Tide Of Fortune (Kirov Series Book 20) Page 24

  “Not much of a bulldog with this one,” said Lamb. “It’s an old German freighter! We haven’t even got a proper hanger deck, just the one bloody flight deck, and that’s only 420 feet. No wonder we can only carry six or eight of these new planes. They’ve got to fix them, arm them, fuel them, and spot everything right here on this deck, which leaves us no more than 300 feet for takeoff, and only two cables to try and catch the hook on landing. God help us if one of those German Stukas puts a nice fat bomb down on top of us.”

  “Now none of that talk,” said Brown. “That’s why we’re here—to make sure those planes never get anywhere near the bloody ships.”

  “Just saying,” said Lamb with a shrug. “You can sound all smug and confident, cause they made you flight leader instead of me. When I get the job, I’ll be the one bucking the other lads up. For now, a good mash and a complaint or two is no bother. I was on Ark Royal once, and this thing is half her size. So I wish they’d sent us to Glorious.”

  “Won’t find quarters good as these on Glorious,” Brown countered. The old German freight liner had also retained its twelve passenger cabins, which were now the relatively plush domains of the Martlet pilots. They were on the lower deck, now called the “Promenade Deck” by the men, because the old staterooms, cabins, dining halls, lounge and wardroom were still there.

  802 Squadron had first gone to sea with the senior carrier on the watch, HMS Glorious, though these men were mostly new recruits. That ship had already experienced many harrowing encounters with the Germans, narrowly escaping a sure death at the hands of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, then getting in on the action at Mers-el-Kebir, the battle that made an enemy of a proud but defeated foe, sending France into the Axis orbit. Glorious, and her enterprising young Captain Christopher Wells, had run cover for operations aimed at reinforcing Malta before the Germans took that other jewel from the Crown. The ship had then supported the ill fated raid on Dakar, where the French Navy held off the British in a running gun battle that saw the loss of the old battleship Barham. More recently, Glorious had been a part of the air operations over the fleet in opposing the German sortie of the Hindenburg. Now Audacity would run with her big sister, which carried all the strike planes in the new Albacores, and one more Squadron of Martlets.

  “If you miss the wires, just give it the throttle and come round for another try. And that said, there’s always Glorious out there for backup if you can’t find this little steel matchbox,” said Brown, pointing to the deck. “Land over there and you’ll get a good chewing out, but that’ll leave us all the more room here.”

  “I can’t land over there,” said Lamb. “Otherwise who’ll lead Red Section over here? That’s you and me, the two of us. Each pair of pilots make a section here on this ship. How many more ways can they find to divide a Squadron up? We’ve got eight planes, and four sections, Red, Green, Yellow and Black. Georgie over there is the spare tire.”

  “Right… Well, let’s hope we don’t have a blowout.”

  It was a deadly game out in the Atlantic now, and no place for slackards. The Germans would send out groups of twelve to sixteen planes, all looking for convoys. When they spotted one, they would then vector the Wolfpacks in. It was Audacity’s job to foil that reconnaissance effort, and to harry any U-Boat they might find on the surface. Since that last big engagement in May, the Germans had been content to leave their surface fleet in French Ports, and in Gibraltar. But now, as the news of Japan’s entry into the war, and by extension, the United States’ entry, all the talk had been on what might happen next. The French had been moving big surface ships into Casablanca, and now the Germans had sortied with a strong battlegroup as well, the dreadful Hindenburg, and his shadow, the Bismarck. Soon it would be serious business out here, thought Brown.

  That night they slept in their plush quarters, just a little uneasy with all the news. There had been another big convoy action in the Pacific, and this time the Japanese and French mixed it up with the Yanks and Aussies. The American heavy cruiser Houston had been lost, and a big transport ship carrying aviation gas. But the French had lost their only carrier, the Bearn. Everything comes with a price tag, he said to himself again, wondering what the cost would be for HMS Audacity and the nine sleeping pilots aboard that night.

  * * *

  It was another day, and another mission, come all too soon after that dark Atlantic night. HMS Audacity was on wide escort, covering Convoy HG 76 even as the German Wolfpack closed in. It was Sheepy Lamb who spotted the enemy first, seeing the foamy bow wave of a submarine below them and sending the signal call to Winkle. “Tally Ho! Look to starboard! U-Boat in the water, and she’s going under.”

  Winkle saw him tip his wings over and roll down to make a run on the sea serpent, and he soon followed, right on Sheepy’s tail. Yet U-131, was quick that day, and was under the sea even as they let loose on the boat, seeing their MG rounds zip into the water around that periscope mast. They spread the word that the enemy was near, calling in a pack of nipping hounds in those seven corvettes escorting the convoy. Then it was back to Audacity, to land before darkness made that job even more difficult than it already would be.

  The alarm had been sounded, and the torch was passed to Commander Frederick John Walker, a pipe smoking, whisky drinking old salt, who looked rather dashing in his navy blue jacket. He was aboard the 1200 ton ASW sloop Stork that night. It wasn’t a speedy destroyer at a whisker over 18 knots, but that was plenty fast for convoy duty where some of the ships would plod along at speeds of only 10 knots. The Stork had six 4-inchers doubling as AA guns, and four more 0.5 inch 13mm machineguns. Her real threat to subs was the rack of depth charges she carried, and old “Johnny Walker” knew how to use them.

  Walker would become an expert in ASW warfare, and help change the course of the Tide of Fortune in the Atlantic with this very battle. He came up with any number of innovative tactics, always seeing his charge as a real hunt for the enemy, and not a passive defensive assignment. So it was that he would often play a favorite tune over the ship’s Tannoy loudspeaker when he went into action, A Hunting We Will Go!

  He developed many new methods in that hunt, the “creeping attack,” where two boats would pay a stealthy cat and mouse game with their enemy below, and then again a thunderous “barrage attack” where a line of three or more sloops would make a saturation attack with their depth charges.

  Winkle Brown had put Walker on to the enemy, and he was quick to the scene with his hunting song blaring on the loudspeaker. He would get U-131 that night, and the Sea Robbers would have a difficult time of things thereafter. They would lose four boats, and Johnny Walker and his Stork dropped more than a few nasty bundles on the sea, getting two of those kills. Döenitz would call off this costly attack, but not before the Germans got their revenge on the men who had first spotted U-131.

  It was a very dark night, and Audacity had recovered all her Martlets. Yellow Section had been flown off to the Argus, so they were down to just these six planes. They were clustered on the after quarter of the flight deck as always, cabled down to hold them in place against the rolling of that matchbox in the sea. There was an almost eerie quality to the darkness that night, for it was the witching hour, and a time when any remaining U-boats had that darkness as their friend. So Audacity was following up the convoy, zigzagging as she went, while Winkle Brown was having his chat with Sheepy Lamb over a cup of coffee.

  Suddenly there came a loud explosion, and they soon found that the ship had lost all power to master her steering. They had taken one of those one in a hundred thousand unlucky rudder hits from a torpedo, and the escort carrier was now circling, and quite helpless to forestall further attack. She was alone, could not launch any planes, and Brown got up on deck with Lamb to see something very strange on the sea, about 200 yards off the port side of the ship as it wallowed to a halt.

  As he stared at it, Brown could make out the telltale shape of a submarine that had just broken the surface of the water, but someth
ing was very odd about it. The hull rippled with a strange green phosphorescence, as if the boat was endowed by some unearthly energy. Lights flashed from its conning tower in an eerie display of otherworldly color.

  No man aboard that U-Boat realized it at that moment, but they had been elsewhere for a time, never knowing the dark and distant waters in which they were sailing. If Fedorov had been there, he would have seen something hauntingly familiar in the eerie green light that washed over the boat, and his thumb on the map would have quickly seen the very spot the two vessels were now over, a place called Peake’s Deep. It was there that he had hurled the thing Orlov had found in Siberia, the Devil’s Teardrop, and though it had plummeted into the depths, it was still working its charm on the sea, and everything in it.

  Brown could see the dark silhouette of a man there, Kapitänleutnant Gerhard Bigalk of U-751, a Type VIIC boat. He could even see the gold braiding on the man’s cap, glinting in the light through that eerie phosphorescence that still surrounded the U-Boat. As the enemy studied their dark silhouette through his field glasses, he was looking at his Knight’s Cross in waiting, and just vengeance for the loss of four boats this ship and its exceptional pilot had set in motion. But he knew nothing of that. For Bigalk there was just a sense of relief, as he realized just where and when he must be.

  “So it is a British ship after all,” said the Kapitan to his 1st Warrant Officer, Hermann Schroder. “We’re back!”

  “Yes,” said Schroder, “back in this damn war again. Look at us! Look at the sea. It’s damn strange.”

  Both sides stared at one another for a long breathless moment. Then one man could no longer abide the silence on Audacity, rushing to a 20mm cannon and firing at the German boat. That sealed the carrier’s fate.

  “Yes,” said the Kapitänleutnant. “We’re back, and there is our welcome. Give them the forward torpedoes, and then let’s hope Saint Nazaire is still where it’s supposed to be, and get ourselves home.”

  Three of those torpedoes would strike the carrier, one aft to put an end to the engines, and the other two right forward, where a reservoir of Avgas exploded and blew the bow clean off the ship. There were 400 men on the flight deck, called up by the Captain as he thought they had a fair chance of getting safely into the sea from that level. But the chaos that ensued was like a scene out of an action horror movie.

  Audacity gulped water from her shattered bow, going nose down in a matter of minutes. As it did so, the stern literally rose out of the sea, damaged rudder dangling like a broken foot, and the angle of ascent slowly increased. Brown saw men already jumping into the sea, and he and Sheepy Lamb took the plunge, glad they at least had a Mae West life preserver on to keep them afloat. But then they heard the snapping of the cables that held those six Martlets in place on the aft deck, and to their horror, they saw all six planes careen down the whole length of the flight deck, cutting right through hundreds of men there.

  Instinct took over, and both Brown and Lamb swam for their lives. As Audacity started to slip beneath the dark oily sea, they could hear the loud crack of doom as the pressure of the inrushing water crushed segments of the ship.

  So ended the brief career of Britain’s first light escort carrier, but in its first sortie into the Atlantic it was enough to establish proof of concept. The Allies would build 43 more of them to serve in the Royal Navy before the war was over, at least in Fedorov’s history. They would win the Battle of the Atlantic there, but it remained to be seen if the Tide of Fortune would carry the legacy of Audacity onto that hallowed shore.

  As for Winkle and Sheepy, they went into the water in a group of 24 men, and they huddled together, thinking help would soon be at hand and they might all make it out. They talked of what had happened, the long three day battle against the Wolfpack, and the loss of their ship and so many men at the end. Yet it was January, in the dead of winter, and it was cold in the sea at night, even in these latitudes. One by one, the men stopped talking, and some fell forward, seemingly asleep, and they drowned. Those that couldn’t stay awake and hold on had to be cut loose from the group by the living, and slowly, the circle of life diminished. In the end there were only two of the 24 men alive when they were finally picked up—Winkle Brown and Sheepy Lamb.

  Days later, when U-751 finally reached Bordeaux, her crew was not surprised to learn they had been presumed lost, months ago, for the boat had gone out as one of seven assigned to Wolfpack Reisswolf in late October of 1941. “Where were you?” the docking crews wanted to know. “We thought you were gone for good.”

  “So did we,” said the Kapitänleutnant, but he would say nothing more, nor would any of the men aboard ever speak about the strange absence of the U-Boat all those weeks. As fate would have it, another boat in that same Wolfpack would have a unusual life line, U-73 under Helmut Rosenbaum, the man who would sink the Eagle, and have a strange encounter with a very mysterious ship.

  One of the service men assigned to re-provision U-751 scratched his head when he went to test the fuel level in the boat. Gone all that time, U-751 should have been dry as a bone, and probably running on vapor, he thought. But that was not the case. There was enough fuel in the boat to operate for weeks, and he never found out why.

  Kapitänleutnant Gerhard Bigalk had only one kill in the war before he crept up on Audacity that night, and when he was out on the town celebrating his Knight’s Cross, another sailor overheard him say something very odd. “I finally got my third kill,” he grinned, “and something worth the torpedo this time.”

  Just where he had been on his submarine all those weeks, and how his tally of ships sunk would differ from the official German record, was a mystery that would remain unspoken of for many years.

  Part X

  Condor

  “It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations,

  if you live near him.”

  —J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

  Chapter 28

  The German Plans for Operation Condor had been watched quietly by the British for some time. Their secret spy operation in Gibraltar, a so called “stay behind cave” where men had been hidden in an undiscovered passage that was sealed off before the evacuation, was most enlightening. It reported on the ships anchored at Gibraltar, notably the Hindenburg and Bismarck. Yet of far greater interest were the slow arrivals of transport ships from Toulon, and the British in North Africa had not failed to notice the withdrawal of a regiment of mountain troops from Rommel’s defiant Afrika Korps. They also saw the quiet removal of airborne troops from Syria, a move that brought some relief, as the Australians were about to leave their post there and head for the Pacific.

  Then British planners began to wonder just where these troops were being redeployed. They did not go to Russia as expected, but moved through Italy to Gibraltar and then down into Morocco. That was when the Admiralty, and Bletchley Park, began to unravel the German plan.

  Tovey had taken Admiral Volsky with him to the Azores, where the British Admiral revealed the hidden little fleet of modern day transports secreted away there, and briefed him again as to the existence of the Argos Fire.

  “So you see, Admiral, that little key you carried to me in your secret jacket pocket might well unlock more than you realize in this war.” The translator finished the briefing, sitting quietly.

  Volsky shook his head, still somewhat bewildered by all of this, yet realizing he was part and parcel with it all, a man from a distant future marooned in the turbulent and dangerous waters of WWII. Marooned… that was the perfect word for how he felt now, bereft of his command, and not even really knowing what had happened to his ship and crew. He often thought of Fedorov, wondering as to his fate, and whether Karpov had been able to see through his deception, but there had been no news of him at all.

  Tovey could see his discomfiture, and so as far as he was able, he kept Volsky at the heart of all their deliberations and plans. “You are a most useful and resourceful man,” he told him. “Believe me, I do n
ot say this merely to flatter you, or even to bolster your morale. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

  “Yet that was another man,” said Volsky. “And I still can hardly comprehend that he was with you over a year ago, and now here I stand as his replacement.”

  “Yes, it seems you people just won’t stay put, bouncing from one year to another, but you are every bit that same man, Admiral, and I stand here before you with the unique perspective of knowing all the potential within you. I have every faith that you will be of the greatest possible service here in these events, which is why I invite you to sail with me in HMS Invincible.”

  “You are most gracious, sir, and I will gratefully accept.”

  “Remember also that you have knowledge of all the history yet to unfold, which can be most useful.”

  “I know the broad strokes,” said Volsky, “but I relied on Mister Fedorov for all the fine points.”

  “We all did while he was with us,” said Tovey. “And the astounding fact that he retained all the memories of the time he spent with us is most promising. It could mean that these odd recollections I have in my own head might one day become graspable, or that you might recover your own memory of those events.”

  Volsky nodded, wondering about that, though he still remained clueless of most everything he had learned here. “This other man that visited. What was his name again?”

  “Ah, you mean Professor Dorland. Yes, he’s a most interesting case, completely unexpected. All I can fathom of it is that the possibility and practical application of this traveling through time originates from your day, and so here you all are, wandering about in our world. The professor tried to explain it all to me, but it’s a very slippery fish.”

  That expression prompted an odd moment for Volsky. “Slippery fish,” he repeated quietly. Somehow the phrase, particularly in the context of this discussion concerning movement in time, seemed to tingle in his brain, prompting one of those unaccountable feelings of recollection. He was almost certain he had heard that expression before, but not spoken by Tovey. Frustration followed when he could not retrieve the memory.