Knight's Move (Kirov Series Book 21)

by John Schettler

  Then that second salvo from the dark raider blasted into the ship, and all hell broke loose. Captain Young lost his footing, falling to the deck. The urgent call would soon go out: “Mayday! Mayday! This is Kilo-Delta-Tango, and we are under attack!”

  Far to the north, the seaplane tender USS Albemarle was on the comm-link, ready to report observation from her post near the Azores. They saw the bright flash, high up, and the low wavering propagation of the eerie green auroras. It was just what they expected and hoped to see, but it came as quite a surprise to the British forces there in 1942.

  They saw it too….

  Part VII

  Gift of the Magi

  “Be careful what you set your heart upon—it will surely be yours.

  ― James A. Baldwin

  Chapter 19

  Like a shadow retreating from the light and returning to the darkness from whence it came, Kaiser Wilhelm vanished. It was there in that one wild moment, the sharp edge of war cutting into the night with the anger of its guns, and then it was gone. The strange lights in the heavens seemed to descend and surround the ship, finally collapsing inward to a scintillation of jade green phosphor, and then fleeing into the night.

  For Kapitan Heinrich, the sudden disappearance of the ship he had been firing upon was a shock. He lowered his field glasses, a stupefied look on his face. Dieter Jung stood beside him, gawking with disbelief. The booming sound of Schirmer’s last salvo seemed to quaver on the tension of that moment, oddly distended, as if far away, at the end of an impossibly long tunnel, a roar that became a rumble, then nothing more than a quiet murmur. It was then that he saw another light, strangely out of focus, a white smear on the horizon that soon solidified to the solid shape and silver glow of the waxing gibbous moon. It was back again, right where it should have been all along, but the enemy carrier they had been firing at was completely gone.

  Schirmer’s second salvo with both forward gun turrets had been right on target. He had seen a shell strike the carrier, heard the roar of the explosion. Could a ship of that size have simply blown up? No, his mind protested, eyes wide, seeing the stillness in the sea, feeling again the warmer temperatures, when there had once been an icy chill in the air. Now the scene off his starboard bow was eerily still and empty. He looked around, seeing the shadow of the Goeben over his shoulder where the hybrid carrier steamed in his wake. It was as if nothing had happened, until the watchman on the high mainmast shouted out another contact.

  “Ship sighted! Port side contact!”

  Heinrich looked, already seeing the ship’s main turrets slowly rotating to confront this new interloper. There, he saw what looked to be a cruiser class vessel, yet he could discern no visible gun turrets, and it seemed strangely dark and silent.

  “All guns, cease fire!” He shouted back through the hatch to the bridge. His big turrets had just retrained, the barrels elevating ever so slightly to adjust for the range, chaos held in a tense moment of suspense. For the next minute, everything waited in that hushed silence, the world seeming to be a frozen thing. Heinrich peered through his field glasses, seeing no sign of life on the distant ship. It hovered like a shadow on the sea, aimlessly underway at a sedate speed of less than ten knots from what his well educated eye could tell.

  “Signal that ship to identify itself by lantern.”

  It was too dark for flag hoisting, and soon the watch crews were flashing signals at the silent ship, but nothing was returned. Heinrich looked at Jung, quite perplexed, seeing the younger man simply watching him, as if hoping to find an answer to the riddle. When the lantern signals were not returned, Heinrich ordered one 5.9-inch battery to fire a warning shot across the bow of the ship, watching closely for any sign of movement of life on deck, but there was nothing.

  “Could they be playing possum?” Jung looked at him. “They had to see what happened to that aircraft carrier.”

  “What aircraft carrier?” Heinrich’s voice was near a whisper, and Jung was silent, a bemused look on his face. Both men could feel something was very wrong here. It was almost a tangible sensation of presentiment, the kind of shiver that shakes you in the face of unknown danger. For the next minute, all was held in that breathless interval, the body driven by adrenalin within, restrained by the mind as they struggled to understand what was happening.

  “Send to the boat deck,” said Heinrich. “An armed detachment will launch at once. Signal that ship. Heave to, and prepare to be boarded.”

  Heinrich had no idea what he had on his hands here. The chaos and surprise had barely subsided. His guns were still smoking from the two salvoes Schirmer had fired. Crews stood tensely at their action stations, but all was silent. It was as if they were now pacing a derelict ship, cruising aimlessly, abandoned by Captain and crew.

  That might be the case, his inner mind argued. This looks to be an auxiliary ship, not a warship. After ordering a ten point turn and slowing to ten knots, he came around to run parallel to the other vessel, still seeing no life or any sign of movement. He knew full well there was danger here, for this could be a commerce raider, just like Atlantis and Pinguin, masquerading in silence, waiting for the range to slowly close before dropping its disguise and showing its fangs. It was that silence that seemed to hold unspeakable danger, the dark unknown poised in the tension of that moment like a knife.

  If that is so, he thought, then it would likely have no more than five or six inch guns. If they so much as show me a machinegun barrel, I’ll blast that ship to hell… just like the other one… yet what did I just see a moment ago? What was Schirmer firing at? Where could that ship be? Even if we did get a lucky hit, possibly striking a magazine or aviation fuel bunker, there should still be wreckage and fire all over the sea. The smoke should be blotting out those cold stars, yet it is as if someone simply reached down and snatched that ship away. This is impossible! And now what do I have here off the port quarter?

  He was keeping Kaiser Wilhelm slightly behind the other ship, where it would not be easy for any hidden guns to bear on him. And he trusted to the ship’s armor, 190mm at the belt, to give him protection from any lighter caliber guns.

  Slowly, the boat launch was made, and a crew of fifteen men approached the ship, which was still underway at about 8 knots. Heinrich could hear them calling out in English on the bull horns, yet there was no reply. Soon he would have his answer. He saw his launch come along side, riding the gentle swell from the ship’s forward motion.

  It was a very odd looking ship, with a long fantail deck that extended over 40% of the vessel. A prominent crane amidships was angled forward, telling him this must be some kind of seaplane tender. There was something jutting from the open fantail deck, though it clearly was not a gun turret. The fat superstructure merged seamlessly with the hull and showed no sign of any secondary batteries, and no guns were mounted forward. Above the conning section, which was relatively low and flat, an angled structure seemed to hold squarish flat panels, with rounded edges, crowned by what looked to be a small radar set. Other antennae were visible behind the mainmast and just forward of the single stack. The moonlight played over the water and grey hull, and he squinted through his field glasses, seeing the hull lettering VM and then a long letter “I,” which he took to be the Roman numeral one.

  He saw his men using grapples to come alongside, and then they began making their way cautiously up the side stair and gangways, weapons at the ready. The next minutes passed, and Heinrich finally saw men on the ship—his own men. Soon a lantern flashed in the night, and Jung was mouthing out the message as it winked: “Ship abandoned. No crew…”

  The furrow on Kapitan Heinrich’s brow deepened, and he found himself looking about, scanning the horizon for any sign of smaller boats, or any other ships. Nothing was there. Then the next message came. “Ship secure. All stop. Request Kapitan’s presence aboard prize.”

  That was what he obviously had on his hands there, his first prize ship taken at sea, but under the strangest possible circumstance
s. Could this ship have been a derelict, taken in tow by that carrier? The disturbing lack of any sign of the carrier still galled him, refusing to be understood, and lending this whole scene an air of incredulity. Soon, however, he would learn just what a prize he actually had, one that now threatened to radically alter the future meridians of time.

  The ship his men had just boarded was AVM-I, the USS Norton Sound, and the history written in the secret reports that would now be filed away concerning Project Argus would be much different than the information Fedorov could fetch from his files.

  CVS-40 would come home under a veil of secrecy, escorted by the four destroyers that were hastily ordered back to the scene. The two oilers were still on hand, though many miles away. They arrived first, aghast to see the big carrier on fire, explaining the thick, heavy smoke they had seen earlier on the horizon. Damage control teams would eventually suppress the flames, and the crews were able to seal off segments of the hull that had been blasted open, causing some flooding amidships. The one ship that was not accounted for in the Task Force was the Norton Sound.

  As flight operations on Tarawa were not yet possible, planes were alerted on Wideawake Airfield, both for security and search operations. Yet no sign of the converted seaplane tender was ever found, nor was there any wreckage of flotsam on the sea, no oil slick, no life boats, not a single man adrift. Above the entire scene, the eerie luminescent glow of the sky seemed to haunt the Americans. What had happened? What had they done? What ship had appeared so suddenly to fire on them like a lurking sea demon? Where had it gone, and where was Norton Sound?

  The ill fated Project Argus was immediately cancelled, having fired only one of the three X-17A missiles that had come so far south. In the long hours after the Germans boarded their prize ship, they would be delighted to find much advanced radar and communications equipment, and there, sitting on wheeled cradles in the hanger bay amidships, were two long and dangerous looking missiles, over 40 feet long, with needle point noses, and broad stubby fins at the wider base. The Americans had taken to calling the X-17A the “Nail Driver,” and what the Germans did not know at that moment was that the missiles were carrying very dangerous warheads.

  “Naval rockets!” said Heinrich when he first set eyes on them. “At last we see them first hand. So this is the terror weapon that has been giving us nightmares.”

  It was all that and more. The small W25 nuclear warhead had been developed in 1954, a fission bomb with a small yield of 1.5 kilotons, just a tenth of the size of the bomb that might one day destroy Hiroshima. It had been designed to be fired by unguided rockets from US aircraft, and used as a area detonating weapon against Russian bomber formations. While a small tactical weapon, an air burst would nonetheless cause complete destruction on the ground below, out to a radius of 1000 feet, or over three football fields, with anything combustible likely to catch fire out to a radius of about a mile. Weapons like the W25 had been developed to make the massed bomber formations of WWII as obsolete as cavalry charges.

  There, sitting on those long threatening weapons, were the two warheads the Argus team planned to use in subsequent launches to take place on August 30 and September 6. The missiles they were mounted on could climb to an altitude of 300 miles, tip over, and then re-enter the atmosphere at a blistering Mach 14.5. In effect, it was a weapon that was virtually unstoppable after it was launched.

  The American scientists had already proven the Argus Effect was real, but they had the bad luck to fire their first shot along the fragile crack of a lost meridian in time. It wasn’t the size of the detonation that did the damage, but the precise location where it struck. Nuclear testing had seen massive warheads smash against the fabric of spacetime without undo consequence. In this case, all it took was a single tap. That weakened meridian had been further stressed by the inexorable tide of change migrating forward from the war. It was casting a shadow before it as it went, a Heisenberg Shadow, a zone of chaos where the solidity of the history it was about to overtake and re-write was highly vulnerable.

  The strange events of August 27, 1958 had been at the edge of a kind of sink hole in time, and the detonation of that rocket had been just enough to open a breach. Kaiser Wilhelm sailed right on through, there for the briefest moment, but just long enough to blast away at Tarawa before being pulled back to its own time in 1942. As for the USS Norton Sound, it moved at that same moment, slipping sixteen years back in time to 1942, as if dragged there by the sheer gravity of Kaiser Wilhelm. That posed a grave problem for the ship’s crew, for every man aboard would have been alive in that day, and Paradox had its way with them all.

  The ship, however, and all its contents and equipment, had not been built yet in January 1942. It would not even be laid down until September, and so all of that artifice passed the stern review given by the court of chaos, and remained intact. Something would happen between that day in late January of 1942, and the 7th of September of that same year, and the plans for the laying down of AV-11, Norton Sound, would be cancelled.

  The Kapitan ordered a small skeleton crew aboard, elated with his find. Still harried by the strange engagement with that carrier, he hastened away, pleased that this captured American ship could at least work up to 18 knots. He had not yet taken the full measure of the prize he now held, but his first thought was to get the ship to a place where it could be safely hidden and inspected in more detail, and he knew exactly where he could go. Initial finds made him jubilant. He had captured a pair of the dread naval rockets, and many advanced radars. And though he did not know this at the time, he had one other thing in his holds, and if he could get it safely home, Germany would have it as well… the bomb.

  Chapter 20

  Kaiser Wilhelm and Goeben turned, angling southeast on a course that would take them round the Cape of Good Hope. The weather worsened, with rain and storms more prevalent. Often they found themselves sailing amid the dark grey columns of thunderstorms, which towered up into the slate sky, their flanks riven by streaks of lightning. The roll of thunder seemed grim and hollow in the distance, inherently carrying that sense of warning, a feeling that there was something impending, something waiting out there for them, something that now hungered for their lives.

  Kapitan Heinrich had consulted his charts and set his thumb on another hidden island in these lonesome, empty seas, and it was well named. A French held territory, Kerguelen Island also came to be known as ‘Desolation Island’ when Cook called it that after visiting in 1776. There was one large island there, Grand Terre, nearly 2600 square miles, and it was surrounded by a broken scattering of some 300 smaller islets, many no more than barren rocks jutting ominously from the sea like stony icebergs. It had been named for the French navigator that discovered it in 1772, and he immediately laid claim to the place for France, leaving a message there to notify any others to that fact. For years it was a favored hunting ground for whalers.

  Heinrich knew of the place because it had been visited by the German raider Atlantis the previous year. With numerous bays and fiord like inlets, it provided many places to lurk unseen, and the island itself had good sources of fresh water, and even food. Getting there was no easy task, for the seas were swept by vicious cold winds in a region known as the Roaring Forties. Gale force winds were the norm, the ships rising and falling as they cut through the frothy white crests of the troubled sea. The sound of that wind was ever present, a vagrant moaning at times, rising to a demonic welter at others. Under such conditions, flight operations were impossible, but Heinrich had no fear that they might encounter enemy shipping here.

  In heavy swells that often towered over the ship, anything that wasn’t tied down would be flung across the decks, or sent clattering through the interior compartments, including the men. There were plenty of bruised elbows, knees, and bumped heads in that journey, which always stood out in the minds of the crew as some passage through a twilight zone between two great oceans of the world. There, in that desolation of sea, wind and sky, they passed lik
e grey spirits riding in phantom ships.

  The sea remained ice free in this region, and January was one of the warmer months, where the mean temperature would be about 46 degrees. When they finally spotted the islands, the crew was much relieved, for it seemed they might be lost on forsaken seas forever, denizens of that twilight zone, never to walk on solid ground again. They made their cautious approach, and Heinrich consulted notes and charts he had obtained from a former crewman of the Atlantis. So he knew enough to be cautious of the bays, for even those marked ‘safe’ might have hidden rocks like the one that had grounded Atlantis, threatening to maroon the ship and crew there indefinitely.

  They skirted the ragged coastline, the work of a thousand centuries of icy wind and rain scouring the volcanic rock, grateful that the weather had subsided somewhat to allow safe passage of the flotilla through Passe Royal, the inlet to Morbihan Gulf where the only settlement worth the name squatted on the shore as a collection of small cheerless huts. It was there that they saw another ship, and for a moment it seemed as if Atlantis was still stranded on the rocks, but Kapitan Heinrich knew otherwise.

  He smiled when he saw the low grey lines of the ship. “Right on schedule,” he said to Jung. “Detmers is a very punctual man.”