The Passenger (9 page)

Submerging was invariably accompanied by a sense of wary expectancy. Human beings were not meant to survive underwater and every man understood—at some level—that he was party to an infringement, a transgression that might not be readily overlooked. They were defying Nature or Neptune or some other proprietary Personification and when the pointer on the manometer revolved, it measured not only depth, but increments of dread. The pounding of the diesels ceased, and it wasn't until the maneuver was successfully completed that the tension in the atmosphere finally dissipated. Their hubris had gone unnoticed, or some kindly god had granted them yet another dispensation.

Lorenz sat at the attack periscope in the conning tower, securing his position by clamping his thighs around either side of the shaft. He switched on the motor and tested the pedals, rotating
the column and saddle to the right and left. His fingers found the elevation control, and he raised the periscope. Conditions were very favorable, the ‘stalk' was traveling in the same direction as the sea, and the waves were washing over the hood from behind. He was able to keep the objective low in the water, reducing the chances of being spotted while simultaneously benefiting from a clear view. Falk was standing by the computer, lightly touching its dials and buttons as if he needed to reacquaint himself with their function. There was something superstitious about his redundant movements. He seemed to be performing a private ritual.

The hatch in the deck that separated the conning tower from the control room was supposed to be closed during an underwater attack, but Lorenz always kept it open because he liked to feel in direct contact with the men below. He liked to hear Graf's instructions and to monitor the steady flow of reports. As they drew closer to the convoy he called out, ‘Half speed ahead,' ensuring that the size of the periscope's wake would be reduced. A U-boat's principle advantage was stealth. Without stealth, there was only vulnerability.

Several cargo ships were now visible. Employing 6X magnification Lorenz examined each one in turn and selected his target. He then ordered another minor change of the submarine's course. Reverting to 1X magnification he watched the two escorts sail past.

‘Flood all tubes.'

Another escort, flanking the convoy, was very close; however, U-330 was already inside the protective perimeter.

‘Open torpedo outer doors. Course twenty. Bow left. Bearing sixty . . .'

Falk began feeding the information into the computer. When he had finished he addressed Lorenz, ‘Tubes one and two ready to fire.'

The electric motors seemed to hum more loudly. Lorenz could feel the release lever in his hand. The cargo ship was positioned
perfectly in the crosshairs when, quite suddenly, it vanished, and Lorenz was gripping the periscope shaft tightly to prevent himself from falling off the saddle. The entire column had rotated forty-five degrees and stopped abruptly. Yet, he had not been conscious of applying any pressure to the pedals.

‘Kaleun?' Falk sounded worried. Was the flanking escort preparing to ram?

The motor labored when Lorenz tried to correct the periscope. It felt as though the column was encountering some kind of resistance. When the cargo ship finally appeared in the viewfinder it had changed course slightly. ‘Damn!'

‘What?'

‘We'll have to start again.' The automatic update system depended on the variables remaining constant.

Lorenz revised the figures, and for the second time Falk declared, ‘Tubes one and two ready to fire.' The cargo ship was back in the crosshairs, the detail of its superstructure clearly visible. Lorenz was hesitant, almost expecting the periscope to swivel around again. It had moved just as he was about to fire. The timing had been curiously precise and optimally disruptive. Indeed, it had felt more contrived than contingent, a purposeful interference, and, for an instant, it had seemed as if someone were snatching the periscope out of his hands, wresting control away from him. He tightened his hold on the firing lever, and as he did so, he heard an exhalation close to his right ear, an expulsion of air, but imbued with a faint vocal quality, enough to suggest the emotions of frustration and regret. Although disconcerting, Lorenz dismissed the phenomenon. He could not afford to be distracted.

‘Tube one—fire! Tube two—fire!'

Falk counted off the seconds, and Lorenz kept his gaze fixed on the target. Graf was still giving orders. To maintain depth and keep the boat level it was necessary to fill the trim tanks with sea water weighing exactly the same as the torpedoes that had just been discharged. The adjustment was subtle but perceptible
nevertheless. Lorenz felt strangely detached, like an ancient god dispensing casual destruction. He saw the cargo ship transformed into a blazing fireball, and the absence of sound made the conflagration appear like an event in a dream. Lehmann, who was manning the hydrophones, must have reacted and signaled success, because a chorus of triumphal exclamations preceded the arrival of the shock wave.

‘Did we hit it?' asked Falk.

‘Yes,' said Lorenz. ‘We hit it.' He was obliged to evaluate the feasibility of undertaking another attack, but when he looked for the flanking escort he discovered that it was already turning toward them. ‘Close torpedo doors, new course 180 degrees, 75 meters, ahead slow: silent routine.' In the control room, men grabbed the handles of the leverage valves, and their feet left the matting as they used all of their body weight to pull them down. The ballast tanks flooded, and the boat tilted while Falk and Lorenz were still negotiating the ladder. Hand wheels were being rotated with furious, concentrated energy, and members of the crew who were not seated had to reach for the overhead pipes to stop themselves from falling. Anything unfastened slid toward the bow: cans, sou'westers, books, and boxes.

The first detonation was like a sledgehammer landing heavily on the hull. It produced a reverberating clang, all of the lights blinked, and the metal began to shriek. There then followed a terrifying roar, even louder than the initial strike. An enormous quantity of water, blasted outward by the force of the explosion, was rushing back to fill the void. Men staggered, others lost their footing and fell, and the boat's angle of descent steepened. In the confusion that followed, Lorenz heard a voice shouting: ‘Ober-Maschinistmaat Richter badly injured!'

Before Lorenz could react there were two more massive detonations that accelerated the boat's descent. Graf's response was swift and effective. The aft compartment dropped and the deck became level again. When the noise subsided there was absolute
silence. Even a cough would conduct through the hull and betray their location, so all of those who were not seated swapped their boots for slippers. Men crept into bunks and attempted to breathe slowly and remain calm. The boat could not remain submerged indefinitely: it was imperative to conserve air. Only essential lighting was retained to save power. They waited—and waited—until the stillness was infiltrated by the repetitive thrashing of high-speed propellers.

A mechanic lowered himself to the matting and knelt next to the master gyro compass. Another seaman crouched beneath the chart table. It seemed that the crew was trying to escape danger by making their bodies occupy less space. Fear had impoverished their thinking, and their irrational behavior betrayed a return to infantile logic, the reappearance of semi-magical beliefs. They folded their arms and shortened their necks, as though it were possible—by the exercise of will—to shrink to a vanishing point and elude the destruction promised by the relentless thrashing above. Lorenz looked at his men and hoped that their sanity would be protected by some vestige of pride or honor, that their training and countless practice dives would make the approach of the escort bearable.

Six splashes—an agonizing interlude of fraught expectation—succeeded by six detonations. With each boom the manometer pointer jumped, and the boat was pushed lower. Lorenz closed his eyes and translated what was happening into a reduced mental representation. In his head, a tiny U-330 was traveling in one direction while a miniature escort sailed transversely above it. He guessed the current positions of the forward escorts, estimated their speed and courses, and introduced them into the trigonometry of his mental representation. ‘Hard a-port,' said Lorenz. The tiny U-boat in his head began to turn. He opened his eyes and climbed through the forward hatchway.

‘There's another escort coming toward us,' the hydrophone operator whispered.

‘Just the one?'

‘Yes.'

‘Bearing?'

Lehmann rotated his wheel: ‘One hundred and sixty degrees.'

‘Interesting,' Lorenz closed his eyes and reconstructed his model. He repositioned the first forward escort, made the second vanish, and tried to determine his next move. It was like playing three-dimensional chess. His concentration was broken when the steward and Berger appeared carrying Richter. They were having difficulty getting the unconscious mechanic through the hatchway; one of his arms kept catching on the bulwark. When they finally succeeded, Lorenz saw that Richter's face was divided by a deep, diagonal gash. Blood was still streaming from the ugly wound.

‘What are you doing?' Lorenz asked.

‘Taking him to the bow compartment,' the steward replied

‘Why?'

‘There's a strong smell of chlorine in the petty officers' quarters.'

‘That's all we need. Look, just lay him down in my nook for now. What happened?'

‘Slipped and went flying. He took off and smacked his head against one of the diesels.'

‘Took off?'

The steward nodded. As they attempted to rotate Richter's body, Berger tripped. He dropped Richter's legs and fell onto the deck, producing a loud crash.

‘You fucking idiot, Berger!' The steward's stage whisper was despairing rather than angry.

‘Shit,' the young seaman hissed, ‘I'm sorry.' He looked up at Lorenz who simply gestured for him to hurry. Berger grabbed Richter's ankles and helped the steward maneuver the unconscious man onto the mattress.

Lorenz tapped Lehmann's shoulder. ‘Are their screws getting louder?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Altering their course?'

‘One hundred and fifty-five degrees: they heard that.'

Lorenz leaned into the control room. ‘Take us down another fifteen meters. Hard a'starboard.'

Soon, they could all hear the forward escort's approach; propeller blades churning water. There were more splashes, so many that it became difficult to count them. Lorenz pictured the lethal dispersion of depth charges: trails of air bubbles, slow descent. A moment later they were being attacked by raging Titans. Enormous cudgels were pummelling the hull, buffeting the boat this way and that, battering the conning tower, bashing the ballast tanks. The deck plates jolted painfully against the soles of feet; wood panels split and splintered; iron growled. Then came the roaring, excessively prolonged as the ocean came crashing back into the numerous empty blast spaces. When the cacophony ended, there was no longer absolute silence. The men were hyperventilating. Graf leveled the boat, and Lorenz climbed back into the control room. ‘See,' said Lorenz. ‘They missed. Even with Berger's generous assistance, they missed. I hope they appreciate how sporting we've been.'

The crew was staring at him with the rounded, protuberant eyes of nocturnal animals. Extreme terror had made them appear even younger than they did ordinarily. For a fleeting moment it seemed that the boat was being piloted by schoolchildren. Only Graf and Müller looked like adults. Several of the men were trembling, and one of them had bitten his lower lip so hard that his chin was now cleft by a glistening, crimson stripe. The seaman beneath the chart table had put his fingers in his ears. Even though Lorenz could feel fear gnawing away at his own innards, he adopted an air of indifference and remarked, ‘We'll shake them off in the end, don't you worry.' The quality of his performance was vital. Under conditions of such appalling, unspeakable dread, anyone might snap and become hysterical. Lorenz had seen it happen. . . .
Let me out,
let me out! For God's sake, let me out!
Fortunately, there had never been an incident of this kind under his command. His men had always lived up to Dönitz's ideal: the community of fate—each component held in place by adjacent parts, the teeth of every cog locked into the rotation of another.

Lorenz remembered reading a story to his little niece and nephew. It was a gruesome tale but they had insisted that he continue even though they were obviously very frightened. Before switching off the light he had kissed their sweet-scented hair. ‘It's only make-believe,' he had reassured them. ‘Nothing bad will happen to you.'

More explosions brought him back to the present: a truly shocking tumult. A continent was breaking up above their heads, mountain ranges were crumbling into the sea, avalanches of rock were raising monstrous tsunamis. How could it go on for so long? How many drums was it possible to drop in a single location? A seaman in the bow compartment was vomiting into a bucket. The boat twisted like a living creature trying to free itself from the teeth of a trap; glass shattered and the submarine was plunged into darkness.

‘What's happened to the auxiliary lights?' Graf's question was really a command. ‘Well?'

The sense of being entombed was overwhelming; the claustrophobic darkness pressed against their bodies, thickened in their windpipes, and clogged their airways. As the roaring subsided, flashlight beams appeared, one after another, sweeping through the void, crossing like swords and creating consoling roundels of visibility. Objects flashed into existence—the air compressor, the chart table, the main gyrocompass. Reports were made, one of which was instantly verified by the sound of gushing water. ‘Flooding in diesel compartment, request help.' Lorenz crossed the control room and shone a flashlight through the aft hatchway. The petty officers' quarters were empty; everyone who had been lying on the bunks had responded.