Chapter Six Hundred Thirty-Seven
31st December 1947
South Atlantic, East of San Clemente del Tuyú
“Word has gotten around” The Ship’s Doctor said pleasantly, “All the Corpsmen are afraid of you after that suggestion you made with the offer of a practical demonstration. While I think that what you did will serve his eventual wife and daughters well, it was a little extreme. It’s our job to ask questions like that.”
“You can ask questions all you want” Kat replied, “But is it too much to not offer commentary as well?” The Ship’s Doctor was pleasant enough, the Corpsman in question had been obnoxious and immature regarding certain questions. He had asked a question and then the follow up question regarding her certainty regarding that answer. There were some questions that men should never be allowed to ask, this was one of those. That was when Kat had asked some questions of her own.
“I am curious though” The Doctor said, “Can you really approximate the feeling of menstrual cramps in men with electrocution?”
“And childbirth” Kat said, “But it’s considered torture under the Geneva Conventions.”
The Doctor laughed at that, “That would be quite an education” He said, “From what I’ve seen from your Sea Lion counterparts I wouldn’t put anything past someone like you.” With that the Doctor left.
Kat didn’t think that the Doctor was taking that seriously, it had not been an idle threat. It was the usual sort of battle she had fought again and again for the last several years. Surrounded by men who had to learn that her personal boundaries were strung with concertina wire. Small wonder she always seemed to end up back in the Court of the Empress. At the same time, she understood the reasoning for what was happening. The SMS Graf von Richthofen was effectively a closed ecosystem. If anyone brought an exotic bug aboard the results could be catastrophic. The problem was that the way they had gone about it had left a great deal to be desired.
Not that everything was bad, Doug had come back from working in the photo lab with an envelope of the photographs that he had taken of them atop the ridge in the Andes. He was right about the two photographs of them standing together, Aunt Marcella was going to love those. The one of her sitting there alone was good, Doug said that he wanted to publish it. Kat alone with the magnificent backdrop revealed the sheer scale of the landscape. She had thought that she had looked terrible that day, but she looked like an adventurer in the finished picture. It belonged in a mountaineering magazine.
Kat laid down on her bunk, Douglas was off doing whatever he was doing. He had hundreds of photographs to develop, and as he had put it, those were going to pay for this vacation, Kat could hardly begrudge that. She must have fallen asleep because there was a knocking on the door. Kat opened it and a Cadet was shuffling nervously.
“Major von Mischner” He said, “If you could come with me.”
He led Kat through the ship, after a few minutes she would have been hopelessly lost had she been alone. Then they were walking through a cavernous hanger full of clamorous work that must be going constantly here, day and night. Then through a hatch and they were in open air. Kat saw that she was standing at a rail that was at the stern of the ship. Doug was standing there in the luminescent wake of the Aircraft Carrier.
“I know that we had planned to spend to spend New Year’s in Buenos Aires” Doug said as he popped the cork on a bottle of Champagne he had acquired from somewhere and poured it into a paper cup that he handed her. “Looks like we’re here instead.”
“I’ve spent worse” Kat said, “What time is it?”
Doug looked at his watch in the dim light. “Local time, eleven fifty-eight.”
Kat took a sip of the Champagne, she was here just in time.
They stood there at the rail for a long minute waiting. Somewhere nearby, they could hear men counting down to midnight. Then in what could only be described as a flagrant violation of regulations some of the crew up on the deck fired off several signal flares. It was a good tradition, Kat shared a kiss with Doug as the sky lit up with flashes of red, green and white.
Buenos Ares, Argentina
Reier walked with his squad through the darkened city until they entered a building and dug in, as per their request the loyalist faction of the Argentine Army had pulled back. The Coup might have failed but that didn’t mean that Putschists were giving up without a fight. The leadership was holed up in the Palace of the National Congress and the elected Government of Argentina had asked their German allies for assistance in ending the Coup with prompt dispatch, the building was expendable. Reier looked across the wide plaza with his binoculars. The poor stubborn fools in that building had been given until midnight to surrender. They had chosen not to.
The radio operator was talking quietly into the mic of his radio. The new mobile encoder was a wonder but Reier couldn’t even pretend that he knew how it worked or exactly what it did. He just knew that they could radio each other without anyone listening in. The radio operator was telling a series of numbers to the ships waiting in the river just outside the city. The afternoon before the Argentine Navy, having only a handful of formerly British and German Battleships and Battlecruisers leftover from the First World War had opted not to commit suicide on behalf of a lost cause. The result was that what about to happen was going to happen.
“Fire” The radio operator calmly said and Reier heard a distant BOOM! A few seconds later something crashed into the building and yellow smoke was pouring out of a large hole in the roof.
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Albrecht, along with the rest of the crew had been unable to have any New Year’s parties because the ship had remained in General Quarters all night. Now that it was just past midnight Albrecht was getting targeting data and this was not an exercise. Below him, he could hear machinery running as powder and shells were being hoisted up from the magazine. Then more machinery started as the turret turned. He had typed in the inputs, the measures of powder and the gun angles as they had come in. Then a red light came on signifying that Bruno turret was under local control. That meant that the plotting room was doing calculations for the ten 15cm guns in the secondary battery on that side of the ship. Albrecht’s mouth went dry when he realized that meant the Rhineland was going to fire a full broadside, into a city. The red light went out and the green one came on, saying that the gunnery tower was back online. Albrecht received a new set of numbers that he was requested to run and confirm. He keyed confirmation. There was a distant echo of the ranging shot fired by Anton turret, long seconds passed. Then the entire ship got the order, fire for effect.
Albrecht couldn’t directly hear it, being buried deep in the turret but he saw the 42cm gun recoil. Christoph hit a button sending a blast of compressed air through the barrel then hit the button to open the gun breech. Then the second shell landed in the tray in front of the ram which pushed it into place, followed by bags of premeasured powder and ballistic filler. The breech closed with a loud clank and the second broadside fired twelve seconds after the first.
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Reier was watching as the first shells landed. 15cm if he had to guess. The Fleet could do better than that he thought to himself just as thirty-two 42cm shells arrived, all at once. His mind was still trying to process what he had just seen as he saw the smoking hole where a building had just stood.
“Hell of a way to ring in the new year” He muttered to himself.
