“Any word from our X-3?” She wanted to know what had happened to the Russian battlecruiser.
“They’ve been up an hour,” said MacRae. “All the British ships are just where they were, but the Russians are gone, and now there’s something else out there. Sampson radar has it too. We’ve got a string of seven more surface vessels about 20 kilometers out off our port side. X-3 says they look for all the world like Point-Class sealift ships—four of them, and a few other auxiliaries, including the Ulysses.”
Elena knew the ship, a transport ferry of Irish registry. “Ulysses?”
“And fancy this…” MacRae forged on, thinking to dump the whole unseemly lot out at one time. “We picked up a message on a secure channel—coded channel used in Royal Navy operations in our time. Well, we’ve got the equipment here to decode it, seeing as though we’re wearing the uniforms ourselves. Morgan says he thinks it came from that sub the Russians were squawking about. They were sending to the Diligence—fleet Auxiliary and repair ship—and asking about the Destroyer Duncan. That’s a Type 45 destroyer, which would make it our long lost cousin, would it not?”
“There’s another British destroyer out there too?”
“Not that we know of. We have nothing on radar, and we’d damn well know it if another Sampson system was operating here. No, I think this is starting to add up some other way, crazy as it might sound. Morgan thinks there was a Type-45 out there, riding shotgun for those seven merchant marine ships… In our day that would make perfect sense. He did some digging and found out that there was a fleet order to get RoRo ships down to Mersa Matruh. They were going to pull the 7th Armored Brigade out of Egypt and move them to France.”
Elena’s eyes narrowed, and all she could think of now was the discussion she had with the Russian Captain concerning how he thought Kinlan’s troops had suddenly appeared here. Someone lit one off to go after them as well, and apparently it blew a hole right through the time continuum, sending Kinlan’s entire brigade here, to the same place that box in her cabin had sent the Argos Fire. That convoy would have made another nice target, and if the Russians used a nuke…
My god, she thought. It’s coming apart at the seams! Eighty years on the Russians are enemies, and yet here we must embrace them as allies. Yet both are throwing nukes around like there was no tomorrow… That thought gave her considerable pause, for it was exactly what she had warned them about, sheer calamity, a stony silence from the future that spoke of real doom. Now the Russians were suddenly gone, but in their place they had a whole string of uninvited guests. What to do about this?
“What about Rodney?” The urgency of the moment returned, pushing all these other incongruities aside. “We’ve fired missiles?”
“Aye, I sent three along to see if we could dissuade the Germans, though I’m not sure how much good we did. Thing is this, Elena. We’ve na’ but seven more missiles under the deck, and without the Russians they won’t be enough to decide this little disagreement. The battlecruiser is gone, and now we’ve no word from their submarine either. This situation is going from bad to worse. Now then. What would you like me to do here, mum?”
Chapter 3
The Germans were going to answer that question for MacRae, and in a most uncomfortable manner. The battle continued, this time with Tirpitz and Scharnhorst slugging it out with Renown and Repulse. With only seven anti-ship missiles remaining, MacRae decided that was a very thin margin for the defense of the ship.
“I think we’d have to salvo fire at least five missiles to seriously discourage one of these battleships,” he said. “That will leave very little under the deck, but we can also weigh in with the deck gun”
“Well will it hurt them?” Elena folded her arms.
“It’s a 155mm naval gun, a six incher that can outrange anything they have. I could even engage over the horizon. It may not penetrate their side armor to do serious harm, but it will be damn annoying if we hit their superstructure.”
“Do it. A stiff jab is better than nothing. I knew we should have considered a heavier missile, but who could foresee this? Are the Russian missiles that much better than ours? They seemed to have no problem with these ships.”