“The best I could find on short notice, sir. That’s the river there that we were illuminating with our searchlights a moment ago. If I keep it on our left then the airfield should be no more than 5 kilometers northwest, but I can’t see a thing out there. There’s certainly no sign of air activity here.”
“Well, there’s plenty of open ground about. We’ll just have to hover low and anchor in a field. Then get the engineers busy. I want to be over London at dawn, just as I surprised the Germans. Tunguska will be quite a sight over Big Ben, will it not?”
“I can only hope we get a better reception than the Germans gave us. We’re fair game down here, sir. And their Spitfires are good planes.”
But they saw no sign of aircraft, and heard no return to their radio hails. It was as if England had just gone to sleep, with only the faint snoring of Morse code over the airwaves, but that was not so. Tom Willers had been wide awake that night, as was Mrs. Turner of New Catton and Bob Thatch of Tharston, and the reports were soon coming in all over East Anglia. For Tunguska was not where Karpov thought to take it, at least not the hour and day he had hoped to arrive.
Something in the awesome power and magnetic energy of that towering storm over the North Sea had found affinity with the bones of the ship, the odd flecks of exotic metals that had been smelted into the beams which made up the massive structure. The dancing fire and rippling light that Karpov had seen was the telltale sign of its power, and the ship was elsewhere for some time, until it finally settled into the here and now-but not the one they had left behind them at nearly 15,000 meters, with the shaking winds and battering ice of that massive thunderhead. It stood like a great anvil in the dark tormented sky, and the hammer of god had descended upon it, falling on the ship that carried something from another world in the core of its very structure.
Karpov would not find that out for some hours, while the airship hovered like a great beached whale over the downs of Tunstead. There was a winding road not far from the place where they ground anchored for repairs, and on that road was another late traveler on a bicycle, working his way along the track towards the old rectory. He was making a very early delivery at two in the morning, and he had promised the parson he would have fresh cheese, milk, and a morning paper well before dawn. He had come up Peter’s Lane from Ice Well Wood, feeling the chill on the air as he rode, and then he saw it, the massive shape hovering silently above the ground, the shadows of men beneath it, and the sound of an odd language being spoken.
Tyrenkov’s security men stepped out of the woods, brandishing submachine guns, and he made the sign of the cross, thinking the only thing that made any sense to his startled mind at that moment. It was the bloody Germans! That thing on the downs looked like one of their massive airships, and the invasion everyone had been worried about was finally on-but not the invasion that had been expected in 1940 or 1941. No. The date on the newspaper found in his delivery basket would say something quite different.
Soon Karpov would have another real mystery to sort out, and very little evidence to come to any real conclusion, except for the absence of one prominent thing in the sky. The date on that newspaper was very odd, and the fat gibbous moon that had grinned at them as they taunted the storm over the North Sea was gone. In its place, rising that very moment, was a thin morning crescent, almost entirely dark!
Karpov looked at it, the conjunction of too many ominous signs now stacking up in his mind in one sudden moment. The strange rippling fire in the ship… luminescent, green and violet light… the sudden disappearance of the rain and the warmer temperatures that they would not expect in February at this latitude. Then the radio calls that went without an answer became more significant, the scratch of Morse code in their place. The missing airfield… and now this…
He stared down at the newspaper Tyrenkov had handed him and read the headline: “Scareships over East Anglia for a second night — Constables on the Watch!” It was Dated May 18, 1909…
How could this have happened, thought Karpov. How was it possible? There was no detonation, no explosive volcano, and no Rod-25, but there had been that massive storm they challenged, and the strange energy that had flowed through the skeleton of the ship was most unnerving. Beyond all that, he could feel that something was badly off its kilter. He had shifted in time too often now, and he knew the feeling, the odd discomfiture and disorientation, and the sudden inner sense that his life and being had been profoundly moved. He was somewhere else, not in space, but in time. How it had happened did not really matter. If it proved to be the case, then…
