John Schettler - Tigers East

He closed his eyes, summoning up the memory of that brief adventure. Mironov had two other men with him, a tall man with a Ushanka, and then that stranger—yes—the Englishman. After he got over his suspicion that I was working for the Okhrana, Mironov told me that second fellow was a reporter working for the Times of London, covering the Great Race, a man named Byrne. He might still be there as well.

I also know that Volkov used that stairway to get to 1908, but the details on that are fuzzy. I have no way of knowing how he did that. Or when he appeared—what day. He could be there this very day, or he might not appear for months. One thing I do know, Mironov followed me up those stairs on June 30th of his time, and like Orlov said, that was where I made my mistake and warned him of his fate. Kamenski didn’t think I was fully responsible. He argued that anything Mironov did after that warning was of his own free will, but would he have done those things if not for my warning?

So there he was, approaching that same fateful moment in time again, and wondering if the same actors would be on the stage. Would Mironov still be at the inn? If not, then Fedorov would be in a most difficult position. Mironov should be close, but it might take time to find him.

If he boarded a train for Irkutsk, thought Fedorov, then I suppose I could use the airship to find it, but that would be a very awkward rendezvous. Lord, I hope he hasn’t left the inn to travel by other means. It could take days to locate him, and I have so little time here. He tried to recall if there was a train there in 1908, but it was too fuzzy. The only thing to do was to get there, get on the ground, and then sort the situation out, but he had a lot of loose ends to deal with, and the thoughts in his mind about them weighed heavily on him.

What if I simply cannot locate him? Then what? I have one last play here—Karpov’s arrival in the Pacific. We have just enough fuel, and just enough time to get there. He was in the Sea of Japan, and I could simply radio him. He’ll certainly be surprised to hear from me, won’t he? But what would I be doing? I have no Rod-25 with me, and there would be no way to get him back to 2021. So there I would be, counting out the hours and minutes before the Anatoly Alexandrov appeared in 1908, and I was on that platform.

There it was—Paradox.

He had a very limited life span here, and now he knew he had no play in the Sea of Japan looking for Karpov. All he could do would be to try and persuade him not to take the actions he was planning, and to wait for the Alexandrov —to wait for his own arrival, and most likely his own death by Paradox. No. His only solution had to be here, at Ilanskiy. It was Mironov, just as he had reasoned it out with Karpov. It was Mironov’s death, or nothing. At least he had the stairway up to escape the Paradox, but that presented other problems.

How to resolve the issue of the Irkutsk?

I can’t very well leave that airship here, he thought. Suppose I do what is necessary at Ilanskiy, then we re-embark on the Irkutsk . If I took it back to the epicenter, would we shift again? Would Time deliver us back to 1942? That sounded all too convenient. While he had good reason to assert his travel up and down the stairway would always deliver the walker back to the approximate time he last left, that same logic did not necessarily apply to his travel on that airship.

I can see how we might have been pulled here to this time by the sheer gravity of the Tunguska Event. I’ve thought that all along, when Kirov shifted here after Karpov set off that nuke in 1945 and killed the Iowa . Things seem to fall through to 1908 easily enough, perhaps pulled by that time gravity I’m speculating on. But would the inverse be true? I was able to get the Anatoly Alexandrov from 1908 back to 2021 again, but that was the work of Rod-25 and possibly Chief Dobrynin’s magic as well. Something tells me that I would only be courting further disaster if I took Irkutsk back to that epicenter. It’s just too risky. So what do I do?

The words that spoke now in his mind might have easily been uttered by Karpov. He would have the solution easily enough, but for Fedorov, getting there was an agony—the Irkutsk had to be destroyed, and not just the airship itself, but perhaps Symenko and the entire crew as well. Orlov had come out with his comical description of the whole damn crew, all packed into the downstairs dining room at the railway inn, and filing up that stairway, one after another. Would it work? He would have to try, because his only alternative would be Karpov’s solution—take down the airship, crew and all.

To do this, we would have to anchor the airship at Ilanskiy, a nice eyeful for anyone there to see. I’d need Symenko’s cooperation, and then the crew would have to disembark, probably using the same basket they hauled us up on. What a scene, and what effect would it have on the locals here, particularly when I give Troyak the go ahead to take that airship down? Could he? I haven’t even spoken with him on this.

“Sergeant Troyak?

“Sir?”

“A word with you please. We have a situation here… I can’t allow this airship to remain at large here, and I don’t think we can navigate back with it the way we came. Understand?”

Troyak merely nodded, waiting.

“Can you destroy it? Is there any weapon you have that could do that?”

“Yes sir. We have a handheld ATGM, and three thermobaric rounds.”

“Thermobaric? You’re talking about fire now.”

“Aye sir, and it would wreak havoc on this airship if we hit it from the ground. I could also rig up grenades at a few key places, the engineering section, engines. It would bust up the equipment.”

“Yes,” said Fedorov. “Nothing could be left for the locals to find or use. All the equipment, radars, radio sets, even the guns would have to be destroyed.”

“Most of the ship would die in the fires,” said Troyak, “but the bigger guns might have to be revisited on the ground and we could pop grenades down the barrels, or into the breech. That should do it.”

“You brought all this with you?”

“Standard weapons loadout. We assembled these things in packs, then we can just grab them and deploy.”

“I see. Well, that airship coming down would make quite a scene. Perhaps we should plan to do this at some distance from Ilanskiy, then we move to the town on foot. I have business at the inn, and I’ll need to get there as soon as possible. I suppose you could lead the crew to the railway inn after the demolition. It would be very important that this gets done flawlessly. No useable equipment could be left behind, and each and every last crewman would have to be herded to the town, and right to the railway inn. We can’t lose a single man. Otherwise they’d be stranded here.”

Even as he said all this, he realized how insane it was going to sound to Symenko. There was no way he could get him to understand and accept what was involved here. He was still under the assumption that this was 1942, and his fate was sailing towards a safe haven in Soviet Russia. Trying to explain that he needed his entire crew to assemble in that railway inn was going to be quite a challenge.

“Sergeant,” he said. “It’s occurred to me that Captain Symenko may not be cooperative in all of this. But neither he, nor any of his crew, can remain here, and that airship has to be destroyed. I may have to make a very tough decision here.”

“Aye sir,” said Troyak. He knew what Fedorov was saying now, hard as it sounded.

“This is 1908,” Fedorov went on, looking for the rhyme and reason. “If any of them fail to come with us… well, they can’t remain here. The impact that could have on future days would be impossible to calculate, and I cannot allow it to happen, not under any circumstances.”