Devil's Garden

Chapter 26

Troyak was watching the coastline closely with his field glasses as they approached. They had taken a high speed swift boat that had been part of the Aist hovercraft inventory, and now he was with Fedorov and a squad of his best Marines. They could not raise anyone on radio, and so the only thing to do was to go ashore in a landing party. Fedorov was leery of using the Mi-26 at this point, so the boat made perfect sense. It was small, much more inconspicuous than one of the hovercraft, and fast enough to get them ashore in good time.

“Well at least everything is here, Fedorov. The coastline doesn’t look developed like it should be in our day. Do you suppose this is still 1942?”

“Then where are the Germans we were just fighting? They would have taken the port at Makhachkala by now. The warehouse by the rail station was on fire and we should still see it burning. I see no sign of fighting ahead.”

Troyak nodded, but had nothing more to say.

“Look, there’s the new lighthouse they built in the 1800s.” He pointed to a hill rising from the shore where an octagonal tower stood with a lantern fixture at its top. “That’s Aji-Arka Hill. I’ve been up there before. Peter the First made his camp up there when he mounted his campaign against Persia in the early 1700s. The place was just a small fishing port at that time.”

Troyak was amazed at all Fedorov knew. “How do you manage to fill your head with all these facts, Colonel?”

“I just read a lot, Sergeant. Reading is my way of getting into worlds I might never have a chance to visit in the flesh. And sometimes it can be a very pleasant time to escape into the past and leave the sorrow and pain of routine navy life behind.”

“Yes, until you actually do start visiting that past and find German infantry shooting at you.” Troyak smiled. “The past has seemed far more dangerous than the life we had on the ship, Fedorov.”

“I suppose that’s true…But where in hell have we ended up this time? Can you make for that sand bar south of the harbor?”

They eased up to the shore, and Troyak’s Marines fanned out, much to the surprise of a group of fishermen who were working to untangle their nets. Nothing in the landscape looked right to them, and Fedorov knew they were certainly not in the future. He could see rows of small buildings made of sun-dried brick, what looked to be a small public bath house, a few open water pipes where people would pump water, and few buildings of any real size.

It was clear that a railway like the one they had just been defending was getting started here, but it was much smaller. Fedorov had the sinking feeling that reminded him of that moment when he had stepped outside the dining room at Ilanskiy and saw the rail yard was different, the train was missing and the whole town site reduced to a cluster of just a very few buildings. My God, he thought. We’ve gone back in time, not forward!

He approached one of the fisherman, who stepped back, somewhat intimidated by his uniform and the obvious military bearing of the Marines.

“Good day, sir.” Fedorov removed his Ushanka, trying to appear less threatening. “We are Navy sailors and our ship had foundered on a Caspian sandbar. We’ve lost our navigation charts in a bad storm. Can you tell me what port we have found here?”

“What port? Why, this is Petrovsk. Where have you come from?”

Fedorov was confused at first. Petrovsk? Then he realized that was the old name for the port and town that became Makhachkala, but the city had not been called that since the late 1920s! He needed to find out the date. “We put out from Astrakhan some weeks ago, but the sea has not been kind to us. Our ship ran aground and it has taken us many months to refloat it. What is the date? What has been happening? Have we slipped into another year while we were struggling at sea?”

“Another year? No. it is still the summer, July if you want to know. The weather should tell you that much.”

“And the year?”

The man gave him a perplexed look. “1908, of course! You must have been at sea a good long while if you are that confused.”

Fedorov half expected to hear that. The clues were stacking up in his mind, one after another, and things were now starting to make sense. Dobrynin told him that Admiral Volsky had confided something about the control rods they were sent.

“These are very unusual,” he said. “The inspector General looked up the source materials, and they have some very strange trace elements that were mined near Vanavara. You know the place-it is very near the Stony Tunguska in northern Siberia!”

That word spoke volumes of untold mystery in Fedorov’s mind. He had been fascinated by the Tunguska event since he was a young boy, reading any story he could ever find about it. The largest impact event in recorded history, it was felt over a wide area, its effects lighting up the skies as far away as London for days after, and it had just happened, if this fisherman was correct. If this was early July of 1908 they might still see the effects in the sky after dark, even this far south.

Tunguska…He remembered reading the story by Alexander Kazantsev, a pioneer of UFO research in the Soviet Union. There had been many theories as to what the event actually was, but Kazantsev hypothesized it was the crash of an extraterrestrial spacecraft. Fedorov eagerly read those old stories, like Burning Island, Stronger than Time, and A Visitor from Outer Space. At one point Kazantsev speculated that the event may have been a Soviet Time-ship that was out of control! How ironic, he thought. If Kazantsev only knew what Fedorov knew now!

Admiral Volsky told Dobrynin that large explosive events had been shown to disrupt the fabric of space and time as well-particularly events involving nuclear explosions. This they had experienced with their own eyes, but Rod-25 had remained a mystery, a conductor’s wand that seemed to open a connection between their time and 1942 with uncanny regularity. Yet now something had changed. They would always move from 1942 to 2021 and back again, but for the first time they had obviously displaced further into the past. Something was wrong.

“It did not sound correct,” Dobrynin had told him earlier.

“What do you mean?”

“There were other voices in the choir, other harmonies and frequencies that I never heard before. I know this sounds strange, Mister Fedorov, but I listen to the reactors, and I hear things there. This time the score was different.”

Then, while they were searching the Anatoly Alexandrov for Orlov, Fedorov was shocked to see that someone had been a little too curious about the strange cargo they loaded onto the Mi-26, and they opened the containers! What possessed anyone to do that was beyond his imagining, but the lids had not been properly fastened. His first worry was of a radiation leak, until Dobrynin told him these were completely new control rods that had never been used before.

“We just put them in a radiation safe container because if they were eventually used it would come in handy.”

1908…He had found another hole in time linking 1942 to that very year, the same day of the Tunguska event. Now it seemed that the action of Rod-25, perhaps influenced by the presence of the other two control rids, had orchestrated another surprise, and all things fell through to this year, the year that the materials finding their way into these rods first came from the deeps of outer space! Whether by asteroid, meteor, black hole or spacecraft did not matter so much. The reality he was facing now was that they had slipped much farther back in time, and so the damage they could do to any future history here was exponentially greater.

“Well I thank you,” he said graciously. “My men and I will be returning to our ship now. We’ve finally got it seaworthy again. Good day, sir.” He nodded to Troyak, and the Marines boarded the boat and pushed off.

“Use the oars,” he said quietly. “No sense arousing undo curiosity. We can start the outboard motor when we get further out, away from prying eyes.”

“Where to now?” Troyak gave him a searching look.

“A good question, Sergeant. Let’s get back to the Anatoly Alexandrov. I need to speak with Chief Dobrynin.”

* * *

“1908?” Dobrynin had a look of profound shock on his face. “I was afraid something like this was going to happen when Volsky handed me this mission. Just go and fetch Fedorov, he said, and be sure that helicopter gets safely launched. Nothing was said to me about a visit to 1908. What is happening, Fedorov?”

“I was hoping you could help me sort that out, Chief.”

“Yes…Things were different this time. It did not sound correct. What we can do about it? I have no idea.”

“We discovered the seal on the other control rod containers was loose. Could that have been a factor?”

“Your guess is as good as mine, Mister Fedorov. But now that you mention it, there were other harmonies in the sound. Then it descended, and I was not expecting to hear that at all. The only thing I can suggest is to seal those containers and run the procedure again. Yet I can make you no guarantees as to where we might turn up this time.”

Fedorov sat with that for some time, and he knew that it would only be a matter of time before some passing cargo vessel would happen across them, just 15 kilometers off the shores of what would one day become the Russian Naval facility at Kaspiysk. The sight of the massive Mi-26 sitting atop the roof of the floating powerplant would be shocking, to say nothing of the big hovercraft moored alongside. As he wrestled with this, he was approached by a junior officer with an odd report.

“Captain, sir,” the man said. “We have been monitoring signals traffic after we sent out our initial hails to try and contact the base at Kaspiysk.”

“The base?” Fedorov gave him a distracted look, his mind still deep in thought.

“Yes, sir. We had no answer, but we broadcast on all channels, just as you ordered, and we just now picked up a signal.”

“What kind of signal?”

“It was on the shortwave band, sir. The call sign prefix was KIRV, and the senders name was coded NIK.”

Fedorov was stunned. “When did you receive this?”

“Just minutes ago, sir. In fact, it’s the only radio signal we’ve picked up.”

“Where was the signal coming from? Could you locate it?”

“I was a DX specialist at one time, sir. The signal was very fleeting, and we only caught a minute or two of it. I could not pin down the entity of origin, but the location prefix was PN.”

A DX specialist was a shortwave operator who focused on receiving and identifying the location of distant radio signals that could propagate for thousands of miles around the earth at times. Fedorov was astounded! He immediately recognized what the call sign prefix was, the four character identifier for Kirov! The sender name was obvious as well. NIK was the handle Nikolin would always append by sheer habit to any message he encoded. As for the location, as a trained navigator he was also very familiar with the Maidenhead locator map, which bisected the world map on a grid and assigned letters to each column for longitude and each row for latitude. By cross indexing the two letters you could get a general idea of the approximate location of the signal, and this message had been coded PN. He immediately knew that latitude was in the Pacific, and very near to Vladivostok!

He rushed to the radio room, eyes alight to get a Maidenhead map and confirm his assumption. “My God!” he said. “How is this possible?” The signal is coming from a map box centered on Korea, with the Yellow Sea on one side and the Sea of Japan on the other. He had seen a hundred messages handed to him by Nikolin to plot ship traffic, and they always ended the very same way. He would triple hyphen, then append the Maidenhead locator code followed by his own operator’s code, NIK. One fact tumbled upon another in a wild moment of realization. Kirov… Here…In 1908…In the waters off Korea or Japan!

“Get another transmission off at maximum power. Boost the signal any way you can! Give our call sign, Maidenhead coordinates and append the operator code FDV. Send it on our military shortwave band. Do it now!”

* * *

It came in loud and clear, rising above the low band transmissions, though Nikolin was surprised to see it was on a higher military transmission band. The call sign did not mean anything to him at first, though he wrote it down to look it up. ANAV. Then the message transitioned into a standard military hail call, and it was giving a specific target, the operator the sender was hoping to contact. To his great surprise it was him!

“Captain…”

Karpov was in the Captain’s chair, watching the HD video feed from the Tin Man. “Have they changed their minds, Mister Nikolin?” He assumed Nikolin had received a message from the Japanese. He had been pounding their cruiser squadron with all three of his twin 152mm batteries for the last several minutes. The lead ship, which he presumed to be the flagship, had fallen off the battle line, burning badly amidships after three more hits had shattered a tall mainmast there and blown away one of the cruiser’s three smoke stacks. Jet black smoke enveloped the ship from the truncated stack.

“No sir…I’m receiving a coded message on the military shortwave band. It’s from another ship, sir.”

“What ship? Rodenko. Are there any other contacts on radar?”

“No sir, we have only the eight contacts we are presently engaging”

“Captain, I have the ship call sign prefix now. ANAV. It’s a Russian ship, the Anatoly Alexandrov.”

That gave Karpov a moment’s hesitation, his head turning sharply to the communications station.

“What did you say? Anatoly Alexandrov?”

Karpov raised an eyebrow in surprise. “That’s a floating nuclear power facility stationed off the Kaspiysk naval base. Volsky was going to use it in that operation to rescue Fedorov! Are you certain that was that callsign?”

“Yes sir! It can’t be anyone else. The first shortwave long distance calls weren’t made until the early 1920s. And the operator code on this one was FDV. That’s Fedorov, Captain. He always signs that way. He’s trying to contact us via shortwave! Those signals can reach virtually any location on earth using skywave propagation.”

The Captain passed a moment of complete confusion. It was as if he had been caught right in the middle of an elaborate crime, with the authorities bursting in to apprehend him. He felt a sudden jab of guilt at the thought Fedorov was trying to signal them, pulled back to that first meeting with Admiral Volsky when the young navigator had put forward his plan to find Orlov. Fedorov! What was he doing here…in 1908?

Suddenly the crack of the ships 152mm deck guns was a jarring distraction. Karpov felt light headed, strangely bothered, and then quickly turned to Samsonov. “Secure deck guns,” he said sharply. “That will suffice for the moment. Mister Rodenko!”

“Sir?”

“Resume evasive heading and maneuver to break off from this engagement. Head west if you must, and get us beyond their visual horizon. Then turn the ship south and resume course 180 at your earliest opportunity. I’ll need to work closely with Mister Nikolin at the moment, and I think we have taught these ships a lesson. This message now has top priority.”