Kirov Saga: Hinge Of Fate: Altered States Volume III (Kirov Series) Read online

  “Of course you would, Captain, but you and I both know that isn’t going to happen either. We’ll wait here until Angara arrives to keep an eye on the Oskemen. Then you and I will get cozy and you can come on up with your pouch. Karpov out.”

  Karpov switched off abruptly, removed his earphones and stood up, fetching his leather gloves from a jacket pocket. He pulled on the gloves slowly, flexing his fingers into a fist to tighten the fit.

  “Bogrov,” he said tersely. “The minute Angara arrives have them take position off the tail of that second airship out there. Make ready on the spy basket. We’re going to have a visitor!” He gave the Air Commandant an evil grin.

  * * *

  Symenko was not happy. He had been told to slip in as close to the rail junction at Ilanskiy and off load a couple companies of infantry. He was to take Kansk, tear up the rail lines there, and then knock down the airship tower—that is if he could manage to get in there and achieve surprise. Should he be discovered prematurely, then he was to ease in slowly and hand off the diplomatic pouch to Karpov personally. What was the Governor General thinking? He obviously knew Karpov would be here, and with at least one airship equipped with their new Topaz radar sets. He knew damn well I wasn’t going to sneak in above the clouds and get my troops landward easily.

  He shook his head, not understanding why he had been sent here. Why not send some young buck like Petrov on the Oskemen? I’m division commander! You don’t send someone like me out on a mission like this. Volkov had it in his mind to get something here, he thought. This was supposed to be a snatch and grab. Yes? And he wanted to make damn sure I had enough men with me to do the grabbing. A full goddamn battalion on each ship? Now I’m damn near maximum weight and slow as molasses if it comes to a gunfight here. Karpov already has altitude on me, and he has his guns bore sighted on my forehead as it stands.

  But be polite, I’m told. Be diplomatic. Say everything I was told to say, but nothing more. That was never my calling card. If Volkov wanted me to run in here and raise hell, then he should have let me do it rigged for air operations—ship to ship. Instead I’m lugging these troops around for some kind of land assault, and Karpov will know it easily enough. It makes sense to take out the rail yard at Kansk and knock down that tower, but these orders concerning Ilanskiy—what is that all about? What could be there that would be of any interest? It wasn’t his place to question orders, he knew, but he wasn’t the sort not to do so when they didn’t suit him.

  It was bad enough they took Omsk from me. I was to be City Commandant! I had good men die taking that god-forsaken place last winter. It was to be mine, and I was to be provincial Governor there. Now Volkov chokes and hands the whole city over to Karpov! For what? To keep that scrawny little bastard off our ass while we deal with Sergei Kirov? Why couldn’t Volkov pay the price out of his own purse? I made arrangements, plans, promises to a lot of men, and now look at me, still watching the paint dry on this ship. To make matters worse, Volkov has made me a red faced errand boy in thanks for losing Omsk, adding insult to injury. I’ve half a mind to tell Volkov to fuck off and take my ship north and go rogue.

  He was pacing on the bridge, restless and angry as he felt the overweening shadow of Abakan as the airship moved slowly into position to lower their spy basket. He knew he could never get away with that—going rogue. Volkov was not a man to make an enemy of. If I tried anything Pavlov on the Oskemen would never go along with it, and then Volkov would spare no effort to hunt my ass down and roast me over a slow fire.

  So here I am—following goddamned orders—and in ten minutes I’ll be dangling from a cable and reeled in like a fat tuna for Karpov to grin at me and rub salt in the wounds. I should put a bullet in that man. He’s going to be more trouble out here than anyone knows, and believe me, I’m a man who knows trouble. But Karpov is too damn careful. Yes. He’ll have his men grope my bung hole for any sign of a weapon before I get anywhere near him, so no point bringing one.

  And that thought did nothing whatsoever to settle his mood.

  Yes, Symenko was in a foul mood today, and he had every reason to be the surly choleric airship Captain he was known to be. To say he was a short tempered man, crusty and quick to anger, was an understatement. But he was still Captain here. He still had the Alexandra, which was the only consolation he could take from this sudden turn of misfortune. Now nobody was getting those nice fat mansions in Omsk, and all the favors he was planning to call in as he doled out land and title there had blown away on the Siberian mist. He wasn’t City Commandant at Omsk, and he wasn’t regional Governor either. Now he was only Captain Symenko, First Squadron of the Eastern Airship Division, Volkov’s messenger boy.

  He shook his head, slowly heading aft to find the main ladder up to the top gun platform, and thinking how much more satisfying it would be to get behind one of the 76mm recoilless rifles there and blow a hole in Abakan—blow their forward bridge gondola to hell. But he didn’t do that. Instead he climbed the long ladder up, steamed on the cold open air platform, and grunted as he hauled himself precariously up the rope ladder dangling from the Abakan’s spy basket, just a nice fat fish on Karpov’s line now.

  His eyes betrayed the murderous rage in him, barely controlled as he was slowly reeled in and the basket was tucked under the main gondola of the other airship. The cold air had cleared his head, and given him just a little time to settle down, but he was still in a foul mood when they pried open the basket hatch. He grunted, his jaw tightening as he realized how Karpov was going to lord it over him now, and there was nothing he could do about it. Nothing at all.

  Then, to his great surprise, he eased out of the basket and heard a Marine Sergeant issue a sharp, bawling order, calling his security detail to attention. The men stiffened, their black polished boots stomping the metal deck in a brisk movement. They were wearing dress uniforms, and the detail Sergeant was holding a drawn saber, squared off right along the line of his nose. Another man held a flag of the Free Siberian State.

  “Sir!” The Marine Sergeant spoke in a deep voice. “Welcome aboard the Abakan.” The man nodded to a private, and he piped the Captain aboard in traditional naval style.

  Symenko was more than surprised, and stood just a little taller at the greeting. Karpov had him dangling from his little finger. After hearing him taunt me over the loss of Omsk on the radio I expected nothing more than humiliation here, and yet… the man has shown me a little respect. It was not something he expected, but it did much to tamp down his sallow and ill-tempered mood.

  “This way, if you please, Captain.” The Marine Sergeant gestured with a white gloved hand, and the detail filed off behind the two men as they made their way out of the receiving chamber and into the main gondola. They came to a door on the right side and the Sergeant opened it, beckoning Symenko to enter. There the Captain was surprised again to see a table laid out with fine white linen, plates of cold cuts and cheese, a flask of brandy with elegant crystal glasses, and two cigars sitting quietly on a silver platter like the two airships riding in tandem now for this meeting.

  Respect, thought Symenko. Yes, just a little respect for a change, and more in the last five minutes than I got from Volkov in the last month. Brandy and cigars are hardly compensation for everything Volkov just took from me and handed to Karpov…

  But it’s a start.

  Part III

  Tunguska

  “All large trees on the mountains were leveled in dense rows, whereas in the valleys one could see both roots and trunks of age-old giants of the taiga broken like reeds. The tops of the fallen trees were directed to us. We were going north towards the super-hurricane that had raged here years ago… I climbed Shakrama mountain and for the first time saw the unbelievable land of dead forest… everything has been leveled and scorched in the Great Hollow… and in the center of it all, a cluster of trees were still standing upright like bare telegraph poles, all devoid of leaf and branch.”

  —Leonid Kulik: Tunguska

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p; Chapter 7

  Evgeny Krinov handed the young staffer a large box, a solemn look on his face.

  “Take these as well,” he said matter of factly. “They’re just cluttering up the storage room and have become a fire hazard. So let us put them to the fire and be done with it. See that they go directly to the incinerator.”

  “As you wish, sir.” The staffer took the box and hastened away, and Krinov watched him go, his eyes dark and thoughtful. That is the last of them, he thought. That will put an end to Kulik’s nonsense once and for all.

  An astronomer and geologist, Krinov was a well known scientific researcher with an expertise in meteorite falls. Born in 1906, he was a two year old child when the greatest fall of his lifetime, perhaps the greatest in modern history, occurred in the strange event on the morning of June 30, 1908, just north of the Stony Tunguska River in Siberia. As it happened, however, Krinov was working at the meteor division of the Mineralogy Museum of the Soviet Academy of Sciences between 1926 and 1930, when the intrepid Leonid Kulik mounted his first expeditions to the Tunguska region to try and discover the cause of the event.

  It was very strange, but Kulik had uncovered a number of key findings that could lead to the answer to the enigma. The first were the awesome physical evidence of a massive explosion in the Great Hollow. Thirty million trees were felled there, in a radial pattern where each fallen tree pointed back to the epicenter of the cataclysmic event. The second key finding had been thermal—the clear scorching of the trees, even beyond the fallen zone which covered all of 1400 square kilometers. A blinding flash of light had left its imprint in the dead wood, and searing flames left their mark well beyond the Great Hollow.

  The next key clue was more enigmatic, a magnetic footprint that seemed to lay on the land, ranging 1400 square kilometers. The soil itself exhibited the effects of some strange magnetic anomaly, and it was later learned that disturbances in the earth’s magnetic field had both preceded and followed the event. Auroras and strange noctilucent clouds appeared for days after.

  This was not all. There were botanic effects in the plants, mutations in the animals, strange genetic effects that caused trees to enter a period of accelerated growth at the edge of the event, while others were twisted and stunted into malformed shapes, some flecked with small embedded nodules of glass. Exotic materials were found in the soil, and there was a measurable radiation effect, ionizing radiation that became thermo-luminescent at night, creating an eerie glow at times over the land.

  Krinov got very interested in the matter, and resolved to accompany Kulik on a return expedition years later, in 1930. He still bore the scars of that journey, and in more than one way. Braving the Siberian winter was always dangerous, and he had suffered a severe frostbite on his feet that compelled him to withdraw and spend a lengthy time in the hospital. The doctors had been forced to amputate a big toe, and now Krinov walked with a characteristic limp, though that was not the worst mark the trip to Tunguska had left on him.

  Kulik was convinced that the site he had discovered, that haunting swath of utter destruction in the Great Hollow, was hiding the hidden remains of a meteorite, though no evidence was ever found to support this claim. Yet Kulik’s ardor would not abate. He set himself to draining and digging up one swampy bog hole after another, disheartened to find a broken tree stump in his favored prospect, which proved it could not be the site of an impact. Anything big enough to cause the devastation that stretched for kilometers in all directions would certainly not have left a tree stump standing at the bottom of its impact crater. Kulik had forbidden any photographs of that stump, but Krinov had secretly taken several to use as evidence in the heated scientific debate that he knew would soon follow on the heels of the expedition.

  Kulik remained determined to continue looking for the meteorite, and it was said that he eventually found something very strange during one of his excavations. When questioned about his findings one day the bristly Kulik just looked at Krinov from behind those dark round eyeglasses of his, his eyes strangely alight. Then he did something that astounded Krinov. He reached into his pocket and handed his associate a small hand compass.

  “Find north for me please,” Kulik had said quietly.

  Krinov blinked, but indulged his colleague and stood in the center of the room, consulting the compass until he could point himself north. Then Kulik got up and walked slowly to Krinov’s side, a wry smile on his face.

  “Are you sure?” he said.

  To his amazement, Krinov looked down at his compass and saw it spinning in mad circles. He looked at Kulik, who then stepped back, taking his seat again, gesturing that his associate should consult his compass again. Sure enough, the reading was normal now. Krinov tapped it, looking at the compass with some suspicion.

  “Oh yes, I thought you would jump to that conclusion,” said Kulik. “It’s quite proper. Keep it and see for yourself.” Then he got up and slowly headed for the door, turning with a smile as he left. “Good day, Evgeny.”

  Krinov never forgot that, or anything else he had learned on that expedition. He tested the compass for long years after that, and it always read true. But nothing else ever read true concerning Tunguska. It was most disturbing. Kulik had labored to take aerial photographs of the whole disaster site and delivered them to the academy to fuel the debate. There were 1500 in all, and Krinov spent a long time studying them… until they became a fire hazard.

  One day, his soul still shadowed by the strange events of that brief time he had spent in the wild lands of the Siberian north, he gathered up each and every one of the negatives, put them in a sturdy box with a bunch of old newspapers, and handed them off to a staffer with the order to take them directly to the incinerator. There, he thought with just the barest sigh of relief. Now no one else will ever know…

  Yet others did know, though what they had discovered in that forsaken place was kept a well guarded secret, known only to a very few. One of them was a man who followed in Krinov’s footsteps, one Nikolai Vladimirovic Vasilyev, who later assumed the title Krinov once held as Deputy Chairman of the Commission on meteorites and cosmic dust at the Russian Academy of Sciences. It was Vasilyev who had come across a hidden cache of positive photographs made by the very same negatives Krinov had destroyed that day.

  It was Vasilyev who then devoted his life to the study of the Tunguska event, becoming the director of the Interdisciplinary Independent Tunguska Expeditions society, and collecting data and writing about the event to his dying day. And it was Vasilyev who penned the cryptic notes into his literature concerning the many “oddities” surrounding the event, claiming it was evidence of something much more than a simple meteorite strike, something vast and deeply significant, and a warning concerning the possibility of a collision with earth threatening “aliens” from outer space. What had he discovered in those photographs? What was Krinov really trying to hide by destroying the negatives?

  Mainstream science had long ago dismissed the notion that the explosion in 1908 had been caused by a UFO, but there are other “aliens” that come from space, and the earth had been visited by them many times before.

  * * *

  Aboard the airship Narva, Captain Selikov wanted to get as far away from that river as he could, but he also knew it was dangerous to do so until they had a firm fix on their location.

  “This weather is clouding over again,” he said as he shook his head, clearly unhappy. “The cloud deck is very low and it extends for what looks to be two hundred kilometers in every direction. We can’t see a thing up here, and I’m not inclined to take the ship down until I can determine how thick that deck is. But we might get down right on top of the clouds and use the sub-cloud car.”

  “What is that?” Orlov had never heard of such a thing.

  “Think of it as a bit of an amusement park ride, Mister Orlov,” said Selikov. And he explained how they would lower a device, a spy basket, that looked like a big hollow bomb suspended on a long cable, complete with tail fins t
o aid its movement through the air.

  “A man with good eyes in there can call up the land forms and then we can find the river again and navigate. Otherwise we could drift about up here and get even more lost than we already are. If the deck isn’t too low, we’ll reel you in and come on down.”

  “Good then,” said Orlov. “Let me be the man in the basket. It’s boring shuffling about up here trying to stay warm.”

  “I’m afraid you won’t get any help on keeping warm if you volunteer here,” Selikov warned. “There’s no heat in the car.”

  “Well, there’s no heat up here either, so what’s the difference?”

  “You can read a navigation chart?”

  “Of course,” said Orlov, with just a hint of irritation. So it was decided, and Orlov was led off to the rear gondola by a mishman. When he saw the contraption he was about to ride in, he grinned from ear to ear. It was exactly as Selikov had described it, the shape of a huge bomb, with windows in the nose and four fins on the narrow tail. A man could lay prone inside, his head in the nose, and make observations that he could call up to the airship bridge gondola above on a hand cranked telephone.

  “Here,” said the man, handing him a pair of binoculars and a chart book. “You’ll need these.”

  Minutes later they were lowering the pod on the long steel cable and Orlov thrilled to the sound of the wind whistling on the tail fins, though its cold fingers found their way into every seam and hollow, chilling him at once.

  Down he went, trailing behind the great mass of Narva until the airship was lost from sight and, in spite of the chilling cold, Orlov found the ride thrilling, laughing as he was swallowed by the heavy vapors of the cloud deck. He was to call up the moment he broke through the deck, but it took much longer than he expected. Finally, when the cable was near its maximum extension, the mist and cloud thinned and the pod broke through into clear air.