Kirov Saga: Darkest Hour: Altered States - Volume II (Kirov Series)

by Schettler, John

  Life is a forge, he thought, and he put the matter out of his mind.

  * * *

  Alan Turing was having a very bad day. Thankfully his hay fever had abated somewhat, and he could at least breathe again. And he had managed to keep his coffee mug chained up until he wanted it. But the pressure was now mounting, as one intercept after another began to pile up on his desk, in a well named German naval code that was proving to be a real enigma.

  Admiral Tovey had been on the hot seat at Whitehall over losses and damage to the Home Fleet in the recent duel with the Germans in the Denmark Strait. Questions had been asked about the W/T intercepts of German command level signals, and why they were not deciphered, but more so about the strange decision to parlay with the Admiral of a Russian cruiser—the very same ship that Peter Twinn had dropped in his lap with that handful of photographs. Now they wanted to know more, and Turing was back in the storeroom rummaging through boxes of old photo reconnaissance material. And that was when his day went completely bonkers.

  How could we have missed the construction and commissioning of such a ship, he thought? They were saying that it must have been a secret project, possibly built in Odessa or the shipyards at Nikolayev South, also known as Soviet Shipyard No. 444. It was certainly not laid down in any of the Baltic shipyards, and we have no evidence to suggest that the Soviets could build a ship of that size at any of their northern ports. If it was laid down at Shipyard 444 then they damn well must have had a magician’s cloak over it the whole time.

  I was never on ship watch. I’m here to sort through the signals intelligence and decipher the damn things. And that is all I’ll be doing for months now—going over anything they pile up from three and four years back to ferret out the trail on this ship. Surely there were orders, message traffic, commercial contracts, personnel assignments, materials acquisitions. It would simply be impossible to hide all that for very long. We should know about this ship, chapter and verse. But yet I find nothing; nothing at all in the archives here.

  He stood up, frustrated, and ready to call it a long afternoon and go unchain his coffee mug. Then he saw it, the box tucked discretely away behind the last indexed photo box on the reconnaissance shelf. Someone got hasty, or very sloppy, he said to himself. Here they’ve gone and mislabeled a photo box. He stooped down, leaning in and wishing there was better light in the musty old storage room of the archive. Well, what is it then? He pulled the box out, sliding it in to an open space on the hard tiled floor, right beneath the bare light bulb hanging from a cord above.

  We simply must find a better way to keep track of things. Now where does this belong? The box was very odd, and it left him feeling strangely unnerved. No label at all… Just stuck in here in a nook against the wall behind that entire indexed series of photo boxes, and taped up rather well.

  Curiosity got the better of him now. If had always been one of his salient personality traits, or flaws—that persistent curiosity that so often accessorized the mind and character of a scientist and intellectual. Wondering about things was always the first step down the garden path to the roses of understanding. Now he wondered what he had dragged away from the old daddy long-legged spiders, layered in dust and looking like it wanted nothing more than to be left alone—for another century or two.

  But to Alan Turning a closed box wanted opening, just as any puzzle or chess problem needed solving. He reached for the tape and had it off in a minute, slowly opening the lid to the box and setting it aside. A last bit of masking tape clung plaintively to one end of the lid as he did so, but Turing had his way.

  Now what have we here, he said to himself, his curiosity redoubled? There was a nice fat row of well stuffed manila envelopes, typical of the sort they all used here to store files and reports and photos pertaining to one thing or another. This one did have a label, which he read, though it rang no bell in his mind as he did so. Must have been before my time here, he thought, though the writing did not look all that weathered. Strangely, each and every envelope bore the same label.

  There was no good trying to get into all that in the middle of the storeroom floor, so he took a single envelope, the first in the series, and retreated down the long aisle toward the light of the open door. It would make for a brief diversion while he took a brief time out for some much needed coffee.

  He set the file down on his desk, fished about in his pocket for his padlock key, and then slowly unchained his coffee mug, heading for the pot brewed fresh at four in the afternoon, along with plain hot water for tea. Back at his desk he settled in, enjoying those lingering first sips and the aroma of good hot coffee as he picked up the manila envelope.

  He was not surprised to see what looked like typical aerial reconnaissance photos, and as was his habit, he turned the first over without really looking at it to note the location, source and time stamp.

  No wonder, he thought, as it was clear that someone botched the time stamp, fat fingered the numbers and stamped the wrong year. A quick look at the back of all the other photos in that envelope reinforced that, all misdated. Someone was getting sloppy, he thought. They botched the labels on all these photos and probably had to re-do them all again. But we never throw much of anything away here, do we? So they bloody well threw them into an envelope and thought to hide it all away in the back. He smiled, like a school master who had just caught one of the students cheating on an exam, and turned the photo over to have a look.

  And his heart nearly stopped dead.

  There was a ship… a ship at sea, making a wide turn, its wake curved out behind it. It was obviously photographed by an aircraft, probably a seaplane out on a scouting and recon mission. But that ship… He leaned in closer, squinting, reaching for his magnifying glass, his pulse racing though he could not think why. Yet it wasn’t a matter of thinking at that moment. It was all something in the pit of his stomach, a feeling, a dark intuition, laden with misgiving and an edge of fear.

  A ship… the ship… the ship that Peter Twinn had clued him in on! It was unmistakable, the silhouette, high swept bow, long foreword deck that was strangely empty, the strange domes and antennae mounted all about the dark superstructure, and more, that feeling of dangerous menacing power, yet he could not see why—there were hardly any guns worth the name to be seen.

  What is this, he thought? Has Peter been holding out on me? I told him to let me know the moment we had anything more on that ship, and here’s an nice fat envelope… in a box full of nice fat envelopes, all taped off in the storeroom. Perhaps they did get wind of this ship years ago, and this was the mother lode of information he had been looking for!

  He looked at the photos, each with a date in August of 1941, a full year off due to that dodgy rubber stamp. Let’s have a look at the others, he thought, his curiosity rising again.

  And it was a very long and harrowing afternoon from that moment on, ending with Turing sitting alone, a look of perplexed astonishment on his face that soon gave way to white faced fear. It was completely unreasonable, this feeling that had come over him, a feeling that he had seen these photos before, though he knew he had no recollection of ever doing so… Until he saw the unmistakable scrawl of his own handwriting on the back of photo five next to a string of numbers he had written there: Length, 820ft; beam, 90ft; displacement, Estimate 30,000 +, and there were his initials, claiming the note and hand dating it himself, in August of 1941!

  He looked over his shoulder at the open door to the storeroom, his eyes dark with apprehension. Then he reached for the telephone on his desk, thinking he had done exactly that once before… exactly that…

  “Turing here. Hut Four. Secure line to Whitehall please. Admiralty office of the Home Fleet Commander.”

  As he waited on the line he turned the manila envelope over again, noting the single word on the typewritten label there, all capitals.

  It read, GERONIMO.

  Part XII

  Anomalies

  “Through every rift of discovery, some seeming a
nomaly drops out of the darkness, and falls, as a golden link into the great chain of order.”

  —Edwin Hubbel Chapin

  Chapter 34

  Siberia was the greatest wilderness on earth, vast, desolate, a seemingly unending stretch of pine and birch forests that stretched from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific. The land was dotted with a hundred thousand marshy bogs, traversable only when frozen over in winter, and broken by steep ridges and deep valleys cut by the aimless wandering rivers that had remained largely unexplored, even to modern times. In all that space, over five million square miles, there were just a scattering of tiny hamlets, and no more than a few thousand people.

  Only along the Trans-Siberian rail line were their towns and cities worth the name, but north of that thin steel corridor the wilds of Siberia were largely uninhabited. A few that did live there had passed decades in complete isolation. One family of six, the famous Lykovs, would live more than 40 years without seeing another human being, completely oblivious to the course of modern events, the war and all that followed it, until they were eventually discovered by chance in a remote river gorge by geologists.

  So the Siberian wilderness could swallow whole armies if it wished, and they could vanish never to be seen again. The stolid stands of larch, spruce, pine and birch sat in their unknowing silence, and the centuries passed, largely without witness by human eyes. To this day it is said that the wilderness hides undiscovered mysteries, and few have received more speculation than the strange event on the morning of June 30, 1908.

  On that day something came from the deeps of outer space, streaking across the Siberian sky, and blasting into the valley of the Stony Tunguska River. One of the few humans that saw it descend described it very strangely: “a flying oblong body that narrowed towards one end, and light as bright as the sun.” Some said it left a trail of smoke and dust behind it, and appeared in the shape of a pipe or fiery pillar. Another described it as a tube, and one claimed it actually changed course as it approached!

  Whatever fell there was preceded by a strange magnetic storm that was detected on instruments in European universities for several days before the event. The impact explosion, thought to approach 20 megatons, was seen 1500 kilometers away, and the eerie light in the sky that lingered for days was noticed as far away as London. It devastated the 2150 square kilometers of the taiga forest in every direction, blowing them flat and burning them. It sent seismic waves trembling through the earth and atmosphere that were felt half way around the world, and the sound of thunderous explosions continued for fifteen minutes and were heard 1200 kilometers away.

  The magnetic storm persisted another four hours after the impact. Optical anomalies were seen in the night sky all over Europe, along with strange Noctilucent clouds. Radiation was found at the site of the impact, and other anomalies in genetic mutations of the local Tungus people were reported over time. Yet trees that survived the impact went into a sudden, unexplained period of accelerated growth.

  The site lay undiscovered for years, but an enterprising Russian scientist named Leonid Kulik had mounted four expeditions, the first in 1927, and the last in August of 1939—at least in the world Fedorov had been born to. He had found an old Siberian newspaper dating from 1908 that made a very unusual claim: “…a huge meteorite is said to have fallen … beyond the railway line near Filimonovo junction and less than 11 versts (12 kilometers) from Kansk. Its fall was accompanied by a frightful roar and a deafening crash, which was heard more than 40 versts away. The passengers of a train approaching the junction at the time were struck by the unusual noise. The driver stopped the train and the passengers poured out to examine the fallen object, but they were unable to study the meteorite closely because it was red hot...”

  If the report was true, the object or meteorite, perhaps a fragment of the larger Tunguska object, would have fallen very near the place where the Airship Abakan was now tethered to the tall mooring tower at Kansk, perhaps 25 kilometers from the small hamlet and rail station called Ilanskiy.

  * * *

  What was out there, thought Orlov as he gazed out the main gondola windows. What was causing the strange anomaly in the compass room? The Airship Narva had left Port Dikson, heading south to follow the broad gleaming course of the Yenisei River south. Many other rivers would feed the mighty Yenisei as it wandered north to the cold Kara Sea. They had passed these tributaries as they cruised south, using dead reckoning and compass navigation, and the visible track of the river itself to guide them. On the fifth tributary, the Angara River, they would branch away to follow that east briefly, and then look for the twin tributaries of the Burisa and Cuna rivers that would lead them southwest to a point just above Ilanskiy.

  But something had gone wrong.

  A day out of Port Dixon they had covered some 1600 kilometers when the skies began to thicken with rafts of dark, threatening clouds. Orlov saw streaks of white lightning rippling on the flanks of the storm, and the ship’s Air Master, Captain Selikov, seemed worried.

  “That’s the problem out here,” he said to Orlov. “No good weather maps, so we have to take things as they come. Now we shall have to climb,” he said to his Elevatorman where he stood at the broad metal wheel. “Ten degree up bubble. I want to get above that storm front.”

  Narva had become much lighter by burning fuel over the last 1600 kilometers, and there was a fuel weight panel that calculated this, and allowed a man to select just the exact amount of water ballast to be dropped, lightning her further. The airship slowly nosed up into the grey sky, but the storm clouds towered up and up, rising in huge angry anvils hammered by some unseen god that sent thunder and lightning crackling through the sky. For a time they seemed to be navigating a great canyon of angry clouds. They had to get higher, and Selikov nervously watched the altitude increase.

  Theoretically, an airship could climb to any height as long at the pressure between its helium gas and the reserve air sacks could be carefully balanced. Helium expanded as the atmospheric pressure weakened with altitude, which is why the helium gas sat inside a larger air filled bag where the air could be pumped out to a reserve air sack at the tail to allow the helium sack to expand. When the ship descended the process was reversed.

  Even though it was late July, it was very cold as they gained elevation. The crew of the airship tramped about in their heavy woolen coats, hands tucked into mittens and thick gloves, heads lost in dark fleece hats. Orlov was no stranger to these conditions, having stood many a watch on the cold Arctic Seas, and he was wearing his thick leather service jacket and Naval Ushanka. As they climbed, he watched the ribbon of the river below them grow smaller, then cloud over, until they were lost in the thickening sky.

  The Rudderman was standing with a firm grip on the wheel, feeling the winds beginning to buffet the airship’s tail. The wheel itself vibrated in his grip from the pressure exerted on the rudder, over 600 feet behind them. The Elevatorman, a mishman named Yeseni, was exerting himself, spinning the wheel to maintain the inclination and trim of the ship.

  The winds became more intense, and Orlov could feel the Duralumin frame of the airship shuddering and creaking as its great mass was moved by the storm. The Captain’s eye strayed to the gas board, where the pressure in each of the big gas bags could be constantly monitored and vented if necessary, though with the rarity of helium that was seldom done, except in emergencies.

  They were skirting the north edge of the storm, an old trick the airship captains had used known as ‘pressure pattern navigation.’ Winds in the northern hemisphere circulated around a low pressure center in a counter-clockwise rotation, so by skirting north they would move in the same direction of the winds around the storm.

  “Rudderman, ten points to port,” said Selikov. “We’re drifting.” The Carl Zeiss Drift indicator would normally scan the movement of terrain beneath the ship through a downward facing telescope, and the blur of the passing terrain would appear as a streak between two lines on the readout, which were rotat
ed to match the desired course. As long as the streaks were within those lines, the course was true, and a nearby compass allowed the Captain to adjust his course magnetically as well.

  With thick clouds and altitude there was little or no terrain to be seen, so the drift indicator became less useful. Selikov kept his eyes fixed on the compass instead, until it began to shudder and quiver oddly within its casing. He looked up, thinking it was only a temporary vibration caused by the buffeting winds, and when he looked at the compass again the needle was spinning wildly.

  “What’s this?” He tapped the compass, thinking to stabilize the vibration, but to no avail. Then he walked to the voice pipe and shouted down to the navigation room.

  “Navigator, what is your main compass reading?”

  There was a long pause before he got the answer he feared. “Captain… I can’t read anything. The compass needle is all over the dial!”

  Selikov frowned.

  “What is wrong?” Orlov asked.

  “This storm has the ship’s compass all fouled up. We can’t read our heading accurately. I will have to attempt radio direction finding if this keeps up. That might help, assuming we can pick up any stations in this region.”

  This was tried, but the same odd magnetic interference that had the compasses in a dizzy spin was also clouding over all the radio equipment. Then Troyak came up from the auxiliary crews cabin where his Marines were quartered, and huddled with Orlov over the situation.

  “We cannot navigate,” Orlov explained what had been happening. “What about your equipment, Troyak? Our transmitters are quite powerful.”

  “All of my equipment is fouled up too. We lost contact with Kirov half an hour ago, and now I can’t raise them on any bandwidth.”