“What will you do with them,” he asked flatly. “You can’t kill them. Kill Volsky and you’ll have to watch your back for the rest of your life on this ship. The crew love that man for a reason, Karpov. He’s not just any boss. They won’t like it, believe me, and some will have the guts to do something about it when they realize what you have done.”
“That’s where you come in. Who’s going to back you down, Orlov? Don’t worry, they won’t be harmed, of course not. Nobody is talking about killing anyone here-except the British and Americans. They are the enemy, Orlov. Keep your mind in the right place and just leave Volsky and Zolkin to me,” he finished, deciding to say nothing more about what he had already done. When the Captain perceived that Orlov still had reservations, he played out his last card. “I have spoken with Troyak,” he whispered. “He and his men are ready should we need to call on them.”
“You got Troyak to actually speak?” Orlov forced a half hearted smile. “He will support you? You are sure of this?”
“Troyak is not a child. He knows an order when he hears one. He will do his duty. And I also spoke with Martinov in the weapons bay. He is with us as well. The Captain stretched the truth on both accounts, just a little vranyo, and he did so with great skill and no qualms whatsoever. In his mind Martinov was with him because he ordered it-Troyak as well. They would do what he told them to do, if he could just keep Volsky out of the picture for the next few crucial hours or days. After that, they might relent, and reach an arrangement, but by then his business would be concluded.
“Martinov? That bumbling idiot? All he does is root about counting his missiles and warheads. What good will he do us?”
“Don’t be stupid. He knows where the special warheads are stored, and I had a talk with him this afternoon. Our forward missile bays will have a little more sting in the number ten launch tubes.”
“You ordered him to mount-”
Karpov held up a finger, silencing the Chief, and the two men gave the door a sidelong glance. The Chief suddenly realized that this was no longer a simple discussion, Karpov had already acted! The Captain had stepped over a clear red line, violating a direct order from the Admiral.
“But Volsky gave us a direct order,” he rasped.
“If you want to eat fish, you have to get in the water, Chief. Volsky is indisposed. I am in command now, and I rescinded that order on my own authority as Captain of this ship. I just need to know if you are ready to stand with me when things come to a head-because they will come to a head, Orlov, and very soon. Otherwise you and I will have to stand here twiddling our thumbs, and saying ‘yes sir,’ and ‘excuse me sir’ while Volsky runs the ship. How long will that go on? What is he going to do if he takes the ship east? The crucial moment is here and now. The next three days will be the heart of it. We either act now, or the moment slips from our grasp. We have Martinov. We have Troyak and his marines, and there are others, Orlov. Don’t think I am the only one fed up with Volsky’s vacillation. There are men on this ship, are you one of them?”
He was lying now. This was not the gentle boast of vranyo. It was not mere stretching and bending of the truth. No, this was lozh, pure and simple; a straight-faced lie, and Karpov told it with all the skill and duplicity he had cultivated so well over the years. “We can smash the enemy, here and now, once and for all, and then no one will be able to bother us again. Come on, Orlov. You can’t sit on two chairs. What’s it going to be here? We can smash them! Are you ready?”
The Chief thought for a moment, looking Karpov directly in the eye, and neither man blinked. Then he opened his jacket and angled his body to show the Captain a sleek, grey automatic pistol tucked into his belt line. “Yes, I am ready, boss, and so is Comrade Glock,” he said darkly. Then Orlov gave the Captain a hard look. “But tell me, Karpov. What are you going to do? What is your plan? Are you going to pay a visit to this secret little meeting with Churchill and Roosevelt?”
Karpov took a long breath. Something shifted inside him now, easing the burden he had dragged through the ship from one station to another. He was no longer alone. It was not just his fate on the line. Orlov was Orlov after all. He had seen trouble looming and already prepared for it. Why did he ever doubt it?
A deadly calm settled over him now, stilling the last plaintive inner voice of warning. Yes, he was going to smash things, but at least now he had a hammer in the strong right arm of his Operations Chief.
“We are going to do a little more than that, I’m afraid,” said Karpov. “Yes, Volsky was talking about this secret meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill. Perhaps he thinks he can go there and negotiate, but that is like trying to divide the pelt of a bear before you have killed him. We are going to kill the bear first, Orlov-you, me, and Comrade Glock.”
Chapter 30
August 7, 1941
Secrecy was soon found to be in short supply. Too many men had seen the attack on Wasp, or heard about it, or suffered from it, and one of them was a civilian reporter aboard Mississippi sent out to cover the occupation of Iceland. Somehow, word on the attack leaked out, passing from pilot, to able seaman, and over cables and airwaves to eventually reach the U.S. The headline in the New York Times that day, August 7th, was bold and pointed.
GERMANS ATTACK! CV WASP SUNK! HEAVY LOSS OF LIFE Fearsome New German Raider Still At Large
Roosevelt To Convene Emergency Session Of Congress.
The article referenced some of the events that had transpired, though it was noticeably fuzzy as to where the attack had happened, what German raider had attacked, and even more vague on just when the president would convene this emergency session of congress and in fact where the president even was.
Reporters quickly stormed the White House briefing room, but were held at bay and given no further information. The president was consulting with his Joint Chiefs of Staff, it was said, but nothing more was revealed, particularly the fact the Roosevelt was not even in the country, and was quietly slipping into Ship Harbor in Argentia Bay aboard Augusta by the evening of that same day.
Aboard King George V, Admiral Tovey was listening to a shortwave radio broadcast out of New York when Brind came in from the radio room, a decoded signal in hand and a puzzled expression on his face.
“I’m afraid I’ve given you some bad advice, Admiral,” he began. “Admiralty says they’ve spotted the Graf Zeppelin near Stettin.” The implications were obvious, and he said nothing more.
Tovey rubbed his brow, troubled. “The cat is out of the bag,” he said. “The story had leaked out to the press and the Americans are outraged. It’s to be expected, I suppose, but we still have no idea what this ship is, and that I find difficult to swallow.”
“Well, an American PBY out of Reykjavik spotted the German ship a few days ago, sir, and they got some photos.”
“Photos? It’s bloody well about time. What do they show?”
“I’m afraid the song is the same, sir. Bletchley Park says it’s a large cruiser, very large, probably a battlecruiser in size. They were able to spot a crewman on a foredeck and worked out the scale. The damn thing is all of 900 feet long, and nearly a hundred feet abeam.”
“My god, what a monster. That’s a bigger ship than King George V. In fact, it’s bigger than anything in the fleet. It’s even longer than the Bismarck! ”
“Yet no sign of anything but a few small secondary guns, and a curiously empty foredeck covered with a series of what looks to be cargo hatches. Given what we’ve learned about this ship’s capabilities, they’ve come round to the conclusion that these rockets must be stored there; possibly brought up on deck for launching, or even fired from below decks through these ports.”
“Amazing,” said Tovey. “I knew the Germans were developing a weapon of this nature, but all our intelligence indicated it was to be an air dropped bomb.”
“Yes,” Brind nodded. “The Fritz-X, or so the boys at BP call it. That was also mentioned in the Admiralty report.” He glanced at his signal and read: “Co
nsider Naval deployment of guided Fritz type ordinance or possibly more advanced Henschel Hs 293 guided rocket.”
The Henschel 293 was a development led by the brilliant mathematician and aircraft designer Herbert Wagner, Germany’s answer to the Bletchley Park genius of Alan Turing. Wagner, along with notable physicists Schrodinger, Heisenberg, and designer Wernher von Braun had been involved in the development and testing of new German wonder weapons for some time. The Fritz-X radio controlled glide bomb had been in development since 1938, and the Henschel 293 was a new approach that was intended for use against British convoys. The Germans were already building training and refit bases for the rocket at Cognac and Bordeaux on the south Atlantic coast of France, in addition to numerous facilities around Hamburg and Kiel, and bases at Bergamo and Foggia in Italy. It began as a glide bomb, like the Fritz, then migrated into a liquid fueled rocket. As far as Bletchley Park knew, however, it was still in the testing phase, unless this was to be its coming out party, a deadly ship mounted version that could strike with alarming accuracy and power.
That was the one thing that still bewildered the British intelligence arms. How could the Germans have achieved this level of accuracy and range on the weapon? Everything they had been able to learn about the program indicated that it still relied on a human operator, a man able to see the target and aim or guide the missile in flight. And much of its expected range was delivered by the aircraft that carried it, large German bombers. It’s actual range after firing was very limited, yet this was contradicted by every report gathered thus far from the ships that had been targeted. There had been no sign of any German aircraft near the targets. The reports from ships at sea indicated that the enemy was seeing and targeting them from well beyond the range of optical or even long range radar detection!
Eventually they came round again to the initial sighting of airborne contacts near the German ship in the first days of the encounter. It was then suggested that the Germans might be launching sea planes of the type often carried by cruisers and battleships, and then using these as platforms to spot and vector the weapons in. Bletchley Park suggested they had only to fire the rockets in the general heading of the target, and perhaps the Germans had then rigged some kind of homing device, even a small radar set in the nose of the missile, that would enable it to hit with such precision. It was a remarkably accurate assessment, but equally shocking to think the Germans had made these advances while similar Allied programs remained at rudimentary levels of development.
“We thought that from the very first,” said Brind. “But I’ll be damned. None of our pilots have managed to get a look at these German planes… except for that odd report we got from the weather station on Jan Mayen.”
“You mean that helicopter report?” Even the word sounded odd to Tovey, let alone the concept of a plane without wings. Yet ideas about helicopters had been around since the time of Leonardo da Vinci, and he admitted to the possibility that the Germans had again stolen a march on them and put such an aircraft into service.
Tovey sighed. “First we get news that Tirpitz is on the loose, then Bletchley Park tells us it’s Admiral Scheer, then we think this ship is Graf Zeppelin, and now this… We’ve run out of German ships, Brind. What do we call this one? We don’t miss something on the order of a new ship design. I can excuse the rest. These rockets could have been developed in underground facilities, and kept very hush, hush. But a ship? To have anything like this at sea now the Germans would have had to lay her keel years ago, and you and I both know they only have so many dock yards capable of building a cruiser class ship.”
Brind was clearly perplexed. “There were two ships originally planned in that German carrier program, sir. Ship “B” was contracted, but her hull was never completed. The Germans halted construction on that one and scrapped her just after the war began in September of 1939. We’ve had some inkling they might be trying to convert a cruiser or even a civilian ocean liner to a carrier, but these photos put an end to that speculation. The odd thing is that there hasn’t been a whisper out of Berlin about this business either, sir. You would think they would crow about their engagement with us, or perhaps make some statement regarding this attack on the US task force. I may be climbing out on a limb here, and I apologize for leading you up the bridle path about Graf Zeppelin…”
“Don’t worry about that, Brind. Speak your mind, man.”
“Well sir, this might not be a German ship at all…”
Events were running on, as the ships, American, British and from parts unknown plied through the sea on courses that all seemed to be converging on Newfoundland. The British were worried that the raider would simply turn east and head out into the Atlantic, but a small fishing trawler out of Newfoundland spotted a lone ship on a course due south of the location where Wasp had sunk. Apparently this German captain seemed convinced of his invulnerability, and came boldly on, albeit at a more cautious rate. The trawler estimated the contact speed at twenty knots.
At the time Tovey was some 225 miles to the south, and the American Task Force 16 was 150 miles northwest of his position. Somerville was an equal distance south, and the three forces, steaming for Newfoundland, formed a slowly compressing wall of steel as their courses converged. Then a further report came in from the PBY: amazingly, the enemy ship changed course in a direction no one expected, not east or southeast into the Atlantic, but southwest on a heading that would put it off the coast of Newfoundland in another twenty four hours.
“The gall of that ship,” Tovey exclaimed. “Do they think the Royal Navy has just turned tail and run home?”
“More than likely they’ve got other ideas,” said Brind. “They may have even got wind of this secret meeting.”
“What could they possibly be up to with that heading?” Tovey shook his head.
“It could be a fuel situation,” Brind suggested. “Perhaps they have a tanker hidden away that the Americans failed to spot. The weather has been somewhat grim. Then again…If they do know about the Prime Minister’s meeting, that ship is on a course that will put it in firing range of Argentia Bay given the range of these rockets.”
Tovey raised his eyebrows at that. “Damn,” he said. “Could the Germans have known about this meeting all along? I only learned the details but a few days ago.”
“True, sir, but there it is. The raider would be here tomorrow morning if it holds its present course and speed.” Brind pointed to the map off the northeast cape of Newfoundland. He took up a pair of calipers and neatly drew a circle. “That’s the range we’ve observed on these rockets.” The arc of fire covered the whole of Argentia Bay.
“We’ll have to do something about this, Brind. We can’t very well have Jerry taking pot shots at the Prime Minister, can we? Look here… If we put out the word and make all the speed we can, perhaps we can cover that coastline and herd this raider into the Sea of Labrador. All we have to do is form a line and then sweep north.” Tovey moved his arm, as if stroking a tennis ball and knocking the German ship halfway to Greenland. “We’ve enough ships to cover well over 200 miles. We’ve got her now, Brind. She’s stickling her neck out with this maneuver, and right into our jaws of steel.”
The Admiral could see an opportunity here, and he immediately asked the Prime Minister if he would consider transferring to a fast cruiser, and sail on ahead, well screened and protected by all the ships now gathering in the region. That way he could keep Prince of Wales in hand for the battle he hoped was just hours away now.
Churchill, balked, at first, hoping to stay at sea for the action. “Giving me the bums rush, Admiral?” he complained. “I was hoping to actually see you get your teeth into this German ship.” He was eventually persuaded that this would be most unwise, and the early arrival of the Americans and FDR at Argentia proved a sufficient lure. That decided, the Prime Minister was ferried over to the cruiser Devonshire and, thankfully, Admiral Pound went along as well. Tovey detached three destroyers with them, Echo in the van, and Eclipse a
nd Escapade to either side. Designated Task Force C, the group sped away at all of 34 knots, hastening on toward their fateful rendezvous at Argentia Bay.
This allowed Tovey to take the rest of Home Fleet, including Prince of Wales, northwest on a course that would eventually put him just east of the American Task Force 16. Being informed of the American order of battle, he reasoned that together they would then have sixteen ships, including three battleships, a battlecruiser, five cruisers and seven destroyers-a wall of steel stretching from the coast of Newfoundland some 200 miles out to sea, in a good position to find and smother this enemy raider when they turned north.
That was not all. With FDR safely ashore, the Americans were now free to reinforce their fleet with the addition of the battleships New York, Arkansas, three or four fast cruisers and double that number of destroyers in Desron 7. Admiral Starke convinced King that this was, indeed, a job for the cruisers.
“Leave the battleships behind,” he suggested. We can use their AA guns to beef up air defense in the bay here in the event the Germans try lobbing some of these new glide bombs and rockets our way.” He also wanted FDR in the best armored ships he had, and the cruisers and destroyers had the speed required for a hunt at sea. He put it in terms King quickly understood and embraced. “Release the hounds, Rey. Let’s get the dogs out after this bastard and run it down. The old battleships will just get in the way and, if need be, you’ve got Mississippi out there already, though I suggest you make her the goalie in this game.”
King agreed that this was a much better plan, and so the venerable WWI battleships New York, the “Lady Broadway,” and Arkansas, “Old Arky,” hove to in Argentia Bay, with FDR and all the remaining brass eagerly awaiting the arrival of Churchill. The fast cruisers left hours later, Brooklyn, Nashville, Augusta, and Tuscaloosa, all eager to get out to sea and into the hunt. There was an empty berth back home where Vincennes once anchored, and they had a score to settle.
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