John Schettler: Tigers East

Dear Readers,

Here we are, opening Season Four of the series where I last left you, with Gromyko, and with Fedorov’s bold decision to persist with his mission, in spite of Karpov’s order to return to the ship. You and I know just how determined, and how resourceful Anton Fedorov can be, but even he will be surprised by what happens next. We will get to that again before this novel ends, but first, there is a good amount of wartime action to relate.

I have two theaters heating up now in late 1942. In the west we will return to Patton’s battle in Algeria, and the naval action off Algiers as Tovey attempts to command the seas between that port and the vital Allied supply port of Oran. And we will also revisit an old warrior, apparently beaten and brooding on his defensive lines at Mersa Brega—Erwin Rommel. The Desert Fox has a sudden awakening here, bent on recapturing his old glory again. Whether he can ever do so in the shadow of Kinlan’s Heavy Brigade remains to be seen, but there will be surprises ahead, and unexpected wrinkles in the fate line on Rommel’s palm.

Then we must also take our Tigers East, and relate what has been happening with Operation Blue. There the Germans fight to secure two key objectives. The first will recount von Rundstedt’s drive to take Voronezh, sending Model and Hoth in a big pincer operation. The second follows Manstein and General Steiner’s SS Korps as they push into the lower Don bend towards Volgograd. Now Sergei Kirov and General Zhukov will have two new crisis points to handle, and desperate decisions must be made to try and prevent a general collapse, and survive until the winter of 1942.

After these battles are fought, we return to Fedorov’s dire mission, where unforeseen visitors, and the strange hand of fate, lead him to a moment of real destiny.

A word on the Battle Books…

Many readers have written to tell me how much they enjoy the new Battle Books, which extract chapters forming a major subplot from the series and present them in one continuous narrative. So far we’ve had two released, Foxbane and Vendetta . The next book was going to involve all the East Front action, but I have decided to postpone that volume so it can include material presented here in Tigers East and also from the book following this one, which will be heavy on the great battle for Volgograd, Thor’s Anvil.

Readers have also asked me what happened to other subplots that have not been given much ink in Seasons 2 and 3, notably the Keyholders Saga, the mystery involving Duke Elvington’s trip to 1815 on the eve of Waterloo, Paul Dorland and the Meridian Team in 2021, and many other related events, such as the planned raid on Gibraltar to discover what may be hidden beneath St Michael’s Cave.

So there will be a new Battle Book coming August 1, (assuming I can get it edited!), and in it I will include a good deal of new material involving these other plot lines. In effect, it is going to present one major subplot story line, which will then be extended to include material that I haven’t had room to fit into the regular Kirov Series, all concerning the mystery of the seven keys. I’ve been focusing mostly on the alternate history of the war in recent main series volumes, but if you like those other subplots, the next Battle Book will present material that may not appear anywhere else in the main series. A more detailed announcement on the next Battle Book appears at the end of this volume.

Enjoy!

Gromykodid not have much time, and there were still so many questions unanswered in his mind. He had struggled to understand all the things Director Kamenski was telling him, but he was a submarine Captain, not a master of the arcane science of time travel. It was all still a great mystery to him, something he could not fathom, but yet something he could also not deny. He had lived it all thru, seeing that strange control rod shift his boat to the past, and at a most opportune moment in the heat of a fight with a combined Japanese and American ASW task force. After that, things only got more and more complex.

Admiral Volsky had been his one contact point with reality, a sane and sensible man if ever there was one. Kamenski agreed that if he could get to Volsky again, or to his able confederate, Fedorov, that they could help him sort through this mess. But Karpov was another matter, and Kamenski told him that it was very likely that Karpov would eventually achieve his aim of getting control of the ship… Kirov .

I was in this position once before, he thought. In fact, this mission was on my back when I first shifted to WWII with Volsky and Fedorov. They were dead set on trying to accomplish the same thing Kamenski wants me to do—get control of that ship and send it home, and that failing….

Kill the ship.

That would be a very hard decision, and perhaps even harder to accomplish. I can set my own scruples aside, but I would be asking a great deal of my men. Kirov was the flagship of the fleet, and it was all ready to lead us to war, the sad reality of the situation in 2021. It was going to be a most difficult fight. The navy had been given quite a few new ships in the days leading up to that war, but we were still a shadow on the sea compared to the American Navy. My boat was counted on heavily to address that balance. The same for Kirov . If that ship has to die, then it should do so fighting for Russia—an honorable death—and not this dastardly assassination Kamenski has pushed upon me. I fought side by side with Kirov . Now Kamenski puts this bloody knife in my hands and asks me to stab my comrades in the back. It isn’t right, and yet, the consequences of failure here are difficult to contemplate.

He shook his head, as if trying to clear the errant thoughts that troubled him, the endless nagging questions. Gromyko liked answers, not questions, but now they sat around him like fresh young crewmen that had been mixed up in a fight, and he had to lay down the law, sort things out, restore order.

I’m to go back, he thought, but where will I end up? Kamenski says I’ll get where Time needs me, but that’s as much a guess on his part as anything else. Alright, let’s assume I get right back to the time I left after that scrap with that British sub. I still have no idea how it got there, or how it found my boat to launch that ambush attack. A good name for that sub, Ambush . But I’m to leave that one alone if I ever find it again, or so Kamenski tells me.

Supposing I do find Volsky or Fedorov still in command of Kirov . That would make things so much easier. I just tell them all these things Kamenski told me, and they will certainly cooperate. I just deliver this nice shiny new control rod, and that Engineer of theirs will know what to do next. What was the man’s name? Dobrynin. Yes, I remember him now. We had tapes he sent over controlling our reactors, keying our men as to when the power had to be ramped up. It’s all Greek to me.

Alright… I get that far, Volsky uses that damn control rod—then what? Where does Kirov go? To which world does it return? Does it go forward, or farther back, as it did once before? Does it get back to the world it came from—the world I came from when we first sortied with the Red Banner Pacific Fleet at the edge of that war? Does it get back to this world where my boat sits here getting a nice new set of very sharp teeth? Something tells me that won’t happen. We built Kirov from the bones of the Four Brothers, as Kamenski calls them: Ushakov , Lazarev, Nakhimov, and Pyotr Velikiy . They are still here, so I don’t think Volsky will suddenly appear here with the ship. In fact, the Admiral is probably here as well, clueless as to all of this. Strange how Kamenski knows of all these events, but he does, and that’s a fact.