John Schettler - Golem 7

“And the rest is history,” said Kelly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m on it.”

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

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

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

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

“Radio detection equipment,” said Kelly.

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

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

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

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