Dmitriev wasn’t privy to the machinations inside the Kremlin, but he suspected that the assassination of the Union’s president in Norway had been an inside job, planned and executed by the KGB or perhaps the GRU. Within hours the tanks had started rolling across the frozen border between Russia’s Kola Peninsula and Norway, supposedly in retaliation for the plot and to “restore order” in a dangerous neighbor. It might have worked, too; it had worked as a means of bringing the breakaway republic of Ukraine back inside the Soviet fold, at least temporarily. Certainly, the West had been slow to react, unwilling, perhaps, to see danger in a Soviet Union that everyone believed was already dead. The Norwegian gambit might have left the new Union poised to dominate a confused and irresolute Europe… until the Americans had thwarted the plan. Their aircraft carrier Jefferson, the same ship Dmitriev had cooperated with in the Indian Ocean, had crippled the Soviet naval forces off Norway and opened the way for a full-scale Western intervention. In the process both Kreml and Soyuz, two-thirds of the Union’s available carrier force, had been lost in battle, the most devastating upset of naval power since the destruction of the Japanese carrier fleet at Midway.
Dmitriev turned away from the window, more discouraged than ever. That gamble in Norway had been the final blow to the Motherland. A populist leader named Leonov had seized control from the discredited hard-liners, but it was too late for a political solution to Russia’s problems. Soon Leonov’s Popular Democratic Front, the “Blues,” had been locked in combat with Marshal Krasilnikov’s hard-line “Reds” in an all-out civil war. As the revived Union had started to disintegrate, the Americans had intervened in the far north, seizing key military facilities in the Kola Peninsula. They’d claimed that Krasilnikov was planning to use submarine-launched nukes to blackmail Leonov into submission, though Dmitriev was convinced that their real intent had been to guarantee the success of Leonov and his anti-Communists. The Americans had a long history of anti-Communist sentiments.
The Kola Intervention, in fact, was the second time the West had put their troops on the soil of Holy Mother Russia in this century. The first had been in 1919, when they and a small international force had occupied Murmansk, Archanglsk, and Vladivostok in opposition to Lenin and the Revolution. Few outside of Russia remembered that particular chapter of history now, but the Russians had long memories.
And now that same American carrier, Jefferson, was leading a battle group through the Dardanelles and into the Black Sea. It would have been… satisfying to strike back, to smash this insult to Russian sovereignty, to Russian honor, but Dmitriev lacked the military strength to oppose them. The Red Banner Black Sea Fleet had been too hard-hit by defections and neglect to defend the coasts of the Rodina herself. Dmitriev’s first duty was to preserve the fleet for the coming struggle with Ukraine.
As much as Dmitriev would have liked to bloody the Americans for their invasion of the Kola, he was a realist. The American presence in the Black Sea was almost certainly an artifact of the constantly churning politics between the United States and the United Nations, an unpleasant fact that might be wiped away by the stroke of a diplomat’s pen tomorrow. The Ukraine was a more constant problem, one that was not so likely to simply go away.
Ukraine had never been wholly comfortable with its role as one of the largest and most productive republics of the Union. Ethnic Ukrainians were not Russians, whatever most outsiders might think. They had their own language, their own culture, and a history of independence extending back for centuries. Great Russians still remembered, with the same loving attention to historical detail that recalled the foreign intervention in the Kola in 1919, that millions of Ukrainians had actually welcomed the Hitlerite legions as liberators in the Great Patriotic War.
Now those same Ukrainians were taking advantage of the Russian Civil War to strengthen their own position ― especially in the Crimea.
Geographically, the Crimean Peninsula had always been considered a part of the Ukraine, which extended across the mainland to the north; the Russian Federation bordered the peninsula only to the east, across the narrow Straits of Kerch and on the far side of the Sea of Azov. Politically and militarily, however ― which was to say practically ― it had always belonged to Russia, who’d seen the peninsula’s strategic naval value as far back as the early 1800s when the czars were still fighting the Turks.
And then, in the 1950s, Nikita Kruschev had formally and officially returned Crimea to Ukraine in a gesture of international goodwill and fellowship. At the time, the gesture had been just that, a gesture, a public relations gimmick, as an American capitalist might say… and meaningless in the realities of internal Soviet politics.
Now, though, with Russia unable to defend herself on a hundred crumbling fronts, Kruschev’s goodwill had become a major problem, an invitation to the Ukrainians to settle old scores and to enrich themselves at Mother Russia’s expense.
Not that they needed the encouragement, Dmitriev thought wryly. They would soon be turning their attentions southward. The Ukrainian army was strong and well-equipped, and they controlled more than half of the old Black Sea Fleet. They were the real threat, not the Americans.
But how could he explain all of that to Kulagin? The young aide had been raised and educated during the seventies and eighties, when the West had been the enemy that threatened the Soviet Union, and the breakaway republics and states were tools or dupes of Western adventurism, a clear case of black and white, of good and evil. Though Dmitriev had grown up with all the indoctrination of the Cold War era teaching him those same lessons, he knew from long experience that a broader interpretation was necessary. The forces of political and economic freedom unleashed by Gorbachev didn’t need Western villains to make them dangerous. The genie could never be put back in the bottle.
“No, Anton Ivanovich,” he said again after a long and thoughtful silence.
“We cannot stop the Americans. And I wonder if we really want to, after all. The West may find that intervention here is far more difficult and costly than they ever imagined possible.” He paused, his eyes still lingering on the nuclear carrier out in the harbor that might never venture out of port again. “I do not envy these Americans. They may find that the Rodina in ruins is a far more dangerous enemy than she ever was when she stood proudly in strength and union.”
Dmitriev turned away from the window and gave a gesture of dismissal. He felt weary, discouraged… a tired man who faced impossible odds. Still, he could not give in to his fatigue or his ebbing morale. There was still a job to be done here, and he could not let self-pity or weariness stand in his way.
Nikolai Sergeivich Dmitriev knew his duty, to the Rodina.
And to honor.
CHAPTER 1
“I don’t know,” Captain Matthew Magruder said dubiously. He leaned forward to peer out of the slanted forward windscreen on Jefferson’s bridge, looking across the carrier’s forward flight deck toward the dismal gray waters ahead. “You’d never catch me taking my aircraft carrier into that lake!”
“Ah, these young aviators nowadays,” Captain Jeremy Brandt said, shaking his head in mock sorrow. He was sitting in the bridge’s high chair, the leather-backed elevated seat with the word CAPTAIN stenciled across the back in yellow block letters. “No spirit of adventure at all!”
Magruder, call sign “Tombstone,” turned from the windscreen and cocked a bantering eye at the ship’s commanding officer. “”Spirit of adventure.’ Is that what you call it?”