Men of War

Chapter 25

Fedorov found Karpov on the bridge, pulling him aside, his eyes serious with some hidden energy and obvious concern. “Can we speak in the briefing room, Captain?”

“Very well, Fedorov,” said Karpov, half distracted by the scene being displayed on the overhead HD video monitors. They were delivering two more helicopters today, and he was watching a KA-40 maneuvering to land on the aft deck. He turned to Rodenko. “Keep an eye on things for a moment, Lieutenant. I’ll be with the First Officer in the briefing room.”

The two men entered the room off the back of the citadel bridge, and Fedorov made a deliberate point of shutting the door for privacy. The Captain saw that he had a couple of thick volumes under his arm, with book markers jutting from them to mark out places he had obviously been reading. Fedorov and his books again, he thought, but he had learned to listen to his young Starpom by serving in that same role for him in the Med, so he paid close attention. When Fedorov went to his history books he had something on his mind, and it was most likely important.

“What now Fedorov?” he pointed at the heavy books as the younger man set them on the briefing table.

“Something very odd,” said Fedorov. “I was doing some reading about the war to see what we might have changed. Look, here—this is my original volume of the Chronology Of The Naval War At Sea. You remember, it’s the book I gave to Admiral Volsky.”

“Only too well,” said Karpov. “This rat of a man actually snuck into the Admiral’s quarters to have a good long look at that book.”

“Well this other book is the same publication I picked up in the city a few days ago. I was comparing the two to see what was different, and in September of 1942 I noted an operation in the Med—this one.” He was fingering a passage in his original volume for Operation Agreement, scheduled and carried out Sept 13–14, 1942, the raid on Tobruk.

“It was in the old volume as well,” he said. “But there was just a minor variation, a man who survived that was supposed to have died in my original version. So I marked the passage for further study—marked it with a yellow highlighter like I did with these other passages.”

“My God, Fedorov! You’ll be old and gray before you ever run down all that research.” There were yellow marks dotting the text here and there as Fedorov turned the pages.

“Perhaps I will, but then something very odd happened.” He told Karpov how he had gone to look over the passage again and found it entirely missing in the new volume.

Karpov folded his arms, giving him a bemused look. “What do you mean it was missing?”

“That says it all. The passage was gone, yet it was clear as a bell in my head the day before. I knew I had read it there, and marked it with my yellow highlighter…See here, no marks in the original book, but I was certain I marked it in the new volume.”

Karpov suggested the obvious, that he had simply mixed the two books up, but Fedorov kept shaking his head. “No sir. I’m certain. You must believe me on this.”

“How is that possible?”

“That’s what I am trying to find out. I have an idea about it, but I can’t be sure. Chief Dobrynin came to me and said we lost a man—Markov. He went missing over at the reactor test bed facility.”

“Yes, I heard the report. What about it?”

“Well they had just completed their procedure on the control rod—Rod-25, the very same control rod we suspected here on the ship. Then, Markov vanishes, and not just the man. His jacket was gone, the tea he was drinking, books and magazines, his data clipboard and pen, and get this—both chairs were gone. Everything in the room that was not an integral part of the building itself just vanished!”

Karpov did not know what to make of that, but the connection to Rod-25 took him the next step without too much urging from Fedorov. “They moved into the past,” he said in a low voice. “Our suspicions about that control rod were correct. Did Dobrynin learn anything about it?”

“He went over it with a microscope, but frankly, he’s not a physicist. He was just looking for aberrations or other obvious abnormalities, but the rod looks normal.”

“There must be something about it that is different from the others. This is astounding!”

Fedorov looked at the Captain and simply said: “It looks like the amount of mass that can physically move is probably dependent on the power of the reactor where it finds itself. The ship had a twenty-four rod reactor, two of them in fact. That’s ten times the power of the test bed facility reactor. Rod-25 is the wildcard. Whenever it’s inserted into the reactor core it causes the time breach, and displaces loose mass within a given radius. In our case that loose mass was the entire ship!”

“Did the reactor itself disappear?”

“No. It was an integral part of the building itself and the facility around it. The displacement effect did not have the power to move all of that mass. It doesn’t simply scoop physical mass of a given area and leave a gaping hole. It’s much more fastidious and simply moves free objects within a given radius of the reactor itself. In this case anything that wasn’t nailed down, including Markov. This is the best guess I can make about what happened, and I have no way of knowing if I’m even correct.”

“Then you suspect Markov had something to do with the history changing in your book? How can you know he went back to the same time period?”

“I started with that assumption. I thought that Rod-25 had some vibration or affinity for a particular point in the past, or perhaps it’s simply a question of power. It moves things approximately 80 years into the past, Markov vanishes, and then this operation clearly evident in the history I know suddenly never takes place. It was there just yesterday, right in the new book I bought. Whatever happened changed the course of history again, but the amazing thing is this: it caused a physical change in the book itself!”

“Well it’s all beyond my understanding,” said Karpov. “I still can hardly believe any of this happened in the first place. How could it change books—change facts that you knew to be true. If you remember this, then others who read that same book would also remember. The facts of history are quite clear, Fedorov. This is nonsense. How can they just change overnight like that?”

“The facts are clear? Who killed President John F. Kennedy? The facts on that will differ from head to head, Captain. Only a few might know the real truth, and it may be quite different from the written history of that event. We only record a small percentage of everything that happens out there. The real truth is that things happen the historians never really know about, or write about. Written history is just the tip of the iceberg, the part that shows in the waters of time. The rest is largely unknown, but that’s the part that really matters.”

Karpov had a frustrated look on his face. “What are we supposed to do about this, Fedorov?”

“I asked myself that same question, and realized that I had to find out what happened to Markov to nail down this cause and effect. Well thank God for the Internet. The amount of information available to us now is absolutely amazing. I was able to find a report on Markov’s death! He did shift into the past. He was killed, right here on the harbor quay in Vladivostok, in September of 1942. He was caught breaking and entering a home above the harbor, or so the report read. He then fled to the quay, and was shot by pursuing officers. The military police report was right there in the archives. I looked up the address listed as the location for the suspected burglary. House no longer exists, but the nuclear test bed facility was built in that exact location twenty years ago.”

The silence conveyed Karpov’s amazement, and he was equally impressed by Fedorov’s tenacious investigation of the matter. The dogged ex-navigator had been the one mind and voice that had enabled them to make some fleeting sense of their impossible situation, steering their course through the turbulent waters of time.

“Heaven’s above… can you imagine poor Markov?” said Karpov. “One minute he is sitting there staring at his reactor gauges, then he suddenly appears in this house. It must have been maddening. But how did that change the history? How could it affect this operation you say was canceled half way around the world?”

“I thought about that for some time and could not make the connection. Then I realized that it must have been something in the book or magazine he had in the control room with him that day. They went back too. Mister Garin said he was reading a copy of Russia Today, and a science fiction novel. I went out and bought a copy of that magazine and look what I found.” He handed the magazine article to Karpov, who stared wide eyed at the headline on Operation Agreement. ‘British Remember Losses In Agreement Gone Bad.’

“This is the operation you spoke of?”

“Exactly. It was a background piece published in tandem with another article about planned British Petroleum operations in Siberia. Those have been cancelled too with all this war talk.”

“Astounding… Simply unbelievable.”

“Yet it happened. This one article from our world today was enough to contaminate the history to an extent that I saw actual physical changes here—in our time! That is what is so astonishing. Think about it, Karpov. The change was very small, very subtle. I’m willing to bet that no more than a handful of people on this earth might have noticed it. Who sits around reading this history for recreation?”

“Yes, how many are as crazy as you, Fedorov?”

Then something occurred to the Captain that did not make sense. “Just a moment…We didn’t even make port until September 15th. Dobrynin took that control rod over two days later. If Markov vanished, wouldn’t he appear after this operation was already concluded? You said it was scheduled for the 13th to 14th.”

“Correct. Well we know these time displacements don’t seem to respect our calendar. When we moved we often lost hours, days and even weeks. Markov obviously appeared well before the operation. Who knows how, but the British must have gotten hold of this article, and it probably froze their blood. But do you realize what this means?”

“It means the whole world is crazy,” said Karpov. “Am I going to wake up tomorrow and find Brezhnev never lived?”

“I would think it takes something more than a minor change like this to affect the life of such a man, but who knows? The important thing is this—the history isn’t fixed! This situation we find ourselves in is the result of millions and millions of individual events all tumbling down like grains of sand in the hourglass of time. It’s an alternate history, markedly different from the one we left behind in Severomorsk—but Markov has just changed it. It isn’t fixed! If he can change it, then we can change it too.”

“Apparently so,” Karpov shrugged. “We’ve already changed it several times, with each missile we fired. I’ve changed it with my own actions.”

“Unquestionably. There was no Pearl Harbor attack, no Battle of Midway. None of that is written up in that new volume there, and believe me, a lot more has changed. I’ve only had a few days to look into it all. Yet the amazing thing is that whole segments of the history remain intact, flawlessly intact. It’s as if it were all a big mirror, perfect until you come upon a section that has a crack that suddenly distorts the image. Everything is different there, but the rest of the mirror is fine.”

“If the book changed, why not you, Fedorov? How could you remember that passage was there. How can you be so sure?”

“I really don’t know. I tried to figure that out and the only thing I could think of is that it’s because we are the ones changing things. All of us, the men on the ship here as well. We’re not from this altered timeline. We belong to the world we left back in Severomorsk. No one I talked to in the city seemed to know a thing about Pearl Harbor, for example. I asked a few people in the library. They were clueless. We know that the Japanese were supposed to attack there on December 7, 1942, but here, on this alternate time line, they never did, and no one knows about it.”

Karpov sat down at the briefing desk, taking a deep breath. “Here we are at the edge of another world war and now we have to deal with this! What can we do about it, Fedorov? I realize you cannot help yourself digging in to all of this, but to what end?”

“I’ll tell you what we can do. We can find Orlov.”

The name fell like ice in a pail of hot water between them, and they both immediately grasped the implications. Orlov, alive in the year 1942 and with a Computer Jacket harboring the Portable Wiki.

“We have unfinished business, Captain, and until we find him, everything, and I mean everything is at risk. It could very well be that the outcome of these events we’re preparing to face here in the Pacific are not inevitable as we now believe. The dominoes don’t have to fall the same way each time—at least we hope this is the case. Look what happened with the Key West. It could be that we had nothing whatsoever to do with the devastation we saw in the world, not you, not me, or even the ship itself. It could have been something Orlov did, or failed to do in the life he led after he jumped ship. Understand what I am saying?”

“Orlov? He caused it?”

“All I know is that this world, this situation we face now, is a world that Orlov lived in all those years ago. Suppose we find him—figure a way to bring him home. All this would change!”

“But how?”

“I’ve been trying to find out what happened to him for a good long while, and I think I may have found a trace of the man in my research last night.”

“You mean in the history books?”

“Of course. Nobody goes through this world without leaving some mark on it. Again, thank God we’re living in the information age and I can call up archival records on the computer. Well I found something. You’ll be amazed. I found that man’s footprints in the history, and by God I think I can figure out where he went after he jumped from that helo.”

“Where? What did you find about him?”

“It seems the British got hold of him and had him at Gibraltar. Then he slipped away. The next fragment I picked up was an entry in this very book.” He held up the new volume of the Chronology Of The Naval War At Sea.

“His name came up in a brief engagement between a Soviet Minesweeping trawler and a German U-boat in the Black Sea. So I followed the breadcrumbs. He was listed as a prisoner and suspected murderer of three NKVD guards in Poti. Then comes the kicker—the British went after him. They mounted a commando raid to try and recapture him. Take a look at this…” He opened to a new bookmark and showed Karpov the Passage: 25 Sept. 1942—Operation Escapade sends a small commando unit into the Caspian region to look for a suspected Russian agent.

“But it doesn’t say anything about Orlov,” Karpov protested.

“No, the book is very vague, but I found two other sources that give more details. They were after Orlov. It was kept very secret, but I dug things up.”

“I’m sure you did.”

“And there’s more…” Fedorov now reached into his jacket pocket to play his last trump card. He handed Karpov a folded piece of paper and the Captain took it slowly, almost as if he was afraid of what he might see there. He opened it and read silently, his features clearly reflecting the surprise and emotion he felt.

“Son of a bitch,” he whispered. “Where did you find this?”

Fedorov just smiled.

Chapter 26

The truck made its way along the thin dirty track that passed for a road. Now the passage of vehicles and people had widened it, trampling what little grass had managed to scratch a living on its fringes. It growled past the wide rolling vineyards, the vines still thick with ripening grapes that Orlov had picked and sampled any time they stopped. The harvest was near, but this year the wine would have to wait and molder on the vines. The peasants of Kizlyar had all been rounded up, the men set to digging trenches on the western fringe of the town, the women carrying wood and setting up encampments and cooking sites to feed the weary soldiers that came in on the trucks.

Orlov was one of them, jostling along with a small rifle squad until he gave the men a warning frown and jumped off when the truck neared the outskirts of the town. None of the men moved to follow him, and the truck rolled on.

Orlov wanted to have a look around, noting the winding course of the Terek river to the west of the hamlet. It stretched away to the north, lost amid the rolling farmland, the vineyards and scatterings of trees that clung to the banks in small groups. He could see the work parties digging there on the eastern bank, building up a wall of earth and loose stone to hide gun positions. Some cut trees which they laid out as obstacles for enemy tanks and vehicles, but there was no sign of any fighting here yet.

He saw a small stream that had been diverted from the main river to bring water in to the town, and so he followed it lazily along the southern fringe of the settlement until it bent north and led him in past a few hovels and weathered barns. The sparse trees here still had leaves, though they were yellowing and starting to fall. He passed an old man leaning heavily on a cane near a tall stand of grape vines, then came to a deep trench dug across the road as a kind of defensive barrier in front of an old red brick building. A plaintive red flag was nailed to the door, and he took it to be an official building.

Molla, he thought. Perhaps the bastard is hiding out here. He made for the building, his hand in his pocket fingering the revolver he had taken from the NKVD guards. The door opened with a dry squeak and his footfalls were heavy on the bare wood floor.

Two men were drinking at a plain table, and they turned to give him an unfriendly look. “What is it?” A balding man with a thick neck spoke up, wiping his lip with the back of a fat hand.

“Commissar Molla?”

“Not here,” said the man. “What’s your business?”

“I have orders for the commissar.”

“Orders?” The man gave him a toothless smile. “Orders he says,” this time he was nodding to his companion, a scraggly officer with Lieutenant’s bars on his shoulder. “Well Molla don’t take orders lightly.” The man laughed, his voice gritty, then he coughed, clearing his throat before he spat on the floor.

Orlov walked slowly across the room. “Where is he?” he said in a low voice. The edge of a threat was plain for both men to hear, and the heavy set man gave him a frown.

“I says Molla don’t take orders, eh? He’s Commissar, or haven’t you heard. He gives orders, and you better get used to it. That shiny badge on your cap counts for nothing up here.”

“Is that so…” Orlov drew out his pistol, then slowly reached for the bottle the men had been sharing with his other hand, looking it over. It was a brandy, well noted in the region, and he raised the bottle to take a sip. The two men were clearly not happy about it.

“Not bad,” said Orlov. “Maybe I’ll keep it. But then again, maybe I’ll break it over your thick skull.” He gave the fat man a murderous look. “I’ll ask you again. Where is Molla?”

“Up the road with the truck convoy,” the heavy man said quickly enough. “He’s up herding the women, as always—one of Beria’s men. You heard of him, yes? Big boss man Beria. You want Molla, then look for the trucks with the women. He’s usually not far afield.” He gave Orlov a wide eyed look, watching him take another long swallow from the brandy. Then the big Chief set the bottle down with a thump on the table.

“Thank you, Comrades,” and he walked out the way he came.

An hour later he came to a long line of the trucks pulled off the side of the road leading north from the town. Men were carrying boxes of food and drink from old buildings and warehouses along the side of the road. Inside, he could see women, young and old, huddled in the shadows, and he realized he might find his grandmother here.

Orlov stuck his head into the yawning opening of the first truck. “Anya Kanina?” He puckered his eyes, staring at the sallow faces of the women where they sat on the plan flat wood bed of the truck. The fear in their eyes was plain to see, but no one spoke a word. “I am looking for Anya Kanina? Has anyone seen her?” Silence was his only answer, so he moved up the line to the next truck, getting much the same response.

Five trucks on he saw a woman shrink a little deeper into the shadows when he called out the name, and his heart beat faster. Could it be her? He leaned in, staring into the shadows to get a better look at the woman, noting her youth, the long blonde hair that his grandpa always talked about. “Oh, your grandma was a real beauty, Gennadi. Her hair was like gold silk…”

His excitement and relief brought a broad smile to his face, and his impulse was to jump into the truck and go embrace the woman. Yet she was obviously afraid, shirking away from his gaze and huddling deeper. “Anya Kanina?” he said jubilantly.

“Leave her alone,” an old gray haired crone put her scrawny arms about the woman protectively. “Hasn’t she suffered enough? Tell the Commissar to find someone else this time, the bastard. Yes! Shoot me if you wish, but you’ll not hurt this poor girl again. You’ll have to drag my dead bones out of here first. Leave her alone!”

Orlov felt a surge of anger when he heard the woman speak. The Commissar… That bastard Molla! Sookin syn! He turned abruptly, eyes set, jaw tight, his hand stiff in his NKVD jacket pocket. Then he strode away towards the old warehouse where the men were sorting through a supply cache, a dark light in his eyes.

“You! What are you doing?” The stranger’s voice was sharp and demanding. There were six men in dark trench coats and black Ushankas, their PPS submachine guns hanging from their broad shoulders on thin leather straps.

“Commissar Molla?” Orlov got right to the heart of the matter.

“Who wants to know?”

Orlov stepped up to the group, his heart still pounding, his excitement in finding his grandmother now a barely controlled anger in his chest. “Orders for the Commissar,” he said, eying the men with a frown.

“I’ll take them.”

Orlov saw the woven gold and white on red felt of an NKVD officer’s badge on the man’s sleeve, a colonel from the insignia on his hat, and the man was looking him over from head to foot.

“You are Commissar Molla?” Orlov’s finger moved to the trigger of the pistol in his jacket pocket, and two of the other men now seemed tensely alert. He knew if he fired and killed this man he was a dead man himself, but he did not care.

“Molla is down the road. If you have orders for him, give them to me. I’ll see that he gets them.”

Orlov shook his head. “Sorry comrade Colonel, I was told to speak directly to the Commissar. Where is he, please?”

The colonel did not like that. He was a man accustomed to seeing other men do exactly what he told them, and without any lip or hesitation. He was, as the fat man in the red brick building had hinted, one of Beria’s men. Lavrentiy Beria was the notorious head of the state security apparatus, and he had some very vile habits that often saw him send men out to sweep the villages for young pretty women, particularly when he was near his old homeland in the Caucasus as he was now. The colonel put his hands on his hips and squared off to Orlov, anger evident on his face.

“Did you hear me, Captain?”

Orlov noted the leather straps crossed on the man’s chest, the prominent collar boards, thick black belt with a gold star in a square buckle, flared pant legs above black leather boots. Another damn officer, he thought, his hand tightening on the revolver.

Haselden squinted through his field glasses and saw the group of NKVD men taking to another tall man, and something did not seem right to his well trained eye. The group was tense, one man in the back was pointing a sleek submachine gun at the newcomer. Something was wrong here. He peered through the glasses, adjusting the focus and thinking that this might be their man. He stood a head above the others, and his uniform was different. Clearly he was not like the other NKVD men they had been watching near the warehouse from their well concealed cover blind.

“Damn, Sutherland. Have a look at this. Could that be our man?”

Sutherland took the field glasses, careful to note the sun so the lenses would not catch the light. He took a long look and sighed. “Your guess is as good as mine,” he said. “He’s too far away to get a good look at him.”

“But the whole scene looks suspicious. Looks like trouble.”

Their conversation was suddenly interrupted by the sound of a church bell ringing out a warning in the town. Sutherland pivoted slightly, re-focusing on the distant river to the west. “Well, well, well… Looks like we’ve got company.”

Even as they finished they heard the distant, mournful mutter of machine gun fire, and then the high whistling fall of an incoming round. There was an explosion near the river, a little south of the main town site, then another and another.

Haselden knew the sound of those rounds. They were coming in from an 8-cm schwere Granatwerfer 34 German mortar. The weapon earned a fierce reputation for its good range, accuracy and rate of fire during the war, though this was more likely due to the expertise of the men who used it. Haselden could see that these were simple covering fire rounds, getting the range as much as anything else, though those machine guns had to be firing at something.

“Looks like Jerry is crashing the party,” said Sutherland.

“It certainly does,” Haselden returned, steely eyed.

As the first rounds came in the group of NKVD men acted quickly. Three had their weapons trained on Orlov and he was hustled up into the back of a truck. Haselden had to think quickly. “Look, Davey, if that’s our man he’ll be out of town and heading north on a truck if we don’t move now.” His sibilant whisper conveyed the urgency of the moment as he reached for his STEN gun.

“Well we didn’t come all this way for nothing,” said Sutherland firmly. “Let’s get on with it then.” He looked over his shoulder, flashing a hand signal to Sergeant Terry, who was quickly mounting a round on the nose of his PIAT and slapping home a C-clip cartridge on to top of the Bren Light Machinegun he was manning. The Sergeant was their fire support man, and on Sutherland’s signal he opened up on the front of truck with the LMG in a series of brisk, short bursts.

Haselden and Sutherland were up and running in a low crouch, closing on the back side of the warehouse. There was shouting, men running out of every door in the old building, weapons ready, and over it all came the whine of more German mortar rounds and now the distant growl of an armored car.

The two commandos fell in behind some cover, with Sutherland rolling to one side and already laying down covering fire. The NKVD men scattered, jumping behind any cover they could find and Haselden was up and running. He reached the warehouse and tossed a flash-bang grenade through the wide open door, then ran north along the back of the building.

Sutherland was starting to take return fire in crisp, burps from the Russian submachine guns. Now Sergeant Terry swiveled his Bren to the left and barked out a return, forcing the black Ushankas to go to ground. Sutherland was immediately up and running in towards Haselden’s position. Smoke was coming from the open back warehouse door, and now Haselden tossed another flash-bang around the corner of the building. He was very near the truck, but heard the engine thrum and saw the vehicle starting to move. He looked back at Sergeant Terry and flashed him a quick hand signal. Terry had the PIAT up in a second and the sharp pop of the round firing bit the air. The warhead struck the front right door of the truck and exploded like thunder. The vehicle rocked with the blow and a fire started.

Now Haselden was around the edge of the warehouse, STEN gun at the ready, and firing as he went. Sutherland was right on his heels as they leapt for the back of the truck. Haselden reached it first, peering into the back through the thickening smoke. It was empty, and his eye soon saw why. The canvass top near the front cabin had been torn back and was dangling loosely in the smoky breeze. Obviously the men who had scrambled inside had dislodged the canvas and slipped out when Terry’s Bren gun first bit into the steel of the engine cowling. He swore under his breath, then wheeled on his team mate, his arm stiffly pointing down the line of trucks.

Sutherland saw him turn and fired again at something on his left, then he moved as fast as his feet would take him, running the opposite direction, down the long nine of trucks that were all suddenly moving, their engines thrumming, wheels spinning madly in the dirt as the drivers gunned the big engines. The whole column was working its way back on to the road, and as Sutherland approached he could hear the screams of women and children.

Damn, he thought. The man was nowhere in sight, nor was there any sign of the bloody NKVD men. He heard the renewed firing of Sergeant Terry’s Bren, and now he looked to see what appeared to be a full company of brown uniformed infantry running from the edge of the town, up this very road, and across a wide field to positions at the edge of the Terek river.

Haselden saw the men coming, heard the crack of small arms fire, the bullets whizzing by, but he had not seen what Sutherland knew. He was bravely providing cover fire in the hope that Sutherland could get to their man, but it was a hopeless cause. Just as he realized that the Russians were about to make a final rush at his position, he fired one last sharp burst from his STEN and then fell back, reaching into his breast pocket for a command whistle.

Haselden blew three shrill notes, the signal to fall back to the secondary position they had scouted and prepared earlier by an old barn. He knew he had to get quickly back to a position where he could cover Sergeant Terry’s withdrawal with the heavier weapons and he raced to a low stand of grapevines at the edge of the vineyard that had once filled the warehouse with barrels of wine. That was in a better day, and the long, regular rows of vines had not been properly pruned or well cultivated this year when the war came south. Yet they were enough to give him a little cover, and he laid down a base of fire, seeing Sutherland dashing into the same plantation off to his right.

Terry made a skillful withdrawal, and the chaos of the German attack now commanded the full attention of the Russians. The three men eventually fell back along a stream bed that wound its way around the north fringe of the vineyard and made a breathless rendezvous behind an old weathered barn.

“Bloody hell,” said Haselden. “Anyone hit?”

The others were winded, but unharmed. Sutherland eyed his right shoulder where a bullet had just nicked his jacket. “Now what?” he breathed heavily.

They could see the line of ten trucks hurrying down the road to the north leaving a wake of dust behind them. Then, to their great surprise, the column stopped briefly, and a moment later the lead truck turned right onto a secondary road heading east off the main track. One by one the ten trucks followed, the last of them stopping and disgorging a fist full of dark coated NKVD men in black Ushankas who fanned out and went to ground. They were soon firing at something to their north and Haselden snapped up his field glasses to get a better look.

“Germans!” he rasped. “Three bloody armored cars and infantry. The road north is cut mates! Sutherland—your map! Where does that east track lead?”

Sutherland was quick to his breast pocket and had the wrinkled map open in a heartbeat. “Christ! That’s our road. Remember we worked our way well south off the road as we approached the city. But that’s it, Captain. Look, it works its way up round this wine country and then picks up the main road east to the coast.”

“Then they’re trapped?”

“No, look here, sir. They can take this track and get round the marshland here to head south. It will take them right on down to Makhachkala again, and from there south to Baku if they have a mind.”

“Well, the Queen’s luck is with us today, lads. We need to get this man before he ends up dead. He won’t be much good to us then.”

“Dead men tell no tales.”

“Right you are, Sutherland.”

Haselden squinted at the map then pointed with a dirty finger. “Here,” he said definitively. “We can work our way through these vineyards and then follow the north bank of this river heading east. That’s bound to be bad ground out near those marshes, and slow going even for those trucks. So if we move quickly we just might be able to get to this bridge before they do.”

“That’s got to be forty kilometers!” Sutherland had a weary look on his face.

“No, a bit more like fifty, so we’ll need a vehicle. If we find anything with wheels that runs we can take this road and cut them off… at Kazgan. It’s our only play.”

“Let’s get to it, sir.” Sergeant Terry was already up and shouldering the PIAT. They had a long road east ahead of them through some very tough country, but the mission was still on.

Chapter 27

Karpov stared at the page Fedorov handed him, still reading, a look of shock and amazement on his face.

Karpov folded the paper solemnly, slowly handing it back to Fedorov. “So Orlov finally found his backbone.”

“I found references to that action at Kizlyar, but it wasn’t in our history. Books we might find here today record that the German Sixteenth Motorized Division pushed elements of its reconnaissance battalion toward Kizlyar in late September, 1942. They were after the oil in Baku, of course, but they got stopped—not only there, but elsewhere along the line of the Terek. The action seemed to be thought of as particularly important. It prevented a wide general envelopment of the Terek river line defenses.”

“So they send him off to Baku. Where did you find this letter?”

“The letter? It took a lot of digging, but it turned up on an obscure web site. A fellow named Smerdlov was publishing the last letters from Soviet men and women who died in the war, both on the front and in the prisons and camps. He called it ‘Letters from the Dead.’

“Then this is Orlov’s last letter? It’s over? You mean to say he is already dead?”

“It’s 2021, of course he’s dead. But he was alive at the time he wrote that, in 1942. It could be that Orlov wrote this later in a diary at the work camp, or even in Bayil—that’s the infamous prison on the south bay of the city there, sometimes called Bailkovka. Tens of thousands were shipped off to Siberia during that damn war, but the prison was full in Bayil just the same. It was a miserable place. Did you know that Stalin even served time there in 1908? Poor Orlov… Maybe he died there, maybe not. There’s a lot we still don’t know.”

“Well if he’s dead then Orlov can’t change anything.”

“Think again, Captain. He’s already changed things. The result is what we see outside—the headlines being written for the newscast tonight. This war is coming, as sure as night follows day. The Admiral has been haggling with Moscow, but they’re taking a hard line there, or so I have heard. Here we sit, getting the ship ready for battle again, and if we thought we had trouble before, this fight is going to be the real hell. Did Orlov cause all this? Did we? Or was it meant to happen in any case. We can’t know any of that for sure, but Orlov changed something, just as we did, just as Markov did. There are cracks in the mirror, and before long we won’t be able to see ourselves there any longer. We’ve got to do something about this.”

“Something tells me you have a plan.”

“Look at the date on that letter, Captain. The one thing we do know for sure now is Orlov’s location at a given point in time. He’s at Kizlyar on the 30 September, 1942. He says he was on a truck to Baku, so we have a good fix on his whereabouts.”

“But it isn’t 1942, Fedorov. We’re here in the year 2021!”

“At the moment…” He let that hang there, the implications of what he was saying obvious to them both. But Karpov pushed on that half open door just the same, and heard it squeak with an ominous sound.

“What are you suggesting?”

“You asked what can we do about it.” Fedorov closed his book with a hard thump. “Yes, we can still change things, Captain. We can go and get the man, that’s what we can do. We can find Orlov and bring him back where he belongs—him and that damn computer jacket he took with him. That’s the real threat now and we have the power to change things with Rod-25. And we need to get to him before he ends up in Bayil.”

“My God, Fedorov, your suggesting we pull that hat trick again? With the ship?”

“I have an idea…”

Karpov shook his head, somewhat exasperated. Here he was trying to pull the ship and crew together for imminent war, and now his first officer comes to him with this! Yet even as he thought this he heard the voice of Admiral Volsky in his head: “And one more thing…Fedorov…Listen to him, Captain. Listen to him. He is Starpom this time around and you have the ship, but don’t forget those moments on the bridge when that situation was reversed. Become the same mind and heart together that saw us safely home. Do what you must, but we both know that there is something much greater than the fate of the ship at stake now, something much bigger than our own lives. We are the only ones who know what is coming, Karpov, and fate will never forgive us if we fail her this time.” He could at least listen to what Fedorov was saying. He owed him that much.

“Alright, Fedorov, out with it. What crazy idea do you have this time?”

“There are two ways we can try this,” Fedorov began, somewhat excitedly. “One way is to use the ship as before. We would have to get Rod-25 back and mount it as the maintenance control rod.”

“Then what?” Karpov would be the devil’s advocate. The grave situation they were facing demanded it, but he would listen nonetheless. “Do we just sail out and vanish again?”

“Something like that,” said Fedorov. “I was thinking we get up into the Sea of Okhotsk, or in the gulf west of Sakhalin Island south of the Tartar Strait. We’d be less visible there. The fog is thick as pea soup. Then we put men ashore and travel to Kizlyar.”

“Who are you talking about?”

“I’ll go. And I was thinking of asking Troyak and some of the Marines—volunteers.”

“A rescue operation, eh? That’s a thousand miles from the coast. None of our helos could even fly that far, let alone back again.”

“We go by the Siberian rail.”

“Then you get there and do what? Ask around for Orlov? The place would be crawling with NKVD. And what about the Germans? Meanwhile what do the rest of us do? We just sit there in the ship off Sakhalin Island, waiting while all hell breaks loose here with this war? This is madness, Fedorov. And when they learn Kirov sailed and disappeared again, what will they think? I’ll tell you as much. They’ll think a big fat American submarine ripped open our belly and put us at the bottom of the sea, that’s what. Only they won’t have time to look for us, because the missiles will be flying. The nation needs this ship desperately now if it does come to war. All eyes will be on us if we sail again, and the hope of the nation. Have you considered that?”

“I have…Not that I relish the prospect of Kirov going to war again. All we’ll do is push the world a little closer to the abyss if we do that, and you and I both know that this ship has a lot of muscle left, wounded or not. If we push, we push hard.”

“I understand what you are saying, but consider the men, they’ve been through hell. We can’t ask them to do this again. If we have to fight here, that’s one thing. The men will understand that. It’s why they signed onto the navy in the first place.”

Fedorov shrugged. “Alright, then there’s another way. We leave Rod-25 where it is and go back from the Primorskiy Engineering Center… Just like Markov…”

Karpov just looked at him. “But how will you get back?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? Well neither do I. Here you sit worried about a man like Orlov and his Portable Wiki, and you assume this situation we’re facing here can be laid at his feet, but then you can glibly suggest you go back yourself with Troyak and his Marines? After what we saw with Markov? Damn it, Fedorov. Listen to yourself! What makes you think Orlov is the devil incarnate now? For all you know he died there, or in Baku, and that was the end of it. Anybody who found his jacket wouldn’t have the slightest idea what they had in their hands. Orlov may have done nothing. He could be completely innocent of the crime you fear he has already committed.”

Fedorov looked down, rubbing his forehead. Karpov was correct. What did he really know? Who was he to say that Orlov was responsible for anything going on in the world now. Was it just an easy way for him to excuse himself, the Admiral, Karpov and the ship? No. They were all equally guilty if any crime had been committed here. When he looked in that broken mirror he would have to be man enough to say he saw his own face there.

“Perhaps you’re right, Captain,” he said, feeling somewhat deflated. “Yes, it is a crazy idea. There’s no way we could take the ship and do what I propose under these circumstances, and what you say about plan B is equally compelling. If we try to follow Markov and go back that way, then we’d all be trapped there in the past. I’d like to think that I would be cautious enough to behave myself there, but I’d be the man who knew tomorrow, and that is a temptation I would not wish on any man.”

“And then there would be Troyak and the Marines to think of as well,” Karpov put in.

“I know…” Fedorov had a defeated look on his face. The Captain was the voice of reason this time, and he had to put his wild notions aside and face the reality of their situation now.

“What’s going on out there, Captain? I’ve had my nose in 1942 the last two days.”

Karpov scratched his head, thinking. “I’ve been watching the headlines and I can rattle them off from memory: Russian Fighter Jets Breach Japan Airspace, Japan Warns China Over Missile Attack, Vows Reprisal, North Korea Warned Against Provocative Actions, Taiwan Enters Fray In China Japan Sea Spat. They’ve kicked the football into the U.N. Security Council for the moment, but you and I both know what’s going on behind the scenes—the telephone calls, the angry words, the threats. And I have little doubt that men in every military base on the globe are sharpening their spears. I heard they flew in two squadrons of strategic bombers and new squadron of T-50 PAK-FA fighters. That’s our fifth generation stealth fighter, so you know they mean business.”

“How much time do you think we have?”

“Hard to say. If things are taking the course we fear, then the U.N. won’t resolve anything. Japan will ask for a resolution condemning China’s ballistic missile attack on Okinawa. China will veto it. That was a big mistake the UN made long ago to allow any single permanent member a veto. A vote of four to one from permanent members should have been decisive.”

“In another world,” said Fedorov.

“Precisely. Well, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Russia would have voted with the Chinese. As it stands now the Japanese have a small detachment camping out on those worthless islands, and both sides are moving ships and planes around. But the real threat is Taiwan. It was the major flash point in that newspaper we found, yes?”

“That’s what it sounded like.”

“The Admiral called me yesterday to ask about the ship. He told me the satellites have been seeing a big Chinese buildup along the Taiwan Strait. He thinks this business over the Diaoyutai Islands is nothing more than the overture. The curtain is about to open on act one of this little drama, and soon.”

“He thinks the Chinese will attack Taiwan?”

“Most certainly. It will start with a demand, of course. Then China will pass some kind of resolution declaring Taiwan as an integral part of the People’s Republic. The Taiwanese government will rebuke them and on and on it will go for a few days while the Americans move their carriers.”

“Yes, the carriers. That’s how it really caught fire according to that article. Remember, the Chinese moved the Liaoning out to sea and the US stopped it with a submarine. That led to the attack on the Eisenhower. Any news on that ship?”

“It’s coming,” said Karpov. “Volsky says it’s in the Indian Ocean at Diego Garcia.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Fedorov fretted. “They may be loading nuclear warheads from stockpiles kept there.”

“Sharpening their teeth? Most likely, just as we are. They made a special delivery today.”

Fedorov was not happy. “How many?”

“You know that is always undisclosed until we actually put to sea with orders.”

“Martinov knows.”

“Of course Martinov knows. How do you think I pulled off that nonsense in the Atlantic? Well I’m not asking him this time, and believe me, I’m have no great urge to see any of them mounted on a missile after what we’ve been through and seen. In the meantime, I hope we’ve put this plan of yours to rest, Fedorov. We have more on our duty list than worries about Orlov.”

Fedorov looked down at the folded paper he had handed Karpov, the letter from the dead, feeling a strange connection with the man who must have surely met his own fate and died decades ago. They were living now in the world Orlov and the men and women of that generation left them. To think that Orlov alone could shape the contours of the entire world was nonsense. Yet something told him that voice of reason was wrong, some aching sense of warning that set his adrenaline rising. Deep down, that persistent inner voice still whispered the truth: they had to get Orlov or the world would end in fire.