“Should you read this your mission will have concluded as planned…” As planned? That suddenly had a rather ominous tinge, for he realized that his name there implied he was most likely aware of that plan, if not its author. Yet how could that be possible? How would I get hold of something like that, a box from the future with something in it capable of moving that ship in time. Why, the whole matter seems like it was designed to bring that ship here, to this moment, to serve in this hour of need.
A sudden thought occurred to him, and brought a smile to his lips. This whole business with none of these people knowing about the Orenburg Federation is rather telling, isn’t it? Why, it’s as if they all came from a completely different world, a copy of this world, yet different. In fact, the Russians fairly well confirmed this. The words of Admiral Volsky came to mind now, from that fateful meeting aboard the Russian ship off the Faeroes... “Quite frankly, the world as it now stands does not seem to be the one we left. This will also be difficult for you to grasp, but the history we knew did not see our homeland divided in civil war as it is…”
They claim they met with me off Gibraltar in 1942, to parley, and the evidence of that meeting was plain to see in the archive. Why, I even knew the name of the place—Las Palomas. It just popped into my mind like I had lived all that through in this life, a memory emerging from some hidden depth, like a fish leaping from the unfathomable sea, and then it was gone…
Who’s memory was that? Mine? It couldn’t be. The thought of another John Tovey out there, interacting with the Russians, establishing the shadowy group that came to be called the Watch… well it gave him a bit of a shiver. The more he thought about things, the deeper the feeling became seated in him.
These odd feelings and notions aren’t simply hunches or intuition, he thought. It’s a powerful sensation, like déjà vu, a shadow of a deeply hidden memory upwelling in my mind. These must be remnants of those other lives… echoes. In fact, Turing felt them as well, though Cunningham seemed completely unaffected this way. He was properly astounded by what he learned at that briefing, and I’ll have to keep a good eye on him now, but I sense no deeper root in him like the one that seems to be growing within me—at least not yet.
It was more than memories, much more. There were tangible things from that other world in this one, the intelligence files he had just told Fairchild about, and the strange box aboard her ship—the device she mentioned. And what about Turing’s watch! There was another little mystery that was as yet unsolved. It went missing in this world, and then turned up in a box from some other telling of these events. How could all these things from other times find their way into this world? How were these memories emerging from within him?
A box from the future—a device… Fairchild said she had instructions that led her to Delphi. Someone must have a flair for the dramatic, he thought, hiding the damn thing beneath the Oracle’s shrine. Now that I think of it, that young Russian Captain intimated there were other places like this, where the rifts in time caused by all these massive detonations had become permanent. Think on it—gateways in time, portals to other worlds. Yet, from everything the Russians have told me, things done in one world seem to have an effect on all the others!
That was why the Russians remained here, and why Admiral Volsky has thrown in with Great Britain. They’re trying to prevent things that happened in their own time, things they have seen, a great doom that comes upon the world in 2021. It was a doom of our own making, or so they have led me to believe. These missiles they fire, scratching the blue sky, driven on with relentless yellow fire, like mindless sharks—that is what put an end to their world. Yet how ironic it is that we need them now, in this war, to give us any hope of seeing they never consume the world in the next one.
A bell rang, turning over the hour, and setting the new watch. He suddenly became aware of his senses in the here and now, the smell of the sea, the light on the water, the streaks of dark grey in the distant clouds that promised the threat of rain.
My life is wound about this Russian ship like a vine now, he realized. My God… I believe I saw this ship decades ago, in the Straits of Tsushima, aboard King Alfred, off Iki Island. Then boxes of reports and photographs appear, and notes from the future, bearing my name. The Russian Captain came to the same conclusion as Miss Fairchild did about all this. He could still hear Fedorov’s voice… “How could images of events we lived through in 1941 and 1942 be here, a year before any of that ever happened, in the year 1940? Unless—and this is the only possibility we could grasp at—unless they were brought here, from some future year, and by someone we have yet to identify who is also capable of moving in time.”
He smiled now, a strange light in his eye. Someone planned it, the mission for this Argos Fire. The order went out through the Watch, the organization I supposedly founded. The note bore my name. Why feathers and fiddlesticks…. I think I may know who brought these things here, and it wasn’t old H.G. Wells with his Time Machine as I told the Admiral.
“Excuse me Admiral. Message from the Russians.”
Tovey was again pulled from his reverie into the urgency of the moment. He took the decrypted message and read it quietly…. Argos Fire had radar contact at long range on the Italian fleet. CONTACT ON LARGE ENEMY FLEET REPORTED, BEARING NW AT 120 KILOMETERS. The coordinate of the contact followed, and estimated composition. Many ships. Steel in the water, and an impending battle at sea rising with the weather off his bow. RECOMMEND YOU JOIN A.B.C. - HOSTILITIES IMMINENT.
That was an understatement, thought Tovey.
“Mister Towers, send to Captain Bridge on Eagle and have them reconnoiter this contact and ascertain ship type and number. I want to know what we’re looking at.”
“Right away sir.”
* * *
That was a question on Admiral Volsky’s mind as well that morning. Rodenko had reported no less than thirty separate contacts! At a range of 120 kilometers, the two forces were closing the distance between one another by at least 40 kilometers per hour. They would have the enemy on their horizon in under three hours time, and by noon the battle would be fully engaged. Yet Volsky had no intention of waiting for the enemy to get within gun range. He could have fired an hour ago, but chose to take the time to coordinate his actions with the other fleet elements.
As with the air strike, it was decided that Kirov would open the action, followed by Argos Fire. Then they would observe the enemy’s reaction, take battle damage assessment, and decide how to proceed.
“Well,” Volsky said to Rodenko. “I was laid up in sick bay with Doctor Zolkin when we last faced the Italian Navy. What kind of fight can we expect here, Mister Rodenko?”
“I suppose that depends on the men commanding that fleet,” came the answer. “They didn’t like our missiles, and we’ll again have the advantage of first shock. If we hit them hard enough here, we just might drive this fleet off.”
“That is my hope,” said Volsky. “We have thirty-two SSMs, correct Mister Samsonov?”
“Yes sir, nine Moskit-II, nine MOS-III, and the new missiles we received from Kazan, fourteen P-900s.”
“Then let us begin with a salvo of four P-900s. We’ll hit them and then see how they react. Can we target their capital ships?”
“Radar signal processing is fairly conclusive, sir,” said Rodenko. I can designate capital ship targets with high confidence.”
“Then I see no reason to wait any further. Fire your salvo, Samsonov. The ship will come to full battle stations.”
* * *
The man on the other side was also a familiar face in these actions, one Admiral Angelo Iachino, the very same man who had faced the wrath of Kirov off the Bonifacio Strait. When Da Zara’s cruisers had encountered a fast enemy ship in the Tyrrhenian Sea, and come off badly damaged near Calabria, Iachino was urged to sortie with his heavy battleships from La Spezia.
The history was different then. In that world the British attack on Taranto had occurred in November of 1940, a
nd the ships Iachino had at his disposal were those last survivors of that very successful attack. Cavour, Duilio and Littorio had all been damaged in that attack, but it had never happened. Iachino inherited the command of the Main battlefleet from Admiral Campione, who was deemed too cautious in the early encounters with the Royal Navy in 1940. Those battles had been inconclusive, and Iachino was now in command of a force capable of settling the entire issue of the war at sea in the Mediterranean, or so he believed.
“Wait for the Germans, wait for the French.” He shook his head when Admiral Bergamini cautioned him in a meeting they held aboard the battleship Caio Duilio. “I will do no such thing!” We have the entire fleet here, Bergamini, six battleships. The British have only four, and we match them in cruisers and destroyers as well. I’ll have the entire matter settled before the French ever get to the Straits of Messina.”
Iachino had every reason to be confident, but it was a boast he would soon come to regret. He had no conception of what was about to happen to his fleet, and he would soon face an attack that would come completely ‘out of the blue.’ The weather was still behind him, and ahead the skies were open and clear—until the first missiles came. His watch reported something in the sky, a thin white contrail, and he reached for his field glasses, raising them with a brown gloved hand. Iachino was a man in his early 50s, yet grey haired beneath his officer’s cap. He was in the second division, his flag aboard the new battleship Littorio, a ship that had been built to counter the French Dunkerque design.
Where Dunkerque had eight 12.9-inch guns and 225mm armor, Littorio would be built with nine 15-inch guns and 350mm of armor at the belt. Ahead of his ship, in the first battleship division, Admiral Bergamini had placed Conte Cavour in the vanguard, following with his flag on Caio Duilio, and with Andrea Doria rounding out that division. Iachino followed with the newer ships, Littorio, Veneto and Roma. Now Iachino spied the contrails in the blue sky, thinking it must be high flying planes. But he soon saw that they were moving much too fast. What were they?
“Enemy planes!” he shouted, with the only explanation that would rightfully come to his mind. “Fast!”
“Look sir, they are diving!” The watchman pointed, and Iachino could already see the AA guns on the battleships well ahead of him starting to train their barrels skyward. He gave the order for battle stations, the bells sounding as the men rushed to their weapons. “Arrogant,” he said aloud, clearly seeing four contrails now. “These must be fast reconnaissance planes. They think they can get down low and sneak in on us, but don’t they ever look over their shoulder? Those contrails can be seen for fifty miles!”
Then he heard a clamor from the men, raising his field glasses again to see what they were fussing about. The planes were swooping low—so low that it seemed they would crash right into the sea! Then, to his amazement, they began a shifting maneuver, a dizzy dance as they approached his leading battleship division. Some crazy pilots were thinking to make themselves difficult targets today. What were they doing? Were these torpedo bombers to be coming in that low? They were certainly not the lumbering British Swordfish—my god! Their speed!”
It was then that he saw the first dark fist of black smoke mushroom up from the ships ahead. The planes had suddenly put on a tremendous burst of speed, flashing in at Conte Cavour and Duilio. They had hurled themselves right at the battleships in a suicidal charge that sent all four to fiery deaths!
“What in god’s name has possessed the British,” said Iachino. “Are they so desperate that they are willing to sacrifice the lives of their pilots like this to get hits?”
Apparently so. But these planes had come in so fast that the battleships had barely trained their flak batteries before they struck home. No plane could travel at such speeds. He soon got the alarming reports from Bergamini. Both his ship and his lead battleship had been struck, and now a fatal flaw in the redesign of Conte Cavour was exposed. The ship had been completed in 1915, given several overhauls between the wars that extended her length and beam, upgraded AA guns, and even bored out her main guns to 12.6 inches. Her deck and barbette armor had also been thickened, adding weight that had caused her main belt armor to be completely submerged at full load. So when the P-900s struck, they hit the ship well above this heavy armor, and the 200 kilogram warheads moving at two and a half times the speed of sound during the final high speed run, carried a considerable impact.
Bergamini reported bad fires amidships on Conte Cavour, and the hull holed in two places with gaping black tears, over ten feet wide, that were now belching torrid flames with heavy smoke. His own ship Duilio had been struck at a different angle, with one hit on the sturdy conning tower about thirty feet below the bridge. The ship had not seen much of the fire of war. It had served only seventy hours at sea in WWI, then went through extensive refits similar to Cavour. She was nicked at Taranto, by the British attack there in the old history, but missed altogether in this altered history, as that attack had never been launched. Her initial wartime patrol had failed to find the enemy the previous year, and so the ship’s first real taste of battle would be this hard slap in the face from a P-900 Sizzler, and a punch to the gut when a second missile also struck her amidships.
In one hot minute a third of Iachino’s battleships were hit and burning. He gritted his teeth, angry that he had not insisted on fighter cover over the fleet. That would be something he would soon have to correct. But if the British were going to simply crash their aircraft into his ships like this… Was it desperate bravery on their part now? They knew they could not face me ship to ship here. Or was it simply madness?
He would soon learn that it was neither, for the missile attack had only just begun. It started with the fires, bright and fierce, but they would soon become burning coals in the guts of his battleships that would burn with unquenchable heat.
Part V
Turnabout
“Turnabout is Fair Play.”
― The Life and Uncommon Adventures
of Captain Dudley Bradstreet
(1755)
Chapter 13
Johannes Streich, commander of 5th Light Division, was at his wits end. He had been ordered to move his battlegroup south yet again, in another of Rommel’s wide enveloping movements. Bypassing Tobruk was one thing, and something Streich had real doubts about. It was difficult enough to get fuel and supplies up to the fighting units as it stood, and with the Australians holed up in Tobruk, there was always a threat they would break out and raise havoc if the Germans moved too far east.
For some days now the British seemed to have no stomach for battle, withdrawing first to Bardia and Sollum, and then yielding those positions to move further east. Now the Germans had come up against a new division, the 2nd New Zealanders, and they looked to be well dug in and prepared to make a stand. They spent a day moving units up and reconnoitering the situation, seeing that this was the place the British had determined to make their last stand. About 30 kilometers due south of Bug Bug on the coast, the long escarpment that had formed Wavell’s castle wall in the desert made a dog led at its farthest point from the sea, and then extended northeast in the general direction of Sidi Barani.
Just south of this dog leg the ground was very bad for armor and vehicles, with numerous silted depressions in some places, and hard rocky ground in others. There were also several hills and ridge lines that formed natural defensive barriers, and it was here that the 2nd New Zealand Division had been placed on defense. The remnant of 2nd Armored was held behind the lines of entrenched infantry to act as a fire brigade, and the position looked very strong to Streich. His troops were tired, his tanks needed maintenance, and there was always too little fuel to go around.
“Move south? Again?”
“I will not be handed a battle of attrition at Tobruk,” said Rommel stolidly. “If the enemy is there it is because that is where he wants me to attack him. Well I will not oblige him. Instead I plan to swing around the flank of that division like this.” He pointed to
the map, his finger tracing out the route he had in mind.
“Bir el Khamsa,” said Rommel. “The roads meet there, and beyond it is a British railhead in the making near Mishiefa, which we can use. They are extending the rail line from Mersa Matruh to that place, so it looks to be a big supply center. There is your gasoline, Streich. Sidi el Razig and Bir Thalata will be your primary objectives. It is presently undefended, and this whole area is only being screened by light reconnaissance units. Once we take that we will be in a good position to cut the rail line operation and outflank any planned defense of Sidi Barani.”
“Then you are not going to attack up the main road here?”
“Not directly. I’ll give that job to the Italian Ariete Division.”
“The Italians?”
“Yes, they won’t break through, but it will serve as a nice demonstration while we maneuver, as before. 15th Panzer will lead this envelopment, we will follow with 5th Light. Once we appear well behind the enemy on his flank, those infantry will think twice about holding on to their entrenchments. We will do with gasoline what might otherwise cost us men and material.”
“Assuming we have the gasoline!” Streich objected.
“Take what you need from non-essential vehicles, the flak batteries, except the 88s. They will be useful in case the British have more of those Matildas at hand.”
“But sir… Yes, we can probably move another 25 kilometers to Bir el Khamsa, but when we get there we will be wanting fuel, water, food, all left behind in this maneuver. Why not wait for the supply columns to come up and replenish before we make this turning action? That way, when we do reach Sidi Razig, there will still be gasoline in the tanks to do something more.”
Grand Alliance (Kirov Series) Page 11
