Grand Alliance (Kirov Series) (41 page)

“Now that you mention it, there
was one small glitch. You were there, Fedorov. Sorry to be so short with you,
Captain, but when that flux alarm goes off it really gets my attention. It
turned out to be a small event. The system settled down just after you left.”

“I see,” said Volsky. “Then the
reactors are fine?”

“There was one other incident,
just before the KA-40 mission was launched. It was the same thing, a flux alarm
that got me all worked up, but before I could determine what was wrong, things
settled down again.”

“Could this have anything to do
with those control rods?”

“They aren’t in the system now,
sir. I’ve retracted both to radiation safe containers, and I’m using an old
spare in the number 25 spot now. Thankfully it doesn’t send us on a marathon
through time when I perform routine maintenance.”

“Chief… Orlov found something
that we’d like you to take a look at.” The Admiral gestured to the Devil’s
Teardrop, still sitting on the briefing table near Kamenski. Dobrynin had
noticed it, wondering what it was, but now he gave it a closer examination.

“Very strange,” he said. “It’s
almost glassy smooth, and very reflective. Looks like it was machined, and then
deformed to this shape by high temperatures. Yet there’s no heat damage
visible. You say Orlov found this?”

“In Siberia,” said Fedorov.
“Along the Stony Tunguska.”

“Why is it that name raises my
hackles?”

“Orlov says it acts funny,”
Fedorov explained. “It changes temperatures. In fact, it got very hot—too hot
to touch—right when that incident happened in the desert, Admiral.”

Kamenski had been listening to
everything, sometimes with his eyes closed, as if he needed a good long nap.
The mention of Tunguska perked him up again, and now he spoke up.

“We know that materials from that
region have produced strange effects, temporal effects. Is there any way you
can examine this in the lab, Mister Dobrynin? Could you determine its makeup?”

“I’d be happy to have a look,
sir.”

“Good, please do, because I think
we may be in for quite a little surprise!”

Part
XII

Scareships

“Supposing our friends the
Germans are amusing themselves by carefully observing the fortifications and
outworks of Norwich, and other strategic points on British soil… Maybe they are
landing troops one by one, with instructions where to join the main army in
1915. I only hope they have provisions until then. That they are humorists
there can be no doubt, otherwise they would hardly have given poor old Norwich
a visit. Meanwhile, our nerves are all on edge, and some of the more flabby-minded
will probably end by crowding out our well-filled asylums.”

―
A Letter from E. B.
Nye: Norfolk News, 22 May, 1909

Chapter 34

Karpov
was satisfied that
he had finally reached an understanding with Sergei Kirov. He knows how useful
I can be to his survival, he thought, and the survival of Soviet Russia. And he
also knows how dangerous I could be as an enemy. Carrot and stick—that was the
way to negotiate. I showed him what I could do when I stopped Volkov’s
offensive. Otherwise he might have perceived me as a weak, whining nobody,
trying to enlist support in a fight I could not win. But I did win, didn’t I.
Volkov knows that, and now Kirov knows it as well.

Ilanskiy had been his real trump
card, he knew. Kirov knows that there is no way he can get his hands on the
place now, not after I have discovered what was going on there. I have no
doubts that he was complicit in that little plan by Volsky and Fedorov to
destroy the place, but no one suspected I would find a way to reverse that
outcome. Of course not. They don’t see all the angles like I do. They don’t see
the big picture. As soon as Kirov realized I had the power to walk those stairs
again, he came around in good order.

He smiled, thinking about his
next planned move. It was daring, even rash, but with
Tunguska
he had
every confidence he could pull it off. If I’m ever to be taken seriously in
this world, he thought, then I will have to also establish a relationship with
Great Britain. As distasteful as that seems to me, if I have chosen to take
sides with Sergie Kirov, then he is allied with Britain. So I will have to
reach some understanding with the British, and they will soon have to learn to
respect the name Vladimir Karpov as well. But what can a minor power, with
eleven airships and no navy, locked in the heartland of the Asian continent,
possibly offer Great Britain? I can’t send them materials or supplies, or even
troops. My forces are too far away to be able to support anything they are
involved with. At present my only usefulness in their eyes might be the fact
that I set myself in opposition to Ivan Volkov. But there is one other thing I
can give them that they might find very useful. First, the journey. I will show
them that backward Siberia has some tricks up its sleeve.

The car reached the great open
field north of the Kremlin where
Tunguska
was docked to a high mooring
tower, and Karpov took heart when he saw the enormous mass of the airship
again. With negotiations concluded here, he had checked his party out of the Moscow
Hotel, his motorcade escorted by Kirov’s “honor guard” all the way to the field
at the Central Moscow Hippodrome, the largest horse racing track in Russia. Now
the field was hugely overshadowed by the largest airship or aircraft ever to
fly on the earth.

They look at it with a mixture of
awe and derision, thought Karpov. Kirov himself called it an overinflated
balloon, but they will soon see that
Tunguska
is not an anachronism or
throwback from a bygone era. I will do something that none of their airplanes
would ever attempt, at least not if they wanted to survive the experience. I
will go to England, and not by a circuitous, roundabout way. I will fly
directly over Hitler’s precious Third Reich, taking photographs the whole way
to prove it.
Tunguska
can fly higher than any aircraft of this day. They
have no fighters that can bother me up there, but I could bother them a great
deal, couldn’t I?

In
Tunguska
, Karpov found
a bit of the same old feeling he had in the Captain’s chair aboard
Kirov
.
He knew it was not the same. He had no SAMs or Moskit-II missiles, and he
certainly had no nuclear warheads, his air fuel bomb components being a pale
shadow of the power that he once had at his fingertips.

But I have the ability to go
places
Kirov
could never venture, and to go there with a modest force at
my disposal that can achieve the ends I have in mind. This time it will not be
force that I demonstrate, but merely a capability that is beyond the means of
anyone else on this earth. I can fly higher, and farther, than anyone else, and
up there I can see things that can make me a very useful man.

The thought that he was flying to
England now rankled him a bit, but the British were at war with the greatest
enemy Russia had ever faced. Hitler’s troops would devastate the homeland, and
soon, unless he could do something to prevent that. It may not be possible, he
realized, but there is no question which side I must take in this conflict now,
particularly after what Volkov did. Yet I must demonstrate that I can do more
for the Allies than simply tie down a few divisions in a humdrum backwater frontier
east of Kazakhstan. So off we go.

“Captain Bogrov,” he said as he
exited the car. “See that the baggage is loaded immediately, and be ready to
cast off within twenty minutes.”

“Very good, sir. Will we be
returning to Novosibirsk by the same route?”

“I will speak to you on the
bridge,” said Karpov. “Is there anything we need here by way of supplies? We
may have some high altitude flying to do.”

“No sir. The ship has already
refueled, courtesy of the Soviets, and they even sent over a case of good
vodka, with sausages, cheese, and some good black bread.”

“Excellent. We’ll discuss the
route over dinner in the Officer’s Wardroom.”

That was one thing about Karpov,
thought Bogrov. He doesn’t hold to protocols. Every Captain and navy man worth
his salt knew that you never discussed ship’s business in the Wardroom. It was
a sanctuary, reserved for good food and recreation, and a break from the
otherwise onerous duties of the ship. But he said nothing of this, knowing
Karpov well enough now. He could see that the man was scheming on something,
and he had pulled more than a few surprises out of his hat in recent months.
That little escapade to the mines for coal dust became something quite more
than he ever expected. It was terrifying, but effective, and he saw how the
weapon had helped to turn the tide against Volkov’s Grey Legion. What was it
this time, he wondered?

“I’ll look forward to it, sir,”
he said.

Tunguska
cast off on the
10th of February, 1941, rising into the crisp, cold air of Moscow. Thankfully,
Karpov had built some creature comforts into this ship, with pressurized,
heated cabins that made the cold altitudes much more bearable, unless you were
a man unlucky enough to pull duty on the inner rigging or upper deck exposed to
the open sky on top of the ship, but those positions were normally manned only
when the ship was at battle stations under threat of enemy air attack. Karpov
had improved the Topaz radar sets forward, aft, and on both the top and bottom
of the ship, and he had rigged out a radar room,
Kirov
style, where he
appointed his Chief of Signals, Yuri Kamkov. He had four men sitting there
watching the dull returns on the rudimentary screens of the radar sets, which
were fixed antennae covering only their designated arc around the ship.

 As
Tunguska
slowly
climbed, Karpov looked out over the sprawling city, wreathed in a blanket of
white snow, and realized it may be enjoying the last peace in the silent cold
of winter for the next four years. The Germans had launched Operation
Barbarossa on June 22, of this year, just months away. He knew the action and
timing of that event would likely be very different in this history, but war
was coming, as sure as the seasons turned. Would Moscow stand this time? The
Battle for Moscow had been fought in October of 1941, even as the Germans were
pounding at the gates to the Caucasus at Rostov and the Crimea. His Siberian
divisions had been the reserve that had helped to save the city, and he
wondered if he would be leading his men back to this city next year to fight
for Sergie Kirov. We shall see, he thought.

They would head due west for the
next thousand kilometers, until he reached the Baltic Sea around midnight.
Somewhere north of Kaliningrad, they would turn southwest and overfly Gdansk en
route to Berlin. Karpov would seal his fame as the man who boldly overflew the
heart of the German Reich. At midnight he ordered the course change and altered
speed ahead two thirds. It was another 500 kilometers to Berlin, and he wanted
to approach the city in darkness, but time his arrival there at dawn. He
retired for a good night’s rest, leaving orders that the ship was to be alert
and ready to man air defense stations at sunrise.

The sun rose on a clear morning
at a little after 08:30 that day, and the airship was approaching the city as
planned, cruising at an altitude of 12,000 meters, which Karpov deemed safe
enough. It was a dizzying height for that day, but he was soon to find that the
Germans were not pleased to have his airship over their city.

A flight of three Bf-109s had
been scrambled to investigate the unusual sighting. The first German Zeppelins
had a service ceiling of about 6,000 feet, and this was soon doubled to 13,000
feet by 1916. They had also produced a rigid airship design known as the Höhe
Bergsteiger, or “Height Climbers,” to operate above 20,000 feet, but even at
that height conditions were so harsh that they saw little service. Oil lines
could clog up, windows would crack with the bitter cold, radiators would freeze,
and the crew would battle dizziness, oxygen deprivation and bone chilling
temperatures.

Karpov knew all this when he
inserted himself into the design process for
Tunguska
, using the
knowledge he had access to in his service jacket computer to correct all these
deficiencies. Now he was able to achieve altitudes twice that of the best
German Height Climbers, and so he knew he could not be opposed by any remaining
German airships here either. But three Bf-109s were rising that morning, intent
on investigating this impudent intruder that had been spotted by a flight of
German bombers just after dawn.

Karpov had mounted the best
cameras he could find for high altitude photography, and he had his camera
crews busy with that job in a lower gondola pod when the fighters were first
seen.

“Enemy aircraft reported by the
Topaz crews, sir. Number four operator has what looks to be three contacts
climbing on our position.”

“Action stations,” said Karpov
calmly. “We are a neutral country, and our insignia is plainly visible. Let’s
see what they do here.”

Bogrov had some misgivings about
that, and this whole operation seemed very risky to him. His eye strayed to his
altitude gauge, noting they were level at 12,000 meters. He doubted the planes
would get this high, but he was wrong. The Bf-109 was one of Germany’s highest
flying fighters at that time, and the German planes were straining to get near
the intruding airship, which loomed ever larger as they climbed.

The planes were among the fastest
and best of the early fighting, with more aerial kills logged than any other
fighter during the war. But this was a tall order. As Willy Beyer led his
flight higher, he could feel his engine straining to make the altitude. As they
approached he could see the insignia on the tail of the massive airship, though
he did not know what it was. His only thought was that it looked to be Russian,
and he reported as much on radio. The orders soon came back to fire warning
shots across the bow of the airship. Still a couple thousand feet below his
target, he nonetheless maneuvered his plane and fired a burst from his twin
13mm MG 131 machine guns, and this was followed by warning in German on the
radio.