Kirov III: Pacific Storm

future, seeing the ruin and destruction of Halifax Harbor. “It looks like we stopped it this time,” he said. “That alarm clock bomb you talked about, Mister Fedorov.” It looks like we heard it ticking, and reached a hand out to turn it off just before that jarring sound could rattle our brains.”

Karpov smiled. It had been his hand that stopped it, pulling Samsonov’s away. It had been his hand.

Then they heard something that astounded them all. It was Nikolin’s radio set, finally winning its struggle to tune in a distant channel, and it was music. Nikolin’s eyes gleamed as he heard it, rushing to the radio to adjust the dial further and turn up the volume as the song faded in and out. The beat was steady, and every man among them knew the tune. It was the Beatles, beloved in Mother Russia for decades, and they were singing Back in the U.S.S.R.

“…Been away so long I hardly knew the place
Gee, it’s good to be back home.
Leave it till tomorrow to unpack my case,
Honey disconnect the phone!

I’m back in the USSR,
You don’t know how lucky you are, boy,
Back in the US…
Back in the US…
Back in the USSR!

Admiral Volsky was smiling ear to ear, Fedorov broke out laughing. Nikolin started to dance. They were home—but not in the U.S.S.R, they hoped. That old, reeking structure had collapsed decades ago, and this was a new Russia. Yes, now there was SinoPac, the Sino Pacific alliance initiated by the Chinese, and the spring of war was still coiled tight. But they knew what was going to happen now, what might happen if the world kept steady on the course it had been sailing, and they could do whatever they might to forestall it. They were men of real power now. God may have died in this world, but this was now a ship of angels.

Admiral Volsky smiled, an idea in his mind. “Mister Nikolin,” he said in a calm voice. “When you have finished crushing those grapes would you be so kind as to call that American submarine on the radio? We were about to send them a nice, fat super-cavitating cigar, but I think I would like to offer their captain a box of fine Cuban cigars instead. If I can parley with Admiral John Tovey, then by God I can speak with this man as well. Get them on the radio.”

And he did.

~ ~ ~

The world Kirov left behind in 1942 had a long time to consider the mystery of this strange interloper on the high seas. The code word Geronimo was kept a quiet secret, but the mysterious ship was never seen again. This time it had vanished for good. The British Admiralty locked away the files in a deep, deep cellar beneath Hut 4 in Bletchley Park, and few knew what happened to them once that facility was eventually closed after the war. Admiral John Tovey was one of them, following the reports of unaccountable engagements that week in the Coral Sea, and smiling to himself, then crumpling the decrypts and putting them to the fire.

He spent the next years serving ably in spite of Churchill’s desire to remove him for his transgressions, and was eventually promoted to Admiral of the Fleet, retiring from service in 1946 to pursue ‘other matters.’ Few ever knew what scope and scale of those matters actually were, but those close to him said he had been fond, in his later years, of reading novels by Jules Verne and the work of H.G. Wells. No one ever really knew that he still remained in the hunt for the mysterious ship that had once been code named Geronimo, keeping a silent, vigilant watch on the world.

Alan Turing continued his amazing work as a cryptanalyst, eventually trailblazing the development of the computer with his “Turing Machine,” and laboring on in logic and number theory. His work on artificial intelligence and encrypted speech transmission was also groundbreaking and well ahead of its time—and for good reason. The startling discovery that Geronimo had left one thing of great importance behind when it vanished set him on a search that was to consume him for the remainder of his days, and there were all too few left to him.

As for Novak and Osborne at FRUMEL Headquarters in Melbourne, they kept chewing on the rind of the orange they had been peeling that week. They did learn enough to know a great battle had been fought off the coast of Papua New Guinea, a battle the Japanese had apparently won, or so they read the tale when this strange enemy ship simply vanished, presumed sunk. But they knew it didn’t go without a fight. A plane out of Milne Bay had managed to get a photo of a large and dangerous looking Japanese battleship, obviously bearing the scars of a major battle as it slipped by, escorted by a gaggle of cruisers and destroyers. It was Admiral Yamamoto and Yamato, bound for Rabaul and then Kure. The Americans never knew much about the Yamato incident, for they knew very little about the ship itself, or its sister ship Musashi, until many years later.

On the Japanese side, when the cruiser Tone made port at Rabaul, the crew was so distraught with the tale of a demon ship from hell that they were relieved to a man, scattered throughout the empire, and the ship was re-crewed. Yet ever thereafter the Tone was whispered to be a ghost ship, and men reported seeing strange lights in her dark and twisting corridors, and they had bad dreams. The ship would survive until July of 1945 when she was sunk in Kure harbor by planes off the USS Monterey. The final stroke was a rocket attack by planes from the resurrected carrier Wasp, on July 28, 1945, exactly 76 years before Kirov had first vanished.

Captain Sanji Iwabuchi was sent to the Philippines in some disfavor. He would never recant his story, that his ship had finally found and rammed the phantom enemy they had come to call Mizuchi, and sunk it that night. And he went on to stubbornly disobey his orders to withdraw from Manila years later, leaving tens of thousands massacred in the fighting there. No one else much believed his tale, though they never dared say as much to Iwabuchi’s face. Yet the odd thing that no one had been able to explain was the slightly crumpled bow of the cruiser Tone, damaged in that first split second of her harrowing encounter with Kirov, before the Russian ship slipped out of phase, sailing away on the cold drafty seas of time.

The Japanese never knew what had so bedeviled them in the Coral Sea. They sailed Yamato home, casting a cloak of shame and secrecy over the ship again as they set about to repair the extensive damage. No announcement was ever made to the public about the disaster, or the greater loss of three fleet carriers in the Solomons. Strangely, Kirov had restored the balance of power to what it might have been after the Midway battle that had never been fought. In some bizarre calculus known only to herself, Mother Time had balanced her books.

A young Ensign named Mitsuo Ohta had been deeply impressed by the dreadful “suicide rockets” the enemy had deployed. Watching them dance over the sea in their evasive maneuvers, and knowing nothing of computer controlled guidance systems, he could only conclude that they were piloted. He soon approached students of the Aeronautical Research Institute at the University of Tokyo for help in designing a similar weapon. His plans were submitted to the Yokosuka research facility, and the Navy Air Technical Arsenal began to produce prototypes of a rocket powered piloted cruise missile they would call the Okha, or Cherry Blossom. Its only liability was that the three solid fueled rockets it used were not yet powerful enough to launch it from a ship.

Instead the rocket had to be carried by a twin engine bomber to within 37,000 meters, and then it could launch to make its daring and final high speed run to the target, with a human pilot standing in for the missing computer and radar controlled brain that had guided Kirov’s missiles. These