Up into the fresh air again. "Where away, Klaus?" he asked.
"There, sir." Hammerstein pointed. "A smoke smudge."
"Ja." Lemp saw it, too. "We'll have to get closer, see what it is." They could do that. The U-30's diesel engines gave off less smoke than did ships burning fuel oil or coal. And the gray-painted U-boat sat low in the water, making it hard to spot. Julius Lemp called down the hatch: "Change course to 350. I say again-350."
"Jawohl. Changing course to 350," the helmsman answered, and the U-30 swung almost due north.
Lemp and Hammerstein both raised their binoculars, waiting for the ship to come up over the horizon. Lemp didn't forget the rest of the seascape and the sky. You could get caught with your pants down if you concentrated too much on your prey. That was how you turned into prey yourself. Every so often, when the skipper lowered his field glasses for a moment, he looked over at Ensign Hammerstein. The pup hadn't forgotten to look other places besides dead ahead, either. Good.
"That's no freighter, sir," Hammerstein said after a while.
"Damn right it isn't," Lemp agreed. The silhouette, while tiny, was too sleek, too well raked, to haul anything so mundane as barley or iron ore. Easier to mistake a thoroughbred for a cart horse than a freighter for a…"Destroyer, I think, or maybe a minelayer."
"I want one of those!" the ensign said. "The bastards are dangerous."
"Too right they are," Lemp replied. Admirals sneered at mines-but admirals didn't have to face them. Sailors who did had a healthy respect for them. Mines were worse than a nuisance-they were a scourge. And they were an economical scourge, because they murdered ships without endangering the murderers…most of the time. But not today! Lemp set a hand on Hammerstein's shoulder. "Let's go below."
The U-30 stalked the enemy warship at periscope depth. That slowed the approach, but no help for it. If the ship spotted the U-boat, she could get away-or fight back. In a surface action, the U-30 was doomed. Her deck guns were for shooting up freighters and shooting down airplanes, not for taking on anything with real weaponry.
"It is a minelayer, by God!" Lemp said. The silhouette matched the one in Jane's Fighting Ships. How thoughtful of the English to help destroy themselves. The enemy vessel went about her business without the slightest suspicion the U-30 was anywhere in the neighborhood. That was just how Lemp liked it. It might as well have been a training run. He sneaked to within a kilometer.
At his orders, the torpedomen readied three fish in the forward tubes. The enemy ship filled the periscope's field of view. Fighter pilots from Spain said you had to get close to make sure of a hit. The same held true under the sea.
"First torpedo-los!" Lemp called. Clang! Whoosh! "Second torpedo-los!" Clang! Whoosh "Third torpedo-los!" Clang! Whoosh!
Under two minutes to the target. The minelayer showed sudden, urgent smoke-someone aboard her must have spotted the wakes. But you couldn't do much, not in that little bit of time. And Lemp had aimed one of the torpedoes on the assumption that the enemy vessel would speed up.
Boom! "Hit!" Lemp shouted exultantly. The U-30's crew cheered. Then a much bigger Boom! followed. The exploding torpedo must have touched off the mines the enemy ship carried. The minelayer went up in a fireball-and the U-boat might have been under the worst depth-charge attack in the world. It staggered in the water. Light bulbs blew from bow to stern, plunging the boat into darkness. Several leaks started.
With matter-of-fact competence, the crew went to work setting things to rights. Torches flashed on. Sailors began stopping the leaks. Lemp ordered U-30 to the surface. If there were survivors, he'd pick them up. He didn't expect trouble, anyhow.
And he didn't get any. Bodies floated in the chilly water. He saw no British sailors still alive. With that stunning blast, he was hardly surprised. A little disappointed, maybe, but not surprised. The minelayer had already gone to the bottom.
"Resume our previous course," he told the helmsman. "We'll celebrate properly when we're clear."
"Resuming previous course." The petty officer grinned. Schnapps was against regulations-which didn't mean people wouldn't get a knock after a triumph like this.
These days, the British Expeditionary Force was mechanized. That meant Staff Sergeant Alistair Walsh got to ride a lorry from Calais to this piddlepot hole in the ground somewhere right next to the Belgian border. Then he jumped down out of the lorry…and he was back in the mud again. Twenty years unwound as if they had never been.
If anything, this was worse than what he'd known in 1918. He'd fought through the spring and summer then, and got wounded early in fall. Guys who'd been through the mill talked about how miserable trenches got when it was cold and wet. Guys who'd been through the mill always talked. This time, they were right.
He squelched when he walked. So did everybody else. People screamed "Keep your feet dry!" the same way they screamed "Always wear a rubber!" Not too many people listened-and wasn't that a surprise? The first cases of trench foot meant rockets went up from the people with red stripes on their caps.
Walsh remembered a trick he'd heard about in the last war. "Rub your feet with Vaseline, thick as you can," he told the men in his company. "Do your damnedest to keep your socks dry, but greasing's better than nothing."
Only one man came down with trench foot, and he didn't follow instructions. "Good job, Sergeant," said Captain Ted Peters.
"Thank you, sir," Walsh answered. He was old enough to be the company commander's father, but he would have had to start mighty young. "Some of these buggers haven't got the sense God gave a Frenchman."
"Or a Belgian." Peters scratched at his skinny little mustache. Walsh didn't think much of the modern fashion. If he was going to grow hair on his upper lip, he wanted a proper mustache, not one that looked put on with a burnt match. But he couldn't deny that the captain was a clever bloke. Peters went on, "You know why we haven't crossed the border and taken up positions where we might do some good?"
"Belgians haven't invited us in, like," Walsh answered.
"That's right. They're neutral, don't you know?" The way Captain Peters rolled his eyes told what he thought of that. "They think they'll offend the Boches if they get ready to defend themselves. Much good that kind of thing did them in 1914."
Maybe he'd been born in 1914. Maybe not, too. Either way, he was right. "The Germans jumped them then. They'll jump them again. Hitler's a bigger liar than the damned Kaiser ever was," Walsh said.
"Too bloody right he is," Captain Peters agreed. "You can see that. I can, too. So why can't King Leopold?"
"Because he's a bleeding idiot…sir?" Walsh suggested. "Like one of those ostriches, with its head in the sand?"
"He's got his head up his arse," Peters said. Walsh goggled; he hadn't thought the captain talked like that. "Thinks the French are as bad as the Germans. Thinks we are, for Christ's sake."
"What can you expect from a wog?" Walsh said. As far as he was concerned, wogs started on the far side of the Channel. The French were wogs on his side, which meant he cut them some slack. The Belgians weren't, and he didn't.
He had genuine respect for the bastards in the field-gray uniforms and the coal-scuttle helmets. The Germans fought hard, and in the last war they'd fought as clean as anyone else. What more could you want from the enemy?
Patiently, Captain Peters answered the question he'd meant as rhetoricaclass="underline" "I would expect an ounce of sense. If the balloon goes up-no, when it goes up-we're going to have to rush forward to reach the positions we should already have. So will the French. That will give the Germans extra time to advance and consolidate, time they simply shouldn't have."