Three Kings

It was all so wildly impossible that if he had not seen it happen with his own eyes he would not have believed it. In fact he did not quite believe it now. He had half a mind to surface the boat and put those human eyes to the test. Might his digital readouts and screens be lying to them? In the world of 2021 they had all grown so accustomed to believing the digital image of a thing was reality. But what if it was all wrong? What if all those ones and zeroes in the data stream between the mast camera’s lens and his monitors here was as befuddled as the radar seemed to be now? He knew that was very unlikely, but there was still something in him that wanted to break to the surface, wanted air, the smell of the sea, a look at the night stars overhead. But that would not happen-not until he knew what their tactical situation was. Gromyko was a very cautious man. That was a good submariner’s first order of business-caution.

“Very well,” he said still rubbing the back of his head. “We wait. Down periscope. The boat will run silent.”

“Aye sir, main mast down and the silent running lights are on.”

Now Gromyko looked at his sonar man. “Your game, Mister Chernov. Until you can certify the sea is clean around me, we’ll sit here like a hole in the water and wait.”

Chernov vanished beneath his headset, using the ship’s powerful sonar to listen at high amplification to all the sounds around them now. The deep, threatening rumble he heard filled him with a sense of dread. Then he realized that he had heard something very like this before. Following that thought, he reached over, toggled on his signature bank, and looked for a pattern match. There it was!

“Captain… That background noise I reported-it’s geothermic.”

“Geothermic?”

“It’s that damn volcano sir, the one we were trying to get away from when the Chief Engineer on Kirov reported it was muddling up his procedure.”

“Yes,” said Gromyko. “And that led us on quite a merry little adventure.”

Kazan had moved south through the Sea of Japan to a point very close to the North Korean port of Wonsan. There they had stumbled upon an operation by the North Korean Navy, and an accident in the engine room had created a sudden noise on a squeaky bearing that gave their position away. It had plagued them ever since, on the run down pastUllung Do Island, and during that encounter they had with a combined Japanese American ASW group. Then the Shadow Dance had begun, the stealthy undersea duel where the slightest failure of nerve and technique could have finished them.

That had been a very close thing. There was little margin for error with the odds stacked so heavily against him. They had been engaged by at least three enemy subs, one of them a good American boat, and a Japanese surface action group with helicopters. They had been fired upon, more than once, and it took all his considerable skill to evade the deadly undersea lances aimed his way, though his boat and crew performed admirably.

By any measure they should all be dead now, fish food on the bottom of the sea, but they came through intact. They ran that infernal procedure on the reactors, dipping a strange control rod into the mix-Rod-25 as they called it. Just as things were winding up to the breaking point in that tense undersea duel, a hole had opened in time, and the submarine slipped right through!

It had been so close that one of the enemy torpedoes came right through that hole in time with us! But fortunately, it was as punch drunk as our own systems seem to be now, thought Gromyko. Damn thing lost its hold on Kazan. Either that, or it was fooled by the large mobile decoy I launched. One way or another, the boat had come through without a scratch.

Yet there were other contacts in the region, and they did not get off so easily. The American torpedo’s systems must have gone into reset mode, and it circled, looking for a new target when it heard a lot of surface noise overhead-Japanese ships from World War Two! They never knew what hit them. A Japanese freighter went down that day, killed by a torpedo fired at Kazan nearly eighty years in the future! It had sealed the fate of that unfortunate ship, and also made good on an appointment the USS Bonefish had with doom, the last of “Pierce’s Polecats.” The American sub had been lurking in the vicinity, and it was found by Japanese ASW ships and sent to a watery grave, though Gromyko never knew that.

Now he smiled, wondering just how the Japanese and Americans must have felt about that little maneuver they pulled with Rod-25. One minute we were there, and they thought they had our position pegged due to that damn noisy bearing in the engine room. The next minute we’re gone-decades gone-all the way to 1945!