Kirov III-Pacific Storm (Kirov Series) (28 page)

“But the Atlantic Charter conference
was going on at that time. That’s ridiculous!”

“Yes, it certainly is, but this is
what the skipper off
Plunkett
claimed, a fellow named Kauffman. They
interviewed every man on every goddamned ship and they all corroborate what
this Captain Kaufman says. The men say those destroyers pulled up anchor and
headed south for Halifax, and they just come waltzing into the harbor some days
later. Hard to believe, but that’s what really happened to
Desron 7
. The
Navy got hold of those ships, painted over their hull numbers, renamed every
last one and scattered them to harbors all over the Pacific Coast.”

“Are you serious? How did you get this
information?”

“I never did get it.
You
never
heard about it either, Novak. Use your head. This stuff is buried as deep as
they could dig the hole, but I have a few contacts here and there that I can’t
mention, and I got the scuttlebutt from them. Either it’s all a crock of shit,
or something really strange went down in the Atlantic last year.”

“Then if
Desron 7
didn’t get
this raider, this
Geronimo
the British are talking about, what happened
to it?”

“It just vanished…” Osborne let that
dangle for a moment. “And that’s what they say right here in this message,
Novak: Contact lost, 23-AUG-42, no sightings. Confidence high this is
Geronimo
.
Details to follow.”

Novak leaned back in his chair,
clearly nonplussed.

“Well I’ll be a monkey’s ass,” he said
slowly.

Osborne lit his pipe again.

Chapter
20

Fedorov
found Admiral Volsky in the reactor
room, leaning over a table with Dobrynin. The floor was still wet with an
eighth inch of seawater, and men were working mops in one area of the
compartment. Two bulkheads away they could hear the sound of the pumps running,
and the clatter of tools on hard metal. It had been very close, he thought. If
the reactor room had been flooded….He didn’t want to think about it further.

“Mister Fedorov,” said Volsky. “Just
the man I wanted to see! Come have a look at these printouts.”

“These are charts of the reactor
performance data the Admiral asked me to produce,” said Dobrynin.

“Is there something wrong with the
core?” That was always a great hidden danger on any nuclear powered ship.

“No, don’t worry about it,” said
Dobrynin. “The core was never threatened. Just a little leakage from the outer
hull breach, a little seawater is all that made it in here. The men will have
it mopped up in no time.”

“But have a look, Fedorov. Notice the
line of that chart.”

Fedorov leaned over, staring at the
chart, a bit like a seismograph reading it seemed to him, and he noted a series
a vertical lines pointed out by Dobrynin with a heavy thumb.

“Each line is one day, marking the end
of a normal twenty-four hour period. This red line is the total power output,
so you can see where it increases when we were running the ship at high speed.
This violet line however, those are flux levels in the core.”

“Do you notice anything?” Volsky
asked, eager to see if Fedorov saw what the other two men had been discussing.

“Well it looks like the line spikes
every so often.”

“That’s what I saw,” said Volsky.
“Dobrynin here tells me its normal, however.”

“It’s just a routine maintenance
operation,” the engineer explained. “We’re running a 24-rod reactor core here.
Twenty-four control rods, but we have to inspect them at regular intervals. So
what we do is pull one rod into this containment structure,” he gestured to a
point high up above the main equipment in the room. “We can look the rod over
for decay with inspection equipment, even on a microscopic level if need be.
While we do this we have to insert a spare rod that descends from that metal
tube there,” he pointed again. “That’s rod twenty-five. It gets a dip into the
core every so often when we pull one of the other rods for this inspection
routine.”

“Then you are saying you get reactor
core flux events whenever you do this procedure?”

“Correct,” said Dobrynin, “but not
immediately; not during the procedure itself, but just a little while after,
sometimes a few hours, sometimes a full day. I suppose that’s why I never
connected the two events.”

“I see,” said Fedorov. Then something
occurred to him, and his next question was obvious. “Chief…How often do you
perform this maintenance routine?”

Admiral Volsky smiled, folding his
arms over his broad chest with a wink at Fedorov. “Go on Dobrynin,” he said.
“Tell him.”

“Well every twelve days, sir. We pull
a rod every twelve days, but I never associated the flux event with the
procedure until—”

“Until I had him run these performance
charts,” said Volsky.

Fedorov’s eyes widened, a quiet light
there now. “Every twelve days? The interval, Admiral! This could explain a
great many things!”

“Indeed it might,” said Volsky. “It
could be that the answer to this entire mystery has been right under our noses
the whole time. We thought the explosion on
Orel
set off this crazy
chain reaction, this time displacement we’ve been trapped in.”

“Perhaps it did,” Fedorov suggested,
“but my hunch about the interval is certainly telling.”

“What’s this talk about an interval?”
asked Dobrynin.

“I’ve been tracking the dates
closely,” said Fedorov. “Every twelve days there has been a time displacement.
We either move forward, or back again. Let me see the dates of these
maintenance checks…”

He leaned over the chart, his head
nodding with the excitement of discovery. “Yes! Look Admiral. There was a rod
just before our live fire exercises were scheduled. Then look here, another
procedure the day before we vanished near Argentia Bay. Dobrynin… when was the
last procedure run?”

Dobrynin squinted. “Why, three days
ago. I pulled the number eight rod, stuck in number twenty-five and—”

“And here we are,” said Admiral
Volsky, “shooting missiles at Japanese planes and ships!”

“Then this is even more evidence that
the cause of these displacements is not some external event,” said Fedorov. “It
could be right here, right in our own reactor. We could be causing it just by
running this maintenance procedure.”

“Which means…” Volsky’s eyes were
bright under his heavy gray brows. “It’s just as Doctor Zolkin suggested. He
told us to go tell Dobrynin to fiddle with his reactor and send us home. He was
speaking in jest, but now we find that this may end up being the truth after
all.”

“What do you suggest we do, Fedorov?
Should we test it?

“You mean complete the maintenance
procedure and see what happens?”

“Of course! Dobrynin, is there any
reason why you could not run this procedure now?”

“Now, sir? Well, nothing in principle,
except I think we should wait for the men to clear the last of this seawater.
The rods are just absorbing neutrons produced by the fission in the core. They
just moderate the temperature of the reaction and control the flux.”

“Why would this maintenance procedure
cause these neutron flux events you’ve recorded? They were very unusual, yes?
Not normal?”

“I’m not exactly sure. If there was an
air leak in the inspection module and the zirconium alloy coating the rods came
into contact with air we could get oxidation there that would produce hydrogen.
But the monitors have not detected any unusual hydrogen levels. I could also
check the cooling water for contaminants. It must remain very pure, no ions, no
chlorides.”

“Run some diagnostics, Dobrynin, and
if possible, try to complete a normal maintenance procedure as soon as
possible. Be sure to inform the bridge when you do so.”

“Very good, sir.”

“This is going to be interesting,”
said Fedorov. “How long will this procedure take, Chief?”

“I should have everything ready to go
in an hour. After that, the rod inspection normally takes two hours.”

“Then do it exactly as you would any
other time,” said Volsky. “I want it perfectly routine. No rush. Just let us
know when you complete it. Come now, Fedorov, let us get to the bridge. What
were those three missiles I heard a while back?”

“Japanese planes out of Port Moresby.
They were flying a typical search pattern and one group got a little too
curious. Karpov took them down.”

“It sounded like the Klinok system. I
thought as much. Well, Fedorov, now that we’ve got the repairs well in hand
what next? We are in the Coral Sea, where should we steer?”

“We’ll want to stay well away from the
Solomons. They would be east of our present position. I suspect there will be
fighting there, whether the history has changed or not. Some places just have
strategic magnetism about them, and the Southern Solomons is one of them
insofar as this campaign is concerned.”

“Should we try to go north?”

“I wouldn’t advise it, sir. That’s all
Japanese territory, and New Britain Island, the Bismarck barrier, will force us
into restricted channels within range of Japanese air bases at Lae and Rabaul.
The Bismarck Sea north of that Island is a Japanese lake at the moment. No, I
think we must go south.”

“What about the Americans. Should they
discover us they may be as dogged as the Japanese, particularly if they should
manage to put two and two together and realize we are the ship responsible for
that attack in the North Atlantic.”

“That would be quite a stretch, sir. I
suggest we stay on a heading of 135 degrees southeast. That should keep us in
the Coral Sea for a good long while, but well off the Australian Coast. There
will not be much threat from the Australians. They had very little air or naval
power to speak of at this point. New Caledonia is another matter. There’s a big
American buildup underway at Noumea. We should keep well away from that place,
and this course will give us a 400 mile buffer. We’ll eventually approach New
Zealand on that heading, but we can turn on 90 degrees due east well before
that and head into the South Pacific. That will take us down below the
fireworks in the Solomons, and who knows, sir, we might even find your island
girls out there somewhere. Tonga is 400 miles southeast of Fiji, then there is
Niue, the Cook Islands, French Polynesia, Tahiti, Bora
Bora
,
even Pitcairn Island. That’s the most isolated place I can think of on earth.
The mutineers from the old ship Bounty settled there, but it’s virtually
deserted.”

“Let’s have a look at French Polynesia
first,” said Volsky. “That is assuming we can slip away from these Japanese
without any more dive bombers coming through the roof.”

“We should know more near dawn, sir.
With
Kirishima
down they may lose their ardor for the chase. They
already know their cruisers are no match for us, and I’m guessing that their
other carrier divisions are much further east, near the Solomons. Nikolin says
radio traffic is really heavy.”

“French Polynesia sounds much better
to me,” said Volsky. “But Fedorov, if Dobrynin completes his maintenance, we
could see changes in a matter of hours, assuming our little theory here proves
to be true.”

“Possibly, sir.”

“And supposing we do move again, start
shifting. It was very subtle last time. How will we know?”

“I think we’ll get enough clues—the
radio traffic would suddenly disappear, we can look for changes in known
weather patterns, even time of day. Remember when we shifted into the Med we
went from night to day in just a few minutes time.”

The Admiral sighed. “Well now we get
to choose which nightmare we end up living in, I suppose. If it was Dobrynin’s
maintenance routine causing us to move, we can control that, yes? We can choose
to stay put. The only thing is this: will the world still be empty if we shift
again? Will we still be sailing from one dark radiation blighted shore to
another?”

“Well, sir, we can’t really know.
We’re changing the history each time we appear. We have no way to predict what
we will find if we do displace forward in time again. But even if we do, I tend
to think French Polynesia will not be on anyone’s target list.”

“I would hope not,” said Volsky sadly.

Fedorov completed his report as they
walked, and then, seeing the Admiral was looking very tired, he suggested
sleep. “Sir, it’s just after midnight. I can see to the last of the damage
control work with Chief Byko. Why not get some rest.”

“I was considering that. In fact I
think I will do so. Thank you, Mister Fedorov. But wake me if Dobrynin reports
anything unusual.”

“He said it could be hours after the
procedure before he might notice anything, sir, even a full day.”

“In that case I will sleep well, but
don’t hesitate to wake me. And if you can get some rest yourself, that would
also be good.”

“Thank you, sir.”

 *
* *