Winter Storm (32 page)

Well,
thought Reeves, we’ve found the German flank, but too bad for Big Al in number
one out there. Sergeant Alvin Combs and his crew had the dubious distinction of
dying before they were ever born. Reeves looked the situation over, eventually
determining that he had what looked to be a full regiment of German infantry in
front of him. They were dug in, and what was that they had just fired to kill
that lead tank? He knew the Germans were not supposed to have any hand held AT weapons
like that, not this early in the war.

Fedorov’s
visit to Palmyra had changed all that.

With a
shrug, the Lieutenant got on the radio and called up Colonel Allen. “Infantry,”
he said. “But they just popped off a hand held AT round and killed my lead
Scimitar. Gurkhas are still behind us, but I don’t think we’ll want to waste
those men in a frontal assault. I’m looking at a regiment here.”

“Very
well Lieutenant,” said Allen. “Hold there. My Challengers are still about 40
kilometers east of your position, but we should be there by dusk.”

By the
time Allen would get there, the British Army was sitting proudly on Rommel’s
Gazala line, having taken both Gazala itself near the coast, Bir Hacheim, and
hill 557 south on the northern fringes of Wadi Thiran. Monty had reached Trigg
Capuzzo, and had every intention of continuing his attack the next day. Yet at
the same time, Rommel, in a whirlwind of ceaseless energy, had slowly managed
to get his two infantry divisions back to a better defensive line. Neither side
was beaten, for there was a lot of guff still left in the Germans, but both
sides had been worn out by many days fighting.

All of O’Connor’s
armor needed fuel and ammunition, and his infantry needed rest, particularly
the hard pressed 4th Indian Division, which had barely escaped the jaws of
Crüwell’s attack. When Rommel found Crüwell at long last, he spent ten minutes
shouting at the man, who stood stolidly in the face of his rage until the
Desert Fox finally pulled off his gloves, sitting on an empty supply crate, his
wrath finally abated.

“Counterattack
was the plan here, General Crüwell, not a major offensive. The better part of
valor is discretion!”

“But if
we merely stand on defense,” said Crüwell, “the morale of the Army will surely
fail. Victory can only come to those bold enough to seize it.”

“A nice
turn of words,” said Rommel. “Here in the desert, victory comes when we destroy
our enemy. Only then can we contemplate a move east. I made the mistake earlier
of thinking the occupation of endless swathes of this desert was the outward
sign of victory, but that will come only if we destroy the British 8th Army.
That is how we plant the seed of victory. It does not matter where it happens,
here, on the wire at the Egyptian border, at Mersa Brega, Tripoli, or even
Cairo. You have thrown my entire defensive plan out the window. We cannot hold
here, not with Montgomery pushing the Italians. I’ll have to find a way to
cover all the roads leading into Mechili from the coast now. That will take
Ravenstein’s entire division. Can I trust you with the other two, or must I
relieve you here and now?”

“Where
do you want them?” Crüwell said sullenly.

“We’ll
hold the line west of Bir Hacheim. You pivot your entire sector back on that
hinge. Cover the roads leading to our fort depot on the road to Msus. The wadi
will provide good cover and positions for you to post a delaying force. We move
tonight.”

“And
then what?” said Crüwell. “Back to Mersa Brega? Another retreat?”

“Not if
I can salvage the situation you’ve left me in,” Rommel gave him another hard
look. “I intend to hold here as long as feasible. We’ll stand in front of
Mechili, but if the British push hard for Derna, I may have no choice other
than to move west again. Strategic redeployment is not retreat, Herr General,
any more than a reckless advance is a victory.”

More
than one Crusader had been chastened in the desert during that hard fought
battle. Crüwell would spend a sleepless night, still burning from the scourging
Rommel had given him and inwardly feeling that the other man had simply lost
his nerve. The British would find they lost half of the tanks they took so long
to build up, and that their new Crusaders were very unreliable, prone to
breakdowns, under gunned, and under armored. Reeves would preside over a brief
desert burial for the three men he lost in that Scimitar, and have a long talk
with his men about the weapon the Germans might have used to kill them.

Brigadier
Kinlan positioned his Challengers for a possible assault the following day, but
as O’Connor sorted things out, it would be the better part of a week before the
8th Army could move again. The troops needed fuel, food, water, new equipment,
tanks from the reserve pool, and well earned rest. Before they did move again,
the Desert Fox would slip away.

“So
I’ll make you an offer,” said Karpov, looking Fedorov
right in the eye. “
Starpom
. You stand with me, or you stand against me.
It’s the same question this war asked of both of us, and now I want your
answer.
Starpom
… I’ll make you my Number One, with a promotion to
Captain of the Third Rank, not that the rank matters, but we’ll follow normal
naval protocols. You’ll stand with me, right there on the bridge, confer with
me, support me, and yes, you speak your mind as you see it. I’ll listen to you,
and consider everything you tell me, and then I’ll make my decision, just like
Volsky would. If you say yes, and stand with me, then I want your pledge of
loyalty too, just as you would give that to Volsky. When I give an order, I
want your Aye Sir, right after it, not an argument on the bridge in front of
the other officers.”

“And if
I disagree with that order?”

“Hell,
Fedorov, you know I disagreed with the way Volsky was handling things from the
moment we had that accident with
Orel.”

“Yes,
and when the Admiral wouldn’t see things your way, you tried to subvert his
authority and take the ship.”

“That
was regrettable,” said Karpov. “I’m not that man any longer. Surely you must
see that now.”

“I’m
not quite sure what I see yet. All I know is what you’ve done. You told Volsky
you were a changed man once, and he placed his faith and trust in you. Look
what happened.”

“I
fought hard to get here, Fedorov. You think it was easy being dragged out of
the sea three years ago, left for dead by you and everyone else?”

“Yes, Captain,
but you must admit that your methods, and your judgment, are sometimes quite
self serving. I understand that in 2021 you needed to stand up against the
Americans, but in 1945? What were you thinking?”

“My
blood was up. It was war,” said Karpov. “Like I said a moment ago, when you
take up the sword, you had better know how to use it. When the Demon Volcano
blasted us back to 1945, well there I was, with no magic wand in Rod-25 to get
anywhere else, or so I saw things. And there was the American fleet, Nimitz,
Halsey, and all the rest. They had just beaten Japan to a bloody pulp, and then
they thought they could do the same to me. They made a mistake in that, but it’s
all in the past now as much as we might think it’s in our future at this
moment. Yes, this is 1941, and that was 1945,
but not in this world.
The
moment the ship shifted back to 1908, everything changed. Don’t you see? I
re-wrote all of that history! There was no ‘incident’ in the Pacific between
the US and Russia in 1945. Believe me, I looked for it in any history book I
could find here. I still remember it all, but it never happened in this world,
because the Japanese took Vladivostok from us long ago. It hasn’t been Russian
held territory since before the Revolution.”

“Thanks
to your meddling in 1908.”

“You
want to argue all that again?” Karpov folded his arms. “If I had finished what
I was doing, the Japanese Empire would not be calling Vladivostok
Urajio
now, nor would they be sitting on Port Arthur, all of Manchuria, and all of
Primorskiy Province! Don’t you see? I would have stopped them, but you and
Volsky had to come along in your submarine, so sanctimonious, so
self-righteous. That bit about being self-serving cuts both ways, Fedorov. Well
look around. Read the history books now, because it was
your
hand that
wrote them. Do you like what you see? There wouldn’t
be
a goddamn
Japanese Empire if I had been able to finish what I started. And by god, this
war would look a whole lot different then, wouldn’t it?”

Fedorov
shrugged. “I suppose that’s true,” he admitted.

“Of
course it’s true! Alright, I understand what you and Volsky did, and why you
thought it was necessary, but you were wrong, Fedorov. You thought you could
put all the puzzle pieces back together again, but you were simply
wrong
.
That is what I have known from the very first—you can’t save the past, or try
to preserve the future we came from by doing that. The moment we appeared here,
everything changed. Those changes were subtle things at first, but the acorn
becomes a tree in time. Now look at the three of us! We took up sides here, and
we fought our enemies. Nothing could ever be the same after we made those
choices. The history could never be preserved. All we could do was rewrite it,
and that is all we can do here now. So I ask you again, and for the last time,
will you stand with me? If so, then we’ll rewrite it together, because believe
me, the future we came from was dead the moment Volsky shot that first plane
down. Understand?”

Fedorov
thought for a moment, his eyes reflecting the torment of all they had seen and
done. In one sense, Karpov was correct. How could the history of this world
ever recompose itself to become the future they came from? That realization had
been growing in him for months, like that acorn, and now it’s sturdy trunk
seemed to tower up and up in his soul. This was the world they made together,
all of them, Volsky, Karpov, himself, and yes, even Orlov. How could he ever
reset the hands of this clock? With each passing second, the history continued
to change. It was being slowly re-written again, and even if this ship, and
everyone aboard, simply vanished into the ether of that strange fog again, this
world would carry on and be what it would be.

“You
realize what this means?” Fedorov said slowly.

“Of
course I do,” said Karpov.

“We’ll
never get home again,” said Fedorov. “The future we’ve been trying to preserve
won’t be there. How could it be?”

“Exactly,”
said Karpov. “No, we’ll never see 2021 again. Neither one of us could live that
long, but we’ll see the world we shape here with our own hands, and that can be
a world you might be glad to live in. Look at it now… This war is hanging in
the balance at this moment, and we can weigh heavily on those scales. What we
decide now, what we do, will shape the future course of history. You and Volsky
threw in with Churchill, of course, what else could you do? I threw in with
Sergei Kirov—what else could I do? But Volkov….”

The
sound of the man’s name seemed like the hissing warning of a rattlesnake when
Karpov spoke it. “Volkov has other ideas, Fedorov, and god help this world if
he prevails. He’s a traitor and a coward, and he simply
must
be
defeated. Germany
must
be defeated, and now the Japanese along with
them. That’s job one. Then, once we’ve won, only then can we turn to the men of
this world we forged alliances with and find our peace. The Cold War doesn’t
have to happen this time around. There need be no Berlin Wall between us. Yet
we have a very long way to go before Germany and Japan, and now Orenburg go
down to the flames of perdition they deserve. I’ve done what I could for Sergei
Kirov. I’ve thrown the entire fate of the Free Siberian State on his fire. It
could be no other way. He’ll have to deal with the Germans, and I’ll support
him every step of the way. As for the Japanese….” He smiled, waiting, watching
Fedorov very closely now.

Fedorov
looked down, rubbed his forehead. Then he met Karpov’s eye, finally knowing
what he simply had to do. He had thought to oppose Karpov and try to regain
control of the ship, yet now he realized that battle was one he simply could
not fight. So as Shakespeare had so eloquently put it long ago, the better part
of valor was discretion.

“Starpom?”
Karpov asked again.

“Starpom,”
said Fedorov. “What else can I do? But Captain, Admiral,
or whatever I should call you now. You had better damn well listen to me. I’m not
meddlesome little Fedorov any more than you are not the man who jousted with me
on the bridge when we first shifted here.”

“Understood,”
said Karpov.

“Speaking
of that other man,” said Fedorov. “Where is he?”

“My
other self? Very strange, isn’t it Fedorov. All this is still so much of a
mystery. Can you imagine how I felt when I first looked in that man’s eyes? I
called him my brother, and that is the way I like to think of him now. He’s
aboard my airship,
Tunguska
. I wanted my intelligence chief to brief
him, bring him slowly into the reality of this world.”

“I’ll
bet he wasn’t happy when you took his place here.”

“Yes,
he squirmed a bit, but he listened to my reasons and agreed. Too much is at
stake now. We cannot afford to make any mistakes. This whole thing is on the
razor’s edge. One false move and we could lose this war. We have to be every
bit as sharp as that razor, and that is why I need you, desperately. You’re a
major force in all of this. I need your knowledge, your experience, your sound
judgment, because it will take everything we have, together, to prevail. I know
you were thinking to hide your real identity, gather allies aboard ship, and
then what? Were you going to do the same thing I tried, and stage a mutiny? We
have to put all that behind us now, there can be only one Captain here.”

“What about
your brother?”

“An
interesting question,” said Karpov. “From his perspective, the ship just
vanished. For us it was just a few minutes time, and here we’ve bounced a full
month ahead.”

“We’re
pulsing,” said Fedorov. “The same thing happened to us many times on those
early shifts. Chief Dobrynin ran his maintenance procedure, only this time no
one threw a nuke at the sea, and so we didn’t move as far as we once did earlier.
I think that energy really supercharged Rod-25.”

“I’ve
told Dobrynin not to run the procedure again,” said Karpov. “Do you think our
position in time will stabilize? We’re still in 1941.”

“Yes,”
said Fedorov. “In the beginning we made small jumps, always a little ahead of
the time we were in before, though we moved an entire year. This time it was a
month, but we still might be in flux. Remember my metaphor about the rock
skipping on the pond? We may not be fully settled in this time. We could move
again. We’ll have to wait and see.”

There
came a knock on the hatch, and Karpov looked over his shoulder, reaching to
open it and seeing Nikolin there.

“Excuse
me, Captain. But there’s more news. I got a clear signal from the BBC. The
situation on the eastern front has taken a turn for the worse.”

“Well,
out with it! What happened?”

“Moscow
is being evacuated. The situation is very confused, but from what I could gather
the city was burning, and the Germans have broken through.”

“The
government is leaving the city? What about Sergei Kirov?”

“The
news is not clear, sir. BBC says they were expecting a speech from the Kremlin tonight,
but apparently that has been cancelled. The situation must be very grave.”

“Alright,”
said Karpov. “Keep listening, Mister Nikolin. See what else you can pick up.
And one more thing… Now that the airwaves are clearing up, switch to the secure
channel I gave you. Try to raise
Tunguska
, and let me know the moment
you get through.” Nikolin saluted and returned to his post. Karpov turned to
Fedorov again.

“It
seems we have our work cut out for us,” he said heavily.

“It
does indeed,” said Fedorov.

Karpov
thought for a moment. “We proceed as I have planned. There’s nothing we can do
for Moscow, though I’ll have to find out what’s happening in Siberia if Nikolin
can get through with that signal. Otherwise, we need to get this ship into the
Pacific as quickly as possible. I need you at navigation now. Can you get us
through?”

“The
data I have on the ice conditions will all be wrong, but we can use the
helicopters to scout ahead. We’ll get through.”

“That’s
the spirit.” Karpov started for the hatch, then stopped, holding out a hand.
“Fedorov,” he said… “I’m sorry for the things I did… with Volsky, on the bridge
of Oki Island, and what I did to Zolkin. I was possessed with the thought you
all wanted me dead, and that submarine didn’t help matters. Can you forgive
me?”

Fedorov
took a deep breath, then extended his hand and took the Captain’s. “As the
Americans say, this is a whole new ballgame.”

Karpov
smiled. “Then after you, Mister
Starpom
. Let’s get started!”

Nikolin
got through to
Tunguska
an hour later, and Karpov was elated to hear
Tyrenkov’s voice. He took the radio call in the briefing room off the main
bridge.

“Sorry
to slip off like that,” he said. “Our position in time may not be stable yet,
but if we do shift again, we think we will make small moves forward. In such an
event you need to keep your wits about you. How are things back home? Any news
I should be aware of?”

“The
situation after Kolchak’s passing has stabilized,” said Tyrenkov. “All the
Generals from the Eastern Provinces have pledged their support, but they’re
worried about the Japanese.”

“Justifiably
so,” said Karpov. “I’m going to start working that problem very soon. Where are
you now?”

“Were
over the East Siberian Sea. Your brother wanted to scout ahead to look for you,
but we’ve seen nothing for nearly 30 days. In the meantime, there’s trouble in
Moscow.”