John Schettler - Devil's Garden

“Get another transmission off at maximum power. Boost the signal any way you can! Give our call sign, Maidenhead coordinates and append the operator code FDV. Send it on our military shortwave band. Do it now!”

* * *

Itcame in loud and clear, rising above the low band transmissions, though Nikolin was surprised to see it was on a higher military transmission band. The call sign did not mean anything to him at first, though he wrote it down to look it up. ANAV. Then the message transitioned into a standard military hail call, and it was giving a specific target, the operator the sender was hoping to contact. To his great surprise it was him!

“Captain…”

Karpov was in the Captain’s chair, watching the HD video feed from the Tin Man. “Have they changed their minds, Mister Nikolin?” He assumed Nikolin had received a message from the Japanese. He had been pounding their cruiser squadron with all three of his twin 152mm batteries for the last several minutes. The lead ship, which he presumed to be the flagship, had fallen off the battle line, burning badly amidships after three more hits had shattered a tall mainmast there and blown away one of the cruiser’s three smoke stacks. Jet black smoke enveloped the ship from the truncated stack.

“No sir…I’m receiving a coded message on the military shortwave band. It’s from another ship, sir.”

“What ship? Rodenko. Are there any other contacts on radar?”

“No sir, we have only the eight contacts we are presently engaging”

“Captain, I have the ship call sign prefix now. ANAV. It’s a Russian ship, the Anatoly Alexandrov.”

That gave Karpov a moment’s hesitation, his head turning sharply to the communications station.

“What did you say? Anatoly Alexandrov ?”

Karpov raised an eyebrow in surprise. “That’s a floating nuclear power facility stationed off the Kaspiysk naval base. Volsky was going to use it in that operation to rescue Fedorov! Are you certain that was that callsign?”

“Yes sir! It can’t be anyone else. The first shortwave long distance calls weren’t made until the early 1920s. And the operator code on this one was FDV. That’s Fedorov, Captain. He always signs that way. He’s trying to contact us via shortwave! Those signals can reach virtually any location on earth using skywave propagation.”

The Captain passed a moment of complete confusion. It was as if he had been caught right in the middle of an elaborate crime, with the authorities bursting in to apprehend him. He felt a sudden jab of guilt at the thought Fedorov was trying to signal them, pulled back to that first meeting with Admiral Volsky when the young navigator had put forward his plan to find Orlov. Fedorov! What was he doing here…in 1908?

Suddenly the crack of the ships 152mm deck guns was a jarring distraction. Karpov felt light headed, strangely bothered, and then quickly turned to Samsonov. “Secure deck guns,” he said sharply. “That will suffice for the moment. Mister Rodenko!”

“Sir?”

“Resume evasive heading and maneuver to break off from this engagement. Head west if you must, and get us beyond their visual horizon. Then turn the ship south and resume course 180 at your earliest opportunity. I’ll need to work closely with Mister Nikolin at the moment, and I think we have taught these ships a lesson. This message now has top priority.”

Itwas a slow process, and the signal faded at times and was lost, but they were able to get a message through. Nikolin worked out the subsquare location on the grid from Fedorov’s signal.

“They are right in the Caspian Sea, sir. Just off the coast at Kaspiysk.”

“My God, they must have run their procedure with that damnable Rod-25 and then shifted back here even as we have-but why 1908? Our shift was caused by that explosive detonation. Why would they shift here as well, to this day and year? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“I’m getting a voice signal now. They’re using a frequency above 12MHz to improve integrity. Got him sir!”

“…Read me on this channel. Repeat, this is Anton Fedorov aboard Anatoly Alexandrov on location in the Caspian sea. Calling battlecruiser Kirov. Please acknowledge.”

Karpov nodded his head, giving Nikolin the go ahead to respond.

“Roger that, Anatoly Alexandrov . This is Kirov calling. Reading you five by five, loud and clear, Fedorov. Lieutenant Nikolin responding.”

“Ten Four — Nikolin! Am I ever glad to hear your voice! Where are you? Over.”

Karpov reached for the handset now: “Fedorov? What are you doing here? Do you realize what year this is?”

“Captain Karpov? Good to hear you, sir. To answer your question, we really have no idea why we are here. Dobrynin ran his procedure and here we are. I have just verified the date. Over.”

“Well, what in God’s name are you going to do here?”

“…Good question, Captain. We have Orlov! But when we attempted to use Rod-25 to return home, we ended up here instead. Now we must see what we can do about all this. Is Orlan with you?

“No. Orlan is not here.”

There was silence on the line for a time. Then Fedorov returned, his voice uncertain. “Orlan did not shift with you? And what of Admiral Golovko?”

“Neither ship shifted here with us. We are alone, and I have no idea what has happened to Orlan .”

“Might it still be trapped in 1945, Captain?”

This time it was Karpov that hesitated before he spoke. “That is possible, Fedorov, but given the circumstances we were facing, I doubt the ship survived…”

There was another pause that seemed interminably long, and Karpov realized that Fedorov must be reading between the lines of everything he was saying here. The man was not stupid. He would soon understand that there was combat, though the Captain had no intention of going into the details here. Yet Fedorov’s next question was very pointed, and touched on the heart of the matter.

“Captain….How did you shift here? Rod-25 is with us.”

“There’s no point discussing that, Fedorov. The fact is, we are here, and with no way to get home, or so I believed until I heard your voice.”

“I see…Captain, I don’t have to tell you how important it is that we do nothing to interfere with the history of this time period. We must work to rendezvous and get to you with a control rod. Over ”

Karpov ignored the first half of what Fedorov said. “And how do you propose to get here? Do you expect us to sail into to the Black Sea and have no one here notice this ship?”

“ We have an Mi-26 loaded with fuel and two more control rods that may work just like Rod-25. Our plan was to fly them to you on the Pacific coast, over.”

“Fly here? It’s a huge distance, Fedorov. Even for an Mi-26.”

“We may have the fuel…But perhaps you could sail our way and we could arrange a rendezvous some place closer. What is your present position?”

“We are in the Sea of Japan at the moment.” Karpov sounded impatient now, almost as if he resented this sudden and unexpected development and saw it as an interruption. It would certainly mean his planned operation here would end abruptly, and they would again be dipping an infernal control rod into the nuclear soup aboard Kirov . Who knew where they might turn up next? He was now at a decisive point in history, with exactly the right instrument to impose his will on time. Now comes Fedorov with another outlandish rescue plan.

“If you could get to the Arabian Sea, or even the Bay of Bengal it would give us much more safety margin on the fuel. I think we could get the Mi-26 there easily enough. Over.”