Decoy (28 page)

‘It is a fine city,’ Wellmann said nostalgically, ‘particularly with – how do you call the
Nord-Ostsee-Kanal
?’

‘The Kiel Canal.’

‘Ah, how flattering for us. Well, with the Kiel Canal running through to Brunsbüttelkoog, there are always many ships passing to the North Sea. Until the war, anyway.’

‘Did you volunteer for U-boats?’

‘No. Because of my physics and mathematics I was put down for navigation and wireless work. I did three cruises in late 1940 as sub-lieutenant in a U-boat; then in 1941 I was ill and missed a cruise from which the boat did not return.’

‘So all your shipmates were lost?’

Wellmann shrugged his shoulders, and Ned was not quite sure whether the gesture meant that he bore the loss stoically for the Fatherland or did not care for his shipmates.

Now the motion of the boat was changing: the slow roll gradually stopped, he felt the bow dropping slightly and the hum of the electric motors took on a deeper note: he thought he could feel rather than hear the beat-beat of the turning propellers.

With a nonchalance he did not feel, he asked Wellmann: ‘Who commanded this boat?’

‘
Oberleutnant
Schmidt. He was due to be promoted
Kapitänleutnant
when he returned. We’d done three cruises. This is the third.’

‘These three cruises – you had successes?’

‘Yes,’ Wellmann said warily, and seeing that Ned expected details he added: ‘In the Atlantic. Three ships on the first cruise, four on the second and three up to now.’

‘Those earlier cruises in 1940,’ Ned said. ‘What happened?’

‘The usual successes, and on the fourth cruise, when I was sick, the boat lost contact.’

Ned reflected on the phrase ‘losing contact’. It was, of course, quite correct, meaning that the captain no longer signalled his headquarters (presumably still Kiel at that time) listing his successes, and when the wireless operators in Kiel tapped out the call sign of his boat there was no reply. Contact was lost. It was an easy way of saying that the boat had been hunted by the Royal Navy – by the ‘Tommies’, as the Germans called them – dropping depth-charges, and at a certain point the charges had dropped so close that the hull – Ned involuntarily glanced at it, grey-painted and glistening with condensation – was punctured or crushed, and the U-boat filled and slowly sank a couple of thousand fathoms until it settled on the bottom, an intruder among primeval debris.

‘What happened to you then?’

‘By now our boats were moving to bases in south-western France – Brest, Lorient, Saint-Nazaire, La Pallice, Bordeaux, La Rochelle. The Lion – this is our nickname for
B der U
, Admiral Dönitz – moved to Kernével, which is near Brest.’

‘Tell me,’ Ned asked, hoping to answer a question of little consequence, but which had puzzled ASIU, ‘how did the Lion and the SO West work together?’

Wellmann shook his head. ‘The Senior Officer West, as far as I could see, commanded all the surface ships and looked after the work at the ports, like building the concrete bunkers for the U-boats when the RAF began its bombing. The Lion,’ he said proudly, ‘was responsible for U-boats and reported directly to the Führer.’

The U-boat had dived and the lack of motion was uncanny: down here – whatever depth they were at – they were below the surge of swell waves, and he found no difficulty in guessing the number of revolutions at which the electric motors were turning the propellers – about sixty a minute.

There was a knock on the door frame – curtains replaced actual doors – and Jemmy came in.

‘We’re cruising at fifty metres, and she went down very smoothly,’ he reported. ‘Handles very well.’

‘You got over the snags, then?’

Jemmy looked puzzled. ‘But we didn’t
have
any snags,’ he said. ‘It all went perfectly.’

Ned laughed at the expression on Jemmy’s face, like a child allowed to choose the best chocolate in the box only to have it taken away before he could eat it.

‘I’m teasing. How many knots?’

‘Four kilometres an hour. Actually, I came to ask permission to get rid of the fish.’

Ned scratched his head and then, to warn Jemmy that the German spoke English, introduced the Second Lieutenant.

‘Yes, I’ve been thinking about them. Must we get rid of them?’

‘What good are they to us? We aren’t likely to sight the
Bismarck
, or the
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
, and with the weight of the fish and all those prisoners up forward I had a hell of a job getting a trim. We’ve got all the rest of the prisoners ready to go aft. If we don’t get rid of the weight of those torpedoes, if we do a crash dive she’ll be so bow heavy that we’ll probably go down like a harpoon and stick in the mud at 2,000 fathoms. That’s four miles deep or thereabouts. This bucket will start springing leaks below about four hundred feet and probably flattens like a squashed can of peas at eight hundred.’

‘We can go down to 100 metres,’ Wellmann said.

‘Oh – ah, yes, thank you,’ said a startled Jemmy. ‘Well now, that’s nearly 350 feet, although it doesn’t affect firing those fish.’

Ned knew he was being absurd: he simply disliked being in an unarmed ship.

‘We can keep the one in the stern tube,’ Jemmy said, as if reading Ned’s thoughts, ‘and we’ve got the guns.’

‘Very well, get rid of the four. But wait ten minutes, I’d like to watch.’

‘You just say when,’ Jemmy said cheerfully, leaving the cabin.

Ned turned back to Wellmann. ‘So what happened to you when you recovered from your illness?’

‘I was promoted to
Leutnant
and sent to a signals school near Hamburg.’

‘Why? Did you expect it?’

‘Yes,’ Wellmann explained patiently, ‘because I guessed I was to serve as Second Lieutenant in a U-boat and would be responsible for signals and ciphers.’

Ned waved to the Enigma. ‘And this machine?’

Wellmann’s eyes dropped.

‘This is your first cruise with the Mark III, I suppose,’ Ned said conversationally. ‘Have you had any trouble with the extra rotor? An extra rotor and a new cipher – we were surprised Admiral Dönitz took a chance trying out both at once.’

‘That’s true,’ Wellmann agreed, nodding his head. ‘But he was right – we’ve had no trouble with the machine or Triton –’ he broke off, appalled at having used the word.

‘Yes, Triton isn’t really any more difficult than Hydra,’ Ned said easily. ‘Really, it was just the extra rotor. Having more to choose from is no problem?’

‘No,’ Wellmann agreed, apparently reassured. ‘And of course it is much more secure, giving us four settings, three of which we change daily, and the fourth changing with every message, and a choice from eight rotors. So we have a theoretical choice of more than 150 trillions. It’s completely unbreakable, a cipher and a machine like that.’

Ned said nothing, and Wellmann stared at the steel deck for a full two minutes before looking up again, his face once more pale, and pinheads of perspiration suddenly leaking out on his brow and upper lips. ‘But it
is
completely unbreakable,’ he repeated. And then, still trying to reassure himself: ‘The Lion would not continue using the machine with a new cipher if it wasn’t, would he…?’

‘Give me your keys,’ Ned said quietly, and when the bemused man handed them over, added: ‘Where is the manual giving the Triton settings?’

‘In the Captain’s safe. Behind the aftermost panel in the Captain’s cabin,’ Wellmann said and then, as if excusing himself to an invisible Gestapo witness: ‘You’d have found it anyway, now you have the keys.’

‘Of course,’ Ned agreed. ‘Now, you must have the easiest job on board the boat! What do you do with your spare time – read books?’

‘Spare time!’ Wellmann exclaimed. ‘I have to stand a watch, so I have no spare time. Well, not until the transmitter broke down.’

Ned felt his body chill. ‘The transmitter does not work?’

‘No. About four days ago something burned out. A pair of final valves. We had a spare pair and, because the operator was in the middle of transmitting an important signal, he fitted them and started transmitting without waiting for them to warm up.’

‘So that’s how the spare pair burned out, too?’

‘Yes,’ Wellmann admitted shamefacedly. ‘I had enciphered the signal on the machine and given it to him, and he was sending it to
B der U
. I suddenly needed –’ he stopped, trying to find the phrase.

‘To relieve yourself.’

‘Exactly, otherwise I should have insisted that we find out what the fault was. It is routine. The man was excited.’

‘Why?’

‘We – well, we were reporting.’

‘On an attack?’

‘Yes. We had sunk two ships,’ Wellmann added defiantly, ‘which made a total of three for the cruise so far.’

‘With five torpedoes still left.’

‘Exactly. We could hope for at least one more.’

‘But with no transmitter?’

‘
B der U
might wonder if we had been lost, but breaking off suddenly like that in the middle of a transmission – the receiving operator at Kernével would probably guess something had gone wrong with the transmitter.’

‘The
receiver
still functions?’

‘Oh yes. We can receive orders but can’t acknowledge them. Or we could until now, rather,’ he corrected himself.

‘What time does Kernével come on the air each night?’

‘I do not feel I should be talking so freely.’

‘The Gestapo would make you talk.’

‘Yes, but…’

Ned let the pause hang in the air, with its implication that the Royal Navy and the Royal Marine commandos could teach the Gestapo a thing or two.

‘Well, I suppose you’d find out from the wireless log since it gives all the times of origin,’ Wellmann said. ‘We listened at midnight Greenwich to see if we were on the traffic list. If we were, we listened three hours later and took the signal.’

‘What if another U-boat sighted a convoy and wanted reinforcements?’

‘We’d pick up his report and decipher it with the Enigma, but of course we would not change our position until we had orders from
B der U
.’ His smile was superior as he added: ‘We have so many boats in the Atlantic now that he has no trouble in assembling a pack.’

Realizing that he needed to keep the initiative, Ned smiled back. ‘Yes we know how many boats, and their reported positions.’

Wellmann nodded, accepting the significance of Ned’s words. ‘For how long have you been able to read Triton?’

Ned raised his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders. ‘When did you start using it? A month ago, five weeks?’

‘And before that, Hydra?’

Ned nodded. There was no harm in the fellow knowing the British had read a cipher which had now been replaced.

‘What will be happening now because your transmitter is not working?’

‘I suppose
B der U
will continue calling us, assuming we will repair our transmitter. He would not consider us lost for another three or four days because he knows we might be shadowing an enemy and keeping radio silence.’

‘Thank you,’ Ned said, adding: ‘No one will ever know what you have told me.’

Wellmann looked first startled and then puzzled. What had he told this hard-eyed man who seemed to be telling
him
things? That the Tommies knew about the Mark III Enigma, and the introduction of Triton, for instance. Then Wellmann began to feel fear; had he betrayed the Führer and the Lion? His comrades? He could not see how, but this Englishman was thanking him for
something
, and that could only be secret information. He vowed to keep his mouth shut when the others questioned him about what the Tommy had asked. At that moment he realized that he was effectively the senior surviving officer. The Engineer was technically second-in-command to the Captain, but he took no interest in anything but diesel engines and dynamometers. So the men must now be looking to him as their leader – the man the Tommy’s senior officer had just thanked for being so helpful.

As Ned pulled back the curtain to let Wellmann out, he was startled to see that the once crowded control room was now almost empty. Four of his own seamen were seated at various controls. The Croupier must have taken the rest of the prisoners aft.

Then he called to the rating sitting at the nearest of the two wheels, controlling the forward hydroplanes. The man pointed up the ladder, to where it disappeared up into the conning tower.

Ned hurried up the ladder to the conning tower, hauling himself into the small circular cabin which could only be described as a small apartment one deck above the control room. He looked up and saw that the ladder continued right up to the hatch to the bridge. He was looking up in just the same way as the Germans were when he dropped a black banger on top of them. The shock must have been enormous: it was unlikely that any of them had ever seen or heard of such grenades. Having one dropped down the ladder when as far as they knew the Captain and his men on the bridge had, while taking the Tommy captain out of a lifeboat, accidentally caused an explosion on the bridge and fired a Schmeisser burst, must have been quite a shock.

The inside of the conning tower was circular, the size of the straphanging section of a London Underground train opposite the sliding doors. Jemmy was sitting on what looked like a bicycle saddle, peering into the eyepieces of a periscope, which he seemed to be turning by manipulating two wooden handles which stuck out like bicycle handlebars. As the periscope turned, so did the seat. Then Ned saw that Jemmy was turning it by a foot-pedal fitted to the seat, and the handles were presumably for focusing.

A rating stood nearby and there was another periscope to one side, presumably for spotting aircraft.

Jemmy stopped the periscope turning, slapped up both handles, and said briskly: ‘Down periscope!’

The rating did something that Ned could not see and there was a humming noise but Jemmy, startled to find Ned standing behind him as he turned, said with mock sternness: ‘Only the captain and watchkeepers allowed up here!’