Volsky slept in his chair, unwilling to leave the bridge, and refusing to have anything to do with Karpov and Orlov for the time being. He would talk with them later. Fedorov went below for a while, catching a few hours sleep before returning to stand another watch when Rodenko again reported clear airborne contacts close enough to be within sighting distance of the ship! This time Tasarov had similar readings on his sonar equipment indicating the presence of ships nearby yet, just as the ship’s new executive officer was ready to sound the alert, the contacts mysteriously vanished again, and the watch settled back into the long quiet hours at sea. It was a 300 mile journey, and even at 30 knots it would take them ten hours to reach Halifax.
Along the way the Admiral had Fedorov bring the ship in close to the shore on occasion, and they scanned the coast with field glasses and long range HD video cameras, yet saw no sign of activity there. The coast was a maze of small inlets, bays and islets, sprinkled with tiny fishing towns here and there, though they could not make out any buildings. They passed Mitchel Bay, Sheet Harbor, Sober Island and Taylor’s Head without seeing anything of note. There were no fishing trawlers out to sea, and no sign of life on the coast that they could discern, but they were still too far from shore to make out much, and Volsky did not want to expend any more aviation fuel to recon that area.
“Let’s wait and get down to Halifax,” he said. “Nuclear fuel seems to be getting us about fairly cheaply. Aviation fuel is another matter. We must conserve as much as possible.”
Some hours later they were again surprised by Tasarov’s report of screw sounds on his sonar. A few seconds later Rodenko confirmed the report on radar, very close, and Fedorov’s eyes widened when he thought he spotted the silhouette of a small cutter take shape on the foggy horizon. The contact vanished again, like a cloud changing shape and dissolving into the mist, but this time they dispatched the KA-226 scout helicopter to conduct a thorough search of the area, yet nothing was found.
“Are we imagining all these contacts?” Fedorov asked. For that matter, he wondered if the whole scenario was nothing more than a bizarre nightmare of their own making. When Dobrynin called up to the bridge to report more unusual flux activity in the reactors, the Admiral seemed very troubled.
“It comes and goes, sir,” he said over the intercom. “Three times now…But things have settled down again. I note no unusual readings.”
Fedorov was troubled as well. He slipped quietly over to his old navigation station to retrieve the copy of The Chronology Of The War At Sea, and opened to August of 1941. His eye was drawn to the odd segment where the allied naval forces had come to full alert after three separate sightings of a “ Hipper class cruiser” in the seas near Newfoundland. The ship was reported that way each and every time, yet it seemed to vanish, and no sign of it was ever found. His eyes betrayed the depth of his muse, and the confusion as he struggled to form a clear thought on what he read…was it possible? They had picked up the ghostly image of ships around them three times now-ships that vanished just as that Hipper class cruiser had vanished in August of 1941-three times… He set the book down and returned to his station, his eyes scanning the seas ahead with a look of grave concern on his face.
They caught sight of Devil’s Island and headed for the Inlet that would lead them up past McNabs Island to Dartmouth and Halifax Harbor. It was 04:00 hours before they were in the main shipping channel, expecting to see the lights of the city glittering in the hazy distance, yet a thick bank of fog was on the headlands, masking all. Halifax was one of the world’s largest and deepest harbors, and Volsky fully expected to find the answer to at least one of their questions here. He decided to sail boldly up the channel, fog or no fog. There was nothing but the coastline return on Rodenko’s screens, and Tasarov heard nothing on sonar. As a precaution, he stood the crew to action stations, and was fully prepared to use his formidable 152mm deck guns if they ran into anything hostile. He was taking the ship in.
Fedorov knew the place well. “McNabs Island is largely empty,” he said, “But it was heavily wooded, and I see nothing there at all now. Very strange, sir. We should be seeing something more at the harbor in a few minutes. This is a very busy port, particularly in 1941, as it was a major embarkation point for all the outbound convoys. The absence of shipping in this channel is ominous, to say the least. There should be steamer traffic, tankers, civilian craft all about us by now. I don’t have a good feeling about this, sir.”
“Helmsman, ahead one third,” said Volsky.
“Ahead one third, sir. Aye.”
“That damnable fog,” said Volsky. “We rely so much on our technology. Radar sees nothing, Tasarov hears nothing, yet I want the evidence of my own eyes before I can assure myself we are no longer entangled with the British and American navies. I don’t even trust those Tin Men with their video cameras any longer.” He waved dismissively at the HD video displays.
They passed McNabs Cove on their right and headed into the outer harbor. “We should see something there,” Fedorov pointed. “Just past Point Pleasant on the left, sir.”
The ship had slowed to a sedate ten knots, and drifted through the veils of fog, yet they saw no lights, and the morning was heavy and quiet, a stillness that conjured up an unaccountable fear in every man as the ship cruised closer to the harbor entrance. Then the fog lifted briefly and Fedorov caught a glimpse of the shoreline.
“Good god,” he breathed. It was a blackened wreck. No buildings were standing. The long commercial piers were completely gone, and the coast seemed a charred rubble pile. It was clear that something had been there, a harbor, a city, yet the whole scene was a mass of debris and wreckage. As the ship edged in closer they could see none of the high rise buildings that should have graced the harbor’s edge. In their place were masses of burned out rubble and twisted steel.
“Mister Rodenko,” Volsky said in a quiet voice. “Scan for residual radiation.”
“Aye, Sir…I’m getting a low background reading, elevated above normal, but nothing to be overly concerned about.”
Volsky nodded his head. “It looks like the entire city had been obliterated.”
George’s Island loomed ahead, a blackened, treeless cone, and Fedorov had the helmsman move the ship to the right of the burned out islet. “That should be the Imperial Petroleum tank farm and refinery sector,” Fedorov pointed, yet all they could see were piles of wreckage, stained char-black by fire and smoke damage. As they reached the inner harbor he could see that MacDonald’s bridge was completely gone, and the cities of Halifax and Dartmouth were both completely destroyed. A smoky fog and haze hung over the broken landscape, and shrouded their minds and hearts as Volsky ordered the ship to slow to five knots.
“We could sail on in to Bedford Basin, sir,” said Fedorov, but I don’t think we’ll find anything there either. What could have done this?”
“How many warheads did that maniac Karpov unleash?” asked Volsky, looking at Samsonov.
“Sir, we fired the number ten missile in the MOS-III bank. All the rest were Moskit-IIs with conventional warheads.”
“It is clear that we did not do this with our weapons then,” said Volsky. “Though we may yet be responsible for what we are seeing here.”
“Sir,” said Fedorov. “We need to ascertain our position in time. I think it is fairly safe to say this is not Halifax of 1941. I suggest we put a shore party in for a closer look. We might find something that could tell us the date, or at least give us some better idea of what happened here.”
“Correct, Mister Fedorov. I think this is a job for Sergeant Troyak. Let us answer this question of when concerning our position, here and now.”
“If I may, sir, I’d like to accompany the landing party.”
The Admiral sent down the order, and Troyak took five marines ashore with Fedorov in an inflatable boat. They would search for anything they could secure that would shed light on their situation, but there was not much to find. Clearly the entire region had undergone a severe trauma. The damage from blast, shock and fire was evident. Most anything that would burn was incinerated, and apparently some time ago. There was no residual heat coming from the rubble piles, largely heaps of metal and concrete that had survived whatever had happened here. In places Troyak even found stone that had apparently been broiled to a hard glassy state. They returned, disheartened and chastened by the experience.
Fedorov had a haunted, defeated look on his face. “There was nothing, sir,” he said. “Nothing intact. No sign of life-no bones in the rubble either, not even a bird or a fly. Whatever happened here was severe and utterly lethal. It was not a natural event either. No tsunami or earthquake could have accounted for what we saw there. Metal was melted-rocks heated to form glass! And I think it happened some time ago, sir. The radiation levels were very low, though they decay to near normal within a hundred days of a detonation. But this could have happened much earlier, perhaps even years.”
