“Except dolphins fucking,” someone muttered quietly.
“What was that,” Sieinski shrieked, his eyes roaming madly around the control room.
“We were spotted from the air by a German plane,” Stefan said.
“How do you know? He could be lying.”
Stefan shook his head. “By the time a destroyer got close enough, we wouldn’t have needed hydrophones to hear her screws. And she would have dropped multiple charges, not just one.”
Sieinski’s face fell, his mouth opened like a fish gulping for air.
“A plane? How was that possible? We must not be as deep as I ordered…” He glared in Eryk’s direction.
“No sir, we were in the exact location you specified,” Stefan said.
“Then what was it?” Sieinski demanded.
“Rotten luck?” Squeaky volunteered.
There was a suppressed giggle from one of the boys at the helm. Dangerous territory, this, Stefan thought. The captain was already damaging himself in front of his men. What little authority he had was being tattered like an old flag in a gale. And anything Stefan could say wouldn’t help the matter. If he explained about the clarity of the Baltic this time of year, it would only make the captain look even more the fool. And if truth be told, it wouldn’t do Stefan any good, either. After all, he knew better, knew they weren’t deep enough. And yet, he had done nothing. If they were killed by one of depth charges, the fault would be his alone. His pettiness might be the death of this boat.
“He’s probably right, captain,” Stefan added evenly. “Just a fluke that the plane happened over our position with the sun at just the right angle so that our shadow on the bottom was visible.”
Sieinski glanced around the control room. All eyes except Stefan’s were averted. He wasn’t so sick that he didn’t suspect something else was going on, but he couldn’t identify it. Not at the moment. He nodded slowly. “So, fill me in, Mr. Petrofski.”
“We’re underway,” Stefan said, “heading for deeper water. No doubt the plane has notified the Kriegsmarine of our location. We should be able to avoid detection.”
There was another detonation, shouts of alarm from somewhere forward. Thankfully, Stefan thought, the woman, Kate, was keeping quiet. But, of course, he wouldn’t expect her to scream, not from something like this. She was tough, that one. Lights flickered again, glass dials on the green board shattered. A stream of water arced across the control room, hitting Sieinski right in the chest. He shrieked with outrage, hopped to the side. Eryk jumped up and cranked a valve closed. The leak shortened and then died out altogether.
“Take us deeper,” shouted the captain, dabbing at blood that had suddenly begun leaking from one of his nostrils.
Eryk looked at his watch, shook his head.
“Not yet, sir, another…” Stefan cautioned. He glanced at Eryk, who flashed two fingers.
“Another two minutes, and then we can dive deeper.”
Sieinski clenched his jaws and nodded.
Even for Stefan, it was the longest two minutes of his life. Each second seemed to mosey on by as if it had all the time in the world before it had to give way to the next. Unlike the rest of the crew, he had experienced depth charges before. But those had been training exercises designed to simulate a depth charge attack, not actually kill the submarine below. The officers running the simulation had made sure that all the cans were dropped at a safe distance away from the submerged submarine. No sense trying to be too realistic and damaging a boat or worse. This was something entirely new. The sudden assault that shook the submarine like a child beating his rattle against a rock, the roar echoing throughout the boat, turning your mind and senses into mush. The roller coaster torment of waiting for the next blast. Another sudden, nerve-shattering explosion. A brief moment of wonder, listening for screams and the roar of ocean water spewing into the ship like blood from a punctured artery. And then a surge of exhilaration at your survival extinguished almost immediately by the fear of the next explosion, and the next one. Everyone kept count. The men in the planes above wanted nothing more than the destruction of the Eagle and the sixty-five human beings inhabiting her insides. They tried six times. And then a break that stretched into a half minute, and longer.
When Eryk nodded, Stefan ordered the Eagle deeper and called another course correction.
While the captain watched silently, Stefan hollered, “Anything, Ears?”
“No, sir. No contacts,” came the response from the sound room.
Sieinski blew out his cheeks, holding onto the pipes to keep from collapsing. “Well, that’s good news,” he said with shaky voice. “Let’s run for a few hours,” he ordered gruffly, gathering himself, reasserting his position, “and then find a safer place to wait until nightfall. I don’t want to get too far off station.” Sieinski didn’t wait around. He turned and shuffled like an old man back to his bed.
“Aye, aye, sir,” Stefan said. He glanced around the control room. Minor damage. A few leaks, broken glass, cracked dials. It could have been worse, much worse. And it would have been his fault. The only fool on this boat was him; that was for sure. He clenched his right hand into a fist. Next time, he wouldn’t stay quiet, even if it meant challenging the captain directly in front of the men. No sense obeying orders that got them all killed. He would have to use all his meager skills to make sure it didn’t get that far. Unfortunately, finessing senior officers had never been one of his strong suits. He wasn’t optimistic about how he would do with Sieinski. The man was obviously coming unhinged. It couldn’t all be blamed on the blow to the head. No one really knew how a man would act under stress. Now they were about to find out, not only with Sieinski, but the rest of the crew, as well.
In a perverse way, however, Stefan knew that the attack hadn’t been a bad thing. It had gotten the crew’s attention, given them their first taste of battle. They must all do their jobs or they would die. It was that simple.
Stefan noticed the seaman at the helm who had peed himself glancing furtively in his direction. “Back in sixty seconds,” Stefan said, pointing a thumb over his shoulder. The boy scrambled out of his seat, and ducked down the passageway toward the bow, trying and failing to hide the stain on front of his pants with his hands.
Squeaky grinned wickedly. His voice boomed through the control room and after the boy. “Hey, Lubomir, don’t forget to bring back a diaper.”
There was a smattering of nervous laughter. Even Stefan had to smile. They had survived. And learned something in the process. It could have been worse, much worse.
“Find us a safe place to rest this time,” Stefan said.
“Aye, aye,” Eryk intoned.
“At nightfall, we return the favor.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
“A word with you, Captain?” Ritter tapped his knuckles on the bulkhead outside Sieinski’s closet-sized quarters.
The Eagle had been quiet for an hour, cradled in a bed of silt 80 meters from the surface of the Baltic this time. Around the vessel, the various stations were manned by a skeleton crew. Everyone else resting up for the long night to come, no longer aware of the cocktail of fetid smells so thick it almost made the air visible: the stink of unwashed bodies, ripening bananas, mold, urine, smoked meats, chlorine, excrement, diesel fumes. With humidity at 100 percent, everything was damp with condensation running down the walls and sporadically dropping from the ceiling like rain in a tropical forest.
“Enter,” came the listless response.