Armageddon

Prologue

Curiosity is a powerful urge, and one that has led many men to their doom in ages past. For Mironov, it was a lure he could not ignore, and his mind was always haunted by the strange man he had encountered at the Ilanskiy railway inn, and the odd words he had whispered to him. Was the man working for the Tsar’s dread secret police, the Okhrana, he wondered? Was he sent to find and follow me after my release from prison, so that they could find yet another reason to arrest me?

The more he thought about it, the more he began to feel something was very strange about that brief encounter at the inn. The day itself was one he could never forget. A terrible light had flashed in the early morning, there came a loud roar in the distance, an awful tearing sound as if the sky itself had been ripped open and something came burning through, a wild, scintillating light in the heavens, brighter than the sun. A violent wind was blowing outside, sending a hail of debris flying as the dining room windows shattered.

Mironov jumped at the sound, covering his head and face. There were frightened shouts outside, and they heard the sound of thunder or distant artillery firing. Rushing out they looked to see what appeared to be a second sunrise that morning. The entire horizon to the northeast was aglow with red fire, as if the taiga was burning in a massive forest fire. Everyone stared in awe, pointing at the spectacle…and then the stranger came.

Mironov had not seen him in the village before, and assumed he was a recent arrival, a traveler seeking lodging at the inn. The man seemed confused when he had first met him, disoriented, as if he did not know where he was, but Mironov thought it might only be the shock and amazement of the spectacle glowing on the horizon that had the whole town in an uproar. They went back to the dining hall, intent on finishing breakfast in spite of the strange event, and that brief encounter with the stranger had been more than enough to plant that first seed of curiosity.

He seemed oddly dressed, and Mironov remembered the threatening insignia that decorated his jacket and the pistol in the man’s side holster. That was enough to add a kernel of suspicion to his curiosity about this man, for the Okhrana were everywhere, and might appear in any guise one could imagine.

“Military?” He had asked, and the man told him he had come from Vladivostok en route to the Caspian. He called himself Fedorov, and claimed he was a soldier traveling to a new post. In time they returned to the hotel dining room and, when the stranger followed them back, Mironov’s curiosity and suspicion prompted him to engage the man. He remembered being very blunt with him.

“Tell me you are not a security man working for the Okhrana and I will be happy to share my breakfast table with you,” he said. “Then again if you are Okhrana, I must tell you I have done nothing inappropriate. I was given a full release, and I mean only to travel to Irkutsk to visit friends. You need have no further worries about me.” He looked at the stranger, waiting. “Well? Which is it?”

“Have no fear,” the man said. “I have no business with you…”

Yet that had not been enough to quell the suspicion. When the stranger excused himself Mironov watched as he took the back stairway to the upper floor, presumably to his quarters there. He got up and went to the front desk to inquire about the man, but with the village still unsettled by the strange event underway, the innkeeper was gone. So Mironov took a peek at the register, and his suspicion ticked up yet another notch when he could see no recent entry, or any guest listed by the name Fedorov.

Now there was an edge of fear on his suspicion, so he went back through the dining hall to rejoin his comrades, only to find they had gone back outside to look at the fire in the sky. So Mironov decided to see what more he could learn about the stranger, though he knew he was taking a chance at being apprehended again. He crept slowly up the narrow back stairway after the man, his heart pounding and an inner voice berating him for being so foolish. The Okhrana will find you easily enough, he chided himself. Now here you are skulking about and courting their attention! Yet his curiosity seemed all too compelling. He had to know who this man really was.

Sure enough, his worst fears were realized when he reached the top of those stairs. He felt the hard grip of a steely hand on his shoulder, turning to see another soldier had immediately fallen upon him.

“I’ve done nothing. Let me go!” He protested, but he was soon shoved down the hall and into a room where, sure enough, he saw the man who had called himself Fedorov with yet another soldier, a stocky, rock-like man that looked very threatening.

“So you are with the Okhrana after all,” Mironov said sullenly as soon as he saw Fedorov there. “I knew there was something odd about you. What have I done? You have no right to detain me!”

The man gave him a wide eyed look, as if he had suddenly come to some inner conclusion about him, but then he began asking those odd questions.

“Listen to me, Mironov,” he began. “What is the date?”

“The date?”

“What is the month and year?”

It was just as he feared. The questions… They always started that way. Who are you? Where have you come from? Where are you going? What business do you have there? But this was an odd one-the date? Mironov spoke, somewhat indignant.

“So you mean to interrogate me, is that it?”

“No, no, please. Simply tell me the date.”

It was some kind of test, he thought, to see if his story would hold together. So he humored the man with an answer. “The 30th of June. I arrived late last night. You think I’m a dim witted fool, eh? I knew you were Okhrana the moment I set eyes on you. I have done nothing! I have said nothing, nothing at all!” His eyes were fiery as he spoke, indignant, combative.

The man looked at him as though he had seen a ghost.

“My god,” he said in a low voice. “My god, what has happened? Mironov…You came up the back stairs just now?”

“I saw you go that way, and yes, I followed you to see what I could find out about you. It seems I have learned too much, eh? But that is no reason to arrest me again. A man has the right to see to his own safety, particularly after what just happened out there.” He turned thinking to point to the awful red glow in the sky outside, and then he, suddenly noticed the darkness, the silence, the quiet night beyond the window lit by a silvery gibbous moon. Now it was Mironov’s turn to stare dumfounded at the window.

“What’s happening here? Where’s the day gone?” He was suddenly as confused as the stranger had seemed when he first encountered him. How could it be night? Was it that explosion? Had the red fire on the horizon blackened the sky with smoke? But no! The moon… The moon was up, and all was quiet and still, hushed in the midnight darkness. Then the strangers questioned him yet again, asking his name, and they knew exactly who he was.

Now he was certain they were Okhrana, and he resigned himself to the realization that he would most likely be arrested here again, and taken back to prison. Yet he was suddenly surprised when the man named Fedorov seemed ready to release him.

“You mean I am free to go?”

“Yes, just follow me.” Fedorov reassured him.

Mironov looked at the other soldiers, frowning, then followed Fedorov out the door to the upper landing of the back stairway.

“This way, Mironov. Quickly!” The stranger seemed very insistent, an urgency about his movements. There came a rumble of thunder again, and now Mironov concluded that he had been correct, the darkness must be from the smoke of that fire. Perhaps the moon was still up, and only revealed when the smoke obscured the sun, he thought. He went to Fedorov’s side, looking him in the eye as though he were staring into the face of fate itself.

“You must go by the way you came,” said Fedorov. “Go quickly now, while you see that light.” The man gestured to the amber glow from below. “And Mironov-never come up this stairway again. Understand? Get as far away from here as you can.”

The stranger had an anguished look on his face, as if he had something more he needed to say, a tormented expression that held Mironov fixated for a time, their eyes and souls locked together in some bizarre twist of time and fate. Yet the man seemed to hesitate, uncertain of himself.

What was this strange look of fear and trepidation in the man’s eyes, thought Mironov. Just as I turned to go down the stairs, the stranger reached out, taking hold of my arm to delay me. He leaned forward, close to my ear and whispered something, his eyes vast and serious, his face like that of a man who was seeing a phantom from another world. The words blurted out, an urgent whisper: ‘Do not go to St. Petersburg in 1934! Beware Stalin! Beware the month of December! Go with God. Go and live, Mironov. Live!’

That was how he remembered it. The man finished, then released Mironov’s arm. He recalled standing there, uncertain, confused for a moment. Then the urgency of the moment compelled him to move, and he stepped quickly down the narrow stairs.

What was he saying about 1934, a year so far away in the future? Who was this Stalin he spoke of? Why should I be wary in December? What did he mean that I should not go to St. Petersburg? He was speaking as though…as though he saw some distant future in the world that had not yet come to pass, some far off doom, for his tone of voice clearly carried the edge of warning.

Mironov reached the bottom of the steps, bemused to find the morning seemed clear and bright again, and still tinted with the red glow of that strange fiery sky. He sat in the dining hall, thinking about all that had just happened. Then he took the man’s advice, deciding he would get himself as far away from this place as possible, heading east to Irkutsk where he had relatives. Yet always the memory of that man’s face, and his strange warning, remained with him.

He eventually made up his mind to travel west again, to Baku where the oil workers had been roused to strike against their corporate masters. The incipient fires of the revolution were burning there, the embers stirred by several nefarious organizers rousting about in the region, fomenting trouble and advocating against the wealthy oil barons.

They wanted their damn oil, he thought, and they would do anything to line their pockets with the gold it would bring, and the power. So Mironov decided he would go to Baku as well, and join the revolutionary movement there, but along the way he stopped again at that same railway inn at Ilanskiy, the very place he had met the stranger that day.

Curiosity…that was what drove him that day. His curiosity surrounded that back stairway like a shroud. He was down in the dining room again when he heard the odd rumble, saw the strange glow in the back stairwell, triggering the memory of that strange event he had witnessed. What was happening? Was there a fire upstairs? He remembered getting up, walking quickly to the stairs to climb them again…and his life was never the same after that, for the world he soon found himself in was not the same either!

He emerged on the second floor, but the inn seemed worn down now, a stark and cold place, with none of the inviting warmth it had offered. He looked about, briefly, then went down the main stairway, to look for the innkeeper. The old grey haired man was gone, yet his portrait was hanging behind the main desk and a young serving woman was tending to the inn instead. What was going on here? He would soon find out more than he ever wished to know.

He went to the window and peered outside to a horrific world where he saw hundreds of people being herded into train cars pointed east. The rail yard seemed infested with the security apparatus of the Okhrana, dark coated men with black Ushankas. They spoke to the people in harsh tones, and some used their rifle butts to beat them if they did not move quickly enough. The scene was so shocking that he withdrew quickly, his eyes finding the serving girl by the desk.

“What has happened?” he asked, shaken by what he had seen.

“What do you mean?”

“The Okhrana…Why are they taking everyone? And the soldiers?

“The war, the work camps, what else?” The woman shook her head. “Comrade Stalin is fighting the Germans with one hand, and his own people with the other. The war will be the end of us. Stalin’s dirty war on life itself. This will be the third train heading east to the camps this week. What… don’t tell me you have escaped from one of those train cars. You cannot hide here! If they find you I will be punished as well!” She looked around, as if she feared the hard men outside would storm in at any moment and take her away with the others.

“Comrade Stalin?” That was the same name the stranger had whispered to him. Beware Stalin!

“What war do you speak of? The revolution? Has it finally happened?”

“What? Don’t be daft. You’ve read the papers. The Germans have reached the Volga! They are after Stalingrad now, and driving on Baku.” There was a newspaper on the counter and she shoved it his way. He took it, his eyes scanning the headlines. It was called ‘Vpered Za Stalina! Forward for Stalin! And a drawing showed soldiers standing proudly with bayoneted rifles.

“Go! If you have escaped then you must get out of here. Head south and hide in the woods! Quickly, or the guards will find you!”

Mironov moved, on instinct, for he had been a fugitive for years now, the Okhrana always nipping at his heels. He started for the door but, as fate would have it, three dark coated men were walking slowly toward the weathered porch. So he turned and ran up the main stairway, thinking he might get through a window and climb down a gutter pipe to find the woods beyond. Yet no sooner had he made the upper landing when he saw more uniformed men coming out of one of the rooms. This sent him rushing down the hall, turning off quickly to the narrow back stairway, which was his only hope of escape now. As he started down into the shadows, there came a dark rumble, as if thunder had broken the sky with the threat of rain.

His boots were hard on the steps as he hastened down, and he hoped no one had heard him. Reaching the bottom, he peered furtively around the edge of the wall into the dining room. All was quiet and empty. There was a fire burning softly on the hearth, and the smell of something cooking. He stepped into the room, clearly confused and somewhat disoriented. There, he saw the world as he might have expected it. There was no sign of the frenetic activity he had seen outside in the rail yard, no soldiers, no trains waiting, no one being herded into the cars.

He looked down at the weathered newspaper in his hand, astonished by what he now read. Stalingrad…a city named after a man called Stalin, the man of steel. Then another article, on Baku where they showed an image of the city nestled on a wide bay at the edge of the Caspian Sea and surrounded by high hills. Mironov had thought to find the revolution there, but the photo showed the ruin and misery of war. The city looked like an industrial slum, yet the article referenced a name. “Kirov yet stands his brave watch on the city,” it read.

There in the photograph he could see the prominent statue of a uniformed man on a high hilltop pedestal of stone. His arm was raised in a proud salutation, as if greeting the masses below while also beckoning to some distant future with the promise of hope. Kirov… Who was that? Something about the name was very appealing to him, and the longer he looked at that image the more he was taken by the odd notion that he was seeing himself there, a distant ghost in a bleak future where every hope had perished but the one he held in his outstretched hand.

Mironov looked over his shoulder, his eyes darkly on the shadowed entrance to the stairway…the stairway the stranger had come down. The stairway Fedorov had insisted he go down again himself after he first followed the man’s footsteps that day in late June of 1908. The stairway, and the warning never to use it again…

Yet curiosity is a powerful thing. He took two more bold trips up and down those stairs, each one more harrowing than the last. There he learned of the hideous world that was coming, dark and pitiless as the soul of the man who would forge it from the steel of his own hand, Josef Stalin.

There he found another paper, this time a poster extolling the leader of the great Soviet Union-Stalin. In a moment of strange deja vu he thought he had seen that face a thousand times before-the coldness in Stalin’s eyes, the emptiness that yawned open, boundless as the night and darker than perdition. It was as if he was looking into the eyes of death itself, come to make a quiet appointment that would end his days forever. And he also learned why the statue above the city of Baku looked so familiar to him, and the meaning of the warning the stranger had whispered to him that day: ‘Do not go to St. Petersburg in 1934! Beware Stalin! Beware the month of December!’

It was then that he finally knew the meaning of the stranger’s warning, and what he had to do.

The prison was a dark and cheerless place, a place of terror, and isolation and the misery squeezed from one man after another where they huddled in the cold stone cells, behind heartless bars of iron. One man sat there, brooding, yet scheming in his mind. He had been arrested for his persistent criminal acts against the order of the state. The tall, fearsome agents of the Okhrana had tracked him down and dragged him before a court of censure, where he was lucky to have only been sentenced to 18 months in Bayil, the Black Hole of Baku.

He was born 18 December, 1878 in a little town in the Caucasus called Gori. His mother had been a simple housekeeper, his father a cobbler who often drunk himself into a stupor and beat him cruelly in the early years of his life, where the world also branded him with the scars of smallpox, and physical ailments in his feet and left arm that would plague him in later years. Yet he endured the abuse, as if he was nothing more than another piece of stone beat upon by his father, and he grew to a handsome man in his twenties.

His rebellious spirit soon found him in the activist circles and hidden meeting rooms of the incipient revolution in Russia. He read forbidden literature, the writings of men named Lenin and Marx, and soon began to agitate on their behalf. He wrote and circulated papers condemning the wealthy oil barons and bankers who had come to Baku at the edge of the Caspian Sea, and he helped organize workers strikes against them there. He joined the Bolsheviks, helped to print and spread their propaganda, and recruited new cells. He robbed the bankers he saw bleeding the country dry and used their money to foment further revolutionary activity…and he was tracked down by the Tsar’s secret police and arrested.

Now he sat in the prison of Bayil, brooding on how he might soon regain his freedom and continue with his revolutionary zeal. It was all arranged. He would feign illness so he could be taken from his cell to the infirmary, and there he would switch places with another patient being discharged, and escape. He had secretly sent messages to his comrades outside, and they would arrange a sleigh and driver to spirit him away into the cold countryside where he would travel north and east, far away from the black hole in which he now found himself. He would then change his name, assuming an alias like so many other comrades in the struggle, and he would find another cell to infect and breed the virus of revolution. The name would be a simple one, easily grasped, and rooted in the Russian word that sounded much like his old family name. He was Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, and Dzhuga meant “Steel” in the old Georgian tongue. So he called himself by the Russian name for that word-“Stalin.”

It was all set to happen as he planned it, except for one small mishap. Three nights before he would set his plan in motion a man arrived at the gate of the prison, dressed in the dark black garb of the Okhrana. He presented his badge and papers, and was let in through the high metal doors, slowly climbing the stone steps to the warden’s office. In his hand he held an order concerning a certain prisoner, and soon the cold clap of his boots were echoing in the long stony hallway that led to the cell where Stalin slept.

The prisoner was awakened in the night, squinting up through bleary, sleepless eyes when a voice spoke from beyond the metal bars, saying his old family name, a question in the inflexion.

“Yes,” he breathed, wondering who the shadow was that had come to him in the dark of the night. The shadow was death-his own death-in the hand of a man who held a steel pistol, aiming it right at the center of the heart that would so blacken the world in decades to come. The shadow had a name as well, Sergei Mironovich Kostrikov, though he never spoke it and he wasted not another second as he squeezed the trigger and fired.

That one single act, the flexing of a finger in the night, would change the lives and fates of millions, redraw the borders of nations, and recast the entire political landscape of the world in decades to come. Was it born in Fedorov’s plaintive and desperate whisper at Mironov’s ear, and given life by his insatiable curiosity that day? Or did it spring from the hollow of Orlov’s darkened soul when he leapt from that helicopter and set Fedorov off on the long pursuit that followed. It did not matter. It was done.

Yet Mironov was not the only man to be shaken by their experience on that narrow stairway at Ilanskiy. Captain Ivan Volkov had also taken that journey and he soon learned where he was, the year and day, impossible as it seemed. After the madness passed, the cold logic of his mind perceived the opportunity at hand when his reason finally grasped the fact of his existence in the year 1908. That impossibility soon became possibility, and he knew what he would do.

He would become the hidden face in the warning Doctor Zolkin had desperately tried to hand Captain Karpov one day as the two men jousted in the sick bay aboard Kirov.

“Face it, Karpov,” Zolkin would say. “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.”

Mironov could not see that shadow rising as he stood over the lifeless body Josef Stalin, watching the man of steel’s blood spread out in a dark stain on the cold stone floor of the cell. He slipped the pistol into the holster beneath his dark overcoat, turned on his heel and was gone. Ever thereafter he would go by another name- Kirov.