Men of War (2013) Read online

  “It’s going to be very difficult, Fedorov. I mean, knowing what happened—what could happen so easily again. It may not be my hand on the trigger this time, but there are too many others like me in the navy…too many others like the man I once was. Knowing that this world could all blow up and go to hell again any moment will not be easy, particularly if the other side gets pushy. And if they do find us at sea again, and come at us in anger, then I may have no choice but to become that other man, that man of war I was back then. Can we avoid it?”

  “That will be hard to say. We can’t disclose anything about what we’ve learned, at least not directly. All we can do is be men instead of machines if they ever send us out here again. We’ve learned some hard lessons, but yes, we are still men of war—not just you, Captain. All of us.”

  “A crash course!”

  “Yes… Well, if they do get Kirov operational again, do you think they will give the ship back to you, Captain?”

  “I suppose that will depend on how the investigation goes.”

  “Investigation?”

  “Certainly... The questions. The Naval Inspectorate will have men here in black suits in no time. The Grand Inquisitor will pay us a visit. They did the same to Christ on his return—showered him with reverence for a week, and then started the trial. Karpov was referring to the famous parable by Dostoyevsky, The Grand Inquisitor, which saw Christ tried and condemned yet again after his second coming. Kirov, the presumed savior of the fleet, was resurrected and now coming home again, but he had little doubt that she would fare any better than the Son of God. “They’ll be a week or two going over the ship, most likely interviewing every man aboard.”

  “We talked to the men, in small groups. There’s a lot of comradery among the crew, and a real spirit of élan now that we’ve come through the fire and reached safe waters again.”

  “Someone is likely to slip up and say something stupid.” Karpov held up a warning finger. “Of course if anyone told the truth they would be thought insane, and laughed off the ship. But it isn’t the big truth I’m worried about. It’s the little lie. Believe me Fedorov, I was a liar long before I was ever a Captain in this Navy, and a damn good one. I’m not worried about myself, or the senior officers, but some damn matoc from the fifth deck is likely to be asked a question and let something slip.” Karpov acted out a brief interrogation now.

  “So tell me how the aft citadel was damaged again, Gavrilov? Oh, that happened when we were hit by that plane, sir. You mean the helicopter? The KA-40? Oh, yes sir. Of course, sir.”

  Fedorov nodded, his lips pursed as he considered that there were over 700 men that would have to hold to the same story for their lozh to stand up under any scrutiny.

  “All it will take is three or four slips like that before some little prick in the Inspectorate gets a hair up his ass about it. I can tamp some of it down if it starts to flare up. You know me. I can throw my rank around pretty good. But if they get real curious, things could take a different direction. If that happens I think they will beach every last one of us.”

  “You mean you might lose the ship?”

  “Very likely, but I must tell you that it will not be so much of a loss in my mind now. I’m tired, Fedorov, tired of missiles, and the rank and file of the navy and all the rest of it. I think I may retire soon, after all this blows over, assuming we still have a world left here. Then they can say or do anything they want.”

  Fedorov was quiet for some time, thinking, until the Captain prodded him again. “What about you?”

  “I know what you are saying, Captain. I was a navigator. Yes, I love military history but, in truth, I’m not a fighting man. It hurt to know I was killing men in those engagements. A lot of men died, and I’ve seen all I think I ever want to know about battle at sea. But on the other side of it, if we stay in the service, the Admiral, you, myself, then we might have some power to prevent the war we know is coming.”

  “You think we could prevent it from ever happening?”

  “We’ve already kept it from starting when it was supposed to. If we stay in the service for a while we could at least keep our hand on the tiller and try to steer things away from conflict.”

  “True,” said Karpov. “We would have some authority, particularly if they do end up giving us Kirov back again. If war does come, and starts here in the Pacific as we discovered, then they will look to this ship to lead out the fleet. It would be hard to go if that should happen, but just as hard to stay behind, if you know what I mean.”

  “Yes, I do. But there is one other thing we have to worry about. There’s a lot we have yet to learn about the world we’re coming back to. Things have changed, Captain. There was no Pearl Harbor attack, no Battle of Midway, but the war ended much the same, only no Hiroshima or Nagasaki this time. I haven’t had time to look over everything after WWII, but I’m sure we’ll learn that quite a lot of furniture has been moved around. We may even find that key officers have been shuffled about in the navy. The world still looks the same. I’ll bet you that all the pieces of that old puzzle are still here, but they may be in a different order now, and the new picture may be a little unsettling.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well suppose a man takes his leave, rushes home, and finds his house was sold years ago and is occupied by strangers. If the big things can change, then the details can change along with them. We have no idea what we’re really going to find here.”

  “I never quite thought of it that way,” said Karpov. “And I suppose we never will find out what happened to Orlov, will we? Is that in your research, Fedorov? Would it not be funny to see his face glaring at you from one of your old WWII photo books?”

  “I’ve thought about that a good long time,” Fedorov frowned. “Orlov wasn’t likely to do the world much good. I suppose he might have used his general knowledge of the future to some advantage, but he wasn’t an educated man. He could probably know that the Americans landed on the moon first, but could not tell you when or very much else about it.”

  “That’s a blessing,” said Karpov. “Orlov’s ignorance may end up preventing a lot of grief, but something tells me his temper is going to cause trouble, one way or another. He’s cagey, Fedorov. It wasn’t all brawn and bad temper, and he will think himself more than he really is, a wolf in the fold, if you will.”

  “Well… Now that we speak of this, I did find something that was a bit unsettling when I went over the ship’s library computers. Someone made a big download a few weeks ago, and they didn’t know enough to cover their tracks in the data logs.”

  Karpov’s eyes narrowed. “Orlov?”

  “Perhaps. Would he be that selfish and foolish to take something back with him?”

  “Take what?”

  “Who knows. Maybe he loaded data onto a cell phone or a pad device. He obviously planned his escape very well.”

  Karpov’s eyes widened with sudden recollection. “His jacket!”

  Fedorov didn’t understand and the Captain explained.

  “He had a Computer Jacket, just like the Marines use for special operations. I remember him talking about how he liked it because he could listen to things on his earbuds while making the rounds, news, music, that sort of thing.”

  “I can’t say I like the sound of this,” Fedorov had a very disheartened look on his face now.

  “Don’t be surprised, Fedorov. You had better check the history very closely when we make port if Orlov downloaded data into that jacket.”

  “I plan to do exactly that, though I’m not sure what good it will do at this point. Whatever Orlov ended up doing, it’s all over and done with now. He would have to be dead by now. It’s history. But we will be living in the world he helped build the moment we set foot off this ship. Yet if Orlov had that jacket with him, we could learn that more things have changed than I expected. Its very existence in the past would have to cause a major aberration. Computer circuitry found in the 1940s could change a great deal!”

/>   “Now you have me wondering what else has changed.” Karpov had a distant, empty look on his face. “But even if they did find it, they wouldn’t know what it was, Fedorov.”

  “Oh, there were some very clever men back then, Captain. I would not be so sure. This is very disturbing news.” He gazed at the distant land form of Primorskiy Province as it reached south to Vladivostok. “We’ll make port in the next few hours. We will soon see the peak of Eagle’s Nest Hill and the shores of Golden Horn Bay. Count on both still being there. But who knows whether they still have that old WWII Soviet sub on display at the Naval Museum, or if the Oceanarium was still built here in the city.”

  “I won’t miss either one, but the food at ZolotoyDrakon was always good, and so was the sushi at the Yamato Bar on Okeanskiy Prospekt.”

  They both smiled at that. “Yamato Sushi Bar?” said Fedorov. “I guess the legend lives on after all, even if the ship is now on the bottom of the sea. At least we didn’t put it there.”

  “Oh, but I tried very hard to sink that ship.” Karpov wagged a finger at him. “It was a tough old warthog, that one.”

  Fedorov looked at his watch. “About three more hours. Then I suppose we learn whether home is still there for us, and what kind of a world we are living in now.”

  Chapter 8

  Vladivostok was one of only four major ports serving the vast expanse of the Russian Republic. Sometimes referred to as the San Francisco of Mother Russia, the city is located at the tip of a long peninsula, clustered on the fringes of the beautiful Amursky Bay, where long new elegant bridges connected the isthmus to Frunzenskiy Island to the south and formed a kind of Golden Gate of their own where ships pass beneath them to eventually enter the “Golden Horn Harbor.” And like San Francisco, it also had a thriving and fast growing Chinese community mixed in with the city’s 700,000 residents, their shops and restaurants creating little china towns here and there near the harbor district.

  Like many cities in Russia, it suffered from pollution, a reputation for corruption, and a struggling economy that saw over 25% of its citizens living below the poverty line. Those who could get jobs in the industrial sector there would often wait long months for a meager paycheck, and others became self-styled tour guides serving a slowly growing tourism industry. That said, the city and its vital port remained a crucial strategic hub for Russia in the 21st century, and the Pacific Fleet still berthed its guided missile cruisers, destroyers and submarines in the region, though all too few.

  One Slava Class cruiser, the Varyag, would now bow and yield its crown as the Pacific Fleet’s Flagship to the newly arriving battlecruiser Kirov. There were a few aging destroyers, four in the old Udaloy Class, three Delta III submarines, an old Oscar, five Akula’s and even some rusting Kilo class diesel subs tied off at the wharfs and piers of the submarine base at Pavlovskoye, south of Fokino where the Naval Headquarters had been located. One new sub, the sleek new nuclear attack submarine Kazan was perhaps the most formidable boat assigned to the undersea fleet based there. It was hidden in the old underground submarine pens that had been dug through the north cape of Pavlovshoye Bay.

  The navy rolled out the red carpet for Kirov when the big battlecruiser arrived, just as Karpov said it would. There were honor guards, a marching band, a flag ceremony and a lot of military rituals. Admiral Volsky had the entire ship’s compliment out in their dress whites, and he played up the ceremony for all it was worth. Yet through it all there was a kind of reserved shock when the other sailors and officers assembled on the quays saw the damage the ship had sustained. Kirov was missing her Top Mast radar sets, there was a raw gash on the aft quarter, and obvious damage to the superstructure behind the secondary mast where fresh paint and a canvass tarp now hid the worst of the wreckage inflicted by Hayashi’s D3A1 dive bomber.

  The rumor that the ship had endured these insults when Orel blew up on sea trials provided little comfort, as it spoke only to the continued incompetence of the service, still struggling to reach the lofty goal set in 2011 of building 100 new ships before 2020. Most of these were to be smaller frigates, corvettes, and new submarines, accounting for about seventy of the planned additions. The remaining thirty would see some real new teeth put into the fleet, including two new nuclear aircraft carriers that had been planned, though neither had been completed. The fleet still had little reliable seaborne air power, and therefore could never hope to fulfill the long held Russian dream of becoming a real blue water navy.

  China went shopping and bought up most of the older Soviet era light carriers. Kiev was now a floating hotel, and Minsk an amusement park. The second Kuznetsov class hull, named Varyag before it was sold to the Chinese, was now the Liaoning, the ship once fated to die at the hands of an American submarine in the growing squabble over Taiwan, as least insofar as one Australian newspaper had it. Russia’s only fleet carrier to speak of was this ship’s elder brother, Admiral Kuznetsov, which had also been moved east when the Russians had been quietly informed that China was planning a ‘major operation’ in the near future.

  One relatively new frigate with the all new carbon fiber superstructure and stealth design had been assigned to the Pacific Fleet, the Admiral Golovko, laid down in 2012. Two more were expected soon. The Project 21956 destroyers were also still largely incomplete, though one such ship, now named the Orlan, or Sea Eagle, was proudly berthed at Vladivostok next to the new arrival.

  Kirov was given a proverbial ‘wide berth’ off the concrete docks near Korabelnaya Street. Admiral Volsky knew, as Karpov had warned, that the Naval Inspectorate would be arriving within days, so he huddled with his Chief Engineer Dobrynin to see what could be done about the reactor control rod they now suspected as the cause of the strange displacement the ship had experienced—Rod-25.

  “What can we do with it, Dobrynin? Can we risk leaving it here on the ship?”

  “If we do, sir, then what might happen the next time we have to do rod maintenance?”

  “Yes, it would be most disturbing if the ship were to suddenly disappear again while berthed in the harbor! Can it be removed safely? Stored somewhere?”

  “That would take some doing, Admiral, but it might be transferred to the Primorskiy Engineering Center across the bay. We have a diagnostic rod test-bed facility there, and I could study it more closely. We would put it in a radiation safe container, then barge it across the bay to the commercial pier and truck it up the hill to the center.”

  “I will cut the orders,” Volsky said quickly. “Anything you need will be provided. But I want this to seem routine. I want to avoid calling undue attention.”

  “I understand, sir. I can just write up a standard rod replacement order—not unusual at all after a long cruise like this. In fact, I may have to replace rods five and seven as well. I can ask for a new spare to fill in for Rod-25. It is nothing unusual.”

  “Good, Dobrynin. Get the damn thing off the ship as soon as possible, then, eh?”

  “I’ll have it moved tomorrow, sir.”

  “Perfect… But I think we should have a man there at all times, to keep watch on it. You know how things get shuffled around from one place to another. Someone comes in looking for something and things get moved. Some enterprising supply clerk looking for spare parts comes in and sends the damn thing off to another ship.”

  “We wouldn’t want that to happen, sir.”

  “Precisely. So leave a man there—on my orders. If anyone questions you tell them that this comes directly from me. That should take care of it. One advantage of carrying all this extra weight is that you get to throw it around once in a while.”

  “That’s what Admirals are for, sir. I’ll put two men on it.”

  * * *

  Pavel Kamenski looked up from his book, staring over the rim of his reading glasses when he heard the commotion on the stairs. It was Alexi, his grandson, racing up the steps and shouting for him with that edge of eagerness in his voice that promised discovery.

  “Grandpa! Grandpa! I
t’s here!”

  Alexi ran in, all of twelve, his knees bare between long white socks and plain brown shorts, for the weather had been uncommonly warm that week in Vladivostok. He rushed in, eyes gleaming, cheeks red with his haste. “It’s here!”

  “Just a moment, my good young man. What is here?”

  “Kirov! It’s back Grandpa. It was all on the television a moment ago. Kirov is in the harbor! Can we go see it, Grandpa? Let’s go and see it, please?”

  “Kirov? Here?”

  “It was on the news. They say it wasn’t sunk after all, Grandpa—just on a mission, that’s all. And now it’s home again, and here! Can we go see it?”

  Alexi was no different than millions of other young boys at that age. He had cut his teeth on plastic dinosaurs, slowly graduating to toy soldiers, and spent long hours playing with them in the dirt with his friends, developing some strange calculus wherein a triceratops could be traded for two machine gunners and a sniper, or one tank. In time he slowly traded off his herd of dinos to the younger boys, and built the root and stem of a Motor Rifle Division in their place. When he got a few years older he left these behind and moved on to model building. At Christmas he might be seen slowly flying his model Mig-31 fighter about the house, turning it this way and that in his hand as the plane banked to avoid decorations on the tree, and then swooped on Tamiko, the cat.

  At eleven he had taken to reading stories of great battles at sea, and building models of his favorite ships. He had a model of the old German battleship Bismarck, and one of the famous Japanese battleship Yamato, the biggest of them all. He also had a big Shchuka-B type nuclear attack submarine, the boat NATO now called Akula. But of all his models, Kirov was his favorite, and he had spent long hours watching it sail the seas of his imagination, and thinking that one day he might join the navy himself, and become its captain.