Hammer of God (Kirov Series Book 14) (29 page)

“Volkov was from your time? I
see. Now it makes sense. He was able to outmaneuver Denikin so easily, and take
power in Orenburg.”

“That federation never even
existed in the history I know from my time,” said Karpov. “In fact, this whole
situation, the divided Russia we see, is an aberration. It was never supposed
to happen. It was our meddling, perhaps my own doing, that may have led to it
all. But Ivan Volkov certainly had a great deal to do with it. I thought to
befriend him at one point, in that meeting at Omsk, but we have seen that a
snake is a snake. His treachery is apparent, and now he has made a very bad
mistake. He has made an enemy of me, and here I am, in 1909, by fate or chance,
and in a perfect position to do something about Volkov before he ever gets
started.”

Tyrenkov nodded his head. “He is
here? Now?”

“Somewhere, even as we speak.”

“You say he slipped through a
hole in the history, but how did he do that, really?”

“No one knows, exactly. It
happened at Ilanskiy.” He told Tyrenkov the story Volkov had shared with him,
and the other man slowly nodded, beginning to understand many of the strange
things that had been happening concerning that railway station.

“I could never understand why
Volkov tried to seize that station, or why anyone would want to try and destroy
it.”

“Now you know. There is something
there, Tyrenkov, a gateway of sorts.”

“Where does it lead?”

“I am not certain.”

“Ah…” Tyrenkov remembered now.
“That back stairway. Something very strange happened there. You went up those
stairs, and it seemed to me that you returned quite shaken. Even your uniform
was soiled, though you tried to cover that up.” Now Tyrenkov remembered the
cigarette he had noticed, still burning in Karpov’s hand when he returned.
Time…
Yes, that had to be it! That stairway was the hole in history. That was what
everyone was fighting over at Ilanskiy, and that is why Karpov has been trying
to rebuild it!

“Very observant,” said Karpov.
“Do you understand where we are going now?”

“Yes sir. I think I do, at long
last.”

“Excellent! Because I plan to
take you with me, Tyrenkov. You and I have much to do! But first, we need to
make a little side trip to Saratov, and now I will tell you why.”

Chapter 29

Karpov
looked again at his
chess set, smiling. “Petrov’s defense,” he said. “It was played out by a
namesake of mine against a young man named Magnus Carlsen—quite a chess
prodigy. But never mind the game itself. I was merely passing time with it to
rest my mind. It is what occurred to me while I was playing it through that
matters now. It was nothing about the game itself, just the chance association
of names.”

“I don’t quite follow you,
Admiral.”

“Of course not… In that game, a
man named Anatoly Karpov, no relation, was playing out the well known defense
devised by a former chess master, Alexander Petrov. They call it the Russian
Defense now. Well, those names suddenly struck a hard note in my mind—Petrov, Karpov.
You see Petrov was also the name of a well known early revolutionary, and the
reason I bother with this at all will soon be obvious to you. This man,
Alexander Petrov, the revolutionary, not the chess master, seems to have his
fate line tangled with my own. He was attempting to infiltrate the Czar’s
secret police.”

“The Okhrana? That would be very
dangerous.”

“Indeed! Well he very nearly
succeeded. In fact, he was being actively recruited by high level officers in
the Okhrana. They had arrested Petrov and had him in prison, when the man
thought to ingratiate himself with the authorities, saying he wished to join
and support the activities of the secret police. So he was approached by a man
named Sergei, and slowly recruited. The Okhrana wanted to use him as an agent
to uncover more activists in the revolution, and the inverse was also true. The
revolution wanted to use Petrov to get a look at the inside workings of the
Okhrana. A most unfortunate incident occurred, however, and it all came apart,
the whole scheme. Petrov’s handler was in Saint Petersburg, and learning his
protégé was there, he made a call, saying he would soon be there to meet with
him. No one knows why, but Petrov used that brief interval of time to plant a
bomb under the table where they were to meet, then he excused himself, and
boom, the bomb went off, killing the handler, but also ending Petrov’s ploy at
infiltrating any further into the Okhrana. That was apparently no matter to
him, for he seemed to have accomplished what he set out to do. You see, the man
he killed was no mere handler, but really a highly placed officer in the
Okhrana. His name was colonel Sergei Karpov, and he was my Great Grandfather…”

Tyrenkov was very surprised to
hear this, but remained outwardly calm. “When did this happen?” he asked.

“A good question. I have found
different sources with different dates, but they all agree that it was in the
month of December, in this very year, 1909. So we are going to see about it.
Because at this very moment that revolutionary is still stewing in Saratov
prison, trying to finagle his way out to take the path that will eventually
lead him to that meeting with my Great Grandfather. Only this time things will
be different.”

“I believe they will, sir,” said
Tyrenkov, and now he allowed himself a smile. Something told him that a good
many other things were going to be different in the days ahead.

* * *

It was a simple matter to gain entrance
to the prison at Saratov. Once the massive hulk of
Tunguska
appeared in
the sky, the authorities in the city were quite shaken. The airship hovered low
over the site, bristling with guns, and soon the cabled cargo baskets were used
to lower squads of Tyrenkov’s security personnel. Karpov had given him his
marching orders, and Tyrenkov did not disappoint. The men landed right inside
the prison, and he sent several platoons of black-clad special service troops,
well armed with sub-machineguns, to find the warden. Even as Orlov had found
his target in the Prison of Baku, and as Sergei Kirov had found Stalin, the
history was again to turn on another visit to a dank prison cell by knowing men
from another time. Tyrenkov found the man in question, and without so much as a
brief announcement, he concluded the matter.

“Alexander Petrov?” he said.

Petrov looked at him through
bleary eyes, thinking that this could only be one of two things. Either it was
yet another interrogation, and most likely a beating ordered by the local
police, or perhaps, he hoped, this might be the authorities from Saint
Petersburg he had appealed to, offering his services to the Okhrana in exchange
for freedom.

It was neither. It was simply his
most unexpected appointment with death.

“You are hereby condemned for the
conspiracy and assassination of Colonel Sergie Karpov.”

Petrov heard the words, but could
not understand what was happening. “What?” he blurted out, his instinct for
survival suddenly pulsing with the adrenaline in his chest. “What do you mean?
I have killed no one!”

“Correct,” said Tyrenkov, “for
the moment. But you will kill someone if left to your devices. But not this
time.” He reached into his service jacket, drew out a pistol, aimed, and fired.
The sharp report of the weapon in the confined space was deafening, but
Tyrenkov hardly blinked. He took a long look at Petrov satisfied that the
bullet hole he had put in his head was fatal, and then turned, his boots hard
on the cold stone floor of the prison hallway.

Ten minutes later his men were
ascending to the ship in the sub-cloud car, and history groaned as it turned
over in its sleep. For Sergei Karpov had been slated to become head of the
Okhrana in Saint Petersburg before Petrov’s bomb prevented that. Now he
would
become head of that nefarious organization, and like his grandson, he had a
very long list of things he planned to do, and some of them were going to
matter a great deal in the years ahead.

While Tyrenkov and his men were
away on their mission of death, Vladimir Karpov had passed the time listening
to the memoirs of Alexander Petrov as fetched from the library material he had
stored on his service jacket computer. A shiver went down his spine when he
began to hear names in the narrative that were all too familiar. The man who
had first approached Petrov was called “Sergei,” the name of both his Great Grandfather
as well as a certain other figure that had risen to prominence in the
revolution—Kirov. One day Petrov was invited to Sergei’s house, along with
other members of the nascent underground revolution. The moment he arrived a
bomb went off with a roaring explosion, throwing Petrov to the ground. His legs
had both been injured, but he still had the presence of mind to drag himself
towards the door, managing to eventually reach the street outside, dazed and
wounded.

The police arrived, pushing into
a crowd that had gathered around Petrov, and added to his misery by kicking him
with their boots. It was just another revolutionary, or so they believed, and
they took Petrov off to the police station. There the local chief ordered the
man taken to the hospital to see to his bleeding legs. In one of those strange
twists of history, the doctor who operated on him was named Fedorov! Later, the
Okhrana actually did recruit Petrov, and provided him with a false passport
under the name Rodenko! So there were the names of men who had served on the
bridge crew of the battlecruiser
Kirov
—all strangely associated with
this Petrov figure, a man who was planning to kill his own Great Grandfather!
The dark implications of that did not go unappreciated by Karpov. If Petrov had
done his deed just a few months earlier, he would have snuffed out the life
line that now sustained him, as Colonel Sergei Karpov would have died before he
had conceived his son.

The eerie echo of those names in
the narrative unnerved him as he listened—Fedorov, working to sustain the life
and mobility of Petrov, Rodenko, lending him his identity so that he might move
unnoticed in the murky seas of the early revolution…

I was that close to annihilation,
thought Karpov. But why did Petrov want my Great Grandfather dead? Was it his
own doing, or was he put up to it by someone else? Was it merely revenge for
the attack that injured him? Were these other men secretly involved, Fedorov?
Rodenko? And who was this “Sergei” that had tried to kill Petrov himself that
day? Was it really his Great Grandfather? Why would he do this if he was really
seeking to turn Petrov as an agent, as all the other accounts had it in the
history? Was it someone else named Sergei? Who? Why?

He sighed, switching off the
computer in his service jacket that had been reading him the file, a cold,
clammy feeling on the back of his neck. Something about this incident was
entirely too personal now. It was not like the grand strategy he had been
plotting, aimed at striking decisive blows to the history. No. It was darker,
more devious, more sinister. People were moving through the waters of history,
like submarines lurking beneath the thermals of time. People were out there
trying to kill him!

The sound of a knock on the door
shook him from his fearful reverie, and he sat up in his chair, eyeing the door
with suspicion.

“Who is it?”

“Tyrenkov, sir. Here to report.”

“Come.”

The door opened, and Tyrenkov
strode in, saluting as he came. He reached into his jacket pocket and drew out
his pistol, handing it to Karpov. The barrel was still warm.

“The operation was successful,”
said Tyrenkov flatly. “Petrov’s defense did not work this time. He is dead.”

Karpov took a long, deep breath. The
assassin was dead, and now his Great Grandfather would live, or so he believed.
His life line seemed more secure—at least for the moment. He breathed deeply,
satisfied, and appreciating Tyrenkov’s efficiency and calm yet again.

“That will conclude our business
here,” he said. “We will depart for Ilanskiy immediately.”

“Very well, sir. I’ll go to the
bridge and inform the Air Commandant.”

“Don’t bother,” said Karpov. “I
have already informed him by telephone. We’ll be underway shortly. Why don’t
you sit down for a moment. As to Petrov, you were certain he expired?”

“I put a bullet right through his
head, sir,” said Tyrenkov. “If he did survive I don’t think his brain would
have been of any further use to him. Why did he wish to kill your Great Grandfather?”

“An interesting question,” said
Karpov. “The thought did occur to me that he was put up to it by others.”

“Who sir?”

“Don’t think I reached this
position without making enemies, Tyrenkov. I can think of several people who
might want me dead now. This attack on my Great Grandfather always bothered me
as a young man. My father told me about it, and I once thought that I might not
even be alive if this man Petrov had done his dirty work a few months sooner,
before my grandfather was conceived. It is a very sly way of completely
eliminating someone from the line of fate. You just kill his ancestors! Who
might wish to do this, I wondered? Ivan Volkov came to mind immediately.”

“Volkov?” said Tyrenkov. “But how
would he have any influence over Petrov, a man of this day and age?”

“I thought the same thing,”
Karpov replied. “If Volkov was behind this plot, then he would have had to have
some means of traveling to this year in time to recruit Petrov for this task. I
can think of no way that would be possible—except for one.”

“Ilansky,” said Tyrenkov quietly.

“Precisely. You are very sharp,
Tyrenkov. Yes. If Volkov were to gain control of Ilanskiy, and learn of that
back stairway, then he might send someone back and do something like this. He
could not come himself, as he is already here—even as we speak, but as the
impudent young officer who was sent to inspect my ship. He’s still probably
trying to figure out what happened to him, and drowning his sorrows with some
good vodka. But that Volkov would know nothing of my rise to power in Siberia,
or of our enmity. Only the Volkov of 1941 would have that knowledge, and also
the knowledge of Ilanskiy if he had mind enough to associate his fate with that
place—and I think he did. Otherwise, why did he violate the treaty we signed at
Omsk, and make that stupid attempt to seize Ilanskiy? You see? Volkov already
tried to get Ilanskiy under his control once…”

Tyrenkov was silent for a time,
thinking. Then he looked up and asked another question. “You think Volkov may
have made a subsequent attempt—and one that succeeded this time?”

It was a dark thought, and still
sent a shiver down Karpov’s spine. “That is a possibility,” he said. “But it
would mean he was able to drive all the way to Ilanskiy, and I don’t like the
sound of that. It would mean we were defeated on the eastern front by the Grey
Legion.”

“You mean beaten by Volkov’s
forces? At some future time?”

“A bit unnerving to consider
that, isn’t it?” said Karpov. “Yet that is one scenario that would have to
occur if Volkov were behind the plot to kill my Great Grandfather. It gave me
fits for a time, until I realized that for Volkov to attempt this, I would have
to still be alive, and a viable threat to him in that future time.”

“Why wouldn’t he just send
someone back and shoot one of your ancestors, as I just shot Petrov?”

“Who knows? Perhaps he prefers a
subtle touch, and one that does not directly implicate him… Yet all of this is
mere speculation. I have come to conclude that Volkov was not the culprit. If
someone did put Petrov up to this attack, then it was another man.”

“Who?” Tyrenkov was simple and
direct, another reason Karpov admired him.

“That is what you and I will set
our minds on now,” said Karpov. “If Petrov was a tool, then the man who sought
to use him would have to have the means of traveling to this time to do so—this
much we have already determined in considering the Volkov question. So that
creates a very short list of names, Tyrenkov. First off, the man must have the
knowledge that time travel is possible, and that is known to very few.
Secondly, he must have the
means
to travel in time, and that is another
major obstacle. Thirdly, and this is the part that is certainly bothersome, he
must have a motive for wanting me dead. Yes. This list is a very short one. As
far as I know now, there are only a handful of men who might fulfill all these requirements.”