Kirov Saga: Hinge Of Fate: Altered States Volume III (Kirov Series) (29 page)

“Now
that you explain it this way, I must agree with you. In fact, one day the shoe
may be on the other foot and we may wish these people could manufacture just a
little more 30mm ammunition for our AR-62 close in defense guns.”

“That
might be possible, but all our missiles and munitions benefit from decades of
advanced metallurgy. We might get a 30mm round from them that we could fire,
but certainly not with the performance of our own munitions.”

“Which
is why we must be very stingy about using them,” Volsky admonished, though he
knew Fedorov would be the last to use unwarranted force in battle.”

Nikolin
interrupted them, saying he was receiving a radio message from Operations Chief
Orlov on the Airship
Narva
. In the next few minutes they learned that
the Germans had finally stirred again from their cold northern outposts on the
Norwegian coast. The
Narva
was flying high, and could not recognize
exactly what they were seeing, but they had spotted two large ships out from
Narvik and on a course that might take them very near the Island of Jan Mayen.

“There’s
one more thing, sir,” said Nikolin. “I’ve been monitoring long range signals
traffic and pattern filtering. The volume has taken a sudden increase, and when
I listened in I discovered those letter sets again.”

“Letter
sets?”

“Yes
sir. A stream of letters in sets of five, and quite of bit of that now.”

“Do you
have any of it?”

“I
printed out this latest message, but there’s a good deal more.” Nikolin handed
Fedorov the message, and he noted the telltale letter sets that indicated this
was a special message being sent in the German Naval Enigma code. NVXCO TYQUY
BTURS OVWPD VPVKZ UPZGH, and on it went. Fedorov wasted no time getting to his
pad device with the Enigma decoding application. Using that day’s date, he soon
established that his rotor position should be set at IV-V-III, with a rotor
start position KXU and the rings set at VQG. Ten letter pairs were also set on
the plugboard, and when he decoded the message he soon had his answer. It read:
‘Activate Plan Fimbulwinter, Stage I, with Alfargruppe, effective immediately.
Fleet commander to execute Stage II, with Jötnargruppe, at his discretion. Plan
Felix to follow.”
The Admiral was watching him closely, noting his intense
concentration with some admiration.

“Trouble,
Mister Fedorov?”

“What
else? These are fleet movement orders, Admiral. These words here are ship units
being ordered to sea—a major fleet movement, sir. The shocking thing about it
is that there are only two ships on that list which might have been active at
this time in the war,
Scharnhorst
and
Bismarck
. Unless they are
code names, there are others listed that I’ve never even heard of. They must be
code for something else, because the Germans could not possibly have this many
ships operational in 1940.”

“I
suppose we should not be surprised, Fedorov. Admiral Tovey has a new ship. Yes?
So the Germans may have been busy in the shipyards as well.”

“Indeed
sir. But it’s this last word here that I’m worried about.” He pointed to his
application screen. “Felix.”

“A new
German battleship?”

“No
sir. The battleships on the list are
Bismarck
and
Hindenburg
,
more than enough to worry about. But this last word comes later, after a series
of movement orders. It refers to an operation name—Operation Felix. That was
the German plan to attack Gibraltar! But it never happened in the real war.”

 “The
real war, Mister Fedorov? This one isn’t convincing enough for you?”

Fedorov
forced a smile at that. “This would indicate a major point of divergence, sir.
At this time the Germans had three options for prosecuting the war. One was to
strike directly at Great Britain with Operation Seelöwe. That plan was
discarded when Goering failed to break the R.A.F. and secure airspace over the
Channel. The second option was to open hostilities against Soviet Russia with
Operation Barbarossa, but that did not happen until 1941. The third was to
pursue a Mediterranean strategy, striking indirectly at Britain by driving a
wedge right through the heart of her empire. Remember our discussion when we
were down there, Admiral?”

“How
could I forget it? I still get headaches from that fall I took.”

“Yes,
well there are three places Britain needs to hold to have any chance of
prevailing in the Mediterranean and eventually knocking Italy out of the war.
Suez in Egypt is the heart of their operation in the east, Malta is the
lynchpin in the center, and Gibraltar the key outpost in the west. It’s the
gateway to all future offensive plans there—Operation Torch, the landings in
North Africa, the Tunisian campaign and invasion of Sicily and Italy—these all
depend on Gibraltar standing as a viable British base of operations. Up until
now the war in the West has followed a fairly familiar course. The campaigns in
France and Norway have turned out much as they did in our history. But if
Gibraltar falls we could be looking at a radical change in the entire course of
the war. It would have to mean that Spain is either invaded by Germany or that
it becomes an active belligerent against England. If this is so the Germans
will have access to ports from Tromso to Gibraltar.”

“These German
ships plan to sail all that distance? That does not make good sense to me.”

“Agreed.
But I don’t think that is their objective. These orders simply indicate the
Germans are planning to put battlegroups out into the Atlantic. Operation Felix
would be undertaken by the army, but a sudden sortie by the Kriegsmarine like
this would certainly strain British resources. It would mean Admiral Tovey
could not send reinforcements to Force H at Gibraltar.”

“That
at least makes sense. Does it say where the Germans are planning to break out?”

“No
specific locations are mentioned, but there are references to rendezvous
points. The names for battlegroups appear to be
Jötnar
and
Alfar
.
I looked those up. They refer to giants and elves in Norse mythology. And the
whole operation is being called
Fimbulwinter.”

“Codes
within codes.”

“It
appears so, sir, but I do not have to think too hard to interpret this.
Fimbulwinter
was the name of a harsh north wind that comes before the end of the world.
Jötnargruppe
would probably be the heavy battleships,
Alfargruppe
the lighter
supporting ships.”

“I
see…” Volsky pursed his lips, considering all this. “A cold wind blowing from
the north…. We had best pass all this on to the British, Mister Fedorov.”

 “With
your permission, I will have Nikolin send a report to
Sheffield,
and
they can transmit to the Admiralty on their normal channels.”

“Agreed,”
said Volsky. “And we should notify the Ice Watch that the weather in the
Denmark Strait may be taking a turn for the worse. They may soon be picking up
this contact the
Narva
spotted. In the meantime, let us steer to the southern
end of the Denmark Strait. We may have unexpected guests for dinner, though I
do not think they will like what we have on the menu. If the Germans bother my
watch, I’ll be serving up missiles in short order.”

Chapter 26

More
than one dinner was going to be bothered by uninvited
guests that night. Phones jangled in the Admiralty, and alarms leapt over the
wires from Whitehall to Scapa Flow. The British already had wind of the operation,
the first rising swells of a cold north wind. There was movement in the
Norwegian Sea, and reports of much activity on the waterfront and berthings at
Kiel. The berth for Germany’s formidable new battleship
Hindenburg
was
reported to be empty from the latest R.A.F. overflight. The
Bismarck
was
also missing, and presumed to be on the move north. Giants were on the loose
again, and British Sunderlands took off, flying north of Dogger Bank to scour
the sea even though sighting was hampered by thick clouds and fog. the Germans
had deliberately chosen this weather as the perfect cover for their operation.

One
Sunderland pressed on north towards Kristiansand and got into trouble when a
pair of Me-109s found it and riddled the plane with gunfire. The signalman got
off a plaintive S.O.S. before he went down into the sea for a forced water
landing.

High
above, Oberleutnant Marco Ritter banked his Me-109 and came around with a grin.

“Somebody
is getting curious!” he said over his short range radio to his wing mate.

“And
someone else gets credit for another kill,” came the return.

“Not
for me, Heinrich,” said Ritter. “I don’t count fat seaplanes. If you want it you
can chalk it up on your account. I’m just counting British fighters.”

Ritter
was flying top cover again for the
Graf Zeppelin
, operating now to clear
the airspace around the carrier and its escorts as the ship waited the arrival
of her principle battle units,
Bismarck
and its big brother, the new
flagship of the German fleet, the
Hindenburg
. Admiral Raeder’s heavy
chess pieces were on the move. Their mission was to first link up with the
carrier, then move at high speed up to Bergen. From there they were to continue
north into the Norwegian Sea, eventually turning west towards Iceland.

The two
ships that had been reported by the
Narva
west of Narvik were the
battlecruiser
Scharnhorst
and the heavy cruiser
Admiral Hipper
, a
bishop and a knight taking up their posts south of Jan Mayen. Kurt Hoffmann led
Alfargruppe
, and its mission was to demonstrate towards the Denmark
Strait in advance of the main breakout attempt by the heavier battlegroup,
Jötnargruppe
under Admiral Lütjens. It was Raeder’s shadow play, as he called it. With a big
operation slated to begin soon in the Mediterranean, he wanted to draw the
British Admiralty’s eye north to the cold Norwegian Sea, and thereby prevent
any further reinforcement of Force H.

The
Kriegsmarine had licked its wounds over the last several months, refueling and
repairing ships damaged in the abortive Operation Valkyrie. Of the bigger
ships, only
Gneisenau
was still in the docks, but the
Bismarck
and
Tirpitz
were ready for operations again, though the latter was being
held in reserve at Bremen. The second aircraft carrier,
Peter Strasser
, was
not yet operational as hoped, and it would be another six months fitting out
and running through trials in the Baltic.
Graf Zeppelin
was therefore
out on her second major operation of the war, and Marco Ritter and Hans Rudel,
both survivors of the first engagement, were out for blood again.

While
both of the older pocket battleships
Deutschland
and
Admiral Scheer
were also still under repair, they had been replaced in the order of battle
with the addition of two faster new Panzerschiffe class units, the
Rhineland
and
Westfalen
, and another even faster new design, the battlecruiser
Kaiser,
was included in this operational plan. There was one more surprising ship in
the flotilla, steaming twenty kilometers to the east in the heavy fog, a secret
new addition to the Kriegsmarine that Raeder was now adding to his active ship
list, the
Goeben
. Marco Ritter had a special assignment involving that
ship, but it was one he kept under his hat, saying nothing to any of his wing
mates until the moment was at hand.

 These
were the names Fedorov had decoded with his Enigma application, all assigned to
a new operations It was dubbed “Operation Fimbulwinter,” a cold north wind to
chill the frayed nerves of the Royal Navy on the eve of an even bigger
operation planned to the south. Admiral Raeder would show the British his
cards, let them see his Ace, King and Queen, and in so doing put as much
pressure as he could on the already overburdened Home Fleet.

The
movement of his ships would coincide with yet another sortie by the French
Force
de Raid
from their Atlantic African ports. The long month since the action
off Dakar had allowed them to make repairs, though their fuel situation was not
good, and stores were running down at Casablanca. Yet they had enough to join
in the operation now being planned, a strong wind from the south as well. The
battleship
Normandie
would be joined by
Jean Bart,
two cruisers
and four destroyers, again in a feint towards Gibraltar with the aim of keeping
Force H well occupied for the real thunder yet to come with Operation Felix.

Now the
cold north wind began to blow across the tall battlements of Germany’s newest
and most powerful battleship, the
Hindenburg
. First conceived nearly a
decade past, the ship was laid down in late 1935, the first of six planned
ships authorized by Hitler in his fateful meeting with Raeder in January of
1936. Hitler first proposed that ships H and J be named after two relatively
obscure figures from German history,
Ulrich von Hutton
and
Gotz von
Berlichingen
. The former was a scholar, poet and leader of Imperial Knights,
the latter an iron fisted mercenary who was known as Gotz of the iron hand,
literally because he wore prosthetic metal forearm, complete with moveable
thumb and five fingers that could be fashioned into an armored fist.