The quartermaster sergeant eyed him in amused admiration. “Beats me that you didn’t talk him into it, ’cause you’re good, you know? You’re wasted as a Marine. You should be back in the States writing toothpaste commercials.”
“If I could get back to the States, I wouldn’t care what I was doing,” Pete replied. “When I climbed onto Tern Island from the launch before I flew here, a guy in there with me kissed the pier because he’d been seasick. Put me back in America and I’d lay a big, wet smack on the first ground I touched, too. Bet your ass I would.”
“So would I,” Lindholm said. “So would everybody here.”
“So send in whatever paperwork you need for some hookers,” Pete said. “Maybe they’ll send ’em. Even if they tell you no, how are you worse off?”
The quartermaster sergeant thought that over. Then he started to laugh. “I was going to say, because they’d call me Horny Vincent Lindholm or something like that-the nut who put in an order for dames. But what the hell difference does it make, y’know? Long as I’m stuck on this goddamn island, who cares what they call me?”
He duly sent in the requisition, for ten blondes, ten brunettes, and ten redheads. It came back rejected in record time, with a stern warning against wasting any more of the War Department’s precious time with facetious requisitions. He had to go all over Midway before he finally found a bookish Marine who knew what facetious meant.
“They thought I was kidding,” he told Pete. “Kidding! Can you believe it?”
“Old fools,” Pete said. “They haven’t screwed in so long, they don’t remember what the urge is like.”
He did. Remember was all he could do, though. He had no idea when or if the old men who ran things would ever let him off Midway. In the meantime, there he stayed, on a sandy speck in the middle of the world’s vastest sea. Forever or twenty minutes longer, whichever came first. That was sure how it looked.
Julius Lemp stared with something approaching religious adoration at the U-boat tied up alongside one of the piers in Kiel. “Himmeldonnerwetter!” he whispered. “If we’d had a few dozen of these when the war started, we would have swept the Royal Navy out of the North Sea and the Atlantic and starved England into surrendering in about three months.”
Kapitän zur See Rochus Mauer looked pleased. He was a very senior engineering officer, a man who, in his own words, fought the war with a slashing slide rule. “Yes, the Type XXI is a whole different kind of boat,” he said. “It takes performance to a new level.”
“I’ll bet it does!” Lemp exclaimed. “The jump between my Type VII and this is about like the one from a Panzer II to a Tiger, isn’t it?”
“Well, something like that, perhaps.” By the way Captain Mauer purred, Lemp would have bet he’d had a lot to do with the Type XXI’s design.
If so, he had plenty to be proud of. The new boat’s hull and conning tower were almost perfectly streamlined. The tower had a couple of 30mm gun turrets, one abaft the periscope and the other forward of it, so the boat could shoot at airplanes. Other than that, it was all metal with curves as sweet as a woman’s. No projecting deck gun. No angles anywhere. It would slide through the water like a shark.
“Tell me again about the performance,” Lemp said, as if he wanted to hear a particularly juicy dirty story once more.
“Speed on the surface is pretty much what you’re used to-about sixteen knots,” Mauer replied. “But that shape and the extra batteries we’ve loaded into the hull will gave you the same speed underwater. And if you stay below five knots, the enemy’s listening devices won’t be able to hear the engines.”
“It’s-gorgeous.” Yes, Lemp might have been talking about a leggy chorus girl. He was head over heels, all right.
And he might get to have his way with a Type XXI, if not this boat then another one coming off the slips. The diesels that drove the U-boat on the surface and charged the batteries breathed through a Schnorkel. Not a single living skipper in the German Navy had more Schnorkel experience than one Julius Lemp. He’d fallen into a pile of shit when he sank the American Athenia by mistake, but now at last he’d grown out of it. And here he was, smelling like a rose.
“If only we could have had them even a couple of years ago,” he said, longing in his voice.
“We-the development team-had worked out the proper hull form by then,” Captain Mauer said. “But Dr. Walther had come up with a new hydrogen peroxide-powered engine that would have been wonderful … if only it worked better and didn’t catch fire whenever you looked at it sideways.”
“That doesn’t sound so good,” Lemp said.
“That wasn’t so good. A U-boat with one of those engines in it was about as dangerous to itself as it was to the Royal Navy. The development team pointed this out to the powers that be. But Dr. Walther had political connections with people in the government. And so”-Mauer looked disgusted-“we wasted two years on boats with good hulls and death-trap propulsion systems.”
“I hope we won’t have to put up with that kind of nonsense any more,” Lemp said. Despite the brave words, he couldn’t help glancing up into the sky. The Luftwaffe, the most Nazified service in the Wehrmacht, kept fighting the Salvation Committee along with the SS and some diehard Army and Navy men. Bavaria was still a bloody mess, with Nuremberg and Munich remaining in Nazi hands.
“It would be nice if we didn’t,” Captain Mauer agreed. He’d worked for Hitler till the Führer got killed-maybe not always happily, but he had. So had an awful lot of other Germans. Lemp wanted to forget that he’d been one of them himself. He wanted to, but he hadn’t managed it yet.
“I wonder what other little toys we might have had sooner if the Party hadn’t kept pissing in the soup,” he said.
Mauer started talking about airplane engines-talking with great enthusiasm and more technical knowledge than Lemp would have expected from somebody who specialized in designing U-boats. Lemp wasn’t a bad technical man himself; a skipper had to know how his boat worked. He soon saw that he was outclassed, though. He did gather that the new engines could fly a plane without a propeller, and fly it faster than any prop could manage.
“A lovely application of engineering and physics-lovely!” Yes, Mauer was an enthusiast, all right. Of course, the other side had its own enthusiasts. Lemp remembered Admiral Dönitz’s worries that sending Type VIIs out to sea was tantamount to murder because the limeys hunted them down so well.
He also wondered what would have happened had the Bolsheviks, not Germany’s own generals, overthrown Hitler. He guessed Captain Mauer would have gone right on planning new and improved U-boats for the Reds … as long as they didn’t shoot him for being a right-wing reactionary. He was one of those people who didn’t care whom they worked for if they got to work at all.
And what about you? Lemp asked himself. Could he have taken a U-boat to sea flying the red flag of Communism? If the other choice was that firing squad, he suspected he could have. But he would have noticed more about his new masters than how they helped or hindered what he wanted to do anyhow.
He hoped he would have.
How could you know? Once you asked the question, the answer seemed obvious. The only way you could know was by finding out. He hadn’t just been willing to serve under the Nazis. He’d been eager. They promised glory. They promised promotions. They promised victory.
And if they’d delivered on everything they promised, chances were he’d still be eagerly serving under them to this day. Of course, if Stalin had delivered on everything the Russian Revolution promised, plenty of Soviet citizens wouldn’t have greeted the oncoming Germans with bread and salt and welcomed them as liberators.