Three Kings

Gromyko smiled. “The Japanese? I can handle them. But we have no missile or torpedo that will do anything against the emptiness out there now. At least if we do go back, we can make a difference… somehow.”

And so they put it to the crew, explained it all, and sat for a long day and night beneath the sea while Chernov listened and the engineers poured over those digital recordings, huddling in the reactor room to determine what they might soon be asked to do. One of them was Junior LieutenantIlya Garin, a reactor Engineer that had worked with Chief Dobrynin, the devil’s apprentice. He had seen how the Chief controlled the use of Rod-25, and had been involved in the mission that sent Fedorov back from the Primorskiy Engineering Center test reactor, and then again when the Chief tool them all back to find him on the Anatoly Alexandrov. Now he was here, reassigned to Kazan, and working in the reactor room to see if he could duplicate the Chief’s magic.

He did not have to worry. When the decision was finally made, the crew vote tallied, Rod-25 would do all the work for him. All he had to do was lower it slowly into the reaction, time it, pretend to listen to it like Dobrynin might do. Yet it was mere theater, and he sensed that on some level. Rod-25 was, indeed, a stubborn thing. It would take them back to the 1940s as sure as rain follows the flash of lightning at the edge of a storm. But it was getting old, even as Dobrynin warned. It might have taken them to 1945, to the place they had only just escaped from, but it slipped a bit. The boat kept falling through the hole in time it created, just a little farther into the void.

To the year 1941.

They did not know that at first. They arrived in the green wash of eerie light, the frosty cold and strange static electricity that raised the hackles on the back of Gromyko’s neck. But they made it through. All seemed well, until Lieutenant Garin came up to the bridge.

“Captain,” he said plaintively. “I think we have a problem.”

“You think we have a problem?” Gromyko was not accustomed to anything less than precise certainty when it came to the workings of his submarine. “What is it Mister Garin?”

“The control rod sir, Rod-25. Our systems are indicating damage to the rod structure. Radiation level is high. I’ve retracted it into theRad — Safe containment and we’ll see what we can find after we take some pictures with the inspection camera.”

“Is the procedure over? Did it run its course?”

“Yes, sir. This happened right after final retraction, but I don’t think we can risk using that control rod again until we get a good look at it, and take some further readings.”

“Very well. Carry on, and well done Mister Garin. Now all we have to do is find out where we are.”

They went through it all one more time, the quiet wait while the boat’s systems seemed to slowly recover their sensibilities, the cautious approach to the surface. Radiation readings were normal, which gave them all some great relief, but what would they find when they raised the sensor mast and periscope again? Just to be on the safe side, Gromyko had returned to the relative safety of the Sea of Okhotsk, cruising off the Kuriles well north of the Demon Volcano. If they did appear in the 1940s again, he wanted to make sure they had some room to maneuver.

Belanov’sremark about landing right in the middle of the Japanese Empire was good warning. While he didn’t think he had anything to really fear from the Japanese navy of the 1940s, there was always that first woozy hour after they shifted, when he might not have the advantage of his sensory suite or even the functional use of his weapons. And Gromyko was a very cautious man.

So they waited. Chernov listened. Gorband had a look around on radar, and Karenin raised the communications antenna and sent off that coded signal.

Silence followed, a place where every fear might grow if it lingered for very long. Gromyko became uneasy himself, pacing on the bridge, waiting. Soon Karenin began to hear voices in that silence, then pulses on the airwaves and the dot-dash chatter of coded messages from a telegraph system, a faint scratching of the airwaves that were otherwise clean and silent. Only one man on the boat spoke Japanese, a sailor namedGenzoGavrilov, his name a hybrid of Japanese and Russian, as he was born from the marriage of his Russian father to a Japanese woman. The crew called him GG for short, and he was pulled from his duty in the torpedo room and called up to the bridge, a bit intimidated to be in the presence of all the senior officers there.

“Just listen in to any radio traffic,” the Captain told him. “Find out what’s going on up there.”

GG listened, hearing what sounded like routine radio calls, ship to shore, merchantmen at sea. Then news came from Tokyo of the Japanese offensive in China. It was not long before he fished out the day and time from the stream of grandiose propaganda. It was 1941. January of 1941, the 11th day, to be exact.