They got bolder as nights stretched longer, though. And so did Julius Lemp. Night gave freighters more chances to hide, but it also helped cloak stalking U-boats. Along with two other submarines, the U-30 helped scatter a convoy. He credited his boat with two freighters. One blew up with a roar that shook the submerged U-boat. The other burned and burned and burned. If it wasn’t hauling high-octane avgas, he would have been amazed.
He was a happy man, then, or as happy as a dour man ever got, when he came into Namsos after that patrol. And he-and his men-were even happier when the base commandant ordered them down to Wilhelmshaven for a refit more thorough than they could get at the base in the far north of Norway.
Yes, they would be at sea a while longer. All the same, the advantages were obvious. In case they weren’t, Gerhart Beilharz summed them up: “More booze. Better booze. More whores. Better whores.”
“Maybe even a chance for some of us to take a furlough and see their families and friends,” Lemp added dryly.
“That, too, skipper.” By the way the engineering officer said it, it might be true, but it wasn’t all that important. And, from what Lemp knew of U-boat sailors, Beilharz understood their priorities and made them his own. After a moment, he added, “More and better chow, too.”
“Well, we can hope,” Lemp said. “Even for servicemen, rations in the Vaterland are getting pretty dismal.”
“Too right, they are,” Beilharz said. “Suppose the Bonzen will hang a defeatism rap on us for saying so?”
“You know, Gerhart, I’m old enough that there are things in this world I can live without finding out,” Lemp answered. And that, no doubt, explained why the two of them tossed the question around in whispers in Lemp’s curtained-off cabin. Beilharz pondered the reply and seemed to find it good. Which was fine, unless he hung a defeatism charge on his superior-he wouldn’t hang one on himself, of course.
When the U-30 tied up in the harbor at Wilhelmshaven, the men roared off to the town’s fleshpots. After making his own report, Lemp had in mind a rather more upper-crust version of the same thing. Not to put too fine a point on it, he wanted to get drunk and he wanted to get his ashes hauled, not necessarily in that order. After a successful combat patrol, he figured he’d earned the right.
What he got instead was a summons to the office of the SS man who’d pulled his best electrician’s mate off his boat for political unreliability the last time he was in Wilhelmshaven. The blackshirt was skinny and looked aristocratic; whether he was entitled to a von, Lemp didn’t know. The man punctuated his conversation by blinking his eyes and by licking and licking and licking his lips.
Lemp eyed him with distaste he knew he didn’t hide well enough. “Reporting as ordered,” he said. He didn’t say Let’s get this over with so I can get the hell out of here, but his manner said it for him.
Blink. The SS man stared back at him. “I see your ship met no misfortune without Petty Officer Nehring,” he said. Lick.
He still didn’t know enough to call a U-boat a boat, not a ship. Odds were he didn’t know enough to shake it before he stuck it back in his pants, but you couldn’t tell him that. The SS knew everything-if you didn’t believe it, all you had to do was ask them.
“No thanks to you,” Lemp growled. If the pigdog had called him in to gloat about that, he’d … He didn’t know what he’d do. What could you do to an SS man that God hadn’t done already? “Have you got any other reasons for wasting my time today?” No, he wasn’t hiding distaste at all well, was he?
“Do not play games with me, Commander Lemp.” Lick. Blink. “The political situation is far more serious than it was when last we spoke.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Lemp replied. “I’ve been fighting the war since then. How about you?”
Anger turned the SS man’s bony, sallow cheeks almost the color of a normal human being’s. “I told you not to play games, Lemp.” Blink. He didn’t bother with the U-boat captain’s rank any more. “Unrest is abroad in the land, and it is my duty to stamp out that unrest wherever it raises its ugly head. Believe me, I will do my duty.”
“I’m trying to do mine, too,” Lemp said. “If you help the Reich lose the war, is that doing your precious duty?”
“Stamping out unrest will help the National Socialist Grossdeutsches Reich win the war.” Blink. “Now. Let us get down to business. Who in your crew is from in or near the rebellious city of Münster?”
“Rebellious?” Lemp said.
“That’s right. Rebellious. In a state of resistance against the authority of the National Socialist Grossdeutsches Reich.” The SS man brought out the clumsy phrase as if it were one normal people used every day. He punctuated it with another blink, then continued, “Answer my question, Lemp. Who in your crew is from Münster or close by?”
“You already took Nehring away for coming from around there and getting letters from his kin, didn’t you?” Lemp said.
The look the blackshirt sent him was colder than winter water in the Barents Sea. “If you do not stop evading what I ask you, I promise”-lick-“you will be sorry. You have not the faintest idea of how sorry you will be.”
What occurred to Julius Lemp was With idiots like this in charge, no wonder Münster is up in arms. He didn’t say that; it would have landed him in water hotter than the SS man’s eyes were cold. What he did say was, “I’m not evading you, dammit. Except by their accents, I don’t know where they’re from, and I don’t care. All I know, and all I do care about, is who does what and how well he does it.”
“Your uncooperative attitude will be noted.” Blink.
“Oh, fuck your noting!” Lemp burst out. “If you want to know where they come from, go through their files. You don’t seem to have anything better to do with your time. I damn well do.” Visions of a perfumed blond Fräulein wearing a few wisps of silk capered lewdly across his brainpan. An officers’ brothel would be a lot more fun than this. So would almost anything this side of a depth-charge attack.
“I have already made note of your unsatisfactory attitude,” the SS man said.
“That’s nice,” Lemp answered blandly. “I suppose going out and fighting the war is what does it to me.”
“I am fighting the war against treason and betrayal!” The blackshirt wasn’t doing a lizard impression any more. Now he was really and truly steamed. The shrill fury in his voice showed it, too.
Lemp took off his cap. Even with it on, he looked less imposing than the Party functionary, because he didn’t bother with the spring stiffener. No U-boat skipper did. But the white cloth cover said he was a skipper. The grease stain on the cover said he did some real work in that cap. Whether the SS man could read those signals, he didn’t know.
Blink. “Get out of here!” the SS man said peevishly, as if Lemp had barged in without an invitation rather than in answer to a summons. Lemp got up and left before the fellow could change his mind. The brothel first, he decided, and then the officers’ club.
Arno Baatz had talked with Russian-speaking Germans whose job was to intercept and translate Red Army radio messages. The Ivans had crappy security. They sent way too much in clear. The guys who monitored their signals said that when they started talking about the Devil’s grandfather or his aunty, things had got screwed up but good.
Right this minute, Baatz felt like talking about Satan’s second cousin once removed. Things in this part of Russia had got screwed up, all right, and they wouldn’t unscrew any time soon. Rain poured out of the sky. Arno had yet to see a paved road in Russia more than a few kilometers outside a big city.