Knight's Move (Kirov Series Book 21)

by John Schettler

  “1958 again. The same year indicated on that map.”

  “Quite so.”

  “Well,” said Tovey, “ships and planes that haven’t been built yet, with course tracks marked on a map for an operation sixteen years hence. And here you’re telling me the RAF is photographing them in the South Atlantic. They’ve been here, in our time?”

  “Seeing is believing,” said Turing.

  “Something many of us here have learned in the most alarming ways,” Tovey agreed.

  “Only in this case, Admiral, there was nothing to see when a number of these photographs were taken. They were test shots, usually snapped on the empty sea, just to test the calibration of the camera. Then, when developed, these images were found. One interesting thing about this… Every shot was taken very near, or on, the course tracks marked on that map.”

  “I see….” Tovey had a look of deep concern on his face now. “What about this other word, typed in all capital letters on that map diagram you showed me—ARGUS. That wouldn’t be our own HMS Argus, would it?”

  “I hardly think so,” said Turing. “Strange… Argus was the first Aircraft carrier ever built, back in 1918, and here we have a look at one that hasn’t even been born—still in the womb.”

  “What could all this mean?” asked Tovey, expecting that Turing would have everything sorted out by now, yet he was disappointed.

  “Nobody seems to know,” said Turing. “But why not ask our Russian friend, Mister Fedorov? He’s a man who can see all the shadows of things to come. If this is something that may happen, he might already know about it.”

  “He’s in the Pacific,” said Tovey. “And that is another matter we shall have to discuss.”

  “What about that special radio they sent over to Invincible?”

  “How did you know about that?” Tovey gave him an odd look.

  “Well I’ve learned that it uses a kind of encryption for set-to-set signals transfer. My dear Admiral, anything with the word encryption attached to it is likely to come to my attention at one time or another. Now I’ve heard Invincible is scheduled for a refit. Perhaps you could take a stroll to the radio room?”

  “I’ll see to it,” said Tovey.

  That statement was the beginning of yet another round of mystery that would soon complicate the already fragile state of affairs in WWII. Tovey would make his call, and come to learn more than he expected from Fedorov, who used his access to the history files in his library to solve the riddles found in Turing’s second file box. It was a strange tale, one that involved hundreds of personnel in the US Army, Navy and Air Force, with forces scattered to distant outposts over vast reaches of the globe, and all to conduct an arcane scientific experiment, conceived and hastily launched in just five months.

  It was top secret, a clandestine operation that saw a group of nine ships slip quietly out to sea from ports on two shores of the continental US. From Newport, Rhode Island, the aircraft carrier Tarawa went out in the company of two Dealey class destroyer escorts, the Courtney and Hammerberg, two more destroyers, the Warrington and Bearss, and two oilers, the Neosho and Salamonie for fleet replenishment.

  Neosho was not the ship that had been destroyed in the recent Pearl Harbor disaster, but another by the same name, commissioned in 1954. Another ship, a seaplane tender named the USS Albemarle would slip away from Norfolk, Virginia, and take up a position near the Azores. The ninth ship was the USS Norton Sound, a seaplane tender converted to a missile test ship operating out of Port Hueneme, California. It would sail south into the Pacific, around Cape Horn and into the deep South Atlantic. There it would make a secret rendezvous on August 22, 1958, with Tarawa, the lead ship in Task Force 88, on a very special mission. For Norton Sound had a most unusual cargo aboard that day, three X-17A missiles, with each one holding a small 1.5 kiloton nuclear warhead.

  Chapter 18

  All these government agencies and armed services were now conspiring to conduct a great experiment. As Fedorov explained it to Tovey, the idea that would set it all in motion came from a most unexpected time and place. There was something about Lawrence Livermore Labs in Berkeley California that would stand as a thorn in the side of Mother Time. It would be the place where an intrepid band of scientists and researchers would one day find a way beneath her skirts, when they opened the continuum for the first time in May of 2020.

  That first violation had been launched out of a sense of exploration and discovery, but was mounted at the edge of an impending disaster—born in the Canary Islands. The unstable slope of El Hierro, the volcano that makes up the mass of the Island of La Palma, had tumbled into the sea, and the resulting displacement of seawater would send a massive tsunami west towards the coast of the US Eastern Seaboard… Or would it? The project team led by Professor Dorland had every hope of reversing that catastrophe, and that was what they set their minds to do.

  Yet decades before that, there were men working at that same lab who would unknowingly flirt with Mother Time, and one of them was an Electrical and Mechanical Engineer, a former elevator company owner, with a long time interest in accelerator physics and high-energy particles. Nicholas Constantine Christofilos had dappled in these arcane arts, eventually creating an idea for a machine he called the “synchrotron,” a particular type of cyclic particle accelerator.

  Christofilos would later go on to become a member of a group known as JASON, independent scientists advising the United States government on matters of science and technology. One of his major projects would be a top secret operation under the code name “Argus,” which was carried out in one of the most isolated regions of the world in August of 1958, deep in the South Atlantic. Argus was just one of many harebrained ideas conceived by the military as it tinkered at the edge of infinity, experimenting with military applications for the exotic aftereffects of nuclear detonations. It was one part fear, one part curiosity, and one part chaos, no matter how well it was all planned and calibrated by the methodical scientists that conceived it.

  The fear was born of the new nuclear foe on the block, the Soviet Union. It was thought that a radiation shield might be created with sufficient strength to interfere with the electronics aboard incoming ICBMs. This “shield” would itself come from the detonation of a small nuclear warhead at the edge of space, where the decaying electrons would become “trapped” in the earth’s magnetic field and create a shell of white noise around the globe as they bounced back and forth between two poles in that field. Known as the Argus Effect, the scientists wanted to see if it could actually be created, and then determine if it had any practical military application.

  Very little was known about that operation, even in Fedorov’s history, where it passed quietly into obscurity after its completion. But in the distorted reality now underway in the alternate timeline where Fedorov now found himself marooned, Operation Argus would become the seed of major changes, a point of departure born of chaos, and one that would soon skew the lines of fate, another insult to time that contributed to the “Great Calamity” professor Dorland had so darkly warned Tovey and the others about at their Azores meeting in 1941. The curiosity of science, and the eagerness of the military to find some new defensive measure against the weapons they themselves brought to war, would now come face to face with the uncontrollable force of chaos, and the result would be something quite unexpected.

  * * *

  “A sailor lives for three things, chow call, pay call, and liberty call.” James R. Giles was a flight crewman in VS-32 assigned to the USS Tarawa that day, and he had just written that line into his journal of these events, which were finally coming to the boiling point insofar as the operation was concerned—but not the weather, which had grown progressively colder as the Task force moved south. The ship had been transformed from CVA-40, an attack carrier carrying squadrons of F9F Panthers, Cougars, and Sky Raiders, to a less dashing role as CVS-40, now entirely rigged out to be an ASW carrier facing a completely different threat.

  In place of
the sleek fighters and attack planes, the carrier now carried a group of stogy twin engine Grumman S2F Trackers. They were ideal for maritime patrol, the forerunners of the more modern S3 ASW planes on modern carriers, and they could carry the Mark 43 torpedo, designed specifically as an anti-submarine lance, before the Russians began to build subs that could simply outrun the weapon. There were also several Sikorsky H-34 helos aboard, designated HSS-1 by the US Navy, mostly useful for search & rescue, and ship to ship transportation within the task force itself.

  Giles had been out many times on routine patrol, flying with his buddy from Newton, Texas, Allyn Howard. These patrols were so uneventful that most of his journal had been filled with the innocent banter concerning the inevitable “Crossing of the Line” ceremony, where the uninitiated “Pollywogs” would face the terror and torture dreamt up by the old Shellbacks who had made the crossing before. King Neptune would be piped aboard as the ship reached the line of the equator, and he would rally his Shellback sons to the duty now before them, to humble, harass, harry, and humiliate the Pollywogs. One favorite ritual was the smearing of anything vile that could be found on the bare belly of the most portly Shellback aboard, dubbed “The Royal Baby.” The Pollywogs would then be forced to crawl to kiss the Royal Baby’s belly, paddled the whole way. The impending events of “Wog Day” seemed to dominate Giles mind, for he really knew nothing of the ship’s true mission.

  The men had been told they would sail north when they set out, and it was not until they were aboard that they learned they would be heading south. Long days of humid and sweltering temperatures first saw the crew sleeping on deck, preferring the hard metal surface to the smothering oppression of the compartments below, but that soon changed. As the ships moved south, the weather worsened, temperatures dropped, and Giles wrote on August 19: “Weather growing colder by the day!” August 20: “Rough weather and fairly heavy seas. Deck pitching. Weather getting even colder.” August 21: “Flying as usual and weather steadily getting colder. And finally the arrival of an unexpected ship on August 22: “Rendezvous with the Norton Sound, a guided missile ship. Rough seas and heavy flying. We hope to be away from here by the end of next week.”

  Giles and crew would see his hopes realized soon enough, but not before they saw something else, the first harbinger of the chaos inherent in the experiment these men were now about to conduct. In the early morning hours of August 27, at about 2:30AM, the ship had finally reached “Point Lima,” a carefully selected map coordinate that would correspond with a meridian of fate that arced up through the earth’s magnetic field, descending above the equator at a point as far north of that line as the ship was now south. That corresponding point was the Azores, which was where the seaplane tender USS Albemarle was quietly waiting with radar sets, along with other land based monitors and planes flown from airfields on those islands. The first of the X-17A missiles were finally launched. If the experiment worked, and decaying electrons were indeed injected into the magnetic field, that was where they would migrate, to the so called “mirror point” which would then see them reverse course and head back to Lima Point.

  45 minutes before “the event,” men were out on the frigid, snow covered flight deck struggling to launch large weather balloons, with sensors to spy on the doings then underway. General quarters was sounded, and the ship’s crew were all huddled below decks while a team of special men were posted on the flight deck in dark heavy rubber suits, with thick round goggles and special binoculars. They huddled around the squarish form of an Air Force truck mounting an MSQ-1A radar set on top, parked just forward of the island. They looked like dark, shadowy ghouls about a mastodon, waiting for some obscene ritual. Then the countdown would be sounded on the ship’s P.A. system, and the strange words were heard: “Buzzard away! Six minutes to Flash Light.”

  The missile climbed up through the cold skies, and finally detonated, creating a horizon wide and piercingly bright flash in the sky that rippled along the cloud layer, and then shot off streamers of milky green auroras to the north and south. The experiment was working. The Argus Effect would become a proven reality, but it would do something no man there could have possibly anticipated.

  * * *

  Kaiser Wilhelm had finished up at Ascension Island and then sped away to the south, hoping the message they sent off home would put the British off their real intended course. Kapitan Heinrich would now plan his route around the Cape of Good Hope, but he intended to go very deep into the southern seas before he turned, too deep. He bypassed St. Helena to the west, thinking the British would be likely to have warships there as a precaution. That island marked the outer boundary of the southern convoy zone, and the enemy would likely be very vigilant.

  Kaiser Wilhelm and Goeben would travel another 1750 nautical miles south, disappearing into the vast, empty sea. Kapitan Heinrich thought he might have a discrete look at the world’s most isolated inhabited island, Tristan de Cunha. There were also a couple other little specks in the sea there, Inaccessible Island, and Nightingale. One of those, he thought, might offer a source of fresh water, but he found both quite barren and uninviting.

  So he continued south towards the next volcanic rock in the sea, Gough Island. The ship was between that rock, and a very hard place, though no one knew it at that moment. The quiet empty sea and sky belied the chaos ahead, but that night they would sail through its portal. The first sign that anything was amiss would come was that bright flash of light in the sky, and then the strange auroras would waver and flow like silken phosphors in the moonless night, for its silver waxing gibbous sphere had set an hour earlier.

  The night watchmen saw the light, and woke others. Soon many men were on deck, their necks craned upwards to see the ghostly aural display. The Eskimo peoples of the north believed these mysterious lights were bridges between one world and another, and in this case, the legend was very close to the truth. Sixteen years in the future, in that very same spot, Operation Argus had just launched the first of its three X-17A missiles off the snowy decks of the USS Norton Sound.

  Aboard Kaiser Wilhelm, the watchmen on the high mainmast was taking in the show, when he saw the same eerie lights seem to hover low on the horizon. He looked, smiling with delight, and then his jaw slackened, his hand reaching quickly for his field glasses. Seconds later his hand was on the bell, his voice loud and strident.

  “Ship off the starboard bow! Alarm! Alarm!”

  * * *

  James R. Giles was as restless as the men on Wideawake airfield that night. He had been hustled below decks, but he knew this was the moment the mission had brought them here to experience. When the ship’s alarm sounded again, he thought he might be hearing an all clear signal, but that was not the case.

  “All hands, all hands. Stand to general quarters. This is no drill. Repeat, this is not a drill.”

  Giles looked over at his friend Allyn Howard. “We already are at general quarters. What do they mean?”

  “They mean get to general quarters again—the real general quarters. They just herded us down here for the damn missile launch. Now they want us back at our regular action stations.”

  “At 02:45 in the morning?”

  They heard a distant boom, loud and threatening, and instinctively knew it could not be thunder. Seconds passed, and then came the long drone of something heavy falling from the sky, the hard jolt of something striking the wild seas, very near the ship from the sound of things.

  “Holy mother of God,” said Allyn. “Someone’s shooting at us!”

  * * *

  Kapitan Heinrich could not believe his luck. When he first heard the alarm he was annoyed when coming on deck, thinking someone had thought to let every man aboard in on the spectacle in the sky. Then, out on the weather deck off the bridge, he saw what the lookouts were pointing at. There was an chill in the air which made him shirk, and then he saw the dark silhouette of a large ship off his starboard bow, and the profile of an aircraft carrier was unmistakable. For one fleeting
moment he thought the Goeben had inadvertently moved out of steaming order, until he realized this ship was much bigger, a full scale fleet aircraft carrier. How could they have run up on it like this, without either side seeing anything in that approach?

  That was a mystery he would not solve in that moment. Instead three things clicked like tumblers of a lock in his mind. This was a British ship, for who else could have an aircraft carrier here. It was looking for him, as he could imagine no other duty that would bring such a ship to these waters. Lastly, it was right before his guns, no more than 3000 meters off, and easy prey.

  His crews were racing to their action stations, and a minute later, without the slightest hesitation, he gave the order to fire. Schirmer’s opening salvo was an immediate straddle, in spite of the darkness. It was only then that Heinrich looked around him, seeing the strange lights above, and the glow that seemed to surround his own ship. On some unconscious level he noted the moon was gone. It had been a waxing gibbous moon. Low on the horizon, but all was dark and quiet there. Then the second salvo fired, and chaos held court.

  Having the range, Schirmer put both forward turrets into action, and one of those 15-inch shells blasted into the side of CVS-40, easily penetrating the relatively thin 100mm belt armor. The carrier that once held over 90 warplanes now had only 19 Grumman S2-F twin engine trackers and four Sikorsky HSS-1 Seabat helos. Captain Howard Leyland Young was on the bridge with the Task Force Commander, Vice Admiral Lloyd Mustin.

  “What in god’s name just happened?” said the Admiral, after the first near miss salvo.

  Young had his field glasses up, and having seen the ominous flash of naval gunfire, he knew in his gut what had happened, but who in the world could be out there. They had seen nothing on radar. The position of every ship in the task force was well known. It could not be a mad hatter Captain on one of the destroyer escorts, for all four were over 460 kilometers to the west on a long line weather picket. The two oilers had moved well off to the east away from the launch site, and Norton Sound had no armament to speak of in her role as a test ship. It was out there, well off the port quarter of Tarawa. My God, could this be a goddamned Russian ship? Where in hell did it come from?