Hitler's War (35 page)

J
anuary. The North Atlantic. A U-boat. The combination was not made in heaven, as Lieutenant Julius Lemp knew only too well.

Oh, he could take the U-30 down below periscope depth, and she’d escape the fearsome waves topside. The only trouble was, down below periscope depth she’d be about as useful to the war effort as if she were a five-year-old’s toy in a Berlin bathtub.

A five-year-old splashing around couldn’t whip up a worse storm in that tiny tub than God was kicking up out here on the broad ocean. One ten-meter wave after another rolled down on the U-30. Because she was so much smaller and had so much less freeboard than a surface warship, it was like taking one soggy right to the chin after another.

Lemp tied himself to the rail atop the conning tower so an extra-big wave wouldn’t sweep him out to sea. He wore oilskins, of course. He knew he’d get soaked anyhow. This way, it would take a little longer, though.

He wondered why he’d bothered bringing the binoculars with him. So much spray and stray water splashed the lenses, he might as well
have peered through a couple of full beer steins. You had to try all the same. Why else did they send you out in filthy weather like this?

Another wave smashed over the bow. It splashed past the 88mm deck gun and crashed into the conning tower. Lemp got himself a faceful of ocean. “Fuck,” he said, spitting salt water. He would have made a bigger fuss had it been the first time, or even the fifth.

He looked at the binoculars. They were good and wet now. Ironically, that might make them easier to look through than when they’d just been spray-splashed. He raised them to his eyes and swept the horizon with a hunter’s intent patience.

He or one of the other watchstanders did this as long as there was enough daylight to see by. At night, he did take the boat down twenty-five or thirty meters so the men could cook a little and could rest without getting pitched out of their cramped bunks and hammocks.

Something glided past him on the wind: a petrel, on the prowl for fish, not ships. Stormy weather didn’t bother the bird. Lemp wished he could say the same.

The U-boat’s bow sank down into a trough. That meant the following wave would be worse than usual. And it was. If not for the fastening—and for his holding on to the rail for dear life—it would have swept him into the Atlantic. Would he have drowned before he froze? That was the only question there.

He wanted to ride on top of a crest, not get buried by one. Eventually, the U-30 did. That gave him those extra ten meters from which to look around. He didn’t expect to see anything but the scudding gray clouds that had kept him company ever since leaving Germany. His watch would be up pretty soon. Then he could descend into the U-boat’s crowded, stinking pressure hull, dry off, and change into his other, slightly less soaked, uniform.

When you didn’t expect to see something, you probably wouldn’t, even if it was there. Lemp almost missed the smoke trail to the northwest. His hands were smarter than his head. They snapped back of
themselves and gave him another look at it. Without even noticing he’d done it, he stopped shivering. He stopped caring he was wet clean through.

He pulled out the plug on the speaking tube that let him talk to the helmsman and the engine room. “Change course to 310,” he ordered. “All ahead full.”

Hollow and brassy, the answer came back: “Changing course to 310, skipper. You found something?”

“I sure did,” Lemp said as the diesels’ building throb told him their crew had got the command, too. “Now we have to see what it is and whether we can run it down.”

He thought they had a decent chance. Not many freighters could match the U-30’s surface speed. And he could get mighty close before the ship spotted
his
exhaust: diesel fuel burned much cleaner than heavy oil, to say nothing of coal. The U-boat’s low, sharkish silhouette shouldn’t be easy to pick up, either.

The other side of the coin was, he couldn’t make seventeen knots in seas like this. Now that the U-30 had turned away from taking the swells bow-on, she got slapped in the port side instead. British corvettes—U-boat hunters—were said to roll on wet grass. The U-30 was doing the same thing. As long as she straightened up every time, Lemp couldn’t complain.

His stomach could, and did. He was a good sailor, but he seldom faced a challenge like this. He gulped, hoping lunch would stay down. If he was going to sink that ship, he had to get ahead of her before submerging to wait for her to reach him where he lay in wait. A U-boat’s greatest weakness was that it was slower submerged than its quarry was on the surface.

He ordered another course change, swinging closer to due north. The ship was making a very respectable turn of speed. In turn, that argued she was big and important: a ship England particularly wouldn’t want to see lost.

When the U-boat rose to the crest of another wave, Lemp got a good look at the enemy vessel. He whistled softly, though he couldn’t even hear himself through the howling wind. She had to be 15,000 tons if she was a gram!

“A Q-ship,” he muttered under his breath. In the last war, England had put disguised guns on several merchantmen. They looked like ordinary freighters…till an unwary U-boat skipper approached them on the surface, confident of an easy kill. Several such skippers had paid with their boats—and with their lives. Lemp shook his head. “Not me, by God! Not me.”

The enemy wasn’t zigzagging. She didn’t know he was around, then.
Good
, he thought, imagining what 15cm guns could do to his hull. And the U-30
was
overhauling her. He smiled wolfishly Yes, she’d get a nasty surprise before long.

He went below. No time to change now. After the hunt would have to do. He’d kept his sausage and noodles down on the conning tower. He almost lost them for a second time leaving the cold, pure ocean air for the stinks and smokes of the pressure hull. His eyes also needed a moment to adjust from gray daylight to the dim orange lamps the U-boat used.

“Take her down to periscope depth, Peter,” he said.

“Periscope depth. Aye aye, skipper,” the helmsman said. Dive warnings hooted. Air hissed out of buoyancy tanks; water gurgled in to take its place. The U-30 could dive like an otter when she had to. The crew practiced all the time. If a destroyer or an airplane came after you, you had to disappear in a hurry or you’d disappear forever.

Lemp raised the periscope. The instrument wasn’t perfect. It got out of alignment, and the upper lens took even more splashes and spray than his binoculars did. But the periscope didn’t need to be perfect this time. Here came the merchant cruiser, fat and happy as if she had the world by the tail.

“Course 190. All ahead one third,” Lemp ordered, and the batteries that powered the U-30 underwater sent her toward her prey.

The target was making about ten knots. The torpedoes could do better than thirty. If the range was down to…he peered through the periscope again…900 meters, he needed to launch…now!

“Fire one!” he snapped, and then, “Fire two!” and then, “Fire three!”

Wham!…Whoosh!
One after another, the fish leaped away from the U-boat. “All three gone, skipper,” the torpedomen reported.

“Ja,”
Lemp agreed absently. In these waves, he couldn’t watch the wakes as well as he would have liked. On the other hand, the merchant cruiser would have a harder time seeing them coming, too.

At the very last moment, she started to turn away. The very last moment proved much too late. The first torpedo caught her up near the bow. The dull
Boom!
filled the U-30. The soldiers whooped and cheered. Somebody pounded Lemp on the back. Discipline on a submarine wasn’t the same as it was on a surface ship—nowhere close. The skipper kept his eyes on the periscope, so he never knew who it was.

A few seconds later, another, bigger,
Boom!
echoed through the water. The second torpedo hit the enemy ship just aft of amidships. “That does it.” Lemp spoke with quiet satisfaction. “We broke her back. She’s going down fast.”

He waited for the impact of the third torpedo, but it didn’t come. That one must have missed. He was annoyed. He hated to miss. But the two hits were plenty to sink the merchant cruiser. And that, after all, was the point of the exercise. He wouldn’t be too hard on himself.

A lot of boats out. A lot of heads bobbing in the water as the ship slid under. The survivors wouldn’t last long, not in seas like this. Lemp wondered if he’d sunk a troopship bringing soldiers from Canada to England. That would be an even stronger blow against the enemy than he’d thought he struck.

He also wondered if she’d got out an SOS. If destroyers, say, were
hurrying this way on a rescue mission, he didn’t want to hang around any longer than he had to. “Surface,” he said. “Let’s skedaddle. We’ve done our job here.”

PEGGY DRUCE FINALLY HAD HER
bags packed. In a couple of hours, she would head for the train station. The train would take her out of Germany and into neutral Denmark. In Copenhagen, she would get on a lovely American liner, the
Athenia
. Before too long, she’d be in New York. Two hours by train from Philadelphia. A million billion miles from a Europe that had lost its mind.

Somebody knocked on the door.

A hotel flunky
, she thought. As soon as she saw the uniform, she realized the man wasn’t from the hotel. It wasn’t a military uniform, but civilians in the Third
Reich
liked playing dress-up, too. This guy, unless she was wrong, came from the Foreign Ministry.

And this guy, unless she was very, very wrong, was Trouble. With a capital T.

“You are Miss, uh, Margaret Druce?” he asked in pretty good English.

“Missus,” Peggy corrected automatically. Just as automatically, she flashed her ring.

“Please to excuse me. And please to let me introduce myself. I am Konrad Hoppe, of the Sub-bureau for the Supervision of Interned Neutrals.” He didn’t click his heels, but he gave her a stiff little bow, something you’d never see in the States. As he straightened, he went on, “You were formerly scheduled to leave Germany today and to return to America in the near future.”

Amazing how something as simple as an adverb could be scarier than the bombs that had rained down on Berlin at New Year’s. “What do you mean, formerly?” Peggy demanded, doing her goddamnedest not to show how frightened she was.

“Ah.”
Herr
Hoppe nodded, more to himself than to her. “Then you will not have heard any news this morning.”

“What’s that got to do with anything? Don’t play riddles, if you don’t mind. If you’ve got something to say, come out and say it, already.”

“Very well, Mrs. Druce.” This time, Hoppe got it right. And, this time, he really did click his heels. “I regret that I must be the one to inform you that the
Athenia
went down in the North Atlantic yesterday, bound for Copenhagen from New York City. Loss of life is reported to be heavy.”

“Went down.” Numbly, Peggy entered the words. They sounded innocuous, almost antiseptic. Little by little, her wits started working. “What do you mean, ‘went down’? Went down how? Did a U-boat torpedo her?” That was the likeliest way she could think of for a ship to go down in the middle of the North Atlantic in wartime. “They can’t do that! She’s a neutral! She’s an American!”

They
could
do that. They could do anything they damn well pleased. Sometimes, as an American herself, she had trouble remembering that in spite of all the horrors she’d seen. Maybe that made her a fool. Maybe it left her one of the last sane people on this poor, benighted continent.

Konrad Hoppe, dutiful employee of the Sub-bureau for the Supervision of Interned Neutrals, looked pained. “So the BBC claims. But this is one more lie from a nation of liars. The government of the
Reich
has denied any involvement in the sinking of the
Athenia
. If it was not an accident, the British torpedoed or bombed it themselves, to stir up hatred against Germany in America.”

“That’s the nuttiest thing I ever heard in my life!” Peggy exclaimed.

“It is not,” Hoppe insisted. “For the British, it would make perfect sense. But why would the
Reich
sink an American ocean liner? Do you not think we learned our lessons on the folly of this in the last war?”

Peggy opened her mouth. Then she closed it again. She didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t imagine England doing anything so filthy. But she also had trouble believing Hitler wanted to antagonize the
USA. Wouldn’t he be cutting his own throat if he did? He might be nuts, but he wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t
that
stupid, anyhow, or Peggy didn’t think so.

“Maybe your guy just made a mistake,” she said after a few seconds of thought. “Have you ever crossed the Atlantic in January?
I
have, and it’s rough seas and nasty weather all the way.”

“Our submarine captains do not make such errors,” the Foreign Ministry official said stiffly. “It is impossible. And if you find the Atlantic in January so unappetizing, why did you book passage on the
Athenia?”

To get the hell out of your stinking country
. But if Peggy said something like that, some guys who wore different uniforms—those of the SS, say—were liable to have some sharp questions for her. Or pointed ones. Or hot ones. “To get away from the war,” she did say, a couple of heartbeats slower than she might have.

“I am afraid this is not possible for you at the moment,” Hoppe said.

“Can’t I go to Denmark anyway?” Peggy yelped. The lights were on in neutral Denmark. Denmark had never heard of rationing, except as something other people suffered. Much more to the point, Denmark was a civilized country. Once upon a time, Peggy would have said the same thing about Germany. No more. No more.

“I am very sorry.” Konrad Hoppe didn’t sound sorry. If anything, he sounded coldly amused. He got to tell foreigners no, and the Foreign Ministry paid him to do it. If that wasn’t heaven for the nasty little man, Peggy would have been amazed. A small, chilly smile on his lips, Hoppe went on, “That also for you is not possible.”