Three Kings

A tone sounded on the ship’s intercom, and Elena tapped the button to take the message. It was the ship’s executive officer, Mister Dean.

“Bridge reporting. We’ve got radar returns now, but can’t seem to get signal returns on the tankers. Radio is clearing up, but nothing on the Black Line.”

“Forget the Black Line,” she said. “Listen to AM bands. See if you can pick up any local news. And you can forget the tankers as well.”

At this Dean seemed to stumble, a brief silence indicating his confusion before he spoke again. “Excuse me, Mum… Forget the tankers? I thought we were to escort them toHeraklion.”

Both Captain MacRae and Mack Morgan were giving her the same look that had to be on Dean’s face at that moment, a bemused look of worry and concern.

“Yes, proceed toHeraklion, but I’m afraid the tankers won’t be coming. I’ll explain everything later Mister Dean. Just get us underway.”

“Very good, Mum. We’ll get moving immediately.”

They had shepherded the company’s tanker fleet through every hazard, all in the service of securing the deal that could save Fairchild Inc. from certain bankruptcy after the loss of Princess Royal in the Persian Gulf, and secure vital oil supplies for Britain in the bargain. They had braved the transit of the Bosphorus and dueled with the Russian Black Sea Fleet, losing one of their three remaining tankers there, Princess Irene. Yet they had managed to get safely through the Bosphorus with the last two tankers and two million barrels of precious oil. Then, like a dog that had tussled for hours with a rope and then suddenly lost interest, the Company CEO had told them the oil no longer mattered.

MacRae pursed his lips, wondering what was up here, and how they could have lost radar signals on the tankers. “We’d best check that radar dome on the mainmast,” he said. “It may ‘habeen damaged in the storm.” His Scottish brogue rolled like honey at times, and his reserve of calm was most welcome in the tension of the moment.

Elena Fairchild took a long breath. “Don’t worry about that, Gordon,” said Elena. “The tankers don’t matter now. They’re no longer with us…”

MacRae scratched his head at that. “Well they were five miles off our stern ten minutes ago,” he said, an edge of frustration creeping into his tone.”

“Yes,” she returned, “they were, and they’re probably still sitting there, god help them now that we’ve moved.”

“Moved? You’re not making sense, Elena.” He used her first name, he realized, and in front of Mack Morgan, but then he threw that aside. They were talking about the two million barrels of crude oil he’d been shepherding the last nine days, and it was no time to worry about the niceties of protocol. Mack wasn’t stupid. He could read the book that MacRae and Ms. Fairchild had been writing together, and knew they had cross that thin professional line between them and become something more than a company CEO and her dutiful ship’s Captain.

“Sorry Gordon, but there’s no other way to put it. We’ve moved. Argos Fire is no longer in the soup the world was serving up in 2021. They key finally worked and it did its job-only not the way I expected. We’ve moved in time, gentlemen. We haven’t lost our tankers, but they’ve lost us, and god speed them both to safety now. We’re somewhere else. Their fate is no longer our concern.”

“Somewhere else?” MacRae looked at Morgan now to see how he was taking this, and he was just standing there, stupefied, and looking to MacRae to sort things out. The Captain had at least one anchor on the situation. Elena had made some startling revelations the previous night, about the Russians, their experiments with an odd effect of nuclear detonations that cause aberrations in the flow of time. Yet the real stunner had been the business about the shadowy group that had been established within the Royal Navy called the Watch.

Yes, the Russians were playing with time travel, or so she had explained, and it all had something to do now with that big warship that went missing last July in the Norwegian Sea, the battlecruiser Kirov. The ship went missing alright, to another century! It had apparently displaced in time to the 1940s, and became embroiled in the Second World War! That was what she had told him, the goddamned Russians were tampering with history, but the real revelation was how she had managed to find that out. He remember the moment when her words had struck him like a thunderbolt…

“Something truly profound is about to happen,” she had told him, “something terrible.”

Chapter 29

“What?” he had asked. “Is it somehow related to this Russian ship?”

“Yes. Kirov has everything to do with it, but we aren’t exactly sure what to expect. One thing we were told is this: it could be catastrophic-life ending-at least life as we know it now. And the worst of it is that no one that survives will know about it. This thing will happen and then it will all change-that is if the missiles don’t finish off the world first.”