“I see…” Fedorov was quite surprised to hear this, but it only deepened the mystery surrounding this object. There it was, just gleaming in that open clearing of the taiga, very near that other oddity, the thing Troyak described as a cauldron. They had been shrouded in mystery on the taiga, spoken of in ancient lore, where they were thought to be the haunts of demons. Anyone who found one was befallen by strange ailments, vision problems, dizziness, fainting, loss of balance, unaccountable chills… and fear. Orlov had tried to describe it to him, how unnerved he had become…
“In fact, it scared the crap out of me, and I’m not ashamed to admit that. It was as if… well I could feel something was terrible there, a real feeling of doom. Your senses were keened up like a grizzly bear was on your trail, but it was deathly quiet. I never felt anything quite like it. All I could think of was getting the hell away from that place.”
“Would this be anything we might have made, in our time?”
“I suppose the technology is within our grasp,” said Dobrynin, “but it would take some very sophisticated work to create an alloy like this. The surface of that thing was remarkably smooth. Yet I can’t imagine what it would be doing here, in this time.”
“Thank you, Chief. Where is the object?”
“Locked away in a rad-safe container, and as far from the reactors as I could get it.”
Fedorov thought about this, though he could not come to any sure conclusions. Yet he kept that object locked away in the back of his own mind, wondering what it might do if allowed to really interact with the function of the ship’s reactors for any length of time.
A manufactured object, he thought. So my initial theory that this was a part of the comet or meteor that struck at Tunguska is somewhat shaky now…. Unless it wasn’t a comet… He did not know where that line of thinking could lead him, but the presence of this object here in 1941 was most disturbing. If it was machined, an alloy as Dobrynin believes, then how did it get here? Who brought it here? What was its real purpose?
He had heard all the other stories about Tunguska as well, that it wasn’t a comet, but something much more. The UFO crowd had speculated about it, filling the empty space at the heart of that mystery with their own colorful ideas. In 1946, Soviet Engineer Alexander Kazantsev wrote a story called “A Visitor From Outer Space,” where he theorized that the Tunguska event was actually the explosion of a spaceship from Mars. Many more serious expeditions had been also mounted in the wake of Kulik’s early explorations. In 2009, a Russian scientist named Yuri Lavbin claimed he had found unusual quartz crystals at the site of the event, crystals with strange markings on them. He also claimed to have found “ferrum silicate,” something he said could only be produced in space, though no evidence was forthcoming.
It was all speculation, fantasy, storytelling, just like those old legends reputed the strange metal cauldrons to be the homes of demons on the taiga. We’ve only just substituted UFOs for the demons, thought Fedorov, but this object came from somewhere, did it not?
I may not know what the damn thing is, but I know what it might be able to do—what it may have already done in bringing Kinlan’s Brigade here. That thing affects the stable flow of time, particularly if catalyzed by a nuclear environment. It may be dangerous to have it anywhere near the ship, but they had experienced no ill effects as long as it was safely away from the reactors.
A thought occurred to him now, emerging from a worry he had nursed for some time. It was May 1941. In less than 90 days they would have to face a most uncomfortable moment, the instant Kirov first breached time and appeared on July 28, 1941—Paradox Hour. That was what he called it in his inner thoughts now. It was that impossible moment when the ship, and everyone on it, might face utter annihilation if they still remained here.
What was going to happen? Was this the world Kirov first shifted to, or was it some other universe? There were no altered states when they first shifted back. The Soviet union was intact, as was the history itself, before we started changing everything. I was able to call events, chapter and verse, but I could not presume to do that now.
But what if this is the world we first appeared in, only one we have warped and changed with all our meddling? We would have to be somewhere else when that moment arrives, and it must arrive, yes? Kirov must shift back for us to even be where we are at this moment. But can there be two Fedorov’s in the same moment—one on this ship and another arriving here on the 28th of July? We have always thought that would be impossible.
We must face this soon. That meeting with Elena Fairchild and Director Kamenski is a step in the right direction. If nothing else it may at lease answer a few questions. Let’s see what we can determine.
* * *
To cover their movement west with a plausible operation, Tovey had a signal leaked in an old code that had been compromised some time ago. It conveyed his intention to conduct bombardment raids on both Benghazi and Tripoli in an effort to interdict enemy supplies. The risk was that the Germans would know they were coming, and might further reinforce their airfields on Malta and at Tripoli. That was the first line of enemy air defense they would have to penetrate, but as it happened, they found enemy air operations scattered.
At noon on the 2nd of May, they set their course west at 25 knots, thankful for some air cover off Crete for a time, until they had reached a point due north of Benghazi. At this time Rommel’s offensive was only in its second day, and the Germans had not seized airfields in the Jebel country from Al Bayda to Derna. Planes on both sides were skirmishing, and many of the Stuka Squadrons Goering had promised Rommel were still in Italy and Sicily, feverishly making preparations to transfer to airfields Rommel expected he would control in two or three days time. The Germans only real reaction to the move was to issue a warning to a convoy bound for Tripoli, place a single Stuka Squadron there on alert, and move two U-boats .
As for Malta, it was presently being garrisoned by the Italian Folgore Parachute Brigade, and its air squadrons were mostly Italian fighters, there to serve as a defense against British bombers. After a thirty hour run west, the flotilla was between Tripoli and Malta, and when Kirov and Argos Fire detected an incoming contact, an enemy recon plane.
“We could easily shoot that down,” Rodenko suggested, and poke out their eyes before they see us.” In Fedorov’s absence he had been serving as acting Captain, and was now back in his role as Starpom.
“Perhaps a little ruse might serve us better,” said Fedorov. Let us allow them to approach within sighting distance, adjusting our heading to a course aimed right at Tripoli just before they get into visual range. That should be very near dusk.”
“Ah,” said Volsky. “You want to reinforce Admiral Tovey’s cover story.”
“Of course, sir. It will be a new moon tonight, very dark, with a bare sliver of a crescent just rising about 50 minutes after midnight. If they see us making for Tripoli just after sunset, they will assume we have plans to make a run at them under cover of darkness. That plane will not have much time to shadow us, particularly after dark. Then we turn for the Sicilian narrows and make our run there. If we increase to 30 knots, we could be between Tunis and Trapani on Sicily just before sunrise on May 3rd.”
“A very good plan, Fedorov,” said Volsky. “I will have Mister Nikolin signal our intentions to Admiral Tovey.”
The ruse worked. The Germans had a Dornier-17 take a look at them, discouraged from getting too close by some sharp anti-aircraft fire by HMS Invincible. As the light faded, it turned southwest for Tripoli, and when Rodenko reported it safely out of visual range, the flotilla changed heading and slipped away at high speed.
The following morning the Germans would have two squadrons of JU-87s at Tripoli, both preparing for transfer to bases around Benghazi. The planes had just arrived from Italy the previous week, and the ground crews had been busy repainting them. They shed the normal European of dark green Schwartzgrün, and a lighter underbelly of Hellblau blue, for a new paint scheme that wa
s more suited to the desert climes. Now they were dressed out in Sandgelb, a sand-yellow paint that was developed just for this theater. One pilot, Leutnant Hubert Pölz, was seeing his own plane adorned with an elaborate snake from tail to engine.
“Aren’t we going to get up after those British ships?” a service mechanic asked Pölz.
“What ships? They sent out patrols this morning looking for them, and nothing was found.”
“But I heard an Italian plane off Pantelleria spotted them again.”
“Pantelleria? That is 400 kilometers north of us. If they spotted them there than they must have turned last night after that sighting we made.”
“We can still get them. I can mount extra fuel pods for you.”
“What? And ruin my beautiful snake? The paint hasn’t even dried. No, that is too far for us to try and mount a hasty search and strike mission. We’ll stick to our orders and fly to Benghazi this afternoon.”
It was a fateful decision, for if Pölz and his squadron had gone north after the British ships, it was very likely that he would not come back. As it was, he had a rendezvous with destiny at some other place, and he and his plane, with its elaborate decoration, were going to have a most interesting encounter in the deserts south of Tobruk.
* * *
So it was that Kirov sailed northwest, passing Pantelleria in the early hours of May 3rd as Fedorov had planned, and getting into a good position to run the Sicilian Narrows. In 1942, and in the history they had once lived through, the place had been a choke point for British convoys attempting to reach Malta. Operation Pedestal, the ill fated effort to resupply Malta, was one of many that would be pushed through those dangerous waters. At that time the Germans and Italians had expected the British coming east from Gibraltar, but this time the surprise achieved by Fedorov’s maneuver after dusk left them flat footed.
They were spotted by a fighter patrol off Pantelleria, and word was sent to Tunis and Bizerte, as well as Toulon. There the French took the information in hand, and seemed in no great hurry to act on it. They had been none too happy with the German decision to withdraw Hindenburg from the Mediterranean. When the news finally reached the desk of Admiral Gensoul, he gave the message a well deserved sneer.
“British ships were spotted northwest of Pantelleria… What could they be doing there? Chasing the Germans?”
“Shall I order the fleet to get up steam for action, sir?”
Gensoul looked over the starchy Captain, a new adjutant to his staff that week. “How many ships were spotted?”
“Three, sir—a battleship, battlecruiser and a heavy cruiser. We can have Normandie and Dunkerque ready for operations in a few hours.”
“Very odd,” said Gensoul. “The British have only just moved two battleships around the cape to Alexandria. Now they send these ships west?”
“They must be chasing the Germans, sir.”
“Well have we received any request from the Germans to initiate operations?”
“None sir.”
“Correct. That is because they were thinking to slip out the back door and leave this business in the Med to us now. Well good riddance! They weren’t much help here in the first place, and their troops in Syria haven’t been able to stop the British there either. So let them go. Our ships are still making repairs, and I have no intention of going into action with the fleet flagship on a moment’s notice like this. Besides, the weather is bad. There’s a storm building. Get word to Algiers and Casablanca as a precaution, but we will not go running off after these ships today. Let the Germans at Gibraltar worry about them.”
Chapter 18
It was called Baba Gurgur, the ”Father of Fires,” the place where a low smoldering fire had been burning in a small crater for centuries. Local lore had it that the shepherds and farmers near Kirkuk would often come there to warm themselves on the cold desert nights, and pregnant women would make offerings there in the hopes of giving birth to a boy. Yet in 1927, when a gaggle of geologists were summoned from all over the world, it became one of the first major gushers in the region when drilled, emitting a tall geyser of black oil over 140 feet high that drenched the derrick and surrounding area in an evil black rain. And it was also the scene of one of many environmental scares that the oil industry would cause, when the ceaseless flow threatened to inundate a nearby wadi that was a major watercourse in the wet season, and blacken the fields of farmers for miles.
While one of the first disastrous side effects of the emerging petroleum industry, it would surely not be the last. From the Exxon-Valdez tanker spill in 1985, to the massive deliberate disaster in Kuwait when the retreating Iraqi Army spilled 240 million gallons of crude into the Persian Gulf, oil had been a primary requirement for world powers, the essential resource of modern civilization, and both an object and a weapon of war. In 2010, British Petroleum would struggle for weeks to cap the raging Deepwater Horizon well beneath the Gulf of Mexico, and later the massive offshore platform Thunderhorse would be smitten by the rage of a hurricane and then deliberately destroyed, sent to its demise by a Russian torpedo. In WWII, the oil wars were only just beginning…
In 1927, Baba Gurgur was the scene of a desperate ten day effort to cap that first gushing well. The local Jubur tribesmen came to the site from miles away, joining the work crews in the effort to get close enough to the gusher to try and cap it. Their near naked bodies were blackened with the oil, and many succumbed to low lying pockets of blue mist that was actually lethal gas. In the end a large aircraft engine was deployed to try and clear the black rain from one segment of the wellhead to allow the crews to shut it down. Dikes were constructed in the wadi to trap the flowing oil and prevent it from moving farther down to contaminate the nearby rivers. The well was capped after gushing over 95,000 barrels per day, disaster was averted, and the geologists had tamed the demon that would both feed and haunt an energy hungry world for the next hundred years, the “Age of Oil.”
By 1941, Baba Gurgur was considered the single largest reserve of oil on the planet, as the mighty Ghawar fields of Saudi Arabia would not be discovered until 1948. Ivan Volkov would claim he sat on vast resources in the Kashagan fields of the north Caspian Sea, but none of that had been developed as yet. The British, however, were quick to the tap, and soon pipelines extended from oil fields northwest of Kirkuk, through Iraq to Haditha, where the lines split, one transiting northern Syria to Tripoli, and a second flowing through the Trans Jordan to Haifa in Palestine. They were already considered trophies of war for whoever could secure and control them in the campaign underway, but Hitler would soon come to turn his greedy eye on the source itself, the Father of Fires, Baba Gurgur.
The German need for oil was most apparent to the planners at OKW, where Keitel, Halder and Jodl all met to discuss what might soon become a very grave situation.
“We had 15 million barrels of oil stockpiled before the outbreak of the war,” said Halder, looking at the carefully drawn numbers on his charts. “Now, with the consumption needed to launch Operation Barbarossa, we are likely to run out by late August, and that would be a most inopportune time. This operation is unprecedented in all of human history. Look at these numbers! We must move 91,000 tons of ammunition, 600,000 trucks, 750,000 horses, and half a million tons of fuel. That is 40% of all the oil stocks we presently have, and all for the opening two months of Barbarossa! Hitler had it right. When this attack commences, the world will hold its breath. On top of all this, we have this nonsense going on in Syria.”
“What about all those pipelines through that region,” said Jodl, who had been the able Chief of Staff at OKW throughout the campaigns in Denmark and Norway. “You want more oil, well there it is.”
“They run to Tripoli in Lebanon,” Halder said quickly, “which does us no good if we hope to get the oil anywhere by sea. Don’t forget the Royal Navy remains unbroken, and Raeder’s incompetence is to blame.”
“You are too hard on the man,” said Keitel. “These new naval rockets the British hav
e developed are quite formidable. They have unhinged all his operations, and the damage to the ships is plain to see.”
“Thank god for the Führer’s order to stop his senseless Plan Z program and concentrate on U-boats,” said Halder acidly. “Doenitz is the man to rely on, not Raeder.”
“Something tells me we will need them both,” said Jodl. “The only reason the British don’t have even more power in the Mediterranean is because of the threat posed by our own naval forces.”
“Our battleships did little good there,” said Halder. “Not even the Hindenburg, the biggest oil hog in the fleet.”
“Don’t let the Führer hear you say such things,” Keitel admonished, stepping in to the light overhanging the map table.
“He has already said that himself! Why else are we planning everything around the need to secure more resources, more oil?”
“In that you are correct, Halder. But we will have a quick victory against Russia, just as we defeated the British and French last year. You will see.”
“Go on hoping, Keitel, it’s the doing that matters. So what do we have here with this latest wrinkle in the Führer’s mind?” Halder was referring to the letter he had received that morning, directing him to see to the possibility of securing Mosul and Kirkuk in Northern Iraq as part of the Syrian campaign.
“The Führer has not been fully briefed,” he continued. “Doesn’t he know that things did not go as planned in Syria? These figures on losses to 9th Panzer Division were quite alarming. We were barely able to get the division there over that antiquated Turkish rail system, and committing a unit like the SS Motorized Division behind it was a waste. Kleist was not happy about it.”
“Manstein settled him down. Remember, the Führer has ordered the entire 56th Panzer Korps to Army Group South, and all the SS units.”
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