Kirov Saga: Hinge Of Fate: Altered States Volume III (Kirov Series) (32 page)

Fedorov
looked to Admiral Volsky, who nodded, giving him quiet permission to speak
further. “As to Soviet entry into the war,” he said, “Hitler decided that in
June of 1941 when he launched an operation called Barbarossa and attacked the
Soviet Union. That may or may not occur now. It all remains to be seen. As to
the American entry into the war, they are of a mind that they can remain
neutral until such time that they have adequate forces built up to make a
meaningful entry. But you can count on their support, Admiral. I think you
already know that much. The timing of their entry, as we knew it, was late in
1941.”

“A long
wait,” said Tovey with another sigh.

“And
there is one more thing you must know,” said Volsky. “We are here now, Admiral
Tovey, but we do not know how much longer we can stay put. Our candle is
burning as well, and if Mister Fedorov is correct, it may soon blow out. We may
be forced to leave this time before late July in 1941, or we could be facing another
problem—annihilation.”

“I
don’t understand,” said Tovey.

Volsky
explained. “We first shifted in time to arrive on the 28th of July, 1941. That
date therefore looms as quite a threat to our continued presence here.”

“I
see…” Tovey thought for a moment, suddenly remembering Alan Turing’s long
discourse concerning his watch. He shared the story with the Russians to see
what they might make of it.

“Amazing,”
said Volsky. “You say the watch vanished the day we arrived here, and then
turned up in that box?”

“Quite
so, Admiral, and our Mister Turing seems to think that when faced with the
inconvenient problem of having to account for two identical timepieces trying
to occupy the same moment, time seems to have simply moved his watch. Might the
same thing happen to your ship come next July?”

Volsky
raised his heavy eyebrows, wondering. “Fedorov? What do you think of this?”

“Very
strange, sir. Time seems to have exercised a little sleight of hand, just as
Kamenski might describe it. I would like to think we might get off just as
easily, but we are human beings, sir, not pocket watches, and moving us about
like that may be… uncomfortable.”

Part X

Wolves

“Don’t expect justice from the Lord of the Manor,

nor mercy from the Wolf Pack.”

—German Proverb

Chapter 28

Convoy
HX-69 was making good time, though it was just a little
late embarking from Halifax for the long journey to Liverpool. Now it was three
days out from its destination port, and though the sailors could almost smell
the scent of home in the tang of the rising wind and sea, this was one of the
most dangerous legs of the voyage.

It was
23 ships when it first set out from Halifax on the 28th of August, under
command of Commodore J. S. Ritchie of the Royal Navy Reserve, aboard the Dutch
steamer SS
Ulysses
. Nine more ships joined the odyssey at sea two days
later, and another 15 ships on September 1st to swell the ranks to 47 ships.
Ulysses
was a stately looking merchant steamer, with a long black hull trimmed in white
at the gunwales and a tall single stack amidships. There had been no suitable
British ship available at Halifax, and so the Commodore gratefully accepted
Ulysses
as his convoy flag. The Dutch crew was smart and efficient, though Ritchie
noted they were a bit loose in maintaining steady revolutions on the turbine.
The ships speed might vary between seven and ten knots, but maintained a good
average over time.

Captain
Jugtenberg and the other Dutch officers were excellent navigators, taking
regular measurements with compass and sextant, and there was easy cooperation
between Ritchie’s staff officers and the Dutch crew. The convoy was carrying a
wide range of minerals and supplies—iron ore, bauxite, steel, lumber, diesel
oil, gasoline, sulfur, and other general cargo.

Commodore
Ritchie had been pleased to have had a fairly uneventful crossing until they
encountered heavy swells on September 3rd. One sheep, the SS
Condor
fell
astern with engine trouble, but managed to catch up in time for the planned
emergency turn maneuver executed on September 5th. Ritchie remarked that the
station keeping and overall speed of the convoy was the best he had ever seen.
On the 7th, however, the sea increased at midnight, with a fresh gale force
wind from the northwest frothing up rough seas at dawn the following morning.
Fimbulwinter was upon them, though no man in the convoy knew it just then.

The
ships were spread out in lines of nine abreast, with
Ulysses
in the
number five position on row one. Seven of the ships were newly arriving escorts,
sent out to bring the convoy home on this final three day run. They included
older Admiralty Class destroyers like HMS
Arrow
and
Winchelsea,
the
Canadian destroyers
Saguenay
and
Assinboine
, and corvettes HMS
Heartsease
,
Clarika
and
Camelia
.

Ritchie
felt fairly well protected to have seven sheep dogs escorting his flock now,
but the wolves were about on the wild sea that day and they would have more
work than they expected.
Arrow
was part of the Western Approaches
Defense Force based at Greenock. Commander Herbert Wyndham Williams, had her
out in front of the convoy, nervously sniffing the waters for any sign of the
U-boats that made this place a favorite hunting ground. He was supposed to have
been destined to take a promotion to the light cruiser
Birmingham
one
day, but that would not happen in this timeline. The Germans had already put
that ship at the bottom of the Denmark Strait.

HX-69
was also supposed to have completed its run into British ports without
incident, but that history was about to change as well. Williams had already
seen evidence of wolves on the prowl when he stopped to pick up survivors of
Poseidon,
a Greek ship that had been torpedoed a few days ago. Now he was feeling
just a little ill at ease, the cold wind biting, with the promise of a hard
winter to come in the months ahead.

At
09:00 a signal came in that a periscope had been spotted off the starboard side
of the convoy. HMS
Winchelsea
was on the watch there, and was quick into
action churning up the choppy seas even more with a burst of speed. Commodore
Ritchie ordered the convoy to make an emergency turn to port, away from the attack
but he was too late. A torpedo wake was sighted and within a minute the oiler
Charles
F. Meyer
exploded in an angry red fireball and was soon enshrouded with
acrid black smoke.

U-99, a
Type VIIB boat under Kapitan Otto Kretschmer, had just taken the first bite out
of HX-69. When he saw the massive explosion in his periscope, Kretschmer
smiled, thinking his good luck was holding after a shaky start. On his first
patrol, he was returning to Bergen with a medical casualty when he sailed into
the path of the German battlecruiser
Scharnhorst
. An eagle-eyed
Arado
pilot thought he was seeing a British submarine and swooped into attack. Before
he reached port the submarine was attacked a second time by German aircraft,
and six days later he had to make another emergency dive when a German plane
dropped three bombs on his position, sending him all the way to the seabed
where he bumped his nose with a hard knock.

Those
days were over, and he had settled in to three more good patrols since that
time. He logged 22,700 tons on his second patrol, bettered that with 57,890
tons on his third patrol, and already had over 18,000 tons up on this patrol
with another two weeks left to hunt. Kretschmer already had one Knight’s Cross
for his work, and he was aiming to get his oak leaves this time around, and destined
to be the number one U-boat ace in the Kriegsmarine.

“That
had to be in oiler,” he said quietly to his First Watch Officer, Leutnant Klaus
Bargsten. “Come right twenty degrees. Emergency down bubble, and make your
depth 150 feet. There's a pesky destroyer up there looking for us.”

Winchelsea
would have no luck that day, because Otto Kreschmer was a
fated man. Bargsten nodded with a smile, not knowing at that moment that his
own personal fate would be destined to become entangled with that of a mysterious
unknown ship. In one telling of those events, Bargsten would command U-563 with
orders to join the
Grönland
wolfpack forming up south of Iceland
in August of 1941, but the boat’s Captain would see something in his periscope
lens that pricked his curiosity. He spotted what looked to be two British
battleships, which were in fact
King George V
and
Repulse
hastening west. Both ships were hit and burning, and Bargsten came to believe
that there must be other U-boats about. Eager to get into the action, he turned
west, and eventually came very near another strange looking vessel, which he
tried to engage with a badly planned long shot. He paid for that mistake with
his life, because the long shot he took came in a moment of great tension on
the bridge of the battlecruiser
Kirov
.

At that time Captain Vladimir
Karpov had just seized control of the ship in the North Atlantic, intending to
force a decisive engagement with the Allied fleets that were hunting him. The
strident warning called out by Tasarov, torpedo in the water, set Karpov off like
a time bomb, and before the incident ran its course, the massive angry mushroom
cloud of a nuclear weapon would blight the Earth for the first time in human
history.

In so many ways, Bargsten was the
match that lit the fuse to begin the great unraveling of the history that had
taken so many centuries to weave. His was but a single errant thread, yet, when
pulled upon, it precipitated chaos in the loom of fate and time. And there he was
again this day, huddled in the conning tower of U-99, smiling at his Kapitan,
taking silent lessons as he watched how easily Kreschmer commanded his boat—the
devil’s apprentice.

Kreschmer would hit 46 ships in
his brief career, under the emblem of the lucky golden horseshoe painted
prominently on the sail of the boat. A quiet, methodical man, Kreschmer had
earned the nickname ‘Silent Otto’ as he worked his craft. His motto was ‘One
torpedo… one ship,’ and he demonstrated that with the swift kill he had just
logged against the oiler
Charles F. Meyer
. He would always say that his mission was to sink ships,
and not men, and would render assistance to any survivors he ever could, but
this time the close proximity of the British destroyer forced him to evade. But
he had his kill, on his way to become the tonnage king of the U-boat service
sinking over 273,000 tons.

One day I will get my chance,
thought Bargsten as he watched his Kapitan with admiration. He would end up
sinking less than one percent of Kreschmer’s unmatched tonnage, just 22,171
tons in the five kills he would log in his career, but the last torpedo he would
fire would shatter the history of the world.

“We’ll linger here for a while,
then creep up on them again tonight,” said Kreschmer. He was famous for his
night attacks, firing from the surface, but with the moon waxing, the weather
would have to stay clouded over for him to risk that tactic. He would end up
getting one more ship later that day, a vessel carrying sugar and rum called
Traveller
,
much to the chagrin of sailors back in Liverpool who were expecting the rum.
That kill convinced Commodore Ritchie that he was in infested waters here,
which prompted him to make a fateful decision.

“We’ll get no mercy from the wolf
pack,” he said to his first mate. Let’s alter course just after sunset and come
fifteen points to port.”

The convoy would execute the
maneuver smartly on command, and it would take the remaining 45 ships right into
the path of another great wolf, the Lord of the Manor, flagship of the German
Navy, battleship
Hindenburg
.

* * *

Tovey
was back aboard HMS
Invincible
when he got the news that a scout plane out from the fledgling air base on the
Faeroe Islands had failed to return. What he first took to be trouble with the
thickening weather soon became cause for alarm. A message was received saying
the plane had been engaged by German fighters, and shot down. That could only
mean that the German aircraft carrier
Graf Zeppelin
was on the prowl
somewhere near those islands, as they were too far from Bergen to be bothered
by fighters based at that location.

This led Tovey to reconsider his
deployment of the other two battleships. They had been steaming northwest all
day, and were now in a position some 200 miles west of the Faeroes. What if the
Germans shunned the more distant coast of Iceland and turned south near those
islands instead? He immediately sent a signal to the Admiralty, and Captain
Patterson on
King George V,
suggesting this possibility, and advising
the cruiser
Kent
should investigate. Admiral Pound sent back a contrary
opinion. Tovey was handed the message ten minutes later.
“Admiralty and
First Sea Lord do not concur. Continue on your original posting. HMS Kent to
remain on station with Illustrious.”