Chapter 3
Stranded
Atlantic Ocean, USS Halsey (DDG 97)
17 March 2024, 10:43 Hours
Steven Flynn awoke lying on the cold metal floor of USS Halsey's CIC, his ears singing and his mouth filled with the taste of his own vomit. The air was filled with the stink of smoldering plastic, feces and puke. It was too much: his stomach rebelled and started to empty out what little had remained in it. Pressing his lips and teeth together he fought the nausea - and lost. He stabilized himself against a console with a hand, leant forward and vomited the rest of his breakfast onto the floor in coughing spasms. He felt as if a steam-roller had run over him, and his head was spinning.
When he had recovered his breath once more he truly noticed his surroundings for the first time. The CIC was dark, darker than usual. The red emergency lighting had clicked on, providing the sole illumination for the chaos: the screens and displays of the consoles were all dead. If there was any of the usual electronic ambience, it was either non-existent or so subdued he could not perceive it with the singing in his ears. The moans and choking noises of the rest of the crew were the only sounds in the dead nerve center of the guided missile destroyer. Some of the sailors lay unconsciously on the ground or in their seats, others hung in front of their black consoles with glazed over eyes, again others tried to pull themselves together, their stained faces a contortion of disorientation. Some were already back on their feet, and if he looked anything like them he did look horrible.
“Sit-rep!”
Captain Steven Flynn's voice was hardly more than a hoarse croak.
One of the nearest crew members looked at him as if he had talked in Chinese and stumbled over to an unconscious comrade. The man opened the petty officer's mouth and put his fingers into her throat. Another member of CIC's watch also glanced at Flynn before deciding to follow his comrade's lead. Too surprised to say anything, the captain watched the two continue before the switch in his head was flipped and he silently joined them in their efforts. It was one of, if not even the most basic first aid lesson: to bring unconscious persons into the recovery position and prevent them from choking on their tongues or their own vomit. Luckily, there had not been any serious casualties within CIC, leaving aside the dent in his self-esteem and everyone's having literally shat their pants.
Weak-kneed, he forced himself up the ladderway towards Halsey's bridge. The same picture as below greeted him there: disoriented or unconscious men and women, dead workstations and the penetrating stink of feces and vomit. Flynn searched for the officer of the guard and found him in the person of Commander Pattinson on the bridge's port side. Bryan Pattinson was in the process of bidding farewell to the contents of his stomach. When he noticed Flynn his ashen face turned even paler.
Flynn tried to give him a reassuring smile that come out as a grimace and stopped the commander's stuttered apologies with a wave of his hand.
“Catch your breath, Bryan. We'll take care of the ship once you're ready,” he croaked.
The singing in his ears slowly began to wane, and while he mechanically helped to get the rest of the bridge's crew out of their state of unconsciousness the fog around his head also began to lift. To say that something was not in order would have been the understatement of the century after what they had just gone through.
More by chance than anything else his eyes found their way to his watch. It was an heirloom from his grandfather. Harold Flynn had worn it when he disembarked from a landing craft during the allied landings at Anzio in 1943 and had worn it until the end of the Second World War. His own son had passed it on to Steven Flynn, who had worn the mechanical contemporary witness since his days at the Navy Academy. The sweep hand made its rounds with soft, inaudible clicks while minute and hour hand told him it was 10:50 AM. Captain Steven Flynn looked through the Halsey's bridge windows - and onto a calm blue sea above which a late afternoon summer sun shone brightly.
Atlantic Ocean, FMG Brandt (D-201)
17 March 2024, 11:01 Hours
Chaos reigned supreme in the narrow corridors of the federal navy's flagship as sailors strayed through the ship's sections, leading wounded to sick bay in a cacophony of voices and sounds. The ventilation and large parts of the non-essential systems of the destroyer had shut down since the central computer in CIC had decided its continued ability to function outweighed such convenient things like the regular lighting of the ship's interior. As a strange contrast to that, the electronic equipment within the ship's nervous center seemed to be working flawlessly, even though most of the data displayed on the multitude of screens made no sense, and atmospheric ionization was still too high to have the systems run at full capacity even on an EMP-protected vessel like Brandt. Semih Aracan looked almost impeccable compared with the rest of the crew in the CIC, a fact owed to the iron self-control that had allowed him to leave the Hamburg ghetto and start this career in the first place. In a calm voice he had re-established order in his 'domain' in short order.
Captain Florian Hallwinter looked a lot more miserable and a lot less dignified standing beside him, looking over the radar operator's shoulders. “I'm either too daft to count or there's something seriously wrong with that picture,” he muttered, his breath smelling sourly.
“Diagnostics indicate that our radar is functioning nominally, Herr Kapt'än,” an equally miserable looking radar operator responded. But despite the claim diagnostics had made, his voice told Hallwinter that he and the rest of the men were just as unable to make sense of the situation as he was. The task force consisted of a dozen vessels, but the radar plot only showed eight within a range of fifty miles and all of those were less than two miles away. At least radar was working again.
“Mr. Aracan, I'll be on the bridge. Try to call the other vessels. If the radar's working again, maybe the rest'll also be running. Datalinks, digitals, I don't care. We need to re-establish communications. And see if you can patch us through to SATCOM-Bw - or any satellite for that matter.”
He left the second operations officer to his tasks and forced himself up towards the bridge, outside the armored bowels of the destroyer's CIC. His knees no longer were quite as wobbly as they had been during the first five minutes or so since he had awoken, but every move still felt as if it was drawing a lot more from his reserves than it normally should have. The smell up here was no better than it had been down in CIC - in fact, it was likely worse despite the fewer numbers that had produced it. At least the corridors down there at some point led to junctions with the outer bulkheads from which fresh air streamed into the ship's interior. Brandt's bridge was as far away from that as was the engine room, and its windows were made from thick, bullet-resistant glass that could not be moved. Hallwinter dimly noticed that it was bright and sunny outside but his mind was preoccupied with searching his field of view for the task force's ships. There was Emden, some five hundred meters to their starboard, trailed by Berlin's bulky shape. On the other side of his view, Mendonca would have crossed their course in almost a ninety degrees angle had any of the ships' engines been online. Small wisps of smoke rose from the fleet tender's center. Halsey and Monmouth drifted south-east of Brandt's position, less than three hundred meters away from each other, and in the center of the fleet U-36 had surfaced, its crew standing on its hull, gasping for air and washing their hands and faces.
But it was not they who had his attention. Not in the center of his field of view but in the center of the task force floated Daring, their flagship, and she was a smoking ruin. Had his mind been racing to try to cope with what had happened to his crew and himself during the past minutes, trying to get an overview and restore some semblance of order it now began to tackle the overall situation. He took a look around the bridge. The highest officer present was Ensign Lukas Freistorff. The Westphalian looked green around the gills but otherwise seemed to have regained his self-control a lot sooner than the rest of the bridge crew, even sooner than steadfast Petty Officer Hensgen whose sole expression was one of embarrassment. There was little Hallwinter could do to remedy the situation with all of them were stained in puke and excrement, but he still needed to get things going again.
“Mr. Freistorff!” he called out and the young officer's eyes attentively focused on him while he snapped to attention. “Pick some able-bodied men and two of our boats and move to Daring as quick as you can. She's aflame and we need to try to save whoever we can! Move it!” The ensign slipped down the ladderway within the second. “Hensgen!”
“Yes, sir?” The Bavarian's voice sounded even hoarser than it usually did.
“Did you see what happened?” A hint of uncertainty crossed the experienced soldier’s face as he furrowed his brows.
“Damned if I know, Herr Kap'tän,” he shrugged, being himself again at least as far as his manners were concerned. “One moment we're running a straight course with the rest of the task force at barely fifteen knots, the next there's this immense white flash and the sky turns orange. I've got no idea what that was...” His eyes widened when he recognized the look on Hallwinter's face. “Oh, fuck me, sir, you don't think it was...?” The petty officer paled as his voice died down.
“Right now I have no idea what the hell I should believe, Hensgen,” he told the helmsman. “But I certainly won't take any chances now. Take some of the men of Lt. Brueggemann's security detail and check the deck with Geiger counters. If you find anything, get the hell back inside and bar the bulkheads,” Hallwinter insisted. “I'd rather have us all smell like a dump than risking radiation poisoning for half the crew.”
“What about the rescue mission for Daring?” Hensgen asked.
“If you catch up to them, tell them, if not...” Hallwinter simply shook his head. Even though he hoped his first fears were incorrect, the rescue of whoever might be still alive on the flagship was a military and moral imperative. He wished the ship's intercom system was back online, but strangely enough the simpler systems aboard Brandt were more affected by the blackout than most of the shielded high-tech in CIC and elsewhere. Most likely the system had just blown a few fuses, but so far there had been more pressing concerns than this inconvenience, even though it now might result in a tragedy for some of his men. “Try it!” he finally commanded the Oberbootsmann. He was willing to sacrifice men for the mission, Hallwinter thought, but one never should be reckless with human lives.
Looking outside, he saw Monmouth and Halsey also lowering dinghies into the water while the flight deck of Emden had begun to fill with people of the crew and the contingent of naval infantry the assault ship was carrying. They all had their eyes on the flagship.
Atlantic Ocean, HMS Daring (D-32)
17 March 2024, 11:23 Hours
The two long, black rubber boats raced across the distance between Brandt and the flagship, warm wind bracing the faces of the dozen men Ensign Freistorff had gathered for their rescue effort. Half of them wore the fire-resistant protective clothes of their own ship's fire control brigade, with masks and oxygen tanks resting between the boats' 'benches'. The rest of them were medics and what first responders he had been able to find in the short time, carrying with them first aid kits and stretchers. He tried to use the radio he had taken from the armory but the usual frequencies were still filled with static noise, and he disabled the device after a sharp screech seemed to drown out even that.
As the group rapidly approached the Type-45 destroyer, the ensign was shocked by the appearance of the ship. The usually gray hull was dotted with deep black burn marks, and smoke poured from the bridge's broken windows so thickly it dimmed the sunlight over them as they went alongside Daring like a translucent murky blanket. The ship's symmetric radar tower's top had been blown off, leaving a smoldering, twisted ruin. Her central flag pole had been subjected to enough heat to twist the blackened steel into a nightmarish mockery of a leafless tree. This close the smell of burnt plastic and other things Freistorff did not want to imagine was strong enough to veneer their own rank smell, and he imagined he could feel the heat the ship emanated. The metal around the burn marks looked as if it had been worked with a blow torch. He hoped that was just his imagination playing tricks on him, for if Daring as a whole was on fire, they were running into a death trap.
Bringing their small boats alongside the destroyer's hull, the men around Freistorff fastened ropes around the posts of the ship's mangled railing, twisted as though under the arms of a giants. One by one, the rescue team pulled themselves on deck. Lukas Freistorff bent down and pressed a palm against the steel. He was relieved to find it no warmer than was normal for a metal body that had been out in the sun for about an hour. That gave him a bit of hope, hope that he desperately needed. There was a fire aboard Daring, so much was certain, and with her dead in the water, how much of a chance of finding survivors was there when there were no other openings and thick black smoke was pouring from the only windows that existed?
Hauling their equipment on deck behind them, senior midshipman Freistorff grabbed an ax and went for the nearest bulkhead. The rest of the German rescue team followed him, carrying medical supplies, axes and crowbars as well as their oxygen tanks. He carefully touched the valve that usually opened the way into the destroyer's interior and tried to turn it, putting his whole weight into the effort. Two, three times he tried, until his face had turned crimson and he let go, grasping for breath.
“Damn it, it's stuck,” he cursed, motioning the sailor with the crowbar to try it instead. The man did his level best, and with Freistorff and two others pulling and pushing like mad, the wheel started to turn after a protesting screech that sounded as if they had just had knocked off half a century worth of rust. With all their effort they turned it, the wheel inching around inch by inch with the sound of grating metal, until after what seemed like hours the thread had reached its end. Soaked to the skin in their own sweat, they took a step back. In the distance, Monmouth and Halsey, the other Royal Navy ship and the US destroyer, had launched lifeboats of their own which were approaching Daring's husk. A part of Freistorff's mind wondered where the British fleet tender was but the rest of it was occupied with more pressing concerns. “All right, let's get this hatch open,” he told the rest of the men, a sense of urgency in his voice, and pushed against the starboard bulkhead.
It did not budge one single inch. Despite them having opened the valve the steel door sat immovably in its frame.
“The frame’s twisted,” one of the men commented, and true enough, on second glance it seemed as if the bulkhead sat in its mounting tilted inside by just a fingertip too much.
“Hermanns, Koslovski, put in your crowbars where I show you to,” Freistorff told two men who had originally belonged to the Brandt’s seaborne security detachment, an institution that had been installed during the past fifteen years on all Navy vessels to be able to repel the growing threat of boarders posed especially from fast boats in coastal waters. Originally coming from the Kommando Spezialkräfte, the German army's Special Forces command, the task had long since been taken over by indigenous forces of the Navy. That meant that under normal circumstances Freistorff would have had access to some of the HULC Mk. V combat exoskeletons that some of the NATO members - most prominently the US, of course, since they were manufactured by Lockheed-Martin – had come to use. Still, given how shaken all electronic systems – even the shielded ones – seemed to be he had left them inside their armory. A malfunctioning exoskeleton was about as mobile and useful as a car without gas.
He turned. “You two,” directed to another pair of men, who moved toward the hatch, “put all your weight against it on my command.” The senior midshipman took his fire ax and hammered its blade between the small slit left between the frame and the bulkhead’s lower side. “I’ll try to push it up so that you can push forward. On the count of three.” A glance to check all were in position, then: “One… two… three!”
All of them thrust their full weight into the task, grunting. There were still people behind that door, people they wanted to save. At first the bulkhead remained solidly in its place like a rock, until two more pairs of hands finally made an impression on the twisted piece of metal. Creaking and screeching, it slowly broke loose until all at once resistance was gone and the entrance to Daring’s interior slipped open, crushing against the side wall with a metal ‘clank’. Two of the men pushing against the door stumbled inside as it jerked open beneath them only to hurry out again the moment they managed to get back on their feet: fat, black globs of smoke poured from the opening,. There was no way to blame them as black wads of smoke streamed out of the opening, blinding Freistorff’s crew. Coughing, the men stumbled back from the open frame.
With the smoke came no immediate heat spike. But that was the only thing keeping the Germans’ hopes up. That smoke was toxic, filled to the brim with all kinds of fumes that were created when electronics and plastics were burned, and whatever fire was raging in the depths of the flagship had just been given new food by them giving it a new supply of oxygen.
“Fuckin’ hell, that smells as if someone has thrown a steak on the grill with its plastic wrapping!” one of the men commented, and Freistorff gloomily thought that the description, as bad as it sounded, was most likely not that far off the mark. He only hoped that by some act of providence some sections of the ship had been sealed off.
“Put on your masks,” he commanded the team. “Firefighters to the front, the rest with me. We’ll do this section by section.” Ushering the ones in fireproof suits forward he made it clear that, as the one holding the responsibility, he would be the first one to follow them.
Slipping the gas masks on, the dozen men slowly made their way into the smoky wreck. The black clouds made it nigh impossible to see anything, and the fact that none of them was familiar with the Daring’s interior layout only compounded the complicated task. But despite that, it did not take them long to find the first victims of the catastrophe that had befallen the destroyer. Mangled corpses, some with wide open eyes and swollen tongues, lay on the ground in the dim, heavy with smoke light of their flash lamps. On closer inspection, most of them showed signs of heavy, localized burns, as if parts of their bodies had been worked with a blowtorch. Freistorff thanked God their masks subdued the smell of the burnt flesh. Still, there was little left in their stomach that they could have vomited.
They made their way through the crew quarters, the mess hall and the ship’s kitchen. Lukas Freistorff prayed that some of his men had stayed on the top of things with regards to the path they had taken so far. In all the smoke and darkness he felt they were blindly stumbling through a maze, and they were not doing so very fast. He should have left one of the men behind to coordinate with the other teams that had been heading to Daring, he castigated himself in his mind. If the teams from Monmouth and Halsey went the same way as they had done… But it was too late for that line of thought now. He needed them all to check for survivors among the crew members they found with almost every step they took. Everywhere the picture was the same, and the picture was grim. The ensign had no medical expertise but it looked like the causes of death had been either electrocution, asphyxiation, or a mixture of both.
Moving further towards what Freistorff believed to be the ship’s bow they felt the heat slowly increasing, and smoky air grew thicker. He just wished they would find the destroyer’s manual fire control system which was basically a purely mechanical sprinkler circuit. He had given up all hope of finding survivors. The ship’s crew had been caught as off-guard as all of them, and the only difference their search made was that the injuries became increasingly dire. Still, they went deeper into the ship, dutifully checking each body they found. Had they been eager to move forward when they had found the first dead in the hope to find pockets of survivors, by now they were only going through the motions. Realistically, there was no chance they would find someone still alive the closer they got to the source of fire, and the quiet way in which the men did their duty reflected this realization.
At some point they reached a ladderway that led from the level of the officers' mess to the flagship’s CIC and officer quarters. How much time had passed since entering the smoke-filled carnage, Freistorff didn’t know. There was no light to go by, either: the further they went, the darker and grimmer it became. By now they were all covered in soot, too. He had, however, an idea whose corpse it was that lay crumbled in the middle of the room. Freistorff had seen pictures of Angelica Lyons, but had never met Admiral Gordon’s chief of staff. An attractive, petite woman in her late thirties, she had once sported shoulder-long blonde hair that framed a face centered around a mischievous button nose. That was the only thing that still enabled him to identify her. Most of her body was a charred lump, half her hair had been burned off and her face was twisted into a grimace of pain in the moment of her death. Looking down at her, he had to fight off his gag reflex. He succeeded – barely – and instead forced himself and the others to move on, even though he was no longer certain for what reason. Probably so he could tell his conscience that he had done all he could, he thought.
Led by the firefighters, the team moved deeper into the flagship’s charred bowels. The walls here seemed to have stored some of the heat the ship had been subjected to, and with all the smoke and corpses and blackness, to Freistorff it felt as if they were quite literally descending into Hell. By now he was convinced there was more than one source of fire.
Groping their way forward they suddenly bumped into each other on a T-corner where three corridors met. The red and yellow of flames shone through the darkness, and even though he still stood behind the corner Freistorff could feel the heat increasing exponentially. This was not a place where he wanted to be. Still, he had his duties. “Check out how serious it is,” he told the four men in firefighter gear. “We need to know if we can still save the ship. We’ll wait here and then make our way back to the surface.” That was their only choice now: there was simply no reason to continue searching for survivors. Whoever had been down here was dead by now.
The four men slipped off into the flame-lit twilight, and Lukas Freistorff and the rest of his team settled into an uneasy waiting stance. Those four knew what they were doing, he told himself. They made their living dealing with situations like this. He assumed it would take them some time to get an overview of the situation, which would give his men a few minutes to rest. The confines and all the dead took their toll on them, and waiting where they were they at least did not have to bump into some deceased English sailor all the time.
To their surprise barely a minute seemed to have passed when the four men rushed back around the corner, almost stumbling over the others who had slipped down to the ground, leaning against the walls of the corridors. “We need to get the hell out of here!” the man leading the group yelled, his voice panic-stricken as he pulled himself and the man he had stumbled over up to their feet. “The fire’s heading towards the main gun’s ammo storage!”
hey were all on their feet instantly, hurrying back the direction they thought they’d come from. The Daring-class carried 800 rounds of ammunition for its 4.5 inch main gun, and each of those rounds contained nearly forty pounds of explosives. Once the fire set those aflame the ensuing explosion would vaporize them all.
By pure chance alone they managed to remain on more or less the same path they’d come in on as they darted through the smoke. Passing the kitchen, the mess hall and the crew quarters they were all propelled by the knowledge that each step could be their last, and that only running faster brought with it a chance of salvation.
Freistorff had fallen to the last position, at the end of his team. It was the old, maybe even outdated understanding of his role of an officer that compelled him to place the safety of his team over his own. He would leave the ship last, after his men had safely taken to the dinghies. More than once the men stumbled over one another as the lighting conditions made it nigh impossible to move safely at anything faster than a slow walking pace. Be it either through panic or grim determination, the men accepted the bruises they took without moaning or complaining, doing their best to keep moving instead. Freistorff thought there was some familiarity in the corridors he ran through, and sure enough he passed a junction they had crossed during the first third of their rescue expedition into the flagship.
Without forewarning the silhouette of a man stepped from a corridor leading to the crossing from the right and the lead member of his team crashed into him at full speed, throwing himself and the unknown sailor down to the ground. Neither really noticing or caring, the sailor – Koslovski – jumped up again and yelled at the men in his native German before running on. “Los, runter vom Schiff, die Munition geht gleich hoch!”
The man who staggered back to his feet wore a stained USN uniform, Lukas registered after a foggy moment. “There’s a fire near the ammo storage,” he quickly explained to the American sailor. “Get your people out of here now!”
His eyes widening behind the mask he wore, the man ran off. Freistorff could hear him calling out in English even though the corridors seemed to swallow the words the further the distance between him and the German group grew.
Perhaps a minute later they found the entrance corridor through which they had first entered HMS Daring. Just as the fire below had come as a sudden surprise when they had finally found it, the daylight streaming through the wads of smoke seemed no less alien to the senior midshipman. He ran outside as the last of his group and saw the boats of Monmouth already speeding off towards the frigate. Halsey’s dinghy, commanded by Steven Flynn’s second-in-command, a tall, broad-shouldered and short-haired African American by the name of Bryan Pattinson, was just taking in the last of its own rescue team. None seemed to have any survivors of the flagship with them. For some strange reason that filled him with a sense of relief. At least it was not he who had failed. There simply had not been anyone left to save.
People aboard Emden's flight deck were huddled around one of their helicopters, but Freistorff was too far away and preoccupied to see what the commotion was about. He wondered how they had taken the electrical storm that seemed to have happened.
“Sir?” Hermanns’ voice cut through his thoughts and Freistorff looked down at the two boats into which his men had retreated. “We have to fucking leave now, sir!” the tall soldier called out, and with a start the ensign realized how utterly reckless and stupid his standing around on the flagship’s deck was. He ripped the mask off his face and almost dove down into the closest of Brandt’s dinghies. There was a strange fizzling in the air.
“Get us the hell away from her!” he yelled, and the two outboards roared into action, launching the small boats across the smooth surface of the Atlantic Ocean. Freistorff looked back over his shoulder as the destroyer began to shrink in the distance. A hundred meters, two hundred, three hundred… Then, maybe four hundred meters out, all sound seemed to cease for the blink of a second. But only for that briefest of instants: accompanied by an ear-shattering roar, Daring’s bow rose twenty feet or more into the air. The 114mm gun turret was blown into the sky two hundred or more meters. It seemed to sail slowly back to sea, so high had the twisted metal remains been catapulted. The ship’s bow appeared to be standing still there for a second as the noise of the explosion deafened all other sounds, then, as if in slow motion, it slumped back into the waves and broke off as debris began to rain down all around the speeding dinghies. After that came a series of secondary explosions that ripped across the full length of the destroyer, blowing deep holes into the superstructure and hull, spraying the sea around it with deadly shrapnel. In a few seconds the ship had slipped onto its starboard side, and in less time than it took Freistorff to curse in German, the name giver of the Daring-class had capsized.
Getting further away from it, Freistorff watched as the wreck, and with it the bodies of more than a hundred and ninety brave souls, was swallowed by the sea, and a silent tear ran down his cheek.
Atlantic Ocean, Tender FMG Berlin (A-1411)
17 March 2024, 13:34 Hours
With closed eyes, Berlin's captain took deep breaths of the fresh, salty air and tried to calm down his racing heart. The first panic had been the worst, after his helmsman had woken him from his state of unconsciousness. In the time that had passed since then Moritz Dierke's otherwise unshakable self-confidence had only slowly begun to return. He hated not being in control of the situation. So far his only consolation was that nobody else seemed to be in control of the unknown situation. Then, his panic slowly abating as he fought to regain control of both his ship and body functions, the task force’s flagship had blown up, the blast wave almost killing the people who had gone aboard to try and save some of the crew and giving his and all the other ships a good shake-through. What a waste! Had he not had his hands full with the situation aboard Berlin he certainly could have gotten some men to Daring sooner.
Well, at least he no longer felt like a pile of manure. Commander Dierke had since then taken a shower and put on a fresh and clean uniform while messengers brought situation reports from all over the ship. After all, it could hardly be expected of him to lead his men with soiled drawers!
The picture emerging from these reports was everything but encouraging. All electrical systems had been damaged, and even though his LI told him that most of it was superficial it would nonetheless take time to get everything up and running again. Their radio communication also was still basically useless, as was their SATCOM connection. At least there had not been any fires on board. After all, Berlin carried several thousand tons of fuel, ammunition and combustible supplies in its bowels! That placed them in an infinitely luckier position than their flagship, though there had been casualties amongst his crew, too. Five men had been killed, and there were three times as many wounded. Even worse – and more perplexing – was that roughly one out of ten of his sailors were still unconscious, comatose or whatever else one might call it, and it just happened to be so that his second medical officer was among those. At least the British medical team he had taken aboard for the ship's MERZ, the naval operations rescue center, were good for something after all.
But what bothered him the most was the stink. Commanding a fleet tender did not make one's sense of smell squeamish, but the overpowering, sourly odor of vomit made his stomach revolt. He had ordered all windows, bulkheads and portholes to be opened to rid the horrid, relentless stench. The air that streamed inside was mild, almost warm and had nothing in common with the sharp wind he knew had blown outside before he had fallen unconscious. The sky above was almost cloudless, with the sun standing high in it, and the sea upon which it shone seemed to be less dark to him than it had been a day or so ago...
After his gaze had swept over the calm ocean surface for a few seconds, Dierke shrugged and returned back inside. There was much to do, and Korvettenkapitän Moritz Dierke would master it all. He always did.
Atlantic Ocean, USS Halsey (DDG 97)
March 17, 2024, 18:12 Hours
“Anything yet?” Commander Bryan Pattinson looked over the destroyer’s communications chief’s shoulders, a deep frown chiseled into his long face’s features. The loss of the flagship with all hands had shocked them all, even more so under the inexplicable circumstances it had happened, but Pattinson agreed with Captain Flynn that the longer they lingered on the fate of their comrades the worse the situation aboard Halsey and the other ships most likely would become. The men – and he included himself in that – needed to be occupied, a task that at least so far proved to be easy to fulfill. A third of the crew had suffered injuries in whatever had happened to them this morning, some of them quite severe. There was not a face inside the destroyer’s CIC that did not show the signs of bruises even in the dim light of the ship’s nerve center. Some members of the crew were still unconscious and under the ship’s doctors’ close watch.
And then there were the true casualties, the dead. Of a complement of nearly three hundred officers, crew and SOF nineteen men and women had not made it, dying from asphyxiation or various forms of blunt trauma suffered in falls. Fortunately for the ship, their loss did not constrain Halsey’s functionality, cold as that sounded, but there had been some among them who Pattinson had known personally. That personal note also was what helped him keep his calm now. They needed to get in touch with NATO command to find out what was going on, to find out what or who was responsible for the death of nineteen fine young Americans. And what had happened to the ships they were missing? Triton and Evertsen and the rest of them: they had quite literally vanished.
At least their initial worst fears had not been confirmed. When people had awoken on all remaining combat ships, one of the first things the commanding officers had done was to dig out their good old-fashioned Geiger counters to check for radiation. Nobody could explain what just had happened to them, but a sub-oceanic nuclear explosion, some kind of mine triggered by their proximity, was quite within the realm of the possible. But measurements on Monmouth, the German destroyer and Halsey herself had soon dispersed those fears. While there was a higher, yet rapidly declining background radiation that seemed to emanate from around the place where Gordon’s flagship had sunk, none of it was in the range where it could have been lethal to begin with. And like all ships of her class, Halsey was equipped with an NBC-protection filter suite that would have greatly reduced the risk of contamination. Still, the specter of nuclear war hung over all of them, and with every waking hour they were unable to establish communications with anyone outside their little task force, the men’s anxiety grew.
“No, nothing at all, commander.” The chief’s fingers flipped over her keyboard almost faster than Pattinson could see. Chief Kimberley Chambers knew her job like no other, a fact which made the frustration in her voice even more palpable. “And it’s got nothing to do with our equipment!” She pointed at the three screens that enclosed her semi-circularly.
Pattinson’s eyes followed her quick fingers as she pointed from one screen to another.
“UHF, VHF, high frequency – the receivers are working just fine. I had the tech guys check the antennas and open them up. They could use a new paint job,” she added dryly, “but aside from that there’s nothing indicating that the problem is on our side. After all, we’re getting through to the rest of the ships just fine. There’s not an inch of static between any of us, at least not anymore. Not that I have any idea how there can be static on digital channels to begin with.” She shrugged. “But as strange as that is, radio-wise that’s only part of what’s truly bugging me, sir.” She withdrew a case from beneath her keyboard, removing a thick stack of print-outs, and handed them over to Pattinson.
Half of what was written on them made absolutely no sense to the commander, and that was not only because it was obviously in a foreign language. He furrowed his brows and gave her a questioning look. “What are these, chief?”
“Halsey’s equipment automatically monitors all radio traffic in its vicinity. This is what still was in the system’s cache. It’s the combined chatter of the past three days in a ninety sea miles radius.” She took the papers from his hands, shuffling through them until she found the part she had been looking for. “Here, this is from just before we all hit the pillows. It’s the radio traffic of at least four other ships.”
“I thought we had already lost all contacts at that time?”
“Well, we had lost all sensible contacts, yes. What the system recorded at the time were just unintelligible alphanumerical strings, but that’s not what’s bugging me. Sir, the point is, those ships were there when we… were hit, but they are neither on our radars now nor on our radios. We’re close to the Azores, and this is one of the more well-traveled regions of the world, smack in the middle between South America and Europe. The place should be crawling with traffic, both on the airwaves and physical. But there’s nothing on digital at all! No military communication, nothing civilian, not even a darn fish trawler!” She threw her hands up in frustration.
Nowadays digital radio technology was incredibly cheap, reliable, and had superior quality than analog communication, so even the poorest of the poor were able to use it on their boats. The technology was developed enough and easy enough to handle that even Somali and Yemenite pirate bands had developed their own indigenous command networks based on it.
“Link-22 and Link-16 work flawlessly between all units, and the com officer aboard Emden coordinated with me when we tried to get through to Spain and the units coming from the Mediterranean. Principe de Asturias should have been able to receive us, especially when we used the Emden’s antennas.”
The Principe was Spain’s aging flagship, a 17,000 ton STOVL carrier which had been constantly modernized and served as the command vessel of the units of UNBIF that Italy and Spain contributed. It should have been decommissioned two years ago, but, there being no suitable replacement and no money to buy one, the Spanish Navy was stuck with it. With the far larger Juan Carlos I in dry dock, it had been their only option to use in this mission. Given that Emden was a command vessel herself, using her extensive and powerful communication equipment she should have been able to contact her.
“Did you try the satellite network again?” Pattinson pointed at the screen to her right where he knew a part of the display automatically updated which communication satellites – civilian and military – were in range.
The blank stare Chief Chambers gave him was the closest thing the NCO could have done without outright asking whether or not he was fucking kidding her. This was, after all, her job, and more than that, a matter of pride. Then, after an awkward pause, Chambers nodded simply. “Yes, I did that.” She sucked the air in through her teeth before adding a belated ‘sir’. “Twice. As did my colleagues on Monmouth and Brandt. Skynet, SATCOM-Bw, AEHF-Milstar, nothing worked. Again, all our equipment appears operational. By now I’m almost thinking it’s not a problem with any of the equipment: it’s more as if none of those satellites are there anymore.” She said the last two words slowly, through gritted teeth.
“That’s… unlikely, chief.” Pattinson’s voice was more than a bit skeptical. “All of the BRIC countries combined don’t have the ASAT assets to kill all our birds in such a short time,” he told her. Let alone a reason to do so, he added in thoughts.
“Just saying,” she muttered, staring at her work-station before turning back to Pattinson. “Well, we haven’t gone through our whole arsenal yet. There’s an ungodly number of civilian satellites up there that we could try to use. They’ll hardly be up to our safety standards, but I reckon they’ll be enough to send a simple ‘Hello, what’s going on?’ to Brussels or D.C.”
“Good,” Pattinson said. “Do that,” he rubbed his temples, trying to stave off a headache – a normal headache. “See if you can get the Germans and the Brits into the boat. I suppose if we coordinate our resources we should be able to finally get some results.”
But one thought lingered in his mind that he didn’t speak: what if they could not?
Atlantic Ocean, FMG Brandt (D-201)
17 March 2024, 20:22 Hours
Everybody was overworked and exhausted, some showing off their bruises or fresh bandages around cuts or sprained joints. Ironically, the ship's chief medical officer was absent, resting in sickbay with a concussion.
“Well, we're sitting ducks. Blind, deaf sitting ducks,” Semih Aracan told the rest of Brandt's officers with a mirthless chuckle.
Doctor Ralph Dorske, standing in for the chief medical officer as the destroyer's lead officers met for the first time since the catastrophic events of the day added, “Ducks with eighteen dead and four times as many wounded.” He sounded far less neutral than the ship's Second Operations Officer. “Luckily, none of those was wounded too heavily,” he sighed.
The smell of coffee hung heavy in the air, giving the destroyer's briefing room the atmosphere of a small Italian back-alley café. That, and it helped veneering the last remains of the awful stench their collective unconsciousness had left.
“
That may be true, sir,” Lieutenant Stefan Wieszmann addressed his direct superior as well as the rest of the room, “but it’s not due to any faults on our side. We still do have the occasional 'ghost' in the system, but as far as the equipment's concerned we're running smoother than ever since we left Portsmouth Harbor,” the EW [8] section chief of the destroyer's CIC stated. “There've been no attempts at electronic warfare against us or any other ship of the flotilla during the past eight hours, and no surface contact within radar range has tried to initiate communication with us. And my radio operator tells me they haven't reacted to any of our calls either.”“Could it be a technical problem, not with CIC, but the actual antenna up there?” Hallwinter pointed upwards.
“Nein, Herr Kap'tän.” Wieszmann shook his head. “I thought of that myself and asked Oberleutnant Aracan for permission to leave my post and check on the deck equipment with two technicians. We found no sign of broken equipment, sir. Indeed, after consulting with my counterpart on Halsey it seems neither they nor us have suffered any serious technical breakdowns.”
“Which is something else to consider, Herr Kap'tän,” Lieutenant Markus Diponto chimed into the discussion. As the ship's weapons officer, all radar data also went through his own work-station. “Brandt is explicitly EMP-shielded, and Captain Flynn's ship received an equivalent upgrade after the Gulf Shock. Any big tubs in our vicinity haven't. We should have had surface contacts with at least half a dozen oceanic freighters dead in the water by now. But all radar's picking up within 150 miles around us are comparably tiny boats, barely larger than the inflatables we carry, I'd wager, and most of them close to the islands.”
“Cutters and fishing boats, most likely,” Hannah Schumacher mused. An exceptionally bright young officer, Lt. Schumacher came from a long tradition of Jewish German officers – briefly broken by those damn twelve years – and held the position of section chief for ASW duties aboard the destroyer, a task that also made her the chief of the ship's three MH90-NG helicopters.
“Yes, Frau Oberleutnant, I agree. But even Somali fishermen have digital radios nowadays.”
“Maybe what's affected us has moved on southwards, plaguing them now,” Wieszmann proposed. “Perhaps we should bring one of them in with one of the task force's dinghies?”
“No, Mr. Wieszmann.” Florian Hallwinter shook his head, his eyes lying deep in their sockets. “As long as we don't know what the hell's going on here I'm not sending my men out – how many miles away is the closest contact?”
Diponto jumped into the breach. “Last I checked some thirty-three miles, Herr Kap'tän.”
“Thank you.” Hallwinter continued, building on his train of thought, “I'm not sending half a dozen men out in an unarmed dinghy more than thirty miles away from the fleet to basically kidnap some Portuguese fishermen. I'd rather like to get an idea of the situation without exposing this ship to too much of a risk. We've already lost Daring and her whole crew. Miss Schumacher,” he said now, turning to the brunette, green-eyed ASW officer, whose hair was held back by a black hair tie, “are our ARGUS drones operational?”
The Automated Radar Guidance Utility System, or ARGUS, was the result of a joint BAE-EADS reconnaissance drone program that had built on the experiences gained with land-based systems like the US 'Predator' drones. Unarmed and powered by a mix of lithium-ion batteries and solar panels, the drone resembled a flat, one foot high and seven foot long triangle in whose center sat a circular casing. Twice the diameter of a soccer ball, it housed the drone's avionics as well as a high-resolution camera sending live footage to an operator back on its mother ship and high-performance radars. Designed to act as a floating recon platform with endurance up to eight hours, ARGUS rarely achieved those factory presets when running at full capacity. No operator worth the name ever had one of those in the air for more than five and a half, maybe six hours a time.
The USN new systems, called EMRU or Extended Marine Recon Unit, had a lot more raw power at their disposal and also could be armed with up to 2,000 lbs of ordnance, but the only ships technically in range which already used those were the two Zumwalt-class destroyers that escorted Admiral Birmingham and the USS Harry S. Truman.
Still, the German ship's size allowed the destroyer to carry three of the semi-independent recon drones, effectively expanding its radar-coverage more than a hundred miles if all three were used simultaneously.
“I'm afraid not, sir,” Schumacher said, shaking her head. “Unlike the ship or even the helicopters, the ARGUS systems are too lightweight to have received any kind of EMP shielding. The electronics of all three are a bust,” she admitted grudgingly. She added hastily, “We can get them up and running using spares stored on Berlin. I've already requested the transfer of the material from the tender, but I won't have any of them operational before, say, thirty-six hours from now. I had given the helicopters priority until now.”
“I'll see what my colleagues have in mind.” Hallwinter stifled a yawn. Schumacher nodded curtly, and the captain placed both his palms on the briefing room's table. “All right, ladies and gentlemen, let's call it a day then.”
Atlantic Ocean, Amphibious Assault Ship FMG Emden (LHD-1)
18 March 2024, 07:33 Hours
Hectic activity filled the long flight deck of the helicopter carrier outside the starboard-sided superstructures. Members of the flight crew and the technicians were crowded around a single MH90-NG helicopter on a landing spot. The machine was special only insofar as out of the twenty-six the ship carried in total it happened to be the only one in operational status. The flight and hangar decks both had been turned into giant spare part dumps, with men buzzing around stripped helicopters like ants, trying to work out the issues of what had happened to their gear. So far they had been successful. Or so everybody hoped.
“Listen, we checked every single circuit on that bird, and we did it twice,” a technician holding an NCO rank almost moaned, more bored than agitated. “We test-started the engines, and we checked the rudders. We even cleaned the damn windshields for you!”
Trust, or the lack thereof, usually was no problem for the members of the air wing and their ground crews aboard Emden. However, there had been a couple of incidents of suddenly malfunctioning equipment during the past twenty-four hours (not even to speak of what had happened before that time and had grounded them all). Machines that had been checked turned up with cut cables when thought operational, and one MHG-90 had almost crashed into the sea when the exhaust heat of its turbines had caused a smoldering. It had only been due to the pilot’s nerves of steel and sheer ability that he had been able to land the machine safely again barely minutes after he’d taken off. When the firefighters had been through with the helicopter it had turned out that, somehow, a heat protection plate shielding cables from turbines had simply gone missing. So far there had not been any open accusations, but trust aboard the amphibious assault ship was suddenly wearing thin.
The technicians had given green light for the mission, but the flight crew was less enthusiastic. After all, it would be their people who would be in harm’s way.
“You better have,” Lt. Hendrik Kramer told the NCO coolly. “I’ll be flying over sixty miles of open sea, and I’d like to do so preferably without having to land in it.” He matched the man stare for stare as his copilot already made himself comfortable after checking his part of the helicopter.
“Won’t happen, sir,” the NCO grumbled. “But you’ll have to do more of the flying yourself this time. We had to wipe the drives and re-install all the software. Including the dummy,” he told Kramer.
“Great,” he muttered sourly. “Any further surprises you don’t want to hide from me?”
* * *
On the helicarrier’s bridge, Captain Michael Thielen, her commanding officer, watched the preparations continue. A native of Kiel, the blond, stoic northerner with the Frisian accent had commanded a corvette for seven years before his command had been transferred to Emden in lieu of the necessarily more proactive foreign policy the Federal Republic and her allies conducted. He had seen her through her trials, and since 2019 he had commanded her in service. While based on the French Mistral-class, his ship had some slightly different features than its counterparts, the most obvious one being that she carried ten more helicopters on her standard configuration of nearly 9,000 m² of flight and hangar decks. Both had been built with the capability to carry heavy models like the CH-53 helicopter, but since those offered no advantages over the far more modern and versatile MHG-90, the Navy had never even thought of equipping Emden and her sister ship with them. And since the UNBIF force still was a sitting duck, and a blind and deaf one at that, the Americans had opted for a surveillance mission to be sent out to at least confirm their relative position.
There had been no objections against the proposal, even though Thielen was a bit surprised that, so far, there had be no discussion about who was in charge of the task force, now that Admiral Gordon and his staff were dead. He was sure the topic would come up, though: albeit probably at the most untimely moment possible.
“Base, Scout One,” came the helicopter pilot's voice over the bridge's speakers.
“Scout One, this is Base, go ahead.”
“Base, ready to launch, all systems go,” Kramer stated as the howling sound of the helicopter's turbines rose outside, the two rotors circulating with increasing velocity. “Confirm mission objectives, over.”
“Scout One, Base. Confirming mission objectives. One, locate Azores. Second, establish marker for navigational data. Three, do not land, do not engage. Confirm, over,” the flight officer repeated the points on the list he held in his fingers one for one without even looking down on them.
“Base, Scout One, confirmed. Requesting permission to start.”
“Scout One, permission granted. Clearing flight deck now. See ya soon.”
Three short howls of a siren blared over the long flight deck of Emden, motioning those who still were outside and in the vicinity of Landing Spot 4 to seek shelter. Men and women in flight suits and oil-stained overalls sped either inside or ducked behind some of the other helicopters on deck, covering their ears as the air the machine's rotors had whirled and whipped up bounced off the steel superstructure in loud, cannon-like booms. Gracefully, the light-gray, sleek, sixty foot long multipurpose aircraft rose into the air. Hovering above deck for a second, the pilot gave a salute before his craft swung around, turbines sucking in air before leaping forward, its nose momentarily pointing to the deep blue seas below before rushing off over Emden's bow to the south.
Over the Atlantic Ocean, MHG-90 NG Helicopter Scout One
18 March 2024, 07:52 Hours
The two men aboard the helicopter had been silent for the twelve minutes that had elapsed since leaving the Emden’s deck. The sky outside was of a light blue that spoke of a cloudless, hot day, and the sun had risen high enough above the horizon to the east that the NH-90's adaptive windshield had automatically reduced light permeability. Still, Kramer wore his sunglasses. As always, Kevin Schroeter thought. He probably wore them at night, too.
Schroeter and Kramer had been a team for the past four years, having gone through basic training and flight school together. The two knew each other, having been paired early on, a policy that was fostered by the higher-ups. Creating cohesive flight units that worked as one was among the goals of the 5th Naval Air Squadron in Kiel. At least with the two of them that goal had been attained.
It had helped that Schroeter was no 'typical' Kevin. The name Kevin had become the synonym for all those poor children in Germany whose parents had given them too exotic names. It had become the forefather of all those Justins, Jaquelines, Beyonces and Chantalles - all names that were not native to Germany, and - far more importantly - all names something like 90% of all Germans could not pronounce correctly - and was as such mostly connected with displaying behavioral problems, under-performing in school and lower-class economic background. German society had even coined a term for the problem: Kevinism. this Kevin was everything but. Indeed, Schroeter was way more punctual, diligent and quiet than his partner. So much, in fact, that they usually spent half their time in silence until one of them could no longer bear it.
This time, Kramer broke the quiet. “I tell you, these are the weirdest early spring days I've ever seen.” He shook his head, his headphones wobbling with the movement. “I was helping some of the tech guys on deck yesterday and I swear it was close to 30° Celsius in the shadows.”
“Currents and temperatures are completely off for this time of the year, but sonar data correlates with what we have on file about the area,” Schroeter mumbled while shuffling some chewing gum from one cheek to another in his mouth. “These are definitely the waters off the Azores. All we’re doing is double-checking they’re there.”
“Why? You think someone stole them and now only will give them back for,” he paused dramatically and placed his small finger against the edge of his mouth, “one million dollars?!”
“Could be the flying spaghetti monster for all I care. It's not as if we mere mortals would be told what's really going on,” his co-pilot snorted.
“Now, now, Herr Schroeter, know your place.” Kramer took one hand off the control stick and wagged it as a mocking reprimand, then hurried to get it back on again as the helicopter veered off course.
Schroeter looked up from the pad in his hand and furrowed his eyebrows. “Still that bad? I totally forgot how flying without the dummies was. You'll have to let me take over again so I get a hang of it while we have the chance.”
The virtual intelligence systems of the helicopters, or dummies as they were more often called, were adaptive flight assistant systems which provided their users with a wide range of airborne maneuver and handling support which, at the high end of things, made flying almost like playing a computer game. They were a relatively new development and had only been installed on the last block of machines delivered to the armed forces, the first one to correct that litany of problems the initial design had raised when it had been introduced. Both British and US forces had similar technologies in use. The dummies also served as gunnery aides, so much in fact that they had been equipped with sophisticated threat reception software that directly transmitted all target data onto the HUD.
“Be my guest, but if my darling crashes... you crashed her!” Kramer shook his head, readjusting his headphones. They usually only wore the standard pilots' helmets these days when they operated at night, where they provided extra visibility. Or in hot zones where the thin Kevlar coating offered the illusion of increased safety. “It's almost as bad as having to learn to walk again. Feels almost like riding a wild bull,” he smirked.
“Which you have intimate knowledge of how exactly...?” Schroeter asked in his usual dry baritone. He glanced up from his pad and looked out the cockpit toward the sea. He thought he had seen dolphins down there, making their jumps out of the water.
“Las Vegas, my friend, but the circumstances are Top Secret! Vegas... What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas!” the pilot continued, then abruptly switched the topic of their conversation. “Are you keeping an eye on the radar?”
“Two, as often as I can spare them,” Schroeter answered. “I'm getting an increasing number of small contacts on the surface, most likely fishing boats, but no radar contacts in the air.” He used the touch pad and a small plastic pen to flip through the menus to transfer the radar display onto his maintenance tool. “You know, this isn't Rotterdam harbor, but there should at least be some bigger tubs out here. The largest blip I have here is barely fifteen meters long,” he added skeptically.
“Yeah, strange. The capital of Ponta Delgada has an international airport, so there should be at least some traffic up with us,” Kramer said through an equally perplexed frown. And then there were the local airports that connected the nine major islands and the dozen or so smaller ones... “Something's definitely not right here. I could have bought that we're in some kind of twilight zone radio hole, but this makes no sense. We'll check that out,” he decided with a tone of finality in his voice.
“Amen to that. Ponta Delgada's radar should have illuminated by now, but I don't register a single radar emitter out there aside from the task force...”
“Aaaand there's land out there.” Kramer pointed to a rapidly growing green island in a literal ocean of blue. “There goes my Dr. Evil theory,” he sighed.
Schroeter put the pad away and produced a map from a pocket of his flight suit. Unfolding it, he studied it intently then nodded at the pilot. “Given the course and assumed position of the task force, and the position of that volcanic cone on the island's eastern tip, this must be Graciosa.”
“Gesundheit,” Kramer snorted without taking his eyes - or hands this time - off his instruments.
“You are such a child, Hendrik.” Schroeter sighed but had to smile. “Change course forty-one degrees south-east and accelerate to 150 knots. I'll inform Base.”
“Roger that.”
Like gray lightning the helicopter veered off its so far straight course and swept to the south-east, the sound of its engines getting louder as its speed increased. The few fishermen laying out their nets off the coast of the volcanic island in their white-sailed boats below looked up in surprise and shock as the strange craft rushed past a thousand feet above their heads, too fast and too bright against the sun for them to be able to make out any details.
A hundred and thirty miles to the south-east lay the main island of the small Portuguese archipelago, Sao Miguel, and on it its capital, the small town of Ponta Delgada. All islands of the Azores were of volcanic origin, the remnants of huge eruptions of a long past age that gave the chain a rugged and alien look in the months of high summer, reverting them to heat-baked, red-stoned rocks strewn with yellow brush land and oases of human irrigation in the many small river valleys.
The flight between the islands took them roughly half an hour. The fishing boats were much more numerous here, and further to the south Scout One also picked up a larger surface contact for the first time, something in the range of 250 ft and maybe one and a half thousand tons. But what irritated Schroeter was the size of the multitude of small boats. Having grown up on the island of Borkum in the Northern Sea he was more than familiar with fishing cutters, even the older ones, but these vessels down there looked nothing like the sort. In fact, most of them still seemed to be sails only!
“Thinking about that girl again?” Kramer asked mischievously, ripping his co-pilot out of his thoughts. “You know, she is quite cute. Black hair, almond eyes: yeah, I can see why you would dig her.” He finished with a whistle.
Schroeter gave him an irritated look. “Could you make even less sense? What the hell are you babbling on about?”
Kramer barked a short laughter. “Oh, come on, you know who I mean. She's been basically all over the place whenever we checked the helis,” he teased.
Schroeter rolled his eyes. “You know, that could have been because she's with the tech crew. Moron,” he snorted, then added a belated, “And yeah, she's kinda hot. Seems to know her stuff, too.”
“I'm sure she does.” Kramer clicked his tongue, forcing his partner to stifle a half-joking, half-embarrassed moan. “Worked on our baby here, too. Sure gave it some good lovin'.”
Schroeter shook his head. “Man, you're one sick puppy. I'm just glad you know to zip it when we ferry the brass around,” he muttered, then whistled through his teeth. “Seems we have an air contact, forty-five miles south-south-east. Speed is about a hundred and twenty knots at two thousand feet, slowly sinking.”
“That's one slow-ass plane. If it goes any slower the pilot will have to get out and push the damn thing. From its speed and course it'll be in Ponta Delgada a couple of minutes before us.”
“Well, then we'll be able to compliment him on a flyby. ETA nine minutes.”
The island of Sao Miguel crept over the horizon, out of the eastern sun which already stood high over the massive caldera that covered all of the main island's north-west, its walls grown over with thorny brushwork that followed the course of the hundreds of small streams that only carried water during the winter months. High and orange red, the remains of the huge volcano stood defiant against wind and waves that slowly, over thousands of years, ate at its substance. Scatterings of white houses with barely-sloped red-tiled roofs, surrounded by terraced fields and plantations of gnarled trees emerged from the barren wilderness here and there. There was a vague sense of wrongness to the picture, but Schroeter could not put his finger on it.
Kramer sped the helicopter towards the walls of the volcano, its turbines howling as the naval version of the NH-90 raced to climb fast enough not to collide with the rusty red steep face. Emerging from its ascent with the stuttering roar of an angry god, Kramer navigated the machine several hundred feet over the caldera's ridge. To his right the slope fell off to a narrow stretch of land between mountain and coast, but to his left the inside of the massive crater extended for miles, filled by soft, green plains and three or four large lakes. To their east, the broken walls of the volcano slowly gave way to rolling lands dotted with the smoothed remains of dozens of smaller volcanoes.
Flying more than two thousand feet high to get a good overview, they approached the island's capital from the north-west, following the southernmost line of volcanic cones. Between these crisscrossed dry grasslands and narrowly walled golden fields, farm houses and half-dry ponds from which the cattle and sheep drank.
Kramer said, gesturing outside with a nudge, “You know, I’m no farmer, but isn’t crop supposed to be ripe around summertime?” Now they flew barely a hundred feet over the ground where golden ears rippled in the wind.
“Well, it certainly seems to be hot enough for summertime.” Schroeter took a short glance outside before focusing back on his tools. “It’s March, though, and the weather isn’t that high on our list of priorities. Ponta Delgada in two minutes.” He pointed ahead.
More and more houses began to appear, whitewashed stone constructions with roofs made of sun-bleached reddish tiles surrounded by sheds and small barns and low stone walls. To their south, fishing huts too small to genuinely serve as homes in the pilots’ minds were nestled against the rough coast. Beneath them people ran from their homes, shouting and pointing as the helicopter passed over them. Mothers shooed their children inside. The elder folk signed themselves with the cross.
“We should be over the outskirts now. Follow the coastline until you get to the marina. As per the map there should be some hotels you can orientate yourself on,” Schroeter explained while his fingers flipped through a series of diagnostics menus only to be interrupted by a harrumphing Kramer.
Kramer harrumphed, “I’m hitting the brakes now, but your map-reading skills have sunken to female levels, Kevin. There’s no dense settlement for at least the next eight or nine hundred yards.”
Scout One's fuselage tilted leftwards as the helicopter began to slow down and fly a long-winded curve towards its destination on the Azores’ main island. The machine had already begun to react increasingly well to its crew’s commands, the VI being rather quick on the uptake. A steady breeze coming from the open sea was easily compensated for by the avionics, and the adaptive systems made the bright sun outside seem just right enough to not really need sunglasses - not that Kramer would have ever taken his off. Still, as Schroeter’s eyes flipped between the map on his lap and the scenery passing by beneath them, the feeling that something was amiss grew within in. He knew how to read maps, and even more so, he was extremely good at calculating their speed and course in his head, combining it with what he had on paper. That it did not work out this time worried him, especially in light of all the other strange occurrences. He switched on the helicopter’s automatic digital channel search, but just as before, all the feedback he got was from the ships of the flotilla, some hundred miles off to their north-west. There should have been undecipherable chatter. In its place came only silence.
Kramer took Scout One into a hard starboard turn out to the sea then swung it around to make a direct pass over the marina – and then suddenly slowed down so much that the navy machine appeared to be hovering motionlessly two hundred feet above the water at the harbor entrance.
Even Schroeter had unglued his eyes off his map and tools for once and stared outside.
“Either there’s been a sudden change and yachts have gone out of fashion, or we’ve ended up over the wrong harbor.”
Where normally expensive personal pleasure boats would have been anchored, fishing cutters and sailing boats that had the clear appearance of utility vessels harbored, huddled closely together at long stone quays. And beneath them, maybe the strangest sight of all of it, a large biplane flying boat was slowly mastering the waves on its way to its anchorage. Its sheet metal hull gleamed in the sun, but the men operating it were almost hanging out of their cockpit, pointing up towards Scout One. The vintage design was greatly contrasted by the way it and its pilots looked, which was decidedly normal. The people on the quay also were paying much more attention to Scout One than to the comparably alien machine below it.
“That also settles the question why we’ve gotten nothing from the international airport.” Schroeter pointed to a strip along the coast to their relative north-west and held the folded map for Kramer to see. “It’s not there. And neither are the seaside resorts.” Instead, Ponta Delgada presented itself to them as a small town that could just as well have stood on the shores of the Mediterranean, with a core of nicely restored historic buildings.
Only that here the core was the whole town, and it was by no means geared towards tourists who bought trinkets. Kramer knew the sight well from the dying small towns along Germany’s Baltic coast. But this was different, too, because there were none of the usual signs of decay from the town’s steady use.
“Let’s set the marker and then get the hell out of here. I’m starting to feel like I’m in a damn episode of the ‘Twilight Zone’!” he growled, pushing the throttle lever hard forward. With howling engines, Scout One rose higher into the air and began to climb parallel to the soft hill Ponta Delagada was built on. The church on top of it was labeled Ermida da Mae de Deus on their map, and so far it was the only thing that truly seemed to be correct on it. Hovering over its red-tiled roof, the helicopter's rotors whirled up the fine dust that lay on the narrow streets and nearby houses, creating a small-scale sand storm as a few of the onlookers sought shelter inside. “You almost could've thought they'd never seen a helicopter before,” Kramer yelled through the noise, grinning like a boy who had just pulled off some masterful prank. But behind the smile and the exuberant voice doubt lingered in the eyes he so carefully hid behind mirrored sunglasses. What if they really never had?
“Or maybe they just don't like getting all that crap blown into their faces that we're whipping up here,” his co-pilot shot back wryly. “All right, let's do this. Base, Scout One.” He opened a channel Emden. “Marker set, transmitting positional data via Link-22 in three, two, one... Transmitting now.”
With the ships' GPS navigation malfunctioning they had taken a comparably simple route to determine their position and bring their navigational computers in sync again. That was the reason why Scout One had been sent to the Azores in the first place. By connecting the helicopter's own navigational software with a human-operated maintenance system on the one hand and the task force's networked systems on the other hand, triangulating their exact position via that data and Scout One's radio bearing was an easy task. At least now everybody knew where exactly they were.
Neither of them registered the faint smell of burning plastic.
Atlantic Ocean, Amphibious Assault Ship FMG Emden (LHD-1)
18 March 2024, 10:33 Hours
Working on the hydraulics of one of the lifting platforms the tech crew employed in case they took apart some of the vehicles transported for the amphibious part of their operation profile, Petty Officer Second Class Alida Semineh barely noticed the commotion at the entrance of the second lower deck's junction with the ship's conning tower until her colleague, a talkative, freckled red-haired sailor two years her elder basically spelled it out for her. It was not that Alida was not interested in what was going on. In fact, she was more than inclined to just jump up and throw herself into the fray to get whatever news or rumors were circulating, but she willfully refrained from doing so. She had her reasons to not stand in the center of attention unless she wanted so. Mike, her colleague, more or less clung to her body's every move, and she was more than aware of the fact that she also attracted looks from most of the other men that saw her.
Alida Semineh was no supermodel, but she had worked, against all that she thought right and modest, to make herself enticing to the other sex. As one of a few women stuck in close quarters with a crew of several hundred - mostly - men that was not much of a feat in general, even less so in her case. She had made good use of her looks, even though she had had to force down the bile in herself the first few times she had done so. But undoubtedly it was useful, and sometimes she found herself thinking that it even was fun. These thoughts she fought quickly to stop. Tall, athletic, with long black hair and almond eyes she had quite simply twisted Mike around her small finger. That he was of a lower rank than her made it all the easier. Noticing his longing looks, she gave him an encouraging smile. “All right, go see what has happened,” she told him generously. “But I want you to tell me, too,” she added insistently as he jumped onto his feet and rushed off to meet the rumor mill. Like a dog, Alida thought, trying to focus her thoughts on the disgust she felt for him and all the others. Which was anything but easy at times: many people here thought of her as a friend, or at least as someone they had a good working relationship with. That she actually knew what she was doing in her job was a welcome bonus to most.
Alida had a quick mind and quick fingers. She had started working on motorcycles during the dark days in the middle of the last decade, just to get along, and she had lived through the crackdown one year later. The memories were still painful, but she had cauterized her sensitivity to them just as she had done with so much else. She was on a mission - a mission she sometimes found harder to pull through than she had expected. Part of her indeed felt pride for what she did on this ship instead of what she had actually come here for. However, she used that as a corrective for her actions. If she became too careless in what she did it would all have been for naught.
Mike came back from the meeting that an officer must have broken up by now, panting as he slid under the lifting platform. “Bridge has lost Scout One,” he told her between breaths. “It dropped off the radar a quarter of an hour ago, and they haven't been able to reach it since.” He looked at her, equal parts shocked and expectant.
“Damn it, we worked that bird over twice!” she snapped, and only a part of her anger was faked. That worried her. After all that had happened to her and her family, she thought she would have embraced the idea of retribution against the kuffar, the unbelievers, more. “We'll finish our work here, and then I want you to get the others who were with us working on it. Command will certainly come looking for explanations, and I want all our bases covered.” She pointed her winch at him until he nodded.
“As if we didn't have enough problems...,” he murmured. Then the lanky mechanic vanished into the depths of the engine room of the Puma AFV they had on their lifting platform.
Alida had her eyes on him for a few more moments before returning to her work, ensuring the face she wore was suitably concerned. But inside her, slowly, she felt a warm smile grow.
Atlantic Ocean, USS Halsey (DDG 97)
18 March 2024, 10:52 Hours
There was no digital traffic. No data streams running across the globe at lightning speed connecting people as far apart as New York and Shanghai. No merchant shipping chatter filling the airwaves across the width of the Atlantic Ocean, no radio feeds accessible via satellite from all points around the world. In fact, there were no satellite feeds at all. Working through all possible channels day and night, the communications officers aboard Brandt, Halsey and Emden had checked the frequencies of every possible known commercial, government and military satellite in their databases. They had tried to hack themselves into the networks of sub-oceanic oil drilling platforms they knew operated off the shores of the Azores. Indeed, amongst themselves Kimberley Chambers and her colleagues aboard the two German ships had tried to use every trick they had in the book to talk to someone using the very technology that everybody used. This was, after all, the digital age. Even Link-16 and Link-22, the two communication standards of the armed forces, were digitized.
No, this morning - or rather, this night - at around 0100 hours they had all taken a deep breath, gulped down their cold cups of coffee and agreed that continuing the search likely made no sense. They had to try the only thing that was left, which was getting the small analog systems each ship still possessed into action. Of little use in the highly networked combat- and work-environment of navies in the early 21st Century, the systems had briefly been engaged when all other communication between the ships had broken down only to realize that they made no difference in that.
Among all the high technology within Halsey’s CIC, the part of Chambers' workstation housing their analog radio transmitters and receivers looked genuinely vintage. And yet it was this spot around which most of the officers of the watch and the rest of the CIC’s crew had gathered in a hushed silence. Chief Chambers worked the switches and rotary buttons of Halsey's radio equipment like a prodigy, her movements delicate enough to bring shame on cardiac surgeons. With her work-station directly linked into the CIC's speakers her every change of frequency was witnessed by all there, and - via a direct conference connection to all other ships - all command personnel.
Her yield so far had been... strange, to say the least. Indeed, the first transmission she had come across had been a vintage Portuguese naval code transmitted in the Morse alphabet, dating back to 1938. Given her knowledge with codes she had been quite indignant that someone out there thought it funny to clutter a frequency with such garbage as a simple two-part code from a land before time. But what had been stranger still had been the accuracy to detail in those messages: ranks, garrisons, original officer names, honorifics, they had all been in there, and stranger even, those dispatches concerned British and German naval movements.
Her second find, aside from some scattered VFH transmissions in what the computer identified as merchantmen French, Dutch, English and Portuguese chatter, was what she could only call a propaganda and entertainment channel coming strong from Morocco and the Spanish mainland. Propaganda for the regime of Generalissimo Franco, that was, and what could only be called gaudy music from the first half of the 20th Century that was authentic to a T. Well, she had heard stranger things during her time as Chief of Communications, and given the short range of most commonly used wavelengths it was not too much of a stretch that this far out to sea she would not get much audible or useful traffic. In fact, she did get a lot more squeaking and howling than actual programs, even with the help of the VI.
One vintage program - even if it was very authentic - was nothing special. Two was a coincidence. But three? It was the third that had all of them glued to the speakers.
“... the war will be long and hard. No one can tell where it will spread. One thing is certain: the peoples of Europe will not be ruled for long by the Nazi Gestapo, nor will the world yield itself to Hitler's gospel of hatred, appetite and domination.”
The voice coming from the speakers was Winston Churchill’s.
“And now it has come to us to stand alone in the breach, and face the worst that the tyrant's might and enmity can do. Bearing ourselves humbly before God, but conscious that we serve an unfolding purpose, we are ready to defend our native land against the invasion by which it is threatened. We are fighting by ourselves alone; but we are not fighting for ourselves alone.”
Captain Mark Francis Piper on Monmouth knew the speech very well. A student of history where most of his contemporaries had chosen to spend their time 'studying' Big Brother or some other such nonsense, he had dug deep into the achievements and life of what some considered to be one of the greatest Britons to have ever lived. It was from the 14th of July 1940, right after the Battle of Britain had begun. Something that should have been nearly eighty-two years ago. And something that was transmitted, as a regular program of the BBC Overseas Service, today.
“Should the invader come to Britain, there will be no placid lying down of the people in submission before him, as we have seen, alas, in other countries. We shall defend every village, every town, and every city. The vast mass of London itself, fought street by street, could easily devour an entire hostile army; and we would rather see London lay in ruins and ashes than that it should be tamely and abjectly enslaved. I am bound to state these facts, because it is necessary to inform our people of our intentions, and thus to reassure them.”
Florian Hallwinter, too, believed he remembered the speech, but he was not quite as certain as Piper. Churchill had always been an enigma to him, a man whom he had not decided whether to loathe or admire, but there was strength in his voice: strength and conviction and authority.
“There are vast numbers, not only in this Island but in every land, who will render faithful service in this war, but whose names will never be known, whose deeds will never be recorded. This is a War of the Unknown Warriors; but let all strive without failing in faith or in duty, and the dark curse of Hitler will be lifted from our age.”
The captain of Halsey let the last words of the British prime minister's speech hang in the CIC's air as a news reader, tacitly accompanied by dramatic music, began to tell of aerial battles over the Channel the last day before the gong of Big Ben ended the hourly program and an old cheerful tune danced over the airwaves once again.
~*~
