“Get at them, Samsonov.”
“Sir… The targets are very imprecise. The system is having difficulty locking on.”
Kirov’s Growlers did not lock on until it was too late to fire. To their horror, they looked and saw Kursk come under heavy attack. Explosions pummeled the ship, and they saw smoke and fire consume the superstructure.
“Damn!,” Karpov swore. “Can you get at the planes that delivered that?”
“Unable to lock on, sir. Insufficient reflectivity.” Samsonov’s voice was hollowed out, and the entire bridge crew was downcast. They had arrived here, with hope in hand and brave hearts, meaning to shape the future they had helped create. In all their many battles, they had prevailed, always hurting the enemy, always invulnerable to harm from the other side. Seeing that smoke and fire pouring up into the sky like blood was a shock to them all, and Karpov knew that they had lost many good men over there.
“Recall the helo. Tell them to get in close and prepare for recovery. Let’s get up there, and ready all boats. All ship’s engineers, prepare to render assistance. Kursk is finished….”
There was fire in Karpov’s eyes now as he stared at the burning ship up ahead. There was anger and the desire for vengeance. Fedorov had seen it before, and he knew how dangerous it was. As Kirov approached its stricken comrades, Fedorov looked at his watch and went out onto the weather deck. He would look east, low on the sea, and through the dissipating haze and smoke he strained to see the moon. Nothing was there. He went over to the bridge opticals, scanning the horizon again with good magnification.
Nothing was there.
Frustrated, he looked all over the sky, his careful eye aided by that high magnification on the telescope. He swept slowly, from side to side, gradually moving higher in the sky, and then he thought he saw something. It took him a moment to find it again through the opticals, but he got it centered and adjusted the magnification to full power.
There it was, not the evening crescent he should have seen, but an ominously dark new moon, sullen, bleak, and foreboding. He took note of its position in the sky, judging how long it might have been up there, but this would be an easy mystery to solve. Now he turned and headed for the bridge again. The navigation almanac computer would tell him exactly what he needed to know.
Chapter 36
“This confirms it,” he told Karpov when the two were conferring again in the ready room. “We’ve moved. Don’t ask me how or why, but that moon should have been up as an evening crescent at 10:46, and it was a no show. Instead I found a dead moon, high up, and so dark I had to use the optics on full power to see it. My guess is that it rose five or six hours ago, probably as early as 06:00.”
For a man who had spent so much time reckoning things by the sun and moon, the ex-navigator and now Captain of the battlecruiser Kirov was almost spot on. (That moon rose at 05:55.) Now he explained what he thought this meant.
“I think we’ve moved forward again.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Easy, because if we had slipped backwards, we would surely know that. Things we see around us would be historical events. Can you remember a time when Java was dark and all the radio stations within range of us in the Pacific were down? I can’t, so I think we moved forward. I consulted the Almanac computer to tell me when the moon would be new on this date and time, at this location. That data is chiseled in stone. All the computer has to do is look it up with a simple data query. I ran the search out to the turn of the next century, and it gave me four years: 2039, 2058, 2077, and 2088. Nothing else until after 2100.”
“So you’re telling me we’ve moved to one of those four years?”
“Assuming this is still the 24th of January. If we find out that isn’t the case, then I could redo the search with the date we verify, but by then, we’d already know the year. Right? So this is the best I can do assuming it is still January 24..”
“Lord almighty,” said Karpov. “But Rod-25 is gone, and we certainly haven’t activated that box again.”
“We’d better check with Dobrynin. What if the reactors were acting up again? We’ve been a little busy here to take calls from Engineering.”
“None came in that I’m aware of, but we’ll get to that in a moment,” said Karpov, thinking. “For now, let’s assume you’re correct and we’ve shifted to one of these four dates. My gut is telling me its 2039.”
“Why so?”
“Well, can you imagine how advanced things would be in military affairs beyond that? The weapons we saw coming at us at least resembled those we are familiar with, but I don’t think any navy in the world will still be throwing slow cruise missiles about much after that.”
“Good point,” said Fedorov. “Well, what in God’s name have we gotten ourselves into here?”
“It was certainly a rude welcome. Why would we come under attack like that, and I mean a well-coordinated, deliberate attack. We were hit from multiple attack vectors, with weapons of varying speeds, and with enough saturation to bankrupt Kursk and run our SAM count down as well.”
“The history could have changed a great deal since 2026. Your speculation that this attack was made by the Americans might be correct. What if we are enemies here?”
It was the only explanation that made any sense. The alarm sounded again, this time three consecutive tones, and that got Karpov’s attention immediately. His eyes widened, and he stood up.
“Undersea contact,” he said quickly. “Comrade Tasarov has found us a sea serpent.”
They both went quickly to the bridge, leaving their speculation behind for another hour. Kirov had come up on Kursk, and slowed to a few knots, as the cruiser was dead in the water, still burning fiercely. Orlov had organized the rescue parties, and they now had every lifeboat on the ship out moving the wounded off Kursk first. The morning helicopter ASW watch had landed, so in such a vulnerable situation, Karpov had ordered up another helicopter, and it had been circling them for the last hour, dropping a web of sonobuoys into the sea around the ships. Something had crept into that web, and Tasarov heard it.
“Report!” said Karpov.
“Sir, Goblin bearing 275 degrees, 16 nautical miles out. Speed estimate is 8 knots, depth estimate about 160 feet. Detection data relayed by buoy number 567, but I have no profile match yet. Moving the KA-40 to the site now.”
“Excellent, Tasarov. Excellent. Let’s get another one up.”
They waited, the tension mounting as the helicopter moved in on the location. Tasarov kept working, adjusting his systems, collating data from the sonobuoy sensor net now, and refining his contact. The helo was on site and using its dipping sonar when he turned to the Admiral, an excited look on his face.
“Sir, I have a firing solution.”
“Veter!” said Karpov, referring to the RPK-Veter ASW missile torpedo. Its name meant “wind” and it was the quickest way to get a weapon on an undersea target. It would move at a brisk 1000 knots, and could range out 54 miles before plopping into the water to become a torpedo.
At that moment, Rodenko chimed in.
“Undersea missile launch. The weapons are breaking the surface now. Eight Vampires.”
They saw the missiles rising up on the horizon, turning, then diving for the sea. They were subsonic, and descended to about 100 feet. Kirov’s computers locked on, and Samsonov sent out the Growlers to get the first six at range. Then the Gauntlet system was used to kill the last two. As that battle was fought, the Veter dove into the sea near the suspected goblin, found it, and bored in.