Golem 7 (Meridian Series) Page 6

  “Well, that’s about what happened. As I recall it the decision was made by the captain of Ark Royal, however. So it wasn’t an unauthorized message, but it was sent out rather frantically when they realized the potential for mishap.”

  “Captain Maund,” said Robert, working up data from the RAM Bank. “And he wasn’t informed of the message from Somerville concerning Sheffield until an hour after the planes had already taken off.”

  “So that gives someone an hour,” thought Paul. “If that message was translated any time in that hour and reached Maund, then the planes could have been forewarned. Failing that, it’s possible someone just sent the message, bypassing that whole scenario and event chain entirely. An operative might be able to pull it off. All they would need is a sufficiently powerful radio. It wouldn’t even have to be aboard Ark Royal—could have come from any ship in the task force. Let’s nail down exactly what ships were still steaming with Force H, can you dig that up, Robert?”

  “I’m on it.”

  “And see what you can find out about that warning message as well. It should be easy enough to find.”

  “OK,” said Maeve. “Let’s say they had a man aboard one of the other ships and broadcast it that way.”

  “It wouldn’t be hard to act that out. You just go rushing into the radio room waving a piece of paper and say you’ve got orders to get this off in the clear, right away.”

  “Yes, and now we have a guessing game on our hands here,” said Maeve. “Which ship? And what about the possibility the message was sent from land? With a sufficiently powerful set they might have pulled it off that way as well, and that pretty much makes it impossible for us to intervene here at this point on the Meridian. How do we find where this radio is?”

  “Radio detection equipment,” said Kelly.

  “I doubt they’ll be doing rehearsals,” said Maeve, her point obvious.

  Paul shrugged. “This is getting a bit slippery, isn’t it? We can see that it is very easy to intervene here in Bismarck’s favor, by either simply shuffling paper, as Maeve suggested, or by simply broadcasting the warning about Sheffield. But it’s not easy to counter-operate against that at all. Putting this genie back in the bottle may be very difficult.”

  “Well don’t bother with the message,” said Robert as he leaned in at his computer screen. “I’m not turning up anything about this cruiser. I searched for that phrase—Look out for Sheffield—and here’s what I get:

  “A photo of Mt. Roland from a lookout at Sheffield…The city. Then Sheffield Lake Detective asks public to look out for elderly relatives… Then a production company at Sheffield University is on the lookout for a sexy male to play a role in a play… Then a bit about a place called Sheffield Lookout Tower, and after that a bunch of drivel about the baseball player Gary Sheffield speaking his mind and we are warned to ‘look out!’”

  “But there must be something,” said Paul. “That warning is now a noted part of British naval history.”

  “Sure, there’s nine million possible documents with those keywords in them. But we’ll need an Arion system to check them all unless you want me to sit here for the next year or so.” The professor’s point was obvious.

  “Then refine your search. Add in the keyword Bismarck,” Paul suggested. “That should narrow down your returns.”

  Robert reconfigured his search, but still turned up nothing more than a page after page of unrelated documents. Paul became very worried now. He had counted on the rich documentation of this history to provide him with fertile field of possible Pushpoints, just as he had been able to lay them all out in the Bismarck campaign. But now something had been levered loose from the Meridian and the history was spinning away into realms unknown. He scratched his head, looking at Maeve and then deciding something.

  “Look up Sheffield,” he said. “Kelly, can you get some Golems on this too? We need to understand why she wasn’t attacked—why this famous warning was never sent. Start with Royal Navy Ship’s logs. There are day by day entries in several on-line databases. There’s got to be a Pushpoint in there somewhere that we have yet to see. How about doing some comparison studies between our RAM Bank data and Golem searches. We should be able to run down some variations on this in no time.”

  The Golems proved to be an enormous help. They were soon able to return the entire history of HMS Sheffield, and Kelly began to read the broad strokes and set up variation search algorithms while Paul and Maeve discussed possibilities.

  “I still like my paper shuffle,” she said. “If the message gets translated then it’s very likely that the flight crews could have been briefed about Sheffield being on station before they took off. In that event there would have been no famous warning sent out in the clear like that, which would account for the lack of search results.”

  “You may be correct,” said Paul, willing to admit the possibility now that he had dismissed earlier. “It still seems a bit weak to me, however. How could they guarantee it would be acted upon?”

  “Hey, look here, Sheffield’s out there as well. Better get this down to the air room briefing!” Maeve acted it out for him, and Paul raised his eyebrows, admitting the possibility now that it was presented in terms he could better imagine.

  Robert chimed in with some new information. “I’ve got some RAM Bank data on Sheffield,” he said. “She had been operating with Cruiser Squadron 18, seeing most of her service in the waters north of the U.K. in 1940. Then she was detached to Force H at Gibraltar, and in April of 1941, the month preceding the Bismarck operation, she had been part of the screening forces for supply runs out to Malta. They were ferrying in Hurricane fighter planes using the carriers Furious and Ark Royal. The Sheffield was steaming with that group.”

  “Any references to combat action?” Asked Paul. He was worried something may have happened to the ship before her crucial service in the Bismarck campaign.

  “At one point they are attacked by 21 Italian bombers…That’s on May 10th. The Italians claim they damaged a cruiser, but the British sources say it was destroyer Fortune, badly damaged by a near miss. There is no further reference to any damage to Sheffield in these records.”

  At that moment Kelly looked over his shoulder at them, a serious expression on his face. “Hold your horses,” he said, adjusting the fit of his Giant’s baseball cap. “I hate to disappoint you all but I can tell you why no attack was made on that cruiser.” He immediately had everyone’s undivided attention.

  “Golem’s are starting to feed variation data to the module now, but early returns are pretty clear. Sheffield wasn’t attacked because she wasn’t on station shadowing Bismarck.”

  “What?” Paul seemed genuinely upset. “Not there?”

  “Nope,” You asked for a list of all ships operating with Force H out of Gibraltar earlier, and I set that search up a few minutes ago. Here’s the list: Battlecruisers Renown and Repulse, aircraft carrier Ark Royal, and destroyers Faulknor, Forester, Foresight, Foxhound, Fury, and Hesperus departed Gibraltar May 24th at 0200 hours to intercept Bismarck. Over the next 12 hours most of the destroyers returned to Gibraltar due to high seas and to refuel as well. So Sheffield was technically part of the task force, but I find no reference to her shadowing Bismarck.”

  “This is from the Golems? Then it’s from the altered Meridian, the one we’re on now,” said Paul, miffed that someone had been mucking about in his cherished naval history. “Then Sheffield never even sailed with Force H?”

  “Apparently not,” said Kelly. “But they did have another cruiser at hand. It came up from the south—light cruiser Edinburgh, patrolling near the Azores and looking for German blockade runners—ordered to close on the German battleship Bismarck's last known location. She was the ship detailed to shadow Bismarck, not Sheffield.”

  “The Azores?” Paul thought for a moment. “That was southwest of where this incident occurs. If this is the case, then Edinburgh would be arriving on station from a different direction, and be in an entirely
different position! No wonder there was no warning about Sheffield. She wasn’t there, and Edinburgh was not on the flight path the Swordfish took to make their attack that evening.”

  “So that’s why the planes go right in to strike Bismarck, as Robert said earlier,“ Maeve put in. “And they had those fluky torpedo detonators.”

  “The magnetic pistols,” said Paul, more to himself than Maeve. He was deep in thought now. The whole scenario has suddenly slipped from his grasp. The history he had been so comfortably navigating, remember it all from boyhood stories, movies, long hours of war gaming, was now a wild sea of doubt and confusion. Nothing was certain, and the quiet, well riveted facts that he had carried about in his head all these years were all but useless now. But his mind immediately leapt ahead to the next obvious conclusion. He was back to the very same question that had opened this discourse.

  “Then what the hell happened to Sheffield?” he said darkly. “If she wasn’t with Force H then our Pushpoint lies with her.”

  Kelly folded his arms over a belly that had enjoyed too many beers in recent years. He removed his baseball cap to scratch his head and then settled it back into place.

  “This shouldn’t take long,” he said, swiveling back to his Golem station. “It ought to be right here in the altered history. All we have to do is read about it.”

  It wasn’t long before he had their answer.

  Part III

  The Tiger

  “When a man wants to murder a tiger, he calls it sport; when the tiger wants to murder him, he calls it ferocity. The distinction between crime and justice is no greater.”

  —George Bernard Shaw

  Chapter 7

  Dock #8, Port of Brest, France – April 5, 1941

  The battlecruiser Gneisenau rested quietly at #8 dock in the port of Brest, her repairs well in hand as she made ready for operations again. Even as the engineers finished up, tightening bolts on newly patched armor on the foredeck, and laying in pipe below decks, they still marveled at what a marvel of precision she was.

  Her keel had been laid well before the war, in 1934, and then work was suddenly halted five months later when the engineers received instructions that the plans had been altered. Germany was quietly intent on violating the mandated limits imposed on her shipbuilding program in the Treaty of Versailles. And so the keel was laid afresh in May of 1935, and the dock workers jokingly referred to her as “the beast with two backs.”

  She had a classic, yet elegantly beautiful design, sleek lines with a sharp prow, yet with ominous mass that spoke of restrained power. As the plans were fleshed out in iron and steel, her decks mounted up and up, until her silhouette filled out into a massive, threatening profile, soon to be bristling with enormous guns housed in three turrets, two fore and one aft, each with three eleven inch barrels.

  She was named after a Prussian field Marshall, as was her sister ship Scharnhorst, and both ships were built for that perfect combination of speed and power that would define their role in the next war that was even now brooding over the horizon.

  Well behind Britain in terms of naval power, Germany had launched herself on an ambitious rearmament plan. While the Kriegsmarine would never be a force that could openly challenge the full might of the Royal Navy as they had done in the First World War, it would nonetheless be a potent threat, particularly to the vital cross Atlantic shipping routes England depended on.

  A battlecruiser by design, Gneisenau was strong enough to smash anything that could catch her, and fast enough to outrun anything bigger. She was a dark panther, designed explicitly to hunt down the wallowing buffalo, lumbering steamers and cargo ships that would cluster in convoys, their sea lord’s eyes straining against the gray horizon at fearful night watches, ever watching for the wake of a U-Boat periscope cutting through the swelling tops of the waves.

  The destroyer and cruiser escorts routinely assigned to convoy duty would rush in to ward off the wolf packs, but when a ship of the size and power of Gneisenau appeared they would be overmatched. A ship’s fighting power could be roughly equated to the size of the shells she could hurl at an opposing enemy. By comparison British destroyers mounted small guns firing a shell that was only 4.5 inches wide. Their main threat to shipping would come from mad dash torpedo attacks, but otherwise they were designed for defensive roles, principally anti-submarine work.

  The light cruiser was a larger ship mounting six inch guns, but the German battlecruiser’s powerful weapons were nearly twice as big, and she had speed as well, able to steam as fast as either of these enemy ship classes. She would make short work of a British light cruiser. A heavy cruiser, mounting eight inch barrels might stand with her for a time, but would soon be overpowered and in grave danger. British heavy cruisers had three turrets with two eight inch guns in each, or a total of 6 barrels. Some had a fourth turret bringing that total to eight guns. Gneisenau, could easily engage two such ships with confidence and still have good prospects for victory. Her armor might shrug off hits received from a cruiser, but her bigger eleven inch guns would deliver powerful, accurate blows that could ravage the smaller ship, doing serious damage.

  Only a British battleship carrying guns in the range of fourteen to sixteen inches could pose any real threat to Gneisenau, and so her very existence in the German order of battle, along with other ships like her, had forced the Royal Navy to assign a battleship to convoy escort duty whenever possible. There were never enough of the larger ships to go around, and so the German strategy was to break out into the Atlantic and look for the less well protected convoys where no battleship was present. In this they often received aid from able U-boat captains, who could find prey and vector in the larger raider to join the slaughter.

  The Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were often teamed together, like two fearsome big cats leading a chariot of chaos. They had given the British fits in the operations against Norway, where they had dueled briefly with the proud battlecruiser Renown in an inconsequential engagement. Later they broke out into the Atlantic and had been prowling with bad intent for several months. There they had orders to leave convoys escorted by battleships alone, but there were plenty of other fish in the sea, and they made a good haul, sinking 22 vessels accounting for over 115,000 tons before they pulled into Brest, and of these Gneisenau had accounted for 14 of the kills.

  Now they licked their wounds in Brest, with Gneisenau making minor repairs while her sister ship underwent a second major refit of her boilers, which had been temperamental throughout that ship’s sea life. Given their demonstrated success as convoy raiders, the Germans were planning an even bigger operation in a few weeks time. Admiral Günther Lütjens would lead out their newest ship, built in style and design much like the Gneisenau, but even more massive, with larger fifteen inch guns and heavier armor. She was christened Bismarck, and would hopefully become a terror at sea to plague the Royal Navy for years to come. It was hoped that Scharnhorst and Gneisenau would sortie again soon to join the mighty Bismarck, where they would form a battlegroup powerful enough to take on any convoy they encountered, even those escorted by the heavier British ships.

  Alas, Scharnhorst would not be ready, but Kapitan Erich Fein had high hopes that he would lead his own sortie with Gneisenau. If he could join with Bismarck and her cruiser escort Prince Eugen the Germans could assemble the most formidable task force they had sailed since Jutland.

  This threat had not escaped the notice of the Royal Navy either, and the Admiralty had been sailing out a powerful task force to watch Brest, lay mines in the area, and hopefully keep the German ships bottled up. In this effort Force H at Gibraltar played the principle role though, as First Sea Lord Admiral Pound would try to explain to the Prime Minister later that month, their attention was constantly divided by the urgency of operations in the Mediterranean as well.

  The heart of Force H, battlecruiser Renown, carrier Ark Royal, and cruiser Sheffield, had only just returned to Gibraltar after another supply run out to Malta, and their tired cr
ews were settling in to their bunks at midnight on April 5th, 1941 knowing they were bound for sea yet again the following day—this time to the Atlantic. A cable had been received from the Admiralty indicating that the big German ships at Brest were being readied for operations. “Consider battlecruisers will probably leave Brest tonight,” it read, as a local agent had been made aware that the Germans planned to move the battlecruiser Gneisenau to a mooring position out in the harbor.

  And so the sailors slept fitfully that night, tucked into bunks and hanging in their hammocks, knowing they would put to sea again to stand blockade duty and wait for any sign of the German raiders in the week ahead. But the British spy had only half the story. The real reason that the big German ship was being moved was the discovery of an unexploded bomb near her berth at dock #8, dropped in a recent night raid by the RAF. By the time they discovered this, Force H had already sailed to stand watch, yet no German ships would appear.

  The following morning a small trawler chugged into the port, a fisherman in a leaky boat hoping to ride out some worsening weather in a safe harbor. Even as the Germans made ready to carefully move Gneisenau, the trawler headed for the mooring pier, her skipper’s eyes intent on one particular spot, as though no other would do. The Harbor Master paid the small boat no attention, noting it’s arrival in his log and then taking a call from the tug captains ready to move Gneisenau.

  The next minute he heard an explosion and was aghast to look and see the trawler had caught fire as it moored when a leaky fuel barrel on its aft deck was ignited by the still burning embers of a seaman’s cigar. The trawler careened into the pier, freshly oiled against the weather, and the fire spread. Within a few minutes a good segment of the mooring area was in flames, and frantic sirens sounded the alarm. Fire crews were soon racing to the scene, marked by thick oily black smoke in the early morning sky.