O’Connor heard the words, but was oblivious to their meaning. He suddenly felt daft as a brush. Third generation? That implied two earlier models or versions of this armor. He suddenly felt something was very odd here. Secrecy was one thing, but hiding the design, development and testing of a weapon this sophisticated was quite another. There was simply no way these new vehicles could have been built and deployed in a fully combat ready status without thousands of men knowing about it, people in the factories, testing sites, dockyards, merchant marine, and anyone at Alexandria when they arrived. And he simply could not imagine that Wavell, with his back to the wall at Sidi Barani, would have blithely ordered a unit of this size and obvious value south into the heart of nowhere like this. It simply made no military sense. He turned to General Kinlan with a strange look in his eye.
“Just who in bloody hell are you people?”
Fedorov saw it now, behind the awe and surprise, a look of profound doubt, and he knew the time was ripe to move O’Connor to a new understanding. The awakening had begun.
“Excuse me, sir,” said Popski on Fedorov’s behalf. “The Captain suggests it may be time to take the General aside for a more detailed briefing.”
“It was six wise men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.
HMS Queen Elizabeth was in the vanguard of the fleet that day, her bow awash with rising seas as the grand old lady led the way at 16 knots. Laid down in 1912 and commissioned two years later, the ship had seen extensive service in WWI, with most of her combat hours logged near the Dardanelles until a troublesome turbine sent her home for repairs. She missed Jutland, eventually returning to Scapa Flow, but was nonetheless honored to present the terms of surrender to the German Admiral von Reuter after the armistice in 1918. After the war she went through two major refits, and first saw duty in the warm waters of the Mediterranean in 1925. Her latest refit was completed in the shadow of impending war at Portsmouth, where the ship had her guts torn out when 25 old boilers were removed to be replaced with 8 of the new high pressure boilers. New AA armament was installed, and her guns were modified to elevate just past 30 degrees, improving their range to 32,000 yards. Even the bridge structure got a facelift, and her distinctive tripod mainmast was finally crowned with the oddments of radar fittings, technology that had not existed when she first went to sea.
All this work kept the ship in the dockyards through most of 1940, and she had been scheduled to visit the powder room at Rosyth one last time before doddering out to sea for duty. There the Queen would have received her new Type 279 and Type 284 radars, but it was not to be. In this altered reality, the pressing need to reinforce Admiral Cunningham sent her off to Alexandria instead. Old but proud, she remained a stout hearted warrior, out now on her first real sortie of the war with the intent to find and hurt the enemy. Behind her two other old warriors sailed in stately review, Malaya and Warspite, both ships in this same class, and veterans of Jutland.
Captain Claud Barrington Barry was on the bridge that hour, a bit restless, as the fleet had been ordered to circle in place while the Admirals detached for an unusual rendezvous to the northeast off Crete aboard HMS Invincible. Cunningham had been aboard when the fleet left Alexandria, more to tour the ship and hearten up the crew than anything else. He had set his flag on Warspite, where his staff still waited, and would return there after the conference.
So Captain Barry was enjoying the last moments of calm he might know for some time. The fleet knew what they were in for, knew the odds were steep. The arrival of HMS Invincible and the strange Russian super destroyer, as the men called it, had been a welcome reinforcement, but that aside, the enemy outnumbered them two to one in capital ships. None of them really knew just what the Russian ship could do at sea, though they had heard rumors that it had played a vital role in turning back the Kriegsmarine north of Iceland. The aerial rocketry it displayed on arriving at Suez had given everyone quite a surprise, most of all the Italians, but you couldn’t sink a battleship with fireworks like that, or so the men thought.
