Tyrenkov nodded. “I understand,” he said. “Big Brother will be happy to have you on board, Fedorov. He may bellow and berate you for a while, but he’ll soon see what was apparent to me from the moment I first saw you on that upper landing this evening. Yes, you are not just anybody when it comes to all of this. You have business to attend to here, and I hope you can manage it. Karpov needs you. This world needs you as well, so don’t forget that.”
“I’ll try to remember, and believe it,” said Fedorov, reaching for another piece of cheese. “Is there any more vodka?”
Chapter 15
The hand that had saved the life of Anton Fedorov would be the hand that would change all history from that moment forward. Mironov stood there, confused and still afraid when he saw those rough soldiers come back into the room. They lined up, one after another, each man with a hand on the shoulder of the one in front of him.
Up they went, and Mironov watched them go, listening to their hard boots on the creaky steps. He could not grasp why these men wanted to get up to the second floor, and why they would have to be so careful about it like this. Fedorov seemed intent on making sure that they left nothing behind, no sign of their presence. Perhaps he needed to go up to that room they were in before and fetch something, but why take the whole lot of them for that? He did not understand, but he would, and very soon.
He waited there, until the sound of those heavy boots stilled and was gone. That alone seemed odd to him, for he should be hearing them clomping about on the second floor, but all was silent. He walked slowly towards the alcove, that same curiosity tugging at him. There he listened in the hushed silence for some time, but resisted the urge to go any further. This time he would take that strange man’s advice, and also take no further chances that another of those hard Marines would bother him.
He walked briskly towards the front entrance, seeing that the proprietor had just returned. Almost everyone in the town had been off in a clearing beyond the rail yard to the west. There they had gathered to send off the German race team, all the tourists, the reporter Thomas Byrne and his translator, and all the locals as well. Mironov wanted no part of that. All he wanted to do now was get on that train when it arrived later that day, and get as far from this place as possible. As he slipped out the door, he cast a glance at the proprietor, who was watching him with a strange look in his eye. The poor man was probably wondering if they would arrest him too, thought Mironov, and he was out on Shkolnaya Street, thinking what to do next.
He briefly considered hiking back to Staynyy, but discarded that. There could be other soldiers about near the wreckage of that great airship. Boarding there, he would be easily noticed by any other operatives of the secret police who might be on that train. So instead he just went off to a restaurant, needing some good food, and just a little time to think about all that had happened to him just now. He took a window seat, and one with a view of the inn, and sat there for some time, fully expecting to see all those soldiers, and Fedorov, emerge and tramp off to some unknown destination, but they never came. They never left that inn.
That alone was a powerful mystery that begged to be solved. Men do not simply disappear into thin air. Where could they have gone? They were probably waiting for the train, he thought. I will most likely see them all again there, and I can only hope this Fedorov doesn’t have a change of heart. Who knows what he might do? He might get worried of reprisals from his superiors, and think twice about sending me on my way. He had that gun in his hand when we spoke for a reason, but somehow, he couldn’t bring himself to do what he was ordered. Beneath that uniform, there is a good man, and with a good soul. I must take some solace in that.
Well then, the goddamned train is my only way out of here now. I certainly can’t hitch a ride with the German race team. I’ve got to go east, and Train 94 is the last ride that way for another week. So I’ll have to get on here, along with all the other passengers, and take my chances.
The German race team started on its way to a chorus of loud cheers, the drivers waving to the crowd as they fired up the engine and started off. The people waved and hooted for a time, then milled about, and the locals started to disperse back to their homes and businesses. Mironov watched them from a distance, thinking to spy out anyone else who looked suspicious. There was one other man with a uniform and jacket very much like Fedorov’s that he might have seen a few hours earlier, but Ivan Volkov had taken one of the carriages heading west to Kansk. It had all been that close.
Volkov had never been to Ilanskiy, but he was already shaken by what he had seen of the place. It was clearly not the same train station he had come to earlier, and the madness that fell on him would redouble when he reached Kansk, a town he knew quite well. Nothing there was as it should have been. Most of the city was gone, as was the big arsenal north of the river that would make this place a target if the war was underway. The biochemical plant was missing, all the buildings and houses seemed antiquated.
He would head south, wandering like a zombie, thinking to reach the Kansk Airbase where he might catch a plane out of this place. There was no airbase, but also no sign of any attack that might have destroyed it. What was happening? How could any of this be possible? With each passing hour, those questions would multiply, the madness blooming with them, and it would be months before Ivan Volkov fully accepted what had happened to him, and realized just where he was, or rather when.
So as Mironov headed east to Irkutsk, Volkov headed west, and the two men would never get close enough to meet again, except on the field of battle. Mironov spent time in Irkutsk, eventually contacting his comrade Popov, and then deciding to go to the Caucasus. It was on that journey west again that he stopped at Ilanskiy, throwing caution to the wind. Venturing up the back stairway, he saw the world that would come in the years ahead, and determined what he could do to prevent that terrible vision from ever arising in his homeland.
Now Fedorov’s warning finally made sense, and he determined what he must do—what Fedorov could not bring himself to do, and made that fateful visit to Baku, killing Josef Stalin before he ever had a chance to fatten himself as the dark spider in the center of the Bolshevik web that was now being spun throughout the land.
Mironov would stay in the Caucasus for some time, and end up a journalist and editor for the newspaper Terek, secretly taking on the code name he would be known by ever after—the very same name that strange man Fedorov had called him—Kirov. He was eventually arrested again on the same old charges surrounding the existence of that illegal printing press. He was in and out of prison, and then the revolution came, and the civil war soon after.
Active in the founding of the Terek Republic, Kirov was at first a subordinate to another strong man with an impossible name, Commissar Grigory Konstantinovich Ordzhonikidze. Most simply called him Sergo. With him, and another man named Mikoyan, Kirov was part of the Bolshevik resistance, securing supplies, uniforms, and weapons from Moscow, and floating them down the Volga on barges to Astrakhan. There was no other way to get them there, for the leader of the White movement, Denikin, had seized control of all the rail lines that led that way.
It was there, in the Caucasus, that Sergei Kirov cut his teeth in the business of war. He teamed up with Sergo and Mikoyan, battled Denikin’s forces, and even those of Kolchak emerging from Siberia. The struggle in that region contributed much to his stubbornness later, refusing to abandon his holdings in the Kuban, and tenaciously ordering the defense of old Tsaritsyn on the Volga, the city that would now never come to be called ‘Stalingrad.’ There, and at the other stronghold of the region, Astrakhan, Kirov fought the White Army with the 11th and 12th Red Armies.