Chapter Two Thousand Eight Hundred and Thirty-Three
11th July 1980
Naval Station Newport, Rhode Island
When Mike had arrived at Surface Warfare School in Newport, he had been told that he would spend most of his time studying. What no one had told was that beyond learning systems in the classroom, there was a good chance that those studies would take him in some odd directions.
Perhaps it was morbid curiosity, but after Little Mike had read a few reports about the German U-Boat Flotilla he had found a copy of Janes Fighting Ships, 1978-79 that had provided him with additional information. He had also discovered the alphabet soup of German Boat-types that served alongside the larger, better-known ships of the High Seas Fleet. That had led Mike down a rabbit hole comparing the ship of various Navies to that of the United States Navy and what he had figured out much of what he had believed about the international situation was wrong.
The British Navy was a shadow of what it had been decades earlier, barely able to meet its obligations under the European Mutual Defense Treaty much less police what was left of the British Empire. While not as badly off, the French Navy wasn’t exactly up to snuff either. The Italians and Germans had been forced to take up the slack, especially since oil and gas in the North Sea had become a strategic consideration. Curiously, for all the hype that the German High Seas Fleet got, a large part of their Navy was comprised of boats that were geared to operate in Littoral waters namely the Baltic and much of the North Sea. The small R-Boats, originally intended to be Minesweepers, with their shallow draft and Voith-Schneider Propellers were actually the most common vessel in German service and that was their main area of operation. The R-boats were joined in that region by the remaining S-Boats leftover from WW2 and the newer SK-Boats that were meant to replace the S-Boats.
The US Navy didn’t have anything quite like that. There were boats that the Navy operated in the Sacramento and Mississippi River Deltas, and the harbor patrol boats that anyone who had attended Annapolis would be familiar with. Nothing on the same scale though. When Mike had brought that up with one of his Instructors, he had it pointed out to him that area of operation was normally taken up by the US Coast Guard, enabling the US Navy to take a wider view. Mike wasn’t quite certain if that was correct or not so he had held his tongue. The Instructor’s response had been to give Mike a paperback book to read over the weekend titled The Greyhound by Louis Ferdinand Prinz von Preussen Jr. It had looked like a dense read when Mike had started it the prior Friday evening, but he had finished it over the weekend. It was the story of SMS Fast Gunboat (SK)12 “Windhund” of the Kaiserliche Marine from the perspective of Louis von Preussen when he had commanded her, first in the North Sea and later in the Adriatic as a Flotilla leader. While it was obvious that von Preussen had a high opinion of himself, he really had done the things mentioned in the book. Pursuing pirates and smugglers off Dalmatia were featured along with the cloak and dagger activity that had gone into the hunt for two Turkish Q-ships that had been preying on shipping were mentioned. Finally there was mention of an odd incident where German and American Special Forces had gone after an elusive Arms Kingpin in a joint operation. Mike had asked around about that and discovered the mission that had been mentioned in Louis von Preussen’s book was still considered classified from the American side. At the conclusion was mention of an encounter with American Navy Captain James Carter and a brief talk they had while watching an Austrian Destroyer get cut up in the breaker’s yard. Mike realized that was Rear Admiral Carter, the Deputy Commander at Naval Command Norfolk.
When Mike had asked why no one on either side of the Atlantic seemed to have an issue with Louis von Preussen including all that in his book, he had gotten an odd look. Did he really have no idea who the author of the book was? It was not as if Mike had had the time to pay much attention to supermarket tabloids over the last few years.
Tehachapi, California
Stanley’s mother had always said that his father had taken a bad turn after they had broken up shortly after he had been born. Stanley’s grandfather had a different take, namely that Stanley’s father had always been a piece of shit, just his daughter had been unable to see it until she had come to her senses and gave him the boot. Both of those things were certainly plausible, Stanley tried to live in the now, so he didn’t really care about that. The rub was that now was probably far worse than the then. It was sort of hard to argue that the Maximum-Security Wing of the California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi was basically Hell on Earth was the present now.
It was only by some weird twist of fate that this meeting was taking place in the Guard’s break room as opposed to the prison’s visiting area.
“Good to see you, Stan” Stanley’s father said as he sat a scoped rifle down on the table in front of him. Stanley had once heard that the only difference between the prisoners and the guards was that they wore different colored uniforms. His father was proof of that considering some of the things that Stanley knew he had done. These days he spent his days atop the prison’s walls watching for the sort of trouble that would swiftly be fixed by putting a bullet through someone’s head.
“Just what do you want Dad?” Stanley asked.
“I can’t catch up with my boy?” Stanley’s father asked in reply.
“You only call when you want something” Stan said.
Stanley’s father just sat there with a fixed smile on his face and Stanley just knew that whatever it was, he wasn’t going to like it.
