Kirov III: Pacific Storm

the British something fierce. Put a couple of their carriers in dry dock and sunk the Repulse.”

Novak’s eyes widened. “You mean to say Repulse was sunk by this raider? There was no U-Boat attack there either?”

“No U-boat attack. It was this ship they started calling Geronimo, the one the US claimed as a trophy after Mississippi went down. You read the reports— Desron 7 was supposed to have taken the bastard down, though not a single ship survived that attack, right?”

“That’ s the way the official report reads.”

“Well the official report is bullshit,” Osborne tapped his pipe in the ashtray, picking at some loose tobacco as he did so. “The whole Desron 7 thing was nothing more than a cover story. Now you keep this quiet, Novak,” he lowered his voice, a warning evident in his eyes behind his dark rimmed spectacles, “but I can tell you this much. Five destroyers showed up at Halifax twelve days after they supposedly disappeared during this incident with the raider. You want to know their names? Plunkett, Hughes, Madison, Gleaves and Lansdale—Desron 7, or at least the last five destroyers from that group. They told quite a story too. Said they returned to Argentia Bay and there was nobody there—no ships in the harbor, no airbase, absolutely nothing. They claimed they searched the whole area, even put men ashore, but that the whole place was abandoned, flattened.”

“But the Atlantic Charter conference was going on at that time. That’s ridiculous!”

“Yes, it certainly is, but this is what the skipper off Plunkett claimed, a fellow named Kauffman. They interviewed every man on every goddamned ship and they all corroborate what this Captain Kaufman says. The men say those destroyers pulled up anchor and headed south for Halifax, and they just come waltzing into the harbor some days later. Hard to believe, but that’s what really happened to Desron 7. The Navy got hold of those ships, painted over their hull numbers, renamed every last one and scattered them to harbors all over the Pacific Coast.”

“Are you serious? How did you get this information?”

“I never did get it. You never heard about it either, Novak. Use your head. This stuff is buried as deep as they could dig the hole, but I have a few contacts here and there that I can’t mention, and I got the scuttlebutt from them. Either it’s all a crock of shit, or something really strange went down in the Atlantic last year.”

“Then if Desron 7 didn’t get this raider, this Geronimo the British are talking about, what happened to it?”

“It just vanished…” Osborne let that dangle for a moment. “And that’s what they say right here in this message, Novak: Contact lost, 23-AUG-42, no sightings. Confidence high this is Geronimo. Details to follow.”

Novak leaned back in his chair, clearly nonplussed.

“Well I’ll be a monkey’s ass,” he said slowly.

Osborne lit his pipe again.

Chapter 20

Fedorov found Admiral Volsky in the reactor room, leaning over a table with Dobrynin. The floor was still wet with an eighth inch of seawater, and men were working mops in one area of the compartment. Two bulkheads away they could hear the sound of the pumps running, and the clatter of tools on hard metal. It had been very close, he thought. If the reactor room had been flooded…. He didn’t want to think about it further.

“Mister Fedorov,” said Volsky. “Just the man I wanted to see! Come have a look at these printouts.”

“These are charts of the reactor performance data the Admiral asked me to produce,” said Dobrynin.

“Is there something wrong with the core?” That was always a great hidden danger on any nuclear powered ship.

“No, don’t worry about it,” said Dobrynin. “The core was never threatened. Just a little leakage from the outer hull breach, a little seawater is all that made it in here. The men will have it mopped up in no time.”

“But have a look, Fedorov. Notice the line of that chart.”

Fedorov leaned over, staring at the chart, a bit like a seismograph reading it seemed to him, and he noted a series a vertical lines pointed out by Dobrynin with a heavy thumb.

“Each line is one day, marking the end of a normal twenty-four hour period. This red line is the total power output, so you can see where it increases when we were running the ship at high speed. This violet line however, those are flux levels in the core.”

“Do you notice anything?” Volsky asked, eager to see if Fedorov saw what the other two men had been discussing.

“Well it looks like the line spikes every so often.”

“That’s what I saw,” said Volsky. “Dobrynin here tells me its normal, however.”

“It’s just a routine maintenance operation,” the engineer explained. “We’re running a 24-rod reactor core here. Twenty-four control rods, but we have to inspect them at regular intervals. So what we do is pull one rod into this containment structure,” he gestured to a point high up above the main equipment in the room. “We can look the rod over for decay with inspection equipment, even on a microscopic level if need be. While we do this we have to insert a spare rod that descends from that metal tube there,” he pointed again. “That’s rod twenty-five. It gets a dip into the core every so often when we pull one of the other rods for this inspection routine.”

“Then you are saying you get reactor core flux events whenever you do this procedure?”

“Correct,” said Dobrynin, “but not immediately; not during the procedure itself, but just a little while after, sometimes a few hours, sometimes a full day. I suppose that’s why I never connected the two events.”

“I see,” said Fedorov. Then something occurred to him, and his next question was obvious. “Chief…How often do you perform this maintenance routine?”

Admiral Volsky smiled, folding his arms over his broad chest with a wink at Fedorov. “Go on Dobrynin,” he said. “Tell him.”

“Well every twelve days, sir. We pull a rod every twelve days, but I never associated the flux event with the procedure until—”

“Until I had him run these performance charts,” said Volsky.

Fedorov’s eyes widened, a quiet light there now. “Every twelve days? The interval, Admiral! This could explain a great many things!”

“Indeed it might,” said Volsky. “It could be that the answer to this entire mystery has been right under our noses the whole time. We thought the explosion on Orel set off this crazy chain reaction, this time displacement we’ve been trapped in.”

“Perhaps it did,” Fedorov suggested, “but my hunch about the interval is certainly telling.”

“What’s this talk about an interval?” asked Dobrynin.

“I’ve been tracking the dates closely,” said Fedorov. “Every twelve days there has been a time displacement. We either move forward, or back again. Let me see the dates of these maintenance checks…”

He leaned over the chart, his head nodding with the excitement of discovery. “Yes! Look Admiral. There was a rod just before our live fire exercises were scheduled. Then look here, another procedure the day before we vanished near Argentia Bay. Dobrynin… when was the last procedure run?”

Dobrynin squinted. “Why, three days ago. I pulled the number eight rod, stuck in number twenty-five and —”

“And here we are,” said Admiral Volsky, “shooting missiles at Japanese planes and ships!”

“Then this is even more evidence that the cause of these displacements is not some external event,” said Fedorov. “It could be right here, right in our own reactor. We could be causing it just by running this maintenance procedure.”

“Which means…” Volsky’s eyes were bright under his heavy gray brows. “It’s just as Doctor Zolkin