“Come now,” said Lieutenant Dove, “you really don’t expect us to answer that.”
“No, but it never hurts to ask.” Deckert smiled at him. “I admire your gall,” he said. “They say the British are always too busy drinking their tea to get busy with this war, but this little caper was quite imaginative.”
“The Degos have given us fits with much of the same,” said Dove. “Turnabout is always fair play.”
“I suppose it is. So why don’t you tell me where your submarine is so I can go up and put a torpedo into it. If you wish, I’ll strap the two of you aboard before I fire, since you enjoy riding those fish so much.”
Both men knew that was nonsense, and Dove just gave his mate a look and shrugged. “You might want to be very careful about that,” he said by way of warning the other man. “Our boys in the undersea service may not get the press you do in your U-boats, but we know what we’re about.”
“I have little doubt,” said Deckert. “Very well, Fritz, take them aft, and find them some tea. They deserve it.”
The two British submarines waited off Cap Blanc for some time, lurking quietly in the depths. At a pre-designated hour, each one put up a periscope to have a look about for the others. They were to wait no more than three hours before pulling out, as they needed to be as far west towards Algiers as possible before daylight the following morning. By that time, word of the raid would have spread and the enemy would be certain to have air patrols up looking hungrily for any sign of the enemy.
None of the three subs spotted any of the diver teams. They had all ridden their Chariots of Fire into the breach of war, and were now considered expendable, just like all the men on the ships they killed that day in the harbor. Lieutenant Wraith sighed, looking at his watch. He had let his spirits go, and none came back. Then he gave the order to come about.
Trooper and Thunderbolt would return empty, and the rescue boat, Unruffled, would also see nothing for some time. Then, just as they were making ready to depart, the sub’s commander saw what looked like another sub on the surface ahead. Lieutenant John Stevens was sure it wasn’t either Trooper or Thunderbolt, and it looked like it was towing something.
“Load tube one and three,” he said quietly. “I think we’ve got a line on a U-boat out there.”
“Loading tubes one and three!”
“Come right five degrees and steady at four knots.”
“Aye sir, coming right and steady on.”
“Sir!” came the word from the sonar listening station. “High speed props! I think a destroyer has gotten wind of us.”
Lieutenant Stevens, spun about, swiveling the periscope as he moved, and peering through the cupped lens. “Damn,” he swore. “Come right ten degrees and dive!”
The crew could hear the dull pop of naval gunfire, and the woosh of the rounds coming, but when they heard the first explosion, Stevens thought it must be wide off the mark. It was.
The Freccia class destroyer Saetta, was an older ship, launched in 1932 and now commanded by Lt. Cdr. Enea Picchio. When the alarm was raised, he had been at the edge of the harbor at Tunis to the south, ready to begin his morning patrols. Receiving a radio call about the attack underway at Bizerte, he fired up all three boilers and sped north.
Saetta had a pair of twin 120mm (4.7-inch) deck guns and two 40mm pom-pom AA guns that were also firing, but not at Lieutenant Stevens’ boat. They had seen U-73 on the surface instead, and it was clearly towing what looked to be a small mini sub or diving torpedo of the same sort the Italians would use. Thinking it was a British sub, he heartily engaged, firing first, and thinking to ask questions later.
Deckert heard the rounds coming in, shocked to see he was now under fire by his own side. He could either try to run up his colors and try to signal the destroyer, but he had no idea whether they would heed such a call, nor could he say anything in Italian. His other choice was to do what any other submarine commander might under fire, and dive.
“Cut that damn think loose!” he yelled. “Dive!”
Deckert was lucky that the gunners aboard Picchio’s destroyer were a little groggy eyed that morning. He got his boat down before the Italian destroyer could get rounds close enough to matter, and then went steaming off to the northwest, his feathers well ruffled, and his 1st Warrant Officer Bentzein shaking his head dismissively.
“I told you!” said Number One. “If those crazy Italians don’t get us first, then it will be our own Stukas in another ten minutes. We should be well up into the Tyrrhenian Sea by now.”
“And miss out on all this?” said Deckert with a wink. “Don’t worry, Bentzein. I’m a slippery fish. They won’t get me that easy.”
That would hold true for Deckert, until the 16th of December, 1943, and he would spend the next Christmas with the British. Bentzein wasn’t aboard when that happened. He had slipped off in November of 1943 to report to Kiel for his first command, U-425, and on the 17th of February, 1945, he would meet up with Lark and Alnwick Castle, meeting his maker soon after.
Chapter 12
Fafnir and Fraenir were up early that day, greeting the new year’s sun as it gleamed off the massive swelling silver canvas of the airships. They had a rendezvous to make, eager to join their two new brothers.
In the last months of 1942, production had been steady on the airship fleet. Hitler had ordered twelve ships, and two more were now ready to join the fleet, Aegir, ruler of the sea in Norse Mythology, and Asgard, named after the land of the Gods. They had all been ordered to Berlin for a grand air parade over the city for Hitler’s delight. Then they would be off on their real mission, flying southwest over Poland and along the border of the Ukraine to Odessa, climbing high to escape the eyes of curious bystanders, and enemies who might ask what they were about.
Each ship had been specially modified to carry a very special cargo, fruit that had been ripening on the tree of German research and development for some time. Like the cleverly modified torpedoes that had become Britain’s Chariots of Fire, this one might have been mistaken for a torpedo as well—until the two stubby wings were mounted. Hitler called the new secret weapons his Schwarzkrähe, Black Crows, and they were all painted jet black to advance this image in his mind. They would be testing the latest model of Germany’s new Argus pulsejet engine, a simple gasoline powered design.
The whole project had been masked with a phony code name, the Flakzielgerat 76, which would roughly translate as the “Flak aiming apparatus.” It was referred to as the FZG-76, and began initial air launched flight testing over the Baltic Sea near Bornholm Island, a site very close to the development nest at Peenemünde. The British knew where it was on the Baltic coast as early as 1941, when a Norwegian engineering student was able to pass a detailed description of the facility to British intelligence. In May of 1942, a Spitfire photo-recon mission was sent to investigate, and several suspicious external features were spotted, one of which was “Test Stand VII” for the secret V-2 project launches.
But the Schwarzkrähe had nothing to do with that. They were, however, the younger cousin of the dangerous V-2, and soon the world would come to know them as the V-1 Buzz Bomb. They had been produced as a way of showering the skies over London with flying bombs, the world’s first real cruise missiles, and they were arriving much sooner than they did in Fedorov’s history. Hitler had Ivan Volkov to thank for that, part of the way he repaid the Führer for the use of all those JU-52 transports he had borrowed for the ill-fated and final raid he made on Ilanskiy. With Volkov’s guidance, Germany had been able to produce weaponized prototypes of the V-1 a full eight months sooner.