perhaps they came to all-stop and had their boilers fired low. That might control smoke emissions, and the horizon is quite hazy as it stands.”

“Are you suggesting they knew we were here? How would they know we were approaching? We make no visible steam at all. Get that KA-40 ready, Rodenko. I want better situational awareness. In the meantime…Mister Samsonov!”

“Sir!”

“The ship will come to battle stations. Activate 152mm batteries and prepare to engage Alpha One. Helm, battle speed. Thirty knots and steady as she goes.”

“Sir, aye, ahead thirty and steady on.”

“Captain,” said Rodenko. “If you’re going to engage here then perhaps we should launch the KA-40 once the action concludes. We have two batteries aft that will be tossing shell casing all over the place back there.”

“Well enough, the Fregat system will do for the moment. We’ll let the range close another 10,000 meters, Mister Samsonov, then I’ll want all three 152mm turrets to engage Alpha One. I guess these impudent little men did not get enough of a beating last time they stuck their noses into our business. We just blasted their lead ship earlier. Now we’ll let them know what they’re dealing with.”

But Karpov did not entirely know what he was dealing with here either. Vice Admiral Kamimura was back on his assigned station at the Oki Island Group, and he was well aware of the approach of the large Russian warship. He had no 21st Century radar systems, but human eyes on the northern coast of Dogo Island had seen the ship darken the horizon long ago, and signal fires were lit that soon spiraled up in thin, dark columns of smoke.

It was happenstance as much as anything else. A sea lion was gliding through the cobalt blue waters off the island, veering toward shore to chase a passing fish and missing his quarry. The rocks near shore beckoned and offered a warm place to sun himself, and that he did, braying with satisfaction as he climbed out of the sea and wallowed up onto the rocks.

The hunter Karpov imagined sitting at his mid-day meal was actually a coastwatcher named Nakai Yozaburo. He had made a lucrative business out of hunting sea lions on those islands, and other small islets further north called Dokdo and Ulleung-do, and the call of a sea lion had interrupted what he hoped would be a nice nap that day. Driven by his greed, he thought instead to get up and have a look from the watchtower and see if he could spot the sea lions. What he saw instead set in motion a series of events that would cascade through the decades ahead, knocking one down after another.

Far out to sea was the threatening silhouette of a large warship! Had it not been for that sea lion’s call he would have missed it. Or perhaps it was the greed in his heart, but he ran to light his signal fire as a backup, and then he would transmit the sighting via telegraph as well.

Soon after, the Japanese fed more coal and fire to their furnaces to quickly build up steam for action. The cruisers were indeed lying in wait, just as Rodenko surmised, and now they rushed boldly into the narrow strait between Dogo to the northeast, and Dozen and Nakanoshima Island about ten kilometers southwest. Five cruisers charged forward to engage the Russian foe in a bold surprise attack.

And there was one more thing that Karpov had not seen, nestled in a shallow bay at the heart of the three smaller islands southwest of the channel. Had the KA-40 been up with its Oko panel it would have easily detected them, but as it was, the battleships Tango and Mishima were neatly masked behind the hilly islands around them, and the shovels were quickly feeding coal to the fires on those two ships as crews hastily began to prep the guns for action.

Deception, not discretion, was now the better part of valor, and the Japanese had pulled their first surprise on the seasoned Russian Captain. Now it was time to fight.