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battle stations? Was Karpov at war with the sky itself? We’re deep inside our own airspace here, though there had been no sign of any other fleet airship, and not a whisper on the radio set. What was happening? Was the fleet off west at the front? Was the Grey Legion making another big push on our Ob River line defenses? Karpov always left at least one airship here at Ilanskiy, which was another thing the Air Commandant never understood. It was too far from the front, and there was nothing here of value that he could think of. But the Admiral seemed intent on building out a major operations hub here. He had gathered troops, engineers, airships to this place, but now it was quiet and forlorn. What was really going on here?
    “Thunderheads ahead sir,” said his navigator. “Shall we steer to avoid them?
    “Steer directly for them,” Karpov intervened. “Take us right into the heart of the storm. Find the worst air possible. If you see lightning, steer directly for it. Yes, I know this is dangerous, but we survived a storm like this easily enough over the English Channel, and we can ride this one out as well.
    “Aye, sir, but why would we want to do this? Are you testing the integrity of our skeleton? Engineers tell me they have good solid welds on those damaged frame girders. There’s no need to air test. Why steer for the storm and put the ship at risk again?”
    There, he had finally done it. Bogrov had directly asked the Admiral why he should carry out the orders he had received. He knew that was risky, always risky with a man of Karpov’s temperament. One could never predict how he would react, but Bogrov would go unsatisfied. Karpov merely looked at him, then stared quietly out the viewport at the rising wall of thunderheads. Bogrov watched as the Admiral slowly adjusted the fit of his black leather gloves, and he knew better than to say anything more.
     

 
 
Part II
 
Lightning In The Sky
 
“What tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder go when it dies?”
 
― Ray Bradbury
     
     

 
    Chapter 4
     
    Raqqah on the upper Euphrates was the ancient capital of the old Abbasid Caliphate dating from the year 796. Centuries earlier it was known as Leontopolis under the Greeks, the “City of Leon,” where emperor Leo I reigned. The Greeks and Romans came and went, ant then came the Muslim warlord Iyad ibn Ghanm, who took the city in 639, for there were already holy Muslim monasteries there, where companions of Muhammad himself once lived. At one time it was bigger than Damascus, the center of an empire that reached into Central Asia, and stretched all the way to the deserts of North Africa.
    In modern times Raqqah was also the seat of the dark Islamic rose of power that the West came to call ISIS. First arising as a resistance movement against the Assad regime in a shadowy evolution of the “Arab Spring,” ISIS soon morphed into the most effective paramilitary Islamic militant group yet seen, sweeping out of their strongholds in northern Syria and into Iraq, where the thin national boundary drawn by the post WWI Sykes–Picot Agreement was declared null and void, and a new modern Caliphate was pronounced. Utilizing brutal terror tactics that were flashed across the world’s computer screens on the Internet, ISIS soon drew a hard response from the U.S., and flurries of ship fired Tomahawk cruise missiles found targets in and around the city.
    In 1941, the only cruise missiles in the world were still aboard the battlecruiser Kirov , a strange new mercenary for another empire that was trying to claim the place as its own. British and commonwealth troops were striving to bring the once great domain of the Abbasid regime under the authority of the Crown, but here there enemies would not be the dashing Sindi horsemen of the 9th Century, nor the swarthy, armored Azarbayjani infantry beneath their black banners. Instead