Kirov Saga: Darkest Hour: Altered States - Volume II (Kirov Series) (38 page)

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 anomaly 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 rotated 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.”

“We
must get clear of this damn storm,” said Selikov. “Our only option now will be
to descend to lower altitudes and see if we can spot the river again. Otherwise
we are just flying blind here, and we could end up anywhere—miles from the
river until we find another tributary to follow.”

Selikov
was able to steer wide of the storm cells, but new formations seemed to loom
up, forcing him to some very tense moments in the navigation of the ship. It
took some physical exertion to turn the rudder or elevator wheels, and the men
there were soon drenched with sweat, in spite of the cold. The storm was much
bigger than they had first believed, and it was long hours of harrowing flight
before they could break into clear air again.

Captain
Selikov was frustrated and ill at ease. “Well,” he said finally. “We’ve got
clear air for a descent. The only problem now is that I haven’t the slightest
idea where we are. Our heading has been unreadable since the compass failed,
and it is still spinning like a top! We could be anywhere inside that circle,
by my calculations.” He pointed to a ‘farthest on’ circle he had drawn around
their last known position on the chart, with a double line on one side
indicating the probable direction.