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  The three NKVD soldiers were down and out, nice and quiet like, just as Seventeen wanted it. Then the three British commandos quickly removed the fallen soldiers’ jackets and hats, and mounted the truck in their place.

  Haselden tapped lightly near the back of the driver’s cabin and the engine growled as the truck started down the road. He settled in with Sutherland and Sergeant Terry.

  “Those three back there will have a long walk home,” he whispered. “And a good long sleep until they wake up. Good that we didn’t have to break any necks.”

  “Right, Jock,” said Sutherland. “Allies and all. But where is this lot going?”

  “We’ll find that out soon enough, Davey Boy. For now, get the mud off your boots, slip into these nice warm coats and put on those Ushankas. We’re proper NKVD soldiers now. Enjoy the scenery.”

  “Yeah? Well what’s the plan, Jock?”

  “We wait a bit. It looks like ten miles to the next river. There’s a small town on the coast there as I read it, a place called Sulak. South is Makhachkala, another fifteen miles. This column won’t do much more than thirty miles an hour on these roads. It’s 10:40 hours now, so I’d say we’ll probably get down there before midnight, and perhaps they’ll stop.”

  “Then what? That cigarette trick of yours was handy, but I counted eleven more men forward of this truck, including our driver. Lucky for us there’s no window in the back of that cab.”

  “No worries. We can play this one of two ways now. We could work our way forward and find this man before we reach town, but that won’t be easy unless they stop again, and any slip up would blow our cover and start a row here. The other thing is to slip away just as we reach the outskirts of town. Then we work our way in under cover of these hats and jackets, looking all proper and such. We find this man in town and try to get him before dawn.”

  “Right,” said Sutherland.

  “Assuming they stop here.” Sergeant Terry wasn’t one for words, but he squeezed that out from beneath his thick mustache, eyeing Haselden in the dark.

  “The Sergeant has a point,” said Haselden. “Well if they don’t stop, and roll right on through town, then they’re probably bound for Baku. We won’t know that one way or another until we get to Makhachkala and see what they do.”

  “So we can’t very well slip away before then,” said Sutherland. “If they push on to Baku we’d be stuck. We’ll lose them for sure.”

  “So we stay with the column,” Haselden concluded. “It’ll be dangerous. If they do stop and that officer comes mucking about we may have to act, and quickly. Eleven men or no, we’ll have to make our play.”

  “In that event, let’s just hope they stop somewhere nice and secluded. I’d hate to start a brawl in the middle of town square.” Sutherland shook his head, the difficulty of their situation apparent. “Alright, suppose we pull this off and we do get this man. What then?”

  “We get him east to the coast. If we’re in a settled area we look for a boat, any boat, and head north up the coast to that finger of land where Corporal Severn is waiting. Still packing that wireless in one piece, Sergeant?”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Good enough. We get this man, call up Corporal Severn with the swift boats and have him come south to meet us if things get hot. Then we get across to Ft. Shevchenko as fast as we can.”

  “Sounds easy enough when you say it like that, Jock. Yet as you can see, things happen. This column could meet up with another. There might be a full company of NKVD at the other end of this road for all we know. We go in undercover and suppose we run into some hothead officer. What then?”

  “If it comes to that then we’ll have to rely on our wits, stealth and the weapons we’re still carrying. As I see the odds now, the three of us should be able to handle the men in this column. After all, we’re 30 Commando.”

  “Here, here,” said Sergeant Terry. “Wish I had a battalion of the lads with us now. Then it wouldn’t matter what we run into.”

  “If wishes were horses, Sergeant Terry.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  They settled into silence, each man turning over the situation in his mind. For the moment they had a breathing space for a little welcome rest off the damp earth, but they knew it would not be long before they would have to answer all the questions they asked one another in the dark. Something told Haselden that Lieutenant Sutherland was right. A smile and a cigarette wouldn’t do the trick again. Now it was down to pistols, knives, and the two Stens.

  Chapter 14

  Fedorov stepped onto the plank leading up to the gangway, a wary look in his eye. The boson’s mate gave him a glance, then saluted when he saw the decorations on his chest and the obvious insignia of a high ranking officer on his cap.

  It had been a long and tiresome journey by rail south to the Caspian. The land seemed to stretch on and on in an endless wasteland of parched, tractless earth. In places the terrain was so untraveled that the rail line failed and they had to detrain to look for transport by truck. But over two days time they managed to reached their destination on the northernmost shore of the Caspian Sea at a town called Guryev, renamed Atyrau in the early 1990s.

  The city was situated at the mouth of the Ural River, sitting right astride the border of Europe and Asia. The muddy brown water of the river wound through West Kazakhstan from the north in a long dull ribbon to eventually find the sea. Over the years the settlement became famous for its fish, but just off shore lay vast latent fields of undiscovered oil that would later become the Tengiz and Kashagan superfields. Decades into the future, big oil conglomerates would delve deep into the waters for the light sweet crude and lucrative gas fields, and Ben Flack would hold sway on platform Medusa at the edge of a growing conflict over energy supplies. Yet at that moment the town and its harbor on the sea seemed a lonesome and forlorn place.

  In recent months, the threat posed by the advancing German Army had seen the arrival of long lines of barges and partially submerged cisterns of oil from Baku towed by commercial tugs. The Soviets were desperately trying to cap the threatened oil wells of Baku and transport the rigs and other equipment, along with as much oil as possible, to other shores far from the German advance.

  When they arrived in town Fedorov learned that the Germans had finally cut the rail and road connections between Astrakhan and Baku, and he knew the way south would now mean a hazardous journey by sea. There was a small flotilla of commercial ships still making regular runs to Baku, but the only ship in port the day they arrived was the Amerika, an old oil tanker that would leave the following morning.

  The quays and wharves were littered with rusty barrels, old sections of weathered pipe, dilapidated drilling equipment, and abandoned vehicles that seemed as though it had been washed ashore by the ebb and flow of the tides of war. Handfuls of stevedores and dock workers rummaged through the scrap, and occasionally a column of three or four trucks would arrive to haul things away. The smaller boats in the harbor seemed useless for what they had planned, old rotting wood fishing boats that seemed the sole livelihood of lean, haggard men trying to scratch out a living for their families, so they had no choice but to board the tanker.

  “I did not expect the port to be so desolate,” said Fedorov to Troyak as they boarded the ship. “The war has not yet reached this place, but it is very near. The struggle for Stalingrad is still underway, and the German Army is deep in the Caucasus. Now we set sail for lands inside the war zone itself. We will have to get south of Kizlyar to avoid the Germans, and this tanker stops at Makhachkala before going on to Baku. It’s our one chance.”

  “Zykov has been chatting with a few locals,” said Troyak. “They say the Germans have mounted occasional air strikes on the shipping lanes to the south.”

  “Yes, they tried to cut these supply lines by any means, and sunk a number of ships. This ship here, the Amerika, will be sunk in a few weeks time off Astrakhan by a German air strike—that is if the history I studied before we departed still holds
true. After what I experienced back at Ilanskiy I have no idea what to really expect now.”

  The more Fedorov thought of those narrow back stairs at the inn, the more he worried. It was strange how he was affected, literally walking down those steps to another time, and then having his experience confirmed so dramatically by the sudden reappearance of Mironov. That was more than coincidence, he thought. Here we are, officers and crew off the battlecruiser Kirov, now Argonauts in time, and I meet the very man that ship was named for! It was still astounding to consider, or even believe, yet the memory of Mironov’s eyes, the face of young Sergei Kirov, was burned in his memory. He recalled the overwhelming temptation to say something to the man concerning his fate, years hence, on that dark day in December when he would die at the hands of an assassin. Did he say too much?

  Here he was on an impossible mission in time to try and find Gennadi Orlov because he suspected the man may have fatally changed the course of events, and then this happens! The thought came to him again, even as it had in that single pulse pounding moment when Mironov was brought in by Zykov—what if this was the key moment in time? What if Orlov was nothing more than a big red herring meant only to bring him here to this place, to that darkened stairwell, and face to face with Sergei Kirov?

  Before he knew what he was saying the words blurted out, an urgent whisper in the young man’s ear. ‘Do not go to St. Petersburg in 1934! Beware Stalin! Beware the 30th of December! Go with God. Go and live, Mironov. Live!’

  What have I done? Fedorov turned that question over and over again in his mind now. I meet one of the most important figures in modern Russian history, a man of the Great Revolution, and I say something that could change everything if Mironov were to ever remember it and act on my stupid advice. What was I thinking? Here I am trying to find a way to prevent that terrible future we saw, but we have been fumbling in the dark all this time. We really don’t know what we must do, or change. Could this be the key?

  What if Kirov remembers me; remembers what I whispered to him at the top of those stairs? What if he does not go to St. Petersburg? Would Josef Stalin still find a way to remove him? Would time find a way, just like all those crewmen on the ship who ended up never being born? A man like Stalin was such an overweening shadow on the face of history that it seemed impossible to think his fate might be changed. But what if Kirov survived…What if?

  He thought about that for a good long while as they settled into a damp crew compartment on the Amerika. If Kirov survived how might his life and influence have changed things? He was very close to Stalin, almost like a brother. Yet Stalin resented his popularity, and his influence. It was clear that Stalin used Kirov’s assassination to launch his great purge and remove thousands of potential rivals and opponents. As many as a million may have died, and surely he would not leave Kirov alive under similar circumstances. Yet if Kirov did live….If he managed to remain a powerful and influential figure, what might Soviet Russia look like once freed from the blight of Stalin’s influence? Could Russia survive the rigors of WWII and still prevail without the ‘Man of Steel,’ Stalin, at the helm of that ship of state?

  It was all too much for him to grasp at the moment, and Fedorov soon found that the mystery of that back stairwell was more than enough to challenge him. He had tried to describe the event as a rift in time, a tear in the fabric of spacetime that seemed to connect two points on the continuum, two years—1908 and 1942. The fact that his regression to 1908 brought him to the very moment of the impact at Tunguska was very telling, and he still suspected that that strange occurrence on June 30, 1908 could have caused the rift to form. The stairwell at the inn must have just been perfectly positioned to allow one to pass through that rift! That was mere happenstance. If the inn had never been built then the rift in time would just be hovering in space at that location, a few meters above the ground. The position and angle of the stairs provided the perfect means of entering the rift, and traveling in time!

  Now he wondered if there were other places like that, other rifts in time possibly caused by the violence and mystery of the Tunguska event. Even more so, he wondered how long the rift persisted. Clearly it did not always work, for Troyak claimed he went down those stairs and yet remained stable in the year 1942. He did not encounter the phenomenon that sent Fedorov farther back in time.

  How long did the effect last? Was it intermittent, coming and going like that strange pulsing the battlecruiser experienced when it moved in time? If it first occurred in 1908, it was obviously still present 34 years later in 1942. The pulsing effect could explain why Troyak did not move in time. Perhaps one had to transit the stairway at just the right moment.

  What if the rift persisted into modern times, thought Fedorov? Was it there in the year 2021? And if it persisted all those years, who might have come up those back stairs in all that time, and who might have passed down them to find themselves in the distant past, stalking through the lost days of history as he was even now? That thought was truly staggering. What if other men had discovered what he had just experienced, and vanished into time? If they could not get back by taking the stairs again, then what? They would be marooned in the past and forced to live out their entire lives there. My God! He realized that every time someone went down those stairs they could have a profound effect on all history.

  They could change everything, just as Fedorov and his team were striving to change the history at this moment, and save humanity from a terrible future fate. He was suddenly filled with the urge to go back and test his theory again. At the very least he wondered if he could somehow get another message to the future, to Admiral Volsky. We must find out if the stairway still exists in our time, he thought darkly. We must!

  Even as he thought this another man was answering some of the very same questions Fedorov was asking himself, for he has also come down those same stairs and was about to make a most interesting discovery of his own.

  * * *

  “I am a Captain in the Internal Affairs Division of the Russian Naval Intelligence! How dare you treat me in this manner!” Volkov’s anger was apparent in the heat, which now colored his otherwise pallid cheeks.

  “Is that so? Well I am a Colonel in the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs—Rail Security Division, Captain, if that is who you really are. Your identification card is most unusual. I have never seen anything like it. Your uniform, weapon, also very unusual. We see a great deal on this line; roust out every sort of thief and scoundrel imaginable, and we hear many wild stories. But this one I have never heard before. At the moment the irregularities I have already mentioned are enough to suspect you are not who you claim to be. This identification card for example…very strange.”

  “That is standard navy issue. Or perhaps you have never seen proper credentials for a naval officer before? There is nothing irregular about it at all!”

  Colonel Lysenko, cocked his head to one side, taking another long drag on his cigarette. “And you say you have never seen this man before?” He pointed to the other officer, the one who had fingered Volkov, the one who regarded him even now with narrow eyed suspicion behind his round wire framed glasses, Mikhael Surinov.

  “I have not… And where are my men? Believe this, Colonel, if that is who you really are. You are now interfering in a matter of state security of the highest order!”

  “Is that so? Then you must work for the Kremlin, eh? Who is this man you were holding at gunpoint?” The Englishman was being watched by one of Lysenko’s men at the front desk where Ilyana sat fretfully listening to the whole scene, not knowing what was happening.

  Volkov folded his arms, defiant. “I was about to find that out when you barged in with this ridiculous charade. I have been searching every station on this railway—every lodgment and depot. We are looking for a man, and this fellow seemed suspicious—an Englishman! What is he doing here in time of war? So yes, I detained him for questioning, and I—”

  “You were looking for a man? Who?” Lysenko exh
aled heavily, the ashes of his cigarette low again.

  “Another naval officer, a man named Fedorov, though he may be traveling undercover.”

  “Fedorov?” The Colonel turned quickly to the shorter officer. “Is that the man you told me of?”

  “Yes sir!” said Surinov. “He was very bold, just as this man here seems—very official. Yet there was something odd about him. He claimed he had come from Khabarovsk, and that was proved to be a lie as soon as I returned there to make my report. I have never met an officer in the Rail Security Division who acted as he did—humiliating me in front of my security detail, not to mention those pigs I was transporting to the detention centers!”

  Now Volkov leaned forward. “You say you have encountered this man—Fedorov? How did you know his name?”

  “That’s what he called himself—him and his Sergeant Troyak. That man was completely insubordinate, and the Colonel did nothing! He just stood there and let a common soldier threaten me!”

  “Colonel? You say this Fedorov was passing himself off as a Colonel? Where?” Volkov almost stood up, but felt the hard hand of a soldier on his shoulder. He gave the man a look of real annoyance and continued, pressing his question on the man. “Where did you see this Fedorov?”

  “We are asking the questions here!” Colonel Lysenko pointed at him with his cigarette, but to his astonishment Volkov swiped it from his hand, real anger on his face now.

  “Get that filthy thing out of my face! Who the hell are you? What are you doing here? What in God’s name are you trying to pull, eh? You will pay dearly for this little prank, I assure you.”

  Volkov reached up, pinched his collar button and spoke, eyes on Lysenko the whole time. “Jenkov…where the hell are you? Get down to the dining room at once. Bring the entire section!”

  Colonel Lysenko gave him a wide eyed look, his surprise quickly transitioning to disdain as he waited. “Such theatrics,” he said with a sneer. Then he struck Volkov full on the face with the back of his hand. “You take me for a fool? Who do you think you were talking to? A ghost?”