John Schettler - Golem 7

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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