Gentlemen of England Now A-bed...
“David.”
“Theresa. Tea?” Politely informal with the Home Secretary who was part of his own party rather than the LibDems, the day seemed like a typical meeting at Number Ten about to happen, and nothing really important in it, down to her prototypical arriving before the rest of the cabinet scheduled to attend.
“Certainly. Is Phillip going to be here?”
“No, he’s at a function for welcoming those crated Spitfires back from Burma,” Cameron answered as the tea was brought forward for them. “Ah, but the usual dreary winter day outside…” He glanced at his watch, then the world went brilliant, bright, shock white, like being inside an opal, as a solid wall of light shined in from every window.
The security detail rushed forward and grabbed both the cabinet ministers, dragging them down though expecting all of them to be dead within seconds later. The white flash seemed so very, very prototypical of a nuclear event, that even Cameron had it flash through his mind that someone had, with no warning whatsoever, just nuked London.
Thirty seconds later they were still alive and being desperately hustled toward COBRA. The sky above was no longer dark and dank and cold. It was instead shining with a brilliant sunlight, a pleasant sunlight of a sun over London which was only seen in the beginning of summer, and already the air around them seemed to be warming from it. Cameron wanted to crack a joke about boffins tinkering with some new weather control device—it seemed plausible at this point, really!—but the security personnel were hurrying them along in much to deadly earnest for that as the cabinet was hastily gathered together.
The world had just gone very, very wrong.
****************
Mireille Beauclerc had seen the flash; they had all seen it. A solid white wall had ripped through the heart of Brest, just across from their Gendarmerie station. The Gendarmes had spilled outside to see in that brief instant buildings guillotined and a few people, too, who toppled dead, not even cauterized, just hideously dismembered. Yet it seemed to have done no damage. The buildings were still standing and several of the older ones appeared to be wholly intact on both sides of the line. Others were weird, postmodernist juxtapositions of two different buildings. The quality of the streets abruptly changed between the two as well.
“My god have mercy, but what has gone on?” one of her colleagues muttered, and the woman frowned, and squinted down the street. “I don’t know! It’s like a scene from an old postcard; we’ve got to restore order, though, to find out what’s happening in the east of the city, and God, I think across the bay, too.” That was rather a big deal, as the nuclear submarine force base of the Marine Nationale was across the bay, and her colleagues got the meaning instantly, some returning inside to start radioing and telephoning other gendarmerie bases to try and establish communications and get a picture of what was going on throughout the whole department.
Advancing with a small squad, they tensed imperceptibly, one man crossing himself, as they stepped over the line. Nothing happened. Ahead of them, they could even see confused people stumbling out of their homes and shops, in very old fashioned clothes. People who seemed astonished to see them, like they were something from a movie—and quite afraid, too.
“We are gendarmes, calm yourselves, the situation is under control!”
“But you are armed, the Boche have ordered you to disarm! What is going on?” one of the women asked her, and then stepped back in shock on seeing her to be a woman. “And what is a woman doing in uniform…?”
Then down the street something like out of a movie swung into view. A tank, but not a tank, an armoured personnel carrier.. a half-track! she thought. And the men in it were uniformed. Uniformed, and wearing gray uniforms. In every person at the start of battle, no matter who they are: No matter their race, creed, or sex, there is a moment which divides them; they may panic and run or they may do their duty and fight. And from that moment on, those who run matter nothing to those who fight. It is a split second when the brain realizes that combat is about to begin, and animal fear either conquers, or is conquered.
Mireille raised her submachinegun without another thought and let go on full auto. The Germans took cover as the bullets ricocheted off the armour plate of their halftrack and the rest of her team went for cover. She threw herself down with them a moment later as the Mauser 98K’s started to crack, and one of the Germans lunged for the pintle mounted machine gun as the civilians around them screamed and fled.
With the machine gun in action they were instantly pinned down by massive, continuous fire of a type their training had never truly prepared them for, but they’d bought themselves the time to get to cover, and for the civilians to flee. That, and they all had radios. The radios were working, and she screamed into one as deliberately as she could to be heard over the sound of bullets ripping over their heads in the basement stairs where they sheltered.
“We need backup, backup now. There are Nazis attacking us!”
“Nazis?”
“Yes, they’re in Wehrmacht uniforms and they’re machine-gunning us!”
“That’s crazy!”
“Everything just went crazy, we are under fire… Whatever that thing was, there are Nazis here taking advantage of it, so quickly, mobilize everyone you can, and alert the Naval Infantry detachment of the Brest yards. Quickly! They are advancing on us and we may be dead soon.” She ended the radio conversation at that point; it would do nothing more to keep them alive.
“Come on, we hold them up for as long as we can, then retreat through the cellar. Once we get armoured cars here the odds will be much better, so we’ve just got to delay them a bit. Whomever they are, they wear the uniforms of my grandfather’s enemies and that’s enough for me, let’s fight!”
************************************
“We’ve lost radio contact with blighty, Sir. All the beacons are down.” Navigator Eustis Williard exchanged a severe glance with the Wellington’s pilot, Group Captain Johnathan Bush. “Sir, everything is gone. But I’m getting plenty of music.” Their situation had been increasingly more desperate since the hundred bomber raid had seen the enormous, perfect wall of white behind them, and then it had vanished and with it any kind of indication of home or of a normal world.
“Music? Put it on, Will.” He turned his attention forward, a hundred bombers sweeping across the North Sea toward Germany. Then he almost wanted to dive the airplane into the sea at the screeching loud nonsense that flooded over the speakers. “Countermand that! Get that trash off!”
Mercifully it went away a moment later, and he followed it up incredulously. “That’s it? What kind of bloody madness is this?”
“I don’t know, Sir. I’m trying every RAF frequency now…”
A moment later: “Sir, it’s getting worse. I’ve gotten in touch with RAF Leconfield, but they’re not giving us correct identification codes. They also don’t recognize our’s.”
“Then it’s some kind of damned Jerry trap. But we don’t have any navigation fix now…” The Group Captain fumed. “What is going on? I’d just assume not turn back, but we’ve got no fix but the coast.”
“Sir,” his copilot interjected, “Jerries couldn’t have taken out every beacon in the country. The music doesn’t make sense. You saw the flash in the sky behind us… We’ve got to turn the force back and see what’s happened to home, Sir, it’s really the only thing.”
“Right, Josh. You’re bloody well right. We’re aborting.” His veins went cold with dread as the prospect of the mission was replaced with fear over what had happened to England. Yes, the flash in the sky could not be ignored.
*****************************************
“Mein Gott. It’s a monster. It must be the largest cargo ship I’ve ever seen, Kaelun!” The Leutnant turned over the periscope to Gunther Prien, who stood quietly looking through it toward the massive block letters on the side of the target that spelled out the word HANJIN, vaguely oriental in nature.
“Ugly ship,” he remarked calmly. “Perhaps the largest in the world, too. I have never heard about it, nor do I know the flag she is flying. But that is an inbound track to Southampton and she is making twelve knots. We have little time for the attack and to have a chance with a target that large we’ll need all four torpedoes.” Then:
“Actung, Aktion Stationen!”
“Mündungsklappen öffnen eins bis vier!”
“Mündungsklappen öffnen eins bis vier, Jawohl Herr Kaelun!”
Minutes later the target solution was finalized as the crew looked tensely around in anticipation of a shot at what their already famed commander said might well be the largest ship afloat in the world. None of them knew how deeply its presence troubled Kapitanleutnant Prien. They just knew that the torpedo data had come in, and that they were going to attack her, and attack her with everything they had, at that.
Prien silently confirmed the firing solution, then:
“Fächer in den Rohren eins bis vier”
“Fächer in den Rohren eins bis vier, Aye!”
“Rohr eins – los!”
“los, aye!” The first fish shot out toward the massive container ship, and then the second, and then the third, and then the fourth. Minutes later a series of three very satisfying splashes ripped across the port beam of the very ironically named HANJIN GERMANY, though Prien couldn’t know that at the moment. Nor, as the ship began to list as the crew abandoned her in utter panic through an incredibly brightly coloured and sealed lifeboat the likes of which he’d never seen—and such a small crew, too, it seemed like they were leaving most of their compatriots to some unknown fate with no other boats!—that he had identified for the Cameron government the one very real threat that the Nazi Reich posed to his nation: Britain’s dependence on lifelines of food and fuel across the dark and cold waters of the Atlantic had only gotten worse in the past seventy years.
