Grand Alliance

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.

Karpov was not happy. These planes had climbed higher than he expected, and so he immediately gave Bogrov an order to gain another thousand meters in altitude. Even as he did so he stood his air defense crews up on the three lower gondolas, and soon they were training their twin machineguns and tracking the swift fighters as best they could. He found a German speaker and sent out a message that they were from the Free Siberian State, warning the Germans that any further hostility would be answered.

Willy Beyer had a good laugh at that. He reported that the Zeppelins were Siberians, and seemed to be intent on overflying the city. His ground control was adamant, order the Zeppelin off, or drive it off if it failed to comply. This was a war zone. He swung around, his plane a bit listless at the altitude, and saw that he could no longer climb. Amazingly, the Zeppelin was receding above him, slowly rising through a thin, wispy cloud. He had never heard of a Zeppelin that could fly at such altitudes.

Following his orders he decided to issue one further demand to turn north at once, and was able to point his nose upward to fire yet another warning shot, which streaked in hot yellow tracers well below the main gondola.

“They order us to turn north away from the city at once, sir.” The radioman gave Karpov a wide eyed look, the thought of those rounds riddling the pressurized cabin none too welcome in his mind.

“They order us to do nothing,” said Karpov. “If they cannot fly up here and look at me eye to eye, then we are outside the boundaries of their controllable airspace.” Then Karpov heard the rattle of the fighter’s guns and saw the tracers streak by.

“Forward gunners!” Karpov shouted an order over the voice tube. “Give them the Fedorovs!” He was referring to the Fyodorov-Ivanov Model 1924 twin barrel machineguns mounted on his gondolas. It had been designed as an experimental main machinegun for the old T-18 tank, but Karpov got his hands on several for the airship, and was fond of calling it the ‘Fedorov Gun,’ after the navigator he knew by that same name.

When the planes came around again, Willy Beyer got a nasty surprise this time. Tunguska had two twin MGs on its forward gondola, four of the gun mounts on the main gondola, and two more aft. There were also guns on top of the ship in open air platforms, but Karpov had not ordered them crewed, as he did not expect any attack from above his current position. The two mounts forward opened fire, sending streams of rounds at the fighter as it swept by below the ship, and one gunner had led his target well and scored a hit!

Beyer felt the rounds bite into his wing, big enough to do some serious damage, and he immediately called out for his wing mates to engage. This time the Germans would use the bigger 20mm cannon, but Tunguska had been slowly climbing and was now another thousand meters higher, well above the service ceiling of the planes. They swooped and then tried to pull their noses up to engage, but the firing was misaligned with the sluggish performance of the aircraft at this extreme altitude. One burst of fire pierced the nose of the airship, but the new double thick Vulcan self-sealing gas bags took the hit and resealed. The rounds passed completely through the nose, just barely missing interior duralumin beams, but did no damage beyond tearing holes in the outer canvass.

This time all the twin MG mounts on the airship replied, and the fighters soon realized they were badly outgunned. Willy Beyer’s plane was already losing altitude and streaming a thin white smoke, and amazingly, the airship was still climbing. They reported as much and were ordered home, but the Germans were not happy and decided to send up another plane, the JU-86 bomber, which could fly higher than any other aircraft in the service at that time. It could reach 13,000 meters, or 42,650 feet, and half an hour later the Topaz system caught a flight of three more planes climbing on their position.

“The fools,” said Karpov. “What is our present altitude?”

“13,200 meters,” said Bogrov. “We’re getting bad frost on all the windows. It won’t be easy to spot those planes if they can reach us.”

“Climb higher. Take us above 14,000 meters. The Gunners will engage any plane that gets close enough to fire.”

The bombers had only three 7.62mm machineguns, but it was soon clear that not even these planes could climb to an altitude where they could pose any real threat. One got close enough to fire, but it was answered by blistering return fire from the Zeppelin and easily driven off. Karpov was invulnerable in the high thin air, and the dizzy altitude of power that he felt now prompted him to do something that would have dramatic repercussions.

“That was an act of war,” he said. “The Germans think they can do whatever they please. Well they cannot touch me here, can they? But the inverse is not true. Let us leave a little calling card for the Berliners this morning, and let them know who they are dealing with.” He called down to the main ordnance deck of the command gondola.

He was going to bomb Berlin!

Chapter 35

The bombs fell, with no particular target in mind, but Tunguska was right over the heart of the city and they tumbled down in a fateful place. The tributary of the Spree wound its way through the heart of the city, and the first of the small 100 pound bombs fell there, doing little more than to crack the ice floes, sending a spray of white water up and startling a few birds. But the next bombs fell on the Admiralspalast Theater and nearby rail yard, blasting across the splayed out tracks in a string of three explosions. Others fell in Tiergarten Park, behind the famous landmark of the Brandenburg Gate, and very near the Neo-Renaissance parliament building of the Reichstag, though they did no damage beyond rattling the central cupola.

It was pure chance, random fate, that saw the bombs fall so close to those symbolic targets, and while Karpov was gloating with his unanswerable power from above, the news of the attack spread swiftly. Berlin had already been visited by British bombers in August of 1940, embarrassing Goering who had boasted the city could never be harmed by enemy aircraft. This embarrassment would have similar results, enraging Hitler who was in the city at that time and even went to a nearby window to look up and see what was happening. When he later got the news that these were not British planes, but a high flying Russian Zeppelin, he was outraged. He summoned the Soviet Ambassador and gave him a tirade about the violation of their neutrality pact.

“You claim to be neutral, and yet it is well known that you have been scheming and negotiating with the British for many months now. In fact you have signed an accord with them, but do not have the backbone to declare war on their enemies. So be it! Now you have the temerity to overfly Berlin like this, shoot down planes and even bomb the city! Do you think the German Reich will sit idly by and allow this insult? The German people are already demanding reprisals, and be damn well aware that I have the means to deliver them!” The German people had said nothing whatsoever about it, as most knew nothing of the incident, but that was a detail that didn’t matter at the moment.

The Soviet Ambassador said that he also knew nothing of the attack, and a few telephone calls assured him that all the known Zeppelins still operating in the air service were nowhere near Germany, and certainly had not violated German airspace in any way.

“Then what was that thing over the city this morning? Another phantom airship?” Hitler was referring to the many incidents of airship sightings that had been reported in England and Europe in 1909, 1912 and later years before WWI. Much of it was written off to pre-war jitters and hysteria born of the fear of flying objects, as aircraft and powered flight were still a novelty at that time, and a subject that fired the human imagination. Hitler wagged his finger at the ambassador, his cheeks reddening as he promised the ‘atrocious act’ would not go unpunished.

That night German artillery opened a five minute barrage across the tense polish frontier, firing one shell for each and every bomb reported. Telephones jangled all the way to the Kremlin, but when the details of the report came in, Sergie Kirov ordered no reprisal. But the level of tension ticked up yet another notch, and Karpov was only just beginning his aerial reconnaissance of Germany. From Berlin he flew another 800 kilometers northwest to overfly the German harbor at Kiel that evening, lingering there all night until cloud conditions were favorable for good photographs the following morning. There he documented the presence of the German battleship Tirpitz, and something else in the slipways that he thought the British would take particular interest in. On the 12th of February he was looking through a high powered telescope at what appeared to be construction of a new aircraft carrier.

“This will get the attention of the Royal Navy, and I will soon prove my usefulness. Now we will see what they have in their trouser pockets at Bremerhaven before we cross the North Sea.”

“You aim to overfly England next sir?”

“How else can I visit London, Captain Bogrov?”

“But if you mean to land there we’ll have to radio ahead and make arrangements.”

“In due course.”

“But the blitz, sir. I realize the Germans have been winding down their air campaign over England to transfer planes to the Mediterranean, but it could be very dangerous if we get caught in the midst of a big air duel. Suppose the Germans are bombing tomorrow.”

“You worry too much,” said Karpov. “I will radio ahead after lunch and obtain the necessary clearance. I wanted to see what intelligence we could gather first, and we’ve seen a good deal. I have photographed the German troop dispositions on the Polish frontier, Berlin’s airfields, their two biggest harbors. All of this will now be my ticket to an audience with the British.”

“You mean to say they don’t know about this trip already?”

“They will learn everything they need to know this afternoon, Captain. Concern yourself with the operations of the ship. I gave Tyrenkov instructions and he will handle the initial negotiations.”

Bogrov was silent, and a bit sullen for a time. He had been watching the barometer and altimeter closely, and wished they could get the airship down to a lower altitude. Thus far Tunguska had performed flawlessly. Her fluids had remained sound and the engines were running smoothly. And they had only used about 20 % of their fuel to cover all this distance, so he had no worries there. But something about this unexpected jaunt, about the quickness in Karpov’s step again, the glint in the man’s eye, made him feel very uneasy. He looked at the weather report again, noting the front that was slowly building over the North Sea. They might have thunderheads building and rising well above 50,000 feet, which was the maximum safe ceiling for Tunguska.

“We may run into some bad weather if we move west,” he said, making one last veiled protest in the weather report. Karpov paid him no mind.

For his part, Karpov had no scruples about his operation over Germany, and no fears about his imminent visit to England. He was demonstrating a power and capability that no other person on the earth had at that moment, and this was something that fed directly into that unfillable well of recrimination within his darkened soul. Later that evening he was satisfied with his photography of Bremerhaven, and gave the order to steer due west for another 300 kilometers before turning southwest for the coast of England near Norwich. Headwinds began to pick up, and they could not make more than 70 KPH, but Karpov was not concerned.

It was then that they ran into the storm.

The light was fading and they remained at very high altitude when forward spotters, and even the Topaz operators, reported a formation of black storm clouds ahead. Bogrov did not like the look of them, and immediately suggested they alter course.

“We must be 3000 meters above them, said Karpov, squinting through his field glasses.”

“Aye sir, they look to be up just over 10,000 meters, but some of these storms can go much higher, and there can be nasty surprises if we run into one, updrafts exceeding 120KPH, turbulence, wind shear, ice, not to mention lightning.”

“We’ve good lightning rods installed,” said Karpov.

“Yes sir, but we also have those nice expensive radar sets on the nose and brow of the ship, and they’ll do the same. It will be a rough ride, but at least the moon is up, and still almost full, so we’ll have some light when we make the coast—if we make the coast.”

Karpov heard the warning in the man’s tone. “Carry on for the moment. If this storm climbs any higher, we can always take an evasive course.”

The storm did climb higher, an unusual monster that continued to billow up and up with angry black fists of clouds, sewn with fitful flashes of lightning. It was a ‘trop buster,’ a storm that was so high that it broke into the troposphere, where the cumulonimbus clouds began to flatten out at the top in the classic anvil shape. By the time they realized what was in front of them, the storm itself was too wide to circumvent. They were going to have to ride it out, and the ominous rolls of thunder grumbled in the sky as they approached.

“All hands, secure for rough weather,” said Karpov, cursing his bad luck to hit a storm of this size.

The view panes were frosted over around the edges, but they were feeding a low current to the center of the glass where they had embedded tiny filaments of wire to heat the surface and allow for some visibility. The airship was shaken by stiff winds, the duralumin airframe shuddering an squeaking as the wind put unusual torque on the structure. At one point a hard jolt shook the ship, and a crewman in the aft section reported a rivet had broken on one of the beams securing the tail and rudder section. The engineers rushed down the long central aluminum mesh walkway, their boots clattering on the metal grating as they went. With their oxygen masks on, they looked like grim, ghoulish figures, the demon crewmen of a phantom ship.

Karpov went into the interior of the massive airship, leaving the heated cabin and venturing down the cold, drafty walkway. His breath came up short in the chilled, thin air, but he thought he could brave the environment, wanting to show his men the iron strength of his will. It was then that he heard an odd thumping on the canvas high above, beyond the bulbous gas bags, and realized they must be running into hail or ice. The ship careened on the wind, a strong gust nearly knocking him from his feet as he gripped a nearby beam to steady himself. When he reached the aft section he could see that the engineers were busy applying a tough canvass restraining belt around the intersection of several duralumin beams where the rivet had failed.

“It’s moving too much to try and get another rivet through, sir. We can’t drill under these conditions and welding is out of the question. So we’ll secure it this way and hope it will hold.”

“Carry on, Chief,” said Karpov, and as he turned to head back, Tunguska shuddered with another impact and a loud boom. He saw what looked like greenish blue lightning running along the interior framework in eerie streaks of Saint Elmo’s fire. It was a weather phenomenon where luminous plasma formed in a coronal discharge. It could center on the tip of any sharp object, like the high mast on a ship, but he had never seen anything like this before. A strong thunderstorm could generate more power than a nuclear detonation, and produce very strong magnetic fields.

When Karpov made it back to the control gondola, he saw that Bogrov’s face was white with apprehension. His men were battling the control wheels, straining to turn them this way and that as they struggled to keep the ship level and stable, fighting the heavy winds. Karpov took one look at the compass and saw the needle was spinning wildly around in jittery circles.

“We’ve blundered into ice, just as I feared,” said the Captain, “and we’ve been hit by lightning at least twice. I’ve lost the number six engine aft and rudder control is very loose right now. This could get bad, Admiral.”

“Should we get lower?” Karpov really did not know much about the aerodynamics of the airship. He was a commanding officer, but not a real Zeppelin Captain here. He had no sense of how to maneuver the ship in these circumstances, and was relying on Bogrov.

“We’ve no say in the matter now. We’re icing up too bad and getting heavy. The gas bags are filled to the bursting point, and yes, I’d advise we let the ship descend.”

“Then take her down, Captain.”

The air seemed to have a strange smell of ozone, ionized by the storm, and the strange glow infused every region of the ship now. Tunguska’s bones were tingling with an eerie magnetic fire, infusing the metals that had been mined in the place that gave the ship its name.

“Candles of the Holy Ghost,” said Karpov, using an old seaman’s name for the effect he was seeing. When Charles Darwin had first noted the effect while cruising on the Beagle, he had described it thusly: ‘everything is in flames — the sky with lightning — the water with luminous particles, even the masts are pointed with blue flame.’ Karpov had seen it aboard Kirov, but under circumstances that gave him a chilling warning of grave danger here. Saint Elmo’s Fire was usually a fluorescent blue or violet color. The strange luminescent green rippling along the inner framework of the ship put a bad feeling in his gut.

It was a difficult ride down, taking all the skill that Bogrov had to manage the inflation and prevent a major gas bag from collapsing as the pressure changed. Helium expanded at high altitude, and contracted as they descended. He had to manage a careful balance but his crew was skilled, and the ship began to stabilize at lower altitudes.

They could see the tall angry storm off the starboard side of the ship, and Bogrov turned to try and avoid plunging into the billowing column again. Evil twisting wind spouts seemed to curl and form at the fringes of the column, and the bridge crew was deathly quiet as they watched.

“Land ahead!” a watchman finally called out the sighting, and Bogrov rushed to his navigation chart.

“Damn if we haven’t been blown another fifty kilometers southwest,” he said, moving his puckered eyes from the charts to the view panes, now wet with rain. “That’s England there, sir,” he pointed. “And we’re at no more than 5,000 meters now and still descending. I’m releasing helium from the reserve and we should level off soon.”

“You may keep us low,” said Karpov. “I doubt if we’ll run into any British fighters at night, and in this weather.”

His prediction was on the mark, except on one count. They descended lower and there was no sign of any other aircraft in the sky, and there was soon no sign of the rain or storm they had just come through either. But they were too preoccupied to notice this at that moment. One of the forward Topaz radars had been hit by lightning, and was no longer functioning, and reports were now coming in from all over the ship.

“We were lucky,” said Bogrov as he tallied the damage. “But she’s a good ship, Admiral. Tunguska came through well enough. What we need now is a little time to catch our breath. Then I can see about that number six engine aft and everything else on this list. We can try making some of these repairs in flight, but it would be much better if we could find some high ground down there and anchor the ship in place. This storm seems to have moved well out to sea, and quicker than I thought. Not a sign of any rain now, and it feels much warmer, strange as that sounds. There should be cold air behind that front. Well sir, we can certainly get down to ground level now.”

“As you wish, Captain,” said Karpov. “Find us an nice bald hill somewhere with a tall tree and we’ll anchor there. But the locals will get an eyeful, won’t they.”

They would.

Chapter 36

It was late that night and the train had just made its brief stop at Hoveton & Wroxham, a humdrum bywater of Norwich. Tom Willers had been on holiday to the north, visiting relatives in Walsham, and was now riding his motorbike home in the dead of night. He could have waited until morning, but he had promised to be back by midnight, and was running late. So when his late supper was finished he bundled up and gave it a go, ready for the short twelve kilometer ride south to Wroxham. He had had one too many nips at the bottle that night, but it would keep his blood warm for the ride, or so he dimly reasoned.

Tom was well known in these parts, and well off to have his own motorbike to ride about at any ungodly hour of the day or night. He putted along, taking a side road to the bridge at Wroxham over the broad sloughs of the River Bure. In modern times the area would berth many boats near a place called Summercraft, but these were not modern times, at least not times Karpov would describe that way.

The night was wreathed in misty drifts of grey clouds, and the moon was not yet up. It was a cold, lonesome time, even for May, and no time to be out, but he was almost home. He reached the bridge and started across, when the front lamp on his motorbike suddenly went out. So he coasted to a stop to dismount and have a look, not wanting to ride the rest of the way home in the dark. It was then that he saw it, catching something out of the corner of his eye, a dark shape above him that blackened the stars.

“Now what in bloody hell?”

Tom Willers looked up, stricken with fear to see a massive shape in the sky above him, huge and threatening, like a great behemoth of the night. Then, to his great surprise and discomfiture, he was suddenly illuminated by a blinding white light. It was a dazzling display, lingering on the bridge where he shivered by his motorbike until the light moved on, searching along the winding road ahead.

His eyes adjusted, and now he could see the dark mass above again, long, cigar shaped, with the faint drone of a whirring sound. He could also see that the light that had dazzled him was from what looked like a powerful searchlight, now fingering the ground beyond the river, and a second light flashed from its other end, so far from the nose of the craft that it seemed to stretch half way across the county!

He was not the only one who saw the strange lights that night. Mrs. Turner of New Catton, Norwich, was near the window on the upper floor of her home, restless and unable to sleep. Her eye was suddenly caught by the brilliant columns of light, so bright that they illuminated the street outside as bright as daylight. She would later report the incident, saying that: “… I looked up and there I saw a big star of light in front, and a big searchlight behind… It was coming from the north-northeast, from the direction of the Angel Road School, and flying very low, so low that it would have touched the pinnacle of the school had it passed directly over it.”

Others in Norwich reported seeing a similar strange shape in the sky that night, and a few minutes later, a man riding a bike in Tharston south of the main town said he saw a ‘torpedo shaped’ object in the sky, and with a powerful searchlight.

Tunguska had come down to a very low altitude, and they were making a search in the dark for a place Karpov was fingering on his navigation map. There had been no suitable hills about as they had earlier hoped to find, but Karpov could see a place denoted RAF Coltishall, which would offer plenty of unobstructed space for the massive airship to hover in place, anchored by the buckets they might lower and fix to the ground. The base had been established in 1938, and would serve until sold off in 2010 after its closure in 2006. It would give them a safe place to stabilize the ship for the repairs they wanted to make, and they could also clear their arrival with the R.A. F. Karpov gave the order to try and raise the base on radio earlier, but they had no response.

“I’m surprised they don’t have fighters up after us by now,” said Bogrov. “The storm is passing. Are the British pilots all asleep?”

“I’m more surprised that they do not answer our hails. Are you certain the equipment was not damaged from those lightning strikes?”

“It seems to be working, sir,” said a signalman. I can hear signals, though they all seem to be in Morse code.”

‘Well why don’t they answer? Signal in Morse then. We need to get this ship sorted out.”

“Well we can’t even seem to find the damn airfield,” said Bogrov. “Where’s the moon?” He seemed somewhat disoriented.

“It’s likely lost in that storm,” said Karpov.

“Storm? Have a look out there, Admiral. Its settled down to a fine quiet night. But where is this airfield? It should be right in front of us.”

“Are you certain these charts are accurate?” Karpov gave him an irritated look.

“The best I could find on short notice, sir. That’s the river there that we were illuminating with our searchlights a moment ago. If I keep it on our left then the airfield should be no more than 5 kilometers northwest, but I can’t see a thing out there. There’s certainly no sign of air activity here.”

“Well, there’s plenty of open ground about. We’ll just have to hover low and anchor in a field. Then get the engineers busy. I want to be over London at dawn, just as I surprised the Germans. Tunguska will be quite a sight over Big Ben, will it not?”

“I can only hope we get a better reception than the Germans gave us. We’re fair game down here, sir. And their Spitfires are good planes.”

But they saw no sign of aircraft, and heard no return to their radio hails. It was as if England had just gone to sleep, with only the faint snoring of Morse code over the airwaves, but that was not so. Tom Willers had been wide awake that night, as was Mrs. Turner of New Catton and Bob Thatch of Tharston, and the reports were soon coming in all over East Anglia. For Tunguska was not where Karpov thought to take it, at least not the hour and day he had hoped to arrive.

Something in the awesome power and magnetic energy of that towering storm over the North Sea had found affinity with the bones of the ship, the odd flecks of exotic metals that had been smelted into the beams which made up the massive structure. The dancing fire and rippling light that Karpov had seen was the telltale sign of its power, and the ship was elsewhere for some time, until it finally settled into the here and now — but not the one they had left behind them at nearly 15,000 meters, with the shaking winds and battering ice of that massive thunderhead. It stood like a great anvil in the dark tormented sky, and the hammer of god had descended upon it, falling on the ship that carried something from another world in the core of its very structure.

Karpov would not find that out for some hours, while the airship hovered like a great beached whale over the downs of Tunstead. There was a winding road not far from the place where they ground anchored for repairs, and on that road was another late traveler on a bicycle, working his way along the track towards the old rectory. He was making a very early delivery at two in the morning, and he had promised the parson he would have fresh cheese, milk, and a morning paper well before dawn. He had come up Peter’s Lane from Ice Well Wood, feeling the chill on the air as he rode, and then he saw it, the massive shape hovering silently above the ground, the shadows of men beneath it, and the sound of an odd language being spoken.

Tyrenkov’s security men stepped out of the woods, brandishing submachine guns, and he made the sign of the cross, thinking the only thing that made any sense to his startled mind at that moment. It was the bloody Germans! That thing on the downs looked like one of their massive airships, and the invasion everyone had been worried about was finally on — but not the invasion that had been expected in 1940 or 1941. No. The date on the newspaper found in his delivery basket would say something quite different.

Soon Karpov would have another real mystery to sort out, and very little evidence to come to any real conclusion, except for the absence of one prominent thing in the sky. The date on that newspaper was very odd, and the fat gibbous moon that had grinned at them as they taunted the storm over the North Sea was gone. In its place, rising that very moment, was a thin morning crescent, almost entirely dark!

Karpov looked at it, the conjunction of too many ominous signs now stacking up in his mind in one sudden moment. The strange rippling fire in the ship… luminescent, green and violet light… the sudden disappearance of the rain and the warmer temperatures that they would not expect in February at this latitude. Then the radio calls that went without an answer became more significant, the scratch of Morse code in their place. The missing airfield… and now this…

He stared down at the newspaper Tyrenkov had handed him and read the headline: “Scareships over East Anglia for a second night — Constables on the Watch!” It was Dated May 18, 1909…

How could this have happened, thought Karpov. How was it possible? There was no detonation, no explosive volcano, and no Rod-25, but there had been that massive storm they challenged, and the strange energy that had flowed through the skeleton of the ship was most unnerving. Beyond all that, he could feel that something was badly off its kilter. He had shifted in time too often now, and he knew the feeling, the odd discomfiture and disorientation, and the sudden inner sense that his life and being had been profoundly moved. He was somewhere else, not in space, but in time. How it had happened did not really matter. If it proved to be the case, then….

His mind now whirled with a thousand thoughts mushrooming up just as that storm had hours ago. They shook the outer canvass of his soul and rippled along the cold duralumin beams of his brain. We’ve moved! By god in his heaven, the whole ship has moved!

Now he had a sudden realization, and a heady feeling that was almost exhilarating. It was the same feeling he had when he realized that Demon of a volcano had blasted Kirov into another century, to the year 1908. He had managed to stay there only a few brief days, but in that time he had hatched a plan to reset the entire power structure of the Pacific. He could do this because he had a ship unlike any other in the world, with power unlike any other man alive.

Now he looked over his shoulder at the looming hulk of Tunguska—an airship unlike any other in 1909. There it sat, bristling with recoilless rifles, racks of incendiary and high explosive bombs, makeshift rockets in the nose and the makings of his thermobaric bomb aboard as well. Britain’s first powered heavier than air flight had only been achieved a few months ago, by Samuel Franklin Cody on 16 October 1908. There were a few airships in the world, but they could barely navigate a distance of 700 kilometers or reach altitudes above 4000 feet. In fact, the British had only one or two, and the Germans only three. If the date on that newspaper is accurate, he was a demigod again, not merely a man desperately trying to earn the respect and attention of others greater than himself. He was invincible.

I’m here, he thought, and for a reason too. Time keeps sending me back. Then he suddenly realized that Ivan Volkov was here as well, but that he was just a very young man in the Russian Naval Intelligence, somewhere in Siberia… perhaps still somewhere near Ilanskiy…

And that place was there as well, wasn’t it? That little railway inn was just sitting there, and so was that damn back stairway! He suddenly realized what he could do, his eyes widening with astonishment and a heady sense of thrilling energy. He felt as big as the airship, as big as Tunguska, bigger than all of Siberia, better than them all.

“Captain Bogrov!” Karpov shouted to his men. “Can the ship make way?”

“Sir? We’ve nearly finished repairs on that aft engine. It was not as serious as I thought, and the engineers had replaced a few loose and broken rivets and stabilized the airframe.”

“Excellent! Get the men aboard. Tyrenkov, let that idiot go and gather up your security team. We return to Ilanskiy at once.”

“Now sir?”

“You heard the order, Bogrov. Now let’s get moving!”

Yes, let’s get moving, because I have miles to go before I sleep, and a lot of people owe me out there — owe me a great deal.

So now they are all going to pay.

Dear Readers,

Thank you for reading Grand Alliance, and especially if you have been with me from as far away as Book I in this series. I am still seeking a “Wiki Master” to build the Wikipedia entries to describe the series. Numerous examples exist for other fiction works on Wikipedia, but they prefer that the entries are made by third parties and not the author or publishers. Is there anyone out there who is a master of Wikipedia and interested in taking on the task to become the official historian of the Kirov Series? If so, please drop me a line and let me know.

My thanks also to all those who have written to me with comments, questions, suggestions, and reflections on the story, and in particular to Don Ursum who has been a valuable resource for the extensive research that goes into each and every one of these novels.

Best regards,

John

Reading the Kirov Series

The Kirov Series is a long chain of linked novels by John Schettler in the Military Alternate History / Time Travel Genre. Like the popular movie “The Final Countdown” which saw the US Carrier Nimitz sent back in time to the eve of Pearl Harbor in 1941, in these books the powerful Russian battlecruiser Kirov is sent back to the 1940s in the Norwegian Sea where it subsequently becomes embroiled in the war.

Like episodes in the never ending Star Trek series, the saga continues through one episode after another as the ship’s position in time remains unstable. It culminates in Book 8 Armageddon, then is resurrected again in a 9th volume entitled Altered States, which begins the third trilogy in the series.

How To read the Kirov Series?

The best entry point is obviously Book I, Kirov, where you will meet all the main characters in the series and learn their inner motivations. The series itself, however, is structured as sets of trilogies linked by what the author calls a “bridge novel.” The first three volumes form an exciting trilogy featuring much fast paced naval action as Kirov battles the Royal Navy, Regia Marina (Italians) and finally the Japanese after sailing to the Pacific in Book III. The bridge novel Men Of War is a second entry point which covers what happened to the ship and crew after it returned home to Vladivostok. As such it serves as both a sequel to the opening trilogy and a prequel to the next trilogy, the three novels beginning with Book V, 9 Days Falling.

The 9 Days Falling trilogy focuses on the struggle to prevent a great war in 2021 from reaching a terrible nuclear climax that destroys the world. It spans book 5, 6, and 7, featuring the outbreak of the war as Japan and China battle over disputed islands, and the action of the Red Banner Pacific Fleet against the modern US Fleet. It then takes a dramatic turn when the ship is again shifted in time to 1945. There they confront the powerful US Pacific Fleet under Admiral Halsey, and so this trilogy focuses much of the action as Kirov faces down the US in two eras. This second trilogy also launches several subplots that serve to relate other events in the great war of 2021 and also deepen the mystery of time travel as discovered in the series. The trilogy ends at another crucial point in history where the ship’s Captain, Vladimir Karpov, believes he is in a position to decisively change events.

The next bridge novel is Armageddon, Book 8 in the series, which continues the action as a sequel to Book 7 while also standing as a kind of prologue to the Altered States trilogy. In this third trilogy, Kirov becomes trapped in the world made by its many interventions in the history, an altered reality beginning in June of 1940. The opening volume sees the ship pitted against the one navy of WWII it has not yet fought, the Kriegsmarine of Germany, which now has new powerful ships from the German Plan Z naval building program as one consequence of Kirov’s earlier actions.

Altered States also covers the German attack on the carrier Glorious, the British raids on the Vichy French Fleets at Mers-el Kebir and Dakar, and the German Operation Felix against Gibraltar. Other events in Siberia involve the rise of Karpov to power, and his duel with Ivan Volkov of the Orenburg Federation, one of the three fragmented Russian states. (And these involve airship battles!)

The sequel to the Altered States Trilogy and the bridge novel leading to the next set is volume 12, Three Kings. It covers the action in North Africa, with a decisive intervention that arises from a most unexpected plot twist at the end of that novel. Book 13, Grand Alliance continues the war in the desert as Rommel is suddenly confronted with a powerful new adversary, and Hitler reacts by strongly reinforcing the Afrika Korps. It also presents the struggle for naval supremacy in the Mediterranean as the British face down a combined Axis fleet from three enemy nations.

The Grand Alliance Trilogy continues with Hammer of God, and Crescendo of Doom.

You can enter any of these three trilogies that may interest you, though your understanding of the characters and plot will be fullest by simply beginning with book one and reading through them all!