Kirov Saga: Darkest Hour: Altered States - Volume II (Kirov Series) (41 page)

“Let’s
keep that material safe, shall we, and just between the two of us for the time
being.”

“Of
course, Admiral. I’ll see to it. Shall I select a few photographs for you now?”

“Take
your time, but send them to my Admiralty office by special courier. Mark it
eyes only, and to my attention.”

“Of
course, sir.”

Tovey
nodded and began to leave, but Turing cleared his throat, needing to say one
last thing. “Something else, Mister Turing?”

“Well
sir, in considering your assumption, that all these documents and photos were
prepared as part of a deception plan,
how could
anyone predict these events? These photos and reports are all detailing things
that have clearly not happened, but in a manner that suggests they
did
happen, that all the material in that box is history. Why would anyone create
material about an engagement in the Pacific that they could never know about in
any wise? It would all be a wild guess and a terrible waste of time.”

Tovey looked at him, thinking. “Interesting point,” he said
quietly. “Yes, I suppose it would be a waste of time, and I can’t see why
anyone would do such a thing.”

“Oh, that question is answered in envelope nine, sir.”

Tovey raised an eyebrow. “Envelope nine?”

“Yes sir. There is one final document there that may be of
interest to you. It indicates that the events documented in these files are to
be classified top secret, so secret that only a handful of people would ever
know about any of it. That code word I telephoned you about—
Geronimo
—well
it was supposedly known to no more than ten men, a group known as ‘the Watch,’ and
you may be surprised to learn that the First Sea Lord, most everyone else of
note in the Admiralty, and the Prime Minister are not on the list.”

“The Watch?”

“Yes sir, and as to the mystery of who might have wasted their
time with all of this, the rascals are clearly identified.”

“Out with it, Turing. Who’s behind all this?”

Turing smiled.
“We
are sir… You and I—at least according to
the report, and the two signatures affixed to it, in envelope nine.”

“You mean to say that someone is trying to use our names and
reputations in an attempt to lend credulity to this box of fairy tales?”

That wasn’t exactly what Turing meant to say, but he decided to be
very discrete here, and simply smiled. “Apparently so, sir.”

Tovey shook his head, clearly bothered by all of this.
As he reached the door he stopped, not
knowing why, a rhyme in his head that he could not account for, like something
that had just welled up from some deep, unconscious pool in his mind. He looked
over his shoulder at Turing, a strange light in his eye.

“Byron,”
he said quietly. “Do you read poetry, Mister Turing?”

“Sir?
Well, now that you mention it, I do. Yes, I am particularly fond of Lord
Byron’s muse.”

Tovey
smiled.

“I
thought as much,” he said with the nod of his head. “Good day to you.”

Turing
watched him go, feeling himself to be the biggest fool in the world. Here was
the Admiral of the Home Fleet, and what did I summon him here to see? That box
full of parlor tricks and deceit—fairy tales as he called it. Of course his
explanation is the only possible answer to all this. It may even be that there
is some secret operation on and I’ve gone and stuck my thumb in the pie. There
is simply no other way to think about this.

He
looked at the box, frowning, feeling the red heat of embarrassment rise on his
neck. The Admiral must have thought he was a complete idiot. Yet on another
level he could sense something more had transpired here. Tovey was genuinely
shocked by the evidence contained in that box. The word
Geronimo
seemed
to jolt him with an almost electric current. Those photographs deeply disturbed
him.

What
was that bit at the end about Byron’s poetry? Ah, the photos. Well I’ll fish
about a bit more and find the best of the lot. As he did so, his hand fell on
something cold and hard at the bottom of the box. When he pulled it out he was
struck yet again with that same feeling of profound anomaly. It was a watch,
and not just any watch. It was his own Gallet Multichron Astronomic! He had
been missing it for a month! What in the world was it doing here in this old
box?

Then
he noted the date and time the watch had stopped. The calendar window read
September… In the year 1942. What in God’s name was going on here? Was he being
framed? He knew there were men spreading rumors, talking about his strange ways
and habits. He knew there were other men keeping a close eye on him—on all of
us here at Bletchley Park.

He
sighed. Looking again at some notes he had scribbled on the back of a photo.
Yes, he clearly recognized his handwriting there. How could anyone mimic it
with such uncanny accuracy? Why they would have to fish about in my waste
basket and find all my doodles and notes, wouldn’t they? Just like this bit
here on this photo.

He
read the note:
Dilly’s ‘L’ Crib!
What was that about? The words meant
something to him. Dilly Knox was one of the team members working on Enigma.
‘Cribs’ were little lapses and errors of judgment that the Enigma machine
operators might use in the formatting of their messages. They might always
start a message with the same word, for example, or make careless and
repetitive keystrokes that could become clues as to how the code could be
interpreted. But he could not think what Dilly’s L Crib might be. Knox had been
active as a cryptologist since 1914 when he worked in the Royal Navy's cryptological
effort in Room 40 of the Old Admiralty Building. He was apparently on to
something again.

That
was another thing that bothered Turing. If this was some elaborate hoax, a
planned deception, the perpetrators had seen to the smallest of details, like
that errant scribble of a note that was all too typical of his own habits. They
might have fished it out of the waste bin, he thought again. It might have been
something I wrote days or weeks ago. I can hardly remember half the mumbo jumbo
that I run through my own head on any given day.

He
finished up, selecting his photos and pocketing his Gallet watch, glad to have
it back again, but very suspicious as to how it went missing now, and how it
found itself in that hidden box under a patina of dust that looked to have accumulated
over long years. It was more than strange. There was an eerie quality to his
feeling about all this now, and one that got his hackles up, chilling him with
implications he did not wish to even consider.

He
sent off his envelope to the Admiralty as Tovey asked, put the box right back
where he found it, and went about his business again, a good deal more edgy and
ill at ease for all his trouble.

The
next time he saw the tall bespectacled
Dilly Knox, he remembered the
note. In a very casual manner he asked his colleague a brief question. “How
goes it, Dilly? Any Cribs this week?”

“What’s
that, Turing? Oh yes! It seems we picked up a test message from a German
operator who must have been all thumbs. I was just looking over the message
when it occurred to me that there wasn’t a single instance of the letter L in
the whole damn message!”

Turing
knew immediately what that meant! Any time an Enigma machine key was depressed,
it would return any letter of the alphabet except the one letter labeled on the
key being used. If there were no instances of the letter L in the message, then
it was a clear tip that the key labeled L had indeed been used, and most likely
multiple times.

“On
a hunch I assumed this operator had gotten very lazy and just kept using that
single key. Well we broke that whole message, and sure enough, I was correct.
It just read LLLLL.” Dilly smiled. “I’m calling it my L crib, Alan. Make a note
of it. It will likely go down in history!” Knox laughed and was on his way.

Turing
did not laugh.

Apparently
I
did
make a note of it, he thought darkly. Right on the back of that
bloody photo. And yet I’ve heard this from Knox for the very first time, and
just this minute.

Just
this minute…

His
hand fell on the watch in his pocket now.

Yes!
It was all about time!

The Saga Continues…

Altered States:
Volume III ~ Hinge of Fate

As
Turing and Tovey pursue the mystery of the strange mother lode of information
on the Russian ship, Admiral Volsky sails to meet with the British on the
Faeroes, bearing an offer of formal alliance between Soviet Russia and Great
Britain. Meanwhile, the Germans plan a fateful meeting of their own, at the
small village of Hendaye on the border near Spain. There Hitler hopes to secure
another vital ally so that he can breathe life into Admiral Raeder’s long
advocated plan for a Mediterranean strategy. It will begin with ‘Operation
Felix’ the assault on Gibraltar, and only one man stands in the way, el
Caudillo himself, Francisco Franco.

As
Britain steels itself for possible invasion, Tovey must now rally his battered
fleet to the defense of Gibraltar, England’s Rock in the Mediterranean and the
hinge of fate that could turn the entire course of the war should it fall.
Opposing him are the powerful new French battleships at Casablanca and Dakar,
and a resurgent Kriegsmarine led by a fearsome new gladiator, the
Hindenburg
.

Meanwhile,
The airship
Narva
faces danger and mystery on the Stony Tunguska, even
while elements of two other airship fleets converge on another hinge of fate,
the inn at Ilanskiy. Action, mystery and intrigue pulse through this compelling
continuation of the amazing
Kirov Saga!

THE KIROV SERIES ~ BY JOHN
SCHETTLER

Kirov

The battlecruiser
Kirov
is the most power surface combatant
that ever put to sea. Built from the bones of all four prior
Kirov
Class
battlecruisers, she is updated with Russia’s most lethal weapons, given back
her old name, and commissioned in the year 2020. A year later, with tensions
rising to the breaking point between Russia and the West,
Kirov
is
completing her final missile trials in the Arctic Sea when a strange accident
transports her to another time. With power no ship in the world can match, much
less comprehend, she must decide the fate of nations in the most titanic
conflict the world has ever seen—WWII.

Kirov II
–
Cauldron of Fire

Kirov
crosses the Atlantic to the Mediterranean Sea when she suddenly
slips in time again and re-appears a year later, in August of 1942. Beset with
enemies on every side and embroiled in one of the largest sea battles of the
war, the ship races for Gibraltar and the relatively safe waters of the
Atlantic. Meanwhile, the brilliant Alan Turing has begun to unravel the mystery
of what this ship could be, but can he convince the Admiralty? Naval action
abounds in this fast paced second volume of the
Kirov
series trilogy.

Kirov III
-
Pacific Storm

Admiral Tovey’s visit to Bletchley Park soon reaches an astounding
conclusion when the battlecruiser
Kirov
vanishes once again to a
desolate future. Reaching the Pacific the ship’s officers and crew soon learn
that
Kirov
has once again moved in time. Now First Officer Anton Fedorov
is shocked to learn the true source of the great variation in time that has led
to the devastated future they have come from and the demise of civilization
itself. They are soon discovered by a Japanese fleet and the ship now faces its
most dangerous and determined challenge ever when they are stalked by the
Japanese 5th Carrier Division and eventually confronted by a powerful enemy
task force led by the battleship Yamato, and an admiral determined to sink this
phantom ship, or die trying. In this amazing continuation to the popular
Kirov
series, the most powerful ships ever conceived by two different eras clash in a
titanic final battle that could decide the fate of nations and the world
itself.

Kirov Saga:
Men Of War
~
Book IV

Kirov
returns home to a changed world in the year 2021, and as the
Russian Naval Inspectorate probes the mystery of the ship’s disappearance,
Anton Fedorov begins to unravel yet another dilemma—the secret of Rod 25. The
world is again steering a dangerous course toward the great war that blackened
the shores of a distant future glimpsed by the officers and crew. Fedorov has
come to believe that time is waiting on the resolution of one crucial
unresolved element from their journey to the past—the fate of Gennadi Orlov.

Join Admiral Leonid Volsky, Captain Vladimir Karpov, and Anton
Fedorov as they sleuth the mystery of Orlov’s fate and launch a mission to the
past to find him before the world explodes in the terror and fury of a great
air and naval conflict in the Pacific. It is a war that will span the globe
from the Gulf of Mexico to the Middle East and through the oil rich heart of
Central Asia to the wide Pacific, but somehow one man’s life holds the key to
its prevention. Yet other men are aware of Orlov’s identity as a crewman from
the dread raider they came to call
Geronimo
, and they too set their minds
on finding him first…in 1942! Men of war from the future and past now join in
the hunt while the military forces of Russia, China, and the West maneuver to
the great chessboard of impending conflict.