Kirov (61 page)

“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.”

“Only
a nuclear weapon could have caused destruction on this scale,” said Volsky. “So
in that we have one clue. We have not slipped further into the past, correct?
Halifax was an important harbor and naval center. If it came to war—who knows
when it happened—then this was a likely target, and we would be right at ground
zero here if a missile was targeted to take out this harbor infrastructure.”

“There
did seem to be a crater, sir.”

“Not
surprising,” said Volsky. “It would have been a low air burst, and I would
guess that this target would have received no less than a 150 kiloton
warhead—perhaps two. That could have been fired by an ICBM, or even one of our
submarines.”

“One
of
our
submarines, sir?”

“Who
else? I don’t think the British or French would have any interest in destroying
this harbor, nor even the Chinese if it came to war. But it has long been on
the target list for our ballistic missile submarines. I have seen the
information first hand.” He shook his head sullenly. “
Borei
class…We
name the damn subs after the north wind, Boreas, but it is a hard wind that
blew here to bring such destruction.”

“Then
you are suggesting another war has broken out, Admiral? That we are back in our
own time again?”

“Well
that hard north wind has blown us clear of the Second World War, and now it
seems we have landed in the Third! One day we will grow tired of counting them
I suppose. But this is damage from a nuclear warhead, that much is clear to
me.”

Fedorov
had a distant, empty look on his face as he thought. The history had changed!
Nothing was certain now. Nothing could be relied on from this moment forward.
He glanced sheepishly at the small library of books on the shelf at his old
navigation station. Much of the history in them was so much fiction now.
Everything had changed, and it had come to war this time around. War was a
ticking clock, he knew, remembering a poem by Kudryavitsky. Tick, tick,
tick—then the Alarm clock bomb goes off taking you by surprise with its morning
shock. “It's better that you hear it…” His voice trailed off, disconsolate and
forlorn in tone.

“Mister
Fedorov?” The Admiral looked at him, brows raised.

“A
Russian poet, sir,” said Fedorov, quoting the line in full:
“
Sometimes the alarm-clock looms up
first, quietly ticking in the doorway. It's better that you hear it…”

Volsky
nodded. “Some men never listen,” he said quietly, musing. “If war came, and
this city was destroyed, then I fear it was a general exchange between Russia
and the West. It is my guess that we will find much the same level of
destruction if we continue on this course and visit the American coastline. All
those cities would have received multiple missiles in a general exchange.”

“But
why sir?” Samsonov had a blank look on his face.

“Why?”
Volsky gave him a long look. “You have to look no farther than this ship to
answer that, Mister Samsonov. We build them, these war machines, these ticking
clocks, and they do their job with lethal efficiency. Look how we savaged the
British and American navies—this single ship—and we could have done worse
damage if Karpov had his way. Yet we vanished from the scene of the crime, a
thief in the night as it were. No doubt they looked for us for a very long
time, but all for naught. We were here, in some black future we only now begin
to surmise, here with the consequences of what we have done when we so blithely
put to sea with our holds crammed full of missiles and warheads. Is that not
what you were trained for?” His eyes softened a bit as he went on. “No—I do not
put any blame on you, Samsonov. It is what we all were trained for. The
uniforms, the salutes, the niceties of rank and protocol—all these are just
ways we console ourselves as we drill in the making of war. In the final
analysis, this is the end of it all, yes? These are the consequences. Who knows
how much of the world is left out there for us now?”

“Then
what do we do now, sir?” said Samsonov. The eyes of the entire bridge crew were
on the Admiral now, for his words had seared them with the realization of what
had happened, what they may have done, mindlessly, reflexively, and by simply
following the orders of Karpov as was their duty at the time. Duty? What were
they, wound up clocks, bound to strike midnight come what may, or men capable
of stilling the hands and stopping that jangling sound of the alarm? Yet they
had failed to listen. Yes, it was better if you listen…Did they change the
history, or was this end as inevitable as the ticking of that clock? No man
among them could answer that.

“What
do we do?” Volsky clasped his hands behind his back. “We go and find that beach
Doctor Zolkin was talking about. We go and find that island.”

The
Admiral tapped Fedorov on the shoulder. “Mister Fedorov, the helm is yours. I
think I had best walk the ship and talk with the men. They deserve to know what
has happened, and for that matter, I think I will pay a visit to Karpov and
Orlov as well.”

There
was a moment of silence on the bridge until the Admiral gave a final command.
“Helm, come about. Take us back up the channel and out to sea. Then ahead two
thirds.”

“Aye
sir, coming about and out to sea, sir.”

~
~ ~

DD
Plunkett
finally righted herself, breaking through another great wave and out into a
mottled sea of luminescent green. Kauffman had been holding on to a bulkhead
beam for dear life, and he looked out, amazed to see that the seas had suddenly
calmed and his ship was settling down, the bow still cutting through the
diminished swells at high speed. He had taken a few hard blows from the enemy,
but now he could see nothing on the horizon, the shadow of steel and fire they
had been chasing was gone.

The Captain was out on the watch deck at once, field
glasses in hand, scanning the seas in every direction. There was nothing left
of his destroyer division.
Benson
,
Mayo
and
Jones
were gone,
but off to the starboard side he caught sight of Division 14. They had been
trailing behind his ships somewhat, and suffered less from the enemy guns.
Hughes
was leaving a wake of smoke, but
Madison
,
Gleaves
and
Lansdale
seemed alive and well.

“Well I’ll be damned,” he breathed. He kept scanning.

“Jimmy, signal Div-Fourteen and see if they have a
sighting on that German ship.”

Word came back by lantern:
clear ahead
, and
Kauffman had the other ships form up on
Plunkett
, a fistful of five
destroyers, the proud remnant of
Desron 7
. They searched the area for
some time, but there was no sign of the German raider, or of that awesome
explosive geyser they had seen to their east. Kauffman decided to risk a radio
call, and he put out a message, hoping to hear from TF-16 and the
Mississippi
.
There was nothing but silence, and the odd green sea.

The
Captain scratched his head. Thankfully the fires were out on his own ship, and
Plunkett
was still seaworthy. With three ships lost, and the enemy nowhere to be seen,
he eventually decided to come about and head back to Argentia Bay. When he
arrived there he would get the surprise of his life.

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