Crescendo Of Doom Read Online Free PDF

word topside, that all crews may take station on ready deck five. Watch your altimeter and variometer, Mister Kanev.”
    “Passing through 200 meters, sir.”
    “Then ahead slow. Rudderman will make a gradual turn north by northeast—five points at three minute increments.”
    “Aye sir, coming five points to starboard now.”
    The airship was always kept with enough buoyancy to make an easy ascent without having to resort to jettisoning much ballast. When land anchored, as opposed to taking station off a mooring tower where it was easy to secure lines, the anchors were actually steel harpoons that were fired to penetrate the ground itself, with a head designed to deploy after impact to create enough resistance to keep it securely anchored in the ground. Grappling hooks could also be tethered to any suitable feature on land, and like a bee sting, when the airship cast off to ascend, the cables would simply be released from the harpoon heads, leaving them embedded in the ground. This made land anchoring expensive, as it slowly used a finite number of harpoon anchor heads. The only way to avoid their use was to find an open field big enough to actually ground the ship on its landing gear, where crews could then drive stakes to secure lines and hold the ship in place. This had not been the case here, as Karpov wanted to hover at some elevation, very near the rail station, another little irritating request that Bogrov never understood.
    Why did they have to take station here at Ilanskiy when there was a perfectly good mooring tower at Kansk, just a few kilometers to the west? Then he got his answer when Tunguska overflew Kansk on approach—the mooring tower was gone, which led Bogrov to believe it might have been bombed by the enemy, though he could see no sign of damage when he looked. It was all very strange. It was as if the tower had never even been built!
    Tunguska rose into the grey sky, untethered and free again, which always had a way of calming the Commandant. He was born to fly, eschewed the ground and all land lubbers as he called them. Once the ship was climbing and through the first deck of lower clouds, he always breathed easier. There the world was a much simpler affair, pristine, clean, clear. Looking down on the cottony cloud tops was still a thrill, and he had come to think of the sky as his private domain, where he could waft with a gentle breeze, or cruise with the trade winds wherever he liked. There on the bridge, his gaze extended out for miles, unfettered by trees or hills or the ugly, squarish shapes of man made things. There was no mud to soil his boots, and no crawling along bumpy dirt roads to get from one place to another.
    He took a deep breath, calming himself. The endless sky, and the steady drone of the forward engines were a comfort. “Ahead two thirds,” he said to the telegraph operator, the man who would tap out the signal that would go by wire to the engine pods, where the engineers would actually set the speed.
    But it was a deceptive calm in the air now. As the big nose of the ship slowly inclined upwards, turning another five points as he had ordered, he could sense that the weather ahead would be rough indeed. That had been a very hard ride over the English Channel. The ship had been badly shaken, though she bore the stress well. That said, the engineers had to reset interior cables, and even weld three segments of the duralumin frame that had been unduly stressed. Why was Karpov chasing another storm, particularly one that looked like this?
    He was in the observation room now, his eyes darkening as he scanned the grey flanks of the clouds ahead. This one looks big, he thought, another goddamn bag buster. Look at that lightning! We’d be wise to get well above those thunderheads, but how high will they climb? I’ve seen storms out here in Siberia that would shake a man’s dreams for days after they passed, and this one looks bad.
    And what was this order for the men to stand to