Kirov Saga Men of War

Chapter 10



Doctor Zolkin was the first senior officer on the scene, arriving behind the two Seamen and a 2nd Class Petty Officer. There were a cluster of three or four other sailors outside the hatch, and he quickly shooed them away. Peering into the cabin, he saw the men ready to lift another man from the cot, and stepped quickly inside, closing the hatch behind him.

“Leave him there, please,” he said, stepping to the side of the cot and seeing the man’s limp body. One look told him he was not merely asleep or unconscious. He opened an eyelid, saw the dark weal and purple bruise marks on the man’s neck, checked for a pulse there and noted the stain on his pants in the groin area. It was Voloshin, the man who had come to him a few weeks earlier with nightmare visions of a Japanese plane flying right through him. Zolkin had prescribed a good meal and bed rest, with a couple of aspirin infused with a mild tranquilizer, and sent the man to this very room on the officer’s deck for some peace and quiet. That was weeks ago, but Voloshin had come back. An orderly had been cleaning the empty rooms and found it difficult to enter here. Forcing the hatch open he saw Voloshin hanging from a high welded metal hook on the wall. He was stone cold dead.

“When did you find him?”

“Just ten minutes ago, sir. He was there.” The Petty officer pointed to the hook, and Zolkin nodded gravely.

“Very well, fetch a stretcher and take him down to the sick bay. I’ll have to do an autopsy.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And I think it would be best if you do not dwell on this in the ranks,” the Doctor admonished. “We have all had a hard ride of late, and the men are worn out.”

“It wasn’t only that, sir.”

“Oh?”

“Voloshin got some bad news today.”

“What news?”

“His wife, sir. He called home, but no one answered. The second time there was another man on the phone. He asked for her, but the man said there was no one by that name there.”

“I see…” Zolkin picked up his emergency medical kit. “And you think Voloshin believed his wife was seeing this other man?”

The two matros seamen shifted uncomfortably now and the other man continued. “It’s not that, sir. Voloshin moved his family here to Vladivostok two weeks before we made our farewell voyage from Severomorsk. He had a small apartment right here in Vladivostok—in the Leninskiy District. We went there with him yesterday but…”

“But what?”

“There was no apartment there, Doctor. He had building number twenty, but the numbers were all wrong: nineteen, twenty-one, twenty-three.”

“You were on the right side of the street?”

“Of course, sir. But there were no even numbers, not anywhere on the street. It was very strange, sir. We looked up the address for his phone number, and it was way over on the other side of town, number 20 Partisanskiy Prospekt. But his apartment building was on Nevel’skogo Street. He was very upset about it, sir.”

“I can imagine he was.”

Zolkin wanted to think that the men had simply gone to the wrong address. After all, Voloshin had just moved to a new town thousands of miles from the cold north of Severomorsk. It may have been easy to become confused in the unfamiliar streets and neighborhoods of the city here. Yet, the more he thought about it the more he realized that the man would not likely forget the place of his new home, and the new life he hoped to start here.

“Very well, gentlemen. I’ll look into this. See that he is taken to sick bay at once.” He went to the linen cabinet and took out a clean sheet, covering Voloshin’s body with an air of solemnity. He was reaching for his medical bag again when someone stepped through the hatch, a tall officer in a gray overcoat with silver buttons and Captain’s stripes on his cuff. The man took a quick look at the scene and fixed his attention on the Doctor, knowing he would be the senior man present.

“What happened here?”

Zolkin gave him a quick glance. He did not know the man and so he stood formally and introduced himself. “Doctor Dmitri Zolkin, Ship’s Physician.”

“This man is ill?”

“I’m sorry, sir, but who might I be speaking to?”

The other man seemed annoyed, his eyes narrowed and a haughty air about him. “Volkov,” he said dryly. “Captain Volkov, Naval Intelligence.”

“Yes, well it’s Captain Zolkin here as well.” The Doctor smiled, extending a hand, which Volkov shook without much warmth. “There,” Zolkin continued. “Now that the Captains have tipped their hats, I think we would be more comfortable discussing this in my office. These men will have some work to do. Would you walk with me, Captain Volkov?” He gestured to the open door, and Volkov frowned, then stepped outside.

“You haven’t answered my question, Doctor,” he said as they started down the corridor.

“Was the man ill? No, Captain. The man was quite dead.”

“Dead?”

“Unfortunately so. From my initial observations it appears to be a suicide, but of course I will complete a formal autopsy and make a full report.”

“Were those other men involved?”

“No, no. They were just orderlies assigned to clean the officer’s quarters. They found him here.”

“This man was an officer?”

“In fact, he was not. That was Able Seaman Voloshin. Apparently he had some family problems—bad news.”

“What was he doing here?”

“It will most likely be a long story, Captain.”

“I see…Well I will want the full report, Doctor.”

“You will want the report? Are you a new command level officer assigned to the ship, Mister Volkov?”

“I told you. I am with Naval Intelligence, Inspectorate Division.”

“Well I am not in the habit of filing my medical briefs with the Naval Inspectorate. I thought you people were mostly concerned with ship’s systems and weapons inventories.”

“I’m afraid we concern ourselves with a great deal more, Doctor, though I can’t say that is a matter I need to discuss with you. Simply file your brief in the medical log, and of course I will want a complete copy of all those files as well.”

Zolkin raised his eyebrows. “I will hate to inconvenience you, Captain, but the logs were damaged during the accident. I’m not sure if you heard. Yes, nothing seemed to function properly and the technicians haven’t had time to get round to my office yet with a new computer. I’ve kept a few manual records, of course, for all prescriptions and drugs issued from the inventory. But there have been no formal computer logs, beyond documenting those men lost in the accident and other injuries sustained by the crew.”

They paused at a ladder, and it was clear that Volkov was not happy. “No medical logs?” he said, a note of recrimination in his voice. “This is most irregular, Doctor. In fact I may go so far as to say it was a dereliction of duty.”

“I can assure you, Captain, where the notion of duty entered my mind it was entirely to be of service to the men lined up outside my sick bay door. Of course I made basic notations in my medical journal, which I would be happy to release to the inspectorate upon approval by a ranking command level officer.”

“I am such an officer, Doctor. Don’t trouble yourself by going to the Admiral.”

“You are now in the command structure for this ship? When did you transfer in, Volkov?”

“Don’t be stupid. I haven’t transferred in. I’m here to complete a thorough investigation on this matter, and I will expect the full cooperation of every man aboard, particularly from the officers.”

“Oh, I will be very happy to satisfy you, Captain, but around here we do things by the book. I’ll need approval from ether Captain Karpov or the Admiral. After that you can spend all the time you wish trying to interpret my miserable writing scrawl. But then again, Physicians are notorious for that, yes?”

Zolkin smiled, gesturing to the ladder well. “After you, sir.”

Volkov clenched his jaw, then relented and started down the ladder, flashing an angry glance at Zolkin as he went.



* * *



Admiral Volsky had finished his main meeting with Pacific Fleet Commander Boris Abramov, clearing the way for his takeover of that position. Now the two men sat in a well appointed office at the Fleet Headquarters building at Fokino, a small closed town above a small inlet some twenty-five miles southeast of the main harbor at Vladivostok. Volsky set down his teacup, staring out over the blue rooftops of the town to the small islands in the bay and wondering if he would ever get back to a place like Tahiti before he died.

“So that is the situation, Leonid,” said Abramov. “One old Slava class cruiser, five rusting destroyers, a few frigates, ten submarines with so many leaks we issue the men chewing gum so they can have something handy to plug them when needed. Thank God they sent us Kuznetsov, and now your ship. The fleet is a bit of a mess, particularly with the present situation down south in the Sea of Japan.”

“Where is Kuznetsov?”

“Up north at the moment, running drills with her Mig-29F Squadron. We’d still be flying the older SU-33s if India hadn’t placed that order in 2012. That gave us enough economy of scale to roll out thirty-six Migs for Kuznetsov. It must be getting lonely up in Severomorsk with Kirov and our only fleet carrier here now.”

“They just commissioned the Leonid Brezhnev. He’ll stand in for us there. And they get most of the new Orlan Class ships. But what’s this business with Japan? We must talk about that now. We’ve been incommunicado for the last five or six weeks and missed out on all the 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 their own internal politics, they are very fond of also sticking them in everyone else’s business.”

“Just like the Americans,” Abramov shrugged. “It’s a new world, Leonid. It’s China’s world too, particularly here in the Pacific. We’re just tired old men watching over a few tired old ships up here. China is calling the shots in the Pacific now, as we both know all too well. They didn’t like it when Japan modified those new helicopter destroyers and then put a squadron of F-35s on them.”

Abramov was referring to the 19000T class destroyer, now reclassified as light escort carriers and the largest surface combatants in the present Japanese Navy at a length of 248 meters and 27,000 tons fully loaded. Japan’s constitution had prohibited the deployment of nuclear weapons, strategic strike bombers and attack aircraft carriers, but the naval planners had argued that the new ships were defensive in nature. Then they modified them to allow for takeoff and landing of the JF-35B Lightning Joint Strike Fighter, a small squadron of only seven planes to augment the helicopters carried by the ships. If that was not enough of a provocation, naming their last two of four units in the class Kaga and Akagi after their old WWII era fleet carriers did little to comfort the Chinese.

It was the same old story again, as nations quibbled over limits on things like weapons systems, ship classes, and naval deployments, and haggled over deserted islands off each other’s coasts, mostly for the oil and gas rights in the seabed beneath them. The world of 2021 was slowly starving for energy. Oil and gas had carried the weight of development into the 21st century, but there had been no wide scale deployment of a reliable energy source that was not nuclear to stand in for the rapidly depleting resources in the petroleum industry. Nations were getting hungry now, their economies needing constant production to remain viable, and competition for any new oil and gas fields was bordering on fierce. The military forces of many key regional powers had now become oil and gas protection services, for the wheels had to always turn, and they were starting to slow down again, in the factories of China and on the freeways of the U.S.

“The Japanese Navy now outclasses our own fleet Pacific Fleet,” said Abramov. “They have these two light carriers, then two more smaller DDH type ships in their Hyuga Class, ten excellent new guided missile destroyers and another thirty DD and DE class warships—not to mention the sixteen submarines. Yes, some of those older destroyers date back to the 1980s like our Udaloys, but they have been well maintained. We’re still scraping the rust off our older ships to see what we can get seaworthy. I managed to get three old KGB Krivak class border guard frigates out to train with Kuznetsov, if you can believe it.”

“Krivaks? We’ve been selling off the best of those refits to the Indian Navy. Now I suppose we will wish we had them for ourselves.”

“So as you can see, Japan will be no pushover.”

“You will get no argument from me on that point,” said Volsky. “I am well aware of the capabilities of the Japanese navy.” He could, of course, never tell Abramov what he really meant with that.

“Yes, well their navy now outnumbers us almost three to one here in the Pacific, and without ships like Kirov and Kuznetsov, we’ve become little more than a coastal defense force, and a bunch of submarine tenders.”

“That’s a good looking new ship off our port side at the berthing,” said Volsky.

“Yes, the Orlan will help a little, and we just received the fast frigate Admiral Golovko as well, but without Kirov, this is still a three week fleet, if we could even last that long.”

“I’m afraid it may take a little longer than that to get Kirov back in full fighting trim,” Volsky sighed. “It was a difficult journey, my friend.” Volsky lowered his voice now. “I’ll tell you about it one day, but for now I have Kapustin sniffing around over there, and a lot of questions to answer.”

“Kapustin is a bureaucrat,” said Abramov, “very thorough too. He’ll work sixteen hour days, and no amount of paperwork will intimidate him. But it’s not Kapustin you should be worried about. He brought along Volkov, and that man is old school Naval Intelligence, sour as a lemon. He’ll be a pain in your neck in no time at all.”

Volsky nodded. Then slid the computer pad back over to Abramov and leaned heavily over the desk, his brow furrowed, eyes reflecting real worry beneath his heavy brows. “Boris…There’s a storm coming, and a very big one I fear. An American submarine snuck up on us when we were finishing up exercises in the Pacific, and we almost put a Shkval up their ass. Things are wound up tighter than a spring, and anything could set them off in this climate. Yes, there’s a storm coming, and if we can’t find some way to prevent it, then we had better be ready for it. Only this time… this time if the missiles start flying I must tell you I don’t hold out much hope for the world.”

The memory of Halifax Harbor was clear in his mind now, and a dark and ominous shadow on his soul.