Kirov Saga: Devil's Garden (Kirov Series) (30 page)

“Well…” He looked at the two British soldiers, realizing this was
yet another problem in his column, and another man was missing as well. They
were obviously from 1942, and now they were his charge. How in the world would
he get them back there where they belonged? He couldn’t think about that just
now. His mind was too full of other urgencies and priorities. First he had to
find out where they were.

“Zykov, have these two escorted to a secure room below. I’ll see
if we have someone who speaks English aboard and check in on them later.”

 Then he gave Orlov a long look. “We’re all tired, and you look
like you could use a good meal, Chief. Follow Zykov to the mess hall and get
something to eat.

He looked at the corporal now. “He is not to be handcuffed, and he
is to be accepted as a member of this crew, with his full rank of Captain
restored.”

“Very well, sir. A promotion and a good meal will do any man some
good, yes Orlov?”

“Right,” said Fedorov, “but don’t get pushy and start ordering the
men around. And promise me you won’t jump ship!”

“Where are we, Fedorov? What is this thing?” Orlov gave the facility
a wide eyed look.

“The
Anatoly Alexandrov
. It’s a floating nuclear power
plant. We’ve got that control rod aboard, and we just used it to displace in
time…somewhere. I’d better go and see about that while you eat with the
Marines. You’re Captain of the second rank now, though I’m afraid
Kirov
is a little far away for us to still call you the Chief of Operations. I may
still do so by habit for a while.”

“Where is the ship—at Vladivostok?”

“We don’t really know…”

Orlov raised an eyebrow at that, nodding. He had not expected this
grace. Fedorov, naive as he was, had bought his whole pile of shit and paid
full price! Good enough. He would go have some food, get some sleep, and then
figure what he might do next. For now, however, there was one part of him that
was glad to be home. He started after Zykov, who was showing him the way.

“Welcome back, Chief,” said Fedorov after him, and something in
the sincerity of the other man’s words touched him. He turned, forcing a smile
on his otherwise grumpy and miserable face.

“Thank you, Fedorov,” he said in return. He didn’t know why, but
he meant it.

Chapter 26

Troyak
was watching the coastline closely with his field glasses as they
approached. They had taken a high speed swift boat that had been part of the
Aist
hovercraft inventory, and now he was with Fedorov and a squad of his best
Marines. They could not raise anyone on radio, and so the only thing to do was
to go ashore in a landing party. Fedorov was leery of using the Mi-26 at this
point, so the boat made perfect sense. It was small, much more inconspicuous
than one of the hovercraft, and fast enough to get them ashore in good time.

“Well at least everything is here, Fedorov. The coastline doesn’t
look developed like it should be in our day. Do you suppose this is still
1942?”

“Then where are the Germans we were just fighting? They would have
taken the port at Makhachkala by now. The warehouse by the rail station was on
fire and we should still see it burning. I see no sign of fighting ahead.”

Troyak nodded, but had nothing more to say.

“Look, there’s the new lighthouse they built in the 1800s.” He
pointed to a hill rising from the shore where an octagonal tower stood with a
lantern fixture at its top. “That’s Aji-Arka Hill. I’ve been up there before.
Peter the First made his camp up there when he mounted his campaign against
Persia in the early 1700s. The place was just a small fishing port at that
time.”

Troyak was amazed at all Fedorov knew. “How do you manage to fill
your head with all these facts, Colonel?”

“I just read a lot, Sergeant. Reading is my way of getting into
worlds I might never have a chance to visit in the flesh. And sometimes it can
be a very pleasant time to escape into the past and leave the sorrow and pain
of routine navy life behind.”

“Yes, until you actually
do
start visiting that past and
find German infantry shooting at you.” Troyak smiled. “The past has seemed far
more dangerous than the life we had on the ship, Fedorov.”

“I suppose that’s true…But where in hell have we ended up this
time? Can you make for that sand bar south of the harbor?”

They eased up to the shore, and Troyak’s Marines fanned out, much
to the surprise of a group of fishermen who were working to untangle their
nets. Nothing in the landscape looked right to them, and Fedorov knew they were
certainly not in the future. He could see rows of small buildings made of
sun-dried brick, what looked to be a small public bath house, a few open water
pipes where people would pump water, and few buildings of any real size.

It was clear that a railway like the one they had just been
defending was getting started here, but it was much smaller. Fedorov had the
sinking feeling that reminded him of that moment when he had stepped outside the
dining room at Ilanskiy and saw the rail yard was different, the train was
missing and the whole town site reduced to a cluster of just a very few
buildings. My God, he thought. We’ve gone
back
in time, not forward!

He approached one of the fisherman, who stepped back, somewhat
intimidated by his uniform and the obvious military bearing of the Marines.

“Good day, sir.” Fedorov removed his Ushanka, trying to appear
less threatening. “We are Navy sailors and our ship had foundered on a Caspian
sandbar. We’ve lost our navigation charts in a bad storm. Can you tell me what
port we have found here?”

“What port? Why, this is Petrovsk. Where have you come from?”

Fedorov was confused at first. Petrovsk? Then he realized that was
the old name for the port and town that became Makhachkala, but the city had
not been called that since the late 1920s! He needed to find out the date. “We
put out from Astrakhan some weeks ago, but the sea has not been kind to us. Our
ship ran aground and it has taken us many months to refloat it. What is the
date? What has been happening? Have we slipped into another year while we were
struggling at sea?”

“Another year? No. it is still the summer, July if you want to
know. The weather should tell you that much.”

“And the year?”

The man gave him a perplexed look. “1908, of course! You must have
been at sea a good long while if you are that confused.”

Fedorov half expected to hear that. The clues were stacking up in
his mind, one after another, and things were now starting to make sense.
Dobrynin told him that Admiral Volsky had confided something about the control
rods they were sent.

“These are very unusual,”
he said.
“The inspector General looked up the source
materials, and they have some very strange trace elements that were mined near
Vanavara. You know the place—it is very near the Stony Tunguska in northern
Siberia!”

That word spoke volumes of untold mystery in Fedorov’s mind. He
had been fascinated by the Tunguska event since he was a young boy, reading any
story he could ever find about it. The largest impact event in recorded
history, it was felt over a wide area, its effects lighting up the skies as far
away as London for days after, and it had just happened, if this fisherman was
correct. If this was early July of 1908 they might still see the effects in the
sky after dark, even this far south.

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.”