Three Kings

That was enough to swallow in one gulp, but it hadn’t ended there, the boat’s position in time remained unstable, and they fell through another gopher hole in time, as Director Kamenski had put it. This time they went all the way back to 1908, drawn there as if by some magnetic force, or perhaps by the skill of that reactor engineer, Chief Dobrynin. That had been their target date all along, but it took two hops to get there. They just had to switch trains in 1945.

There, in 1908, they began their real mission, the stalking hunt for their own comrades aboard the battlecruiser Kirov, now deemed a rogue ship under a rogue Captain with delusions of grandeur, and a plan to unhinge all recorded history from that day forward. It was coming down to the missiles, he knew, and he had little doubt that if he got off the first shots he would prevail, even when facing the most powerful surface ship in the Russian Navy. Instead they had launched a desperate plan to sneak up close to the ship and run that control rod procedure again, and amazingly, it had worked!

We were right on the razor’s edge there, thought Gromyko. If their sonar man had heard us and they put a Shkval torpedo into the water, we were all dead men. But Kirov had struck an old mine, not powerful enough to damage the ship seriously, but enough to wreck the bigPoilinom Horse Jaw sonar in the underwater bow bulge. That may have been their salvation, the devil’s horn on the antiquated old mine that Karpov had blundered into.

Gromyko had no idea what was going on at that time on the bridge of Kirov, how the ship was in a state of near deadlock with the struggle for control between Captain Karpov and his Starpom Rodenko. The ship’s doctor, a man named Zolkin, had boldly stepped forward to Rodenko’s side, taking a bullet from Karpov’s revolver for his trouble. Then, one by one, the junior officers of the ship’s bridge crew stood up, defiant to a man. They would no longer follow a Captain who would do deliberate harm to one of their own.

And that is where it had ended, or so he thought. Now they were trying to get home, and Rod-25 had pulled both vessels forward in time again, but the load was just too heavy. That was how the Chief Engineer Dobrynin had described it. He had been with Fedorov on another impossible journey to the past using that same control rod, this time on that new floating nuclear power plant, Anatoly Alexandrov. The two men had spawned this whole mission, pulling Gromyko, and now his boat and crew, into the incredible vortex of this amazing saga.

It seemed his part in the story was not yet finished. He had been briefed by both Fedorov, Dobrynin and then Admiral Volsky, and his orders were clear. They were all trying to get home, back to 2021 where they belonged, though he knew that world was perhaps the most dangerous place they could ever wish to go. They had left it in the midst of that tense undersea engagement, just one more minor naval action that was part of the ever widening blast wave of a new war, the final war, the war the officers and crew of Kirov had come to dread, and one they were desperately trying to prevent. Something told Gromyko that they had finally returned to that blighted time.

“Geothermic?” He said again. “You mean it’s the Demon Volcano you’re hearing out there?”

“I believe so, sir. The geothermic signature is matching patterns I recorded earlier, just before we…”

“Before we went into the Bear’s cave,” Gromyko finished. “Then we’re back. We’ve returned to our own time. That may explain the darkness on those digital screens. It’s the fallout from that damn volcano.”

“Or something else,” said his Starpom, Belanov.

“It’s just a little over 400 kilometers east of our present position,” said Chernov. “That is if we’re still in the same place we were when we…”

“When we moved in time,” said Gromyko again. “Get used to saying it aloud, son. It will help all the rest of us believe it. Mister Gorban, did you get a fix on our position?” He looked at the boat’s radar man and navigator.

“No GPS data came in over the mast, but using those initial radar returns I have us right where we were before.”

“Yet still no sign of Kirov?” The Captain looked at Chernov on sonar.

“Nothing sir. I would hear them if they were close, even through this background noise.”

“Karenin? Any return on our beacon signal?”

“No sir. The channel is silent.”

“Did you get the signal off?”

“I believe so, Captain.”

“What else do you hear out there?”