Men of War (2013) by John Schettler Page A

we will be living in the world he
helped build the moment we set foot off this ship. Yet if Orlov had that jacket
with him, we could learn that more things have changed than I expected. Its
very existence in the past would have to cause a major aberration. Computer
circuitry found in the 1940s could change a great deal!”
    “Now
you have me wondering what else has changed.” Karpov had a distant, empty
look on his face. “But even if they did find it, they wouldn’t know what it
was, Fedorov.”
    “Oh,
there were some very clever men back then, Captain. I would not be so sure.
This is very disturbing news.” He gazed at the distant land form of Primorskiy Province
as it reached south to Vladivostok. “We’ll make port in the next few hours. We
will soon see the peak of Eagle’s Nest Hill and the shores of Golden Horn Bay.
Count on both still being there. But who knows whether they still have that old
WWII Soviet sub on display at the Naval Museum, or if the Oceanarium was still
built here in the city.”
    “I
won’t miss either one, but the food at Zolotoy Drakon was always good, and so was the sushi at
the Yamato Bar on Okeanskiy Prospekt .”
    They
both smiled at that. “ Yamato Sushi Bar?” said Fedorov. “I guess the
legend lives on after all, even if the ship is now on the bottom of the sea. At
least we didn’t put it there.”
    “Oh,
but I tried very hard to sink that ship.” Karpov wagged a finger at him. “It
was a tough old warthog, that one.”
     Fedorov
looked at his watch. “About three more hours. Then I suppose we learn whether
home is still there for us, and what kind of a world we are living in now.”

 
     
     
    Chapter 8
     
      Vladivostok was one of only four major ports serving the vast expanse of the Russian
Republic. Sometimes referred to as the San Francisco of Mother Russia, the city
is located at the tip of a long peninsula, clustered on the fringes of the
beautiful Amursky Bay, where long new elegant bridges
connected the isthmus to Frunzenskiy Island to the
south and formed a kind of Golden Gate of their own where ships pass beneath
them to eventually enter the “Golden Horn Harbor.” And like San Francisco, it
also had a thriving and fast growing Chinese community mixed in with the city’s
700,000 residents, their shops and restaurants creating little china towns here
and there near the harbor district.
    Like
many cities in Russia, it suffered from pollution, a reputation for corruption,
and a struggling economy that saw over 25% of its citizens living below the
poverty line. Those who could get jobs in the industrial sector there would
often wait long months for a meager paycheck, and others became self-styled
tour guides serving a slowly growing tourism industry. That said, the city and
its vital port remained a crucial strategic hub for Russia in the 21st century,
and the Pacific Fleet still berthed its guided missile cruisers, destroyers and
submarines in the region, though all too few.
    One Slava Class cruiser, the Varyag , would now bow and yield its
crown as the Pacific Fleet’s Flagship to the newly arriving battlecruiser Kirov .
There were a few aging destroyers, four in the old Udaloy Class, three Delta
III submarines, an old Oscar , five Akula’s and even some rusting Kilo class diesel subs tied off at the wharfs and
piers of the submarine base at Pavlovskoye , south of
Fokino where the Naval Headquarters had been located. One new sub, the sleek
new nuclear attack submarine Kazan was perhaps the most formidable boat
assigned to the undersea fleet based there. It was hidden in the old
underground submarine pens that had been dug through the north cape of Pavlovshoye Bay.
    The
navy rolled out the red carpet for Kirov when the big battlecruiser
arrived, just as Karpov said it would. There were honor guards, a marching
band, a flag ceremony and a lot of military rituals. Admiral Volsky had the
entire ship’s compliment out in their dress whites, and he played up