Golem 7

Chapter 19

It took some time, but the Golems had begun to sample the Resonance within an hour or so of Kelly’s wireless broadcast. The Arch had pierced a hole in Time and he sent through his thin stream of dots and dashes, the barest trickle of energy it seemed, yet the impact on events was immediate and profound.

“Good lord!” Paul was aghast. “What a house of cards this is! It seems our first attempt here has done more than we imagined.”

“I’ll say,” said Maeve. “Care to have second thoughts about this?”

Their trick had worked alright. British intelligence picked up the faint signal over London and it rattled through the teletypes and message tubes and into the heads and minds of captains and admirals all across the North Atlantic. The ‘Lonesome Dove’ had quickly become an eagle, descending on the course of events and clawing at them with sharp talons of variation. Admiral Tovey had set out a full day early, yet strange unforeseen events had continued to crop up, bewildering in their effect on the outcome.

“Why would Lütjens decide not to make for the Denmark Strait?” asked Paul. “There was nothing in our message that should have prompted that decision.”

“He had any number of choices,” said Maeve. “Perhaps he had second thoughts as well.”

“This time he chose the Iceland Faeroes Gap,” said Kelly, “and that decision had far more impact on what happened than anything else.”

“I agree,” said Paul. “When Arethusa spotted Bismarck, in this altered history Admiral Tovey could really only steer one heading to best intercept her. Any seasoned commander would have done as much.”

“So there’s no great variable there,” said Maeve.

“Right. But he runs afoul of this U-boat and all hell breaks loose!” Paul ran his hand through his hair, still flustered that his first command had come to an untimely and unexpected result.

“Tovey’s dispositions were sound,” he said, well convinced. “He had Hood and Prince of Wales coming about and back-tracking from the Denmark Strait, and he had King George V and Repulse well in hand. That’s four capital ships that should have easily been able deal with the Germans.”

“The U-boat was the odd variable in the equation,” said Maeve. “That lucky torpedo hit took Repulse out of the battle and Bismarck brushes aside the British and rages south.”

“Damn,” said Paul “It has an odd echo to it as well, doesn’t it? I mean Bismarck gets hit in the rudders later on in the real history, this time it’s Repulse! The Germans then engage Tovey’s reduced battle fleet and damage King George V. She is put out of action when a fifteen inch shell from Bismarck strikes her near the forward main turret. That takes four of her guns out of the fight, and now Tovey finds himself badly outgunned without Repulse to even the scales. I always did think those four-gun turrets on the KGV series were unwise. It’s the only British battleship to mount four barrels in one turret like that. You just loose too much firepower if one gets hit. In any case, Tovey breaks off, two of his cruisers sustaining damage as well. He has second thoughts himself about taking on Bismarck alone, and tries to coordinate an interception where Hood and Prince of Wales can join the fight.”

“Yup! Oh what a tangled web we weave, eh?” Maeve needed to make her point, as this would likely continue and she wanted to impress them with the need for caution here. “Bismarck changes her heading slightly and comes south like a bad storm.“

“Hood and Prince of Wales give chase,” said Kelly, “and the Rodney is taken off escort duty and ordered to try and intercept her so the other ships can catch up.”

“But Rodney is too slow, and she’s alone as well,” said Paul. “That’s one powerful ship, mind you,” but she could just not find or catch the Bismarck, what with 21 knots being her best possible speed in this weather.”

Paul shook his head, bewildered. “Force H is late to the party as well. It’s still in the Med, hastening back from her Malta supply runs when all this happens a day early. I wish I had considered that.”

“It’s a little late now,” said Maeve. “Round one to Fate and the Germans. The British get off a bit easier than the real history, but so does Bismarck. So much for Admiral Dorland!”

Paul shrugged. “I think we’re seeing a whole different game here,” he said. “We’re thinking about this in linear terms, as if one event connects neatly to the next. So we think we can alter one thing and trace its probable outcome, but it turns out that events are connected in unforeseen ways, and the players involved have minds of their own, and second thoughts as well. Lütjens’ choice unhinges everything! He is a Free Radical in the equation, not just a Prime. We cannot assume he will make the same decisions he did in the history we know—this course change to take the Faeroes Gap being a perfect example. Perhaps our error here was trying to intervene too early. My thought was to give the advantage to the British as soon as possible, but intervening this early seems to impact too many things. And Lütjens’ change of heart was a real surprise.”

“Right, and if this intervention holds at this point consider the consequences,” said Maeve. “We’ll have some 1400 new lives on the Hood added to the continuum here, all people who should have died in the battle of the Denmark Strait that was now never fought. Then we have hundreds more subtracted—casualties on the Arethusa and any of the other ships Bismarck damaged. They will be gone, along with all their ancestors. This is no small matter, Paul. I thought we could do something that might just be confined to the outcome of this campaign, but the consequences are going to spill over the dike and ripple out from this now. Has this actually changed? Are we sampling hard variations here or just Resonance, just probable changes?”

“Kelly?” Paul tossed the question to his chief engineer. “Is there any way we can know this from the Golem stream?”

“Nope. It’s all just fish in the stream. The Golems are just indicating the most probable outcomes as a weight of opinion.”

“Well, what’s the verdict?” Maeve wanted to know how the campaign ended. “Pull up some info on the outcome.”

“I’ve been trying,” said Kelly, but just when the Golems seem to coalesce on a probable outcome I get one bank chiming in with a strong minority opinion to the contrary—Golem 7. The little rascals just won’t settle down, and so I can’t be certain of this outcome just yet. The numbers aren’t solid.”

“Then I guess we’d have to shut down the Arch and dissipate our Nexus Point to find that out,” said Paul. “That would allow the Heisenberg Wave to generate and finalize this intervention. Then the history we read would be a new, altered Meridian, and if it was not to our liking we’d have to spin the Arch back up and try again. The only other thing we could do is actually shift in ourselves and have a look at the situation, like I did at Tours.”

“Spook Job? Neither option sounds like a good idea given what’s happened,” said Kelly. “Hey, wait a second. We can still receive incoming media, can’t we? That is information independent of the Golem data stream. Get on the radio. See if we’ve done anything to affect Palma.”

“Good point!” said Paul. “We’ve been so fixated on the fate of the Bismarck that we’ve forgotten it’s the fate of Thomason and Palma that were really concerned with here.”

Maeve brought the shortwave in and they tried tuning in some east coast radio stations first. The wash of static had an eerie, ominous quality to it. There was nothing on the band. Then they tried local stations and quickly learned that events were still on an emergency footing outside the protective safety of the Nexus Point.

“Well we apparently re-arranged the deck chairs on the Titanic,” said Paul, “but I guess whatever we did was not enough. At least not yet.”

“It was enough to raise hell with the Meridian, however. Remember all those extra lives on HMS Hood?”

“Hold on a second!” Kelly interrupted. “I’m getting some real dissonance now on the Golem module. The data stream just won’t coalesce.”

“What do you mean?” Paul was at his side at once.

“Well, I’m still trying to see how the rest of the campaign ended, but all I get is a bunch of contradicting data. One version shows the British sinking Bismarck, another shows her making a safe return to St. Nazaire in France, then another shows her docked at Brest, and a fourth shows her turning out into the Atlantic to link up with a German oiler and raising hell for two months. Then look at this! In this one she is recalled to Germany! See that purple color on the Meridian time line? I coded that color to indicate extreme conflict—a very high degree of contradiction in the probable outcome. We can’t get a weight of opinion under these circumstances.”

“This damn campaign is just too fragile,” said Paul. “Like I said, there are so many Pushpoint clusters here that it’s looking like an intense seismic fracture zone. It appears even the slightest intervention changes things easily enough, but controlling the outcome is extremely difficult.”

“Then how can we operate?” said Maeve. If we can’t get reliable opinions on the probable outcome from the Golems, than how will we know what to do?”

“Well, we do have one clue,” said Kelly. “We know that Palma has not reversed.”

“At least not yet,” said Paul, willing to play the devil’s advocate now. “All we can really say is that the Heisenberg Wave has not altered events at this point in the Meridian.”

“Can we back out of this intervention?” Maeve folded her arms. “You saw how difficult it was to try and find a way to reverse what the Assassins did.”

“Well at least we know where to start,” said Paul, conceding defeat. “I suppose we could try to send another message.”

“Another message?” Maeve protested. “And poke another big gaping hole in the history while you’re at it?”

“No, no,” Paul raised a calming hand. “You’re correct Maeve. We’ll have to back out of this intervention as gracefully as possible if we take that course of action. I would suggest we send a message indicating that the independent call sign table has been compromised, and that any message not using an established sign should be disregarded.”

“I don’t follow you,” said Maeve.

“Lonesome Dove,” said Paul. “Dove was one of sixteen independent call signs agents could use to transmit under in the event they believed their identity might otherwise be compromised. That’s why I used it. It gave us a kind of carte blanche, because if we used an established agent’s handle, they could have contacted him for verification and discovered he never sent such a message. By signing off independently, with the handle Lonesome Dove, I could at least assure the message had a chance to be believed and acted upon.”

“So what do you propose?”

“In effect, we’ll tell them to ignore any message from Lonesome Dove. We open the continuum a few hours before the first message we sent and broadcast that!”

“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,” Maeve waved her hands. “The Great and Powerful Oz has spoken!”

“Alright, Dorothy,” Paul returned. “You’ve made your point… Kelly, can we work up another quick message? Let’s see if we can reset the board and start over.”

“If you insist,” said Kelly.

At that moment Robert came barreling in from the other room where he had been working on the history. “What’s been going on?” he asked. “I heard the Arch spin up. Are we operating now?”

“We’ve stuck our thumb in the pie,” said Maeve. “It wasn’t done so we’re putting it back in the oven.”

“What?”

She told him what they had done, and he raised his eyebrows, as if finally coming to a conclusion about something. “I thought I was seeing double,” he said. “I was reading history on the screen, jotting down notes, then I would forget something and go back to the history and I had a heck of a time finding it again. At one point I found information that was completely wrong.”

“You were probably getting variation data from the Golems,” said Maeve.

“I guess so, because I had hard notes in front of me that were completely contradicted by what I was seeing on the screen.”

“Well, maestro here worked up a pretty significant variation all on his own.” She gestured to Paul with a thumb, and the professor smiled, glad someone else was the focal point of Maeve’s ire for a change.

“Then I must have been seeing alterations caused by this message you sent, Paul.”

“Right, we know all about it. We’ve been reading it here on the Golem Module. Golem Bank 7 has been giving Kelly fits. But we’re going to try and reverse this intervention.” He told Robert what he had in mind.

Maeve was not happy, but she could think of no other solution so she conceded the fight and allowed Paul to go forward. “So how are you going to sign off on this one?” She asked.

“We’re going to make it seem that the transmission was cut off by enemy action,” said Paul. “There was a scene like that in the movie. The Germans catch a coast watcher trying to transmit from his shack, and they burst in and gun him down.”

“What movie?”

“Sink the Bismarck, the 1960 classic.”

“You’re working up scenarios based on this movie?”

“Of course not, but you make a good point, and it’s the only thing that I can think of that will make sense. We can’t very well tell them the independent call signs have been compromised and then sign off with one. Nor can we used an established agent’s sign. So we’ll just have to make it seem that the message was cut off. But before we do anything we had better consider all our variables here. Tell us what you were on to, Robert, I don’t want to miss anything else important enough to sink ships.”

Chapter 20

“Well… It’s this German U-boat. Number 556, the boat with the odd connection to Bismarck. I was trying to run down its service history and learned it came upon convoy HX-126 on May 20th. Our RAM Bank data has a fairly detailed report, with interviews from the convoy commodore, and from witnesses on ships that were torpedoed. Then the German U-Boat data bank also has a clear record of every ship sunk by this boat. It was captained by Herbert Wohlfarth.”

“Yes, I remember reading about this,” said Paul. “He vowed to always defend Bismarck from harm as a way of thanking Lindemann for sending his band over at the boat’s commissioning ceremony.”

“Exactly,” said Robert. “Well, in our RAM Bank data he was unable to answer the call because he had expended the last of his torpedoes in this attack on convoy HX-126.”

“Not in all these Golem data sets,” said Kelly.

“That’s what I was talking about!” Robert said excitedly. “The information kept changing on me. I took a look at that British cruiser we thought the Assassins were operating against. First it was Sheffield having mechanical problems with her engines, then that vanished and Sheffield was involved in a battle and put out of action—it wasn’t even there! Another cruiser had come up in her place. And look at this,” he pointed. “It’s not what I have in my notes at all. I can fetch the notebooks for you, and you’ll see.“

“We’ll take your word for it,” Maeve assured him.

“Then I took a look at this U-boat, but every time I checked the data seemed to change. First off I learned Wohlfarth retained one torpedo, forsaking a shot at the last of three ships he was to have sunk on that convoy in the hopes of finding something better.”

“That is the very same torpedo he hits Repulse with,” said Kelly.

“Then that was obviously caused by Paul’s intervention,” said Maeve.

“Alright,” Robert went on, “so then I get a new variation. I checked the convoy records and that third ship is still not sunk. U-556 has a torpedo when it steams south to the vicinity of Bismarck’s last stand. In fact it has two torpedoes. He encounters Force H this time, not Tovey’s fleet as in Paul’s intervention, and this time he is able to successfully target Ark Royal.”

“Yes!” said Paul. “Kennedy’s book on this subject makes mention of this. He states that Wohlfarth found himself in a perfect position to attack, though he notes that U-556 could do nothing but watch at that point.”

“The U-boat site even goes so far as to state that he watched the fateful air strike take off,” said Robert, “the last strike on Bismarck that damaged her rudders and doomed her. But not now. Not this time. Wohlfarth fires his last torpedo, and hits Ark Royal. It’s not a fatal hit, but it does cause flooding and the resulting list prevents further air operations, particularly in the very high seas they were navigating.”

Paul had a troubled look on his face. “Could Wohlfarth be a Free Radical, just like Lütjens? Could his decision on retaining that last torpedo and how he chooses to use it be our principle lever on these events?”

“A willful decision is seldom a true Pushpoint,” said Maeve. “If Wohlfarth is a Free Radical then there isn’t much we can do about him or his choices. And there’s one more thing to consider,” she warned. “This could all have resulted from a counter operation. We’ve opened the continuum now, and the Assassins may have picked up on that, seeing what we are trying to do. They could have launched a defensive operation already, or yet another attack aimed at assuring Bismarck gets to a safe port.”

“Good point,” said Paul. “That could account for all the dissonance we have in the Golem data stream as well—and for your confusion on how U-556 operates, Robert. If they have a Nexus Point open on this as well, then we would certainly see a lot of confusion in potential results. It’s clear that the air strike by Ark Royal was a vital stroke against Bismarck in the real history. All the interventions thus far seem to have been aimed at preventing it. First they operate against Sheffield, because the mistaken attack causes the British to correct their faulty magnetic pistols on the torpedoes.”

“I don’t think they could have known that by preventing a torpedo attack on Gneisenau they would also be preventing one on Bismarck, said Maeve. But that’s what happened in the altered history. They could have just been trying to buck up the odds for Bismarck’s safe return by making sure that there was another German ship available at Brest that could sortie out to aid her.”

“Right,” said Paul.

“Then, in the intervention Paul just ran, it’s U-556 that takes a prominent role” said Robert. “The reports we’ve had so far show Wohlfarth disabling Repulse with his extra torpedo, yet my notes say it was Ark Royal—at least before everything started getting fuzzy on me. The bottom line is the same, however. Wohlfarth retains a torpedo and uses it to strike a British capital ship that would have been instrumental in sinking the German battleship. We don’t know about Repulse. Perhaps her viability in Paul’s intervention might not have mattered, but we do know that without her King George V cannot stand alone.”

“And in that other variation you uncovered before the Golems went haywire, Wohlfarth strikes Ark Royal instead. Force H cannot slow Bismarck down in that event,” said Paul. “So how do we operate now? How do we try to persuade Wohlfarth to fire that last torpedo at a lowly steamer?”

“Well we can’t very well do anything from his end of things,” said Maeve.

“Could we do something with the convoy?” asked Robert.

Maeve considered. “It would be easy enough to alter its course I suppose, but I don’t see how that will help us. We want the U-boat to find it and expend every last torpedo, but that seems to be coming down to a matter of choice on Wohlfarth’s part.”

“Last time it was the horses,” said Kelly. “This time it’s the damn torpedoes!”

The remark seemed to strike a chord in Paul, and he brightened. “That’s right! Everything seems to involve a torpedo! Whether they are used or spared, whether they explode correctly or not, they have an effect. Remember how they would often give names to bombs and torpedoes, even write on them for good luck in this war? That’s because when they fired there wasn’t any real guarantee they would ever hit the target. There was no GPS and all…” He suddenly remembered something.

“Hey, see if you can call up a copy of S.C. Forester’s book on this campaign. The Last Nine Days of the Bismarck. And get from our RAM Bank, not the Golem cloud.”

Kelly nodded and he found it soon enough. Paul asked him to search out a particular scene where the men below decks were hard at work in the magazines and loading bays.

“Here it is,” said Kelly after typing in a good search phrase. “The Maintenance Chief, a Man named Ginger, is lecturing a new recruit.” He began reading:

“Well now, you’ve seen all the works, you young sprogs. Maybe if this war goes on another five years or so you’ll know something about the care and maintenance of torpedoes. But there’s one thing for you to get into your heads now: We—you and me—we win wars. Yes, you and me. These things’ —slapping a torpedo— ‘sink ships. There’s Winston in London. He knows what’s wanted. There’s James Somerville with his admiral’s flag. He commands Force H. There’s Captain Maund of this ship. You all know what he does. There’s the young officers of the Fleet Air Arm, They fly off and drop torpedoes. But it’s us that really count. Us, you and me. For if these torpedoes don’t run straight and maintain proper depth, and if they don’t keep that up without varying a foot either way in three miles—well, then the torpedoes miss. And in this case , Winston and the admiral James Somerville and Captain Maund and the Fleet Air Arm might just as well have stayed at home for all the good they’ve done… It’s hits that win wars, and it’s us that makes the hits.” He finished.

Paul smiled. “You are correct Maeve,” he said. “Willful decision makers are seldom real Pushpoints. Their presence or absence can have dramatic effects, and the choices they make can alter the course of events. But look what we’ve see here! All our great movers and shakers are changing their minds, yet events remain hopelessly muddled. But, my young sprogs,” He put on his best cockney English accent, “and as Kelly and this Maintenance Chief Ginger might put it, it’s the damn torpedoes! Our thought was to feed information to the Primes and hope it would affect the balance, but we were wrong. The Pushpoint is with the torpedoes! If one hits Gneisenau, then Sheffield is shadowing Bismarck and the first Swordfish strike goes in against her, allowing the British find out the magnetic pistols were bad.”

“Right,” said Kelly. “And if one hits Repulse, then Tovey’s battle fleet cannot stop Bismarck from breaking out into the Atlantic, and we are left with a situation even the Golems cannot seem to sort out to any definite conclusion. We’re effectively blind.”

“And in all the other data variations it’s torpedoes as well,” said the professor. “Wohlfarth uses one on Ark Royal in the most prominent one.”

“So perhaps that’s where the Assassins have been operating all along,” Paul concluded, “not with the Primes, but down on the level of the hardware. Now a lot of the torpedoes were duds early in the war. There were incidents where submarines fired one after another and watched them plunk against targets and fail to go off, as we’ve just seen. And this magnetic exploder was a real culprit. The idea was that they would set the depth of the torpedo to run just beneath a ship, where there was little armor. Then the magnetic pistol would detect the hull and go off—one shot, one kill. Yet they had real problems. Call it fate, good fortune, magic or what have you, the torpedoes are charmed in this battle. It’s as if they are making all the decisions that really matter, just as Ginger said.”

“So how do we operate, knowing all this?” asked Maeve. “What can we do about these torpedoes?”

Paul thought for a moment, then spoke aloud: “Magnetic pistols faulty – Repeat – Magnetic pistols faulty – Do Not Use. Arm all strikes with Contact Pistols at once.”

“You’re suggesting another tweet from Lonesome Dove?”

“Before the strike from Victorious goes in,” said Paul. “That’s the only strike we know of that scores at least one hit. Perhaps we can improve the odds if we prevent those magnetic pistols from being used.”

“I thought we were backing out of this intervention,” Maeve was not happy.

“I’m just suggesting one possible point of intervention concerning the torpedoes. You’d have to admit that a message like that broadcast to Ark Royal, or in my intervention, to Victorious, would certainly increase the chances of a hit on Bismarck.”

“Victorious did get one hit,” said Kelly. “At least in the information we had before the Golem stream was contaminated. But the damn torpedo didn’t go off.”

“A contact pistol on that one and we would have a big explosion, I’m sure of it,” said Paul.

“Yet you have no way to know whether the hit would have caused any significant damage,” said Maeve. “Not with the Golem data stream all wacky. You have no more chance of sorting it out than the professor here. Look at his notes!” She pointed at Nordhausen’s notebooks, long pages of scribbling, things crossed out, others underlined or circled.

“Insofar as the battle is concerned,” Paul reasoned, “if we take the magnetic pistols out of the equation we at least improve the odds for the British.”

“What about the U-boat? Wohlfarth is a free radical, remember? He apparently decides, in more than one variation, to retain at least one torpedo, and then consistently finds himself in just the perfect place to use it. In one variation he hits Repulse, in another Ark Royal—and these are just the ones we know of. I suppose he could just as well have hit Rodney when he spotted her. This guy is really wreaking havoc on the Meridian here.”

“Pull up whatever we can find on him from the RAM Bank,” Paul suggested.

“I’ve done that,” said Robert. “He was a very successful U-boat captain, with several boats before U-556. Called ‘Sir Parsifal’ by his navy associates, he was a hard man, somewhat arrogant, and a strict disciplinarian. Though at other times he had an almost impish streak of humor, even daring to joust with Admiral Lütjens at one point when his boat was working up on trials near Bismarck. You’re well aware of the odd connection between the U-boat and Bismarck. The RAM Bank fetched up a photo of the drawing he sent to Captain Lindemann. Look at it! The man was nearly prophetic.”

They looked and saw that Wohlfarth had drawn the Bismarck, under attack by three WWI style biplanes that were obviously Swordfish off a British carrier, and it showed ‘Sir Parsifal’ riding his U-Boat to the rescue, diverting the enemy torpedoes with a big thumb on one hand and slashing at the planes with a sword in the other hand.

“He drew this in January of 1941,” said the professor. “Four months before this campaign. Here’s the translation: ‘We, U-556 (500 tons), hereby declare before Neptune, Lord over oceans, seas, lakes, rivers, brooks, ponds, and rivulets, that we will provide any desired assistance to our Big Brother, the battleship Bismarck (42,000 tons), at any place on the water, under water, on land, or in the air. Hamburg, 28 January 1941 – Commander & Crew, U-556.’ And in every variation except our RAM Bank history, he gets a chance to save Bismarck in much the same way.”

“Not by stopping the enemy torpedoes,” said Maeve, “but by saving and using one of his own.”

“I always did say the best defense is a good offense,” said Paul.

“I thought Napoleon had the copyright on that line,” Maeve winked at him.

“And here’s another note,” Robert went on. “It’s from a British Royal Navy interrogation of Wohlfarth after he was captured later that year. In these notes it seems U-556 carried a total of twelve torpedoes, not ten: five in the tubes, five in reserve, and two mounted in a special container on deck. Now… He sunk six ships, and damaged one other according to our RAM Bank. That accounts for at least seven of his first ten torpedoes. I’ve looked up all the reports of those ships, and he put two fish into Darlington Court, and another two into British Security. That makes nine, with one left over. Our RAM Bank data shows he used that last torpedo on the light steamer Cockaponset. That’s the ship he passes over in all the altered Meridians, urged to do so by his executive officer Schaefer and sub-lieutenant Souvard.”

“In the altered Meridian, however, it’s the Darlington Court that survives. Cockaponset gets torpedoed instead,” said Paul.

“Six of one, half dozen of the other,” said Maeve. “The main point is that one ship survives. And on my watch survivors who are supposed to be dead become a real problem. Just look at old St. Lambert from our last mission for a good example, and now look at the father of this terrorist as well. Survivors become a real problem.”

“What about the last two torpedoes he had stored on deck?” asked Paul. He had been unaware of this information all along, just another of these small details that are so easily lost in the history.

“The British report states they could not load them into the U-boat due to the rough seas.”

“Thank God for that,” said Maeve. “I can only imagine what he would have done if he had three torpedoes left over instead of only one.”

“Yes,” said Paul, “but in this scenario we have to imagine a way in which he has none. Zip. Nada. It’s the only way the British get to Bismarck. So it’s down to this, as far as I can see. We either find a way to stop this cheeky U-boat captain, or we back out of this intervention and send that warning to disregard Lonesome Dove—but if we do that, we lose that easy handle for feeding in more information if we ever have to. Trying again with another independent code will likely be viewed with some suspicion. In fact, they may even change the code. Then we’d be stuck.” He looked at them, his face as serious as they had ever seen him before.

“I suggest we take a vote,” said Kelly.

Chapter 21

“There may be something more here,” said Robert. “This steamer that survives the attack by U-556—it may be more significant that you think, Maeve. In all the altered data I uncovered, it remained consistent. Darlington Court survives again and again, yet our RAM Bank data clearly shows she was the first ship sunk by Wohlfarth when he attacked convoy HX-126. I’ve got exact times from the convoy reports and ships logs.

“Here… I ran down the service history of this ship. It was the sister ship to the Arlington Court, a vessel that was picked off by U-boats as a straggler from convoy SL-7A, on November 16, 1939. It was built by the same company that commissioned the Darlington Court, and get this…. The captain of Arlington Court, a man named Charles Hurst, had an interesting history as well. He loses his ship and gets a new assignment, the Darlington Court, only to suffer the same fate as her sister ship—picked off as a straggler from Convoy HX-126. The captain survives both attacks.”

The professor flipped through his notes and then keyed in a search to the RAM Bank. “Here is the testimony of Chief Engineer A.H. Stirling, who was on the Darlington Court when she was hit: ‘About 12:58 the same day, in position 57 18N 41 07W, as our Escort hoisted a signal reporting a submarine on our starboard side, we were struck by a torpedo on the port side in the engine room, followed 2 seconds later by another torpedo in the deep tank forward of the engine room. The sea was calm, wind slight, weather was fine and visibility hazy. We were making 8 1/2 knots on Course 035°. The first explosion, which was heavier and sharper than the second, stopped the main engine immediately, and the second torpedo, which struck the deep tank, split the ship in two. The ship capsized immediately, and in about 45 seconds she was out of sight.

I had only just come out of the engine room when the torpedo struck us and, finding it impossible to enter it again, I came on to the boat deck, trying to get my lifebelt over my head, when I was washed over the side. When I came to the surface I looked for wreckage but could not see anything except the blazing tanker, British Security, directly astern of us, which was torpedoed immediately after us. The flames were about 60 ft. high, and a huge column of smoke appeared to come out of the water and burst into flame. I swam about for 3 hours and about 16:00 I managed to reach our starboard lifeboat at the same time as the captain.’”

“So it’s clear from our touchstone data that Darlington Court was attacked by U-556 well before British Security,” said Paul.

“Until things changed,” said Robert. “Now then… Here’s the eyewitness report from our RAM Bank of Captain B. Green of the Cockaponset. This was to be the third ship sunk that night by U-556. In our old history this is the ship Wohlfarth wastes his last torpedo on, not Darlington Court as Kennedy had it in his book. The times in these reports confirm that. He uses Greenwich Mean Time here, which accounts for the difference between this and the Commodore’s report, but the basic sequence of events is the same. Listen: ‘At 12:50 the Darlington Court, which was No. 41 in the convoy, was torpedoed. About 2 minutes after the Darlington Court was torpedoed a Tanker astern of her (this was British Security in station 42) was struck by a torpedo, and almost immediately caught fire. Another tanker astern got into the flames from the other tanker, and when she came out we noticed that she also was on fire, continuing to burn for 3 days. At 12:55 we made an emergency turn of 90° to port and proceeded at full speed, but we had to make more than 90° turn in order to keep clear of the flames.

At 13:10 when in position 57.24N 40.56W, the sea being calm, wind S.E. force 2, the weather fine and the visibility good, we were struck by a torpedo on the starboard side in No. 4 hatch. All the hatches were blown off and the ship immediately listed and water came over the after deck. No one saw the wake of the torpedo.’”

“Well that about nails it,” said Paul. “He gives the exact times each ship was hit, and Darlington Court gets it first. Yet in the altered Meridians—at least as far as we could tell—that ship is the survivor.”

“Every time I looked,” Robert emphasized. “So here is a suspicious case of a survivor that changes the history again, just as Maeve warns.”

“It does have a smell about it,” said Kelly.

“Are you suggesting the Assassins may have done something here—operated directly within Convoy HX-126?”

“Well, you all have been talking about how easy it would be to divert a ship like this away from harm—and yet how difficult it is to reverse that and assure its destruction. This is a clear case. It’s an easy intervention for the Assassins to make, and one we can’t easily reverse.”

“They’ve got their teeth in this pretty deep,” said Paul. “It is suspicious.”

“There’s more,” said Robert. “Here’s the report from the Commodore of Convoy HX-126. He uses local time: ‘About 09:37 Aurania (an escort) hoisted signal Sub in sight 080° and almost immediately afterwards at 09:38-09:39 Darlington Court first, and British Security immediately after, were hit. Darlington Court rolled over onto her port side at once and sank in 2 minutes. I consider 2 torpedoes hit her. British Security burst into flames fore and aft. A few men were seen getting away in her starboard quarter boat on the weather side. As soon as it was seen that attack was from starboard 9T was hoisted and a long blast blown followed by 2 short blasts. All convoy turned 90° to port together perfectly, just as at exercise, but some were hampered by the blazing tanker whose rudder was hard a port, evidently put on to avoid Darlington Court when she was torpedoed. At 09:45 – The Signals TR, (Proceed at utmost speed) – and SM, (Drop smoke float) were made and obeyed. 09:50 – "Scatter" was made. Whilst scattering, roughly between 09:55 and 10:00 Cockaponset (63) was torpedoed.’”

“And our history credits that last kill to Wohlfarth and U-556,” said Paul. “It’s clear that someone has been messing with the history here, but how would they have managed to spare Darlington Court?”

“Good question,” said Maeve. “The more we study this the more we uncover clear information that seems to indicate someone has been running interventions here.”

“It was obvious what they did earlier with that fishing boat bursting into flames at Brest,” said Kelly.

“Yes, but this is much more subtle. They are operating around the whims of a Free Radical, our good Kapitan Wohlfarth. He’s got five torpedoes in his lower ship when he finds this convoy, and he uses four of them to get these first two ships. Then he picks off Cockaponset with that final torpedo. But in the alterations we were able to observe Cockaponset is hit earlier on, and it’s Darlington Court that survives. How could they achieve that?”

“Someone messed with the convoy steaming orders,” said Robert. “There’s further evidence of this in the Commodore’s report, but another odd thing happened here. Several ships in the convoy reported a very large undersea explosion. Well here, I’ll read it to you verbatim from the reports: ‘John P. Pedersen was still afloat, burning before the bridge structure as late as 11:50. (Local time. She had fuel oil cargo. At 10:50, a very heavy explosion shook the ship. No cause for it could be seen. So heavy was it that Nicoya, four to five miles on our starboard quarter stopped and blew off steam. Dorelian, two miles astern, had some men at work on boat deck blown overboard. She stopped and lowered boats.’”

“Ships two to five miles away reacted that way?” said Paul. “They had men literally blown off their decks?”

“That’s what the reports indicate,” Robert tapped his notebook with a pen. “The subsequent investigation had this to say: ‘The captain of Cockaponset says the following: "About 20 minutes later (meaning, after all survivors of that ship had gone in the lifeboats) there was a loud explosion which shook the boat considerably and brought a quantity of dead fish to the surface. There was no water thrown up, but just before the explosion it felt just as if something was tapping under the boat. ”

“That almost sounds like a mine,” Paul suggested. “But I doubt a typical sea mine could produce an explosion that serious, with effects so far ranging. It had to be an explosion on one of the ships that had already been sunk.”

“Well here is what the investigation concluded,” said Robert, reading again: “‘No satisfactory explanation of this explosion has yet been deduced, though three possible causes occur:

a) Darlington Court or British Security, which had been torpedoed at 09:38, blew up. – Unlikely, as the former’s cargo consisted of 8000 tons of wheat, and the latter, a tanker, is reported to have still been blazing on the surface some hours later.

b) A U-boat blew up. – Division of Anti-Submarine Warfare doubts whether the simultaneous explosion of all the torpedoes in a U-boat could produce an explosion of the magnitude here reported.

c) That the shock was due to a subterranean earthquake.

The shock of the explosion and lack of any visible effect supports the view that the explosion occurred below the surface.

These reports appear sufficiently remarkable to warrant further investigation. It is therefore suggested that the Masters of all ships of this convoy be asked to describe their experiences at this time, and whether any eruption of the surface of the water was seen. It is requested that Division of Anti-Submarine Warfare may be informed of any facts which throw any light on the origin of this unexplained explosion.”

“Pretty amazing,” said Kelly. “An undersea earthquake? I hardly think that would register as an explosion, or have the effects described by the eye witnesses. Since when would an earthquake produce quantities of dead fish at the surface? No, this was clearly an explosion.”

“The Royal Navy felt that it could not be a U-boat, even if all her torpedoes exploded at once—it was that damn big. They didn’t even consider it might be a mine—much too small. And there were no reports on the German side indicating any loss of a U-boat here.”

“Then it had to be on Darlington Court,” said Paul.

“But that was discounted as well,” said Maeve. “That ship was just carrying wheat.”

“Wheat can explode,” said Robert. “Grain silos have ignited in the past.”

“True, but the explosion was enormous,” said Paul, “That’s what the report says, so perhaps it had a little help. And we must remember our Sherlock Holmes— ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ And Darlington Court is what remains, at least in our history. She was the only ship that was under water in that area, because British Security was still afloat as was Cockaponset, just about to sink. Her captain’s report states the explosion literally shook his boat.”

“Add a nice bomb to all that wheat and you might get a fairly significant detonation,” said Robert. “You think the Assassins managed to get a bomb aboard her to possibly sink her and save Wohlfarth torpedoes?”

“Well we know how much these terrorists love to blow things up,” said Paul. “Someone has obviously intervened here to spare Darlington Court. She doesn’t get hit and there is no underwater explosion reported in the altered Meridian. That’s even more evidence that she was the source of that unexplained event. Suppose they had a bomb hidden in her hold. Suppose they meant to detonate it when Wohlfarth fires, giving him another kill, as it were. It may have influenced his decision on retaining that last torpedo.”

“Then they would want to time it perfectly if it was a ruse to dissuade Wohlfarth from wasting a torpedo,” said Robert. “There were two explosions on Darlington Court, in the RAM Bank history, fore and aft. But this really big explosion happened well after that in our data. Look at the times noted in the reports. Darlington Court is hit twice at 09:38, and the explosion is reported at 10:50. That’s seventy-two minutes later, well after Wohlfarth’s attack should have been concluded.”

They sat with that for a while, trying to imagine scenarios where the explosion could be fit neatly into an intervention plan. “Could they have planned to blow up Darlington Court, and just botched the timing?” Paul suggested.

“Or could it have been aimed at causing damage to the German U-Boats, a very powerful undersea explosion,” Kelly put in. “In that case it would be the other side involved—the Order.”

“Well whatever it was, they botched it on both counts,” said Maeve. “If they smuggled a bomb on board they should have detonated it the instant a U-Boat was sighted. The convoy would assume it was torpedoed, but they blew it. Wohlfarth got to the ship too quickly, sunk it, and their bomb went off later, accounting for the underwater explosion as Paul suggests, at least in our history.”

“Yet none of this happens on the altered Meridian,” said Robert. “That’s the time line we’re dealing with now.”

“This is some serious shit here,” said Kelly. “What do you mean, in our history? You’re talking like the Assassins or the Order were at work on our timeline. There are signs of intervention all over this attack on the convoy.”

Robert didn’t catch the full implications of what Kelly had said, being caught up with his own train of thought. “Now reason this out,” he said. “Any ship that survives here is at least one more torpedo for Wohlfarth and U-556 to use elsewhere. All three go down in our RAM Bank data. Yet one survives when we look at altered history. On the surface you might conclude an intervention like this would have been run by the Assassins. As for the bomb, I’ll go along with Paul and Maeve and agree they may have had a bomb aboard Darlington Court, possibly to get rid of her before she enters Wohlfarth’s periscope sights and thus remove at least one potential target. But the Assassins wouldn’t have done that.”

“This is getting very curious,” said Paul. “I wondered what you were up to, and it seems you dug up some fairly interesting research here. Yet this bit about Darlington Court still has a lot of haze around it. This was a fairly large convoy. There would have been no shortage of potential targets here.”

“Yes,” said Robert. “I must say that I have an odd feeling about all of this. I can’t quite put it together in my mind yet, but I found other signs of what looked like obvious tampering concerning these ships. Darlington Court was moved from column seven in the Convoy to the lead ship in column four just before the U-boat attack. Wohlfarth attacks column four. Could someone be moving her into harm’s way, I wondered? Then there was a lot of shenanigans concerning that third ship.”

“Cockaponset?”

“Yes, she was supposed to have been assigned to convoy HX-123, but that assignment was cancelled. Then she was to sail with convoy HX-125—cancelled, then HX-125—also cancelled. Finally she gets assigned to HX-126, the fateful convoy Wohlfarth finds.”

“It’s as if someone really wanted that ship in convoy HX-126,” said Maeve.

“I considered that,” said Robert. “But why? There was no shortage of ships, as Paul says. Why does this one have to be in the convoy? And if the steaming position of Darlington Court was moved deliberately, putting her right ahead of British Security in column number four, then that would be the Order at work. They want her to get hit…” He let that fall like a stone in still water, and waited for their reactions.

Maeve seemed to pale with that thought, finally picking up on the thread Kelly had hold of a moment earlier. “But this all happened in our history—the cancelations regarding Cockaponset, the repositioning of Darlington Court, the odd explosion. Robert was reading data from our RAM Bank in those ship reports. If this bomb theory holds up, then it means someone was operating against our Meridian before we even became aware of this!” The conclusion was obvious. “If that is so, then… By God! Do you realize what that would have to mean? Our history, the RAM Bank data, all of it would have to be—“

“An altered Meridian,” said Paul, and the silence following his words was profound.