Chapter 274: Capturing Count Benckendorff Alive, Forcing Beatty to His Death |
Never mind how Count Kitchener and Count Benckendorff were hiding in their cabins, trying to mentally brace themselves.
Colonel Stephen Lacey was in a state of absolute, undivided focus. His only thought was to command his two cutting-edge light cruisers and four destroyers to smash right through the enemy blockade.
Opposite him lay a Demanian battlecruiser, a light cruiser, and two destroyers.
At that moment, he still didn't know the battlecruiser was the Lutzow. The first three ships of Demania's Derfflinger-class looked identical; only the fourth ship, the Hindenburg, featured minor equipment modifications that gave its superstructure a slightly different silhouette.
The enemy light cruiser was a model he had never seen before either. In just a few minutes, he had determined it was about two knots faster than his own ships. Running was definitely not an option.
When did the Demanians build such a blazing-fast, cutting-edge light cruiser? It was unfathomable. The Royal Navy's intelligence agencies had caught no wind of it.
His only chance of survival was to launch a torpedo attack on the enemy battlecruiser. If they could score a hit and slash the enemy's speed, the chaos might force the auxiliary ships to focus on saving their capital ship, allowing him to slip away in the confusion.
It was a desperate bid to find life within death, but he couldn't afford to worry about that now.
The distance between the two fleets closed rapidly. As it shrank to eighteen kilometers, Colonel Lacey tensed, worrying that the enemy ship's 305mm main guns would open fire to gauge the range.
Against targets closing in at high speeds, firing a few shots to gauge deviation and adjust parameters was standard tactical procedure, not a waste of shells.
Several minutes passed, however. When the gap closed to sixteen kilometers, the enemy ship still held its fire. Colonel Lacey was momentarily taken aback. 'Does the enemy commander think it's unnecessary to use main guns against light cruisers? Is he planning to trade fire with his 150mm secondary batteries? Talk about arrogant. Whatever his reason, without the threat of those main guns, our odds of winning just went up!'
Little did Colonel Lacey know that the Demanian battlecruiser captains tightening the net around him today had received secret orders from Admiral Hipper. They were instructed to engage enemy light cruisers using only their secondary batteries, aiming to inflict heavy damage and capture them, or to fish survivors out of the water after the crews abandoned ship.
If they used the 305mm guns directly, a single lucky hit could trigger a massive explosion and sink the entire ship far too quickly, making it incredibly difficult to capture the VIPs.
After all, capturing Count Benckendorff alive held tremendous strategic value.
As long as they secured the original copy of the Sykes-Picot Agreement—already pre-stamped by the foreign ministers of Britannia and France and waiting for Lusha's formal signature—and ideally captured the ambassador alive as a witness, they could immediately expose Britannia's deceit in the Middle East.
The current issue in the Middle East was primarily that local tribes universally backed Britannia, making every step an arduous struggle for Demania and the Osmans.
Lelouch didn't even need the locals to switch sides; as long as they stopped supporting Britannia and maintained relative neutrality, Marshal Goltz could utterly crush the enemies in Kuwait and Basra, swiftly clearing up the entire situation in the Middle East.
For a prize like that, letting the intercepting warships take on a little risk was well worth it. They could sink light cruisers with secondary batteries alone, anyway.
To capture Count Benckendorff alive, the Demanians voluntarily restricted a portion of their firepower. It wasn't until the two sides closed to fifteen kilometers that the 150mm secondary batteries finally opened fire on the Danae and the Centaur. The Britannia ships immediately fired back with their own 150mm main guns.
The Demanians obviously couldn't determine from a distance which cruiser carried their target, so they played it conservatively, spreading their fire evenly across both ships.
The four charging Britannia destroyers didn't disrupt the Lutzow's 150mm battery distribution either.
The Lutzow completely disdained using its 150mm guns on them. Instead, it sent the escorting Coln light cruiser forward to intercept, using the cruiser's eight 88mm guns to handle the Britannia destroyers.
Two Demanian destroyers flanked the Coln to help intercept the incoming destroyer pack.
In no time, the gap between the vanguard ships of both sides closed to under ten kilometers. Demanian 105mm and 88mm shells flew in all directions, while the Britannia 120mm and 102mm guns responded without showing the slightest weakness.
The Coln didn't even divert its eight 138.6mm main guns to the destroyers. Instead, it assisted the Lutzow in focusing fire on the two enemy cruisers.
The clash between the vanguard ships was swiftly decided. The four Britannia destroyers were crippled one after another by artillery fire. Two sank within ten minutes, while the other two drifted like dead fish, entirely stripped of their combat capabilities.
The Coln and the two Demanian destroyers had only taken a few hits. One destroyer suffered a visible drop in speed, its superstructure battered by 120mm fire, while the other had taken only light damage.
The Coln had some of its external equipment blown away, but its core structure and speed were completely unharmed. Its 60mm-thick turtleback armor design was clearly enough to protect its citadel from any destroyer's bombardment.
However, the charge of the four Britannia destroyers wasn't entirely in vain. At the very least, they successfully stalled the Demanian vanguard. And before sinking—regardless of whether they were close enough to score a hit—the Britannia crews frantically fired all their torpedoes, forcing the Demanian ships into cautious evasive maneuvers and buying even more time.
Consequently, the Coln and the two Demanian destroyers were tied down for over half an hour, unable to reinforce the Lutzow.
At most, the Coln's eight 138.6mm guns could lob a few distant shells at the Britannia cruisers. But those cruisers weren't aiming for the Coln; they were gunning for the Lutzow. With the distance remaining vast, the accuracy of the 138.6mm guns was pitiful. Over the course of half an hour, they only managed to land a total of four hits on the Centaur.
On the other hand, the Lutzow's six broadside 150mm secondary guns fired continuously. Once the engagement range breached the ten-kilometer mark, its 88mm guns also joined in, firing at their maximum reach.
The 150mm secondary batteries exclusively used Armor-Piercing Shells packed with the minimum propellant. They avoided high-explosive rounds, terrified of igniting something they shouldn't, blowing up someone they shouldn't, or incinerating evidence they needed.
An Armor-Piercing Shell was fully capable of penetrating a light cruiser's citadel. If it pierced the engine room and stalled the ship, or punched straight through the upper decks and out the hull to cause flooding and a slow sinking—that would be the perfect outcome.
This restrained combat style allowed the two Britannia cruisers to survive for several dozen extra minutes. Their 150mm return fire left over a dozen insignificant scratches on the Lutzow and wrecked some of its superstructure, but any shells striking the citadel failed to penetrate.
Whenever the Britannia cruisers tried to close the gap, the Lutzow would adjust its angle and execute a slight trailing sword maneuver to maintain distance. After forty minutes of fierce fighting, it successfully battered the two Britannia cruisers with surgical precision until they were flooding and sinking, all without triggering a single catastrophic explosion.
By now, the clash between the vanguard ships had also concluded. A relatively intact Demanian destroyer hurried over, aiming to fish out the Britannia sailors and ideally force the surrender of the drifting wrecks bobbing like dead fish on the surface.
But right at this moment, the situation abruptly turned. Perhaps playing the merciful villain was too costly; relying solely on low-propellant Armor-Piercing Shells from the secondary batteries had wasted too much time, and since the battlecruiser was a clear two knots slower than the light cruisers, the gap had eventually narrowed.
Before going under, both Britannia cruisers desperately launched all their torpedoes. Each ship boasted the classic layout of two twin torpedo tubes on both the port and starboard sides, capable of firing eight torpedoes apiece. Together, they unleashed a spread of sixteen torpedoes.
Although they sank at six to seven kilometers out—never breaching the five-kilometer threshold—a crisscrossing barrage of a full sixteen torpedoes was no easy thing to dodge, even past seven kilometers.
Furthermore, the Lutzow was positioned to the north. Under the polar day conditions, the sun sat perpetually in the south, its extremely low angle creating a blinding glare when looking south from the north. Ultimately, during the final mopping-up phase to secure prisoners, the Lutzow failed to evade in time. A single torpedo, fired just before a Britannia cruiser went down, clipped its port hull at a shallow angle.
With a muffled boom and a violent shudder tearing through the warship, a column of water erupted near the aft port quarter.
Commodore Robben Bernhardt stumbled slightly inside the conning tower. He hastily regained his balance and ordered the crew to report the flooding status.
"Port side watertight compartments nine through eleven are flooding! Watertight doors have been sealed!" Soon, the damage control team's report echoed up the speaking tube into the bridge.
Commodore Bernhardt's face turned slightly ashen, but he steadied himself as quickly as possible.
The underwater protection of the Derfflinger-class was fairly robust, boasting seventeen watertight bulkhead sections. Because the Lutzow hadn't suffered any artillery punctures and had only taken a single torpedo hit, the flooding of two watertight compartments was still manageable.
"Report our speed immediately! Confirm if the turbines and boilers are damaged!"
Damage control quickly assessed the situation. The engine room, located deeper inside the hull, was unaffected. However, one boiler in the port-side row had sprung a leak and been shut down in an emergency. Several steam pipe valves were also sealed off because two pipes had fractured from the shockwave.
With two of its seventeen port-side watertight compartments flooded, one of its eight boilers offline, and two cracked steam lines shut down, the Lutzow's top speed plummeted from twenty-seven knots to twenty-one.
"Our top priority right now is to see if we captured the key VIP from those sinking enemy light cruisers! If you spot a fat man with a heavy beard, subject him to strict interrogation and verify his identity instantly!
"Turn the fleet to heading 155. We must rendezvous with the Derfflinger or the Hindenburg. If we have the critical captive, transfer him to them immediately; our speed is already compromised."
Commodore Bernhardt issued the somber order, clearly harboring a bad premonition.
He calculated the odds in his head for a long while before locking himself in the captain's quarters. He hastily penned a fairly long note outlining his ominous forebodings and contingency plans, intending to have someone hand it over to Admiral Hipper later.
As he went about this, the destroyer tasked with recovering survivors returned, dragging along hundreds of prisoners just as expected.
When that Demanian destroyer went to fish them out, they had someone shout over a megaphone, promising to drop the prisoners off in Norway. They announced that several nearby Norwegian ports were already under Demanian control and that, upon landing, they would receive proper POW treatment—
These reassurances were obviously part of the scheme Lelouch and Hipper had cooked up beforehand, entirely meant to coax identity-sensitive captives into willingly surrendering.
Ultimately, Lusha's ambassador, Count Benckendorff, who sat in a lifeboat, sorely lacked Count Kitchener's resolve.
It turned out that not all counts possessed the same courage.
Just as the light cruiser Danae was going down, Count Kitchener had achieved a grim clarity. He had put a bullet in his own head, but not before ordering his adjutant to shackle two lengths of anchor chain to his legs.
After his suicide, his adjutant shoved his corpse overboard, letting him sink to the abyss forever to escape posthumous humiliation and prevent his body from becoming evidence.
But Kitchener and the captain of the Danae had clearly lacked the nerve to execute the ambassador of an allied nation outright.
The cowardly Count Benckendorff had repeatedly pleaded that if they just gave him an ordinary naval officer's uniform, he could pass himself off as a nobody. Once ashore, he'd bribe his Demanian guards with valuables and sneak back to his country by land.
Forging such a treaty to partition the Middle East between the three powers hadn't been easy. If they failed to deliver the envoy this time, they'd have to mount another escort mission. Given the perilous state of the North Sea, that would likely cost even more lives.
His final argument made a lot of sense, which persuaded the Danae's captain to spare him.
Everyone knew it: if the Norwegian campaign hadn't broken out, dispatching another envoy to deliver the secret treaty later would have been fine. But with the war in Norway raging, if the entirety of the country fell to pro-Demanian Sweden, this maritime route would only grow more treacherous.
Therefore, this was arguably their last relatively safe shot. Besides, the enemy might not have even come for the ambassador; they might just be participating in the sudden Norwegian offensive and happened to bump into the Brit Nation convoy.
If he disguised himself as a naval officer escorting an ordinary merchant fleet, the enemy wouldn't be too suspicious, and Count Benckendorff had hidden plenty of wealth to grease palms.
The Demanian Navy currently maintained decent discipline. They wouldn't subject captured enemy officers to overly invasive searches, nor would they confiscate their private belongings.
Paving his way with gold, slipping out of their control, and finding civilian transport across Norway to return to Lusha was entirely feasible.
This blend of indecision and cowardice ultimately led Ambassador Benckendorff, harboring a sliver of wishful thinking, to let himself be captured while posing as a low-ranking naval officer.
He donned the uniform of a Navy Lieutenant, taking on the temporary cover identity of the Danae's deputy navigator. He had considered acquiring a lower-ranking uniform to avoid drawing attention, but as a portly man in his fifties or sixties, his age and appearance didn't match that of a Sub-Lieutenant or Ensign. A Lieutenant was the absolute limit.
Consequently, a few dozen minutes later, he was hauled before Commodore Bernhardt, placed under strict guard, and subjected to the most thorough strip search imaginable.
For the items he had tried to hide, a vicious beating was inevitable; they treated him to the great memory recovery technique.
"Count Alexander Konstantinovich Benckendorff, Lusha's Ambassador to London, yes? You're the one responsible for bringing the Sykes-Picot Agreement back to Saint Petersburg for Foreign Minister Sazonov and Nicholas II to sign?"
Commodore Bernhardt dangled the thick, seawater-soaked, triplicate copies of the Sykes-Picot Agreement in front of Count Benckendorff's face.
At that moment, Count Benckendorff fell into total despair. "Despicable! How can you treat diplomatic personnel like this? So it was your conspiracy all along! You were after me from the very beginning! Going to war with Norway, happening to raid and escort at Narvik Port—it was all a smokescreen!"
"You call this proper diplomacy that can see the light of day?" Commodore Bernhardt scoffed. "This is shameless secret diplomacy! Even Professor Wilson, the Chouguo presidential candidate across the ocean, condemns you people. This world war erupted precisely because of scum like you running secret diplomacy! This isn't protected by international law. Besides, you're not a diplomat stationed in Demania; your diplomatic immunity only applies to the Britannians!"
Even if the rule was "don't shoot the messenger" during wartime, that only applied to messengers sent to one's own country. Nobody ever said you couldn't intercept and kill envoys passing between two hostile nations.
Catching or killing that kind of envoy was a matter of skill, and one had to accept their losses.
By this point, Count Benckendorff was utterly crushed. Deep down, he was drowning in regret; had he known, he would have killed himself earlier to avoid causing such a catastrophic disaster.
But how could he know that someone within the enemy ranks already knew the core contents of this agreement? Even if Benckendorff had died and the documents were destroyed, it would simply mean Lelouch would have to go through a bit more trouble forging a new copy, and its credibility would be slightly weaker.
Still, taking him alive and seizing the original copy was undoubtedly the absolute best outcome. Taking a torpedo to the Lutzow to achieve it was entirely worth it.
This bargaining chip would force the enemy navy to sail out and intercept. If the enemy naval forces mobilized at different times and locations, they were bound to make panicked blunders, causing severe disjoints in their arrival times at the battlefield. Ultimately, this could degrade into oil-adding tactics—like the calabash brothers saving grandpa, feeding units into battle one by one.
And if this chip was safely escorted back to the homeland, it would instantly flip the entire Middle Eastern theater on its head. The value was simply astronomical.
It was just that the Lutzow had eaten a torpedo and lost its speed advantage. Therefore, the task of escorting Count Benckendorff back to the homeland definitely couldn't be carried out by this ship anymore.
Fortunately, the various search fleets in Admiral Hipper's net were only spaced about fifty nautical miles apart. In just an hour or two, the Lutzow would be able to transfer the crucial hostage to another battlecruiser.
At 3:30 PM, Commodore Bernhardt's Lutzow successfully rendezvoused with the Derfflinger, carrying Admiral Hipper himself.
Using a small launch, Commodore Bernhardt transferred the captive VIPs, along with some personnel that needed to be evacuated from the Lutzow, over to the Derfflinger.
Since they had maintained strict radio silence the entire time and had only relied on airships passing short-range light signals, it was only now that Admiral Hipper learned the Lutzow had taken a torpedo and suffered a speed penalty.
His face paled dramatically when he read Commodore Bernhardt's note. Eager to convince the man to reconsider and find another way, he quickly flashed a few coded messages via light signals to dissuade him.
But Commodore Bernhardt held firm to his decision. Stating his resolve to live or die with his warship, he pleaded for permission to carry out this decoy plan, aiming to draw the enemy into an even more disjointed trap.
After agonizing over it, Hipper finally agreed.
He saluted in the direction of the Lutzow, then issued an order laced with sorrow. "Hurry the lighterage with the launches. Evacuate all non-essential combat personnel from the Lutzow. After that, the Lutzow is authorized to break formation and head toward the port of Trondheim to mislead and draw away the enemy's intercepting battlecruisers."
This way, even if the Lutzow ultimately met a tragic end, they could at least minimize the loss of life.
All the senior fleet officers now knew what Admiral Hipper and Commodore Bernhardt intended to do, casting a heavy, solemn silence over the fleet.
At 4:00 PM, with all transfers complete, Hipper led the regrouped battlecruisers and auxiliary ships southward in retreat.
Meanwhile, the Lutzow, flanked by the Coln and two destroyers, headed toward Norway's Trondheim alone, pretending to make port there.
More crucially, the Lutzow broke radio silence, broadcasting a message using an outdated naval code that the Britannians could easily decipher.
"While executing a mission to escort a troop transport fleet to the port of Trondheim, this ship unexpectedly encountered a Brit Nation escort convoy bound for Lusha. In the intense fight to sink all enemy vessels, this ship was unfortunately struck by one torpedo. Due to a loss of speed, safely returning to the homeland is no longer possible.
"We have urgently decided to head for Trondheim. We request the former Army units employed by Sweden to secure the port upon landing and cover this ship's entry.
"Additionally, while sinking the Brit Nation fleet, this ship accidentally captured Count Benckendorff, Lusha's Ambassador to London, and seized the original copy of a secret diplomatic treaty between Britannia, France, and Lusha. The implications are enormous; we request immediate Admiralty support.
"We also learned from rescued prisoners that Count Kitchener was aboard the same vessel bound for Lusha. Fearing capture, he strapped himself to an anchor and cast himself into the sea right before the Danae sank. The Navy must utilize all means to coordinate support."
Just twenty minutes after this telegram was sent, the atmosphere in London Room 40 utterly exploded.
Ten minutes later, a call was placed to the Admiralty. After hanging up, Minister of the Navy Edward Carson's emotions completely detonated as well.
"Can you confirm the direction of the transmission? Was it from the Norwegian Sea, between Narvik and Trondheim?" Minister Carson couldn't help but ask, trembling as he sought final confirmation.
"Yes, Your Excellency. Radio silence was broken off the coast between Narvik and Trondheim. Furthermore, based on the radio frequencies our monitoring stations in the surrounding waters picked up, the transmission power came from a radio equipped on a major vessel, battleship- or battlecruiser-class."
Radio direction finding and range estimation were straightforward tasks; they couldn't be faked. Similarly, transmission power couldn't be disguised.
Or rather, a large ship could masquerade its transmission power as a small ship's by broadcasting at low wattage. But a small ship couldn't fake being a large one unless it was a warship specifically built for deception, strapping a massive radio transmission antenna onto a tiny hull.
The Demanians sending the message so openly meant they were laying all their cards on the table. The dagger was drawn. Perhaps they intended to rely on that ship to forcefully beach or dock in Norway and unload their captives ashore first.
"God! Why is our empire's luck so awful? We assigned the fastest light cruisers to escort Count Benckendorff, so why did they still bump into the Demanians?"
While his blood pressure soared, Minister Carson hastily scrambled to confirm two things.
First, he needed to know exactly where Beatty's battlecruiser fleet had sailed after leaving port yesterday upon hearing that the Demanians were using Sweden to launch an assault on Norway.
Second, he needed to verify the situation at Trondheim. Had the Demanian mercenaries genuinely seized the port? This had to be confirmed with Norway's defense department.
The first point was tricky to confirm because Beatty was still under radio silence and wouldn't reply. They could only rely on friendly forces' rough calculations to guesstimate his general location.
The second point was verified quite quickly. Half an hour later, Norway's defense department relayed word to the Britannians, reporting that the fiercest fighting was currently concentrated over forty kilometers south of Oslo at Oscarsborg, the coastal defense fortress guarding the narrowest stretch of the Oslofjord.
The Demanian mercenaries had been in the country for barely a day, yet they had already breached the border city of Halden and the frontier fortress of Sarpsborg, completely routing a main Norwegian division stationed there.
In a single day's time, Colonel Model had led two elite mountain divisions over seventy kilometers deep!
And he had conquered a border fortress to boot; God knows how he pulled that off.
But none of this mattered most to Minister Carson. He only wanted to know if the Demanians had successfully landed forces at Trondheim.
On that front, he actually received answers that restored his confidence.
"This morning and at noon, a few individual Demanian ships approached Trondheim to bombard the opposite shore, attempting to cover a landing. However, they were repelled by Trondheim's coastal defense guns. Currently, a full regiment of soldiers is stationed in the port area; the Demanians cannot land."
Minister Carson finally breathed a sigh of relief.
As long as the Demanians failed to land at Trondheim, the Lutzow couldn't forcefully dock there and transfer the captive Ambassador Benckendorff back home! Even if they did go ashore, they would be captured by the Norwegian army. Given the historically excellent ties and friendship between Britannia and Norway, as long as the man fell into Norwegian hands, getting them to release him and secretly escort him back to Lusha by land would be a breeze.
The Demanians' sole hope of delivering Count Benckendorff back to their homeland hinged on their navy moving to support the Lutzow!
After cruising the waters near Trondheim for a while and seeing that their army had failed to seize the port and establish a foothold, the Lutzow would definitely have to alter its plans and stealthily slink back south along the fjord's coast.
How could they possibly be allowed to punch through the Royal Navy's blockade?
At this thought, Minister Carson instantly barked out an order. "Wire Beatty again! Tell him to calculate all possible return routes from the Trondheim waters at any cost. He must give it everything he has to intercept and seal off every path the Lutzow could take back to the Demanian homeland!
"We absolutely cannot allow the captives and seized goods aboard the Lutzow to reach Demania! Order him to reply in code instantly! Any requests he has, any allied support he needs—put it all in the reply! There's no point maintaining radio silence to hide his coordinates now! The enemy's already laid their cards on the table, what the hell is he still hoping to hide from?"
Minutes later, in the waters east of the Shetland Islands, Beatty was entirely misled by Minister Carson's frantic telegram.
Hearing that there was a target in the Trondheim waters that absolutely had to be intercepted and destroyed, Admiral David Beatty ran a quick calculation of the enemy's possible routes, then sent his entire force hurtling straight toward the Lutzow's return path at breakneck speed.
All six of the Britannian battlecruisers were mobilized for the strike, leaving nothing in reserve.
