An Honorable German (9 page)

Sailors brushed past Max in the dark on the way to their posts. He climbed quickly up the three flights of exterior stairs
to the navigating bridge.

Gerhard stood on the starboard bridge wing, leaning against the metal plating with the vast sky stretched out above him and
a gentle breeze in his face. Max went over and saluted. “Sir, I am ready to relieve you.”

Gerhard returned the salute. “Seas are calm. Wind is three knots coming due south from one eight zero degrees. Barometer is
steady. We are steaming south-southeast on a compass heading of one five five. We are two hundred forty-five kilometers off
the mouth of the Rio Plata. Making turns for twelve knots. Engines one, three, five, and seven are on line. Shafts are revolving
at one hundred twelve revolutions per minute. All equipment is functioning. The captain is to be called for anything not strictly
routine.”

Max stood at attention. “Sir, I relieve you.”

Gerhard saluted and they ducked inside to sign the log. This done, Max went back out to the open wing alone. He licked his
lips and tasted the salt. A breeze cooled his face, the wind clammy with moisture.
Graf Spee
’s wake glowed wide and bright at her stern as her propellers stirred up the phosphorus in the water. The diesel fumes wafted
strong from the funnel abaft the bridge.

Graf Spee
was darkened, no lights to give her away to her enemies—of which she had many, especially in the estuary of the Rio Plata.
The wealth of South America flowed from the Plata—wealth measured in tons of frozen meat, hundredweights of creamy butter,
cargo holds filled with grain, ingots of steel, all bound for England. The river’s very name gave notice of the riches that
flowed down its waters to the broad Atlantic: Rio de la Plata—the River of Silver. Of course, the Tommies knew all this as
well as Max did. Indeed, they probably knew it better since British investors owned everything worth owning in Uruguay and
Argentina. The Royal Navy constantly patrolled the estuary of the Rio Plata; they would be on high alert for
Graf Spee
. She would have to slip in like a fox, take some fat merchantmen, and be quickly on her way.

At 0551 Hollendorf, the second navigator, came out of the chartroom at the rear of the bridge. “Sunrise in five minutes, Oberleutnant.”

Max nodded and stretched his arms. Like most men at sea, dawn was his favorite time of day. He watched the line of the horizon
until the sun came burning up slowly from the water. It was easy enough to understand how so many pagan tribes had come to
be sun worshippers. Even now, Tian, the head laundryman, knelt on the prow of the ship in submission to one of his gods.

Max lit a cigarette and inhaled, drawing the bite of tobacco deep into his lungs. You couldn’t smoke on deck at night for
fear of giving the ship away. In Berlin, it was midmorning—Mareth would be living her normal life, twelve thousand kilometers
away, not knowing where Max was. Maybe she would be meeting friends at one of the cafés she loved along the Unter den Linden.
She couldn’t stand the brew of chicory roots and acorns that passed for coffee in the Reich, so she would drink one of those
American Coca-Colas. She loved all things American—movies, magazines, Lucky Strikes, Coca-Cola. Or she might be walking alone
in the Tiergarten, the evergreens laden with snow, or perhaps taking a quick walk through the zoo. He imagined her rising
late from bed—she kept cabaret hours—and paging through a copy of the
Berliner Morgenpost
while still in her pajamas, blond hair tousled from sleep. Maybe she was sipping real coffee supplied by the Sergeant Major,
her name for Max’s father. Where he obtained the coffee was a mystery he would not reveal even to Max.

A polite cough brought Max back to the present—Rolf, the bridge steward, had appeared with coffee in thick china mugs for
the watch and first offered the tray to Max.

Coffee. Strong and hot. Max drank it down. He yawned, rubbed his belly. God, he couldn’t be hungry already.

“Bridge! Two masts in sight, twenty kilometers off the starboard bow,” said the young telephone talker, the one who always
screeched, his voice high with excitement.

Max jerked the binoculars to his eyes. Nothing. The lookouts, perched high above the bridge and peering through the range-finder,
could see farther. He picked up the metal phone to call the captain, but the telephone talker shrieked again. “Bridge, six
masts in sight, twenty kilometers off the starboard bow.”

A convoy! At last—it had to be. Langsdorff answered the phone. “Ja?”

“Captain to the bridge!” Max yelled, too energized to observe formalities. He replaced the phone, seized the red-handled battle
station lever, and yanked it upward. The piercing alarm sounded through the ship, the five long bells jolting the crew from
their sleep.

“Action stations,” Max ordered the telephone talker, who spoke into his rubber mouthpiece, his words now blaring over the
loudspeaker. “Achtung! Achtung! Action stations! All hands to action stations!”

Max picked up the engine room phone.

“Engine room, aye.”

“Ships in sight. Prepare for emergency full ahead.”

“Aye-aye!”

Belowdecks, sailors rolled from their hammocks and ran for their battle posts, struggling into lifejackets and balancing helmets
as they went. Engineers cut all unnecessary power and water. Emergency lighting flickered on and off. Petty officers hurried
the men to their positions. “Schnell! Schnell!”

The surgeon lieutenant and his medics set up a makeshift operating theater in the officers’ mess, to supplement the ship’s
hospital and take over if it were put out of action. Damage control parties stood by, ready to carry lumber and mattresses
for plugging shot holes below the waterline. Firefighting parties tested pressure in the water mains. Fire posed a special
danger with all the ammunition piled on the top deck to serve the smaller guns. Shells for the larger guns came up directly
from the main magazine by automatic hoists. These magazines could be flooded from the bridge at the touch of a button if they
were threatened by fire. No ship could survive the explosion of its magazine, so the powder and the heavy shells were hidden
in the safest and most heavily armored part of the hold.

As the noise of the battle alarm died away, Captain Langsdorff, cigar in hand, appeared on the bridge. “Report.”

“Six masts in sight, twenty kilometers off the starboard bow,” Max said. “Ship is cleared for action.”

“Make revolutions for full speed.”

Max passed the order and soon the ship’s vibration increased. Had he secured everything in his cabin? He couldn’t remember.
Anything left sitting on a flat surface vibrated to the deck when
Graf Spee
went to full speed.

Langsdorff flipped his cigar ash and smiled. “A convoy, Brekendorf, a convoy—a nice Christmas present for us all. Perhaps
we’ll capture some tea. A chest of fine English tea for your young lady.” He grinned and puffed. “Chests of tea all around,
Oberleutnant.”

Max grinned, too. Chests of tea and home by Christmas. Nine ships captured plus whatever they sank today. A brass band at
Kiel, a hero’s welcome, a spread of color photographs in
Signal
. No doubt a promotion as well. A promotion and an Iron Cross.

“Left standard rudder,” Langsdorff ordered.

Max leaned over the speaking tube to the wheelhouse. “Helmsman, left standard rudder.”

“Rudder is left standard, sir.”

Standard rudder was the degree of turn needed to take the ship in a circle. Left full rudder put the rudder over by thirty
degrees. Emergency left rudder put it over thirty-five degrees, the farthest it would go.
Spee
heeled to port as the rudder bit. Langsdorff let her swing. “Rudder amidships,” he ordered. “Steady on a new course of two
three six degrees, southwest by west.”

Max relayed this to the helmsman, who checked
Spee
’s turn and brought her steady on course two three six degrees. At full speed, there was no keeping the smoke under control,
and it poured thick and black from the funnel. Max smelled the diesel fumes and knew dark particles were staining the scrubbed
deck-boards. But it didn’t matter: the fight was on. Langsdorff wasn’t going to skulk around anymore, masquerading as a French
battleship. He headed straight for the convoy—a wolf going in among the sheep, Max thought, and to hell with the Royal Navy.

The bridge phone buzzed. Max picked it up, listened, turned to Langsdorff. “Herr Kapitän, gunnery says leading ship is H.M.S.
Exeter
, heavy cruiser. Six eight-inch guns, fires one-hundred-twelve-pound shells, turret armor two inches—”

“I am aware of
Exeter
’s defenses. What about the other ships?”

“They can’t make them out, sir.”

Gunnery called again. Max listened. “Herr Kapitän, gunnery officer says there are three ships. Leading ship is H.M.S.
Exeter
, the other two are destroyers.”

They had to be screening a convoy—a heavy cruiser certainly did not require two destroyers as escorts. Convoy must still be
below the horizon. They would sight it at any moment, and those destroyers were nothing to worry about. They couldn’t hold
their own in a battle. When heavy shells began to fly, a destroyer could do little except run away or get sunk.
Exeter
was another matter, but still no match for
Graf Spee
. Perhaps they would add a Royal Navy warship to their list of ships sunk. It would make their victory even sweeter.

Spee
raced in for the kill, leaving a trail of foaming white water in her path. The morning sun warmed Max’s face. He peered through
his binoculars at the three British warships, straining for a glimpse of the convoy beyond.

“Convoy must still be below the horizon,” he said to Langsdorff.

“We shall see,” the captain replied. “They may put up a good fight but we shall swallow them.”

For the first six months of the year, they had done nothing except steam up and down the Baltic, performing fire drills, anti-aircraft
drills, shooting off so many rounds of ammunition that they had to play the fire hoses onto the barrels of the guns to cool
them down. Lowering boats, then hoisting them back up. Stopping ship, then lurching forward at emergency speed. All in preparation
for this—to prove the German navy capable of something more than surrendering to the British, as they had at the end of the
First War. The handing over of the Imperial High Seas Fleet to the English still shamed Germany. No one could forget the image
of their proud ships steaming from Germany to internment in Great Britain under the guns of the victorious Royal Navy. They
had salvaged only what little remained of the navy’s honor by scuttling their ships all at once in the British fleet anchorage
of Scapa Flow eight months later.

The phone gave an insistent ring, startling Max. He picked it up and took the gunnery officer’s report. “Gunnery says the
two ships in company with
Exeter
are not destroyers as previously thought, Herr Kapitän. They are light cruisers.”

“Is there a convoy behind them?”

Max spoke into the phone. “Can you see…” He turned to Langsdorff. “Nein, Herr Kapitän.”

The captain made no reply. Max lit a cigarette and drew in the smoke. Shit. Three British cruisers. Three British cruisers
out here off the Rio de la Plata, hanging about like street-corner idlers, just waiting for them. Damn the English. Not one
of the cruisers could damage
Spee
, but, taken together, and fighting as one unit, which they would, they had enough firepower to cripple her, perhaps render
her unfit for traversing the winter North Atlantic on her run home to Germany. But they had to fight, they had to and damn
the odds. Only by sending ships of the Royal Navy to the bottom could they win the war.

Langsdorff peered through his binoculars for a long time before speaking. At last he said, “We’re not to engage.”

“Herr Kapitän? Not engage?”

“We are a commerce raider, Oberleutnant. Our operational orders are to avoid engagement with enemy warships unless we are
caught without recourse.”

“I am aware of our orders from the briefing you gave us, Herr Kapitän, but Seekriegsleitung couldn’t have meant us to run
away.”

Langsdorff lowered the binoculars and removed the cigar from his mouth, working his jaw slowly back and forth. Orders from
Berlin were not to be lightly brushed aside, but the captain did not want to turn around. The ship’s motto—
Faithful unto death
—was the personal motto of Admiral Graf von Spee.

Count von Spee had been one of the Imperial Navy’s greatest heroes, commander of the German squadron that handed the Royal
Navy a stunning defeat at the Battle of Coronel in the First War, sinking two British warships—the first to be sunk in a sea
battle in over a century. The British took their revenge a month later, destroying most of the German squadron at the Battle
of the Falkland Islands, a thousand kilometers south of
Graf Spee
’s current position. Admiral Graf von Spee went down with his flagship,
Scharnhorst
, as did his two sons, both aboard as young officers. He fought to the end with flags flying, firing his guns till the water
closed over them. Not a single hand survived. Max had a postcard that showed a defiant German sailor at the Battle of the
Falklands waving the imperial ensign as his ship sank out from under him, into the green waters of the South Atlantic. At
long last this was their chance to avenge Admiral von Spee’s defeat. “I saw him several times,” Langsdorff, who had grown
up in Düsseldorf, Count von Spee’s hometown, once told Max, “walking in the park with his children. I always wished I had
spoken to him, but it was long before the First War and I was still a youngster and much too afraid.”

Langsdorff continued his silence. Many of the officers, including Max, urged him to seek battle with a Royal Navy ship before
heading home. How could they think of themselves as truly brave when the only ships they had attacked were ships that couldn’t
shoot back?