without much warmth. “There,” Zolkin continued. “Now that the Captains have tipped their hats, I think we would be more comfortable discussing this in my office. These men will have some work to do. Would you walk with me, Captain Volkov?” He gestured to the open door, and Volkov frowned, then stepped outside.
“You haven’t answered my question, Doctor,” he said as they started down the corridor.
“Was the man ill? No, Captain. The man was quite dead.”
“Dead?”
“Unfortunately so. From my initial observations it appears to be a suicide, but of course I will complete a formal autopsy and make a full report.”
“Were those other men involved?”
“No, no. They were just orderlies assigned to clean the officer’s quarters. They found him here.”
“This man was an officer?”
“In fact, he was not. That was Able Seaman Voloshin. Apparently he had some family problems-bad news.”
“What was he doing here?”
“It will most likely be a long story, Captain.”
“I see…Well I will want the full report, Doctor.”
“ You will want the report? Are you a new command level officer assigned to the ship, Mister Volkov?”
“I told you. I am with Naval Intelligence, Inspectorate Division.”
“Well I am not in the habit of filing my medical briefs with the Naval Inspectorate. I thought you people were mostly concerned with ship’s systems and weapons inventories.”
“I’m afraid we concern ourselves with a great deal more, Doctor, though I can’t say that is a matter I need to discuss with you. Simply file your brief in the medical log, and of course I will want a complete copy of all those files as well.”
Zolkin raised his eyebrows. “I will hate to inconvenience you, Captain, but the logs were damaged during the accident. I’m not sure if you heard. Yes, nothing seemed to function properly and the technicians haven’t had time to get round to my office yet with a new computer. I’ve kept a few manual records, of course, for all prescriptions and drugs issued from the inventory. But there have been no formal computer logs, beyond documenting those men lost in the accident and other injuries sustained by the crew.”
They paused at a ladder, and it was clear that Volkov was not happy. “No medical logs?” he said, a note of recrimination in his voice. “This is most irregular, Doctor. In fact I may go so far as to say it was a dereliction of duty.”
“I can assure you, Captain, where the notion of duty entered my mind it was entirely to be of service to the men lined up outside my sick bay door. Of course I made basic notations in my medical journal, which I would be happy to release to the inspectorate upon approval by a ranking command level officer.”
“I am such an officer, Doctor. Don’t trouble yourself by going to the Admiral.”
“You are now in the command structure for this ship? When did you transfer in, Volkov?”
“Don’t be stupid. I haven’t transferred in. I’m here to complete a thorough investigation on this matter, and I will expect the full cooperation of every man aboard, particularly from the officers.”
“Oh, I will be very happy to satisfy you, Captain, but around here we do things by the book. I’ll need approval from ether Captain Karpov or the Admiral. After that you can spend all the time you wish trying to interpret my miserable writing scrawl. But then again, Physicians are notorious for that, yes?”
Zolkin smiled, gesturing to the ladder well. “After you, sir.”
Volkov clenched his jaw, then relented and started down the ladder, flashing an angry glance at Zolkin as he went.
Admiral Volsky had finished his main meeting with Pacific Fleet Commander Boris Abramov, clearing the way for his takeover of that position. Now the two men sat in a well appointed office at the Fleet Headquarters building at Fokino, a small closed town above a small inlet some twenty-five miles southeast of the main harbor at Vladivostok. Volsky set down his teacup, staring out over the blue rooftops of the town to the small islands in the bay and wondering if he would ever get back to a place like Tahiti before he died.
“So that is the situation, Leonid,” said Abramov. “One old Slava class cruiser, five rusting destroyers, a few frigates, ten submarines with so many leaks we issue the men chewing gum so they can have something handy to plug them when needed. Thank God they sent us Kuznetsov, and now your ship. The fleet is a bit of a mess, particularly with the present situation down south in the Sea of Japan.”
“Where is Kuznetsov?”
“Up north at the moment, running drills with her Mig-29F Squadron. We’d still be flying the older SU-33s if India hadn’t placed that order in 2012. That gave us enough economy of scale to roll out thirty-six Migs for Kuznetsov. It must be getting lonely up in Severomorsk with Kirov and our only fleet carrier here now.”
“They just commissioned the Leonid Brezhnev. He’ll stand in for us there. And they get most of the new Orlan Class ships. But what’s this business with Japan? We must talk about that now. We’ve been incommunicado for the last five or six weeks and missed out on all the news.”
“That was quite a hat trick,” Admiral. “If not for the fact that NATO staff are getting flayed alive for failing to detect your transit to the Pacific I think you would be the one being skinned. Suchkov was very upset. How did you manage it?”
“Suchkov is so old he can’t even think straight any longer,” said Volsky with a laugh. “He has nothing better to do than huff and puff before they put him in dry dock for good. We are the navy now, my friend. You, me and Tamilov in the Black Sea. God only knows who they will appoint to take my place up north. Suchkov can sit in Moscow and write his memoirs now.”
“You and Tamilov can run things, Leonid. I’m afraid I am not well-heart problems, and the doctors want to do some surgery.”
“You’ll pull through,” Volsky encouraged, but he could see that Abramov was also on his last voyage, tired, pale and with that rheumy eyed look that spoke of too much time on the seas of life.
“As for how we slipped by, that is our little secret. I have some very good people aboard Kirov. We had a lot of trouble with the electronics when Orel blew up, but we managed to get a few things running from ship’s stores. I put my best people on it, and we used a new ECM package that we unfortunately lost in that last missile misfire incident I told you about earlier. But while we had it up and running it was enough to get us through the northern route undetected. That and some very bad weather and thick cloud cover.”
“Amazing. I would have thought they would have had three submarines on you the moment you deployed.”
“Perhaps they did, Boris, but that was a very large detonation when Orel went up. Who knows what it did to their electronics? I knew that the whole place was going to be crawling with planes, ships and helicopters within twenty-four hours. We made a cursory investigation, found nothing-not even Slava — and so I wanted to get my ship as far from that area as possible. NATO spent the next three days searching south of Jan Mayen, yes? I went northwest, and that’s the last thing they might have expected.”
“I still can hardly believe it. You lost contact with Slava too?”
“Must have been our faulty equipment.”
“Radar, Sonar, Radio?”
“Have you ever tried to listen to the deep ocean after an underwater nuclear explosion?”
“It was nuclear?”
“We believed as much, and given the threat of radiation I wanted to get my ship to safer climes. I assumed Slava would do the same and return home. Those were her orders, mine were to transit to the Pacific, and since I was the one who issued those orders, I decided to follow them.” Volsky smiled.
“They didn’t even find you with satellites, at least not that we know of.”
“Good point, Admiral. We don’t know what they really knew about it. For all we know they could have been watching me from up there the whole time and now they are making this media fuss to simply cover their tracks. In any case, I am here, the ship is here, and once he’s been patched up, Kirov will put some backbone into the Pacific Fleet again.”
Unlike their Western counterparts, ships were masculine in the Russian Navy. The Russians couldn’t think of anything with the sheer raw power and hard lines of a battlecruiser as feminine.
