There was no good trying to get into all that in the middle of the storeroom floor, so he took a single envelope, the first in the series, and retreated down the long aisle toward the light of the open door. It would make for a brief diversion while he took a brief time out for some much needed coffee.
He set the file down on his desk, fished about in his pocket for his padlock key, and then slowly unchained his coffee mug, heading for the pot brewed fresh at four in the afternoon, along with plain hot water for tea. Back at his desk he settled in, enjoying those lingering first sips and the aroma of good hot coffee as he picked up the manila envelope.
He was not surprised to see what looked like typical aerial reconnaissance photos, and as was his habit, he turned the first over without really looking at it to note the location, source and time stamp.
No wonder, he thought, as it was clear that someone botched the time stamp, fat fingered the numbers and stamped the wrong year. A quick look at the back of all the other photos in that envelope reinforced that, all misdated. Someone was getting sloppy, he thought. They botched the labels on all these photos and probably had to re-do them all again. But we never throw much of anything away here, do we? So they bloody well threw them into an envelope and thought to hide it all away in the back. He smiled, like a school master who had just caught one of the students cheating on an exam, and turned the photo over to have a look.
And his heart nearly stopped dead.
There was a ship… a ship at sea, making a wide turn, its wake curved out behind it. It was obviously photographed by an aircraft, probably a seaplane out on a scouting and recon mission. But that ship… He leaned in closer, squinting, reaching for his magnifying glass, his pulse racing though he could not think why. Yet it wasn’t a matter of thinking at that moment. It was all something in the pit of his stomach, a feeling, a dark intuition, laden with misgiving and an edge of fear.
A ship… the ship… the ship that Peter Twinn had clued him in on! It was unmistakable, the silhouette, high swept bow, long foreword deck that was strangely empty, the strange domes and antennae mounted all about the dark superstructure, and more, that feeling of dangerous menacing power, yet he could not see why-there were hardly any guns worth the name to be seen.
What is this, he thought? Has Peter been holding out on me? I told him to let me know the moment we had anything more on that ship, and here’s an nice fat envelope… in a box full of nice fat envelopes, all taped off in the storeroom. Perhaps they did get wind of this ship years ago, and this was the mother lode of information he had been looking for!
He looked at the photos, each with a date in August of 1941, a full year off due to that dodgy rubber stamp. Let’s have a look at the others, he thought, his curiosity rising again.
And it was a very long and harrowing afternoon from that moment on, ending with Turing sitting alone, a look of perplexed astonishment on his face that soon gave way to white faced fear. It was completely unreasonable, this feeling that had come over him, a feeling that he had seen these photos before, though he knew he had no recollection of ever doing so… Until he saw the unmistakable scrawl of his own handwriting on the back of photo five next to a string of numbers he had written there: Length, 820ft; beam, 90ft; displacement, Estimate 30,000 +, and there were his initials, claiming the note and hand dating it himself, in August of 1941!
He looked over his shoulder at the open door to the storeroom, his eyes dark with apprehension. Then he reached for the telephone on his desk, thinking he had done exactly that once before… exactly that…
“Turing here. Hut Four. Secure line to Whitehall please. Admiralty office of the Home Fleet Commander.”
As he waited on the line he turned the manila envelope over again, noting the single word on the typewritten label there, all capitals.
It read, GERONIMO.
Part XII
“Through every rift of discovery, some seeming anomaly drops out of the darkness, and falls, as a golden link into the great chain of order.”
Chapter 34
Siberia was the greatest wilderness on earth, vast, desolate, a seemingly unending stretch of pine and birch forests that stretched from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific. The land was dotted with a hundred thousand marshy bogs, traversable only when frozen over in winter, and broken by steep ridges and deep valleys cut by the aimless wandering rivers that had remained largely unexplored, even to modern times. In all that space, over five million square miles, there were just a scattering of tiny hamlets, and no more than a few thousand people.
Only along the Trans-Siberian rail line were their towns and cities worth the name, but north of that thin steel corridor the wilds of Siberia were largely uninhabited. A few that did live there had passed decades in complete isolation. One family of six, the famous Lykovs, would live more than 40 years without seeing another human being, completely oblivious to the course of modern events, the war and all that followed it, until they were eventually discovered by chance in a remote river gorge by geologists.
So the Siberian wilderness could swallow whole armies if it wished, and they could vanish never to be seen again. The stolid stands of larch, spruce, pine and birch sat in their unknowing silence, and the centuries passed, largely without witness by human eyes. To this day it is said that the wilderness hides undiscovered mysteries, and few have received more speculation than the strange event on the morning of June 30, 1908.
On that day something came from the deeps of outer space, streaking across the Siberian sky, and blasting into the valley of the Stony Tunguska River. One of the few humans that saw it descend described it very strangely: “a flying oblong body that narrowed towards one end, and light as bright as the sun.” Some said it left a trail of smoke and dust behind it, and appeared in the shape of a pipe or fiery pillar. Another described it as a tube, and one claimed it actually changed course as it approached!
Whatever fell there was preceded by a strange magnetic storm that was detected on instruments in European universities for several days before the event. The impact explosion, thought to approach 20 megatons, was seen 1500 kilometers away, and the eerie light in the sky that lingered for days was noticed as far away as London. It devastated the 2150 square kilometers of the taiga forest in every direction, blowing them flat and burning them. It sent seismic waves trembling through the earth and atmosphere that were felt half way around the world, and the sound of thunderous explosions continued for fifteen minutes and were heard 1200 kilometers away.
The magnetic storm persisted another four hours after the impact. Optical anomalies were seen in the night sky all over Europe, along with strange Noctilucent clouds. Radiation was found at the site of the impact, and other anomalies in genetic mutations of the local Tungus people were reported over time. Yet trees that survived the impact went into a sudden, unexplained period of accelerated growth.
The site lay undiscovered for years, but an enterprising Russian scientist named Leonid Kulik had mounted four expeditions, the first in 1927, and the last in August of 1939-at least in the world Fedorov had been born to. He had found an old Siberian newspaper dating from 1908 that made a very unusual claim: “…a huge meteorite is said to have fallen… beyond the railway line near Filimonovo junction and less than 11 versts (12 kilometers) from Kansk. Its fall was accompanied by a frightful roar and a deafening crash, which was heard more than 40 versts away. The passengers of a train approaching the junction at the time were struck by the unusual noise. The driver stopped the train and the passengers poured out to examine the fallen object, but they were unable to study the meteorite closely because it was red hot…”