concentration, and it was clear that he felt somewhat responsible for the situation. If the ship had been attacked by a torpedo, why didn’t he hear it?
Rodenko, the soft spoken Ukrainian, was equally disturbed. He was the eyes of the ship, where Tasarov was its ears. The fact that he could not even detect the weather front he had been monitoring was most unsettling.
Nikolin sat at his cubicle on communications, flipping through a code book and checking his radio gain and reception bands. All his normal communication channels seemed strangely quiet, and the silence out of Severomorsk was very odd. He had sent coded emergency flash signals, and there should have been an immediate response.
Some of the junior officers seemed lost in their spacious Russian souls. They leaned over their stations, eyes glazed with the milky luminescence of the screens and systems lights, their thoughts running with the old fairy tale hero, Yemelya, the great idler. Life at sea was often endless and dull for them. They could sense that something was amiss, but had not been privy to much of the discussion among the senior officers, and so they watched the interminable sweep of their radar scopes, tuning and adjusting their equipment. Some seemed lost, others alert and curious, their eyes watching the senior officers closely, as recent events had put them on edge.
The remote helicopter reported no sign of radiation, however. And nothing whatsoever was detected by the sonar buoys-no sign of wreckage on the seafloor at all. They even patched the data through to Tasarov, so his better trained eye and ear could verify the findings. There was just nothing there. Infrared sensors, which would have easily detected heat from a ship that had recently endured combat damage sufficient to sink her, reported nothing unusual.
Then Nikolin seemed encouraged as the signal strength from the KA-226 improved dramatically. He had much more clarity, and instinctively looked at Rodenko, who smiled as he reported. “I have a clear reading on the KA-226 now,” he said. “The interference is gone.” Kirov's systems seemed to be in perfect working order, the telemetry being received from the helicopter on Tasarov's panel was pristine. There was simply nothing else there to be seen, so Admiral Volsky ordered the helo to return. He stared out the forward viewports, noting the color of the sea had dimmed and blanched to a sallow gray again.
“Any response from either ship? Severomorsk?” He broke his reverie, turning to his communications officer Nikolin.
“No sir,” said Nikolin. “I have sent encrypted traffic using normal wartime protocols, but I received no response.”
Karpov drifted to the Admiral’s side, his arms clasped firmly behind his back as he leaned slightly to one side and spoke in a quiet tone of voice, as if to prevent the other members of the bridge crew from hearing him. “What if Severomorsk was also attacked, sir? We could be at war.”
The Admiral gave him a serious look, but said nothing.
Part II
“God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side…”
Chapter 4
The fog around them was so thick now that you could barely see from one end of the ship to the other. The sea was calm and still, and the gray white mist of an ice fog slowly enfolded ship. Soon the gilded masts, radars and antennas were fringed with a hoary white frost, which also settled on the upper decks and superstructure of the ship until she appeared like a great pale white ghost ship silently sliding through the glassy sea.
Kirov was still steaming slowly south by southwest at 10 knots, her sensors keenly scanning the surrounding ocean and airspace for any sign of an enemy of vessel or plane. They seemed to have perfect clarity, but only out to a range of about 30 kilometers, and Rodenko noted that radius slowly increasing. Tasarov’s sonar was clearing up as well, but he still had no contact on the Orel.
Admiral Volsky had been trying to decide whether to continue the investigation or return to Severomorsk. He considered what Karpov had been arguing, that this was indeed a surprise attack by Western forces upon his nation. Both Slava and Orel were suddenly missing and, seen in that light, the explosion Kirov had experienced might have been a near miss attempt to destroy her as well. The fact that Severomorsk did not respond on normal naval message frequencies could mean many things. The base could be observing radio silence, or they could have sustained damage preventing communications. Then again, the base could have been destroyed as well. It was homeport of the Russian North Seas fleet, surely a tempting and vital target in any first strike scenario.
Volsky called down to engineering for a status update on the reactors, pleased to learn that the system readings were now normal again.
“It sounded a bit odd there for a while,” said Chief Dobrynin.
“It sounded odd? What do you mean?”
“I’m not sure, sir. It’s just…Well I’ve been around this equipment most of my career in the service, and you come to know a thing by how it sounds. The harmonics were odd-that’s all I can say. It didn’t sound right to me, but the readings are normal, sir. There is nothing to be concerned about.”
“Very Well, Chief. Carry on, and report immediately if you hear anything else that disturbs you. Anything at all, yes?” The Admiral knew exactly what the Chief was trying to tell him. Years on ships at sea gave some men an uncanny sense that could detect the slightest abnormality in the ship-the way it sounded, or moved in the sea. Volsky settled into his chair, musing as he listened himself, thinking he might hear an answer to their dilemma in the faint hum of the ship’s consoles, or the thrum of the turbines.
Karpov lingered near Nikolin’s communications station for some time, as if he was waiting for a coded signal message to return from Severomorsk at any moment. Yet the time stretched out, and Nikolin waited with him, seeming edgy and somewhat discomfited by the Captain’s close presence. Karpov had a way of hovering over a workstation, and asking entirely too many questions. He was tense and uneasy as well. Somehow the sense of isolation in the long silence left him feeling strangely adrift.
Severomorsk was not merely home, but also the rein of ultimate control on the ship. Orders might come from home port that could supersede those of Admiral Volsky himself. Volsky was Admiral of the Northern Fleet, but above him was Commander-in-Chief of the Navy itself, Gennady Alexandrovich Suchkov, and his Deputy Chief of Staff Vladimir Ivanovich Rogatin. Karpov had been slowly building relationships with these men, hoping they might be useful one day. Vlasky had succeeded Suchkov as Admiral of the Northern Fleet, and Rogatin had been a former Captain of the old battlecruiser Kirov before he moved on to higher ranks. Vlasky was also the most likely candidate to take the aging Suchkov’s place, so Karpov found himself well positioned to advance even further if recent history was any guide.
Now the strange silence from Severomorsk was most discomfiting to him. A favorite tactic against a man of senior rank had always been an appeal to higher authority. Karpov had ingratiated himself with the Naval Staff as he wheedled his way into the command chair of the Kirov. Volsky was his senior, and by a wide margin, but he could always appeal to Severomorsk for a countervailing decision. So his first order of business was to seed the matter there with his own opinion as soon as he possibly could. He wanted to see if he could color the matter at hand in the eyes of senior officers back home, and possibly influence any decision that they might make about the situation. Yet more than this, he wanted to make certain his own actions would be viewed in a proper light; he wanted to
