Kirov Saga: Devil's Garden (Kirov Series) (32 page)

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.

“What do you hope to accomplish, Captain? You will have to kill
men to do it, that much is certain. How many more will have to die to satisfy
your desire for power?”

“You may think I do this only for myself, Doctor, but that is not
the case. I do this for Russia. You know the history. The revolution is
festering even now as we speak. Men like Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin are all in
the mix. Even the man this ship is named for is alive here, a young man
somewhere. They will take some time with their revolution, but it is coming like
a bad storm.”

“So what can you do about that? I think the Tsar is doomed. The
First World War is coming as well. Nicholas will not survive that. It will
bleed the country and make an end of his reign. How can you prevent it? And
even if you could, would you prefer the house of Romanov to Stalin?”

“Yes, you are correct, Doctor. I cannot control all these events.
But what I can do is establish Russia as a Pacific power again, and fend off
all comers. There was an uprising in Vladivostok just after that disastrous
defeat at the hands of the Japanese. They wanted to break away and look to
their own fate, independent of European Russia. That is something we could do
here.”

“What? Set up your own little empire? And you expect me to believe
you do all this for the homeland? You have just said you would wash your hands
of it all and leave the Tsar to his fate when the revolution comes. Well let me
remind you that the revolution came here as well. The Bolsheviks defeated
Denikin, and finally Admiral Kolchak, the last of the Whites.”

“Yes, but that wasn’t until 1920. There is much we could do before
then. The Bolsheviks had very few enclaves in Siberia until late in the Russian
Civil War.”

“So what do you propose to do, Captain? I have heard you announced
yourself as Viceroy of the East. Kolchak tried that line as well. Didn’t he
announce himself as ‘Supreme Leader of Russia?’ All that got him was an
appointment with a firing squad.”

“Kolchak was not prepared to master the situation on land. He was
a Navy Admiral, with little training in ground maneuvers.”

“And you are a Navy Captain with even less! I will warrant that
you can take control of the seas here, Karpov, but Siberia is a very big place.
No one will see
Kirov
sailing boldly over the taiga to enforce your will.
Men like Denikin and all the others will soon realize that you are relatively
powerless to affect events inland. Oh, I suppose you could control Vladivostok,
and probably keep the Western powers from trying to intervene in the civil war.
But you must realize your own limitations. You want to set history right for
Russia? Well Russia may have other ideas about what it wants, and what will you
do if Denikin, Kornilov and the other Whites tell you to go to hell? Your dream
of a Far East Republic will vanish just as it did for Kolchak. And when they
lose to the Reds, as they will you know, then what will you do?”

“A good speech, Doctor. Denikin was in the Caucasus worried about
the Jews, and I need have no dealings with him. But if I choose to do so I can
smash the Red Army and ensure a victory by the Whites.”

“How? Your cruise missiles will need a very long range to do that.
The final big battles were fought well inland at Orel and Samara.”

The Doctor made a good point. The range of his Moskit-IIs was only
120 miles, and the MOS IIIs could reach only 90 miles. Karpov shrugged. He had
not mentioned the use of nuclear weapons, but that was obviously what was on
the Doctor’s mind.

“Power can be achieved by other means,” said Karpov.

“Are you going to start blowing things up again?”

“I know that is your great fear, Doctor, but that may not even be
necessary. The mere demonstration of power can achieve dramatic ends.”

“Did that work with the Americans? All they did was come at you
harder.”

“These are not the Americans of 1945. The men of this era have far
less real power in their hands. Their ships are obsolete old rust buckets
compared to
Kirov
.”

“Face it, Karpov. To achieve anything like the scenario I think
you are creating in your head, you will need the close cooperation of these
men. You will need someone like Kolchak, for example, and a White Army that can
hold its own against the Bolsheviks. Otherwise they will prevail and Stalin
will eventually rise out of the fires of the civil war. What then? You want to
face off with Stalin?”

“Don’t you understand, Zolkin? Knowledge is power too. I can know
all the history as it is about to unfold. Stalin? I did some reading the other
day. You want to know where Stalin is at this very moment? He’s in prison at
Baku! Why, if I chose to do so I could sail to the Black Sea and send
helicopters there and make an end of Stalin before he ever becomes a factor in
Russian history.”

“My God! Listen to yourself. Sometimes I really wonder if you are
serious about all this. Well… I’ll give you one thing, Captain. You have power
here, that much is obvious. You want to go kill Stalin? I suppose no one can
stop you. Do that, however, and another man may rise from the dark corners of
history to take his place. Your knowledge of future events will come unraveling
the moment he dies. Fedorov will tell you this. Anything you do here will have
dramatic repercussions. So this knowledge you think you can use will soon be
useless when everything starts to change. Yes, someone will rise in Stalin’s
place, and you will not know who that man is, or how to reach him. History may be
far more resilient than you realize.”

Karpov shrugged. “This is all academic,” he said. “The question is
what do we do about Fedorov?”

“Fedorov? Yes, he wants to try and rescue us. He’s a good man,
Captain. You know that as much as I do. He will want to do everything possible
to let sleeping dogs lie here. The world is going into the cauldron of the
First Great War soon, and back home it’s about to go into the
last
Great
War. Those dogs will soon be on the hunt without any help from us, in both
eras.”

“Do you think this plan of his will work? I mean… well how did it
come to pass that he appeared here, in 1908? What if those control rods just
end up sending us even farther back in time? Fedorov devises all these plans
and schemes, but he really has no way to control what happens, any more than
you say I do.”

“Yes, Karpov. In the end we are all at the mercy of time and
events. Call it fate, call it the will of God, but there is something bigger
than you or me or Mister Fedorov at work here. We are like blind men in a dark
closet looking for the right coat here. Whatever you decide, consider the men
on this ship. They may not share your dream of conquest. Have you even bothered
to consider asking what they might want to do? Well, here’s a thought you can
put into your own scheming head. Suppose you do something here; something that
changes everything. Suppose the grandparents of men aboard this ship don’t
survive in the new world you create? What happens to the men then? Do they end
up dead, never born, just like the men on that list Volkov was all worked up
over, with no record they ever existed? Suppose your
own
grandfather
dies. Then what?”

Part X

Lindisfarne

“For with the flow and ebb, its style
Varies from continent to isle;
Dry shod o’er sands, twice every day,
The pilgrims to the shrine find way;
Twice every day the waves efface
Of staves and sandalled feet the trace.”

―
Sir Walter Scott

Chapter 28

The
sky was low that day when he arrived, the long causeway leading
the way across the South Low where it meandered into the sea. At low tide there
was a mile or more of mud flats here, until the causeway rose on the far banks
of Holy Isle. At high tide the low was entirely submerged by the sea, cutting
the island off from the greater shore of England to the west. To this day the
tides dictated access to the isle, and now they had gracefully withdrawn for his
Lordship, Sir Roger Ames, the Duke of Elvington, who passed quickly over the
narrow way in his town car.

The bare windswept stone of the island greeted him, called
whinstone by the locals. It was a hard and durable rock, and it had hidden
secrets here from the world for many centuries. He passed beneath the Snook
along the narrow neck of Holy Isle, following the narrow road as it hugged the
coast through the village, past Riding Stone and Cockle Stone to the castle at Lindisfarne
on Beblowe Crag. Cobblestone as it ended, it would take him all the way the boat
houses, three herring boats cut in half and set upside down on the green earth.
The gap was walled in and a door installed. How quaint, he thought.

There he would thank the driver, and have his effects moved up the
long flat stairs to the lower battery of the castle itself, where he had so
arranged it that he would have the entire facility to himself. If Mister Thomas
was prompt, he should be waiting for him to move the luggage. The driver would
be dismissed before high tide, and it would be just he and Thomas left alone at
the castle, on the eve of their great adventure.

They would take their meal, all arranged and set out at that very
moment on the long oval table of the dining hall. It sat at the edge of a great
hearth stretching in a wide arch, with stolid brickwork rising to the vaulted
ceiling. It was once an old bread oven, but it would hold a nice fire and warm
their meal. He had a mind to tour the ‘ship room,’ where a rustic model of an
old tri-mast frigate was hung from the arched stone ceiling, as if it were
sailing there in formation with 17th century Dutch candelabra chandeliers. After
that they would spend a few quiet hours of quiet in the upper gallery. There
were some old books to pass the time, and a lovely cello he might play,
listening to the sound echoing in the empty halls of the castle.

Ian Thomas got quite a kick out of the ship room. “My, look at
that, it’s as if a ghost ship were sailing through the room, sir.”

“Indeed, Mister Thomas. Wouldn’t you be thrilled to ride on a ship
like that?”

“I certainly would, sir.”

“Well, that may soon be arranged.” The Duke let that hang, a
subtle clue to the business ahead, which had Thomas very curious to learn more.
Yet he knew enough not to probe. He would be told anything the Duke decided he
needed to know in good time. So instead he kept to the particulars of their
immediate schedule. After a sumptuous dinner they shared a glass a brandy in
the upper gallery until the Duke stood up, looking at his pocket watch.

“Will we be leaving the castle tonight, your grace? Shall I
arrange for a car?”

“In a manner of speaking…but no, a car will not be necessary. I
should like to walk the shore for a time and see if I might happen upon old
Saint Cuthbert stringing his beads. Would you be so kind as to see the luggage
gets up to the small bedroom off the long gallery? You’ll find it right on the
landing at the top of a narrow stairway there, just outside the gallery on the upper
battery.”

“Right away, sir.” Apparently they were staying the night there at
the castle.

As evening fell the Duke walked in the walled garden, once a
vegetable garden for the castle garrison, enjoying the cool sea air on this
last night. He would end with a final walk on the stony shore as the darkness
settled in, listening to the sound of the surf on stone and the cooing of the
fulmars roosting there. At one point he thought he heard the distant barking of
a dog and looked to see what he thought was a white shepherd roaming near the
edge of the castle, but it seemed to vanish in the mist.

There had been an old priory on the island dating to the 600s,
long before the castle was built many centuries later in the 1500s. Venerable
saints like Adian and Cuthbert both preached the Gospel from the isolated island
base, finding it a special place to withdraw from the world to commune with the
sea, and their God. Adian died there and his remains were buried beneath the ruins
of the old Abbey, and it was said that Cuthbert had a vision that night of the
saint being taken to heaven by Angels.

Yes, the place has always been a portal between this world and
others, the Duke thought as he walked. The Angels come and go, and the saints
take their repose here while the monks painstakingly copy their glorious Gospels.
He had always been fond of the Lindisfarne Gospel, and had even tried to
acquire it at one point in his career. I may accomplish that yet, he thought to
himself, but not here…not now.

The Monks fled when the Vikings came, and were said to have wandered
for generations, carrying with them the body of Saint Cuthbert. The Vikings
almost made an end of the place when they ravaged the shore, and Lindisfarne
was uninhabited for all of two centuries until the intrepid Benedictine Monks
returned.