An Honorable German (40 page)

The first depth charges detonated far in the distance. Max listened intently as he clung to the periscope housing, trying
to gauge their position relative to the explosions. “Right full rudder! All ahead full. Go to one hundred meters.” No use
holding the same course with the wake pointing at them like an arrow.

Another explosion, also well off the mark, but the sound unnerving all the same. The control room crew stared upward as if
they would be able to see the depth charges falling.

“Look to your stations,” Max snapped. Like a damned bunch of conscripts gawking at the Eiffel Tower. He resisted the impulse
to look up himself. How did the Americans attack? Were they dogged like the British, or did they get impatient and go charging
off in every direction? Certainly they couldn’t drop depth charges with any accuracy.

The next two explosions were even farther away and Max knew they were out of danger. Carls looked at him and Max put his palms
out as if to say, I told you so. They smiled at each other. These Americans didn’t have the Tommies’ experience—soon enough
they would. “Both engines ahead one-quarter,” Max ordered. “Resume base course.”

They sank the first freighter at dusk, three torpedoes hitting her broadside. She was gone in less than ten minutes. Two lifeboats
were launched as the ship went down, and Max was happy to see it. At least he hadn’t killed everyone aboard—save for a handful
in the engine room. A twenty-five-kilometer sail to land was all the survivors would have to manage, then a hot dinner and
tall tales. If ships had to be sunk, he supposed sinking them inshore, where most of the crew could get away, was the humane
way to do it—if launching torpedoes at a vessel with no warning could be called humane.

The second freighter, two hours later, was more difficult. She saw the U-boat in the moonlight just before Max launched his
torpedoes, and the ship’s auxiliary gun crew took him under fire with an antique deck gun from the First War. Shells came
over the boat with the high whistle he remembered from battles aboard
Meteor
and
Graf Spee
.

“Dammit!” He pounded the bridge railing with his fist. “All ahead full. Lehmann, shoot, shoot, shoot!”

Another shell from the freighter. This one plowed into the sea about two hundred meters abaft the starboard beam. At least
they were no more accurate than the American patrol plane had been.

“Herr Kaleu,” Bekker called from below, “she’s sending a distress signal.”

Suddenly the freighter’s searchlight fell directly on the bridge, illuminating them for any aircraft or destroyer to see.
Max threw a hand up to shield his eyes.

“Tube one, fire!” Lehmann yelled. “Tube two, fire! Tube three, fire! Tube four, fire!”

“Helmsman! Right full rudder,” Max ordered, shouting through the open hatch to the helmsman just below. “Emergency full ahead.”

Another whoosh overhead, followed by another explosion in the sea as a shell hit the water, closer this time. They were finding
the range, even with their old gun that belonged in a museum.

“Thirty seconds,” Lehmann called as the U-boat turned away, propellers roiling the green water as the diesels breathed a throaty
rumble, blowing exhaust across the bridge.

“Twenty seconds!”

Max fixed his binoculars on the ship, seeing nothing, blinded by the searchlight.

“Ten seconds!” Lehmann shouted. “Five, four, three, two, one.”

Nothing. The first torpedo had missed and still they were fixed in the searchlight’s glare as the ship’s gunners fired another
shell. Max wanted to submerge but it would take too long. He kept going hard starboard, bringing the boat stern to so she
would show her smallest silhouette.

“Number two missed,” Lehmann shouted above the growling diesels.

Number three did not.

It struck the freighter square in the stern and ignited with a terrible blast that threw the sailors manning the deck gun
into the air. Max breathed a grateful sigh of relief and watched the ship begin to list. Boats dropped over the side and men
did the same, too panicked even to climb down the rope ladders. A high-pitched whine pierced the night like a long banshee
wail as the engineers blew the steam remaining in the boilers. The searchlight went out as the ship lost power, and by the
time Max’s eyes readjusted fully to the darkness there was nothing left to see: the freighter had vanished beneath the waves.

The distress call was sure to bring American warships to the scene, so Max decided to take the U-boat a hundred kilometers
out, to lie there on the bottom for a day until the search for him had died down.

His men welcomed the respite when they finally submerged; they always seemed exhausted after an attack, and certainly Max
was exhausted himself. Leaving only essential crew in the control room, he dismissed both watches and soon the sailors were
sleeping everywhere—in bunks, beside the spare torpedoes, in the galley, one beneath the chart table—all of them slack-jawed
from fatigue. Max hadn’t heard snoring so intense since his cadet days aboard the sailing ships, where they’d all slept together
in hammocks on the mess deck.

At 2100 he surfaced to recharge his batteries and ran south through the night, maintaining a distance of one hundred kilometers
from land, until he reached a spot that seemed right for picking up Caribbean-bound traffic. Then he submerged to wait for
morning; he could see nothing in the dark and did not want to be surprised at dawn, when patrolling planes or ships were hardest
to see.

While the crew ate their lunch of blood sausage, canned brown bread, and fruit juice, Max worked over the chart table in the
crowded control room to fix his position as best he could. When they surfaced again, he and the navigator would use their
sextants to take a sun sight. A glance at the almanac told him that sunrise would be at 0618. Twenty minutes, then. That gave
him time for some lunch of his own, though he had no stomach for blood sausage in this heat. Powdered eggs would’ve been better
but the U-boat always stayed on German War Time—Berlin time—during combat operations, and that made it the lunch hour, even
though Max and his crew lay on the seabed a hundred kilometers off Miami with twenty minutes to sunrise.

When Max sat down at the officers’ table, he found Lehmann up to his old tricks again, providing the National Socialist perspective
on the latest war news. Bekker took down the late-night Wehrmacht communiqué whenever he could and passed it along to the
officers. Lehmann usually tried to intercept it so he could put a good face on the latest grim reports from Russia. Now he
was saying, “Of course, the Russians are taking fearful casualties and our retrograde movement is only meant to straighten
out our lines.”

Max listened without comment. He was a sailor, not a soldier, but he doubted that a retrograde movement was good, especially
since it was the only type of movement the Wehrmacht had been making since the Battle of Kursk in July—an immense struggle
that had gone on for days. In Lorient the flotilla commander had told him that at one point, over three thousand tanks had
engaged, firing into enemy tanks at point-blank range. The news from Russia was an endless source of discouragement. All through
last year and the first half of this one, Max had gone on praying that the Führer still had some trick up his sleeve, a secret
plan that would turn the tide on the Eastern Front, a mighty blow he was holding back until the time was right to strike.
But Hitler had nothing. Maybe Lehmann had the right idea; perhaps the war news needed a little dressing up, not that intercepting
the communiqué before the men saw it did much good. Ferret tuned in the BBC for news reports every hour when he didn’t have
the watch. He put it on the speaker for everyone to hear and usually left it on, so the men could listen to jazz and American
big band music—all strictly verboten in Germany. Lehmann protested, of course, reminding him that listening to the BBC was
a capital offense in the Third Reich, but Max doubted any of them would live long enough to be shot by the Gestapo. The British
newsmen, in any case, did not describe the Wehrmacht retreat as a “retrograde movement,” and never speculated that the German
army was simply attempting to straighten its lines.

Max looked at his watch: 0630. He pushed the plate of sausage away. What he really wanted was a cigarette, but for that they
would need to surface.

Entering the control room, he straddled the small seat of the sky periscope. Like all boats of its class,
U-114
had two periscopes. The sky periscope was used to reconnoiter the sea and air before surfacing, while the attack scope in
the conning tower above was fitted with special lenses to register angles and range.

“Periscope depth,” Max ordered.

Muttering to his planesmen, the chief brought the boat up. “Sixteen meters, Herr Kaleu. Scope clear.”

Peering through the lens, Max slowly turned the right handle, manipulating a small mirror that allowed him to look upward
of seventy degrees above the horizon. His left hand operated the control that moved the scope up and down to compensate for
the action of the waves and motion of the boat. Because it was heated to prevent its delicate lenses from frosting, the periscope
was warm against Max’s body, like Mareth sleeping against him in bed. He used the foot pedals to rotate the scope through
the compass. Nothing but the empty Atlantic. The sea was covered by gray mist, a fine rain falling. Then he saw it in the
last ten degrees of his circle.

“Down scope!”

Who knew how alert their lookouts might be? It seemed impossible to Max that a periscope would ever be spotted in the water,
but Dönitz had personally assured him that it happened.

“Action stations!” he shouted. “All tubes stand by!”

Lunch was forgotten as the sailors bolted for their posts, dishes breaking as they fell to the deck. Red lights blinked but
the men needed no prodding. Everyone knew they could go home as soon as their torpedoes were expended. In ninety seconds the
boat was quiet again, all stations manned. Max took up the P.A. microphone. “Achtung! We have sighted a large enemy ship.
I can’t make her out in the mist but she looks to be a freighter of fifteen thousand tons. The ship is coming directly over
us, so we will execute a submerged attack. Stand by.” He climbed into the conning tower and took up the handles of the attack
scope, then called down to the chief. “Up scope.”

Below him the men were silent but alert. He could feel their tension as he put his eyes to the attack periscope’s rubber sockets,
like looking into a cine camera. There she was. “Range, four thousand meters. Angle on the bow green one five zero.

“All ahead two-thirds.”

Had to keep his speed up and not lose her in the mist. In the dim light it was difficult to identify the type of ship, but
it must be a freighter—no other ship would be steaming on this route. Unfortunately, she was not a tanker. Tankers were the
biggest prizes of all because they took longer to build than other ships and were in short supply to the Allies.

“Down scope.”

“Escorts, Herr Kaleu?” Lehmann asked.

So, our National Socialist hero was worried about depth charges. Max shook his head. “Just a fat freighter sailing along by
herself,” he said, and the news went through the boat faster than the crab lice the men all suffered from. Apparently this
really was the perfect hunting ground—the Americans weren’t nearly so cautious as the British. But why should they be? They
had more ships than any nation in the world.

“Tubes standing by, Herr Kaleu,” Carls said.

Max smiled to himself. This would be no more difficult than hitting practice convoys in the Baltic. Those days of endless
drills seemed very far away now. He looked down into the control room. “Ferret, firing data in?”

“Jawohl, Herr Kaleu.”

Max nodded and looked down at the control room crew, their eyes fixed on him. “Stand by then. Up scope.”

The chief pushed his controls and the scope rose again. The rain was falling more heavily now, and at first Max couldn’t see
the ship at all. He cursed under his breath, but then she was there again, a shadow in the fog. But damn it all to hell, the
visibility was almost zero. He could barely make his calculations, but he had to take the risk and fire now or lose his prey.
“Angle on the bow green one five zero. Range three thousand meters. Set depth at four meters. Stand by, stand by… Tube one,
fire! Tube two, fire! Tube three, fire! Tube four, fire!”

Ferret had the stopwatch out. Forty-five seconds on the first one.

“Down scope. Helmsman, right full rudder, steady up on two eight zero. All ahead full.”

“Thirty seconds.”

Max dropped down into the control room, folded his arms, and stared at the deck.

“Fifteen seconds.”

The boat was swinging to starboard, turning away from the target.

“Ten,” Ferret began to chant, eyes fixed on the stopwatch, “nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one!”

Silence. Then the roar of an explosion carried through the water. His sailors cheered. Carls even thumped Max on the back.
Another explosion, then another. Good shooting. The chief even said it: “Good shooting, Herr Kaleu.”

Deep-throated cheers now, deafening in the U-boat’s cramped space—whistles, hands clapping, men stomping their feet. “Beck’s!
Beck’s! Beck’s!” they chanted. There were several cases of it on hand for just such an occasion. A fist punched Max’s shoulder.
He turned to see Lehmann grinning at him. Max threw him a salute.

“Form a line and everyone can take a look,” Max called as the cheering died down. He straddled the seat of the smaller sky
periscope in the control room. “Up scope.” He caught the periscope as it moved up and peered through the eyepiece. Raindrops
and spray splashed against the lens. Damn but it was hard to see. Then he made her out, listing sharply now, just a few boats
manned. Some of the boats on the low side had been destroyed by the torpedo blast. On the high side, opposite the list, none
of them had launched because the ship had heeled over too fast. She was going quickly, too, tipping heavily to port and down
by the bow. People crowded the few lifeboats that had made it into the water—far too many people.