Dorsetshire fired again, and he moved out close to the edge of the weather deck to have a look with his field glasses, but he was not looking forward. Even in the urgency of the battle, the discomfiture he felt, an almost queasy sense of unease that was akin to dread, had prompted him to look aft, and there he finally saw something low on the horizon, a dull red glow much akin to what the sun might look like in the first red moment of dawn. Moving quickly to the chart table on the bridge, his finger tapped out the spot where he thought he was seeing the spectacle. There came a low rumble again, like that of a tea kettle just before it boiled, and the sound of a distant hiss in the sky.
“Must be a bloody volcano,” he said aloud. “But this one has gone dormant, hasn’t it?”
The Captain was an educated man, and new something of the world he was sailing in. The sea mount on his charts was in fact a cluster of small islands, Penjang, Sertung, and then a series of three peaks, Pertuban, Danan, and the highest being Rakata. They rumbled about from time to time, but seldom bothered anyone beyond that. Now it was the boom of Dorsetshire’s third salvo that commanded his attention, and shaking his head, he turned to his battle without another backward thought.
Far to the southwest, the planes were lined up on the decks of the British carriers as the skies slowly began to lighten. Illustrious had suffered an odd collision with HMS Formidable in the old history, and repairs had kept her from this duty. But it never happened here. Somerville and Wells had taken Formidable on a private hunt, and so Illustrious was in fine fighting trim, her two newly installed radar sets alert to any sign of enemy planes. She had her flight deck enlarged by 50 feet, a new catapult installed, and ten more 20mm Oerlikon AA guns to beef up her defenses.
Just as Illustrious wasn’t supposed to be where she was, an officer on her flight deck that morning was also off his appointed rounds. His name was Charles Bentell Lamb, not to be confused with Lieutenant Peter “Sheepy” Lamb who’s fate we have already visited aboard the ill fated HMS Audacity. Charlie Lamb had come up through the Merchant Marine, then learned to fly with the RAF Coastal Command before being posted to Illustrious. He had a fondness for the old Swordfish torpedo bombers, spending many long hours in his Stringbag before it was finally replaced with the new Albacore. Before the war he had gained some notoriety as a boxer for the fleet, and now he was spoiling for another kind of fight, eager to get up and see what the Japanese were up to that morning.
Lamb was supposed to be in a jail cell in French North Africa, captured when he tried to fly in a special agent there, and his plane developed engine trouble and had to go to ground. He would have sat out most of 1942 there, waiting for his confederates to land in Operation Torch in November. But that had not happened either. It was just a small thing that had changed his fate, an errant tick mark on a flight officer roster that checked off someone else’s name instead of his. So there he was, also in good fighting trim, and ready to board his Albacore, one hand reaching up to one of the wings as he completed his pre flight inspection.
Then, strangely, he felt the wing vibrating under his hand, thinking the ship had finally turned to find the wind, but that was not the case. He looked aft, but the wake of the carrier was calm and smooth. Mountbatten had not yet turned, the elevators were still working, and the last of this flight was still being spotted on the flight deck.
But there it was, a trembling vibration that rippled now from his hand on that wing, down his arm and all the way to his boots. The metal deck was quavering, and he thought he felt an odd stirring in the air. He looked around, finding the near full moon clear and bright as it fell towards the horizon. He looked at his watch, seeing it was just a little after 06:00. They had been under its pale silver light for some time, and it would not set for another hour, at about 07:00. Then, in that last interval of darkness, the planes would take off to race north before sunrise at 09:30 that day.
Lamb was enough of an old salt that he knew something was wrong in that vibration. Was Illustrious teething from that last refit? Had the work crews missed something in her engines? He would not find a chart and realize that it was only the occasional rumbling of the volcano that lived in these waters, one of so many that rose in tall misty cones along the Malay Barrier.
The long archipelago that military strategists of the 1940s referred to as the “barrier islands” stretched over 2,500 miles from the northern tip of Sumatra to the eastern tip of Timor. It followed the subterranean line of a great subduction zone, where the Indo-Australian plate slowly folds beneath the Eurasian plate. The resulting pressures created over 130 active volcanoes in the island arc, and among them were some of the great terrors in the panoply of Volcanic Gods.
In northern Sumatra, the mighty supervolcano of Toba sits beneath a serene blue lake, the largest in southeast Asia, that now covers its massive caldera. At its center sits the misty island of Samusir, almost as big as Singapore Island, and white falls of water now cascade down to the lake where hot flows of lava once shaped the flanks of those sheer cliffs. When it last erupted, over 70,000 years ago, scientists say it may have been a V.E.I. 8 on a scale of 9, where no known eruptions of V.E.I. 9 have ever been found. Some believe it nearly wiped humanity from existence, reducing the population to perhaps fewer than 10,000 individuals.
The children of Toba dot the landscape of these verdant, steamy islands for thousands of miles. Rinjani, Child of the Sea, sits prominently astride Lombok east of Bali. Merapi the Mountain of Fire, dominates the rugged central mountains of Java. The legendary Tambora sits as the undisputed master of the Island of Sumbawa, and in 1815, just a few months before the battle of Waterloo, it produced the largest eruption known on earth in the last 25,000 years.
And then there was the demon of the sea, sitting right astride a dogleg bend in that subduction zone, where the thinner crust saw the fiery heart of the earth migrate upwards to produce another famous mountain of fire in the middle of the Sunda Strait, and one with a name that might now be a synonym for fear and dread—Krakatoa. These were the islands that had rumbled to bother Captain Agar that morning, and their stirring had quavered the wing of Charlie Lamb’s plane, even though HMS Illustrious was 110 kilometers to the southwest.
In Fedorov’s history, that volcano had last erupted in 1883, producing the loudest sound humans ever heard, resounding all the way across the Indian Ocean, and shaking seismographs the world over. Its explosive force was 30,000 times greater than the bomb dropped at Hiroshima, and its shock wave circled the earth seven times. The mountain itself was literally blown apart, but as terrible as its demise was, the volcano still refused to die. In 1927, it slowly began to rise again, a dull grey cinder cone emerging from the sea like some dreadful behemoth with a single glowing red eye. Called Anak Krakatoa, or the ‘Son of Krakatoa,’ it would grow at a rate of five inches per week, always restive, never really sleeping, like a man beset with fitful nightmares.
Of all the most explosive eruptions in human history, the top three were Tambora in 1815, Santorini off Greece in 1628, BC, and Krakatoa off Java in 1883—at least in the history Fedorov knew. In this timeline, more than human events had been found to change. Meteorological and geologic events had skipped a beat here or there as well. The 1920s earthquake in Japan that had damaged the hull that was being built for the battlecruiser Tosa had never happened, and now that ship was afloat as a converted aircraft carrier, standing in for the loss of Hiryu after Pearl Harbor.