to your post now, but say nothing of this to the Captain. I’ll be along shortly…Oh yes, may I borrow your book for a while?” He held up the volume Fedorov had shared with him.
“Certainly, sir!”
When the Lieutenant had left them, Admiral Volsky sat quietly with his old friend again, briefly flipping through a few pages of the book Fedorov had given him. “An enterprising young officer,” he said of his navigator.
“That he is, Leonid.”
The Admiral looked up at the doctor, saying nothing for a moment. “Tell me, Dmitri. What do you really think?”
Zolkin thought for a moment, then spoke in a quiet, serious tone. “Karpov is probably correct,” he said. “I argued Fedorov’s point as well as I could, but I’m not so sure I can get my mind around his ideas just yet. You have to admit, it would be an amazing development, yes? Think of it my friend…You would be commanding the most powerful ship in the world if Fedorov’s story was true. The only catch is this…” The Admiral noted the gleam in Doctor Zolkin’s eye as his friend gave him a hard look. “Who’s side would you be on in this war? That book there,” he pointed, “would tell you everything you need to know about the war at sea. Russia and Britain were allies in 1941, but by 2021, things have taken a different course.”
The Admiral raised his eyebrows, smiling, yet his eyes held that distant look again, as if his thoughts were wandering with all the lost souls that had ever sailed these seas. The doctor could see that the question had a profound effect on his friend, kindling a state of mind that the Russians called toska. There was no English equivalent for the word. It’s meaning was something akin to “forlorn sadness,” a melancholia born of the interminable winters and harsh conditions of life in Russia, and a deep longing to be somewhere else, in a place of comfort and warmth where the challenges of life were replaced with quiet and safety. Yet more than this, toska touched upon some inner hidden spiritual anguish of the soul, like that old ache in the Admiral’s tooth that warned him of bad weather. It was a restless anxiety in one sense, and a deep inner yearning in another.
“Well,” said Volsky at last. “Thanks to Mister Fedorov, we’ll know where we stand soon enough, Dmitri. I’m off to the bridge to get that helicopter over to Jan Mayen. I’ll keep you advised. We should know what is happening in a few hours.”
Chapter 9
Karpov was pacing restlessly on the bridge seemingly impatient over something, and occasionally peering through his field glasses at the rising seas ahead. He put the ship into passive mode, stilling the active radar sweeps the ship was blasting the enemy surface action group with and slipping quietly away to the west. He recovered one KA-40, leaving the second in his wake to keep a lookout for the undersea contact that had disappeared. The last thing he wanted was a stealthy American attack submarine creeping up on him. It would be all of 15 hours before he had the ship where he wanted it, assuming he kept on at just 20 knots.
For the moment they saw no further sign of enemy aircraft, though the sight of that old prop-driven plane had been somewhat of a shock to him. Perhaps NATO had deployed a new type of small spotting plane with a turbo prop engine, he thought. Yet they had seen no sign of an orbiting enemy AWAC surveillance plane on their scopes. Unless NATO had managed to completely mask their signals, these two enemy carriers were being quite devious. There should have been a vivid radio-electronic signature around a carrier action group like this-if there really were carriers there. He still suspected that the video footage had been fed to them by NATO PSYOP elements- disinformation, nothing more. He had a mind to turn at any moment and send in a barrage of twenty Sunburns that would wreak havoc on this surface action group, no matter what was there. That would teach them to play with fire, he thought.
The Admiral was below decks resting, and Karpov was glad to have freedom of action on his bridge now. Orlov was still sitting with Samsonov, joking with the burly weapon’s chief, and he had the ship’s crew at condition three, standing down from full action stations to try and relieve the tension on the ship. The crew was still largely in the dark as to what had happened. They all were. Eventually something would have to be said about it to quash the mess hall rumors that were sure to be spreading from deck to deck even now. Were they are war? The crew had a right to know.
The Captain was considering taking a few hours leave and turning the bridge over to Orlov when Rodenko noted a change in the surface contact he was tracking.
“Two ships are breaking off from the main body, and bearing on an intercept course for our plotted position, Captain,” he said. Karpov was at his side immediately.
“Show me.”
“Here, sir,” Rodenko pointed to his screen. “I make that two ships heading north at…twenty-two knots. If they keep on that heading, sir, they will be moving to a position just south of Jan Mayen.”
“Their ability to track us is better than we thought,” said Karpov.
“Unless they deduced what our most likely maneuver would be, sir. This could simply be a radar picket to screen the main body. It continues to move east at 15 knots, toward Norway.”
Karpov’s eyes narrowed.
“Where will they be when we reach our intended position?”
Rodenko pressed several switches, and the screen displayed with a new predictive plot. “About here, sir,” he said. “Looks like they want to get some range from us. They obviously know where we are heading.”
“That would be typical of a carrier force,” said Karpov. The carrier group would want to stand off and use the range of its aircraft to strike from a distance. In close, the reaction time to defend against Kirov’s fast missiles would dwindle to minutes.
“What about the weather, Rodenko? What about that storm?”
“The front is there, sir. Out of the Northeast now. Odd that the winds shifted so dramatically. I was tracking it out of the northwest before that detonation. It seems to have weakened somewhat as well. I make it no more than force five winds. There’s been no signal from the Met on Jan Mayen so I don’t have their readings yet.”
The weather might be a factor in the enemy’s planning as well, thought Karpov. All weather aircraft could launch and use that front to screen their approach. Then again, the carriers might just wait until the front passed their position before they would launch. He had to be ready for either contingency.
Fedorov reported as he came through the rear hatch, saluting. “Permission to resume my station, sir.” He waited, respectfully as Karpov looked his way.
“Carry on, Lieutenant” the Captain said tersely. “And I hope the doctor gave you a good examination, Mister Fedorov.”
The navigator said nothing, slipping quietly over to his post, and appraising the ship’s present position to update his manual chart. He could still rely on radar reports, but thought it best to have a backup in any case. He quickly surmised their situation, and noted that two ships had been detached from the surface contact and were steaming north towards Jan Mayen. That has to be Adventure and Anthony, he thought, remembering the narrative from his history book. They were detached to deliver those mines to Murmansk before rejoining the British carriers. Then he remembered something else from the history. The carrier Furious was supposed to be with them, yet the feed he had from Rodenko’s board showed only two ships had been detached. Something had clearly changed, and that thought gave him a strange, queasy feeling.
They were changing the history!
Somehow the presence of Kirov and the brief, fleeting contact with the British forces had already done something to change the events that were clearly written up in his Chronology of the War at Sea. While the full implications of that were not immediately apparent to him, even this subtle variation seemed deeply foreboding. A hundred questions came to mind, but he pushed them away, unable to deal with them for the moment. Yet the feeling remained with him, an ill-omened awareness that the world was no longer what it once was, what it should be, and that Kirov was somehow responsible.
He said nothing of this to the Captain, holding his thoughts close and busying himself with his navigation plots. Where was the Admiral? Why was he taking so long to return? The answer to all their questions was just a few hundred kilometers to the southwest, on Jan Mayen. When Admiral Volsky finally appeared, Fedorov breathed
