Kirov Saga Men of War - By John Schettler Page 0,1

names and one by one they fell out of active service.

Admiral Lazarev sat in the Bay below Russian Naval Pacific Fleet Headquarters at Fokino near Vladivostok, and Admiral Nakhimov sat in Severodinsk. The last of the four, battlecruiser Pyotr Velikiy, or Peter the Great, remained in active service into the year 2015 when it was also retired. The dread battlecruisers were finally off the world stage and no longer a threat until the year 2018 when the new Russia resurrected its promise to refit and reactivate all four of these formidable ships by the year 2020. They made the deadline, but produced only one such ship, built from the bones of all the others that had come before it. And to honor the original class they gave that ship back its old name and called it Kirov.

In that year, forty-four years after its original design took shape and form, the new updated battlecruiser Kirov returned to the northern seas, making a brief training cruise in the year 2020 and then taking a proud place at the head of the Soviet Northern Fleet as its new flagship. By that time, Commodore Yates was now Admiral Yates, a man of sixty-four years, yet young for his age with just a touch of gray at each Temple and the tall sturdy frame with sharp dark eyes that seemed to notice everything when he entered a room. Yates was now the senior officer in charge of the group known as the Watch, one of many such men and women scattered throughout the world in key positions still keeping a vigilant eye on world events.

2020 had been a jarring year. Kirov was back. That was the great worry once again. Now that the ship had returned to active duty service with new electronics, engines, and deadly new weapons, Kirov once again posed a grave threat to the sea lanes Western navies and their vast fleets of commerce ships depended on. But it was not what Kirov might do to a present-day ship in the year 2021 that so bedeviled the Watch this time. It was what the ship might do to the navies of an earlier time, for now this shadowy group was convinced that this second rebirth of the dread battlecruiser was indeed the ship their founders had come to call Geronimo.

Yates knew that, one day, on some mission, perhaps a routine cruise for training or simply to show the flag at distant ports of the world, this ship would simply vanish. What it would do to the history of the world after that moment would make all the difference between survival and the utter destruction of the entire human race. So just like it's older brother before it, the ship could never sail outside the purview of the Royal Navy. A submarine was assigned to intercept and shadow the Russian battlecruiser at every moment, and a special emergency communications device was installed on that sub that would immediately signal level one critical alert should the sub ever lose contact with the ship. The Royal Navy, and the men of the Watch, wanted to know the exact moment in time that the ship was first displaced to a distant era where now legendary figures like Admiral John Tovey and men like Alan Turing of Bletchley Park had first grappled with the deep mystery of the ship's sudden appearance in the middle of World War II. Now, at long last, they were to have their answer.

On a late summer night in July the telephone was ringing in a lonesome and largely unknown office of Royal Navy Headquarters at the Maritime Warfare Centre, Whale Island, Portsmouth. This was the old Coastal Command Headquarters that was eventually expanded to take over joint operations for air/naval operations for the United Kingdom and related NATO affairs. Home to a staff of 1600 men and women, the main buildings were simple four story offices with long rows of windows and little architectural appeal, but when something really dicey went down, the deep underground secure bunkers were in operation to coordinate events, as they soon were that day when the alert first came in.

Admiral Yates was in his office, working up fleet assignments for the new Queen Elizabeth battlegroup assembling for deployment. He would have two of the newer Type 45 destroyers in Daring and Dragon, the first of the new Type 26 Global Combat Frigates, Defiance, and two more older Type 23s in Lancaster and Somerset. The new Astute class