A little stiffly, Beilharz said, “That safety valve is plenty reliable.”
“All right,” Lemp said in magnanimous tones. “We wouldn’t get flooded. We’d just have to learn to breathe diesel fumes instead.”
“That… can happen,” the engineering officer admitted. A good thing for him, too: Lemp might have pitched him off the conning tower and down into the pale gray sea had he tried to deny it. Still sounding like a maiden aunt talking about the facts of life, Beilharz went on, “That’s only possible with waves like these. When the water’s calmer, the snort behaves just fine.”
“I know. I know.” Lemp also knew the Schnorkel wasn’t the only thing with a slightly unreliable safety valve. Gerhart Beilharz had one, too. Since Lemp didn’t want it to stick and Beilharz to explode, he kept on soothing the tall junior engineering officer: “It’s very valuable most of the time. But you don’t want to use it when the seas run this high.”
That you was deliberate. Beilharz had made it plain he did want to use the snort now. Lemp made him think twice. At least he could think twice, which put him one up on a lot of people Lemp knew… and two up on some. With a sigh, Beilharz said, “When you put it that way, I guess you’re right.”
“Happens to everyone now and again.” If Lemp laughed at himself, he beat other people to the punch.
As usual, the ratings atop the conning tower swept sky and sea with their field glasses. The sky was cloudy, with a low ceiling. The sea’s mountains and chasms changed places without cease. The Ivans were unlikely to come across them till things moderated… which might be tomorrow and might be next spring. But unlikely didn’t mean impossible. The ratings stayed alert. They were solid men. Lemp didn’t have to get on them to make sure they stayed that way.
Having escaped one Russian plane, he didn’t want another one to run across him. He might not stay lucky twice. The Baltic wasn’t very deep or very wide, not when you set it alongside the Atlantic, but it had plenty of room to let a U-boat’s crushed hull disappear forever.
And if a Russian destroyer suddenly appeared out of seaspray and mist… In that case, Lemp would take the U-30 down as fast as she could go, and pray the Ivans’ depth charges didn’t peel her open like the key to a tin of sardines.
But the heavens stayed good and gloomy. That made enemy shipping harder to spot at any distance, but it also meant no Red Air Force planes were likely to swoop down on the U-boat. Given the choice, Lemp preferred the low, scudding clouds.
Gerhart Beilharz eyed the sky, too. His thoughts ran down a different track. “How bad will it get in the middle of winter if it’s already like this? Will we be able to operate at all? Or will the whole sea freeze solid?”
“Not the whole sea,” Lemp answered. “That doesn’t even happen up around Murmansk and Archangelsk, and they face on the Arctic Ocean, for heaven’s sake.”
The younger officer nodded, but he didn’t let go. “Oh, sure, Skipper. But they have the Gulf Stream going for them, so warm water flows up to them from the southwest. Without it, they’d probably be icebound all year around, not just in winter.”
“I wish they were. It would make our lives easier.” Lemp gave Beilharz a grudging nod. “Well, fair enough-you’ve got a point. But the Baltic doesn’t freeze all the way across. There will be ice on it some way out from shore, but the Ivans have icebreakers to clear the way for their U-boats when it’s at its worst. We can’t be rid of them so easily, however much I wish we could.”
“Too bad.” Beilharz grinned crookedly.
“Isn’t it just!” Lemp agreed. “Everything would be a lot easier if the enemy acted like a Dummkopf all the time.” Or if the people on our own side weren’t Dummkopfs themselves, more often than they ought to be. He sighed, wondering whether the Reich had been wise to get entangled with the Soviet Union. Most of Russia might be undeveloped, but that colossal sweep of red on the map remained intimidating.
Again, Beilharz’s thoughts ran in a different direction: “Now that we’ve patched things up with England, will the Royal Navy come into the Baltic and give us a hand against Ivan? Battleships, aircraft carriers, more U-boats… We sure could use ’em.”
“I know,” Lemp said. Germany’s only carrier, the Graf Zeppelin, remained incomplete and unlaunched. He wondered whether it would ever be finished and go into action, or if the powers that be would find better uses for all those thousands of tonnes of steel and order it broken up. That wasn’t for him to say. Hell’s bells-he couldn’t even give the Schnorkel man a straight answer. “If the limeys are coming this way, nobody’s told me about it. And now you know as much as I do.”
“It’d be nice if we found out ahead of time,” Beilharz said plaintively. “We shoot an eel at an English dreadnought by mistake, that won’t make ’em want to stay friendly with us.”
“No. It won’t.” Were the Baltic as cold as Julius Lemp’s voice, it would have frozen solid from surface to bottom on the instant, and never thawed out again afterwards. Lemp had already sunk one important ship by mistake. He didn’t even want to imagine another screwup so monumental.
Beilharz hadn’t joined the crew when the Athenia went down. The Schnorkel man had joined the crew, in no small measure, because the Athenia went down. And what they’d seen since! The failed putsch against the Fuhrer, with history playing out before their eyes to the accompaniment of machine-gun chords. And then the great reversal, so that machine guns stopped firing in the west and started up against the Reds.
Hitler had a lot to be proud of… if he could beat the Russians and make it stick. The last people who’d managed that were the Mongols. They’d done it a devil of a long time ago now. They’d stormed out of the east, too. Coming from the west, Germans, Austrians, Poles, Swedes, Turks, English and French together… everyone had failed.
Which didn’t mean the Reich and its shiny new Anglo-French alliance couldn’t succeed where everybody else had had to toss in the sponge. Of course it didn’t. Of course it doesn’t, Lemp told himself, thinking louder than he might have. The previous track record sure didn’t improve the odds, though.
Track record? On land these days, the track was muddy where it wasn’t frozen. The Wehrmacht and its allies kept gaining ground all the same. They just had to go on doing it, that was all. And the U-boats and the rest of the Kriegsmarine had to help.
Theo Hossbach wondered why he seemed to play football only when it was bloody cold. Here he was, standing in goal on another snow-streaked, bumpy pitch, watching his buddies and-this time-a bunch of Tommies pound up and down. They got warm. Running the way they did, they would have stayed warm at the South Pole.
He, by contrast, was freezing his ass off. A goalkeeper was often as much a spectator as the Germans and Englishmen watching-and betting on-the action from the sidelines. Well, he always had been more a detached observer than a participant in life. If you were going to play football at all, goalkeeper was about the best you could do along those lines, as radioman was if you happened to be part of a panzer division.
Sometimes the world came after you whether you wanted it to or not. A shell from an enemy panzer or antipanzer gun could smash through your armor unless you were good, or at least lucky (or was that lucky, or at least good?-no one seemed to know).
And sometimes a grinning Tommy in khaki dribbled past what were supposed to be your rear four defenders and drew back his leg to drive the ball into the net-they had proper goals this time, loot from a Russian school. Unlike an antipanzer round, he couldn’t blow you to smithereens. But he could humiliate you, which hurt almost as much and was far more public.
Make yourself big. That was what they told goalkeepers in trouble. Theo duly did it, running out at the Englishman to cut off the angle, waving his arms over his head, spreading his legs, and for good measure yelling at the top of his lungs. The Tommy shot. The ball banged off Theo’s left foot and slithered out of bounds for a corner kick.