Tension was high in Toulon, where the main command centre of the French Navy is located. The operations room had a way of making grown men look small.
It was not the flags on the wall or the brass plates that did it. It was the screens. The coast, the sea lanes, the thin lines of radio traffic crawling across the map, and the empty space where a very expensive ship was supposed to be.
A lieutenant planted both palms on the console, leaned closer, and blinked at the last position marker.
It stayed gone.
An aide hurried behind him, breath short, a folder flapping against his thigh. Someone in a dark uniform snapped for quiet, and the room tried to obey. It failed. Too many voices, too many orders, too many people pretending that the word impossible still belonged in a navy's vocabulary.
A commander moved into the centre with sharp steps and clipped gestures, his eyes glued to the radar screen.
"The carrier." The word came out like an accusation. "Say it again."
The lieutenant swallowed. He kept his gaze on the screen like it might be more merciful.
"Clemenceau does not answer."
A pause.
"And Jeanne d'Arc?"
The lieutenant tapped keys until the console bleeped in protest. "Following the carrier at last report. Now nothing. No voice. No beacon."
The commander's jaw tightened. He rotated toward the communications table.
"Try primary. Try secondary. Try anything that still makes sound."
The operator spun dials and toggles, then leaned forward as if getting closer might help the signal reach him.
Static. A breath. Static again.
Then, faintly, a chorus bled through. Not a distress call. Not coordinates. Not even French swear words, which at least would have been familiar.
A sea shanty.
The room froze, as if somebody had just brought a parrot into a funeral.
The operator turned the volume down, slowly, like he was afraid the song would bite.
"You are hearing that too," the lieutenant managed.
The commander stared at the speaker. "That cannot be them."
The operator pressed a hand to his earpiece, listened again, then gave the kind of shrug a man uses when reality stops cooperating.
"It is them, sir."
Orders snapped out, attempts made again and again to contact both carriers until they were lost, their signals dead, and communications channels shut.
Within the hour, the French launched everything that could fly from every base that could get into the air. Maritime patrol aircraft climbed and turned toward the last known point. Rescue helicopters swept low over grey water, their rotors beating time against the wind.
A liaison officer pushed through the crowd with a thin sheet of paper and a face that looked tired already. He read off what the Americans had launched from their own deck, E 2C Hawkeyes to hold the picture from above, S 3 Vikings to sniff at the sea, Seahawks to drag survivors out of water that refused to give any, and fighters to keep everyone else honest. He kept talking as if naming the machines would make them appear on the screen.
It did not help. A carrier did not vanish because a lieutenant forgot to dial a frequency.
Spain and Portugal did the same, because there was nothing else to do besides stare at their own screens and feel the humiliation crawl up their spines.
In Madrid, a Spanish communications officer sat rigid over a console as the message looped again. The frigate's call sign, the same voice, the same background noise, and then the song.
A man behind him asked, softly, "Are they mocking us?"
The officer exhaled. "If they are not, then we are being mocked by the universe."
Someone in the room chuckled at the lyrics about the king stealing the queen while pointing at the missing blips of Reina Sofía. Another man, older and meaner, heard it and was preparing to administer some old school discipline.
"Do not say that again," he warned after a satisfying punch while wiping his knuckles with a handkerchief.
The room ignored him. The song arrived again, and on the edge of it came a single line, sung by too many voices with too much cheer.
It was enough for the room to understand the intention, even if half of them pretended not to understand English.
In Lisbon, the mood was less poetic.
A Portuguese officer slammed a fist against the table hard enough to rattle cups. Someone tried to speak about procedures and protocols. The officer's glare cut it off.
"We do not lose a frigate like a misplaced key," he snapped.
The man beside him murmured, "Unless someone wants us to."
That thought landed in the room and stayed.
Across the Atlantic, the American carrier group joined the search with the lazy confidence of a machine that had been built to never admit confusion.
On the flight deck, jets launched in pairs, one after another, the catapults hurling them into the air with practised violence.
Tomcats and Hornets climbed into the same cold sky and disappeared into the haze like obedient knives. E-2 Hawkeyes climbed to watch the sea from above, their rotodomes turning like patient eyes. S-3 Vikings pushed out to sniff for submarines and surface contacts. Seahawks lifted and spread into a broad arc, ready to pluck survivors from water that had no right to be empty.
The Americans had their own problem.
Their commander, a man with a calm face and a tired mouth, stood in the flag plot while reports came in. The French, Spanish and Portuguese units were searching for lost vessels. He chuckled, as he could not take it seriously even if he wanted to.
Nothing found.
Then his communications officer, pale and defensive, cleared his throat and adjusted the speaker.
The shanty rolled out again.
The captain stared at the speaker with pride in his eyes.
"That will teach them who are the best seamen," he started, voice even.
The officer's shoulders went tight. "Sir, Norfolk is asking the reason why we are singing a Pirate sea shanty."
"The French accent was hurting my ears, that's why." The captain answered,
"Sir, Norfolk is asking again, why a Pirate sea shanty?"
The captain lifted both hands, palms up. "The French started it. Maybe their morale program is different from ours."
A junior officer coughed. It sounded suspiciously like laughter. The captain's gaze drifted toward him.
The junior officer became a statue.
Two days later, in a secure room ashore, the captain found himself on the wrong end of a questioning that felt less like accountability and more like a procedure.
A rear admiral leaned over a table and tapped a pencil twice.
"You were in the area," the admiral pressed.
The captain sat straight, hands folded. "Yes, sir."
"You were also broadcasting a sea shanty."
The captain kept his expression stable. It took effort.
"Sir, we did not broadcast it first."
The admiral's eyes narrowed. "I am aware of the timeline."
The captain held the gaze. "We broadcast it to show them superiority, sir."
The admiral stared at him long enough to decide whether to explode or laugh. He chose neither.
"You understand how it looks."
The captain nodded once. "Yes, sir. It looks like were aware and mocking them all the way. Yet, the song was good, and our boys rocked it."
The admiral's mouth twitched. It did not become a smile.
By the end of the week, the search had become a performance.
International media arrived with their choppers in the air and their boats on the sea, in suits that looked out of place near salt water. Cameras panned across empty waves while commentators spoke about vanishing fleets like they were narrating a fairy tale, a second Bermuda triangle.
France's spokesperson stood at a podium with a stiff smile. Spain's spokesperson said the word unprecedented so many times that it started to lose its meaning.
Portugal's spokesperson refused to answer questions about national competence, which was a wise choice, because the questions were not going away.
The jokes started within the military first.
A British officer, speaking into a handset, suggested the French had finally perfected the art of stealth. A German staffer asked whether the next naval doctrine should include not parking a carrier where pirates could find it.
The jokes escaped into the public in the way such things always did, as if leaked by gravity.
Headlines leaned toward cruelty. Cartoonists drew vessels with legs.
Then the AAP released a video.
In Paris, someone pulled up the silhouettes of the missing ships on a projector and started listing what was now in the hands of the enemy with the same tone a doctor used for a body count. Clemenceau was not just a hull with a flag. She was a floating airfield with Super Étendards for strike, Crusaders for cover, and Alizé for the slow work over water. Jeanne d'Arc was a different animal, a helicopter carrier dressed as a training ship, with Pumas for lift, Alouettes for utility, and enough hangar space to keep them rotating.
Madrid got its own version of the lecture. Santa María and Reina Sofía were Santa María class frigates, the Perry sort, built around a Mk 13 launcher that could throw Harpoon or SM 1 missiles depending on what mood the sea required. They carried an OTO Melara 76 up front, a Phalanx for the moment something got too close, and torpedo tubes for anything that tried to hide under the waves. Their hangars were made for Seahawks, the SH 60B kind that could hunt and bite.
Lisbon's officers did not bother with details. Vasco da Gama and Corte Real were MEKO hulls with Harpoons of their own, Sea Sparrow for air defence, a hundred millimetre gun, and torpedoes. They carried Lynx helicopters that looked small until they were in your face. The conclusion was simple and ugly. Someone out there had stolen not six ships, but six toolboxes of modern war.
It started with a blank screen, then a seal, then a row of faces under harsh light. Sailors. Pilots. Officers. Men and women from six ships, standing in ordered lines, unmarked, uninjured. Soldiers of special forces such as MJK of Norway, KJ of Sweden, FKP of Denmark and MSRO of Bulgaria were in the video standing like statues.
The world watched, with its breath held.
The French President's advisers watched with their teeth clenched.
The Spanish cabinet watched with hands shaking under the table.
The Portuguese Prime Minister's staff watched in grim silence.
The video's message was simple: the crews were alive. They would be returned after some friendly negotiations.
Suspicion started to spread like poisoned air. In Moscow, men in suits spoke in low voices and looked almost pleased. The NATO crack widened, and it widened in a way that could be used.
In Washington, the Pentagon stared at the map and asked questions that had no clean answers.
In London, intelligence officers traded theories and then watched each other's hands, as if one of them might suddenly confess.
An operation of that scale was not something the AAP could manage. It had to be another power.
NATO was conviced It was Russia behind the operation. Russia was pleased to witness the cracks within NATO.
Everyone was on edge and started to send more to the region.
--
On Azkaban's shore, the truth was far less philosophical. The wards of the island were lowered for the arrival of the Aurors and Hit Wizards.
Amelia Bones stepped onto black rock and halted. The sea was calm. The air was cold. The silhouettes in the fog were not.
Six hulls sat in the water like castles, their shapes wrong against the island's ugliness. A carrier's sheer height made the prison feel smaller than it is. Another carrier loomed behind it, then four frigates standing next to each other.
Aurors and Hit Wizards stood along the shore in a loose line, wands lowered, eyes wide with shock at the scene in front of them. Several stared openly, incapable of pretending this was normal.
Arcturus Black waited with the patience of a man who enjoyed his own timing.
"Madame Bones." He greeted Amelia and gave a nod and a wave to the force behind her. Amelia kept her voice calm. She refused to give him the satisfaction of a gasp.
"Minister," she started and paused. What could she say in that absurd moment?
Arcturus inclined his head. "Say hello to our new additions to the Force."
A gangplank lowered with a metallic groan. Witches and wizards moved across it in steady files. Unspeakables followed, hooded and silent, carrying cases the size of coffins.
On the carrier's deck, rows of Muggle prisoners stood at attention thanks to Imperius. They were segregated based on their professions.
Masters of mind magic worked their way down the lines. Without any speech or theatrics, they approached a Muggle, a wand lifted, a hand steadied a chin, eyes met eyes. Threads of memory, pale and viscous, drew out and coiled into a small glass vials. They were labelled based on the post, training and years of service.
One vial after another.
Amelia watched an extraction and forced herself not to flinch.
"Why are they extracting memories of Muggles?"
"We are taking their skills," Arcturus answered.
Than gave her a glance that was almost kind, which made it worse.
"We are taking what one day they might use against us," he replied.
Down the line, another Unspeakable pressed the tip of his wand to a prisoner's temple and seeded a new chain of events, a clean and false story about how their vessel was taken over by Special forces.
When the work finished, the prisoners were stunned and then vanished one by one through portkeys destined for Norway.
Amelia and her teams were tasked to help the already working force to hasten the process.
As the days passed, the extracted memories were being used to train new Engineers, Officers, Sailors and Pilots. Time arrays made it possible to raise a force experienced enough to manoeuvre the vessels with efficiency.
On a lower deck of the frigate Reina Sofia, behind a warded hatch, Manard Sturmheart paced a narrow corridor with a grin that did not belong on a priest, fake or not.
His hands moved as if he were holding invisible tools, sketching shapes in the air.
"Crankshaft," he murmured. "Pistons, Connecting Rods, Fuel lines. A thousand moving pieces. All of it sings if you listen."
Corvus let him pace. The man had swallowed the memories of engineers and technicians, and now he spoke like a builder who had found a new religion.
Manard turned, eyes bright. "We will make them bigger."
Corvus gave him a flat look. "Do not say that near Krafft's men."
Manard's grin widened anyway.
On the carrier's bridge, a pair of newly trained engineers worked through the systems with borrowed and integrated confidence. They spoke in terms of circuits, relays, radar sets, and identification codes. They had learned which boxes could be pulled, which switches could be left dead, and which channels could be replaced with simpler ones.
They did not need NATO's toys to steer a ship.
The NATO part sat in the comms racks and the little locked boxes that officers treated like holy relics. Encrypted voice sets, crypto fills, Mode 4 IFF keys, Link 11 terminals, and the connectors that made a ship more than steel and fuel. The trained engineers learned what could be pulled, what could be isolated, and what could be left dead without stopping the engines. Navigation stayed on charts and inertial sets. Radars stayed in plain modes. When they needed to talk, they used two way mirrors, Patronus and House Elves. Corvus smiled, waiting to see if this type of comms can be hacked.
Corvus watched the work without commenting. His people were learning fast. Too fast for anyone outside the Nest to sleep comfortably.
Behind him, the sea kept its quiet.
Ahead of him, the mundane world was about to discover that losing six ships was not the worst part.
The worst part was the gap it carved into trust, and how easy it became to widen it once the first crack had been made.
The worst part was that the technological gap between Magicals and Muggles was closing at an extreme speed.