Free Kirov Saga: Hinge Of Fate: Altered States Volume III (Kirov Series) by John Schettler Page B

looked at Kulik, who
then stepped back, taking his seat again, gesturing that his associate should
consult his compass again. Sure enough, the reading was normal now. Krinov
tapped it, looking at the compass with some suspicion.
    “Oh yes, I thought you would jump
to that conclusion,” said Kulik. “It’s quite proper. Keep it and see for
yourself.” Then he got up and slowly headed for the door, turning with a smile
as he left. “Good day, Evgeny.”
    Krinov never forgot that, or
anything else he had learned on that expedition. He tested the compass for long
years after that, and it always read true. But nothing else ever read true concerning
Tunguska. It was most disturbing. Kulik had labored to take aerial photographs
of the whole disaster site and delivered them to the academy to fuel the
debate. There were 1500 in all, and Krinov spent a long time studying them…
until they became a fire hazard.
    One day, his soul still shadowed
by the strange events of that brief time he had spent in the wild lands of the
Siberian north, he gathered up each and every one of the negatives, put them in
a sturdy box with a bunch of old newspapers, and handed them off to a staffer
with the order to take them directly to the incinerator. There, he thought with
just the barest sigh of relief. Now no one else will ever know…
    Yet others did know, though what
they had discovered in that forsaken place was kept a well guarded secret,
known only to a very few. One of them was a man who followed in Krinov’s
footsteps, one Nikolai Vladimirovic Vasilyev, who later assumed the title
Krinov once held as Deputy Chairman of the Commission on meteorites and cosmic
dust at the Russian Academy of Sciences. It was Vasilyev who had come across a
hidden cache of positive photographs made by the very same negatives Krinov had
destroyed that day.
    It was Vasilyev who then devoted
his life to the study of the Tunguska event, becoming the director of the
Interdisciplinary Independent Tunguska Expeditions society, and collecting data
and writing about the event to his dying day. And it was Vasilyev who penned
the cryptic notes into his literature concerning the many “oddities” surrounding
the event, claiming it was evidence of something much more than a simple
meteorite strike, something vast and deeply significant, and a warning
concerning the possibility of a collision with earth threatening “aliens” from
outer space. What had he discovered in those photographs? What was Krinov
really trying to hide by destroying the negatives?
    Mainstream science had long ago
dismissed the notion that the explosion in 1908 had been caused by a UFO, but
there are other “aliens” that come from space, and the earth had been visited
by them many times before.
     
    * * *
     
    Aboard the airship Narva ,
Captain Selikov wanted to get as far away from that river as he could, but he
also knew it was dangerous to do so until they had a firm fix on their
location.
    “This weather is clouding over
again,” he said as he shook his head, clearly unhappy. “The cloud deck is very
low and it extends for what looks to be two hundred kilometers in every
direction. We can’t see a thing up here, and I’m not inclined to take the ship down
until I can determine how thick that deck is. But we might get down right on top
of the clouds and use the sub-cloud car.”
    “What is that?” Orlov had never
heard of such a thing.
    “Think of it as a bit of an
amusement park ride, Mister Orlov,” said Selikov. And he explained how they
would lower a device, a spy basket, that looked like a big hollow bomb suspended
on a long cable, complete with tail fins to aid its movement through the air.
    “A man with good eyes in there
can call up the land forms and then we can find the river again and navigate.
Otherwise we could drift about up here and get even more lost than we already
are. If the deck isn’t too low, we’ll reel you in and come on down.”
    “Good then,” said