underwater speed was still a highly classified secret. With a 25 year supply of nuclear fuel, and advanced air and water purification systems, the sub could technically circumnavigate the entire globe without ever once surfacing. Her only limitation was a 90 day supply of food.
Ambush had been following a small task group centered on Kirov, picking them up as they left Severomorsk and drifting quietly as they passed in a stately line. The old Oscar class submarine Orel led the procession, followed by the aging cruiser Slava towing a large targeting barge, and then came the bane of the West, the mighty Kirov out for live fire exercises with the ship’s holds bulging with missile reloads. The formation was in no particular hurry, making a sedate 10 knots until the Slava veered off with her targeting barge and increased to 15 knots. The sub listened to the whole scene, her sensitive sonar tracking the movement of each ship until the Slava was some 30 kilometers south of Kirov and the now submerged submarine Orel, which hovered nearby. Weather reports indicated a strong front was moving in rapidly from the north, and it looked as though the Russians wanted to complete their exercise before the sea conditions made operations impractical.
Then it happened.
The whole boat shuddered with a thrumming vibration as if a massive kettle drum had been struck a mighty blow beneath the sea. The sonar operator ripped his headset off in spite of the noise spike inhibitor, staring blankly at his CO. No one on the boat knew it at that moment, but a strange loop in time had just completed one full cycle.
The first time it had happened there had been no Admiral Yates on the watch, and in fact, no “Watch” mounted at all. The group did not exist when the Orel incident first sent Kirov careening through time to 1941. Yet actions taken by the ship and crew changed history, and in the year 2000 a Great War broke out on that altered timeline and devastated the world. Kirov never saw it. Rod-25 snatched the ship away from the icy waters of the North Atlantic and sent it home to the year 2021…Only home was no longer there!
Twelve days later an unknowing Chief Dobrynin and Rod-25 worked their magic again and sent Kirov back to 1942, only this time she had moved in space while in the future, and was now in the Med. Actions taken by the ship and crew again altered history and caused the war to be delayed in that newly altered timeline, but it happened in the year 2021. When Rod-25 sent the ship forward again off the Island of St. Helena, Kirov once more found the world a desolate and blighted place.
The third shift into the past to 1942 gave the ship one last chance to change that fate. After so many tries Time now seemed to know its own future, and cleverly tipped off the principle officers on the ship by delivering a newspaper to them with a warning before they made that last return trip to late 1942. The war would start in 2021, it told them. Get busy. Kirov’s actions in the Pacific of 1942 had been enough to win but a brief respite to that fatal deadline, a matter of a few weeks delay, and not enough to prevent it from occurring. Because the ship had left one thing, one man of great importance behind-Chief Gennadi Orlov-a Man of War. It was something Orlov would do, or fail to do, that would make all the difference where the two roads of time now diverged in a yellow wood of infinity, and led to a future that only a privileged few now knew.
When Kirov reappeared and made its way home to Vladivostok it was living in the alternate history that the ship and crew had created, and on that timeline a Watch had been waiting for long decades, ever vigilant. In late July, 2021 of that altered history, Kirov vanished…right on schedule. Orel blew up again, just as before on the original timeline, and a story a thousand pages long was written in the new history. This time Admiral Yates was standing his Watch.
A telephone rang in Royal Naval Headquarters-a very special telephone. It flashed signals to the deep underground operations bunker near Portsmouth, to a solitary office in Plymouth, and its shrill alarm was relayed to locations, and individuals all over the globe, all men and women of the Watch. It was just one single word repeating in sets of three until a button was pushed on the receiving end to indicate secure reception of the message: Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo…
It had finally happened. The ship they had been waiting for since the 1940s, watching since 1980, had finally pulled its disappearing act and was gone, and it was now anyone’s guess where and when it might return. The Watch did not have long to wait. Kirov was gone for all of a long, breathless month, and then was suddenly spotted in the Pacific by an American submarine. Key West was supposed to have been killed that day, but lived on due to a moment of restraint that bought the world a few brief weeks of restless peace.
Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan was thousands of miles away when Kirov finally turned her bow north from the paradise island where they had made one final stop. There was only one loose end that they could not account for as they sailed for home, though Anton Fedorov spent many long hours trying. What had happened to Chief Gennadi Orlov? Where did he go? What effect, if any, did he have on the history that Fedorov could now spend long quiet years re-reading, re-learning, much to his delight? His curiosity and diligence would become a saving grace for the world, though he did not yet know that as he stood on the weather deck when the ship first turned for Vladivostok harbor. Kirov was coming home, but it would not be the last time the ship would see the fire of war.
Karpov had stayed his hand at the last moment, and the curious American submarine, Key West had lived to return to its home port in Guam, its captain happily smoking a fresh Cuban cigar on the conning tower. Yet the reprieve that single moment of sanity and restraint Karpov gave to the world was to be short lived. Events in the Pacific were building up like tall storm clouds on the horizon, their flanks darkening with rain, tops crowned with the lightning of the threat of war.
In a strange twist of events, the ship they left broken and stranded on the shallow coral reefs of the Torres Straits would sire a brave young son to pose a new challenge to the world. Kirishima would return, but it would not be the old battleship this time, nor the stern presence of a man like Sanji Iwabuchi. No, this time it was a sleek guided missile destroyer, Kongo class, built for the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force in the late 1990s. In an odd echo of the history they had just lived, Kirov would soon come to hear the name of ship that had hunted them, pursuing them through the long nights as they struggled to find safe waters in a sea of war. DDG Kirishima was now fated to have a major part to play in the war that was still looming.
Men no longer stood the watch from a high pagoda tower on this new ship. Instead they huddled below decks their eyes fixed on the glowing screens of their advanced Aegis Fire Control System. The big 14 inch guns of its distant ancestor had been forsaken for deadly new Harpoon missiles. The AA guns that once bristled from the superstructure of the old ship were now SM-2MR Block IV radar homing SAMs. Yet one thing remained the same, the destroyer was a ship of war pledged to bring her wrath and fire to any who might threaten or oppose the interests of her nation on the high seas. The forms and shapes of the ships had changed, and new men sailed within the hard metal frames plying the waters of the misnamed Pacific, but the deadly game they played with one another was still the same.
Escort Squadron 6 was a part of Flotilla 2 assigned to the Sasebo Naval District, and tonight DDG Kirishima led a group of three warships as they prowled the dark waters near the disputed Senkaku Islands, called the Diaoyutai by rival China. English sailors of old had called them the Pinnacles, deserted specks in the sea that seemed to hold little interest before lucrative oil and gas fields had been discovered on the seabed beneath them in the 21st century. Now the largest of the tiny group, once called the “Island of Peace” would become a terrible new flashpoint for war. History had a way of spoiling human expectations with its cold ironic smirk.
Peace was far away that night, a will-o the-wisp notion that had been laid aside in the service of more immediate interests. The 21st century was starving for energy. China has risen like a great fire breathing dragon, and her hot breath now needed fuel to stoke those flames. Japan too, was hungry again, and the same search for oil and natural resources that had sent her to war in the 1940s now saw her slowly set aside the pledge of non- belligerence written into her constitution at the end of that last great conflict. It was a new world, but some things never changed.
Just as fate brought the name Kirishima back from the dead that night, she was also to start a new, cruel dance for the men who had served, and fought and endured aboard another proud ship of war, the battlecruiser Kirov. For that ship also seemed to return from the dead when the Kirov suddenly radioed home to Vladivostok, and reserved a berth in the Golden Horn Harbor for her weary crew… All but one.
As it turned out, fate was not so kind to the man who had shirked his duty in a wild leap of violent self- interest. Yes, Gennadi Orlov found a new life when he jumped from the KA-226 that day, yet it was not the life he had imagined. Time, fate, and the British Special Intelligence Service had other plans for him. And Fate had plans for Fedorov, and Karpov, and Volsky too, their names written in some bizarre ledger in the Book of Time, right
