The War That Came Early: West and East (38 page)

J
ulius Lemp felt happier about the world, or at least about how his little part of it worked. Now the U-boat skipper understood his orders. And he was pleased with himself, because he’d had a pretty good notion of what they were about even before the balloon went up.

If the
Reich
had decided to forestall the Western democracies by occupying Denmark and Norway before they could, of course France and especially England would try to do something about it. And one of the things they would try to do would be to rush as many warships as they could to Scandinavian waters. If they did that, they’d likely storm right through Lemp’s patrol zone.

No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than one of the ratings on watch sang out: “Smoke to the southwest, Skipper!”

“Ha!” Lemp swung his own binoculars in that direction. “Now the game starts!” He peered and studied. “Looks like … three plumes.”

“I think so, too,” the sailor said, and then, after a moment, “They’ve got wings on their feet, don’t they?”

“Ja.”
Lemp nodded. “Destroyers. They have to be. Nothing else will go
that fast.” By now, England had to know Germany was using her warships to move troops into southern Norway and fight the coastal forts. Destroyers could get to the battle in a hurry, and their crews were practiced with both guns and torpedoes. They were also quick and cheap to build, which made them more readily expendable than bigger, slower ships.

“Can we get to them?” another rating asked.

“We’re going to try,” Lemp answered. They couldn’t make a surface approach, not unless they wanted to get blown out of the water long before their could loose their own eels. “Go below,” he added. “We’ll see how much help the
Schnorkel
can give us.” He followed the men off the conning tower. As he slammed the hatch behind him and dogged it, he called, “Dive!
Schnorkel
depth! Change course to”—he calculated in his head—“to 195.”

“Diving to
Schnorkel
depth. Changing course to 195,” the helmsman said. Nothing flustered Peter. That was one of the reasons he was at the helm.

Lieutenant Beilharz appeared. The matte-black paint on his helmet had a fresh, shiny scratch. He really needed the protection to keep his skull from being gashed. Lemp pointed at him. “Just the man I’m looking for, by God! If we go all-out with your infernal device, how fast can we manage underwater?”

“They say thirteen knots, Skipper,” the
Schnorkel
expert answered. “Everything shakes and rattles like it’s coming to pieces, though.”

“We’ll try it anyway,” Lemp declared. “Three destroyers are heading east as fast as they can go. Without the snort, we don’t have a prayer of getting into firing range before they’re past us. With it … Well, we’ve got a prayer. I think. We’ll give it our best shot, any which way. You keep the damned gadget working the way it’s supposed to, you hear?”

“Jawohl!”
Beilharz said. Lemp had to hope he could deliver. The device was still experimental. And experimental devices had a way of going haywire just when you needed them most.

All he could do was try. He spoke into the voice tube to the engine room: “Give me thirteen knots.”

“Thirteen
, Skipper?” The brassy response didn’t come right out and ask
Are you out of your bloody mind?
, but it might as well have.

“Thirteen,” Lemp repeated firmly. “If that’s more than we can take, we’ll back it down. But our targets are making better than twice that. If we want to meet them, we have to give it everything we’ve got. Thirteen.” He said it one more time.

“Aye aye, Skipper.” The men who minded the diesels would do what you told them to. What happened afterwards wasn’t their worry … unless, of course, it turned out to be everybody’s worry.

They’d done eight knots submerged plenty of times, ten or eleven often enough. Above that, Beilharz had been reluctant to go. War sometimes forced you to do what you’d be reluctant to try in peacetime, though. If the U-30 could knock out one of those destroyers, how many soldiers’ lives might that save? Hundreds? Thousands? No telling for sure.

The diesels surged. They had to work hard to push the U-boat through the resisting water. Lemp felt the power through the soles of his feet as he looked through the periscope. Without taking his eyes off the destroyers the optics displayed, he said, “You there, Klaus?”

“Sure am, Skipper,” Klaus Hammerstein answered. Lemp hadn’t expected anything else. Hammerstein might be a pup, but he was a well-trained pup. The exec’s place in an attack run was at the captain’s elbow. He’d have to do most of the calculating … if they could get close enough to the destroyers for it to matter.

Lemp fed him speed and range. He had to shout to make himself heard. As Beilharz had warned, everything inside the U-30 rattled as if it were getting massaged by an electric cake mixer. Lemp hoped his fillings wouldn’t fall out. And that was no idle worry; every U-boat sailor dreaded a pharmacist mate’s amateur dentistry.

“Skipper, there’s no good solution if the numbers you fed me are anywhere close to right,” Hammerstein said. “They’re going to get past us before we close within three kilometers.”

“Scheisse!”
Lemp exclaimed. “Are you sure?” Here he’d done everything but tear his boat to pieces, and it hadn’t done him a goddamn bit of good? That wasn’t fair. That wasn’t how life was supposed to work.

But sometimes life worked that way anyhow. The destroyers were making better than thirty knots. As Hammerstein had said, they raced
past the U-30 before the sub could approach near enough to launch with any hope of success. You wanted to get inside of a kilometer if you could. Even the exec’s three seemed optimistic.

“Scheisse,”
Lemp said again, resignedly this time. He spoke to the engine room again: “You did all you could, but we can’t catch them. Bring us back down to six knots.”

“Six knots. Aye aye.” Even through the long metal tube, the skipper could hear the relief in the answer. All the same, the
Schnorkel
had paid its dues. Without it, he wouldn’t even have tried the attack run: it would have been obviously hopeless.

“What do we do now?” Hammerstein asked, his voice falling as the boat stopped trying to come to bits around him.

“We stay submerged till those Royal Navy ships get farther away—I don’t want them turning around and coming after us,” Lemp said. “Then we surface and radio their position and speed to the
Vaterland
. We aren’t the only U-boat in the sea. And the
Kriegsmarine
and the
Luftwaffe
will have planes flying out of Germany—out of Denmark, too, by now, I suppose. Someone may pay them a call.”

“All right.” The exec still sounded unhappy, and explained why a moment later: “I still wish we could have done the job ourselves.”

“So do I. If we could have made twenty knots submerged, we would have got them. But you can imagine what the boat would have been like at twenty knots. I don’t think I’ve got the nerve to try thirteen again,” Lemp said.

He went into his tiny cabin to prepare the encoded message he would send when the boat surfaced. The machine that filled most of his safe gave him the groups he needed. Experts assured him the code the machine generated was unbreakable, as long as the other side didn’t get its hands on one of these machines. His orders were to sacrifice anything, including his own life, before he let that happen. He hoped—he prayed—he never had to make the choice.

He carefully scanned the whole horizon through the periscope before surfacing. As soon as he could, he sent off his carefully composed code groups. Then he ordered the boat down to
Schnorkel
depth again. However
little he’d wanted to at first, he’d come to rely on the long, ugly stovepipe. It did what the Dutchmen who’d invented it said it would do. You couldn’t ask for more.

Or could you? A U-boat that would make twenty knots submerged … That would be a weapon the likes of which the world had never known. With U-boats like that running around, how long could a surface navy survive? Days—weeks at most.

But how would you get such a weapon? Better streamlining came to mind right away. The U-30 wasn’t made for high-speed underwater travel. The engineers who’d designed the boat had assumed such a thing was impossible. And it was—when they’d designed the boat. Was it now, with the
Schnorkel
and whatever other clever notions the boys with thick glasses could come up with?

“Not even slightly,” Lemp murmured. “No, not even.” He retreated to his cabin again. Once he got there, he started sketching and making notes. After a few minutes, he shut the curtain that gave him more privacy than anyone else on the boat enjoyed. He didn’t want his men to think he’d gone round the bend.

A TRAIN HAULED ALISTAIR WALSH
and God only knew how many other English soldiers towards a port on the Atlantic or the western side of the English Channel. He didn’t know exactly where he was going. He did wonder whether the officers who’d dragged him and his comrades away from the line in front of Paris knew where they were sending them.

Inside a cat carrier improvised from a lady’s fancy hatbox, Pussy meowed. “Hush, there,” Walsh said, and fed the cat a bit of bully beef. Pussy loved the stuff, which, to Walsh’s way of thinking, only proved the little beast didn’t have the brains God gave a flatiron or a General Staff colonel.

Rank had its privileges. Had Jock or Alonzo tried to bring a cat along when they got transferred to … somewhere, some officious corporal would have made sure it never got on the train. But a staff sergeant was allowed his little eccentricities.

And Pussy entertained the rest of the smelly, dirty, khaki-clad men shoehorned into the compartment with him. They vied with one another
at finding little delicacies for her. And their weary, badly shaved faces softened when they stroked her. She wasn’t a woman, but she was warm and soft—the next best thing, you might say. They laughed when she chased a bit of string over their forest of knees, and hardly swore at all if she slipped and dug claws into a leg to keep from falling.

They didn’t know where they were going, either. Some guessed Russia. More plumped for Norway. “Me, Ah don’t much care,” Jock said. “Put a goddamn Fritz in front of me, and Ah’ll shoot the bugger.” When he came out with that, the rest of the men solemnly nodded. How could you sum things up better?

One fellow kept insisting they wouldn’t see any more Fritzes—they’d done their bit, he insisted, and were going back to Blighty for good. The other soldiers humored him, as they would have humored any harmless maniac. Like them, Walsh would have loved to believe it. Like them, he couldn’t. Once the army got hold of you, it didn’t turn you loose till the war ended—which didn’t look like happening any time soon—or till it used you up.

In Brest (which turned out to be their destination), they filed aboard what was called a troopship. By the way it smelled, it had hauled more cattle, or maybe sheep, than soldiers. Pussy found the symphony of stinks fascinating. Walsh lit a Navy Cut to blunt what it did to his nostrils. On that ship, he would have lit a Gitane, and he thought they smelled like smoldering asphalt.

They made it back to England without meeting a U-boat. He heartily approved of that. They came into port just after sunup, and got served huge helpings of bangers and mash and properly brewed tea. After British army rations, French army rations, and a lot of whatever he could scavenge, he approved of that, too.

“You see?” said the chap who was convinced they were going to be discharged. “They wouldn’t feed us like this if they meant to keep us on.” For the first time, Walsh began to wonder. That did fit in with the way the army mind worked.

Whether it did or not, it turned out not to be true. A captain with a really splendid red mustache stood up on a barrel and addressed the soldiers just returned to their native soil: “Well, lads, we’ll be entraining you
soon. Then it’s Scotland, and then another little pleasure cruise.” His wry grin said he knew what the troopship had been like. Maybe he’d been on it, though an officer would have had better accommodations than other ranks. He went on, “After that, it’s Norway. If Adolf thinks we’ll just sit by whilst he gobbles it up, he’d best think again, what?”

“Norway?” That astonished, dismayed bleat came from the luckless private who’d been so sure he would soon be set at liberty.

“Norway,” the captain repeated. “The Norwegians are tough fighters—there just aren’t enough of them to hold back the Fritzes on their own.” His smile suddenly went broad and lickerish. “And the girls there are mighty pretty, and they’ll be mighty glad to see the blokes who’re helping to keep ’em free.”

That might turn out to be true, and it might not. Most likely, it would be part truth, part stretcher. Some Frenchwomen enjoyed spitting in an English soldier’s eye, while others were complaisant as could be.

Lorries growled up to take the troops from the dockside to the train station. Had the Germans sneaked a few bombers across the Channel, they could have worked a fearful slaughter. But everything went off smoothly. No one seemed to give a damn about Pussy. Walsh was probably breaking all kinds of laws by bringing her into the country, but he didn’t care.

The train proved less crowded than the one in France that had hauled him away from the fighting there. Tinned rations were passed out. He sighed. They’d keep him full, which didn’t mean he loved them.

As the train rattled through the north of England, Jock nudged him and asked, “You won’t mind if me and my mates ’op it here, will you, Sergeant?” The Yorkshireman’s grin said he didn’t expect to be taken seriously.

“Oh, right,” Walsh answered. “Desertion in wartime—they’ll pin a medal on you for that, they will.” He glanced over to make sure the private understood exactly what officialdom would do if he and his mates took off. The twinkle in Jock’s eyes showed he did. Walsh gave him a cigarette and fired up one of his own. They smoked in companionable silence.

Scotland. Walsh had expected Edinburgh, but the train pounded on, north and east. “Aberdeen,” guessed someone whose clotted accent said he knew the local geography pretty well. It made sense. Norway was pretty far north, and they wouldn’t be sailing toward the part the Germans had already grabbed. Walsh hoped like blazes they wouldn’t, anyhow.