Re: Blood and Iron

Chapter 656: No Grave for the Bold

The morning fog had barely lifted from the harbor, but inside the vaulted chamber, tempers ran hot beneath the cold chandeliers.

Foreign Minister Jrgen Vang-Lorentzen set his folder down with an audible smack, glasses perched low on his nose, his tone clipped and precise.

“Let me be absolutely clear, Canada violated our territorial waters three times this month. Three. They boarded two German-flagged civilian vessels under pretense of search and seizure without presenting warrant or cause. That, gentlemen, is not neutrality. That is a provocation.”

Across the table, Justice Minister Elisabeth Frijs laced her fingers and leaned forward.

“And yet it is we who have chosen to lie to the international community. We who accepted prisoners given to us by the German Navy, prisoners they picked up alone and unmoored after sinking the Ottawa. That skiff came from a warzone we denied ever existed. From a ship destroyed in a conflict we claim never happened.”

She gestured toward the redacted report.

“We cooperated, Jrgen. We hid the truth. That skiff was not a civilian rescue. It was a post-battle cleanup. You and the Crown handed the Germans deniability on a silver platter.”

“We honored our treaty,”

the Defense Minister, General Rasmus Hvidt, interjected gruffly.

“The Reich has military passage through our northern waters. They keep our ports open, our airfields supplied, our icebreakers moving. What have the Allies done but blockade and inspect?”

Elisabeth’s jaw tightened.

“So now we call it ’passage’ when submarines with no transponders vaporize ships in the Denmark Strait?”

“You assume the Reich fired first.”

“I assume no such thing. I assume the truth would not favor us. And I assume we are increasingly seen as a client state in all but name.”

Jrgen’s voice lowered, iron beneath silk.

“If the Allies wanted Danish favor, they could have offered diplomacy. Instead they sent Destroyers. Instead they acted like we were the enemy for simply choosing not to join their petty crusade.”

“Then we should have filed a protest. We should have appealed to Geneva or London.”

“And risked what?” General Hvidt snapped. “A fleet embargo? A full economic squeeze? We are not the British Empire, we are Denmark. And we remember what happened to Belgium when it tried to play nice with both wolves.”

The room fell into heavy silence.

A senior aide from the Prime Minister’s Office, young and clearly nervous, shuffled to the podium with a courier dispatch in hand.

“The Canadians have now issued an open diplomatic communique. They’re citing conflicting testimony from the survivors. Some claim the Ottawa suffered catastrophic engine failure. Others… say it was struck. No consensus. No proof. But they’re demanding an international investigation, and they’re openly questioning how our coast guard happened to be so close to the incident site.”

Justice Minister Elisabeth Frijs let out a bitter exhale.

“So the fog begins to lift.”

“Not quite,” Foreign Minister Jrgen Vang-Lorentzen replied. “The fog is thickening. There’s no debris field. No sonar trace. No torpedo fragments. Just a gutted hull resting on the ocean floor, and a half-dozen half-frozen sailors with fractured memories and no proof.”

General Hvidt leaned forward, tone grim but confident.

“Let the Canadians speculate. Without wreckage analysis, without trajectory markers, without even a known adversary, they have nothing. We have plausible deniability. And if the Allies thank us for rescuing those sailors… all the better.”

Elisabeth narrowed her gaze.

“But we are playing both sides now. Whether we admit it or not. If this escalates, if Berlin continues its ’research’ operations unchecked, then eventually, one of these torpedoes won’t leave ambiguity in its wake.”

Jrgen gave a long, tired sigh.

“Then we’d best pray, Minister Frijs, that ambiguity remains the only thing left floating above the wreckage.”

—

Snow flurried gently outside the Parliament windows, casting a pale light over the polished wood and brass fixtures of the Prime Minister’s office.

The mood inside, however, was anything but serene.

Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King stood at the window with his back to the room, arms folded behind him as his senior defense and intelligence staff sat uneasily at the table.

A radio hummed quietly with static, no news of substance had emerged since the diplomatic cables began flooding in.

A naval attaché cleared his throat.

“Sir… the last dive team confirmed it. No sign of a torpedo casing. No impact markers that suggest conventional explosives. Just a heat-burst pattern amid fractured internal bulkheads. Whatever hit the Ottawa, it tore through her like a white-hot lance.”

Kingsley didn’t turn around.

“So we still have nothing.”

The silence was deafening.

“Sir… the only survivors were the inspection crew aboard the skiff. They were boarding the German vessel when the Ottawa vanished off the map.”

Prime Minister Kingsley turned sharply.

“Vanished?”

The naval attaché nodded, hesitant.

“One moment she was there, holding position off the Danish exclusion zone. Next, there was a shockwave. The crew on the skiff said they felt the air ripple. Then they turned and saw what looked like… implosion. The Ottawa simply crumpled in on itself before exploding.”

The attaché flipped through the folder containing all the information they had managed to gather all while summarizing its contents.

“They never saw a periscope. No enemy contact. Although… Some have reported a strange glow in the water. Washington suggests it was a reaction by the local plankton to the path of a torpedo. But… There’s no evidence to confirm this theory.”

Another aide chimed in.

“We’ve reviewed radio logs and sonar. There’s no record of any sub-surface contact. No launch warning. Nothing conventional.”

Kingsley paced slowly.

“So the skiff crew survived because they were off-ship, mid-harassment of a Reich-flagged merchant vessel… in disputed waters.”

Silence.

He stopped and faced his advisors, voice like flint.

“We gave them the excuse. Germany didn’t start this incident. We did. And they responded with annihilation so complete we can’t even prove they were there. That’s what makes them dangerous.”

That made Kingsley finally turn.

His eyes were calm, but the tension in his jaw betrayed him. He looked each of his men in the eyes before speaking.

“It was the Germans.”

“We can’t prove that, sir,” Tremblay said cautiously. “And if we can’t prove it—”

“We can’t retaliate,” Kingsley finished for him. “Yes, I know. That’s the genius of it.”

He stepped forward, slamming the folder shut on the table.

“They’ve grown bold since the Great War. Arrogant. Capable. And worse… clever. They don’t swing hammers like the Americans. They wield scalpels. Precision and cruelty masked by diplomacy and deniability.”

He turned to the naval chief of staff.

“And we gave them a reason. You let a warship cross into disputed waters and menace a German-aligned vessel under Danish protection. No clear authorization. No escalation path. Just… adventurism.”

“Sir, with respect, the Ottawa was following—”

“After Monrovia, I thought you fools had learned. But clearly, even fire doesn’t cauterize stupidity.”

That name, Monrovia, hung like lead in the room. The massacre. The entire city laid to waste by total bombardment from high altitude strategic bombers.

Germany didn’t even hide behind the act. Bruno stood on stage and justified it to the world. And in doing so issued a severe warning that Berlin would play by its own rules.

Kingsley lowered his tone.

“They strike hard… then vanish. And when we scream, the world shrugs, because there’s no proof. Just charred wreckage and broken men.”

He sat, finally, and reached for a decanter of whisky with a slow, practiced hand.

“And Denmark?”

The intelligence aide shifted in his seat.

“Stonewalling. Officially, their coast guard found the survivors drifting. No radar logs. No naval activity in the sector. They’re offering condolences… but nothing else.”

Kingsley poured the drink and stared into the glass as though divining the future.

“Of course they are. They’ve made their choice. Just like Belgium and the Netherlands. They’re not neutral. They’re calculating.”

A long pause. Then he looked up.

“The Reich didn’t just win the Great War. They learned from it. Every loss, every blunder, every limit of power… they’ve corrected. And now they strike from the shadows, testing our patience, our boundaries. And if we push back the wrong way—”

He let the implication linger, then took a sip.

No one spoke.

Outside, snow continued to fall over a city that did not yet realize it was living in the opening days of a much colder war.

And the Prime Minister simply gazed upon it, feeling, as if for the first time, that Roosevelt had pulled the wool over his eyes.

The promises made when he came to Ottawa, spoken with that warm, confident smile, now seemed so obviously and patently false.

“A front seat at the new world,” he said…

And it had taken just two years to see through the lie.

He had been deceived.

And now… now he knew.

When this madness finally escalated into total war.

One way or another…

It would be the death of Canada.