"Well, we'll give it a try," he said. "The North Sea is rough. Will the snort suck all the air out of the boat if the nozzle goes under water?"
"That's not supposed to happen," Leutnant Beilharz said stiffly.
Lemp concluded that it could, whether it was supposed to or not. What happened then? Did it vent exhaust back into the boat? That might not be much fun. He wished he'd never set eyes on the miserable Athenia. Then they'd have fitted the goddamn experimental whatsit onto somebody else's U-boat.
Well, he was stuck with it. He tried it out before the U-30 left the calm waters of Kiel Bay. It worked as advertised. The diesels chugged along with the whole boat-but for the tip of the snorkel tube-submerged. Gerhart Beilharz seemed as proud as a new papa showing off his firstborn son.
What happens when the little bugger pisses in your eye after you take his diaper off to change him? Lemp wondered sourly. He stayed surfaced through the Kiel Canal and out into the North Sea. Away from the sheltered bay, the ocean showed some of what it could do. Several sailors went a delicate green. Puke in the bilges would remind the crew it was there all through the cruise.
"Ride's smoother down below," Beilharz suggested.
"Nein." Lemp shook his head. "I'll use the snort when I have to, but not for this. I want to get out there and go hunting, dammit. Even eight knots is only half what I can make on the surface, so we'll stay up here." The second engineer looked aggrieved, but that was all he could do. Lemp had the power to bind and to loose, to rise and to sink.
He cruised along at fifteen knots, heading up toward the gap between Scotland and Norway. The Royal Navy patrolled the gap, of course-they didn't want subs getting loose in the Atlantic. They laid minefields in the North Sea, too. A lot of U-boat skippers stuck close to the Norwegian coast. Some even-most unofficially-ducked into Norwegian territorial waters to stay away from the Royal Navy. Sometimes-also most unofficially-the limeys steamed into Norwegian waters after them.
Lemp steered straight for the narrower gap between the Orkneys and the Shetlands. As far as he was concerned, the Norwegian dogleg only wasted fuel. He prided himself on being a hard-charging skipper. (Sometimes, these days, he wondered how proud he should be. Would he have torpedoed the Athenia if he'd waited longer to make sure of what she was? But he couldn't dwell on that, not if he wanted to do his job.) And the North Sea was plenty wide. Chances were he wouldn't hit a mine or get spotted by a destroyer. And if he did get spotted, he told himself, it was at least as much the destroyer's worry as his.
He kept four men up on the conning tower all the time during the day. Their Zeiss binoculars scanned from side to side and went higher up into the sky to make sure the watchmen spotted a plane before it saw the U-boat. Leutnant Beilharz took his turn up there. Why not? It was the only time when he could stand up straight.
His disapproval of the way Lemp used-or rather, didn't use-the snorkel stuck out like a hedgehog's spines. Finally, Lemp pulled him into his own tiny cabin. Only a sheet of canvas separated it from the main passageway, but it gave him more privacy than anyone else on the sub enjoyed.
Quietly, he said, "We have the gadget. If we need it, we know what to do with it. Till then, I don't intend to break routine. Have you got that?"
"Yes, sir," Gerhart Beilharz answered sourly. U-boat discipline was on the easygoing side-enough to threaten to give officers from the surface navy a stroke. That formal response felt like, and was, a reproach.
Where the conversation would have gone from there was anybody's guess. Downhill was Lemp's. But somebody yelled, "Smoke on the horizon!"
"It'll keep," Lemp said as he jumped to his feet.
"Ja." Beilharz sprang up, too. He wore his cousin's helmet all the time inside the U-boat-and needed it, too. It scraped on something overhead as he trotted along behind Lemp. He might make a submariner yet, even if he was oversized. Lemp would have thought hard about chucking him overboard had he tried to waste time.
The big, pole-mounted field glasses were aimed northwest when Lemp stepped out onto the top of the conning tower. "What is it?" he demanded.
"Looks like a light cruiser, skipper," the bosun answered.
"Well, well," Lemp muttered, peering through the powerful binoculars. It was indeed a warship: maybe a cruiser, maybe only a destroyer. He would rather have seen a fat freighter out there, but…Before he did anything else, he scanned the horizon himself. If it was a cruiser, it was likely to have destroyers escorting it. Ignoring them while making a run at the bigger ship could prove embarrassing, to say the least.
"Shall we stalk it?" Beilharz asked, all but panting at the chance. "It'll give you a chance to try the snort in action."
Lemp didn't answer right away. Only after he'd gone through 360 degrees without spotting any more smoke or another hull did he slowly nod. "Ja," he said. "We'll do it." He heard the odd reluctance in his own voice, whether the junior engineer did or not. Beilharz could afford to be eager. To him, this was like playing with toys. But Lemp had to be careful. U-30 and the crew were all on his shoulders, a burden that sometimes felt heavier than the one Atlas bore. He muttered something the wind blew away. Then he clapped Beilharz on the shoulder. "Let's go below. We'll see what we can do with your precious gadget."
He didn't submerge right away. He still wanted to get as close as he could on the surface, where he had the best turn of speed. When he did go under, he could still make the eight knots Beilharz had promised, and he would have been down to half that on battery power. The extra speed helped him maneuver into a good firing position.
He launched two torpedoes at the cruiser-he still thought it was one-from a little more than 800 meters. The British warship never changed course, which meant no one aboard saw them at all. One hit up near the bow, the other just abaft of amidship. Like a man bludgeoned from behind, the ship never knew what hit it. It shuddered to a stop, rolled steeply to starboard, and sank inside of fifteen minutes.
Cheers dinned through the long, hollow steel cigar of the U-30's hull. Lemp went to his tiny cabin and pulled out the bottle of schnapps he used to congratulate sailors on a job well done. He thrust it at Leutnant Beilharz. "Here you go, Gerhart. Take a big slug," he said. "You've earned it, you and your snort."
Beilharz drank and then coughed; Lemp got the idea the young man didn't take undiluted spirits very often. Well, if he stayed in U-boats long, he would. After a sailor pounded Beilharz on the back, he said, "Pretty soon, I bet every boat in the Kriegsmarine will mount a snorkel. But us, we've got ours now!" Everybody cheered some more. Why not? They'd just given the Royal Navy a damn good shot in the teeth. STAFF SERGEANT ALISTAIR WALSH SHIVERED inside a house that once upon a time had kept an upper-middle-class French family warm and dry and snug. That family was gone now. So were the glass from the windows, a wall and a half, and most of the roof. What was left of the two-story house gave Walsh and several other British soldiers a good firing position from which to try to stop the Germans pushing down from the northeast.
He wasn't sure whether he was technically in Paris or in one of the French capital's countless suburbs. They blended smoothly into one another. Maybe the fine details mattered to a Frenchman. Walsh didn't much care.
All he cared about right now was whether the side that mostly wore khaki could hold off the side in field-gray If the French were determined to fight, Paris could swallow up an army. Seizing the place block by block, house by house…Walsh wouldn't have wanted to try it. And he would have bet the Germans weren't what anyone would call keen on the notion, either.
If they got around Paris to the north and came in behind it, the jig was up. They'd tried that in the last war, but hadn't quite brought it off. They were trying it again now. Walsh worried that they would make it this time. But he couldn't do anything about that. All he could do was make life as rough as he could for any Boches who got within a few hundred yards of him.