John Schettler - 9 Days Falling, Volume I

“The Argonauts? Nine man squad per helo, with two non-comms. Twenty man team in all.” MacRae was surprised she could so easily shrug off this news on Princess Royal. She was already moving on to the situation here, and he soon found out why.

“Then we still have some muscle here?”

“Three squads, m’lady. Thirty-three men, though I have one squad with Princess Irene up north.”

“Get the rest ashore. Secure the loading facilities. Get engineers with them as well. Nobody is going to back out on my contract. Not while I’ve got this ship and a couple squads of very dangerous men to set this right.”

“You mean to simply take the oil?”

“Take it? It’s mine already! I’ve a letter of credit on file at the exchange for everything Chevron has bunkered at Baku. Made the trade this morning before Princess Royal was hit. Yes, we’ll lose the ship, but her oil belongs to Chevron now.”

“But Chevron hasn’t even taken possession of that oil yet.”

“A minor detail.”

“They’ll say the contract was contingent upon safe delivery and claim non-performance.”

“They can argue with me in court over it six months from now,” She smiled, a fiery light in her eyes. “In the meantime, I’m damn well going to take possession of this oil here—every drop I can get my hands on. And if anyone thinks they can back out of the deal now they’ll have to get past my Argonauts first. Understand?”

MacRae took a long breath. “I do indeed,” he said.

She sat at her desk, eyes staring blankly at the screen, a simmering anger inside her that was slowly giving way to a feeling of thrumming anxiety. She could still lose it all, she thought, not just Princess Royal but all her remaining tankers as well. She could lose the whole damn company in the next forty-eight hours, but what did that matter in the grand scheme of things? She knew, deep down, that it was something more than the fear of imminent ruin and bankruptcy that was plaguing her. It was that damn phone call—the red phone—the signal she had received in those three agonizing words: Geronimo , Geronimo , Geronimo ….

It was back, she mused darkly. Kirov was back in the here and now, and God only knows what had happened to the world while it was gone—happened so subtly that few, if any, could perceive it. The words of Shakespeare whispered again in her inner ear: “Hell is empty, and all devils are here.”

What were those devils up to, she wondered? What did they do to change the course of events in that distant era, the time of her grandfather’s day, when the world was locked in a titanic struggle from one end of the globe to another? The same unanswered question that had plagued the Watch for the last 80 years returned to haunt her. What did the Russians know? They had tried to penetrate that iron curtain for decades, but it was late in the game before the Watch had been able to establish a foothold deep inside the Russian intelligence community itself. They finally had a man inside, and all reports seemed to indicate that the Russians were still fumbling in the dark about Kirov’s sojourn to the 1940s. So it was not an official act of the Russian government to send the ship there. That was the great revelation that had finally been confirmed. It had been an accident—a strange and inexplicable accident—or was it? Other information indicated the Russians had been doing some very odd things in and around their nuclear testing sites. The Americans too.

It all has something to do with that damn ship, she thought. The answer has to be there. Yet her latest intelligence on that indicated Kirov had put to sea two days ago, leading out the Russian Red Banner Pacific Fleet. What will the Americans make of that, she wondered? Then word came in on the secure line late last night. Admiral Yates, the current director of the ultra secret organization, had come to a decision on the question that had been debated by all the Twelve Apostles for some time. Now that Kirov had been seen to vanish and reappear, and the time of the ship’s intervention to the past had been finally discovered, should the ship be destroyed?

They went round and round on that issue, with some members feeling that it would be better to use espionage to try and ascertain just how the ship was able to move in time. Others refuted that with the assertion that the “incident,” as it came to be called, was an accident, mere happenstance, and that the ship had no voluntary control over its movement into the past. They cited that a nuclear detonation seemed to be involved in at least two observed shifts, the first witnessed by the Royal Navy in 1941 when Task Force 16 was destroyed, and the second witnessed by the Submarine Ambush this very year. This explained the strange activities involving above ground nuclear tests, and it was also a far less nefarious explanation of the event, yet one that left several members unsatisfied, Elena Fairchild among them. Kirov had also appeared in the Med and in the Pacific, and no evidence of any nuclear detonations were involved in those incidents.

In the end the Council of Twelve, as it was called when the Watch convened a major meeting, was split six to six on the issue, and the deciding vote went to Admiral Yates. The order was given to seek the immediate destruction of the battlecruiser Kirov and therefore close the possibility, once and for all, that the ship would ever again return to plague the Royal Navy of the past. High ranking officials in the US government were always seated as members of the Twelve, and when Kirov was seen to sortie again in the Pacific they saw to it that orders were quickly relayed to find and sink the ship at any cost.

She sighed inwardly, realizing that if the time breach was something peculiar to the ship itself, its cause would now never be discovered. Perhaps that is for the better, she thought. The power to change the course of events in the here and now was a heady enough drink for any man to stomach, or any woman. The power to change the course of history by altering past events was too great to even fathom. Yet she wondered, even now, what the men aboard that ship ever truly learned about what had happened to them.

Then the intelligence line rang again and her reverie broke. She came back to the moment, seeing Captain MacRae still standing there, hat in hand, looking at her strangely as though he could discern the inner turmoil of her thoughts. She smiled wanly, attempting to give him a thin reassurance that she was still in the fight, then reached for the line.

“Fairchild….Yes…. I see. Very well. Yes, I think we’d better have a look, but be discrete. Report as soon as you know more.”

“More bad news?” asked MacRae.

She cocked her head to one side, considering. “Well here’s a strange bird,” she said. “That was Mack Morgan. I guess I ruffled his feathers over that lapse with Salase, and now he’s ferreting out anything he can find. Well, it may be nothing, but he seems to have gotten wind of an operation underway in the Caspian—a Russian operation. It appears that some unusual assets are deploying to the Makhachkala area, and it involves a ship called the Anatoly Alexandrov.”

She was typing something at her computer terminal. “That’s odd. I just looked it up on the register and it’s a floating nuclear reactor; not a warship—presently anchored ten kilometers off the Caspian coast and listed as inactive. It seems Intel picked up a lot of activity at the Russian naval base at Kaspiysk, and that ship seems to be the focal point. We have helos out there. Think we might be able to sneak a peek with some long range cameras?”