He checked his instruments once more — the tenth time in half an hour — and reassured himself everything was in order as the crew outside finally gave him the all clear.
“All set, Wolff?” He called to his rear gunner over the intercom as he kicked the S-2D’s huge radial engine over for the first time. “Ready to head ‘once more unto the breach’…?”
“Ready for a few more hours’ rest, sir thanks all the same,” Kohl replied with a grin. The joke was an old one: that the rear gunner was only ever needed over the target, and as such could catch some extra sleep during the early parts of any long flight.
“With any luck, the ‘big boys’ will have taken care of the opposition by the time we get there and there’ll be no need to wake you at all.”
“That would be just wonderful, Mein Herr: if you could have a word to the bomber crews about, that it would be a huge help.”
“I’ll see what I can organise,” Ritter chuckled, feeling better already as the ground crew finally removed his wheel chocks and he moved his throttle forward, slowly at first as the Lion began to move toward the middle of the long taxiway they were using as a secondary airstrip.
Not long after 0300 hours that morning, Staff Flight and I/ZG26 staggered woozily into the air, twenty-six aircraft sharing between them close to eighty tonnes of offensive hardware. The flight formed up loosely in the darkness at 5,000 metres, pilots navigating by instruments and keeping pace with each other by carefully watching the pale formation ‘strip’ lighting fitted to each of the aircraft’s wingtips and fuselage sides. At their best economical cruising speed, they were the slowest of the aircraft by far, and although the heavy bombers would ultimately arrive first over the target at the end of their 600 kilometre journey, the B-10A’s were only beginning to taxi out to the flight line for take off as the Lions flew on. Scapa Flow lay two hours away, and there’d be plenty of time for ZG26 to form up properly in daylight with their fighter escort before they reached their distant destination.
Hindsight Training Unit, HMS Proserpine
Scapa Flow, Orkney Islands
He checked and rechecked his equipment several times as he prepared himself carefully for the morning ahead. A final, coded radio message the night before had been quite clear in its instructions, and he’d follow orders regardless of the fact that he’d not be likely to survive their execution. With a little good fortune and a good deal of planning, he might at least survive long enough to carry out all of the aspects of his mission: after that, he’d happily let the cards fall where they may.
Originally a German-born British citizen, Kristof Klein was also a dedicated and fanatical Nazi. He operated under a different identity of course, in his undercover role as a British Army officer within the Hindsight base, but he’d grown up in the Realtime late 20th Century as a rabid anti-Semite, and idolised Adolf Hitler as if the man had been a god. As a young man, he’d trained with the British SAS and had served well for several years before an anonymous report had alerted his superiors to several racial hatred articles posted on his Facebook page.
He’d been summarily dismissed — the Europe of the 21st Century took an exceedingly dim view of anti-Semitic or racially-based hate propaganda — and had spent a year or two in unemployment limbo before being ‘found’ by the New Eagles. The group had seen his training and personal ideology as perfect to fulfil their requirement for a sleeper agent to be infiltrated into 1930s British society, join their officer corps and become a ‘model citizen’. For an angry young man suddenly lacking in direction, the offer of an opportunity to not only fight against Judaism but also become a part of the creation of Hitler’s greatest dream of Grossdeutschland was a dream come true, and Klein had leaped at the chance.
The aftermath of the previous air attack had resulted in doubled guards at each of the four radar units around the island, and a pair of armed men also stationed outside the control room itself. The partially-buried bunker was sunk into open ground between the Hindsight airfield and the main base at HMS Proserpine, on the north-east coast of Hoy Island. A crooked line of zigzagged slit trenches ran north and south from the entrance, and it was thereby possible to enter from some distance and approach unobserved. Klein checked his watch for the third time in ten minutes as he crouched by the far end of the southern trench line. It was 0523 hours: few personnel were out and about at such an early hour, and dawn itself was still just barely threatening the eastern horizon.
He slipped into the trench line and made his way between the hardened earth walls at a crouch to ensure his head remained unseen below ground level on either side, silently glad the weather had remained dry so far, and that there’d been no rain to turn the ground around him to mud. As he neared the last turn leading to the bunker entrance, he could hear the soft conversation of the pair of guards stationed outside, and paused to draw a silenced Walther PPK from within the folds of his bulky combat jacket.
Drawing a deep breath of preparation, he cocked the hammer and waited another moment as he checked to ensure there were no sounds of anyone else nearby. Stepping quickly around into the next trench, he raised the pistol before either guard could react. Their first thoughts were that the man who’d appeared before them was a familiar and trusted superior officer, and it was far too late by the time they also realised there was a pistol in his hand. The Walther was barely audible as he fired a pair of ‘double-tapped’ shots into each man’s forehead without a moment’ hesitation, and the thud of their lifeless bodies against the hard floor of the trench was far louder than the suppressed gunfire that had caused their deaths.
He quickly exchanged the weapon’s magazine for a full one taken from his jacket, wasting no time checking for signs of life that he knew wouldn’t be present: the sound of the bodies falling would’ve been audible from within the bunker, and although the cause of the commotion would be a mystery, those inside would nevertheless be alert. Holding the weapon behind his back, he opened the closed wooden door and stepped inside. As it closed behind him once more, the only sound remaining was the soft rustle of the surrounding grass in the cool morning breeze.
Rifle and pack at his shoulders as always, Kransky squatted at the water’s edge and ignored the biting cold that morning as he watched the ships cruise past at good speed. From his vantage point on the beach at South Walls, near the southern entrance to the anchorage between Hoy and South Ronaldsay, he couldn’t fail to be impressed by the grand sight as the Home Fleet steamed out. The battleships Malaya, Warspite, Queen Elizabeth and Nelson and the battlecruiser Renown were leaving under full steam, accompanied by a support force of cruisers and destroyers. In line-ahead formation, they stretched over quite a few kilometres as the ships headed out and turned off to the east, the battleships in the van and the destroyers forging ahead to screen the fleet as they reached open waters.
It was a sizeable surface force — most of the Home Fleet — and Kransky knew where they were bound. As security chief he worked closely with his opposite number at HMS Proserpine and was therefore privy to classified information that most weren’t cleared to know. There’d been a full alert some time before dawn following word that a British submarine had reported a large enemy surface force heading north-west off Jutland. The sub had lost contact soon after in heavy patches of low-level fog off the Norwegian coast, but there’d been sufficient time to note the presence of at least one battleship and possibly also an aircraft carrier.