Tunguska…He remembered reading the story by Alexander Kazantsev, a pioneer of UFO research in the Soviet Union. There had been many theories as to what the event actually was, but Kazantsev hypothesized it was the crash of an extraterrestrial spacecraft. Fedorov eagerly read those old stories, like Burning Island, Stronger than Time, and A Visitor from Outer Space. At one point Kazantsev speculated that the event may have been a Soviet Time-ship that was out of control! How ironic, he thought. If Kazantsev only knew what Fedorov knew now!
Admiral Volsky told Dobrynin that large explosive events had been shown to disrupt the fabric of space and time as well—particularly events involving nuclear explosions. This they had experienced with their own eyes, but Rod-25 had remained a mystery, a conductor’s wand that seemed to open a connection between their time and 1942 with uncanny regularity. Yet now something had changed. They would always move from 1942 to 2021 and back again, but for the first time they had obviously displaced further into the past. Something was wrong.
“It did not sound correct,” Dobrynin had told him earlier.
“What do you mean?”
“There were other voices in the choir, other harmonies and frequencies that I never heard before. I know this sounds strange, Mister Fedorov, but I listen to the reactors, and I hear things there. This time the score was different.”
Then, while they were searching the Anatoly Alexandrov for Orlov, Fedorov was shocked to see that someone had been a little too curious about the strange cargo they loaded onto the Mi-26, and they opened the containers! What possessed anyone to do that was beyond his imagining, but the lids had not been properly fastened. His first worry was of a radiation leak, until Dobrynin told him these were completely new control rods that had never been used before.
“We just put them in a radiation safe container because if they were eventually used it would come in handy.”
1908…He had found another hole in time linking 1942 to that very year, the same day of the Tunguska event. Now it seemed that the action of Rod-25, perhaps influenced by the presence of the other two control rids, had orchestrated another surprise, and all things fell through to this year, the year that the materials finding their way into these rods first came from the deeps of outer space! Whether by asteroid, meteor, black hole or spacecraft did not matter so much. The reality he was facing now was that they had slipped much farther back in time, and so the damage they could do to any future history here was exponentially greater.
“Well I thank you,” he said graciously. “My men and I will be returning to our ship now. We’ve finally got it seaworthy again. Good day, sir.” He nodded to Troyak, and the Marines boarded the boat and pushed off.
“Use the oars,” he said quietly. “No sense arousing undo curiosity. We can start the outboard motor when we get further out, away from prying eyes.”
“Where to now?” Troyak gave him a searching look.
“A good question, Sergeant. Let’s get back to the Anatoly Alexandrov. I need to speak with Chief Dobrynin.”
* * *
“1908?” Dobrynin had a look of profound shock on his face. “I was afraid something like this was going to happen when Volsky handed me this mission. Just go and fetch Fedorov, he said, and be sure that helicopter gets safely launched. Nothing was said to me about a visit to 1908. What is happening, Fedorov?”
“I was hoping you could help me sort that out, Chief.”
“Yes…Things were different this time. It did not sound correct. What we can do about it? I have no idea.”
“We discovered the seal on the other control rod containers was loose. Could that have been a factor?”
“Your guess is as good as mine, Mister Fedorov. But now that you mention it, there were other harmonies in the sound. Then it descended, and I was not expecting to hear that at all. The only thing I can suggest is to seal those containers and run the procedure again. Yet I can make you no guarantees as to where we might turn up this time.”
Fedorov sat with that for some time, and he knew that it would only be a matter of time before some passing cargo vessel would happen across them, just 15 kilometers off the shores of what would one day become the Russian Naval facility at Kaspiysk. The sight of the massive Mi-26 sitting atop the roof of the floating powerplant would be shocking, to say nothing of the big hovercraft moored alongside. As he wrestled with this, he was approached by a junior officer with an odd report.
“Captain, sir,” the man said. “We have been monitoring signals traffic after we sent out our initial hails to try and contact the base at Kaspiysk.”
“The base?” Fedorov gave him a distracted look, his mind still deep in thought.
“Yes, sir. We had no answer, but we broadcast on all channels, just as you ordered, and we just now picked up a signal.”
“What kind of signal?”
“It was on the shortwave band, sir. The call sign prefix was KIRV, and the senders name was coded NIK.”
Fedorov was stunned. “When did you receive this?”
“Just minutes ago, sir. In fact, it’s the only radio signal we’ve picked up.”
“Where was the signal coming from? Could you locate it?”
“I was a DX specialist at one time, sir. The signal was very fleeting, and we only caught a minute or two of it. I could not pin down the entity of origin, but the location prefix was PN.”
A DX specialist was a shortwave operator who focused on receiving and identifying the location of distant radio signals that could propagate for thousands of miles around the earth at times. Fedorov was astounded! He immediately recognized what the call sign prefix was, the four character identifier for Kirov! The sender name was obvious as well. NIK was the handle Nikolin would always append by sheer habit to any message he encoded. As for the location, as a trained navigator he was also very familiar with the Maidenhead locator map, which bisected the world map on a grid and assigned letters to each column for longitude and each row for latitude. By cross indexing the two letters you could get a general idea of the approximate location of the signal, and this message had been coded PN. He immediately knew that latitude was in the Pacific, and very near to Vladivostok!
He rushed to the radio room, eyes alight to get a Maidenhead map and confirm his assumption. “My God!” he said. “How is this possible?” The signal is coming from a map box centered on Korea, with the Yellow Sea on one side and the Sea of Japan on the other. He had seen a hundred messages handed to him by Nikolin to plot ship traffic, and they always ended the very same way. He would triple hyphen, then append the Maidenhead locator code followed by his own operator’s code, NIK. One fact tumbled upon another in a wild moment of realization. Kirov… Here…In 1908…In the waters off Korea or Japan!
“Get another transmission off at maximum power. Boost the signal any way you can! Give our call sign, Maidenhead coordinates and append the operator code FDV. Send it on our military shortwave band. Do it now!”
* * *
It came in loud and clear, rising above the low band transmissions, though Nikolin was surprised to see it was on a higher military transmission band. The call sign did not mean anything to him at first, though he wrote it down to look it up. ANAV. Then the message transitioned into a standard military hail call, and it was giving a specific target, the operator the sender was hoping to contact. To his great surprise it was him!
“Captain…”
Karpov was in the Captain’s chair, watching the HD video feed from the Tin Man. “Have they changed their minds, Mister Nikolin?” He assumed Nikolin had received a message from the Japanese. He had been pounding their cruiser squadron with all three of his twin 152mm batteries for the last several minutes. The lead ship, which he presumed to be the flagship, had fallen off the battle line, burning badly amidships after three more hits had shattered a tall mainmast there and blown away one of the cruiser’s three smoke stacks. Jet black smoke enveloped the ship from the truncated stack.
“No sir…I’m receiving a co
ded message on the military shortwave band. It’s from another ship, sir.”
“What ship? Rodenko. Are there any other contacts on radar?”
“No sir, we have only the eight contacts we are presently engaging”
“Captain, I have the ship call sign prefix now. ANAV. It’s a Russian ship, the Anatoly Alexandrov.”
That gave Karpov a moment’s hesitation, his head turning sharply to the communications station.
“What did you say? Anatoly Alexandrov?”
Karpov raised an eyebrow in surprise. “That’s a floating nuclear power facility stationed off the Kaspiysk naval base. Volsky was going to use it in that operation to rescue Fedorov! Are you certain that was that callsign?”
“Yes sir! It can’t be anyone else. The first shortwave long distance calls weren’t made until the early 1920s. And the operator code on this one was FDV. That’s Fedorov, Captain. He always signs that way. He’s trying to contact us via shortwave! Those signals can reach virtually any location on earth using skywave propagation.”
The Captain passed a moment of complete confusion. It was as if he had been caught right in the middle of an elaborate crime, with the authorities bursting in to apprehend him. He felt a sudden jab of guilt at the thought Fedorov was trying to signal them, pulled back to that first meeting with Admiral Volsky when the young navigator had put forward his plan to find Orlov. Fedorov! What was he doing here…in 1908?
Suddenly the crack of the ships 152mm deck guns was a jarring distraction. Karpov felt light headed, strangely bothered, and then quickly turned to Samsonov. “Secure deck guns,” he said sharply. “That will suffice for the moment. Mister Rodenko!”
“Sir?”
“Resume evasive heading and maneuver to break off from this engagement. Head west if you must, and get us beyond their visual horizon. Then turn the ship south and resume course 180 at your earliest opportunity. I’ll need to work closely with Mister Nikolin at the moment, and I think we have taught these ships a lesson. This message now has top priority.”
Chapter 27
It was a slow process, and the signal faded at times and was lost, but they were able to get a message through. Nikolin worked out the subsquare location on the grid from Fedorov’s signal.
“They are right in the Caspian Sea, sir. Just off the coast at Kaspiysk.”
“My God, they must have run their procedure with that damnable Rod-25 and then shifted back here even as we have—but why 1908? Our shift was caused by that explosive detonation. Why would they shift here as well, to this day and year? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“I’m getting a voice signal now. They’re using a frequency above 12MHz to improve integrity. Got him sir!”
“…Read me on this channel. Repeat, this is Anton Fedorov aboard Anatoly Alexandrov on location in the Caspian sea. Calling battlecruiser Kirov. Please acknowledge.”
Karpov nodded his head, giving Nikolin the go ahead to respond.
“Roger that, Anatoly Alexandrov. This is Kirov calling. Reading you five by five, loud and clear, Fedorov. Lieutenant Nikolin responding.”
“Ten Four – Nikolin! Am I ever glad to hear your voice! Where are you? Over.”
Karpov reached for the handset now: “Fedorov? What are you doing here? Do you realize what year this is?”
“Captain Karpov? Good to hear you, sir. To answer your question, we really have no idea why we are here. Dobrynin ran his procedure and here we are. I have just verified the date. Over.”
“Well, what in God’s name are you going to do here?”
“…Good question, Captain. We have Orlov! But when we attempted to use Rod-25 to return home, we ended up here instead. Now we must see what we can do about all this. Is Orlan with you?
“No. Orlan is not here.”
There was silence on the line for a time. Then Fedorov returned, his voice uncertain. “Orlan did not shift with you? And what of Admiral Golovko?”
“Neither ship shifted here with us. We are alone, and I have no idea what has happened to Orlan.”
“Might it still be trapped in 1945, Captain?”
This time it was Karpov that hesitated before he spoke. “That is possible, Fedorov, but given the circumstances we were facing, I doubt the ship survived…”
There was another pause that seemed interminably long, and Karpov realized that Fedorov must be reading between the lines of everything he was saying here. The man was not stupid. He would soon understand that there was combat, though the Captain had no intention of going into the details here. Yet Fedorov’s next question was very pointed, and touched on the heart of the matter.
“Captain….How did you shift here? Rod-25 is with us.”
“There’s no point discussing that, Fedorov. The fact is, we are here, and with no way to get home, or so I believed until I heard your voice.”
“I see…Captain, I don’t have to tell you how important it is that we do nothing to interfere with the history of this time period. We must work to rendezvous and get to you with a control rod. Over”
Karpov ignored the first half of what Fedorov said. “And how do you propose to get here? Do you expect us to sail into to the Black Sea and have no one here notice this ship?”
“We have an Mi-26 loaded with fuel and two more control rods that may work just like Rod-25. Our plan was to fly them to you on the Pacific coast, over.”
“Fly here? It’s a huge distance, Fedorov. Even for an Mi-26.”
“We may have the fuel…But perhaps you could sail our way and we could arrange a rendezvous some place closer. What is your present position?”
“We are in the Sea of Japan at the moment.” Karpov sounded impatient now, almost as if he resented this sudden and unexpected development and saw it as an interruption. It would certainly mean his planned operation here would end abruptly, and they would again be dipping an infernal control rod into the nuclear soup aboard Kirov. Who knew where they might turn up next? He was now at a decisive point in history, with exactly the right instrument to impose his will on time. Now comes Fedorov with another outlandish rescue plan.
“If you could get to the Arabian Sea, or even the Bay of Bengal it would give us much more safety margin on the fuel. I think we could get the Mi-26 there easily enough. Over.”
Karpov pursed his lips, his inner resistance to the plan obvious on his face. He stood up straight, noting Rodenko was watching the scene closely. He will argue that we must look to the welfare of the crew, he thought. He will want us all together again with one happy party here on the ship—including Orlov, eh? Somehow the thought of seeing the Chief again did not seem very appealing to Karpov. Now he needed time to think this over and decide what to do. He raised the handset.
“We will discuss this with the other officers here, Fedorov, and see what should be done. I will contact you again in 48 hours on this frequency at 18:00 hours.”
Again the long pause. “Two days? Why the delay?”
“It’s another long sea voyage and a risky plan, Fedorov. I will need time to consider it and make plans.”
“Very well, Captain. If you have an alternative plan, please let me know and we will do our best to try and reach you. If you come west you need only worry about the Singapore Strait. Make a night transit there and then you should be able to make most of the rest of the voyage without undue notice. In the meantime, try to be as inconspicuous as possible there. Over.”
“I understand, Fedorov. We will discuss this later. Karpov over and out.” He switched off the handset with a hard squeeze of his hand.
Fedorov! Intrepid, brave hearted Fedorov. He had come all the way across Siberia to find and rescue Orlov. Now he was trying to rescue Kirov and get them safely home, but to what end? They could not even get themselves there. How the Anatoly Alexandrov shifted here to 1908 was still an unanswered mystery.
I could sail half way round the world for this rendezvous and then what, Karpov wondered? Would those other control rods even work? If they did wo
rk, where would the ship turn up? Would we return to the future and find ourselves in the midst of a great war, a solitary ship to confront any enemy we encountered? Our twenty-one missiles would count for nothing back there. Here they represent enormous power, decisive power, the power to choke the breath from fate itself!
He stood up, deeply troubled. Then he remembered the engagement they had been fighting, and turned to Rodenko, who was still watching from across the room at the Plexiglas situation board.
“Report, Mister Rodenko. What is our status?”
“Sir, we are at 48,000 meters and opening the range. Those main masts looked to be several hundred feet high, as is our own radar mast here. But we should slip over their horizon in a few minutes.”
“Very well… Then take the ship south. Maintain 30 knots for the next ten minutes, then fall off to two thirds. No need to put stress on that hull patch.” The ship was still a wounded warrior, with a reinforced hull patch from that torpedo damage inflicted in the Mediterranean Sea by that German U-Boat.
Karpov shook his head, remembering the incident. That was a very crafty U-Boat Captain, he thought. He was hiding in that shallow inlet and when Fedorov finally realized it he still let the boat go. He did not want to upset his history books. That was Fedorov, so worried about the order of things, and trying always to set the broken china back in place in the cupboard. He did not see the big picture here, though he undoubtedly knew this history very well. His only concern was now arranging this rendezvous as quietly as possible.
“I will return to my rest shift, Rodenko. You have the bridge.”
“Very good, sir.”
“Captain off the Bridge!”
* * *
He went to Zolkin, though he did not know why. He knew what the Doctor would tell him, that he had no right to start his own private war here with the Japanese.
Kirov Saga: Devil's Garden (Kirov Series) Page 22