the pieces of that old puzzle are still here, but they may be in a different order now, and the new picture may be a little unsettling.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well suppose a man takes his leave, rushes home, and finds his house was sold years ago and is occupied by strangers. If the big things can change, then the details can change along with them. We have no idea what we’re really going to find here.”
“I never quite thought of it that way,” said Karpov. “And I suppose we never will find out what happened to Orlov, will we? Is that in your research, Fedorov? Would it not be funny to see his face glaring at you from one of your old WWII photo books?”
“I’ve thought about that a good long time,” Fedorov frowned. “Orlov wasn’t likely to do the world much good. I suppose he might have used his general knowledge of the future to some advantage, but he wasn’t an educated man. He could probably know that the Americans landed on the moon first, but could not tell you when or very much else about it.”
“That’s a blessing,” said Karpov. “Orlov’s ignorance may end up preventing a lot of grief, but something tells me his temper is going to cause trouble, one way or another. He’s cagey, Fedorov. It wasn’t all brawn and bad temper, and he will think himself more than he really is, a wolf in the fold, if you will.”
“Well… Now that we speak of this, I did find something that was a bit unsettling when I went over the ship’s library computers. Someone made a big download a few weeks ago, and they didn’t know enough to cover their tracks in the data logs.”
Karpov’s eyes narrowed. “Orlov?”
“Perhaps. Would he be that selfish and foolish to take something back with him?”
“Take what?”
“Who knows. Maybe he loaded data onto a cell phone or a pad device. He obviously planned his escape very well.”
Karpov’s eyes widened with sudden recollection. “His jacket!”
Fedorov didn’t understand and the Captain explained.
“He had a Computer Jacket, just like the Marines use for special operations. I remember him talking about how he liked it because he could listen to things on his earbuds while making the rounds, news, music, that sort of thing.”
“I can’t say I like the sound of this,” Fedorov had a very disheartened look on his face now.
“Don’t be surprised, Fedorov. You had better check the history very closely when we make port if Orlov downloaded data into that jacket.”
“I plan to do exactly that, though I’m not sure what good it will do at this point. Whatever Orlov ended up doing, it’s all over and done with now. He would have to be dead by now. It’s history. But we will be living in the world he helped build the moment we set foot off this ship. Yet if Orlov had that jacket with him, we could learn that more things have changed than I expected. Its very existence in the past would have to cause a major aberration. Computer circuitry found in the 1940s could change a great deal!”
“Now you have me wondering what else has changed.” Karpov had a distant, empty look on his face. “But even if they did find it, they wouldn’t know what it was, Fedorov.”
“Oh, there were some very clever men back then, Captain. I would not be so sure. This is very disturbing news.” He gazed at the distant land form of Primorskiy Province as it reached south to Vladivostok. “We’ll make port in the next few hours. We will soon see the peak of Eagle’s Nest Hill and the shores of Golden Horn Bay. Count on both still being there. But who knows whether they still have that old WWII Soviet sub on display at the Naval Museum, or if the Oceanarium was still built here in the city.”
“I won’t miss either one, but the food at Zolotoy Drakon was always good, and so was the sushi at the Yamato Bar on Okeanskiy Prospekt.”
They both smiled at that. “ Yamato Sushi Bar?” said Fedorov. “I guess the legend lives on after all, even if the ship is now on the bottom of the sea. At least we didn’t put it there.”
“Oh, but I tried very hard to sink that ship.” Karpov wagged a finger at him. “It was a tough old warthog, that one.”
Fedorov looked at his watch. “About three more hours. Then I suppose we learn whether home is still there for us, and what kind of a world we are living in now.”
Chapter 8
Vladivostok was one of only four major ports serving the vast expanse of the Russian Republic. Sometimes referred to as the San Francisco of Mother Russia, the city is located at the tip of a long peninsula, clustered on the fringes of the beautiful Amursky Bay, where long new elegant bridges connected the isthmus to Frunzenskiy Island to the south and formed a kind of Golden Gate of their own where ships pass beneath them to eventually enter the “Golden Horn Harbor.” And like San Francisco, it also had a thriving and fast growing Chinese community mixed in with the city’s 700,000 residents, their shops and restaurants creating little china towns here and there near the harbor district.
Like many cities in Russia, it suffered from pollution, a reputation for corruption, and a struggling economy that saw over 25 % of its citizens living below the poverty line. Those who could get jobs in the industrial sector there would often wait long months for a meager paycheck, and others became self-styled tour guides serving a slowly growing tourism industry. That said, the city and its vital port remained a crucial strategic hub for Russia in the 21st century, and the Pacific Fleet still berthed its guided missile cruisers, destroyers and submarines in the region, though all too few.
One Slava Class cruiser, the Varyag, would now bow and yield its crown as the Pacific Fleet’s Flagship to the newly arriving battlecruiser Kirov. There were a few aging destroyers, four in the old Udaloy Class, three Delta III submarines, an old Oscar, five Akula’s and even some rusting Kilo class diesel subs tied off at the wharfs and piers of the submarine base at Pavlovskoye, south of Fokino where the Naval Headquarters had been located. One new sub, the sleek new nuclear attack submarine Kazan was perhaps the most formidable boat assigned to the undersea fleet based there. It was hidden in the old underground submarine pens that had been dug through the north cape of Pavlovshoye Bay.
The navy rolled out the red carpet for Kirov when the big battlecruiser arrived, just as Karpov said it would. There were honor guards, a marching band, a flag ceremony and a lot of military rituals. Admiral Volsky had the entire ship’s compliment out in their dress whites, and he played up the ceremony for all it was worth. Yet through it all there was a kind of reserved shock when the other sailors and officers assembled on the quays saw the damage the ship had sustained. Kirov was missing her Top Mast radar sets, there was a raw gash on the aft quarter, and obvious damage to the superstructure behind the secondary mast where fresh paint and a canvass tarp now hid the worst of the wreckage inflicted by Hayashi’s D3A1 dive bomber.
The rumor that the ship had endured these insults when Orel blew up on sea trials provided little comfort, as it spoke only to the continued incompetence of the service, still struggling to reach the lofty goal set in 2011 of building 100 new ships before 2020. Most of these were to be smaller frigates, corvettes, and new submarines, accounting for about seventy of the planned additions. The remaining thirty would see some real new teeth put into the fleet, including two new nuclear aircraft carriers that had been planned, though neither had been completed. The fleet still had little reliable seaborne air power, and therefore could never hope to fulfill the long held Russian dream of becoming a real blue water navy.
China went shopping and bought up most of the older Soviet era light carriers. Kiev was now a floating hotel, and Minsk an amusement park. The second Kuznetsov class hull, named Varyag before it was sold to the Chinese, was now the Liaoning, the ship once fated to die at the hands of an American submarine in the growing squabble over Taiwan, as least insofar as one Australian newspaper had it. Russia’s only fleet carrier to speak of was this ship’s elder brother, Admiral Kuznetsov, which had also been moved east when the Russians had been quietly informed that China was planning a ‘major operation’ in the near future.
One relatively new frigate with the all new carbon fiber superstructure and stealth design had been assigned to the Pacific Fleet, the Admiral Golovko, laid down in 2012. Two more were expected soon. The Project 21956
