Kirov Saga Men of War - By John Schettler Page 0,43
news.”
“That was quite a hat trick,” Admiral. “If not for the fact that NATO staff are getting flayed alive for failing to detect your transit to the Pacific I think you would be the one being skinned. Suchkov was very upset. How did you manage it?”
“Suchkov is so old he can’t even think straight any longer,” said Volsky with a laugh. “He has nothing better to do than huff and puff before they put him in dry dock for good. We are the navy now, my friend. You, me and Tamilov in the Black Sea. God only knows who they will appoint to take my place up north. Suchkov can sit in Moscow and write his memoirs now.”
“You and Tamilov can run things, Leonid. I’m afraid I am not well—heart problems, and the doctors want to do some surgery.”
“You’ll pull through,” Volsky encouraged, but he could see that Abramov was also on his last voyage, tired, pale and with that rheumy eyed look that spoke of too much time on the seas of life.
“As for how we slipped by, that is our little secret. I have some very good people aboard Kirov. We had a lot of trouble with the electronics when Orel blew up, but we managed to get a few things running from ship’s stores. I put my best people on it, and we used a new ECM package that we unfortunately lost in that last missile misfire incident I told you about earlier. But while we had it up and running it was enough to get us through the northern route undetected. That and some very bad weather and thick cloud cover.”
“Amazing. I would have thought they would have had three submarines on you the moment you deployed.”
“Perhaps they did, Boris, but that was a very large detonation when Orel went up. Who knows what it did to their electronics? I knew that the whole place was going to be crawling with planes, ships and helicopters within twenty-four hours. We made a cursory investigation, found nothing—not even Slava—and so I wanted to get my ship as far from that area as possible. NATO spent the next three days searching south of Jan Mayen, yes? I went northwest, and that’s the last thing they might have expected.”
“I still can hardly believe it. You lost contact with Slava too?”
“Must have been our faulty equipment.”
“Radar, Sonar, Radio?”
“Have you ever tried to listen to the deep ocean after an underwater nuclear explosion?”
“It was nuclear?”
“We believed as much, and given the threat of radiation I wanted to get my ship to safer climes. I assumed Slava would do the same and return home. Those were her orders, mine were to transit to the Pacific, and since I was the one who issued those orders, I decided to follow them.” Volsky smiled.
“They didn’t even find you with satellites, at least not that we know of.”
“Good point, Admiral. We don’t know what they really knew about it. For all we know they could have been watching me from up there the whole time and now they are making this media fuss to simply cover their tracks. In any case, I am here, the ship is here, and once he’s been patched up, Kirov will put some backbone into the Pacific Fleet again.”
Unlike their Western counterparts, ships were masculine in the Russian Navy. The Russians couldn’t think of anything with the sheer raw power and hard lines of a battlecruiser as feminine.
“But tell me about this trouble in the Sea of Japan.” Volsky folded his arms, watching the white haired Abramov reach for a computer pad and slide it his way across the desk top.
“There you are,” he said. “I’ve poked at it long enough. See if you can make any sense of it.”
Volsky read the headline, thinking of the newspaper they had found on Malus Island with an inner shiver. It read: CHINA PROTESTS NEW JAPANESE NAVAL MANEUVERS, an old story in the Pacific, but one that was increasingly occupying the front pages of news outlets across the world.”
“Another protest,” he sighed.
“More than that, Leonid,” Abramov cautioned. “We have satellites too. The Chinese have been moving a lot of equipment around in the last few months—a lot of mobile rocket launchers. They’ve been rattling their saber again over the latest election results in Taiwan. They did not wish to see a president elected there who was so firmly set on Taiwan’s independence.”
“Yes, for a nation always wagging their fingers at people who interfere in