“Get a message to Fein and find out how bad it is. Then signal Tirpitz and Hindenburg and see that they are informed—Gneisenau hit by torpedoes, amidships and aft. Speed falling off and damage appears significant.”
* * *
“Two hits on lead ship sir,” said Chernov. “That had to hurt.”
“Two 65s would do the job on most any ship we hit,” said Gromyko. “Even a big supercarrier could not shrug off a pair of those lovelies. Very well—load tubes one and three. More of the same. Make your target the number two ship—birds on a wire.” He smiled.
But no one’s plans were to be left intact that day. The unexpected kernel of chaos at the heart of all battles was again to wreak havoc. Chernov was suddenly very still, his eyes on a module to his left where a red light began to flutter. He inclined his head, flipping a switch there, and listening, eyes closed.
“Con…. Undersea contact. Possible submarine…”
Gromyko turned, a question in his eyes. “An uninvited guest,” he said. “German U-boat?”
There was a moment’s hesitation as Chernov continued to toggle switches on the module he had been using to process the signal. “Sir… This sounds like a British sub.” His voice carried a note of alarm that surprised Gromyko, and he never liked surprises, particularly when he had his bulls lined up one after another, two lances in the first, and was ready to skewer the second.
“British? We were not informed they had anything out here.”
“Sir! This is crazy. It’s reading as Astute Class!” He gave Gromyko a shocked expression. “We got lucky and recorded one boat after learning its deployment date. It’s the only profile we’ve ever managed to get, but my readings are above a 90% match for this signal.”
“Impossible,” said Gromyko, but then a deeper instinct asserted itself, reptilian, a reflex born of many hours beneath the sea. “All stop!” he said. “Launch noisemaker sled number one. Then right rudder fifteen, down bubble fifteen! Rig for emergency silent running!”
Kazan maneuvered like a shadow, its engines suddenly stilled, a great dark whale rolling over and slowly diving into the depths of the sea. At the same time, a special port on the nose of the ship launched a screw-driven sled, which trundled forward on the sub’s original course, leaving a trail of sound behind it designed to imitate Kazan’s normal operating acoustic signature. The Matador twirled his cape, and now spun deftly away from a threat he presumed was imminent. If Chernov was correct, and he was hearing a British Astute Class sub, then they most certainly heard Kazan as well. The boat had been very shallow, and Gromyko’s instinct was to get down below the thermocline as quickly and quietly as possible. Any adversary stalking him would likely be above it if they had a fix on him, but he needed to move whisper soft… descend… descend… Hoping his noise sled would cover his escape as planned.
Even as he finished his steering order, Chernov’s eyes widened again, and he heard the one thing every submariner feared, yet the one thing he might expect if the contact report was solid.
“Torpedos in the water!”
God almighty, thought Gromyko. Which damn war are we fighting here?
Chapter 30
Only one man saw it when it came through—saw it with the dead eyes of a cadaver, bound in the weighted polyurethane of a body bag, and wrapped in the red, white, and blue stripes of the Russian flag. If any part of Lenkov could have seen, he would have borne witness when a hole seemed to open in the sea around him, shimmering green phosphors lighting up the murky depths above Peake’s Deep.
It moved like a great whale, silent, sullen, a dark thing in the sea, deathly quiet as it climbed for the wan light above. Its sides were coated with a special series of tiles that muted sound. Two thin fins protruded from either side of its upper body, above the massive, bulbous nose. Behind them the thin metal sail was bristling with strange spikes, the sensory suite of one of the most advanced submarines ever designed.
Chernov had lived up to his reputation as one of the best Sonarmen in the fleet, and the single lucky profile the Russian Navy had obtained on an Astute Class British submarine had been just enough of the sound puzzle to let him make the call, and give his incredulous warning. After that Gromyko was all reflex, for there would be time for thought and reason only if he survived to ever think again.
His Sonarman had called it right, and Lenkov would have said as much, for only he had seen it come. And he had also seen one other thing, twinkling with light in spite of the murky gloom as the water deepened—The Devil’s Teardrop. It had gone over one gunwale even as Lenkov had gone over the other, and together they slipped silently into the depths, until another moment of pure happenstance came into play, eighty years on…
The sea was no less dangerous there, with the scourge of war imminent as HMS Ambush drifted in the vanguard of a small flotilla of ships. The hastily assembled convoy was a motley combination of Royal Fleet Auxiliary ships, and a few civilian transports that had been press-ganged into service. There had been only one surface warship available for escort duty, and Captain James “Sandy” Vann aboard the Ambush was tapped to lend a hand. He was commander of S120, boat number two in the class, her keel laid on the 22nd of October, 2003, built out in Britain’s premier sub den, the isolated coast near Barrow-in-Furness near Lancaster on Morcambe Bay. The place had been famous for building ships for many generations. Ships for Cunard and the Orient Lines had been built there since 1873, and at one time, Sir Barnes Neville Wallis used it to design and build airships for the British during the First World War. So the people there were long used to strange vessels taking shape in the shipyards, and the sound of engineering and secret works were often underway into the wee hours of the night.
The subs were spawned from within the massive enclosed structure of Devonshire Dock Hall, big enough to house the old airships that had once been built in that place in an earlier time. Now it saw the slow, precision building of the whale-like subs, with technicians creeping over the flukes and flanks of the beast, emerging from its innards on long metal ladders. Using a pressurized water reactor and pump jet propulsor system, the boat was said to be the quietest in the world.
In more modern times, destroyers and even the carrier Invincible were built there, and it was also a principle base for the design and secret construction of Britain’s most stealthy new submarine, the Astute class, which first launched in the year 2010.
Ambush was also strangely entangled with the fate lines of the Russian battlecruiser Kirov. The sub had been lurking in the waters of the Norwegian Sea, skulking so stealthily that not even Tasarov had noticed it at first. And it had been witness to a very strange event that day, an undersea explosion that seemed to take both the Russian battlecruiser, and the sub accompanying it, to their doom. It had returned to port, where a change of command took place, and many questions were asked about the mission it had been on, and whether or not it had succeeded or failed.
Now the new commander, Captain Sandy Vann, was out to sea in those dark hours in late 2021. Yet instead of prowling the depths as the hunter-killer the sub actually was, Ambush had been posted as a stealthy sheepdog for a most important convoy bound for Mersa Matruh. Seven ships were scheduled to rendezvous there to receive the troops, vehicles, and materiel of the British 7th Armored Brigade, which had been on station in the deep deserts of Egypt ever since the incident at Sultan Apache oil fields.
The little fleet was composed of RoRo units, the ‘Roll on—Roll off’ ships that could accommodate the heavy vehicles of the Brigade. There sailed Hurst, Hartland, Anvil Point and Eddystone, and a civilian ferry sailing under an Irish registry was also along, the Ulysses. Capable of lifting 2000 personnel and over 1300 vehicles, the multi-deck ferry was the odd-fellow in the group, with three of its twelve decks styled to cater to civilian tourists, and all on a theme dedicated to the author of the great book by T.S. Eliot the ship was named after, Ulysses.
But all the curio shops, boutiques and eateries were closed that day, and we
ll shuttered. No children played at Silly Milly’s Fun House aboard Ulysses, and the seats in the Volta Picture Theatre were empty, the screen dark, as the sky erupted above the flotilla with the explosion of a 15 megaton warhead.
And so, just as the men and machines of Kinlan’s had met a similar fate at Sultan Apache, the sailors and ships that had been intended to retrieve them would also be caught between the wild energy of two poles, a nuclear blast above, the strangely shimmering madness of the Devil’s Teardrop below—eighty years and long fathoms below, yet right there, in that very same spot where Lenkov drifted in his last, lonesome watch. The object did exactly what it had done before, serving as a beacon that pulled the mass blown through the shattered borders of time that separate one moment from another, one age from another, one arrangement of everything that ever was from some other arrangement. Some strange quantum entanglement had joined these two incidents together in a bizarre twist of fate.
The missile that sought to destroy all these ships had exploded too high, another glitch in a computer that saw the warhead detonate earlier than planned. The resulting shock had been enough to breach the increasingly fragile fabric of space-time in the region, and the Devil’s Teardrop had pulled everything within a three mile radius through the hole that opened in time. The entire convoy had been swallowed whole, including Ambush, which was cruising beneath them, very shallow. As fate would have it, they had appeared many hours sailing time after Fedorov first threw that object over the side, even as Lenkov and the Devil’s Teardrop had both finally settled to their final resting place in Peake’s Deep.
Now Captain Vann stood on the bridge of his hunter-killer sub, a perplexed look on his face, his blonde hair and mustache lending him the nickname “Sandy” among his fellow officers.
“You don’t look happy, Mister Harland,” he said to his Sonarman where he sat before the Thales 2076 system monitors, perhaps the best sonar equipment ever designed. It was said a boat like Sandy’s could hover in the English Channel, yet still hear the maritime traffic in and out of New York harbor, and identify specific ships by the acoustic signatures they sent across the wide Atlantic, ripples in the proverbial pond.
The Captain’s statement was spot on, for Mister Harland had just seen an odd ripple of another sort pass over his screens, and heard a strange crackle of static in his headphones. He sat there, like a poker player who had been placing bets on a sure hand, suddenly shocked to look down and see all his cards had changed, and he was now holding a whole new hand!
The low suits were still there, the seven convoy ships all in place in their proper steaming order. The clatter of the RFA repair ship Diligence was rattling in his ear and scratching the sonic signature lines on his screen with its 10,800 tons. The four Point-Class sealift ships were there, all in a row at 23,000 tons each. Ulysses and the replenishment oiler Fort Victoria brought up the rear, but the Type 45 destroyer Duncan assigned for air defense was suddenly missing. It had been well off the starboard side of the flotilla, standing it’s vigilant watch.
“I’ve lost Duncan, sir.”
“Lost her? Whatever do you mean?”
“Just that, Captain. I have all the convoy ships, clear as a bell, but Duncan is gone! I’ve no reading on the destroyer at all now, and my equipment just experienced an odd glitch.”
“System malfunction? Well get it sorted out.” Captain Vann turned to his communications officer now. “Send code to Duncan. Ask them to report their status and see if they have anything on their Sampson radar that we should know about.”
The Com officer had a legendary name, Lieutenant Samuel Morse, named after the man who had helped develop the dot-dash code that once clattered through the airwaves from ship to shore, and was still in use in 2021. Morse got the signal off, but sat at his station, lips pursed, waiting unsatisfied for a reply.
“No signal confirmation, sir,” he said.
Vann did not like the sound of that. The system should have immediately returned confirmation, even if no reply was sent by Duncan. The electronics on both sides of the transmission would have shaken hands, but nothing came back.
“Send to Diligence. They should have Duncan on radar. Perhaps something went bonkers up there and the destroyer’s communications are down.”
Diligence was accustomed to working with the older British Trafalgar Class subs as a support ship, mostly east of Suez, but this time she was out in the Atlantic Support Group, assigned to this special run down to the Med. She was the primary at-sea battle damage repair ship of the modern Royal Navy, her holds crowded with material for that job, and equipment like lathes, drills, grinders and welding tools crowding her workshops. She was also a supply and munitions replenishment ship, with a magazine of munitions intended for the 7th Brigade when they reached Mersa Matruh.
If they reached Mersa Matruh… That destination was now a very chancy affair, for the ship now unknowingly led its flotilla thru the uncertain waters of 1941, yet was still bound to make its appointed rounds for the 7th Brigade. It was some time before Lieutenant Morse had his reply.
“The com-channel is very cloudy, sir, but I finally got through. Diligence reports odd static on a lot of its equipment. They also report strange effects in the sky and discoloration in the sea.”
“Discoloration?”
“That’s what they say’s sir. In fact, they asked if all was well down here. They say it looks like the Aurora Borealis, but it’s on every horizon.”
That didn’t sound good to Captain Vann, and his mind began to piece the puzzle together, strange as it seemed. “Anything from Whale Island?” he asked, referring to the Maritime Warfare Center HQ there at Portsmouth. He was thinking there may have been a war order, or warning message somewhere in the system.
“Nothing sir.”
Now Vann looked at his Executive Officer, Commander Avrey Bell, a thin man with just the wisp of an allowable mustache beneath his nose, and round, brown eyes. “Shall we sneak up to have a look about?” asked the Captain, and Bell nodded, there being no other threats apparent.
“Were running shallow. Make it so.”
Vann wanted to send up his photonic mast, replete with sensors, cameras and communications antennae, to get a better picture of what was happening topside. All his ducks were still in a row, except Duncan, which remained mysteriously silent. The thought that the strange sky effects reported might have been an attack on the convoy was first to his mind, yet they had no messages from any other ship, and the signals from Diligence seemed more perplexing than alarming.
Yet his day was going to get progressively worse from that point forward. Sonarman Harland soon turned his head again, a warning look in his eyes. “Contacts—numerous surface contacts—processing now.”
Vann waited, and the news he soon got was most unsettling. His man had some difficulty with the reading, switching from one profile bank to another in an effort to find a signal match, but finding nothing—save one.
“Are you certain?” The Captain gave Mister Harland a hard look. “That ship was reported missing months ago. Why, this very boat was on station when it happened.”
“Well, I think we’ve found it sir. My reading is 90 percent confident, though there’s and odd ripple to the signature now.”
“Could this be another ship in that class?”
“Possibly sir, but my tonals and resonance factors are all coming up roses for the flagship. It’s Kirov. I’m almost certain of that now.”
“Bloody hell,” said Vann, again looking to Bell for his reaction. The XO drifted over, and the three men now huddled over the Sonar station.
“Where have you been, you little bandit,” said Bell. “Skulking about, were you?” Submarines like Ambush could move about the seas, unseen, unreported for months at a time, but not the big surface ships. He looked at the Captain, waiting to see what he would do.
“It’s not alone, sir,” said Harland. “There’s another big signal here, but I have no profile on it whatsoever.”
&n
bsp; “A big signal? Another warship?”
“It has to be well over 30,000 tons to be making this much noise, sir. Very strange. Noisy bugger, this one. And now I’m getting data from much farther out. There looks to be something off our port side, perhaps a hundred miles out, also very strong for something at that range. Then here, sir. There are two more groups—one to our west, and one a little southwest. Yet I can’t profile a single ship… wait a second… hold on sir…”
“Come on, Harley,” said Vann using his Sonarman’s nickname. “Get hold of this.”
“I’ve a reading for a Type 45—maybe Duncan, sir. But it’s over 60 nautical miles out now.”
“The damn ship was ten miles off our starboard bow not ten minutes ago,” said the Captain. “There’s no way on earth that could be Duncan.”
“It’s a Type-45, sir. With the photonics mast up I can pick up a Sampson radar set carrier wave.”
Vann put his hands on his hips, like a man about to dress down a group of misbehaving school boys. “What in god’s name is going on?”
His mind was racing now. Something swept over their equipment, a subtle glitch, then Duncan comes up missing and the Captains up topside report strange effects in the sky and sea. Apparently it took some minutes for his submarine’s own electronics to settle down, because Mister Harland reported those additional contacts ten minutes later. Was this an attack? Did it have something to do with the sudden appearance of that Russian battlecruiser? If the damn thing was really out there—Kirov—the ship that had started this whole situation unraveling when it went missing in the Norwegian Sea last July, then why didn’t old Harley have a leash on the ship sooner? It was only sixty miles off, and all these other odd contacts he was processing now were all within 120 nautical miles. The sea around him was full of ships that simply weren’t there fifteen minutes ago, and he found that to be a situation that skirted the impossible. Could this system glitch they experienced have quietly happened some time ago, so subtle that they missed it?
Paradox Hour Page 26