Kamenski had been listening to everything, sometimes with his eyes closed, as if he needed a good long nap. The mention of Tunguska perked him up again, and now he spoke up.
“We know that materials from that region have produced strange effects, temporal effects. Is there any way you can examine this in the lab, Mister Dobrynin? Could you determine its makeup?”
“I’d be happy to have a look, sir.”
“Good, please do, because I think we may be in for quite a little surprise!”
“Supposing our friends the Germans are amusing themselves by carefully observing the fortifications and outworks of Norwich, and other strategic points on British soil… Maybe they are landing troops one by one, with instructions where to join the main army in 1915. I only hope they have provisions until then. That they are humorists there can be no doubt, otherwise they would hardly have given poor old Norwich a visit. Meanwhile, our nerves are all on edge, and some of the more flabby-minded will probably end by crowding out our well-filled asylums.”?
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.
