Men of War (2013) (33 page)

“Only
too well,” said Karpov. “This rat of a man actually snuck into the Admiral’s
quarters to have a good long look at that book.”

“Well
this other book is the same publication I picked up in the city a few days ago.
I was comparing the two to see what was different, and in September of 1942 I
noted an operation in the Med—this one.” He was fingering a passage in his
original volume for Operation Agreement, scheduled and carried out Sept 13-14,
1942, the raid on Tobruk.

“It
was in the old volume as well,” he said. “But there was just a minor variation,
a man who survived that was supposed to have died in my original version. So I
marked the passage for further study—marked it with a yellow highlighter like I
did with these other passages.”

“My
God, Fedorov! You’ll be old and gray before you ever run down all that
research.” There were yellow marks dotting the text here and there as Fedorov
turned the pages.

“Perhaps
I will, but then something very odd happened.” He told Karpov how he had gone
to look over the passage again and found it entirely missing in the new volume.

Karpov
folded his arms, giving him a bemused look. “What do you mean it was missing?”

“That
says it all. The passage was gone, yet it was clear as a bell in my head the
day before. I knew I had read it there, and marked it with my yellow
highlighter…See here, no marks in the original book, but I was certain I marked
it in the new volume.”

Karpov
suggested the obvious, that he had simply mixed the two books up, but Fedorov
kept shaking his head. “No sir. I’m certain. You must believe me on this.”

“How
is that possible?”

“That’s
what I am trying to find out. I have an idea about it, but I can’t be sure.
Chief Dobrynin came to me and said we lost a man—Markov. He went missing over
at the reactor test bed facility.”

“Yes,
I heard the report. What about it?”

“Well
they had just completed their procedure on the control rod—Rod-25, the very
same control rod we suspected here on the ship. Then, Markov vanishes, and not
just the man. His jacket was gone, the tea he was drinking, books and
magazines, his data clipboard and pen, and get this—both
chairs
were
gone. Everything in the room that was not an integral part of the building
itself just vanished!”

Karpov
did not know what to make of that, but the connection to Rod-25 took him the
next step without too much urging from Fedorov. “They moved into the past,” he
said in a low voice. “Our suspicions about that control rod were correct. Did
Dobrynin learn anything about it?”

“He
went over it with a microscope, but frankly, he’s not a physicist. He was just
looking for aberrations or other obvious abnormalities, but the rod looks
normal.”

“There
must be something about it that is different from the others. This is
astounding!”

Fedorov
looked at the Captain and simply said: “It looks like the amount of mass that
can physically move is probably dependent on the power of the reactor where it
finds itself. The ship had a twenty-four rod reactor, two of them in fact.
That's ten times the power of the test bed facility reactor. Rod-25 is the
wildcard. Whenever it’s inserted into the reactor core it causes the time
breach, and displaces loose mass within a given radius. In our case that loose
mass was the entire ship!”

“Did
the reactor itself disappear?”

“No.
It was an integral part of the building itself and the facility around it. The
displacement effect did not have the power to move all of that mass. It doesn't
simply scoop physical mass of a given area and leave a gaping hole. It’s much
more fastidious and simply moves free objects within a given radius of the
reactor itself. In this case anything that wasn't nailed down, including
Markov. This is the best guess I can make about what happened, and I have no
way of knowing if I'm even correct.”

“Then
you suspect Markov had something to do with the history changing in your book?
How can you know he went back to the same time period?”

“I
started with that assumption. I thought that Rod-25 had some vibration or
affinity for a particular point in the past, or perhaps it's simply a question
of power. It moves things approximately 80 years into the past, Markov
vanishes, and then this operation clearly evident in the history I know
suddenly never takes place. It was there just yesterday, right in the new book
I bought. Whatever happened changed the course of history again, but the
amazing thing is this: it caused a physical change in the book itself!”

“Well
it's all beyond my understanding,” said Karpov. “I still can hardly believe any
of this happened in the first place. How could it change books—change facts
that you knew to be true. If you remember this, then others who read that same
book would also remember. The facts of history are quite clear, Fedorov. This
is nonsense. How can they just change overnight like that?”

“The
facts are clear? Who killed President John F. Kennedy? The facts on that will
differ from head to head, Captain. Only a few might know the real truth, and it
may be quite different from the written history of that event. We only record a
small percentage of everything that happens out there. The real truth is that
things happen the historians never really know about, or write about. Written
history is just the tip of the iceberg, the part that shows in the waters of
time. The rest is largely unknown, but that’s the part that really matters.”

Karpov
had a frustrated look on his face. “What are we supposed to do about this,
Fedorov?”

“I
asked myself that same question, and realized that I had to find out what
happened to Markov to nail down this cause and effect. Well thank God for the
Internet. The amount of information available to us now is absolutely amazing.
I was able to find a report on Markov's death! He
did
shift into the
past. He was killed, right here on the harbor quay in Vladivostok, in September
of
1942
. He was caught breaking and entering a home above the harbor, or
so the report read. He then fled to the quay, and was shot by pursuing
officers. The military police report was right there in the archives. I looked
up the address listed as the location for the suspected burglary. House no
longer exists, but the nuclear test bed facility was built in that exact
location twenty years ago.”

The
silence conveyed Karpov's amazement, and he was equally impressed by Fedorov’s
tenacious investigation of the matter. The dogged ex-navigator had been the one
mind and voice that had enabled them to make some fleeting sense of their
impossible situation, steering their course through the turbulent waters of
time.

“Heaven’s
above…can you imagine poor Markov?” said Karpov. “One minute he is sitting
there staring at his reactor gauges, then he suddenly appears in this house. It
must have been maddening. But how did that change the history? How could it
affect this operation you say was canceled half way around the world?”

“I
thought about that for some time and could not make the connection. Then I
realized that it must have been something in the book or magazine he had in the
control room with him that day. They went back too. Mister Garin said he was
reading a copy of
Russia Today
, and a science fiction novel. I went out
and bought a copy of that magazine and look what I found.” He handed the
magazine article to Karpov, who stared wide eyed at the headline on Operation
Agreement. ‘British Remember Losses In Agreement Gone Bad.’

“This
is the operation you spoke of?”

“Exactly.
It was a background piece published in tandem with another article about
planned British Petroleum operations in Siberia. Those have been cancelled too
with all this war talk.”

 “Astounding….Simply
unbelievable.”

“Yet
it happened. This one article from our world today was enough to contaminate
the history to an extent that I saw actual physical changes here—in our time!
That is what is so astonishing. Think about it, Karpov. The change was very
small, very subtle. I’m willing to bet that no more than a handful of people on
this earth might have noticed it. Who sits around reading this history for
recreation?”

“Yes,
how many are as crazy as you, Fedorov?”

Then
something occurred to the Captain that did not make sense. “Just a moment…We
didn’t even make port until September 15th. Dobrynin took that control rod over
two days later. If Markov vanished, wouldn’t he appear after this operation was
already concluded? You said it was scheduled for the 13th to 14th.”

“Correct.
Well we know these time displacements don’t seem to respect our calendar. When
we moved we often lost hours, days and even weeks. Markov obviously appeared
well before the operation. Who knows how, but the British must have gotten hold
of this article, and it probably froze their blood. But do you realize what
this means?”

“It
means the whole world is crazy,” said Karpov. “Am I going to wake up tomorrow
and find Brezhnev never lived?”

“I
would think it takes something more than a minor change like this to affect the
life of such a man, but who knows? The important thing is this—
the history
isn’t fixed!
This situation we find ourselves in is the result of millions
and millions of individual events all tumbling down like grains of sand in the
hourglass of time. It’s an alternate history, markedly different from the one
we left behind in Severomorsk—but Markov has just changed it. It isn’t fixed!
If he can change it, then
we
can change it too.”

“Apparently
so,” Karpov shrugged. “We’ve already changed it several times, with each
missile we fired. I’ve changed it with my own actions.”

“Unquestionably.
There was no Pearl Harbor attack, no Battle of Midway. None of that is written
up in that new volume there, and believe me, a lot more has changed. I’ve only
had a few days to look into it all. Yet the amazing thing is that whole
segments of the history remain intact, flawlessly intact. It’s as if it were
all a big mirror, perfect until you come upon a section that has a crack that
suddenly distorts the image. Everything is different there, but the rest of the
mirror is fine.”

 “If
the book changed, why not you, Fedorov? How could you remember that passage was
there. How can you be so sure?”

“I
really don’t know. I tried to figure that out and the only thing I could think
of is that it’s because
we
are the ones changing things. All of us, the
men on the ship here as well. We’re not from this altered timeline. We belong
to the world we left back in Severomorsk. No one I talked to in the city seemed
to know a thing about Pearl Harbor, for example. I asked a few people in the
library. They were clueless. We know that the Japanese were supposed to attack
there on December 7, 1942, but here, on this alternate time line, they never
did, and no one knows about it.”

Karpov
sat down at the briefing desk, taking a deep breath. “Here we are at the edge
of another world war and now we have to deal with this! What can we do about
it, Fedorov? I realize you cannot help yourself digging in to all of this, but
to what end?”

“I’ll
tell you what we can do. We can find Orlov.”

The name fell like ice in a pail of hot water between them,
and they both immediately grasped the implications. Orlov, alive in the year
1942 and with a Computer Jacket harboring the Portable Wiki.

 “We
have unfinished business, Captain, and until we find him, everything, and I
mean
everything
is at risk. It could very well be that the outcome of
these events we’re preparing to face here in the Pacific are not inevitable as
we now believe. The dominoes don’t have to fall the same way each time—at least
we hope this is the case. Look what happened with the
Key West.
It could
be that we had nothing whatsoever to do with the devastation we saw in the
world, not you, not me, or even the ship itself. It could have been something
Orlov
did, or failed to do in the life he led after he jumped ship. Understand what I
am saying?”

“Orlov?
He caused it?”

“All
I know is that this world, this situation we face now, is a world that Orlov
lived in all those years ago. Suppose we find him—figure a way to bring him
home. All this would change!”

“But
how?”

“I’ve
been trying to find out what happened to him for a good long while, and I think
I may have found a trace of the man in my research last night.”

“You
mean in the history books?”

“Of
course. Nobody goes through this world without leaving some mark on it. Again,
thank God we’re living in the information age and I can call up archival
records on the computer. Well I found something. You’ll be amazed. I found that
man’s footprints in the history, and by God I think I can figure out where he
went after he jumped from that helo.”

“Where?
What did you find about him?”

“It
seems the British got hold of him and had him at Gibraltar. Then he slipped
away. The next fragment I picked up was an entry in this very book.” He held up
the new volume of the
Chronology Of The Naval War At Sea
.

“His
name came up in a brief engagement between a Soviet Minesweeping trawler and a
German U-boat in the Black Sea. So I followed the breadcrumbs. He was listed as
a prisoner and suspected murderer of three NKVD guards in Poti. Then comes the
kicker—the British went after him. They mounted a commando raid to try and
recapture him. Take a look at this…” He opened to a new bookmark and showed
Karpov the Passage:
25 Sept. 1942 – Operation Escapade sends a small
commando unit into the Caspian region to look for a suspected Russian agent.