Golem 7

Chapter 4

“He pulled a D.B. Cooper!” said Nordhausen. “I got hold of a tape from an air traffic control tower in Tenerif North Airport on Santa Cruz. It was well inland and protected from the backwash from Palma at an elevation of at least 200 meters. Now the tape reveals that there was an incident on the plane—a possible hijacking attempt. The tape was somewhat chaotic but the words Allahu Akbar were fairly distinct. Then a passenger shouts out the words: ‘he jumped!’ They think it’s a suicide attempt… until there’s an obvious sound of something exploding. And no one on that plane thinks or says anything more. All fourteen passengers were killed in the crash. The plane overflew the airport and slammed right into the side of Cumbre Vieja. An hour later the entire mountain blows up and this little tidbit of news was fairly well lost, utterly irrelevant given the destruction that followed.”

“He pulled a D.B. Cooper?” said Kelly. “Oh, yes, I remember now. He’s the guy that hijacked a 727 and extorted a couple hundred grand from the airline before bailing out over the Cascades in the Pacific Northwest.”

“Exactly,” said Robert. “He bailed out. Passenger number fifteen, a man that doesn’t exist in the time line before Palma, is now the sole survivor of this plane crash, and most likely responsible for it in the first place.”

“You’re not suggesting the plane set off the volcano,” said Maeve.

“No, I don’t think a small plane like that would make much impression on the mountain. We all know it took a nuke to get Cumbre Vieja to blow, and indications are plain in the news we have now that this second attempt was not a natural event either. My guess is that they still managed to get a warhead in place, and that this man, Kenan Tanzir, was the man who set off the operation. Who knows, perhaps he had a suitcase nuke with him when he jumped.”

“I doubt that,” said Maeve. “Try getting through airport security now with a bottle of shampoo. No, he was definitely not carrying a suitcase nuke.”

“Then he must have linked up with someone on the ground,” Kelly suggested.

“The plot thickens,” said Maeve. “Yes, a man shouting Allahu Akbar and jumping off a plane an hour before Palma is certainly suspicious, but there’s a lot of haze here still.”

“I knew you would object,” said Robert. “I’ve got more—records of equipment purchased two weeks earlier, including a small emergency parachute, a compass, a map. The Arion system was amazing in its ability to ferret out these details.”

“Well,” said Kelly, “if it stinks it must be fish. This guy Kasim is pissed at the Brits when they killed his wife and kid. He joins the other side and was supposed to get killed in 1942, but the man who kills him never arrives in theater, and so he goes on to have a little bastard who ends up blowing up Cumbre Vieja. Man, are we ever having fits with illegitimate sons these days. Three days ago it was Charles Martel, now this.”

Paul was the only one who had not spoken, and the professor could see he seemed deep in thought about something. “Paul?” he said, the question obvious in his voice.

Paul folded his arms. “Just one thing,” he began. “This convoy you mention that is attacked on August 11, 1941… That was the date, correct?”

“Right you are,” said Robert.

“Well there were no German surface raiders operating in the Atlantic in August of 1941. They were all holed up at the port of Brest on the French coast. The battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were both there undergoing repairs, as well as the cruiser Prince Eugen and a number of U-boats. The British were bombing them constantly, without much success, but they managed to keep them bottled up there until the spring of 1942 when they made what was called ‘the channel dash’ and high tailed it through the English Channel back to German waters.”

“That they did,” said Nordhausen, “In the history you are obviously so very familiar with. But the Arion system now says the Germans mounted a sortie with a single raider on August 9, 1941 and this ship caught Convoy OS-85 two days later, sinking four vessels. I realize it’s been a very chaotic time these last days. We’ve run two major missions to try and unhinge the Assassin operations, and we’ve stopped the worst of them. That business aimed at the Battle of Tours was the right cross, as you said Paul. But we have only just managed to get our wits about us, and a little food, fuel and sleep. Who’s had time to have a look at the history these days after Palma? We’ve all been so damn busy—well I had a look. I wanted to see what the bastards were up to and I found something, by God.”

“Then the altered history has one of the German ships in Brest at sea as early as August, 1941?” Paul was still not convinced. “How would Palma have changed that? For that matter, how would the Assassins manage to influence that history? Trying to accelerate the repairs on those ships in dry dock would be like trying to herd cats. Which ship was it, Scharnhorst or Gneisenau? I find it hard to believe they could have had either vessel ready for operations that quickly.”

“It was neither,” said the professor. “In point of fact, if we can call anything a fact these days with all this Time travel business mucking up the history, both those ships were actually run off to the port at La Pallice, to make room for another ship.”

“Prince Eugen?” said Paul. “She limped into port with engine problems around that time, but that’s just a cruiser. They would have had no trouble berthing her there with the other two battlecruisers.”

“Prince Eugen arrives in early June of 1941,” said Robert looking at his notes. “But there was another guest already there before her. The ship I am speaking of was called the Bismarck.”

Paul couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Bismarck? That ship was sunk by the Royal Navy in late May of 1941! I’ve studied that battle many times. Hell, I grew up reading Shirer’s and Forester’s books on the battle and watching the movie ‘Sink the Bismarck’ over and over. I’ve war gamed it many times as well.”

“Well they did sink the Bismarck, eventually,” said Robert. “But not on her first sortie—not in the famous sea chase you are referring to in May. I’m afraid she made it safely into Brest and took up a berth there to make minor repairs before launching another attack on British shipping in August. They covered her with camo-nets and the RAF missed her during several bombing raids. She put to sea a few weeks later and hit Convoy OS-85, then sped out to the Atlantic. In fact, she was spotted briefly by British coast watchers on the Island of Palma as she made good her escape. Gave the Royal Navy fits for a time, but they eventually brought her to heel when she tried to reverse her course and head back to Germany via the Denmark Strait. There was another big battle there, and this time Bismarck was finally sunk.”

“Wow!” It was all Paul could say for the moment. He shook his head, feeling a strange unease. The professor was correct. Nothing was safe now. Even the old war stories he had cherished as a boy were all on the chopping block. “Do you realize what this means?” he said at last.

“It means we’ve got work to do here,” said Robert. “Which is why I rushed over here the moment these thoughts began to coalesce to some conclusion in my mind. I was afraid of that certainty factor you talked about on the last mission, that tunnel thing.”

“You mean Absolute Certainty?”

“That was it,” said Robert. “Yes, I was afraid that once I figured out who the perpetrator was this time around, the other side would get wind of it, because I was damn well determined to do something about it, so I wanted to get inside a safe Nexus Point before I brought you all in on this research and firmed this up.”

“Good man,” said Maeve.

“Yes,” Paul agreed. “Forget the fuel situation, you did exactly the right thing, Robert. But you realize that fingering this Kenan Tanzir is just one end of the stick. Now we have to find out how they could possibly have constructed this scenario, because if what you are saying holds water, then the Pushpoint lies somewhere in that initial sortie by the Bismarck. For the life of me I can’t see how they would be able to determine that saving Bismarck in May would mean she would attack this particular convoy in August and end up killing this otherwise insignificant Berber scout who fathers our newest terrorist, Kenan. It’s mind boggling! Why not just go back and kill this Thomason instead?”

The professor said nothing to that, and they sat with it for a time, each realizing that they were all probably locked into another dangerous and confounding mission here. They knew the operation to try and reverse Palma again was definitely on the radar screen but, coming on the heels of that last daunting journey to the 8th century, the prospect of yet another perplexing Time jump weighed heavily on them now.

“Well,” Maeve said quietly. “It certainly has all the hallmarks of a typical intervention. I understand what you are saying, Paul, but we don’t have to uncover the whole of their operation to reverse this again. Bottom line, all we have to do is make sure this Lieutenant Thomason gets to Alexandria safely.”

“Which means we have to make sure the Bismarck never reaches Brest safely first,” said Paul. “That’s a tall order, particularly given the complexities of the interventions we’ve already uncovered.”

“Why do we have to mess with the battleship?” asked Maeve. “Can’t we just divert the convoy somehow—move it safely out of harm’s way?”

“We could try that,” said Paul, “but we have no guarantee that Bismarck would not still find it and sink this ship. It would be a throw of the dice. Removing Bismarck is definitely more decisive. And remember, Bismarck is not supposed to even be afloat, so it’s clear their operations focused on that campaign if she is. We also have to consider a possible counter operation.”

Maeve wasn’t convinced. “We could arrange for Thomason to receive new orders and go by some other route then. It won’t matter what the Bismarck does in that event.”

“You’re telling me that we’ve got this blatant deviation in the history and you want to ignore it? Thomason wasn’t the only man who dies when that convoy gets attacked. There’s a string of lives cut short. What was it? Four ships are sunk, and none of the ancestors of the men who went down on them were born either. That might cause damage that could go exponential in just a few generations, and who knows what kind of havoc it wreaks on the continuum in future years, even if we can see no ill effects now.”

“Other than Palma,” Robert put in. “That’s one hell of an ill effect, eh?

“These people are a devious bunch, I’ll give you that,” said Maeve. “They ran this right under our noses while Robert and I were off to find the Rosetta Stone. In fact, I think they were working this up even as far back as that little fishing expedition you and Robert took to recover the Ammonite fossil. That’s when Robert first discovered they were using the scroll rubbings and the hieroglyphics to send messages through Time. We get back from our trek to Egypt and find all hell has broken loose, and that it was all part of this major operation—the Rosetta Stone, Palma, and Tours—all a unified plan.”

“Right,” said Paul. “We had to make all those shifts into Egypt, then three time shifts to counter the consequences of their intervention at the Battle of Tours, but it seems the job is still not done. I’m starting to feel like I’m plugging leaks in a dike here. Yet now we see the true breadth and scope of what they actually planned. They hit the Rosetta stone, replacing it with a stela containing instructions concerning the battle of Tours. That may have been happenstance, but it sure rubbed our nose in it, yes?”

“And thankfully so,” said Robert. “They didn’t count on my ability to read the hieroglyphics!”

“Thank god for that,” said Paul. “Well that was just a cover operation. The real one-two punch was reversing Palma to knock the Order back on its heels in the future, so they could then launch the attack on Charles Martel. They may have underestimated our capabilities here. But let’s face it, we were fortunate to stop the worst of this so far, and now we have to finish the job.”

“At least we don’t have to save all of Christendom and Columbus again, as you worried when you first came in here,” said Robert. “But we must do something about Palma. Otherwise we’re all living on proverbial borrowed Time here. We’ve only just managed to lay in a small store of food and fuel, and get some much needed rest. But how long do you think the city is going to remain stable here? Supplies are already scarce as hen’s teeth. The next time we go out for petrol we may very well come back empty handed. And the power is going to go down, one day or another. Then we’re pretty much off line—useless—and the other side has free rein to do whatever they please. In fact, I think they are counting on exactly that happening to us. They don’t see us as a threat now after Palma. Founding Fathers or not they’ll make short work of us, mark my words. So it’s now or never. Yes, we’ve got to finish the job here.”

Paul nodded his head. “Look who’s rallying the troops this time!” he said. “Yet everything you say is true.”

“Golem time!” said Kelly. “You’ve been on that station for an hour now, Robert. What do our little friends say about it?”

“Paul was correct about the amazing scope of their plan,” said the professor. “I was worried we would have multiple interventions to cope with here as well, but the variations don’t start to crop up until the spring of 1941. Everything before that is clean—no variations at all since we beat them at Tours. That helped me hone in on important events in the history, and the Arion system did a lot of work for me. Everything led me back along the breadcrumb trail from Kenan Tanzir at the Le Méridien Hotel in Oran. You pull on a string and you never quite know where it will lead you. In this case I pulled on a thread in this man’s suit and I end up in the North Atlantic ocean, in May of 1941! This is where they’re operating, Maeve.””

“With the battleship Bismarck,” Paul said with a smile, the light of battle glimmering in his eyes now. “Oh, my. This mission is going to be fun. Let’s get started, people!”

Chapter 5

“It was a campaign literally rife with Pushpoints,” said Paul. “In fact, my studies of the second world war uncovered many similar incidents—little moments, quirks of fate we call them, that ended up having major ramifications on the outcome of events. It led me to my whole theory of Pushpoints being these small things, utterly insignificant if taken on their own, but with enormous power to lever events that were massing all around them with this huge buildup of temporal kinetic energy. Well, this campaign has a number of moments like that. Happenstance, errors of judgment, mistakes, and just plain sheer luck as well. Bismarck should have made it safely back to a French port in my opinion, and I can tell you why she didn’t.”

“Wasn’t there a big naval battle in this campaign?” asked Kelly.

“Two of them,” said Paul. “Bismarck had completed trials and was ready to attempt a breakout into the North Atlantic. She teamed up with a smaller ship, the cruiser Prince Eugen, and they made a run through the Denmark Strait between Iceland and the U.K. The British were stretched pretty thin, but they managed to post some screening forces on all possible routes the Bismarck might take. In this case they had a pair of cruisers with radar in the Denmark Strait, Norfolk and Suffolk. These two ships spotted the Germans and began shadowing them at a respectful distance, for even taken together they would be no match for the larger German battleship. The fact that Prince Eugen was along made the German task force an even more potent threat.”

“So where are these Pushpoints you mentioned? asked Robert.

“All over the place. It was as if this was a seismic fracture zone in the Meridian held together by these smaller events. The first was a decision by the German Admiral Lütjens concerning his fuel situation. Bismarck was already some 200 tons light due to a faulty fuel hose. Prince Eugen also needed to refuel, so they stopped at Bergen, though Lütjens elected not to refuel Bismarck, and further, not to rendezvous with an oiler as planned to take on auxiliary fuel later. That choice was to have an important bearing on the outcome of the mission. The refueling stop itself also put the British on to them when they were spotted there at Bergen, so it was a bad move on two counts.

“Next up we get an odd failure with Bismarck’s main radar. There were a few instances where the Germans tried to shake off the shadowing British cruisers, so they would turn and engage them. During one of these instances, concussion from Bismarck’s main fifteen inch guns damaged her radar, and because of this the two ships reversed their sailing order, with Prince Eugen in the lead.”

“Bismarck had been leading earlier?” asked Kelly.

“Yes,” Paul confirmed. “She was the principle unit involved and headquarters for Admiral Lütjens. So this little Pushpoint on the radar failure saw the ships changing position. That doesn’t sound like much but a few hours later it was to have a major effect on the campaign. The British had dispatched two battleships to try and intercept Bismarck. One was HMS Hood, the pride of the fleet and the terror of all the German war games when they simulated maneuvers prior to this battle. Admiral Holland commanded her as his flagship. She had eight fifteen inch guns, same as Bismarck, and she was accompanied by the latest addition to the British fleet, HMS Prince of Wales. That ship had ten fourteen inch guns, though being new she had teething troubles. Even put out to sea with dockyard workers aboard to screw down the loose bolts.”

“So the odds were building up in favor of the British,” said Robert. “They had two cruisers behind the Germans, and now two battleships vectoring in on them as well.”

“Exactly,” said Paul. “Well, the engagement that soon followed was the now famous Battle of the Denmark Strait. The two German ships engaged the two British battleships. The cruisers Norfolk and Suffolk were still shadowing but not yet in firing range. Now here’s what I meant about that radar fluke…. Spotting the Germans in the grey dawn, the British assumed that Bismarck was in the lead, just as the command ship Hood was leading the way in the British task force.”

“But couldn’t they tell the difference between a battleship and a cruiser?” asked Kelly.

“One might think so, given the experience of the men involved. But the two ship silhouettes looked very much alike, and with Prince Eugen leading she was much closer, so her silhouette appeared to be about the same size as Bismarck’s. Admiral Holland gave the order to fire on the lead ship, assuming it was Bismarck. See how this house of cards is stacking up? That radar glitch meant that Holland had selected the wrong target, as Bismarck was naturally the greater threat. But he was opening fire on Prince Eugen instead.”

“I see what you mean,” said Maeve.

“It goes on and on,” said Paul. “Thankfully, Prince of Wales realized the error and her captain decided to disobey Admiral Holland’s order and fired on Bismarck. But Hood was still targeting the smaller German cruiser throughout the battle. They never redirected fire.”

“So now we get one spotting error balanced out by one man’s choice to disobey his orders here,” said the professor.

“Yes,” said Paul. “The captain of Prince Eugen also should have fallen off to the leeward side and let Bismarck take the lead in the battle. This was standard procedure for a cruiser in this sort of engagement, but for some reason, he elected to keep station in the lead. So his ship ended up dividing the available British firepower between both German targets. Then Admiral Holland divided it further by turning at a steeper angle to try and close the distance between the two sides faster. Hood was an older ship, built in 1918, and she did not have much in the way of deck armor. This made her vulnerable to the plunging fire she would receive from Bismarck at longer ranges. Holland figured that if he closed range the angle of the arc on incoming enemy shells would be shallower, striking her side armor if Hood was hit. In the end his tactic was a textbook Royal Navy maneuver, but the result of the battle underscored the weakness of his deck armor. That said, this more direct approach weakened his firepower further, as his aft turrets could not engage effectively.”

“So the British advantage in big guns was rapidly diminishing,” said Robert. “Oh, I remember this now! The Hood blows up!”

“She does indeed,” Paul confirmed. “She was struck amidships by one of Bismarck’s big shells, and it went right through that wooden deck and ignited her main magazine. The resulting explosion broke her in two and she sunk within minutes, taking all but three survivors to a proverbial watery grave.”

“So Admiral Holland had the right idea, but couldn’t close the range before Hood suffered this fatal hit.” said Maeve.

“Now the odds shift dramatically to the Germans,” said Kelly.

“Right,” Paul went on. “After a moment of proverbial shock and awe, the Prince of Wales was also hit and decided discretion was the better part of valor here. She began to make smoke and turned away, but she did manage to score a hit on Bismarck as she disengaged. Amazingly, the shell penetrated one of the battleship’s fuel bunkers, contaminating it with seawater. It wasn’t a serious hit, but it cost Lütjens 200 more tons of fuel, and now his earlier decisions not to refuel at Bergen, or rendezvous with that oiler, become serious matters. He realized that he did not now have the fuel to make a successful sortie into the North Atlantic convoy zones, so after transiting the Denmark Strait, he decided to turn east and head for the safety of a French port.”

“I see what you mean,” said Maeve. “Bad choices, mistaken identity, a fluky fuel hose, lucky hits on both sides—“

“And that damn radar thing,” said Kelly.

“And I note that HMS Hood was the same ship that bombarded the port of Oran earlier. Correct?”

“I thought you’d note that little detail,” said Paul. “Yes, HMS Hood led Force H, and she was commanded by then Admiral Somerville at the time, with Captain Ralph Kerr. Somerville is also commander of Force H during the campaign against Bismarck, though Hood had been detached by then.”

“There’s no way we could ever know, but what if it was a shell from Hood that fell on Kasim’s house in Oran and killed his wife and daughter?”

“It has that spooky echo of rhyming history about it,” said Robert. “Are you suggesting that the Assassins had a hand in the outcome of this battle—that Hood’s loss was arranged for vengeance?”

“That would be hard to do,” said Maeve, “but the fact is, in a very quirky engagement rife with all these Pushpoints, the ship that led the attack on the French fleet goes down big time.”

They digested that for a moment, but no one could yet see any clear connection between the events at Oran in 1940 and this engagement the following year. As chilling as it seemed, they did not believe in curses.

“Let’s let that sleeping hound of paradox lie for now,” said Paul. “There’s more suspicious activity later in this campaign to consider. The British were shocked by the loss of the Hood, but true to form they just buckled down and pulled out all the stops to vector in more assets. Force H was still operating out of Gibraltar, so they brought that north with some cruisers, destroyers and the carrier Ark Royal. Then they still had King George V off to the southwest with another big lumbering battleship that was pulled off convoy escort duty, the HMS Rodney. She wasn’t fast enough to match Bismarck, but she did have big sixteen inch guns. If the British could team up those ships they could again get a fairly good advantage over the two German ships with any help from the lighter vessels they had at their disposal.”

“But wasn’t Bismarck alone when she was finally sunk,” asked Kelly, “at least in our history?”

“She was,” said Paul. “Admiral Lütjens made another questionable decision. Unwilling to accept that his convoy raiding operation was stopped, he decided to split his force and send the Prince Eugen on her way to raid convoys alone while he turned back for France. I suppose he reasoned that this would also divide the British assets, but in this case I think it was a stupid decision. The British usually had at least two cruisers or a battleship with every convoy. Prince Eugen could not prove a very serious threat against that defense. In fact, a cruiser raider had standing orders only to attack targets where she could expect no significant opposition. So Lütjens was after sour grapes, and all he did was weaken his task force and make each lone ship more vulnerable. Nonetheless, he turned Bismarck back to threaten Norfolk and Suffolk and covered the escape of Prince Eugen. Now the German Battleship was alone. He shook off the two cruisers shortly after that, and here’s another quirk, he did not even realize he had done so!”

“Well he already had a fairly significant victory here,” said Robert.

“True,” Paul agreed. “But that made him careless. He sent a 30 minute radio signal to Germany to crow about his victory, and the British were able to use radio detection gear to re-locate his ship.”

“Get your laurels while you can,” said Maeve. “He was probably trying to also justify his decision to return to France.”

“That’s very likely,” said Paul. “Now, here’s where we get another big Pushpoint. As Bismarck steams east to Brest, she is well ahead of the pursuing British battleships, perhaps by 150 miles or so. But that annoying hit on her oil bunker slows her down again when the Brits launch a torpedo attack from one of their carriers.”

“Well hell,” said Kelly. “A carrier should be able to blast that ship out of the water.”

“These were not like the US carriers you may be familiar with from the Pacific theater,” said Paul. They might be no more than smaller escort carriers by comparison, and they were flying fairly rickety old by-planes, the main torpedo bomber being called the Swordfish. These looked more like older World War One planes, with linen canvas siding. They were still a threat, but far less capable than the planes flying from American carriers in the Pacific. Yet, in the end, it was one of these old Swordfish that sealed Bismarck’s fate. There were two Pushpoints stacked one on top of another for that to happen.”

“Two Pushpoints?”

“Right,” said Paul. “The first was another case of mistaken identity. When Force H headed north from Gibraltar the task force actually found itself north of Bismarck’s course to Brest. The hunt began, and this force detached a cruiser, HMS Sheffield, to steam ahead and see if it could find the German ship to the south, with orders to shadow her if she did so. Bismarck was spotted and the carrier Ark Royal launched fifteen Swordfish to go after her with torpedoes. As they approached they were saw a ship below, steaming alone, and thinking it must be Bismarck, they swooped in to attack—but it was Sheffield.”

“They couldn’t recognize their own damn ship?” said Robert.

“Well Admiral Somerville, the Commander of Force H, had ordered Sheffield to close and shadow Bismarck. He informed Ark Royal, but when the coded message came in it was set aside in a pile of signals awaiting translation. The pilots were briefed before takeoff and told the Bismarck was the only ship in the area. By the time the message was de-coded and sent down to the flight deck the Swordfish were already in the air. Ark Royal eventually signaled ‘look out for Sheffield,’ and they sent it out in clear uncoded English, but the strike flight didn’t receive it until after they had already made their attack on the British cruiser.”

“Damn!” said Kelly. “Another case of mistaken identity. Just like that stuff that happened in the battle of Midway. Ever read Miracle at Midway?”

“Sure,” said Paul. “And this was another little miracle right here. The Swordfish come in on attack. Sheffield holds her fire and tries to maneuver. As fortune had it, she was not hit, and a good number of the torpedoes exploded on contact with the water. Others exploded simply by encountering Sheffield’s wake. It appears they had been fitted with quirky magnetic detonators, called ‘pistols’ back then, and when the planes got back to the carrier the pilots reported the misfires, so the British decided to re-arm with older contact pistols for a second go at Bismarck. If these planes had found the German ship instead of Sheffield, it is likely their attack would have failed. But this second spotting error now meant they would be carrying more reliable torpedoes, dramatically increasing their odds of success.”

Maeve nodded gravely, amazed by the way all these small events were holding the tapestry of the whole campaign together. “So we get a bushel of stuff here,” she said—a message delayed ever so briefly results in a second case of mistaken ship identity, and then these quirky magnetic detonators.”

Nordhausen was reading something from his notes and he made as if to say something, but Paul went on with his story. “That’s the first Pushpoint cluster,” he said. “And actually, I think it is the most decisive lever on these events. This incident with Sheffield was essential to the action that followed.”

“I was going to say—“

“Now the second Pushpoint is in the final attack on Bismarck by these Swordfish.” Paul cut the professor off, eager to finish his tale. “They re-arm and another flight takes off. This time they have orders to first find Sheffield again, then follow her heading to locate the Bismarck. This they do, coming upon the German ship to make this last, desperate attempt to stop her so the pursuing British Battleships can catch up. Using the more reliable contact detonators, they score a couple hits. One strikes Bismarck amidships on her heavy belt armor and does little damage, but the second is a proverbial lucky shot that decides everything. It strikes Bismarck astern, damaging her rudder as she was turning to avoid it. In fact, if Bismarck had just maintained course this torpedo would have probably struck her side armor as well and done far less damage. But as it happened, Bismarck turned, and that sent the torpedo right into her rudder. It also damaged a propeller there. Her speed was immediately reduced and she was unable to steer. The mighty Bismarck was now simply steaming in circles with a jammed rudder.”

“And the rest is history,” said Kelly.

“Yes,” said Paul. “The British harass her with destroyers all night, and the following morning the British show up with two battleships King George V, and Rodney, and an number of smaller ships. They were too much for the exhausted crew of the Bismarck to contend with. She was hit several times, and after losing all her main guns to battle damage, the Germans scuttled her. The British thought they had finished her off with torpedoes from their cruisers and destroyers, but James Cameron took an ROV down to the wreck and discovered that none of those hits caused internal flooding damage.”

Robert cleared his throat to get attention at last. “Well I hate to break it to you,” he said “but in the data I harvested with the Arion system there is no case of mistaken identity concerning the Sheffield.” He was confirming the data on the history module even as Paul finished.

The others looked at him, and Paul raised his eyebrows. His gut assumption had been correct, and the professor went on, confirming his suspicions.

“Yes,” said Robert. “That first flight never attacks Sheffield in the altered history. They go right on to strike Bismarck instead. And just as you have indicated most of the torpedoes misfire and they score only one insignificant hit. The German ship shrugs it off and steams on for Brest. By the time the Swordfish get back to the carrier and rearm the worsening weather and darkness force them to call off a second strike. Bismarck escapes.”

“And she lays up for repairs at Brest to sortie out six weeks later,” said Maeve.

“Where she sinks the Prospector in Convoy OS-85 bound for Alexandria,” said Kelly. “Taking Lieutenant Thomason to the bottom of the sea.”

“And so one Kasim al Khafi survives his stint with the Afrika Korps and lives on to sire an illegitimate son who takes down the flank of Cumbre Vieja on Palma and the world we know changes forever.” He put his hands in his pocket, fingering his key ring as he often did when thinking. “I think we found our mission,” he said calmly. “It’s just that I’m not exactly sure how we can put things back the way they were. Sinking the Bismarck, as we have seen, is no small matter.”

Chapter 6

“What happened to Sheffield?” said Paul. “That seems to be the key question now.”

“There are only a few possibilities,” said Maeve. “Either she doesn’t get sent to shadow the Bismarck by Somerville, or the planes get that message decoded before they attack her.”

“Somerville may be a Prime,” said Paul. “An officer of his rank made too many key decisions to try and meddle with him. His choice to dispatch Sheffield was wise and probably not something anyone could talk him out of, unless there was a pressing need for the ship to be elsewhere.”

“Nothing that I noted in the history,” said Nordhausen.

“Are you checking everything? All the books on the subject and the web sites as well?”

“Shirer, Forester, Kennedy, the lot of them,” said the professor. And I’ve got a search programmed for the web sites, both German and British sources. They just don’t mention much about Sheffield. There was no threat to Force H either, as far as I can see.”

“That’s very odd,” said Paul, quite troubled now.

“OK,” said Maeve, “if we leave Somerville alone then we’re probably looking farther down the pecking order on Ark Royal.”

“The radio room,” said Paul. “There was a lot of message traffic, and the message informing Ark Royal that Sheffield was going hunting was set aside for a time. There’s several sources on that. See if you can find anything on it, Robert.”

“That does sound like a good intervention point,” Maeve agreed. “You would just want to get that message to the top of the stack—just a shuffling of paper in the radio room.”

“Yet there would be no guarantee that the decoders would act on it,” said Paul. “They could pick it up, note it as being of a routine nature, and then just set it aside if there were more urgent messages—spotting reports or changes in ship position for example.”

“What about that message that was broadcast in the clear,” said Maeve. “Look out for Sheffield! If it were to be sent out a few minutes earlier, then the planes may have been forewarned.”

“That sounds promising as well,” said Paul. “It would mean someone would have to have access to the radio room, on one ship or another.”

“What, just waltz right in to an obviously busy radio room and say, excuse me gentlemen but I’ve got to make an unauthorized transmission—in the clear, uncoded, if you please.”

“Well, that’s about what happened. As I recall it the decision was made by the captain of Ark Royal, however. So it wasn’t an unauthorized message, but it was sent out rather frantically when they realized the potential for mishap.”

“Captain Maund,” said Robert, working up data from the RAM Bank. “And he wasn’t informed of the message from Somerville concerning Sheffield until an hour after the planes had already taken off.”

“So that gives someone an hour,” thought Paul. “If that message was translated any time in that hour and reached Maund, then the planes could have been forewarned. Failing that, it’s possible someone just sent the message, bypassing that whole scenario and event chain entirely. An operative might be able to pull it off. All they would need is a sufficiently powerful radio. It wouldn’t even have to be aboard Ark Royal—could have come from any ship in the task force. Let’s nail down exactly what ships were still steaming with Force H, can you dig that up, Robert?”

“I’m on it.”

“And see what you can find out about that warning message as well. It should be easy enough to find.”

“OK,” said Maeve. “Let’s say they had a man aboard one of the other ships and broadcast it that way.”

“It wouldn’t be hard to act that out. You just go rushing into the radio room waving a piece of paper and say you’ve got orders to get this off in the clear, right away.”

“Yes, and now we have a guessing game on our hands here,” said Maeve. “Which ship? And what about the possibility the message was sent from land? With a sufficiently powerful set they might have pulled it off that way as well, and that pretty much makes it impossible for us to intervene here at this point on the Meridian. How do we find where this radio is?”

“Radio detection equipment,” said Kelly.

“I doubt they’ll be doing rehearsals,” said Maeve, her point obvious.

Paul shrugged. “This is getting a bit slippery, isn’t it? We can see that it is very easy to intervene here in Bismarck’s favor, by either simply shuffling paper, as Maeve suggested, or by simply broadcasting the warning about Sheffield. But it’s not easy to counter-operate against that at all. Putting this genie back in the bottle may be very difficult.”

“Well don’t bother with the message,” said Robert as he leaned in at his computer screen. “I’m not turning up anything about this cruiser. I searched for that phrase—Look out for Sheffield—and here’s what I get:

“A photo of Mt. Roland from a lookout at Sheffield… The city. Then Sheffield Lake Detective asks public to look out for elderly relatives… Then a production company at Sheffield University is on the lookout for a sexy male to play a role in a play… Then a bit about a place called Sheffield Lookout Tower, and after that a bunch of drivel about the baseball player Gary Sheffield speaking his mind and we are warned to ‘look out!’”

“But there must be something,” said Paul. “That warning is now a noted part of British naval history.”

“Sure, there’s nine million possible documents with those keywords in them. But we’ll need an Arion system to check them all unless you want me to sit here for the next year or so.” The professor’s point was obvious.

“Then refine your search. Add in the keyword Bismarck,” Paul suggested. “That should narrow down your returns.”

Robert reconfigured his search, but still turned up nothing more than a page after page of unrelated documents. Paul became very worried now. He had counted on the rich documentation of this history to provide him with fertile field of possible Pushpoints, just as he had been able to lay them all out in the Bismarck campaign. But now something had been levered loose from the Meridian and the history was spinning away into realms unknown. He scratched his head, looking at Maeve and then deciding something.

“Look up Sheffield,” he said. “Kelly, can you get some Golems on this too? We need to understand why she wasn’t attacked—why this famous warning was never sent. Start with Royal Navy Ship’s logs. There are day by day entries in several on-line databases. There’s got to be a Pushpoint in there somewhere that we have yet to see. How about doing some comparison studies between our RAM Bank data and Golem searches. We should be able to run down some variations on this in no time.”

The Golems proved to be an enormous help. They were soon able to return the entire history of HMS Sheffield, and Kelly began to read the broad strokes and set up variation search algorithms while Paul and Maeve discussed possibilities.

“I still like my paper shuffle,” she said. “If the message gets translated then it’s very likely that the flight crews could have been briefed about Sheffield being on station before they took off. In that event there would have been no famous warning sent out in the clear like that, which would account for the lack of search results.”

“You may be correct,” said Paul, willing to admit the possibility now that he had dismissed earlier. “It still seems a bit weak to me, however. How could they guarantee it would be acted upon?”

“Hey, look here, Sheffield’s out there as well. Better get this down to the air room briefing!” Maeve acted it out for him, and Paul raised his eyebrows, admitting the possibility now that it was presented in terms he could better imagine.

Robert chimed in with some new information. “I’ve got some RAM Bank data on Sheffield,” he said. “She had been operating with Cruiser Squadron 18, seeing most of her service in the waters north of the U.K. in 1940. Then she was detached to Force H at Gibraltar, and in April of 1941, the month preceding the Bismarck operation, she had been part of the screening forces for supply runs out to Malta. They were ferrying in Hurricane fighter planes using the carriers Furious and Ark Royal. The Sheffield was steaming with that group.”

“Any references to combat action?” Asked Paul. He was worried something may have happened to the ship before her crucial service in the Bismarck campaign.

“At one point they are attacked by 21 Italian bombers… That’s on May 10th. The Italians claim they damaged a cruiser, but the British sources say it was destroyer Fortune, badly damaged by a near miss. There is no further reference to any damage to Sheffield in these records.”

At that moment Kelly looked over his shoulder at them, a serious expression on his face. “Hold your horses,” he said, adjusting the fit of his Giant’s baseball cap. “I hate to disappoint you all but I can tell you why no attack was made on that cruiser.” He immediately had everyone’s undivided attention.

“Golem’s are starting to feed variation data to the module now, but early returns are pretty clear. Sheffield wasn’t attacked because she wasn’t on station shadowing Bismarck.”

“What?” Paul seemed genuinely upset. “Not there?”

“Nope,” You asked for a list of all ships operating with Force H out of Gibraltar earlier, and I set that search up a few minutes ago. Here’s the list: Battlecruisers Renown and Repulse, aircraft carrier Ark Royal, and destroyers Faulknor, Forester, Foresight, Foxhound, Fury, and Hesperus departed Gibraltar May 24th at 0200 hours to intercept Bismarck. Over the next 12 hours most of the destroyers returned to Gibraltar due to high seas and to refuel as well. So Sheffield was technically part of the task force, but I find no reference to her shadowing Bismarck.”

“This is from the Golems? Then it’s from the altered Meridian, the one we’re on now,” said Paul, miffed that someone had been mucking about in his cherished naval history. “Then Sheffield never even sailed with Force H?”

“Apparently not,” said Kelly. “But they did have another cruiser at hand. It came up from the south—light cruiser Edinburgh, patrolling near the Azores and looking for German blockade runners—ordered to close on the German battleship Bismarck’s last known location. She was the ship detailed to shadow Bismarck, not Sheffield.”

“The Azores?” Paul thought for a moment. “That was southwest of where this incident occurs. If this is the case, then Edinburgh would be arriving on station from a different direction, and be in an entirely different position! No wonder there was no warning about Sheffield. She wasn’t there, and Edinburgh was not on the flight path the Swordfish took to make their attack that evening.”

“So that’s why the planes go right in to strike Bismarck, as Robert said earlier,“ Maeve put in. “And they had those fluky torpedo detonators.”

“The magnetic pistols,” said Paul, more to himself than Maeve. He was deep in thought now. The whole scenario has suddenly slipped from his grasp. The history he had been so comfortably navigating, remember it all from boyhood stories, movies, long hours of war gaming, was now a wild sea of doubt and confusion. Nothing was certain, and the quiet, well riveted facts that he had carried about in his head all these years were all but useless now. But his mind immediately leapt ahead to the next obvious conclusion. He was back to the very same question that had opened this discourse.

“Then what the hell happened to Sheffield?” he said darkly. “If she wasn’t with Force H then our Pushpoint lies with her.”

Kelly folded his arms over a belly that had enjoyed too many beers in recent years. He removed his baseball cap to scratch his head and then settled it back into place.

“This shouldn’t take long,” he said, swiveling back to his Golem station. “It ought to be right here in the altered history. All we have to do is read about it.”

It wasn’t long before he had their answer.