Kirov Saga Men of War - By John Schettler Page 0,3
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.
* * *
Vladivostok on 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.
Men no longer stood the watch from a high pagoda tower on this new ship. Instead they huddled below decks their eyes fixed on the glowing screens of their advanced Aegis Fire Control System. The big 14 inch guns of its distant ancestor had been forsaken for deadly new Harpoon missiles. The AA guns that once bristled from the superstructure of the old ship were now SM-2MR Block IV radar homing SAMs. Yet one thing remained the same, the destroyer was a ship of war pledged to bring her wrath and fire to any who might threaten or oppose the interests of her nation on the high seas. The forms and shapes of the ships