B00DSDUWIQ EBOK (14 page)

They
settled into silence, each man turning over the situation in his mind. For the moment
they had a breathing space for a little welcome rest off the damp earth, but
they knew it would not be long before they would have to answer all the questions
they asked one another in the dark. Something told Haselden that Lieutenant
Sutherland was right. A smile and a cigarette wouldn’t do the trick again. Now
it was down to pistols, knives, and the two Stens.

Chapter 14

Fedorov
stepped onto the plank leading up to the
gangway, a wary look in his eye. The boson’s mate gave him a glance, then saluted
when he saw the decorations on his chest and the obvious insignia of a high
ranking officer on his cap.

It
had been a long and tiresome journey by rail south to the Caspian. The land seemed
to stretch on and on in an endless wasteland of parched, tractless earth. In
places the terrain was so untraveled that the rail line failed and they had to
detrain to look for transport by truck. But over two days time they managed to
reached their destination on the northernmost shore of the Caspian Sea at a
town called Guryev, renamed Atyrau in the early 1990s.

The
city was situated at the mouth of the Ural River, sitting right astride the border
of Europe and Asia. The muddy brown water of the river wound through West
Kazakhstan from the north in a long dull ribbon to eventually find the sea.
Over the years the settlement became famous for its fish, but just off shore
lay vast latent fields of undiscovered oil that would later become the Tengiz
and Kashagan superfields. Decades into the future, big oil conglomerates would
delve deep into the waters for the light sweet crude and lucrative gas fields,
and Ben Flack would hold sway on platform
Medusa
at the edge of a
growing conflict over energy supplies. Yet at that moment the town and its harbor
on the sea seemed a lonesome and forlorn place.

In
recent months, the threat posed by the advancing German Army had seen the arrival
of long lines of barges and partially submerged cisterns of oil from Baku towed
by commercial tugs. The Soviets were desperately trying to cap the threatened
oil wells of Baku and transport the rigs and other equipment, along with as
much oil as possible, to other shores far from the German advance.

When
they arrived in town Fedorov learned that the Germans had finally cut the rail and
road connections between Astrakhan and Baku, and he knew the way south would
now mean a hazardous journey by sea. There was a small flotilla of commercial ships
still making regular runs to Baku, but the only ship in port the day they arrived
was the
Amerika
, an old oil tanker that would leave the following
morning.

The
quays and wharves were littered with rusty barrels, old sections of weathered pipe,
dilapidated drilling equipment, and abandoned vehicles that seemed as though it
had been washed ashore by the ebb and flow of the tides of war. Handfuls of
stevedores and dock workers rummaged through the scrap, and occasionally a column
of three or four trucks would arrive to haul things away. The smaller boats in
the harbor seemed useless for what they had planned, old rotting wood fishing
boats that seemed the sole livelihood of lean, haggard men trying to scratch
out a living for their families, so they had no choice but to board the tanker.

“I
did not expect the port to be so desolate,” said Fedorov to Troyak as they boarded
the ship. “The war has not yet reached this place, but it is very near. The
struggle for Stalingrad is still underway, and the German Army is deep in the
Caucasus. Now we set sail for lands inside the war zone itself. We will have to
get south of Kizlyar to avoid the Germans, and this tanker stops at Makhachkala
before going on to Baku. It’s our one chance.”

“Zykov
has been chatting with a few locals,” said Troyak. “They say the Germans have mounted
occasional air strikes on the shipping lanes to the south.”

“Yes,
they tried to cut these supply lines by any means, and sunk a number of ships. This
ship here, the
Amerika
, will be sunk in a few weeks time off Astrakhan
by a German air strike—that is if the history I studied before we departed
still holds true. After what I experienced back at Ilanskiy I have no idea what
to really expect now.”

The
more Fedorov thought of those narrow back stairs at the inn, the more he worried.
It was strange how he was affected, literally walking down those steps to
another time, and then having his experience confirmed so dramatically by the
sudden reappearance of Mironov. That was more than coincidence, he thought. Here
we are, officers and crew off the battlecruiser
Kirov
, now Argonauts in
time, and I meet the very man that ship was named for! It was still astounding to
consider, or even believe, yet the memory of Mironov’s eyes, the face of young
Sergei Kirov, was burned in his memory. He recalled the overwhelming temptation
to say something to the man concerning his fate, years hence, on that dark day
in December when he would die at the hands of an assassin. Did he say too much?

Here
he was on an impossible mission in time to try and find Gennadi Orlov because he
suspected the man may have fatally changed the course of events, and then this
happens! The thought came to him again, even as it had in that single pulse
pounding moment when Mironov was brought in by Zykov—what if this was the key
moment in time? What if Orlov was nothing more than a big red herring meant only
to bring him here to this place, to that darkened stairwell, and face to face
with Sergei Kirov?

Before
he knew what he was saying the words blurted out, an urgent whisper in the young
man’s ear.
‘Do not go to St. Petersburg in 1934! Beware Stalin! Beware the
30th of December! Go with God. Go and live, Mironov. Live!’

What
have I done? Fedorov turned that question over and over again in his mind now. I
meet one of the most important figures in modern Russian history, a man of the
Great Revolution, and I say something that could change everything if Mironov
were to ever remember it and act on my stupid advice. What was I thinking? Here
I am trying to find a way to prevent that terrible future we saw, but we have
been fumbling in the dark all this time. We really don’t know what we must do,
or change. Could this be the key?

What
if Kirov remembers me; remembers what I whispered to him at the top of those stairs?
What if he does
not
go to St. Petersburg? Would Josef Stalin still find
a way to remove him? Would time find a way, just like all those crewmen on the
ship who ended up never being born? A man like Stalin was such an overweening
shadow on the face of history that it seemed impossible to think his fate might
be changed. But what if Kirov survived…What if?

He
thought about that for a good long while as they settled into a damp crew compartment
on the
Amerika
. If Kirov survived how might his life and influence have
changed things? He was very close to Stalin, almost like a brother. Yet Stalin
resented his popularity, and his influence. It was clear that Stalin used
Kirov’s assassination to launch his great purge and remove thousands of
potential rivals and opponents. As many as a million may have died, and surely
he would not leave Kirov alive under similar circumstances. Yet if Kirov did
live….If he managed to remain a powerful and influential figure, what might
Soviet Russia look like once freed from the blight of Stalin’s influence? Could
Russia survive the rigors of WWII and still prevail without the ‘Man of Steel,’
Stalin, at the helm of that ship of state?

It
was all too much for him to grasp at the moment, and Fedorov soon found that the
mystery of that back stairwell was more than enough to challenge him. He had
tried to describe the event as a rift in time, a tear in the fabric of
spacetime
that seemed to connect two points on the continuum, two years—1908 and 1942. The
fact that his regression to 1908 brought him to the very moment of the impact
at Tunguska was very telling, and he still suspected that that strange occurrence
on June 30, 1908 could have caused the rift to form. The stairwell at the inn
must have just been perfectly positioned to allow one to pass through that
rift! That was mere happenstance. If the inn had never been built then the rift
in time would just be hovering in space at that location, a few meters above
the ground. The position and angle of the stairs provided the perfect means of
entering the rift, and traveling in time!

Now
he wondered if there were other places like that, other rifts in time possibly caused
by the violence and mystery of the Tunguska event. Even more so, he wondered
how long the rift persisted. Clearly it did not always work, for Troyak claimed
he went down those stairs and yet remained stable in the year 1942. He did not
encounter the phenomenon that sent Fedorov farther back in time.

How
long did the effect last? Was it intermittent, coming and going like that strange
pulsing the battlecruiser experienced when it moved in time? If it first
occurred in 1908, it was obviously still present 34 years later in 1942. The
pulsing effect could explain why Troyak did not move in time. Perhaps one had
to transit the stairway at just the right moment.

What
if the rift persisted into modern times, thought Fedorov? Was it there in the year
2021? And if it persisted all those years, who might have come up those back
stairs in all that time, and who might have passed down them to find themselves
in the distant past, stalking through the lost days of history as he was even
now? That thought was truly staggering. What if other men had discovered what
he had just experienced, and vanished into time? If they could not get back by
taking the stairs again, then what? They would be marooned in the past and
forced to live out their entire lives there. My God! He realized that every
time someone went down those stairs they could have a profound effect on all
history.

They
could change everything, just as Fedorov and his team were striving to change the
history at this moment, and save humanity from a terrible future fate. He was suddenly
filled with the urge to go back and test his theory again. At the very least he
wondered if he could somehow get another message to the future, to Admiral
Volsky. We must find out if the stairway still exists in our time, he thought
darkly. We must!

Even
as he thought this another man was answering some of the very same questions Fedorov
was asking himself, for he has also come down those same stairs and was about
to make a most interesting discovery of his own.

* * *

“I
am
a Captain in the Internal
Affairs Division of the Russian Naval Intelligence! How dare you treat me in
this manner!” Volkov’s anger was apparent in the heat, which now colored his
otherwise pallid cheeks.

“Is
that so? Well I am a Colonel in the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs—Rail
Security Division, Captain, if that is who you really are. Your identification
card is most unusual. I have never seen anything like it. Your uniform, weapon,
also very unusual. We see a great deal on this line; roust out every sort of thief
and scoundrel imaginable, and we hear many wild stories. But this one I have
never heard before. At the moment the irregularities I have already mentioned
are enough to suspect you are not who you claim to be. This identification card
for example…very strange.”

“That
is standard navy issue. Or perhaps you have never seen proper credentials for a
naval officer before? There is nothing irregular about it at all!”

Colonel
Lysenko, cocked his head to one side, taking another long drag on his cigarette.
“And you say you have never seen this man before?” He pointed to the other
officer, the one who had fingered Volkov, the one who regarded him even now
with narrow eyed suspicion behind his round wire framed glasses, Mikhael Surinov.

“I
have not… And where are my men? Believe this, Colonel, if that is who
you
really are. You are now interfering in a matter of state security of the highest
order!”

“Is
that so? Then you must work for the Kremlin, eh? Who is this man you were holding
at gunpoint?” The Englishman was being watched by one of Lysenko’s men at the
front desk where Ilyana sat fretfully listening to the whole scene, not knowing
what was happening.

Volkov
folded his arms, defiant. “I was about to find that out when you barged in with
this ridiculous charade. I have been searching every station on this railway—every
lodgment and depot. We are looking for a man, and this fellow seemed
suspicious—an Englishman! What is he doing here in time of war? So yes, I
detained him for questioning, and I—”

“You
were looking for a man? Who?” Lysenko exhaled heavily, the ashes of his cigarette
low again.

“Another
naval officer, a man named Fedorov, though he may be traveling undercover.”

“Fedorov?”
The Colonel turned quickly to the shorter officer. “Is that the man you told me
of?”

“Yes
sir!” said Surinov. “He was very bold, just as this man here seems—very official.
Yet there was something odd about him. He claimed he had come from Khabarovsk,
and that was proved to be a lie as soon as I returned there to make my report.
I have never met an officer in the Rail Security Division who acted as he
did—humiliating me in front of my security detail, not to mention those pigs I
was transporting to the detention centers!”

Now
Volkov leaned forward. “You say you have encountered this man—Fedorov? How did you
know his name?”

“That’s
what he called himself—him and his Sergeant Troyak. That man was completely insubordinate,
and the Colonel did nothing! He just stood there and let a common soldier threaten
me!”