truckloads of women were going, and it wouldn’t be any place they would ever care to remember.
A lot of equipment was still moving north from Baku. The trains had been creaking with the weight of old rusting pipe, weathered drills and derricks, tools, shovels and anything else they could safely remove from the oil works. They intended to use them to find new oil elsewhere, and vast work camps were being set up, now collecting thousands to serve as raw labor in the new oil fields. Commissar Molla would find his grandmother here, he knew, and then he would take her and all the others in those trucks to God knows where. He had little time to waste now, and so after a meal and some brief rest at the hotel, he went out to look for another ride north to Kizlyar.
The city was now a gathering point for fragments of broken army divisions that had been shattered in the fighting and were slowly regrouping here, receiving supplies from barges offloaded at the port. He saw shoulder patches of the 317th, the old Baku Division that had been destroyed at Izyum and reformed here, and also the 319th, a new Rifle Division forming here along with the NKVD units.
He sighed, realizing that no matter how hard he tried to escape from it, anywhere he went in Russia now the war would soon find him, as it had found him here in the muddied streets of Makhachkala. No matter. He had come a long way now, from an aimless drunkard whoring his way along the Spanish coast, across seas and around the high mountains to this desolate place-but he had a mission now-he was no longer a lost and wandering soul, and that made all the difference.
Part IX
“Dead letters! Does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitting to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters, and assorting them for the flames? Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring-the finger it was meant for, perhaps, molders in the grave;…he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more on errands of life…”
Chapter 25
Fedorov found Karpov on the bridge, pulling him aside, his eyes serious with some hidden energy and obvious concern. “Can we speak in the briefing room, Captain?”
“Very well, Fedorov,” said Karpov, half distracted by the scene being displayed on the overhead HD video monitors. They were delivering two more helicopters today, and he was watching a KA-40 maneuvering to land on the aft deck. He turned to Rodenko. “Keep an eye on things for a moment, Lieutenant. I’ll be with the First Officer in the briefing room.”
The two men entered the room off the back of the citadel bridge, and Fedorov made a deliberate point of shutting the door for privacy. The Captain saw that he had a couple of thick volumes under his arm, with book markers jutting from them to mark out places he had obviously been reading. Fedorov and his books again, he thought, but he had learned to listen to his young Starpom by serving in that same role for him in the Med, so he paid close attention. When Fedorov went to his history books he had something on his mind, and it was most likely important.
“What now Fedorov?” he pointed at the heavy books as the younger man set them on the briefing table.
“Something very odd,” said Fedorov. “I was doing some reading about the war to see what we might have changed. Look, here-this is my original volume of the Chronology Of The Naval War At Sea. You remember, it’s the book I gave to Admiral Volsky.”
“Only too well,” said Karpov. “This rat of a man actually snuck into the Admiral’s quarters to have a good long look at that book.”
“Well this other book is the same publication I picked up in the city a few days ago. I was comparing the two to see what was different, and in September of 1942 I noted an operation in the Med-this one.” He was fingering a passage in his original volume for Operation Agreement, scheduled and carried out Sept 13–14, 1942, the raid on Tobruk.
“It was in the old volume as well,” he said. “But there was just a minor variation, a man who survived that was supposed to have died in my original version. So I marked the passage for further study-marked it with a yellow highlighter like I did with these other passages.”
“My God, Fedorov! You’ll be old and gray before you ever run down all that research.” There were yellow marks dotting the text here and there as Fedorov turned the pages.
“Perhaps I will, but then something very odd happened.” He told Karpov how he had gone to look over the passage again and found it entirely missing in the new volume.
Karpov folded his arms, giving him a bemused look. “What do you mean it was missing?”
“That says it all. The passage was gone, yet it was clear as a bell in my head the day before. I knew I had read it there, and marked it with my yellow highlighter…See here, no marks in the original book, but I was certain I marked it in the new volume.”
Karpov suggested the obvious, that he had simply mixed the two books up, but Fedorov kept shaking his head. “No sir. I’m certain. You must believe me on this.”
“How is that possible?”
“That’s what I am trying to find out. I have an idea about it, but I can’t be sure. Chief Dobrynin came to me and said we lost a man-Markov. He went missing over at the reactor test bed facility.”
“Yes, I heard the report. What about it?”
“Well they had just completed their procedure on the control rod-Rod-25, the very same control rod we suspected here on the ship. Then, Markov vanishes, and not just the man. His jacket was gone, the tea he was drinking, books and magazines, his data clipboard and pen, and get this-both chairs were gone. Everything in the room that was not an integral part of the building itself just vanished!”
Karpov did not know what to make of that, but the connection to Rod-25 took him the next step without too much urging from Fedorov. “They moved into the past,” he said in a low voice. “Our suspicions about that control rod were correct. Did Dobrynin learn anything about it?”
“He went over it with a microscope, but frankly, he’s not a physicist. He was just looking for aberrations or other obvious abnormalities, but the rod looks normal.”
“There must be something about it that is different from the others. This is astounding!”
Fedorov looked at the Captain and simply said: “It looks like the amount of mass that can physically move is probably dependent on the power of the reactor where it finds itself. The ship had a twenty-four rod reactor, two of them in fact. That's ten times the power of the test bed facility reactor. Rod-25 is the wildcard. Whenever it’s inserted into the reactor core it causes the time breach, and displaces loose mass within a given radius. In our case that loose mass was the entire ship!”
“Did the reactor itself disappear?”
“No. It was an integral part of the building itself and the facility around it. The displacement effect did not have the power to move all of that mass. It doesn't simply scoop physical mass of a given area and leave a gaping hole. It’s much more fastidious and simply moves free objects within a given radius of the reactor itself. In this case anything that wasn't nailed down, including Markov. This is the best guess I can make about what happened,
