John Schettler - Paradox Hour

Now we get our chance, he thought, staring through his field glasses at the smoke ahead. Goeben has been busy this morning. One of those hot Stuka pilots has already got a hit, and now we’ll come in like a shark to the blood. The British don’t have anything here that can match my firepower, and I can outrun any ship in their fleet. But we won’t be running this time, we’ll be hunting! Kaiser Wilhelm is the best ship I’ve ever set foot on, and now I get my chance to earn my keep. We were out of the action earlier in the Med, keeping a good eye on the Goeben . This time the ship will be put to its proper use, as an advance guard and scout ship, a hunter out to find and hurt the enemy. And my 15-inch guns will do exactly that.

“Ready for action, Schirmer?” he said to his Chief Gunnery officer.

“Ready sir.”

“Good, because I intend to fight here, in spite of these orders to disengage if the British attempt to close the range. Let them try. Word is that they have three cruisers, but it is more likely that we’ll see those pesky destroyers turned loose on us.”

“Let’s see how they like our guns, sir.”

“All ahead full!” Heinrich wanted to get over the horizon and get a good look at that smoke as soon as possible. It was not long before his watchmen made the sighting, a large ship, possibly a carrier, and burning at the bow. Then the scene clouded over with heavy haze, and Heinrich knew what was happening.

They’re making smoke with the destroyers, he thought. They’re running, but they don’t have the speed to match me. This ship is a whole new evolution at sea. Those British carriers could always outrun our heavy ships, but no longer. Now we close the range here with each passing minute, and let us see if they send anything our way to challenge us.

Thatchallenge was inevitable. The Royal Navy was not about to allow one of its principle assets to go down here without a fight. Of the five destroyers escorting Glorious that day, three turned after making smoke as ordered, and now they were set to make a brave charge in the hopes of discouraging the oncoming enemy raider. Icarus was out in front, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Colin Douglas Maud, a barrel-chested man with a heavy black beard and his favorite blackthorn walking stick always at hand, which he tapped on the deck whenever they made their torpedo run.

Maud’s fate had been strangely entwined with the long odyssey that had brought Kirov into this war. His ship had been in Force P under Admiral Wake-Walker, en-route to the North Cape area to attack German airfields at Kirkenes and Petsamo, though they never got there. Later, he would steam with Admiral Tovey in a hunt for another fast German raider, as that story once played out. Yet the raider was not a German ship, but a strange vessel with weapons so advanced that it managed to hold the entire Royal Navy at bay for weeks in the North Atlantic. Maud’s ship had been screening Tovey’s battleships when the rockets came in, weapons unlike anything he had ever seen. Icarus was hit and sank that day, putting Maud and his crew into the water, along with his beloved bulldog Winnie.

Rescued at sea, Maud was eventually given command of another destroyer, the Intrepid , a ship sailing right off his starboard bow at that moment. As fate would have it, he would meet the ship that killed Icarus and Winnie again in the Mediterranean, and lead Intrepid on a desperate attack to try and even the score. He was lucky enough to survive that encounter this second time, but not lucky enough to get his vengeance. But his story was not finished. A German U-Boat Kapitan would have something more to do with his fate, one Werner Czygan aboard U-118. It was his stealthy web of mines that would catch a fly off the Coast of Spain, a ship named Duero .

It seemed like a small thing, a lowly tramp steamer hitting a mine laid by a hungry, frustrated U-boat Kapitan, but it was the night that changed the entire course of history—not only of the war, but for every day that followed. For a very special passenger was aboard the ship that night, a drifter, indigent laborer, and a virtual nobody that had been taken on as cheap muscle in the fire room a few weeks earlier. His name was Gennadi Orlov.

While serving with Force H, Intrepid came to the rescue of that stricken ship, and Maud became very suspicious about a couple Eastern Europeans aboard, and particularly with the man named Orlov.

But all that had not yet happened. It was action that had began in a frantic naval chase between July 28 and August 8 of 1941, days that had not arrived yet. And it was action that might never occur now, for this world was strangely altered, with whole nations like Russia fragmented into warring states. Even so, details in the picture this history was painting held true, and Maud was aboard Icarus again. Yet the ship that had sent his destroyer to the bottom in one telling of these events to come, was no longer the mortal enemy of the Royal Navy. Instead it sailed as an ally.

Perhaps Maud would never be fated to meet Orlov like that now, though that encounter was a crucial link in the chain of events that now saw Kirov here in this world. If his keen eye had not spied that Glock Pistol at Orlov’s side, then he would not have sent the man to Gibraltar so British intelligence could have a look at him. There Orlov would meet and be interrogated by a man who was a double agent with the KGB, and as a result of that, he would be sent east through the med on a Turkish cargo ship, transferring to a Soviet trawler in the Black Sea.

Orlov’s sojourn east, in search of his grandmother, eventually evolved into a hunt for the man who had caused her harm, Commissar Molla. It took the Chief to a place called Kizlyar, where Molla’s men picked him up and sent him to a prison near Baku. Along the way he left clues in the history, particularly a journal note that a very keen eyed navigator used to find him. If Orlov had not gone east like that, then Fedorov would have never made the journey west along the Siberian rail line to try and rescue him and return him to his own time. He would have never found the back stairway of the Inn at Ilanskiy, and never met young Mironov, Sergei Kirov. It was that meeting, and the careless whisper of warning in Mironov’s ear, that saw this world now shattered in pieces, altered states, skewed history that was becoming more and more unrecognizable with each turn of Kirov’s screws in the turbulent waters of this war.

All that depended on the man now standing on the bridge of the Destroyer Icarus , Colin Douglas Maud. Or was it Werner Czygan aboard U-118, and his decision to alter his tactics and lay those mines instead of hunting with his torpedoes? It was that choice that sent Icarus and Maud to the Duero in the first place. Who could say where the seed of causality was really hidden in the garden? Time was tormented by these circuitous loops and changes, like unseasonable rain that caused things to grow and bloom that were never meant to be. It remained to be seen what part Maud would now be asked to play in this hour, here in May of 1941, long before he ever lived out those events that so altered the history of the world—events that he might never see now.

Out there on the grey horizon, another shadow loomed, the tall mainmast and conning tower of Kaiser Wilhelm becoming more prominent with each passing minute. Maud looked at it with narrow eyed respect. He knew his ships were no match for a fast German raider, but here he was, and with the fate of a fleet carrier riding in the balance.

Glorious had turned south, he knew, and now we have to buy her the time she needs to make good her escape. We’re not likely to hurt that ship out there with our deck guns. They’ll have us in range long before our guns can engage. The only thing we’ve got that matters here are those nice fat 21-inch torpedoes. Between the three of us we’ve all of thirty fish aboard, and that will make one mean spread for that enemy ship to avoid out there. But to launch torpedoes that will have any chance of posing a real threat, we have to get in close. The range of our torpedoes is only 5000 meters, and between here and there, it’s all guts and glory.