He laid the matter out in no uncertain terms. “We have three U-boat sightings today – Expect continued air attack this evening and have inadequate air cover – Two French battleships remain at large off Casablanca and could pose an immediate threat to convoy SL-46 and SL-47.”
Should he mount yet another night raid to bolster the garrison at Gibraltar, or move south to deal with the French? He signaled the Admiralty to seek clarification as to his orders—what was Their Lordships pleasure? In spite of Valiant’s success the previous night, the Admiralty felt it unwise to risk Somerville’s battleships in the straits again. Liddell was told to play for time and hold out, a bone thrown to Churchill. The Royal Navy, however, would do the one thing it was best at, and operate at sea.
At midnight on the 17th, Somerville got his orders. He was to find and engage the French, clear the convoy routes and become master of the waters off Casablanca. Plans were underway for dramatic events yet to come. Admiral Tovey got the word that same hour. Britain would now try to salvage some small measure of advantage while she could, and go on the offensive.
Orders were sent to Wavell in Alexandria that he should make every effort to drive the Italians from Egyptian soil. Liddell would hunker down beneath the imposing limestone fortress of the Rock, Somerville would steam south to engage the French and avenge the loss of Barham off Dakar, and the Azores would be seized the following morning with thunderclap surprise, after which HMS Glorious would return to support Force H. The troops at Freetown, and De Gaulle’s Free French fighters were also put on notice that they would not sit idle any longer. A mission was being planned to throw them at the Cape Verde Islands as soon as the French Fleet was properly dealt with.
Britain, down on one knee, bruised and bloodied by her foes, was getting up and ready to answer the next bell. Yet far to the north, Admiral Raeder was setting his own plans in motion. The German Jötnargruppe was cutting through the seas and heading south into the Atlantic, with the battleships of the Royal Navy in hot pursuit. Speed was now the order of the day, and the Germans slipped slowly away, until one ship loomed off their starboard bow, unexpected, undaunted, and ready to do everything possible to stop the German fleet. This time Lütjens would fight, but he was about to confront an adversary that would prove to be far more resourceful than he or any of his planners in the Kriegsmarine could imagine.
* * *
As the sun rose on the 18th of September, smoke charred the skies above Gibraltar. Fires were burning in the town, and south near the Main Wharf. The last remnants of the 4th Devonshires were still fighting, some holed up in sheds, houses and cellars, others huddled behind the heavy walls of the Main Wharf buildings, mostly held by 2nd Somerset Light. The Brandenburgers were at the Destroyer Camber, and the harbor itself, always bustling with activity with upwards of twenty or thirty vessels on any given day, was strangely empty now.
The Germans sent a motorized battalion of the elite Grossdeutschland Regiment down through the Devil’s Gap, led by their reconnaissance battalion. There they eyed the ridges and slopes leading up to a place called the Breakneck Stairs and Mount Misery. The entrance to St. Michael’s Cave was also in this area, where most of the remaining service troops, porters, artisan engineers, and other non-combatants were now huddled. Even the big 9.2-inch batteries on Windmill Hill and Europa Point had been abandoned, the guns disabled as the crews retreated to the cavernous passages of Saint Michael’s.
There Lieutenant Dawes had fallen to his fate, a hero in the end, dying to save the men that could carry on the fight. Sergeant Hobson saw them carry in the body, what was left of him, and took a long breath. He was tired, weary beyond measure, and the loss of the Lieutenant he had taken under his wing affected him deeply. He sat, head down, dreary and mournful, and losing hope, as were many others around him. Then he heard the quiet chattering of a Barbary Ape, and turned to see a solitary Macaque skittering into the cave. A Corporal threw it an orange peel, and Hobson smiled.
It was just what he had told Dawes about—the Barbary Ape he could follow to the promised land. Yet now he thought to catch it and hold it fast, so that Britain might still hold the Rock. But this one seemed unhappy with the meager fare it had received from the Corporal, and Sergeant Hobson watched it scrabble away over a few rocks and into a passage he knew led nowhere.
“See here,” he called after the Macaque. “Where are you off to? That’s a bloody dead end! You’ll not get out that way—in fact you’ll not get loose at all once I get my fat fist on the scruff of your neck!”
He got up, following the ape, feeling his way in the dark and expecting to catch it just round the next bend. This tunnel led south, down the last of the rocky spine of Gibraltar until it ended somewhere beneath Windmill Hill. It went on for just another few hundred yards, and he could hear the chatter of the Macaque up ahead, but it was very dark. Then he came up short, surprised to reach an impasse in a great boulder that blocked his way.
He knew this rock, as it marked the end of the passage but his Macaque was nowhere to be seen. Hobson fumbled about his shirt pocket for a lighter, holding it up to cast a wan, flickering light on the eerie carved rocks of the cave walls. He remembered the old legend that said there was a hidden tunnel that went all the way under the straits to Spanish Morocco, though he knew that was folly. Then he keened up his senses, looking about when he heard the echo of his quarry resounding, hollow and very distant.
“Now where have you gotten to?” he said, hearing only the echo of his own voice. There was no sign of the beast.
The Barbary Ape was gone.
The Saga Continues…
Altered States: Volume IV ~ Three Kings
As Admiral Tovey struggles to stop heavy German units breaking out into the Atlantic, the embattled garrison of Gibraltar is holed up beneath the Rock. Now England launches operations against Atlantic island outposts in a race to occupy those vital squares before the German 22nd Air Landing Division can claim them for Germany.
Meanwhile, General Wavell launches Operation Compass against the Italians, while Admiral Cunningham prepares a daring attack at Taranto, but it is soon learned that someone is leaking word of these operations directly to the Germans and Italians. The Axis counter is a sudden new blitzkrieg into the Balkans and the Italian invasion of Greece. Soon only Turkey will stand between Germany and the vital oil supplies of the Caucasus controlled by the Orenburg Federation.
As British fortunes reach a desperate state, Volsky and Fedorov soon learn of two powerful newcomers on the vast field of battle, and a triumvirate of powerful ships rises to the challenge, three Kings of the sea to stand as mighty champions in crucial theaters of the war.
The war effort on every side is soon focused on the Middle East. Now representing the Soviet Government, Admiral Volsky accompanies John Tovey to a fateful conference in Palestine to meet with General Wavell and an enterprising new British General named Montgomery. Like three Kings of the West meeting on the field of battle, they plan the future course of the war and struggle to find some way to stop the relentless Axis juggernaut before its shadow darkens the world. Yet to do so they must also reckon with the three Kings of the East, Sergei Kirov, Ivan Volkov and Vladimir Karpov.
Action, mystery and intrigue pulse through this compelling continuation of the amazing Kirov Saga!
THE KIROV SERIES ~ BY JOHN SCHETTLER
Kirov
The battlecruiser Kirov is the most power surface combatant that ever put to sea. Built from the bones of all four prior Kirov Class battlecruisers, she is updated with Russia’s most lethal weapons, given back her old name, and commissioned in the year 2020. A year later, with tensions rising to the breaking point between Russia and the West, Kirov is completing her final missile trials in the Arctic Sea when a strange accident transports her to another time. With power no ship in the world can match, much less comprehend, she must decide the fate of nations in the most titanic conflict the world has ever seen—WWII.
Kirov II – Cauldro
n of Fire
Kirov crosses the Atlantic to the Mediterranean Sea when she suddenly slips in time again and re-appears a year later, in August of 1942. Beset with enemies on every side and embroiled in one of the largest sea battles of the war, the ship races for Gibraltar and the relatively safe waters of the Atlantic. Meanwhile, the brilliant Alan Turing has begun to unravel the mystery of what this ship could be, but can he convince the Admiralty? Naval action abounds in this fast paced second volume of the Kirov series trilogy.
Kirov III - Pacific Storm
Admiral Tovey’s visit to Bletchley Park soon reaches an astounding conclusion when the battlecruiser Kirov vanishes once again to a desolate future. Reaching the Pacific the ship’s officers and crew soon learn that Kirov has once again moved in time. Now First Officer Anton Fedorov is shocked to learn the true source of the great variation in time that has led to the devastated future they have come from and the demise of civilization itself. They are soon discovered by a Japanese fleet and the ship now faces its most dangerous and determined challenge ever when they are stalked by the Japanese 5th Carrier Division and eventually confronted by a powerful enemy task force led by the battleship Yamato, and an admiral determined to sink this phantom ship, or die trying. In this amazing continuation to the popular Kirov series, the most powerful ships ever conceived by two different eras clash in a titanic final battle that could decide the fate of nations and the world itself.
Kirov Saga: Men Of War ~ Book IV
Kirov returns home to a changed world in the year 2021, and as the Russian Naval Inspectorate probes the mystery of the ship’s disappearance, Anton Fedorov begins to unravel yet another dilemma—the secret of Rod 25. The world is again steering a dangerous course toward the great war that blackened the shores of a distant future glimpsed by the officers and crew. Fedorov has come to believe that time is waiting on the resolution of one crucial unresolved element from their journey to the past—the fate of Gennadi Orlov.
Join Admiral Leonid Volsky, Captain Vladimir Karpov, and Anton Fedorov as they sleuth the mystery of Orlov’s fate and launch a mission to the past to find him before the world explodes in the terror and fury of a great air and naval conflict in the Pacific. It is a war that will span the globe from the Gulf of Mexico to the Middle East and through the oil rich heart of Central Asia to the wide Pacific, but somehow one man’s life holds the key to its prevention. Yet other men are aware of Orlov’s identity as a crewman from the dread raider they came to call Geronimo, and they too set their minds on finding him first…in 1942! Men of war from the future and past now join in the hunt while the military forces of Russia, China, and the West maneuver to the great chessboard of impending conflict.
Kirov Saga: Nine Days Falling, Book V
As Fedorov launches his daring mission to the past to rescue Orlov, Volsky does not know where or how to find the team, or even if they have safely made the dangerous transition to the 1940s….But other men know, from the dark corners of Whitehall to the KGB. And other men also continue to stalk Orlov in that distant era, led by Captain John Haselden and the men of 30 Commando. The long journey west is fraught with danger for Fedorov’s team when they encounter something bewildering and truly astounding, an incident that leads them deeper into the mystery of Rod-25.
Meanwhile, Kirov has put to sea and now forms the heart of a powerful battlegroup commanded by Captain Vladimir Karpov. He is soon confronted by the swift deployment of the American Carrier Strike Group Five out of Yokosuka Japan in a tense standoff at sea that threatens to explode into violence at any moment. The fuse of conflict is lit across the globe, for the dread war has finally begun when the Chinese make good on their threat to secure their long wayward son—Taiwan. From the pulsing bitstream of the Internet, the deep void of outer space, the oil soaked waters of the Persian Gulf and Black Sea, to the riveting naval combat in the Pacific, the world descends in nine grueling days, swept up in the maelstrom and chaos of war.
This is the story of that deadly war to end all wars, and the desperate missions from the future and past to find the one man who can prevent it from ever happening, Gennadi Orlov. Can the mystery of Rod-25 and Orlov be solved before the ICBMs are finally launched?
Kirov Saga: Fallen Angels ~ Book VI
The war continues on both land and sea as China invades Taiwan and North Korea joins to launch a devastating attack. Yet Kirov and the heart of the Red Banner Pacific Fleet has vanished, blown into the past by the massive wrath of the Demon Volcano. There Captain Karpov finds himself at the dying edge of the last great war, yet his own inner demons now wage war with his conscience as he contemplates another decisive intervention.
After secretly assisting the Soviet invasion of the Kuriles and engaging a small US scouting force in the region, Karpov has drawn the attention of Admiral Halsey’s powerful 3rd Fleet. Now Halsey sends one of the toughest fighting Admirals of the war north to investigate, the hero of the Battle off Samar, Ziggy Sprague, and fast and furious sea battles are the order of the day.
Meanwhile tensions rise in the Black Sea as the Russian mission to rescue Fedorov and Orlov has now been expanded to include a way to try and deliver new control rods to Kirov from the same batch and lot as the mysterious Rod-25. Will they work? Yet Admiral Volsky learns that the Russian Black Sea Fleet has engaged well escorted units of a British oil conveyor, Fairchild Inc., and the fires of war soon endanger his mission.
All efforts are now focused on a narrow stretch of coastline on the Caspian Sea, where men of war from the future and past are locked in a desperate struggle to decide the outcome of history itself. Naval combat, both future and past, combine with action and intrigue as Volsky’s mission is launched and the mystery of Rod-25 and Fedorov’s strange experience on the Trans-Siberian Rail is finally revealed. Can they stop the nuclear holocaust of the Third World War in 2021 or will it begin off the coast of Japan in 1945?
Kirov Saga: Devil’s Garden ~ Book VII
The stunning continuation to the Kirov saga extends the action, both past and present, as the prelude to the Great War moves into its final days. The last remnant of the Red Banner Pacific Fleet has fought its duel with Halsey in the Pacific, resorting to nuclear weapons in the last extreme—but what has happened to Kirov and Orlan?
Now the many story threads involving Fairchild Inc. and the desperate missions to find Orlov launched by both Haselden and Fedorov all converge in the vortex of time and fate on the shores of the Caspian Sea. Fedorov and Troyak lead an amphibious assault at Makhachkala, right into the teeth of the German advance. Meanwhile, Admiral Volsky and Kamenski read the chronology of events to peek at the outcome and discover the verdict of history. Can it still be changed?
Turn the page with Admiral Volsky and learn the fate of Orlov, Fedorov, Karpov and the world itself. Follow the strange and enigmatic figure of Sir Roger Ames, Duke of Elvington as he reveals a plot, and a plan, older than history itself on the windswept shores of Lindisfarne Castle.
Kirov Saga: Armageddon ~ Book VIII
The lines of fate have brought the most powerful ship in the world to a decisive place in history. Driven by his own inner demons, Captain Karpov now believes that with Kirov in 1908 he is truly invincible, and his aim is to impose his will on that unsuspecting world and reverse the cold fate of Russian history from 1908 to the 21st century. But it is not just the fate of a single nation at stake now, but that of all the world.
Shocked by Karpov’s betrayal, Anton Fedorov plans a mission to stop the Captain before he can do irreversible damage to the cracked mirror of time. Now Admiral Volsky must do everything possible to launch this final mission aboard the nuclear attack submarine Kazan. The journey to the Sea of Japan becomes a perilous one when the Americans and Japanese begin to hunt Kazan in the dangerous waters of 2021.
Join Anton Fedorov, Admiral Volsky, Chief Dobrynin, and Gennadi Orlov aboard Kazan as they launch this last desperate mission to confront the man, and the ship, that now threatens to change all history
and unravel the fabric of fate and time itself.
Kirov Saga: Altered States
Kirov and Kazan move forward yet find themselves stuck in the midst of WWII once again, only the world is not the same! The consequences of all their interventions in history have now calcified to a new reality. The political borders of nations have been re-drawn, Colonial powers vie for control of the undeveloped world, and Russia itself is a divided nation. Discovering they still possess a decisive edge in weapons technology they must now decide which side to take to end a long and terrible war that threatens millions more lives.
Altered States ~ Volume II: Darkest Hour
The first rounds have fallen, heavy shells smashing against the armored conning tower of HMS Hood, stunning the ship and its stolid Admiral Holland. Yet Hood fights on, her guns raging in reprisal as the pride of two navies meet in the largest naval engagement since Jutland. Even as Admiral Tovey reaches the action, the shadow of Hoffmann’s battlegroup looms over his shoulder and the odds stack ever higher against the embattled ships of Home Fleet. Off to the north the Stukas rush to re-arm aboard carrier Graf Zeppelin, while far to the south another ship hastens north to the scene, from a time and place incomprehensible to the men now locked in a desperate struggle raging on a blood red sea that may decide the fate of England in 1940. Can they engage without shattering the fragile mirror of history yet again?
Kirov Saga: Hinge Of Fate: Altered States Volume III (Kirov Series) Page 32