Kirov Saga: Hinge Of Fate: Altered States Volume III (Kirov Series) (8 page)

Then, to his great surprise, he
eased out of the basket and heard a Marine Sergeant issue a sharp, bawling order,
calling his security detail to attention. The men stiffened, their black
polished boots stomping the metal deck in a brisk movement. They were wearing
dress uniforms, and the detail Sergeant was holding a drawn saber, squared off
right along the line of his nose. Another man held a flag of the Free Siberian
State.

“Sir!” The Marine Sergeant spoke
in a deep voice. “Welcome aboard the
Abakan
.” The man nodded to a
private, and he piped the Captain aboard in traditional naval style.

Symenko was more than surprised,
and stood just a little taller at the greeting. Karpov had him dangling from
his little finger. After hearing him taunt me over the loss of Omsk on the
radio I expected nothing more than humiliation here, and yet… the man has shown
me a little respect. It was not something he expected, but it did much to tamp
down his sallow and ill-tempered mood.

“This way, if you please,
Captain.” The Marine Sergeant gestured with a white gloved hand, and the detail
filed off behind the two men as they made their way out of the receiving
chamber and into the main gondola. They came to a door on the right side and
the Sergeant opened it, beckoning Symenko to enter. There the Captain was
surprised again to see a table laid out with fine white linen, plates of cold
cuts and cheese, a flask of brandy with elegant crystal glasses, and two cigars
sitting quietly on a silver platter like the two airships riding in tandem now
for this meeting.

Respect, thought Symenko. Yes,
just a little respect for a change, and more in the last five minutes than I
got from Volkov in the last month. Brandy and cigars are hardly compensation
for everything Volkov just took from me and handed to Karpov…

But it’s a start.

Part III

Tunguska

“All large trees on the mountains were
leveled in dense rows, whereas in the valleys one could see both roots and
trunks of age-old giants of the taiga broken like reeds. The tops of the fallen
trees were directed to us. We were going north towards the super-hurricane that
had raged here years ago… I climbed Shakrama mountain and for the first time
saw the unbelievable land of dead forest… everything has been leveled and
scorched in the Great Hollow… and in the center of it all, a cluster of trees
were still standing upright like bare telegraph poles, all devoid of leaf and
branch.”

—Leonid Kulik:
Tunguska

Chapter 7

Evgeny
Krinov handed the
young staffer a large box, a solemn look on his face.

“Take these as well,” he said
matter of factly. “They’re just cluttering up the storage room and have become
a fire hazard. So let us put them to the fire and be done with it. See that
they go directly to the incinerator.”

“As you wish, sir.” The staffer
took the box and hastened away, and Krinov watched him go, his eyes dark and
thoughtful. That is the last of them, he thought. That will put an end to
Kulik’s nonsense once and for all.

An astronomer and geologist,
Krinov was a well known scientific researcher with an expertise in meteorite
falls. Born in 1906, he was a two year old child when the greatest fall of his
lifetime, perhaps the greatest in modern history, occurred in the strange event
on the morning of June 30, 1908, just north of the Stony Tunguska River in
Siberia. As it happened, however, Krinov was working at the meteor division of
the Mineralogy Museum of the Soviet Academy of Sciences between 1926 and 1930,
when the intrepid Leonid Kulik mounted his first expeditions to the Tunguska
region to try and discover the cause of the event.

It was very strange, but Kulik
had uncovered a number of key findings that could lead to the answer to the
enigma. The first were the awesome physical evidence of a massive explosion in
the Great Hollow. Thirty million trees were felled there, in a radial pattern
where each fallen tree pointed back to the epicenter of the cataclysmic event.
The second key finding had been thermal—the clear scorching of the trees, even
beyond the fallen zone which covered all of 1400 square kilometers. A blinding
flash of light had left its imprint in the dead wood, and searing flames left
their mark well beyond the Great Hollow.

The next key clue was more
enigmatic, a magnetic footprint that seemed to lay on the land, ranging 1400
square kilometers. The soil itself exhibited the effects of some strange
magnetic anomaly, and it was later learned that disturbances in the earth’s
magnetic field had both preceded and followed the event. Auroras and strange
noctilucent clouds appeared for days after.

This was not all. There were
botanic effects in the plants, mutations in the animals, strange genetic
effects that caused trees to enter a period of accelerated growth at the edge
of the event, while others were twisted and stunted into malformed shapes, some
flecked with small embedded nodules of glass. Exotic materials were found in
the soil, and there was a measurable radiation effect, ionizing radiation that
became thermo-luminescent at night, creating an eerie glow at times over the
land.

Krinov got very interested in the
matter, and resolved to accompany Kulik on a return expedition years later, in
1930. He still bore the scars of that journey, and in more than one way. Braving
the Siberian winter was always dangerous, and he had suffered a severe frostbite
on his feet that compelled him to withdraw and spend a lengthy time in the
hospital. The doctors had been forced to amputate a big toe, and now Krinov
walked with a characteristic limp, though that was not the worst mark the trip
to Tunguska had left on him.

Kulik was convinced that the site
he had discovered, that haunting swath of utter destruction in the Great
Hollow, was hiding the hidden remains of a meteorite, though no evidence was
ever found to support this claim. Yet Kulik’s ardor would not abate. He set
himself to draining and digging up one swampy bog hole after another,
disheartened to find a broken tree stump in his favored prospect, which proved
it could not be the site of an impact. Anything big enough to cause the
devastation that stretched for kilometers in all directions would certainly not
have left a tree stump standing at the bottom of its impact crater. Kulik had
forbidden any photographs of that stump, but Krinov had secretly taken several
to use as evidence in the heated scientific debate that he knew would soon
follow on the heels of the expedition.

Kulik remained determined to
continue looking for the meteorite, and it was said that he eventually found
something very strange during one of his excavations. When questioned about his
findings one day the bristly Kulik just looked at Krinov from behind those dark
round eyeglasses of his, his eyes strangely alight. Then he did something that
astounded Krinov. He reached into his pocket and handed his associate a small
hand compass.

“Find north for me please,” Kulik
had said quietly.

Krinov blinked, but indulged his
colleague and stood in the center of the room, consulting the compass until he
could point himself north. Then Kulik got up and walked slowly to Krinov’s
side, a wry smile on his face.

“Are you sure?” he said.

To his amazement, Krinov looked
down at his compass and saw it spinning in mad circles. He looked at Kulik, who
then stepped back, taking his seat again, gesturing that his associate should
consult his compass again. Sure enough, the reading was normal now. Krinov
tapped it, looking at the compass with some suspicion.

“Oh yes, I thought you would jump
to that conclusion,” said Kulik. “It’s quite proper. Keep it and see for
yourself.” Then he got up and slowly headed for the door, turning with a smile
as he left. “Good day, Evgeny.”

Krinov never forgot that, or
anything else he had learned on that expedition. He tested the compass for long
years after that, and it always read true. But nothing else ever read true concerning
Tunguska. It was most disturbing. Kulik had labored to take aerial photographs
of the whole disaster site and delivered them to the academy to fuel the
debate. There were 1500 in all, and Krinov spent a long time studying them…
until they became a fire hazard.

One day, his soul still shadowed
by the strange events of that brief time he had spent in the wild lands of the
Siberian north, he gathered up each and every one of the negatives, put them in
a sturdy box with a bunch of old newspapers, and handed them off to a staffer
with the order to take them directly to the incinerator. There, he thought with
just the barest sigh of relief. Now no one else will ever know…

Yet others did know, though what
they had discovered in that forsaken place was kept a well guarded secret,
known only to a very few. One of them was a man who followed in Krinov’s
footsteps, one Nikolai Vladimirovic Vasilyev, who later assumed the title
Krinov once held as Deputy Chairman of the Commission on meteorites and cosmic
dust at the Russian Academy of Sciences. It was Vasilyev who had come across a
hidden cache of positive photographs made by the very same negatives Krinov had
destroyed that day.

It was Vasilyev who then devoted
his life to the study of the Tunguska event, becoming the director of the
Interdisciplinary Independent Tunguska Expeditions society, and collecting data
and writing about the event to his dying day. And it was Vasilyev who penned
the cryptic notes into his literature concerning the many “oddities” surrounding
the event, claiming it was evidence of something much more than a simple
meteorite strike, something vast and deeply significant, and a warning
concerning the possibility of a collision with earth threatening “aliens” from
outer space. What had he discovered in those photographs? What was Krinov
really trying to hide by destroying the negatives?

Mainstream science had long ago
dismissed the notion that the explosion in 1908 had been caused by a UFO, but
there are other “aliens” that come from space, and the earth had been visited
by them many times before.

* * *

Aboard
the airship
Narva
,
Captain Selikov wanted to get as far away from that river as he could, but he
also knew it was dangerous to do so until they had a firm fix on their
location.

“This weather is clouding over
again,” he said as he shook his head, clearly unhappy. “The cloud deck is very
low and it extends for what looks to be two hundred kilometers in every
direction. We can’t see a thing up here, and I’m not inclined to take the ship down
until I can determine how thick that deck is. But we might get down right on top
of the clouds and use the sub-cloud car.”

“What is that?” Orlov had never
heard of such a thing.

“Think of it as a bit of an
amusement park ride, Mister Orlov,” said Selikov. And he explained how they
would lower a device, a spy basket, that looked like a big hollow bomb suspended
on a long cable, complete with tail fins to aid its movement through the air.

“A man with good eyes in there
can call up the land forms and then we can find the river again and navigate.
Otherwise we could drift about up here and get even more lost than we already
are. If the deck isn’t too low, we’ll reel you in and come on down.”

“Good then,” said Orlov. “Let me
be the man in the basket. It’s boring shuffling about up here trying to stay
warm.”

“I’m afraid you won’t get any
help on keeping warm if you volunteer here,” Selikov warned. “There’s no heat
in the car.”

“Well, there’s no heat up here
either, so what’s the difference?”

“You can read a navigation
chart?”

“Of course,” said Orlov, with
just a hint of irritation. So it was decided, and Orlov was led off to the rear
gondola by a
mishman
. When he saw the contraption he was about to ride
in, he grinned from ear to ear. It was exactly as Selikov had described it, the
shape of a huge bomb, with windows in the nose and four fins on the narrow
tail. A man could lay prone inside, his head in the nose, and make observations
that he could call up to the airship bridge gondola above on a hand cranked telephone.

“Here,” said the man, handing him
a pair of binoculars and a chart book. “You’ll need these.”

Minutes later they were lowering
the pod on the long steel cable and Orlov thrilled to the sound of the wind
whistling on the tail fins, though its cold fingers found their way into every
seam and hollow, chilling him at once.

Down he went, trailing behind the
great mass of
Narva
until the airship was lost from sight and, in spite
of the chilling cold, Orlov found the ride thrilling, laughing as he was swallowed
by the heavy vapors of the cloud deck. He was to call up the moment he broke
through the deck, but it took much longer than he expected. Finally, when the
cable was near its maximum extension, the mist and cloud thinned and the pod
broke through into clear air.

Now Orlov thrilled to the sight
of the vast landscape beneath him, the endless green forest of the Taiga as far
as the eye could see. Small lakes and marshy peat bogs dotted the landscape,
and he caught the dull gleam of water everywhere. The last time he had seen
anything so exhilarating was when he had leapt from the KA-226 helicopter over
the Mediterranean, and came parachuting down off the Spanish coast. Soon he
spied a wandering ribbon of grey water off his starboard side, and he consulted
his chart book, looking for some telltale bend or curve in the river’s course
that he could match up to the drawings.

He called up the sighting,
cranking up the box that operated like a military field phone and sending
navigation orders to the helm. Little by little he maneuvered the airship to starboard,
until they were directly over the river, and slowly heading northeast.