Winds of Change (Empires Lost Book 2)

by Charles S. Jackson

  “We’ll have to be closer than that to get a shot off anyway, fella,” Kelly answered, the sight of Kransky’s emotionless expression sending a shudder through his body that had nothing to do with the cold. “You’ll get your chance, don’t worry about that!”

  “Get La Forge and those kids up on deck now!” The American added as he drew back the rifle’s cocking handle and allowed it to spring forward again with an audible ‘snap’. “This could go south real quick and there won’t be time to worry about getting above decks if we need to go into the drink!”

  “Two minutes…!’ Michaels called loudly, and Kelly immediately pushed his second engine to full throttle, the MTB’s nose lifting as the turbo-diesel roared and it surged ahead with sudden acceleration. He turned the wheel hard to starboard at the same time, bringing them tightly onto a northerly heading that was intended to take them close in past the port side of the enemy vessel at high speed.

  No more than a nautical mile separated the vessels now as they continued to close at an increasing rate, but if Kelly’s theory was indeed correct it was now far too late for the approaching S-boat to receive notification that its erstwhile prey had suddenly changed course once more and had gone onto the offensive. By the time any warning was finally given, the engagement would most likely be over whatever the outcome.

  “Ninety seconds…!” Michaels called again, the tension clear in his wavering voice now as he held onto the wheelhouse bulkhead for dear life. All around him, non-combat crew and civilians alike were all clinging to some solid, secure part of the deck or superstructure in preparation for the coming attack.

  “Range…!” Kransky snarled back loudly, standing firm and unsupported on the deck as if they were out for a quiet Sunday cruise. “Time don’t mean shit: I need a goddamned range call!” With one deft adjustment to a switch at the side of the weapon’s sight, he flipped up the lens covers at both ends and lifted the rifle to his shoulder, carefully traversing left and right as he scanned the foggy sea ahead.

  “Two thousand yards…!” The desperate countdown began, with Michaels giving further readings at fifteen second intervals. “…Fifteen hundred yards… one thousand…”

  With the powerful thermal imaging sight fitted above the receiver of his rifle, Kransky had picked up the approaching S-boat at around fifteen hundred metres, the substantial heat of its diesel engines easily visible despite the thick fog: their combined glow was an unmistakeable, irregular blob of white against the blackness of the icy sea. With armour-piercing rounds – he carried ten in a second, loaded magazine inside one of his jacket pockets – there would’ve been a reasonable chance of him doing some damage and perhaps slowing the enemy vessel down... slowing it down however probably wouldn’t be enough.

  Instead he held fire, patiently waiting for more vital targets. In clear conditions, the thermal sight was capable of detecting a human-sized target at up to 1,300 metres. The current conditions were anything but clear however and the range would need to decrease significantly before he’d be able to detect a man through such thick fog. Strange shapes and figures began to appear in the sight as they drew closer than 1,000m – eerie, ghostly shapes of the S-boat’s superstructure and fittings shimmering into existence, the structures warmer than the open sea but nevertheless much colder than the roaring engines and therefore far more difficult to detect.

  From what the American could see through the sight, Kelly had positioned the MTB perfectly to take them straight past their pursuer down its port side, running parallel and no more than two or three hundred yards apart. At such a close range, the fore and aft guns would be able to batter the entire vessel from stem to stern as they passed and the combined power of both weapons would be devastating at such close range.

  As the approaching vessel drew even closer, it began to take on a faint, transparent silhouette of grey against the black background, appearing as if by magic to surround the glow of the engines and ‘fill-in’ the space around them. There were some tiny, far more solid ‘blobs’ of white also appearing now and although they as yet had no real detail or form, Kransky had used the sight enough times to know what they were: the S-boat’s crew.

  By the time Michaels had called out “…Five hundred yards…” Kransky had identified the position of the S-boat’s flying bridge and determined that the man at the wheel would be one of three men standing upon it. There still wasn’t enough detail to pick out which man was controlling the vessel but that was merely a matter of practicality: he’d simply have to take out all three to be sure. With clinical precision, he tightened his hold around the rifle’s pistol grip, his index finger only slipping inside to touch the trigger for the first time at the same moment that his thumb automatically found the safety catch on the other side of the receiver and disengaged it.

  Port to starboard, he decided impassively with no real preference and positioned the sight’s tiny, central orange aiming dot over the white silhouette of the man standing (from his perspective) on the right side of the open bridge.

  Taking a single breath and holding it half-released, he squeezed his index finger gently and drew the double-pull trigger back to its break point, holding it there for a split second. He squeezed again – barely – and the M107 rifle bucked violently against his shoulder, the report deafening at close range as a single .50-caliber slug hurtled from the muzzle at almost 900 metres per second.

  Toepfer stood at the bridge as he had for the entire trip, peering futilely out into the fog ahead as S-59 thundered on across the Irish Sea at over forty knots. Much like the crew of MTB 102, everyone aboard the S-boat was also surrounded completely by the damp cold of thick fog. Toepfer had no idea what the chill-factor might’ve been as the vessel cut its way through the dark waves of the Irish Sea but he suspected it must’ve been below zero.

  They were in hot pursuit and the enemy ship was running as expected – using the fog for cover and heading west. Its destination was undoubtedly Lough Swilly or another Republic of Ireland Naval Service base on the coast of nearby County Donegal. They were still only making fifteen knots however – nowhere near enough to evade interception – and in Toepfer’s mind he was certain it was the result of damage suffered in the engagement with flying boat Bruno.

  There’d been just three survivors recovered from the sinking wreck – the pilot, Haas, being one of them – and all three were now being kept warm below decks as the ship’s medic tended to their injuries. There’d been nothing more they could do for the three other crew members left in the shattered aircraft save for whispering a quiet prayer as it had finally slipped beneath the icy waters and disappeared just minutes after they’d retrieved the injured by dinghy.

  The Ghost Ship had changed course slightly a few minutes ago, presumably moving a little further north to give it clear passage through the four-kilometre-wide channel formed between Fair Head on the Irish mainland and the southern tip of Rathlin Island. They’d received notification a moment or two later and had altered their own course accordingly, the change actually increasing the closing speed of the two vessels slightly.

  They were very close now and the gun crews manning the pair of 23mm cannon forward and twin 13mm machine guns on their port and starboard beams were all alert and ready for action. Toepfer intended to give the enemy one chance to surrender their vessel: if they refused or – inconceivably – chose to fight, his ships’ powerful armament would blow the smaller craft out of the water.

  “Course change, Kaleun…! Rathlin advises major target course change!” The sudden call came as a complete surprise to all on the bridge. “Vessel now accelerating quickly – already at twenty-five knots and turning on to three-five-seven…!”

  “That’s impossible, Wagner,” Toepfer replied instantly, irritation in his tone as he turned back toward the hatch behind to answer. “Their actions so far make it clear they’ve got radar also, and that course would put them on a northerly heading… they’d be coming straight for us!”

  At that mome
nt, he imagined he heard a sudden, distinctly wet ‘thud’ beside him and felt an unexpected spray of foam spatter across the right side of his face and neck. It was only as he began to turn back to the front that the entire crew heard the supersonic ‘crack…!’of a passing rifle bullet, and Toepfer realised that the warm wetness against his face carried the terrible, unmistakeable smell of copper that could only mean one thing: blood. The S-boat lurched suddenly out of control to port as his helmsman crumpled to the deck with half his head blown away. A second slug sizzled past them as the kapitänleutnant lunged for the wheel, whining off the superstructure close to where Toepfer’s head should have been.

  As the unthinkable started to dawn in the commander’s mind –they were being fired upon from somewhere out of the impenetrable walls of grey fog – his XO fell backward, without a sound where he stood on Toepfer’s opposite side, dead within seconds as he too dropped to the deck, the centre of his back now a bloody exit wound left by a .50-inch slug. Incredible as it seemed, whoever was doing the shooting was somehow also able to target them accurately nevertheless.

  Gritting his teeth and issuing a silent, heartfelt apology to his dead helmsman, he used his feet to push the lifeless corpse out of the way and took command of the ship directly, wrenching the wheel in the opposite direction and bring S-59 sharply back on course.

  “Alarm… alarm…! Enemy vessel approaching off the port bow,” he screamed the warning over the ship’s PA system while simultaneously activating the ships warning siren. “Battle stations: all weapons free…!”

  The whooping claxon brought every man on board to full alert and the gunner manning the pair of 23mm cannon forward slewed his weapons off to port immediately, waiting for sight of any target. He died a second or two later as Kransky’s fourth shot struck him in the right temple and reduced the upper half of his head to a fine, bloody mist that was instantly lost to the passing wind and spray coming off the bow.

  “Forward gunner down…!” Toepfer ordered desperately, adrenalin stretching each passing second into an eternity as the entire world that was his command started to fall apart around him. “Relief crew to forward mount…!”

  It was far too late now for anyone to react. Even as the muffled thunder of approaching engines rose out of the cacophony of sirens and their own ship’s roaring diesels, the thick fog off the port bow suddenly parted to reveal the enemy MTB as if the impenetrable curtain of white-grey had finally decided to forcefully disgorge a foreign object into plain sight.

  Although not travelling as fast as the S-boat, MTB 102 was moving quickly nevertheless and their enemy’s weapons were already loaded and aimed in that general direction as the Kriegsmarine crew caught their first glimpse of their ‘prey’, requiring no more than a few minor adjustments in elevation and traverse to bring them onto target. The passing torpedo boat opened up with all guns at point-blank range and the last sound Kapitänleutnant Leon Toepfer heard before his entire world went black was that of his own portside twin heavy machine guns returning fire a split-second later. As dozens of 13mm rounds hammered through the speeding MTB’s wooden deck and bulkheads, sending debris flying skyward from its stern, his last memory was the sight of the tall silhouette of a lone gunman holding an incredibly large rifle to his shoulder. Everything else was lost in a fiery blaze as a torrent of multi-coloured tracer struck the S-boat and the deck beneath him was suddenly thrown violently upward.

  The gunners of MTB 102 were well-prepared and had opened fire on S-59 the moment it had emerged from the fog. At a range of just three hundred metres there was no chance of missing their target and nowhere for the S-boat crew to hide as hundreds of 15mm slugs and 25mm cannon shells raked along the vessel’s port side, visiting destruction upon the vessel along its entire length from bow to stern. It was almost as if the entire vessel had been fed nose-first into a huge blender as almost everything above the waterline suddenly and quite literally ceased to exist.

  There was no real need to move their weapons’ traverse: the rate of approach was so great the gunners merely needed to hold their weapons steady at the appropriate elevation and allow the fire to ‘walk’ its way aft as both vessels shot past each other at a combined speed of close to seventy knots. A myriad of tiny, sparkling 25mm detonations flickered along the vessel’s hull followed close behind by the shattering impacts of solid 15mm slugs, the smaller-calibre weapons no less devastating at such close range. Wreckage and debris filled the air in fiery clouds of black smoke as the terrible barrage literally shredded the S-boat’s bow into pieces and began to work its way quickly aft.

  They weren’t to be let off scot-free however as the close proximity also left MTB 102 with no way of avoiding returned fire. Although the 37mm automatic cannon mounted on the enemy vessel’s afterdeck was blocked by its own bridge superstructure, Kelly’s ship also initially took some fire from one of the S-boat’s port side machine guns amidships, the heavy rounds punching through their own wooden decks with ease and wreaking havoc below in the engine room.

  Everyone on board felt the little MTB shudder under the impacts as splinters and shards of wooden decking flew all about, leaving some nearby with serious cuts and abrasions, while engine power again began to fall away immediately. The enemy fire was in any case short-lived: as the withering barrage from their own cannon continued to work its way aft, many easily punched straight through the wood and light steel outer fairing of the S-boat’s portside torpedo tube. The 533mm G8e electric torpedo beneath carried a warhead filled with 300kg of Hexanite, all of which detonated in that moment under the explosive impact of numerous 25mm cannon shells. The resultant blast was huge – powerful enough to break the 100-tonne vessel completely in half and throw men and wreckage metres into the air – and what was left of Schnellboot S-59 began to settle quickly in the icy water.

  “Casualties…! Damage reports…!” Kelly demanded from the bridge, blood trickling from his forehead where a large splinter of flying debris had struck his temple a glancing blow. “Everybody check the fella next to ye and make sure he’s okay!” As the MTB coasted away from the battle area, engines once more silent and smoke pouring from its stern, it was plain for all to see that significant damage had been sustained regardless of what appeared to have been a successful engagement overall. “Seamus…!” He bellowed down into the hatch leading to the engine room below. “Talk to me, brother: what’ve y’ got for me?”

  “Seamus is gone…” Brendan’s shattered, hollow voice floated up to him from the darkness below as every crew member within earshot, Kelly included, made a sign of the cross as a sign of respect. “…So are Liam and Ardal… number one engine’s down again… been shot half to bits…” There was a moment’s pause, as if he were making further assessments... or working to keep control of himself. “Working to restart number two engine now but we’ve been holed bad down here and we’re takin’ on water sure enough – a lot of it.”

  “That’s not the worst of it…” Michaels growled softly as he moved to stand beside Kelly. “We’re leaking fuel like a bloody sieve! There’s diesel spreadin’ all around us and there’s a slick o’ the shite trailing behind that leads straight to us.”

  “Bloody tanks were two-thirds empty already,” Kelly muttered as he turned to glance disapprovingly at the fuel gauges on his main instrument panel, “and it looks like we’ll lose most o’ the rest…” He paused for a moment, almost managing a faint smile as number two engine clattered into life once more. “…Still alive though, which is more than can be said for most o’ the poor buggers on that E-boat.” Fair Head’s only a mile away – maybe a little more…” He leaped to the ship’s controls and pushed the throttle forward, turning the wheel to starboard as MTB 102 began to accelerate slowly.

  “We’re gonna be landing on an occupied coastline that’s crawling with bloody Germans!” Michaels warned, not seeing any plausible alternative but unhappy with the situation all the same.

  “Not the safe haven I’d have asked for but we’ve no
position to be fussy right now. Ballyvoy’s not far inland and there’s someone there who can look after us until something’s organised to get us over the border.” He shrugged in resignation. “Shouldn’t take more than five minutes to hit the beach, although there’s a lot o’ cliffs along this part of the coast: we might all get a bit wet before the mornin’s out…” He turned his attention back to the rest of the crew around him. “Any other casualties, boys…? Anybody need attention?”

  “Nobody else hurt who wasn’t already,” Kransky called from a position near the forward 25mm gun mount, the M107 rifle now slung over his back. “Can’t say the same for the poor bastards out there though,” he added, echoing Kelly’s own sentiments of seconds earlier as he threw an outstretched arm toward the wreckage of S-59.

  Some of the larger pieces of debris that remained afloat were still burning and a faint glow of red-orange was visible through the misty fog as MTB 102 came about, increasing the distance between them.

  “Hier…! Helfen Sie uns…!” The repeated cries for help from the survivors were also quite audible, along with some of outright agony from several of the wounded.

  “We’ve no space for prisoners aboard, Richard,” Kelly observed with a dark expression, “and thanks to those bastards we’ll be lucky to make dry land ourselves with the state this bloody boat’s in. They’ll have search-and-rescue units out from Rathlin or Ballycastle within half an hour or so in any case.”

  “Most of ‘em won’t last minutes in water this cold… the wounded, even less,” Kransky countered evenly, stepping across the deck to stand facing Kelly across the windscreen of the flying bridge. The American had killed hundreds of men in his time, if not thousands, but he’d always prided himself on never having shot a harmless man. Any one of that schnellboot’s crew had been a legitimate target while moving in for the attack: now the engagement was over, it was a matter of honour in his mind that the victor should do what they could to help the wounded.