CARRIER 5: MAELSTROM By Keith Douglass

possible.

Besides, he wanted to watch the unfolding battle from here, where he

could see it, feel it with his own senses, instead of as some kind of

fantastic light display on a computer screen.

“There … could be some danger, Admiral.”

“This is war, Dmitri. There is always danger.” Something occurred to

him, a sudden thought. “How are you settling in as air wing commander?”

“Well enough, sir. I wish Captain Terekhov were still here.”

“He will be. His signal this morning stated that he ejected safely and

had been recovered by one of our frigates. But you believe you can handle his

duties in CIC?”

Again, the man’s tongue flicked across his lips. “Yes, Admiral.”

“Good.” Khenkin turned, staring toward the south once again. “Very

good. Captain Lazerov is an excellent Combat Direction Officer. Listen to

him. You will do well.”

Khenkin felt strangely at peace. He’d not expected that, not at all, for

he could feel the weight of Russia’s imperial destiny riding above his small

task force like the ponderous mass of thunderheads above the steppes just

before a sudden storm. But the knowledge that the Americans were now at last

rushing headlong toward a final confrontation with the Red Banner Northern

Fleet was almost reassuring.

All his life, Khenkin had been a Communist. During the coup of 1991,

when the dedicated Communist cadre of the KGB and Politburo had briefly–and

ineptly–seized power in Moscow, he, along with most of the other military

officers of his generation, had watched from the sidelines. The coup plotters

had meant well, but their timing, their poor planning, had betrayed both their

haste and lack of understanding of the forces that were shaping the Soviet

Union at the time. Instead he, and many others, had waited, knowing that the

restructured, so-called democratic government would do nothing to put bread in

people’s bellies, or provide work, or stabilize spiraling prices. The

ordinary workers of Russia and the other republics couldn’t care less who

their rulers were. All they wanted was stability … and food on the grocery

shelves.

And that, of course, had been why the marshals and generals had so easily

taken power in the months and years that followed, how the Communists once

again found themselves leading the greatest power on Earth.

But it had occurred to Khenkin that he was about to be a very small part

of a kind of scientific demonstration. If, as the Marxists claimed, Communism

evolved naturally from capitalism, it was because there was a kind of law of

survival of the fittest that governed the way nations and governments changed,

adapted, and grew. Many of his countrymen felt still that Communism had been

exposed as a bankrupt philosophy by the events of 199 1, that the return of

the generals to power was a kind of death rattle, a spasm soon extinguished.

Which was right? Khenkin himself did not know. The devotion he’d once

felt for the Communist Party had been tarnished by the aftermath of the Coup

of ’91; by now it had very nearly rusted away, corroded by the continuing lies

and hypocrisy that were a part of day-to-day life in the Soviet Union under

the CPSU.

Soyuz. Union. Was it the wave of the future or a dying cult? If the

Americans and their Jefferson triumphed this day, there would be no resurgence

of the old Soviet Union. If Soyuz won, there would be nothing to stop the

complete subjugation of Scandinavia and, very soon after that, of all of

Europe. The technology, the food, the industries engulfed by the victorious

Soviet armies would fuel a renaissance of the Soviet economy and make the

Rodina truly mistress … no, Mother of the world.

It was like a return to older, crueler days, to the ordeal of trial by

combat. Two ships, their escorts, their men, their machines, pitted against

each other in a battle to decide the fate of Europe and the world for the next

one thousand years. The thought was at once thrilling and terrifying.

For Khenkin, the best thing, the only thing to do was to leave the battle

where it belonged, in the hands and minds of the people who would fight it.