Breakthrough (The Red Gambit Series) (6 page)

Tedder stiffened.

“Yes, General, we are clear.
There will be a turnaround time in any case, so I can rest them
,
but it is a long time since they have done day ops.”

Eisenhower, both hands extended palms towards his man, spoke softly.

“I know
,
Arthur. I am asking a lot of them but I think much will be asked of many
this day
,
don’t you?”

The Air Chief Marshall couldn’t buck that at
all;
especially as he caught the stream of arrows around München grow further out the corner of his eye.

“Very well Sir. I will get them ready for a maximum effort. Target list will be with me by five?”

“I will do my very best
,
Arthur.”

The man sped away, his mind already full of orders and thoughts of incredulous RAF officers reading them as tired crews touched down at bases all over
Europe
.

No one was going to be spared on this day.

Four Mosquitoes of
605
Squadron RAF had been tasked with destroying a
Soviet
engineer bridg
e laid over the
Fuhse
River
at G
ro
ß
Ilsede, the main road bridge having been dropped into the water by British demolition engineers
some days previously
.

The plan was for the lead aircraft to
mark
with flares
to permit the
rest of the flight
to drop accurately.

Squadron Leader Pinnock and his navigator
,
Flying Officer Rogers
,
both knew their stuff inside out and the Mk XXV Mosquito arrived on time and on target, releasing its illumination.

Flight Lieutenant Johar, a Sikh and the squadron’s top bomber
,
was confused. The landmarks were quite clearly right; the parallel railway, the watery curve, both present and yet it wasn’t there.

Johar streaked over the target area, his bombs firmly on board, closely followed by three and four, equally confused. Navigators did checks and came up with the same result.

“This is the right place, dead on
,
Skipper, no question”
Rogers
holding out his handwork for his boss to examine.

“Roger Bill,” Pinnock decided not to bother with the normal banter
involving
Rogers
' name and radio procedure that whiled away hours of lonely flying for the pair.

Thumbing his mike he spoke to the others.

“This is Baker lead, this is Baker lead. Mission abort, say again mission abort.
Take out the rail track rather than dump ordnance.
”

The bombs rained down, savaging the track running to the east of the Fuhse, rendering it useless for days to come.

605
’s professionalism was such that no more was said over the radio until they touched down at Wyton some hours later.

The base adjutant, debriefing the crews
,
insisted that there must have been a navigational mistake until all four navigators produced their documentation, setting aside his
first
query.

This raised a rather interesting second one.

"
My rule is, if you meet the weakest vessel, attack; if it is a vessel equal to yours, attack; and if it is stronger than yours, also attack."

Admiral Stepan O. Makarov [1849-1904]

Somewhere to the north of B-29 lay another
Soviet
submarine, probably drifting slowly up into a firing position on the unsuspecting enemy vessels.
The ex-German type XXI U-Boat, now crewed by
Soviet
naval personnel, had been pulled from its patrol off the French coast and sent to operate out of Glenlara.

The two boats intended for the Irish Station had only just been tested as seaworthy and the
Soviet
Naval Command needed a capability in British home waters, and B-29 was it.

The
Type
XXI’s represented the peak of submarine development
,
and had the Germans produced them in large enough numbers things may have turned out differently for the western allies.
Soviet
submarin
ers were now demonstrating the vessels
capabilities off
France
,
America
and
Ireland
, sinking a large number of enemy vessels without loss.
Capable of schnorkelling virtually indefinitely
,
the XXI’s were designed to operate constantly submerged, confounding the enemy AS tactics.

B-29 had been very successful over the last few days, sinking a number of merchant vessels. Even though it had been stressed that naval targets were a secondary priority, Captain 3rd Rank
Yuri Olegevich Rybin had been unable to resist the big battleship he thought was the Duke of York, sending her to the bottom of the
Atlantic
with four deadly torpedoes. The riposte from the escorts was misdirected and B-29 slipped quietly away, popping up twelve hours later to
rip open
an escort carrier and a large tanker
with a six shot spread.

With only five fish left
,
Rybin chose to drop back closer to shore and the rearming base secretly established at Glenlara in
Eire
.

His plan did not survive the
mouth-watering
encounter w
ith the large shapes in the fog. I
nitially drawn forward
to
make
visual contact
by his sonar
reports
, a
snatched
look through the periscope promised more gross tonnage than he could have ever dreamed of.

A contact report was sent to
headquarters
and a swift reply was received, the commander there trying to put B-29 and the arriving
ShC
h
-307 into an ambush position north of
Rathlin
Island
.

This he did
with ease
,
and both submarines now lay in position for the kill.

Kalinin
had managed to get his submarine a long way, despite being harassed and attacked on a daily basis in the
North Sea
. He had made a feint towards the northeast coast of
England
, killed a fishing trawler to draw attention
,
and then reversed course, slipping around the tip of
Scotland
and taking the risky route between Skye and Lewis to make up time.

307’s sonar was picking up engine sounds, exciting the operator
,
who recognised them as belonging to larger
,
more valuable beasts.

His periscope shot up and down in an instant, but long enough for
Kalinin
to see little but the fog and a number of dark shapes.

Starting his attack
,
he repeated the process every two minutes, pleasantly surprised that the shapes were becoming more distinct with each cycle. Information was constantly updated
,
and his torpedoes prepared for their short but deadly journey.

His scope broke water for the
sixth
time
,
and he
on
this
occasion
he dwelt long enough to fix two images in his mind.

Bearings revised and computed, he
ordered
the target book
to be made ready at the navigation station. This was once the property of the Kreigsmarine
, written in German but with
neat,
handwritten Russian notations.

‘
First
,
the warship.
’

In control of himself
,
he calmly opened the book at the
intended
page and was immediately satisfied that he had his quarry.

His officers waited eagerly, the routine
s
observed as normal. Turning the book around so they could see more clearly
,
he placed a finger on the silhouette of the vessel they were about to kill.

Eyes sought the shape and married it with the
bold
handwritten
Cyrillic text
indicating the USS Ranger, aircraft carrier of
fourteen thousand
,
five hundred
tons displacement. Aircraft carriers were an exception to the warship rule, mainly because they were being used to transport aircraft reinforcements to mainland
Europe
, and that had to be prevented at all costs.

Word
on the identity
of their
intended victim
spread swiftly through the crew
,
and it was necessary for some of the older senior ranks to calm their younger crewmates.

For the second
target,
Kalinin
had to go searching, and
,
as he turned the pages
,
his officers found other distractions. After all, what could be as good as a juicy
Amerikanski
carrier?

Kalinin
slid a piece of paper in between the pages and moved back to the periscope stand. Opening the book at the
mark,
he took in the image once more and ordered his scope raised.

Now
the vessel was
revealed
more clear
ly
as the early morning fog
had disappeared;
what he saw was definitely the shape he had identified in the target book.

“Down scope.”

He opened the book and alternated between examining his prize and looks at his officers, drawing them in as they realised that there was more to be had than an
Amerikanski
flat top.

“Fortune smiles on us today, Comrades.
We have an illustrious guest.”

There was expectant, almost childish schoolboy silence throughout the control room as
Kalinin
placed the open book down and tapped the image.

“An illustrious guest indeed.”

Gasps of surprise and softly spoken oaths filled the heavy air
,
as each man identified the
RMS Aquitania,
a
four-funnel
liner. A
beast of over
forty-five thousand
tons
,
she
would
undoubtedly
be
carrying many troops
,
and sinking her would be a huge victory for the
Soviet
Navy.

“Comrades, we attack.”

A similar scene had been played out
three thousand
yards to the south
-west
, where Rybin
and his crew
had experie
nced a similar wave of euphoria after
identifying
the
two prime targets lining themselves up in front of his tubes.

Sonar identified a number of smaller craft, escorts flitting around their charges like nervous sheepdogs
, hounds that
sense
d
a wolf in the hills.

B-29’s periscope broke the surface again
,
and more information was relayed for the firing solution.