Karpov gave him an angry glance, waving at him dismissively. “Ridiculous!” he said sharply. “That air contact will be over us in five minutes now.”
“So we will wait for it, Mister Karpov,” said Volsky. Given the circumstances, he had decided there was simply nothing else he could do. When the plane arrived they would identify its markings and type by clear visual contact, putting an end to the mystery once and for all. In the Admiral’s mind, an answer to his many questions was just five minutes away.
Part III
Contact
“There has been a misunderstanding, and the misunderstanding is quite evident…”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky
Chapter 7
Force P, Norwegian Sea, 122 Miles south of Jan Mayen Island
28 July, 1941
Rear Admiral Sir Frederick Wake-Walker stood on the bridge of HMS Victorious, watching the slowly rising seas. Just off his port bow, a second light carrier, HMS Furious cruised by his side. The two carriers were the heart of Force P, escorted by two heavy cruisers, Suffolk and Devonshire, along with light cruiser Adventure, and seven destroyers. His force was slowly creeping up to the Norwegian Sea, intent upon striking two bases supporting German mountain troops in the far north. The flight crews of his two light carriers would strike Petsamo and Kirkenes in 48 hours, and the pilots were already receiving their briefings below decks.
Wake-Walker was a stolid, competent, and cautious man, well experienced at sea and thought highly of by the commander-in-chief of the home fleet, Admiral John Tovey. At 53, his thinning hair was well receded, and combed tightly back lending him the impression of a proper British schoolmaster. Like most men who had reached his rank, he had a long and distinguished naval career dating back to the First World War. Just sixty days ago, he had taken part in the harrowing chase of the battleship Bismarck. Wake-Walker had been steaming aboard the cruiser Norfolk, finding and shadowing the great battleship, and then assuming command of Holland’s shattered task force after the tragic sinking of the Hood.
Well after the encounter, the intrusive First Sea Lord, Sir Dudley Pound, had thought to bring Wake-Walker up on charges for failing to reengage Bismarck with his two cruisers and the wounded battleship Prince of Wales. Yet John Tovey would hear none of it. He vigorously supported Wake-Walker, threatening resignation should any such charges be brought. The Admiral was vindicated, and his decision to shadow and maintain contact with Bismarck, rather than re-engaging at that time, was upheld.
Now that the enormous threat the German raider represented had been dealt with, the Royal Navy was in the early stages of organizing lend-lease relief convoys to Murmansk. The first such convoy, codenamed Dervish, was scheduled to depart from Reykjavik in a little over three weeks time. Force P was now conducting a mission to pave the way. They hoped to strike and neutralize German airfields and ports at Petsamo and Kirkenes in northern Norway, and thus remove them as potential threats to the newly planned convoy route to the far north.
Yet that evening something had emerged from the distant weather front to the northeast, a great disturbance reported by a weather ship several hundred miles from their position. The message had been garbled when received, and then cut off altogether, and they heard nothing further from the trawler. Now, from the look of the far horizon, he sensed a rising storm bearing down on his planned route to the North Cape area.
The Admiral was about to detach HMS Furious to accompany the cruiser Adventure on ‘Operation EF’ to deliver a shipment of mines to the Russian port of Archangel. Furious would then rejoin his main task force for the planned airstrike. Force P was skulking up slowly, hoping to surprise the Germans, yet the long hours of daylight at this latitude would make their mission quite hazardous. He stared out the starboard screen on the bridge, watching HMS Furious riding in the distance.
A curious ship, Furious was laid down in 1915 as a battlecruiser, but was later converted to a light carrier with the addition of a flight deck and removal of her main bridge superstructures. She carried three squadrons, nine old Swordfish torpedo bombers, nine newer Albacore torpedo bombers, and nine Fulmar II fighters. The torpedo bombers were older biplanes, slow and cumbersome, yet effective enough once they closed with the target. The Fulmars had proven themselves as capable air defense fighters, and the carrier also had a flight of four more modern Sea Hurricane fighters as well. The Admiral’s flagship, HMS Victorious, had another 33 planes aboard, giving him a total of 64 planes to make the strike.
Yet what to do about this odd report from the weather ship? What little they could decipher of the message indicated turbulent seas, and chaotic atmospheric conditions. While the slate gray horizon seemed to threaten, there were no signs of such violent weather as yet. But the Arctic waters were fickle and could change on a moment’s notice, he knew. Best to get Furious and Adventure on their way as soon as possible. He was checking the squadron manifest, noting pilots assigned to the operation, when the signalman reported an odd contact to the north.
“Visual sighting, sir. Aircraft of some type.”
The Admiral raised his field glasses, scanning the distant horizon where he soon noted what looked like a small, yet odd looking aircraft. It hovered over a bank of low clouds, well within sighting distance of his task force, and he swore under his breath, wishing he had had a couple of Sea Hurricanes up for air cover. This contact was most likely a Do-18 flying boat, a German reconnaissance plane out of Tromso. It was the only thing with the range to patrol this far out, and now that he had been spotted, the news would put the enemy on alert.
He had hoped to get much closer to the coast before being discovered, and this news would now force him to reconsider his options here. Should he detach Furious and Adventure as planned, or keep the ships in hand for a quick run in to the coast in the hopes of getting off the strike as soon as possible? He squinted into his field glasses a second time, but the contact had slipped into the low clouds and was gone.
“Better notify Home Fleet,” he said to his Chief of Staff. “And have Mr. Grenfell come to the bridge.” Grenfell commanded his 809 Squadron of twelve Fulmar II fighters, and ten minutes later he was discussing the situation in the plotting room off the rear of the bridge.
“The contact was visual,” said Wake-Walker. “Strange that we didn’t get a look at it on radar first with this odd interference the last few hours. We might have had time to get your boys airborne.”
“Right, sir,” said Grenfell. “I’ve heard the antennae have been a bit rattled today.”
“Well, the thing is this. If Jerry is on to us, and we make a run at the coast now, we’ll need more vigorous air cover over the task force.”
“I can split my squadron in thirds, sir,” suggested Grenfell. “We could put four planes in the air and rotate the duty en-route, then muster the lot of them for the raid.”
“Good suggestion,” said the Admiral. “See too it, will you? And I should like to have the first flight up immediately, if you please.”
“Right, sir. Will we be keeping to our planned course?”
The Admiral considered for a moment. “Unless we hear anything to the contrary from Home Fleet, I’m inclined to maintain our present course. However…I’m cancelling the mine delivery to Archangel for the time being and keeping Furious with the task force pending further developments. In this light, you may wish to coordinate with Furious and extend your air cover with the addition of her fighter planes as well.”
“Very good, sir. Lt. Commander Judd’s four Sea Hurricanes would come in handy. I can have my first flight up in fifteen minutes.”
The Admiral was satisfied that he would not be spotted without air cover again. Yet now he turned his thoughts to the mission ahead. There was little real surface threat, as all the Germans really had in the vicinity at the moment were a few destroyers. They may have been able to slip in a Hipper class cruiser, but with Bismarck gone, the only real formidable threat the Kriegsmarine could mount would come from the battleship Tir
pitz, and she was laid up at Kiel for the moment if the Admiralty's intelligence was correct.
If Hipper showed its face, he had two cruisers here to deal with her. Even if he was spotted, the Germans wouldn't have much to throw at him out here. Oh, the Do-18 might return again and attempt a bombing or torpedo run, but with two Royal Navy aircraft carriers present, it was more than likely the Germans would use these planes to keep a distant, wary eye on the British fleet's movements. U-boats were another consideration, however. The Germans would likely vector in anything they had in the area, but his task force was well protected with all of seven destroyers.
All things considered, he had little reason to think of canceling this mission, though he was comfortable with his decision to keep both carriers together for the time being. Perhaps an opportunity might arise in the days ahead to let Adventure complete her delivery, but for now she would stay with the main fleet. He watched the takeoff of Grenfell’s Fulmars with satisfaction, noting that Furious had also spotted and launched two of their Sea Harriers. The planes circled the task force once and then sped off into the distance.
Moments later the Admiral was interrupted by his radioman.
“An odd message, sir.”
“Home Fleet?” He turned, expecting to be handed a decoded signal, yet his radioman was still at his post, listening on his headset as if monitoring a live transmission.
“It’s in the clear, sir,” he said incredulously. “I think you had better hear this, Admiral.”
“Well, put it on the loudspeaker then.”
The radioman flipped a switch and they heard a clear hailing message, in English, yet the speaker had just the hint of an accent that was immediately apparent to the Admiral.
“Force contact at latitude seventy degrees, forty-two minutes, forty-five seconds; longitude zero degrees, forty-six minutes, forty-eight seconds; speed fifteen knots, please identify-over.” The message repeated.
“Someone is out of his bloody mind,” said Wake-Walker. “Breaking radio silence like this? What, has he given out our position and speed as well? Captain Bovell, if you please, sir!”
“Admiral?” The ship’s Captain was at his side immediately, returning to the bridge from the plot room. The Admiral inclined his head to the overhead loudspeaker, and waited as the incoming hail repeated.
“Damn sloppy,” said the Captain. “What do we have out there, sir, some imbecile in a fishing trawler?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” said Wake-Walker. “How could a trawler be quoting our position chapter and verse like that? Blast! First we get this sighting by a Jerry reconnaissance plane, now this! If that transmission is intercepted our entire cover will be blown. Anything from the watch?”
“No one has reported any surface contacts, sir. Grenfell’s Fulmars are up now, and we can have a look around. I'll check the watch and advise them to be on the lookout for any commercial shipping.”
The hail repeated.
“Very well, Mister Sims. Turn that damn thing off.”
The radioman pursed his lips, again looking at his Admiral, wondering if he should bother the man as the open band hail began to repeat again. Before he could speak, however, a message came over the speaker tube from the radar room.
“Air reconnaissance reports a strong surface contact north by northeast, approximately 40 miles out from our position. No contacts on the ship’s surface radar.”
Admiral Wake-Walker raised his thin brows, surprised. A surface contact? He turned to Captain Bovell to assess the situation. “What do you make of that, Captain? Have we found our fishing trawler?”
“Probably a stray steamer, sir. Could even be a German supply ship, though I can’t see that they would be broadcasting a message like that in English. More likely Norwegian traffic, though we have no notifications of commercial shipping from the Admiralty. Yet this could be our loose cannon. Can’t imagine how they may have spotted us, though. Shall I have Grenfell vector in one of his planes to overfly the contact?”
“That would be prudent,” said the Admiral, and Bovell gave the order to the radioman at once, who seized upon this opportunity to relate the recurrence of the hail he had been receiving. “They just keep repeating it sir, and the operator sounds somewhat edgy, if I may say.”
“Edgy?”
“Might it be a distress call, sir?”
“Perhaps, yeoman. We’ll see to the matter. Carry on then.”
“Aye, sir.”
Minutes later Kirov would activate her forward missile array and paint Admiral Walker’s ships with their targeting radars, yet the British would be entirely unaware of that. Kirov was well outside the range of their own rudimentary surface contact radar, and had no equipment aboard capable of detecting and analyzing the radar signals being beamed at them in any case. In effect, Kirov was squaring off and shouting at a deaf man. When one of their fighters finally spotted something on its radar set, they naturally vectored that plane in to have a closer look.
As the plane approached Karpov, seemed more and more ill at ease. Walking to the forward view screen, he turned and wagged his finger at the Admiral. “You could be making a serious error,” he said. “One we may not live to reconsider!”
Admiral Volsky felt the gesture strayed very close to insubordination, yet he was too preoccupied in the intensity of the situation to deal with that for the moment. Rodenko's timing had been very accurate, and soon they looked to see a distant mark on the gray horizon that was apparently the silhouette of an inbound aircraft. Somewhat relieved, Volsky was gratified that he would finally have the evidence of his own eyes to throw into the odd mix of conflicting information they had been dealing with. The Admiral clearly expected to see the profile of a typical British seaborne helicopter, but it was soon clear to him that this was a plane, flying low already, and still descending as it bore in on their heading.
Karpov reached for a pair of field glasses where they hung on a peg near the forward view port and snapped them up to peer at the contact, his movements tense and driven by obvious adrenaline. Volsky saw his jaw slacken, mouth opening with astonishment. “What in god's name…”
The aircraft sped in, perhaps no more than 300 feet over the water now, and Volsky could clearly hear the drone of a standard propeller type engine.
Fedorov leapt to his feet and was out through the side hatch at once, eager to get a closer look at the aircraft as it overflew the ship. He smiled with amazement, seeing the telltale concentric circles on each wing, the Royal Navy insignia, and he immediately knew from the profile of this aircraft what it was. The plane passed overhead, its engine loud as it banked quickly, climbing swiftly up toward a drift of low clouds.
Back on the bridge Karpov’s shoulders slumped, and he gave the Admiral a sallow look, field glasses in his hand betraying a slight tremor there. He took a deep breath, exhaling the tension, for he had expected the ship might even now be a flaming wreck. The over-flight had been a simple reconnaissance, not a strike mission as he had feared, yet what in the world were the British up to? What did he see just now?
Fedorov was back inside, sealing off the hatch to the exterior watch deck, his face alight with excitement and amazement, nose red from the cold.
“Mister Fedorov,” said the Admiral, “you will kindly maintain your post in the future. Compromising the integrity of the citadel is a serious breach of conduct.”
“I'm sorry, Admiral,” said Fedorov, “but did you see it, sir? That was an old British fighter plane, a Fulmar II from the look of it, the same planes that would be assigned to these carriers in the Second World War, sir!”
Karpov looked as though he was about to say something, but he held his tongue, for he himself had clearly seen what Fedorov was describing. Admiral Volsky noted Fedorov's astonishment, relieved that he had made the right choice in holding fire, at least for the moment. But now even the evidence of his eyes simply added to the wild confusion of the moment, for what he had seen, what Fedorov was describing, was clearly im
possible.
“This must be some sort of reenactment,” said Orlov. “The radio show, the old ships, and now this plane.”
“Sir,” Fedorov went on, shaking his head. “There is only one known example of that aircraft type in existence, and it is sitting in an aeronautical museum in England. There is simply no way that plane could be out there unless…” He himself stopped at the precipice of his own thinking, unwilling to make that last impossible leap over the edge into an abyss he could not hope to fathom. What was happening?
“What are you saying, Fedorov. We just saw the plane, did we not?” The Admiral looked at his navigator, his expression grave and serious.
“It was a Mark II Fulmar, sir, most certainly. That was a Rolls-Royce Merlin 30 engine, and the air duct beneath it on the nose of the plane is a characteristic feature of this aircraft-the long canopy as well. It was used in both strike and reconnaissance roles during the Second World War aboard British carriers, first introduced in March of 1941. Sir, the only known surviving aircraft of this type is the very first prototype model off the production line, which never saw active combat during the war, and it's in the Fleet Air Arm Museum in Somerset! I saw it just last summer while on leave. There is no way this aircraft could be flying today!”
“You tell me you are certain this plane is a Fulmar in one breath and then say it cannot possibly fly in the next. Which is it, Fedorov?” said the Admiral. “How am I supposed to sort this out? Everything we have seen in the last three hours seems completely irregular. Both Orel and Slava are missing without the slightest trace-no sign of wreckage, no thermal signature on the ocean floor, no signals traffic of any kind. Severomorsk does not respond to our communications, and we hear nothing on the radio but historical documentaries and old music. Now I have twelve ships south of my position that no longer exist, and I am being over flown by aircraft that do not exist either-or was that a seagull we just saw.”
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