Kirov Saga Men of War - By John Schettler Page 0,51

you decided you wanted to test a nuclear warhead while I was sleeping? Why? It is never done. It is completely unheard of, and you will lose your command, your rank, and may even be dismissed from the service.”

“I’ve already lost my command and rank once over the matter,” said Karpov. “The second time should be easier.”

“But don’t you understand?” Volsky held out an open palm as he explained. “Your action in defense of the ship, in a real combat scenario, is one thing. But remember, they must never know this ship ever fired a single round in anger. What would we have been firing at, eh? Try to stack that cup on the top of the plates and the whole thing comes tumbling down. The notion that we simply wanted to test a warhead won’t fly either. What do I tell Kapustin then—that we were firing at the American navy in 1941?”

“Of course not, Admiral, but I think this is our only solution. I’ll take the blame. It’s mine and it is only right that I should pay for it. I gave the order to Martinov, told him to reset the Coded Switch Set Controller, and I fired the MOS-III. Tell them I was convinced a real test fire was necessary, that I had asked for permission to do so and it was denied, in fact expressly forbidden, and then I’ll tell them I took it upon myself to countermand those orders while you were indisposed. That’s what happened. It’s our only way out of this mess.”

Now Karpov’s mind was truly working from within his old rotten center, where scheming and subterfuge were the order of the day. He knew men like Kapustin and Volkov, and he knew they were going to dig, and dig until they found something, and he explained it that way to the Admiral now, in the cold logic of the world he had fought his way through successfully all these many years.

“We have to give them something, sir. Give a dog his bone. Otherwise they will dig until they find one. Right now they are very suspicious. They are looking for possible sabotage. They can smell that something is wrong here, and these are a pair of bloodhounds. They want blood, Admiral. If we make it seem that our cover-up has been designed to hide what I did, then it just may divert them. I can tell you right now that if Volkov gets wind of it, he’ll rub his palms together and hump my ass for all he’s worth. Don’t you see? If we give them something, improbable as it may seem, it could be the only thing that stops them from discovering the real impossible truth.”

Volsky stared down at his Chinese food and then rubbed his weary brow, thinking. He looked at Karpov. “I see the logic of what you are suggesting, but you know what it means for your career. It’s going to raise a stink, one way or another, but I suppose it may be our only way out of this.”

Fedorov had been listening, with some anguish, to the whole conversation, and now he spoke up. “I hate to say it, Admiral, but Captain Karpov’s head may not even be enough to satisfy these men if they discover what I think they may in the next eight hours.”

“Discover what, Fedorov?”

“The records of the thirty-six men on the list of casualties they got from Doctor Zolkin were not destroyed by the accident as we claim, nor were they misplaced by the Naval Personnel Division. I think they’re going to discover that those men never existed.”

Volsky gave him an incredulous look. “Never existed?”

“Don’t you understand? Those men boarded the ship in Severomorsk and came from the homeland we left all those weeks ago, but this is a different world now. We changed things. In this world those men might not have ever been born, so I don’t think you’ll be writing those letters after all, Admiral.”

“We did this?”

“I believe so, sir. We changed the history of WWII. Remember, I had a good many books on that war. I’ve studied it all my life. I purged any volume in the ship’s library that related the history as we knew it, but forgive me, I kept certain books so I could see if anything had changed. As it turns out, three books I have were never even published in this world. That set me on a real track to find out what had changed.