Golem 7 (Meridian Series)

by John Schettler

  “Damn,” said Kelly. “You’re right. The best defense is a good offence.”

  Paul just looked at him, the light of yet another realization gleaming in his eyes. “That’s it!” he said snapping his fingers. “By God, that’s it!”

  Chapter 11

  Lawrence Berkeley Labs, Arch Complex, 8:20 A.M.

  Maeve sighed. “I don’t see any clear way we can intervene yet. We keyed on this British cruiser, but the Assassins could have operated against any of the other Pushpoints as well—like Lütjens’ decision not to refuel, or the faulty radar set on Bismarck that caused Prince Eugen to take the lead, anything.”

  “That sounds suspicious too,” said Kelly. “Just like Sheffield takes the lead in the altered history line and runs into that German battlecruiser. Are we seeing a pattern here?”

  “Wishful thinking is more likely,” said Maeve. “If you suspect tampering with Bismarck’s radar, then they would have to have an agent aboard the battleship.”

  “Not necessarily,” Kelly argued. “They could have sabotaged it during construction.”

  “And timed its failure specifically for this sea engagement?” Maeve didn’t buy it.

  Paul waved his hand excitedly. “Hold on, people. This will lead us around in circles again. I think we’ve established that the Pushpoints involved here are not easily restored once they are disturbed. The campaign is too fragile. It seems like any little nudge this way or that results in a scenario that favors Bismarck, at least if we mess with the Pushpoints we’ve been focusing on thus far. It shows you just how lucky the British were in this campaign.”

  “So what are we going to do?” Kelly looked at him, stroking his chin.

  “We’re going on offense,” said Paul. “We’re going to attack. I said it earlier, and it looks like it’s coming down to exactly that. We’ve seen how futile it is to try and restack the cards defensively. Let’s face it, Bismarck had more than a good chance of making it safely to a French port. That she failed to do so hinged upon a number of very shaky events, any one of which may be sufficient to decide things in her favor if it fails to occur. It was sheer luck that the British got that hit on her rudder near the end. But, by God, we have to sink that damn ship—one way or another. It’s the only way we can reverse this intervention. We have to go on offense here and sink the Bismarck.”

  “Aye, aye, sir!” Maeve gave him a salute. “But isn’t that what we’ve been trying to accomplish all along? You have a new idea here?”

  “That I do,” said Paul. “It occurred to me when I realized that bit about Resonance. If we can sample Resonance filtering in from other possible Meridians in a Nexus Point, then the Assassins can too, just as you suggested. And if this is the way they ran this mission, then we have to fight fire with fire here. We can’t go about trying to uncover and snuff out their intervention. We have to counterattack, and we use the Golems to sample Resonance until we come up with something that sinks her.”

  “But what, pray tell, do we use for ammunition?” Maeve was still playing devil’s advocate, but Paul gave her a knowing smile.

  “Information,” he said quietly. “Knowledge is power, right? And we know the entire history of this very famous battle, from one end to another. Remember that movie called Final Countdown? It was about a modern day aircraft carrier that gets transported back in Time to the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor. They knew exactly where and when the Japanese were going to attack, and with that knowledge that single ship could have taken out Nagumo’s entire carrier task force.”

  “That’s the flick with Kirk Douglas!” said Kelly. “But they don’t do that in the movie.”

  “The point is, they could have,” said Paul.

  “Well we don’t have an aircraft carrier to spare here either,” said Maeve, “at least I didn’t see one down in the garage.”

  “But we do have information,” Paul said coolly, “information vital to the outcome of this battle. You’ve heard the expression ‘loose lips sink ships?’ Well we’re going to loosen up these lips, ladies and gentlemen. If we get the right information to Royal Navy Intelligence, at the right time, then my bet is that they’ll do the rest of the work and sink the Bismarck.” He looked directly at Maeve, because he knew his suggestion was fairly radical. It was her watch on Outcomes and Consequences that had set the rules and parameters of past operations. What he was proposing now was probably going to sound treasonous to her, perhaps even insane.

  She thought for a minute, saying nothing. Kelly looked at Paul, then Maeve, but neither one spoke. Paul had learned a good lesson selling shoes as a very young man. In any sales situation there comes a moment in the pitch where you toss the question to the customer, and then shut up. Nine times out of ten the person who speaks next loses. He had made his proposition and he simply folded his arms, waiting.

  Kelly was just about to say something, but he saw Paul move a hand slightly as if to wave him off. Then Maeve broke her silence and weighed in.

  “Explain,” she said, angling for more clarity. “How do you propose to notify British Intelligence?”

  Paul had not thought through all the possibilities, but he was relieved not to hear a flat out NO on Maeve’s part. This was a fairly direct tampering with the course of events. He was amazed that she held her composure, and he crept carefully into a few possibilities, hoping he would not end up in a long argument.

  “Most signals traveled by wire,” said Paul. “Agents and operators were all over Europe—coast watchers, the Free French underground, and British and American agents as well. They sent lots of coded messages by cable, and there were also established telephone links. The Admiralty had a direct secure line out to the Admiral of the Home Fleet where he rode at anchor in Scapa Flow.”

  “You’re suggesting one of us goes back and cables the Admiralty?”

  “That’s about the size of it,” said Paul. “Would you like fries with that?”

  Kelly smiled. “It’s a good idea, Maeve,” he chipped in. “Doesn’t sound dangerous, either. All we’d have to do is get to a telegraph station—anywhere. We could shift into merry old England and waltz over to the telegraph office, send a nice cable to First Sea Lord Pound, then find a good pub and have a few brewskies!”

  Maeve angled her head to one side, lips pursed with a look of admonishment that soon gave way to a smile.

  “For that matter, we could even run a Spook Job,” Paul suggested. “A quick in and out.”

  “You want to toss the First Sea Lord an apple or two?” said Maeve.

  “Well, we’ve seen the technique work once already to save all Christendom and the Western world,” Paul smiled.

  “With a little help from yours truly, and a good Arabian stallion,” Maeve returned.

  “Right,” said Paul. “And look how we received that invitation to send Robert back. You see what I mean? A message can travel much easier than a person—and with very little risk.”

  “Assuming it gets to the right hands,” said Maeve. “The Admiralty doesn’t have a working Arch, do they?”

  “No but they’ve got working telephones. The key thing here is that it’s the information that’s decisive. In this campaign a little foreknowledge goes a long way. Our adversaries knew exactly where to aim their kick. They took out Sheffield in this instance, with a very simple intervention using that fishing trawler—I’m sure that’s what they planned. They may not have known what the actual outcome would be in the beginning, but my guess is that they thought it would weaken Force H in some way, or simply strengthen the German hand by sparing Gneisenau. They probably had no idea it would even work—“

  “Until it did work,” said Maeve.

  “Right you are,” Paul continued. “They got the result they were hoping for and we got Palma. Now… there are loads of other vital points in this battle that we could impact with crucial information delivered at a key moment. We can operate just as they do. We get information to key players in the scheme of things, the Primes, and t
hen we sample Resonance from here to see if it has the desired effect. When we get an outcome that ends up sinking the Bismarck, we can go have a good pizza and hopefully get some rest before the next alert goes off.”

  Maeve shrugged. She realized what this meant—direct intervention, providing information that the Prime Movers in the scenario would not have been privy to. It had real risks, but the more she thought about it the more she came to conclude that the impact would probably be limited. It might affect the outcome of this battle, and then stop there, at least she hoped as much. And how was this any different from making sure a bishop and his family get cut down by Dodo and his armed thugs while you stand there watching, fully responsible? Kelly was correct when he said this was wartime now. The gloves were off. Bismarck was fated to die, and all they would be doing is making sure she meets her appointment with a couple of British battleships.

  She looked at Paul and decided. “Work up a scenario,” she said. “I’ll go get Kelly his peanut butter and jelly sandwich and check on the professor.

  Paul exhaled with relief. This just might work, he thought. He had a sudden thrill that he was about to assume that omniscient-like role that he often took when playing one of his war game simulations. Every time he played he realized that he was acting with full knowledge of the history involved, the mistakes and successes of both sides, and the outcome. As a game designer he was always trying to create rules and systems aimed at frustrating or neutralizing the human player’s inherent advantage of historical hindsight. He had played many games where the computer AI was programmed and given special bonus skills to try and offset this advantage, but no computer had been able to beat him yet. His knowledge of the history, combined with good strategy and tactical sense, made him a master of the board. Computers could beat human chess players because the outcome of each new game was completely unknown at the beginning. But Paul knew how this game needed to end, and he was determined to win it, one way or another.

  “Let’s get busy, Kelly. Those damn Assassins just messed with the wrong guy.” Paul pulled up a chair, ready for battle. “Now the British knew Bismarck was out. She made stops at Grimstad Fiord and at the Norwegian port of Bergen, where they photographed her earlier. Naturally they kept flying recon missions over those locations to see if she was still there, but the weather was bad, and by the time they got a break Bismarck had already left. They overflew both targets and saw no sign of the Germans, but this was a full thirty hours after Bismarck steamed.”

  “So they were late getting orders out to the fleet?”

  “Correct. It was no small matter to send thousands of tons of military shipping out, packed to the gills with fuel, ammunition, not to mention thousands of sailors. They would only act on reliable information, and this is our first opportunity to get it to them.”

  “Lay it on me,” said Kelly. “What do you suggest?”

  “This may be a stretch,” said Paul, “but what if we rigged up a short wave to broadcast, perhaps using Morse code, and also using code words we know were viable at that time given our hindsight on the data. Now we just shift that baby in on a Spook Job—just long enough to broadcast its message—and then we yank it back here.”

  “I’ve got some cool radio equipment down in the computer lab,” said Kelly. “One has an audio dock and I can load MP3s into it, and time them for playback.”

  “Maeve is going to be a problem on this one,” said Paul. “We’re talking about a solid state component here, with transistors, not tubes, right?”

  “And on-board microchips, a gig of RAM, a USB port with MP3 dock, and an account with iTunes,” Kelly smiled. “That’s going to be a real problem with Maeve, believe me.”

  “Well it would only be for a very few seconds—in and out. We can select an isolated area as well to prevent any chance of it being seen during those few seconds. Hell, the damn Assassins don’t have these qualms. The Order thinks they have some kind of mobile equipment they can deploy and interface with natural power sources like the Oklo reaction I stumbled upon in Wadi Rumm.”

  “Yeah, but we don’t know if they’re taking it back in Time. That was in our era. Remember, Maeve will have to sign off on this, and we’re talking about a woman who fed your apple to her horse and then ate the damn message you sent to make sure nothing would be left behind.”

  Paul raised his brows, a pensive expression on his face. “I see what you mean,” he said. “She gave me a pass when I smuggled that .22 rifle in on the Grimwald mission, but she’ll go ballistic if we try to shift in modern equipment like that.”

  “Well…” Kelly thought for a minute. “Rantgar made a point of saying it was easy to transmit information through Time. Suppose I set the thing up and we place it just behind the event horizon line in the Arch Bay. Then I open the continuum and we broadcast a coded message—we just send the information through! Hell, if it doesn’t work then we can always fall back on my plan to shift in and send a cable.”

  “I’ll bet you’d love to get your hand on a pint or two in a pub,” Paul smiled. “Alright, my friend, can you set this thing up to transmit Morse code?”

  “I can transmit it myself, right here from the console. I know the code. All I have to do is plug a Wifi adapter into the USB port on the radio, and we can link it to our system here easily enough.”

  “Cool! Let’s do it,” said Paul.

  “Then what’s the message?”

  “I’ll need to do some research first,” said Paul. “Let’s see if we can call up some records of wartime signals traffic and codes.”

  Chapter 12

  Lawrence Berkeley Labs, Arch Complex, 9:10 A.M.

  Nordhausen had been pouring over history files, comparing RAM Bank data to new Golem reports on the altered Meridian they found themselves marooned on now. He was looking at all the Pushpoints in the campaign as Paul had described it, frustrated to find it still so difficult to piece together a coherent picture of events, even these very significant actions from recent modern history.

  Facts were jumbling up in his head, and he could see no clear way through them. They stretched out like stepping stones across a fast running stream. He would get one bit of seemingly useful information here, another there. But finding a way to jump from one to the next and cross the stream was proving more difficult than he thought. On more than one occasion he had worked forward from an assumption based on some information he had uncovered, only to find other facts rendered his assumption invalid.

  Maeve found him working at the History Module, sipping at a lukewarm cup of coffee and jotting down notes on a lined paper notebook at his side. Even in the computerized world, where everything had its digital expression, he still found something about a good pen and clean white paper to be comforting.

  “Any luck, professor?” She came in with a pot of fresh coffee and warmed his mug.

  “Thank you—but no, I haven’t come across anything significant yet. As well documented as this campaign was, the waters can still be fairly murky.”

  “Paul’s on to something,” she said, telling him about the new tack in their thinking about Resonance and simply working up a scenario by way of offensive operations.

  “That’s our war game designer,” said Robert. “I thought Paul would love this mission the minute I found the trail on Kasim al Khafi ended at that raid on Bardia by the Royal Navy Commandos. Finding that service log from the section leader, Thomason, was a stroke of luck I suppose, but suddenly the whole affair is wrapped up in the battle for the North Atlantic. So what is Paul planning?”

  “He’s thick as thieves with Kelly on the main console. They must be planning a mission scenario on how we can get key information back safely. I’m going down to wardrobe to see about costuming in the event we need to send anyone through.”

  “Well remember, I’m size nine and a half. Find me some decent shoes this time, will you?”

  He went back to his computer screen, grateful at least that they had some sense of direction now, and the
burden was off his shoulders for a moment. He had carried the ball from the moment he shifted back to meet with Abbot Emmerich at the Abbey of St. Martin, and right on through the discovery of this new plot involving Palma. After digging up Kasim al Khafi and his terrorist son Kenan Tanzir, he somehow felt that he now had to work up some scenario to get rid of them. Yet modern military history was not his forte, and he was thankful that Paul was well engaged.

  He leaned back, noting a passage on the screen he had been reading about naval events just prior to the Bismarck campaign. He had been looking at the career of Vice Admiral Holland on HMS Hood, and the service records of that ship in particular, struck by an odd discovery that the Hood had only fired her guns in anger one time before her fateful engagement in the Battle of the Denmark Strait.

  The pride of the British fleet for many years, she had shown the Union Jack all over the empire, and the world. She was at Mers-el-Kebir off Oran when the British Force H was ordered to fire on French ships there. And the next time her guns roared their fire against an enemy ship, she was in the Denmark Strait tangling with Bismarck. It was another eerie connection between the father of the terrorist and the Bismarck campaign.

  The British were to lose a knight when Hood sunk, in more ways than one. Vice Admiral Lancelot Holland was aboard her during the battle, and went down with the ship. Yet he struck one last blow from the watery grave, of his shattered ship, or so it seemed.

  The Bletchley Park code breakers had a windfall earlier that very month when H.M.S. Bulldog forced a German U-Boat (U-110) to surface and captured a working Enigma code machine! A few days later this prize was augmented when one of the Bletchley Park savants suggested German weather reporting ships at sea might also possess code equipment, and become far easier targets.