John Schettler - Grand Alliance

“Just who in bloody hell are you people?”

Fedorov saw it now, behind the awe and surprise, a look of profound doubt, and he knew the time was ripe to move O’Connor to a new understanding. The awakening had begun.

“Excuse me, sir,” said Popski on Fedorov’s behalf. “The Captain suggests it may be time to take the General aside for a more detailed briefing.”

HMS Queen Elizabeth was in the vanguard of the fleet that day, her bow awash with rising seas as the grand old lady led the way at 16 knots. Laid down in 1912 and commissioned two years later, the ship had seen extensive service in WWI, with most of her combat hours logged near the Dardanelles until a troublesome turbine sent her home for repairs. She missed Jutland, eventually returning to Scapa Flow, but was nonetheless honored to present the terms of surrender to the German Admiral von Reuter after the armistice in 1918. After the war she went through two major refits, and first saw duty in the warm waters of the Mediterranean in 1925. Her latest refit was completed in the shadow of impending war at Portsmouth, where the ship had her guts torn out when 25 old boilers were removed to be replaced with 8 of the new high pressure boilers. New AA armament was installed, and her guns were modified to elevate just past 30 degrees, improving their range to 32,000 yards. Even the bridge structure got a facelift, and her distinctive tripod mainmast was finally crowned with the oddments of radar fittings, technology that had not existed when she first went to sea.

All this work kept the ship in the dockyards through most of 1940, and she had been scheduled to visit the powder room at Rosyth one last time before doddering out to sea for duty. There the Queen would have received her new Type 279 and Type 284 radars, but it was not to be. In this altered reality, the pressing need to reinforce Admiral Cunningham sent her off to Alexandria instead. Old but proud, she remained a stout hearted warrior, out now on her first real sortie of the war with the intent to find and hurt the enemy. Behind her two other old warriors sailed in stately review, Malaya and Warspite, both ships in this same class, and veterans of Jutland.

Captain Claud Barrington Barry was on the bridge that hour, a bit restless, as the fleet had been ordered to circle in place while the Admirals detached for an unusual rendezvous to the northeast off Crete aboard HMS Invincible. Cunningham had been aboard when the fleet left Alexandria, more to tour the ship and hearten up the crew than anything else. He had set his flag on Warspite, where his staff still waited, and would return there after the conference.

So Captain Barry was enjoying the last moments of calm he might know for some time. The fleet knew what they were in for, knew the odds were steep. The arrival of HMS Invincible and the strange Russian super destroyer, as the men called it, had been a welcome reinforcement, but that aside, the enemy outnumbered them two to one in capital ships. None of them really knew just what the Russian ship could do at sea, though they had heard rumors that it had played a vital role in turning back the Kriegsmarine north of Iceland. The aerial rocketry it displayed on arriving at Suez had given everyone quite a surprise, most of all the Italians, but you couldn’t sink a battleship with fireworks like that, or so the men thought.

The fleet had sailed west along the coast, all the way to Tobruk where the big guns cleared their throats lending fire support for the besieged garrison. They lingered there for a day until Admiral Tovey signaled that he would detach for an urgent meeting at sea, with no further details. Cunningham left in a hurry, boarding a destroyer and slipping off into the night, leaving Barry and the other fleet Captains in the dark as to what was causing the delay.

That night, on the 30th of January, they sailed north to a position well screened by British submarines. Since that time they had been sailing in a wide circle, attended by cruisers and destroyers just in case an Italian sub might get curious. They had been overflown by recon planes from Greece on the 31st, even while Fedorov was having his most unexpected first meeting with Brigadier Kinlan.

It was hard to keep up morale in these circumstances. Gibraltar had fallen, Malta was battling for its life, and the British army had just been chased halfway across Libya into Egypt again, wiping out all the gains O’Connor had delivered with his remarkable campaign. Captain Barry had a restless, worried feeling now, and the long slow circles he was sailing did little to calm his mind. Anything would be better than this, he thought. The men are as worried as I am, and it’s plain enough on their faces. We should be charging off to Malta now, guns at the ready, but instead here I am idling north of Derna, twiddling my thumbs and reading reports from the Chief of Engineers.

There had been an odd clicking sound in one of the turbines when they left Tobruk and started north. The engineers noted it, and were rousting about to see what it might be, but it did not seem serious. Probably just needs a little grease, he thought. The ship had been too long abed, and she was bound to have some creaks and squeaks now that she was up in her slippers and shuffling about again. That was all…

Cunningham had been welcomed aboard HMS Invincible, curious as to what this meeting was all about. It seemed very odd to be detaching like this, and politics were now uppermost in his mind as he sat down with Admiral Tovey for a briefing. He had assumed this meeting might have something to do with organizing fleet operations aimed at covering an evacuation of Greek forces, possibly to Crete, as they were sailing for Chania Bay. Andrew Browne Cunningham, old “A.B.C.” as he was called from his initials, had been disappointed when the planned attack on Taranto could not be teed up. He finally got hold of a pair of aircraft carriers, and now they were relegated to fleet air defense and anti-submarine patrols. His bid to even the odds and catch the Italians napping in port had been tabled with the news of the attack on Malta.

Now it was down to the real brass tacks, he thought. If we lose Malta the whole central Med goes with it. It was our unsinkable aircraft carrier, battered and beaten up daily by the Italian air strikes, but defiant. He knew the airfields at Ta’qali and Luqa would not hold for long. The Luftwaffe had come in droves, adding its considerable weight to Regio Aeronautica, and there was simply no way the threadbare squadrons on Malta could survive. They did their best, he thought, but we would have needed to get another thirty Hurricanes out there to make a fight of it. The carriers were here, and now I’ve a mind to see what we can do. Cunningham had a great deal on his mind that day, but he would soon learn things that would send him spinning like a top. The knowledge he was about to be handed, like an apple picked from the tree in paradise, was forbidden fruit. He would not be the same man when he returned to the fleet.

For his part, Admiral Tovey had anguished over what to do in this situation. He was the only man who really knew the whole terrible truth about the Russian ship and crew, or so he thought. At that moment, another man was learning that truth, as Fedorov struggled to convince Brigadier Kinlan of his impossible fate. Yet Tovey knew nothing of this when he stood to greet Admiral Tovey as he arrived for the meeting. He had been considering the situation for some time, and had determined that, given the circumstances calling for this meeting, there would be no way he could keep Admiral Cunningham in the dark. The man was simply too essential to the operation of the fleet here, a steady and reliable hand on the tiller that would be difficult to replace.