Operation XD by James Barrington & James Barrington as Max Adams

Author:James Barrington & James Barrington as Max Adams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canelo Books
Published: 2018-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

16 May 1940

The North Sea

Michaels stepped back into the wheelhouse, seized the Morse key and again transmitted the letters KFRE, repeating the message a few seconds later, and then again, a third time.

‘What is it?’ Barber asked. Inside the wooden structure, he had heard nothing.

‘There might be a ship out there. We can hear something but not see it yet. Stay on this course and speed, and make that same transmission on the radio at least once every minute until we know what’s going on.’

The noise was louder, and definitely seemed to be coming from the north. And then, almost simultaneously, three of the KFRE soldiers pointed towards the north-west at a dim and ghostly shape cutting through the water. It was definitely a ship, but more than that none of them could say.

‘The three of you,’ Michaels ordered, pointing at a trio of soldiers standing and staring over the side of the launch, ‘load your rifles. I want three rounds, fired into the air at one second intervals, on my command.’

He waited until the three men nodded that they were ready, and then gave the order.

The three shots, unnaturally loud in the silence of the night, crashed out one at a time. But nothing else happened. The ship – and now they could all make out its raked bow and the trail of white foam left behind by its propellers – didn’t react in any way.

‘Do the same again,’ he ordered.

The metallic clattering of the bolts on the soldiers’ Lee-Enfield rifles was the only sound in the launch until Michaels again gave the command to fire another salvo of three rounds.

But this time, there was a response.

The brilliant white beam of a searchlight suddenly stabbed through the darkness from somewhere on the unidentified ship.

‘If that’s the bloody Bismarck or Tirpitz,’ Rochester said from somewhere near the wheelhouse, ‘then we’re really in the shit.’

The beam traversed the waves in front of them, the horizontal column of white light moving towards the south-west, pausing briefly whenever the operator presumably thought he had spotted something. Then it reversed direction and moved much more slowly back towards the launch.

Night turned instantly into day as the beam stopped moving and steadied on the launch. And then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the searchlight beam snapped off.

‘Now what?’ Dawson muttered.

From about the same location on the vessel as the searchlight, an Aldis lamp began flickering, sending a message in Morse code.

The searchlight had comprehensively destroyed Michaels’ night vision, and it took him a few seconds to focus on the lamp and translate what the operator was sending for the benefit of the men around him.

‘The message reads, “aveto” – I think that probably means “heave to”,’ he clarified. ‘Then it continues, “make your weapons safe and I will come alongside”, and now the same message is being repeated. Well, at least we know it isn’t either the Bismarck or the Tirpitz, Gordon. I’ve still got no idea what ship that is, but it’s certainly British, and right now that’s all that matters.

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