John Schettler - Men of War

Admiral Yates was in his office, working up fleet assignments for the new Queen Elizabeth battlegroup assembling for deployment. He would have two of the newer Type 45 destroyers in Daring and Dragon , the first of the new Type 26 Global Combat Frigates, Defiance , and two more older Type 23s in Lancaster and Somerset . The new Astute class fleet submarine Anson , the fifth in the series, would serve in escort to her majesty, Britain’s newest and largest fleet carrier.

But that night another sub in the same class, the Ambush , was living up to its name as it silently stalked the Russian battlecruiser Kirov north of Jan Mayen. Commissioned in 2015, Ambush was a superbly stealthy boat with a hull coating of nearly 40,000 acoustic tiles. She also had a deadly sting in her six 533mm torpedo tubes firing the Spearfish heavyweight torpedo, a 21 inch diameter killing fish indeed with a 300kg warhead. Her Tomahawk cruise missiles were another long range threat out to 1240 miles, and accurate to within two meters. At 30 knots submerged, Ambush was capable of running with the fast Russian battlecruiser when necessary, and her real underwater speed was still a highly classified secret. With a 25 year supply of nuclear fuel, and advanced air and water purification systems, the sub could technically circumnavigate the entire globe without ever once surfacing. Her only limitation was a 90 day supply of food.

Ambush had been following a small task group centered on Kirov , picking them up as they left Severomorsk and drifting quietly as they passed in a stately line. The old Oscar class submarine Orel led the procession, followed by the aging cruiser Slava towing a large targeting barge, and then came the bane of the West, the mighty Kirov out for live fire exercises with the ship’s holds bulging with missile reloads. The formation was in no particular hurry, making a sedate 10 knots until the Slava veered off with her targeting barge and increased to 15 knots. The sub listened to the whole scene, her sensitive sonar tracking the movement of each ship until the Slava was some 30 kilometers south of Kirov and the now submerged submarine Orel, which hovered nearby. Weather reports indicated a strong front was moving in rapidly from the north, and it looked as though the Russians wanted to complete their exercise before the sea conditions made operations impractical.

Then it happened.

The whole boat shuddered with a thrumming vibration as if a massive kettle drum had been struck a mighty blow beneath the sea. The sonar operator ripped his headset off in spite of the noise spike inhibitor, staring blankly at his CO. No one on the boat knew it at that moment, but a strange loop in time had just completed one full cycle.

The first time it had happened there had been no Admiral Yates on the watch, and in fact, no “Watch” mounted at all. The group did not exist when the Orel incident first sent Kirov careening through time to 1941. Yet actions taken by the ship and crew changed history, and in the year 2000 a Great War broke out on that altered timeline and devastated the world. Kirov never saw it. Rod-25 snatched the ship away from the icy waters of the North Atlantic and sent it home to the year 2021… Only home was no longer there!

Twelve days later an unknowing Chief Dobrynin and Rod-25 worked their magic again and sent Kirov back to 1942, only this time she had moved in space while in the future, and was now in the Med. Actions taken by the ship and crew again altered history and caused the war to be delayed in that newly altered timeline, but it happened in the year 2021. When Rod-25 sent the ship forward again off the Island of St. Helena, Kirov once more found the world a desolate and blighted place.

The third shift into the past to 1942 gave the ship one last chance to change that fate. After so many tries Time now seemed to know its own future, and cleverly tipped off the principle officers on the ship by delivering a newspaper to them with a warning before they made that last return trip to late 1942. The war would start in 2021, it told them. Get busy. Kirov’s actions in the Pacific of 1942 had been enough to win but a brief respite to that fatal deadline, a matter of a few weeks delay, and not enough to prevent it from occurring. Because the ship had left one thing, one man of great importance behind—Chief Gennadi Orlov—a Man of War. It was something Orlov would do, or fail to do, that would make all the difference where the two roads of time now diverged in a yellow wood of infinity, and led to a future that only a privileged few now knew.

When Kirov reappeared and made its way home to Vladivostok it was living in the alternate history that the ship and crew had created, and on that timeline a Watch had been waiting for long decades, ever vigilant. In late July, 2021 of that altered history, Kirov vanished… right on schedule. Orel blew up again, just as before on the original timeline, and a story a thousand pages long was written in the new history. This time Admiral Yates was standing his Watch.

A telephone rang in Royal Naval Headquarters—a very special telephone. It flashed signals to the deep underground operations bunker near Portsmouth, to a solitary office in Plymouth, and its shrill alarm was relayed to locations, and individuals all over the globe, all men and women of the Watch. It was just one single word repeating in sets of three until a button was pushed on the receiving end to indicate secure reception of the message: Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo…

It had finally happened. The ship they had been waiting for since the 1940s, watching since 1980, had finally pulled its disappearing act and was gone, and it was now anyone’s guess where and when it might return. The Watch did not have long to wait. Kirov was gone for all of a long, breathless month, and then was suddenly spotted in the Pacific by an American submarine. Key West was supposed to have been killed that day, but lived on due to a moment of restraint that bought the world a few brief weeks of restless peace.

Vladivostokon the Sea of Japan was thousands of miles away when Kirov finally turned her bow north from the paradise island where they had made one final stop. There was only one loose end that they could not account for as they sailed for home, though Anton Fedorov spent many long hours trying. What had happened to Chief Gennadi Orlov? Where did he go? What effect, if any, did he have on the history that Fedorov could now spend long quiet years re-reading, re-learning, much to his delight? His curiosity and diligence would become a saving grace for the world, though he did not yet know that as he stood on the weather deck when the ship first turned for Vladivostok harbor. Kirov was coming home, but it would not be the last time the ship would see the fire of war.

Karpov had stayed his hand at the last moment, and the curious American submarine, Key West had lived to return to its home port in Guam, its captain happily smoking a fresh Cuban cigar on the conning tower. Yet the reprieve that single moment of sanity and restraint Karpov gave to the world was to be short lived. Events in the Pacific were building up like tall storm clouds on the horizon, their flanks darkening with rain, tops crowned with the lightning of the threat of war.

In a strange twist of events, the ship they left broken and stranded on the shallow coral reefs of the Torres Straits would sire a brave young son to pose a new challenge to the world. Kirishima would return, but it would not be the old battleship this time, nor the stern presence of a man like Sanji Iwabuchi. No, this time it was a sleek guided missile destroyer, Kongo class, built for the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force in the late 1990s. In an odd echo of the history they had just lived, Kirov would soon come to hear the name of ship that had hunted them, pursuing them through the long nights as they struggled to find safe waters in a sea of war. DDG Kirishima was now fated to have a major part to play in the war that was still looming.