The crew was staring at him with the rounded, protuberant eyes of nocturnal animals. Extreme terror had made them appear even younger than they did ordinarily. For a fleeting moment it seemed that the boat was being piloted by schoolchildren. Only Graf and Müller looked like adults. Several of the men were trembling, and one of them had bitten his lower lip so hard that his chin was now cleft by a glistening, crimson stripe. The seaman beneath the chart table had put his fingers in his ears. Even though Lorenz could feel fear gnawing away at his own innards, he adopted an air of indifference and remarked, ‘We’ll shake them off in the end, don’t you worry.’ The quality of his performance was vital. Under conditions of such appalling, unspeakable dread, anyone might snap and become hysterical. Lorenz had seen it happen.… Let me out, let me out! For God’s sake, let me out! Fortunately, there had never been an incident of this kind under his command. His men had always lived up to Dönitz’s ideaclass="underline" the community of fate — each component held in place by adjacent parts, the teeth of every cog locked into the rotation of another.
Lorenz remembered reading a story to his little niece and nephew. It was a gruesome tale but they had insisted that he continue even though they were obviously very frightened. Before switching off the light he had kissed their sweet-scented hair. ‘It’s only make-believe,’ he had reassured them. ‘Nothing bad will happen to you.’
More explosions brought him back to the present: a truly shocking tumult. A continent was breaking up above their heads, mountain ranges were crumbling into the sea, avalanches of rock were raising monstrous tsunamis. How could it go on for so long? How many drums was it possible to drop in a single location? A seaman in the bow compartment was vomiting into a bucket. The boat twisted like a living creature trying to free itself from the teeth of a trap; glass shattered and the submarine was plunged into darkness.
‘What’s happened to the auxiliary lights?’ Graf’s question was really a command. ‘Well?’
The sense of being entombed was overwhelming; the claustrophobic darkness pressed against their bodies, thickened in their windpipes, and clogged their airways. As the roaring subsided, flashlight beams appeared, one after another, sweeping through the void, crossing like swords and creating consoling roundels of visibility. Objects flashed into existence — the air compressor, the chart table, the main gyrocompass. Reports were made, one of which was instantly verified by the sound of gushing water. ‘Flooding in diesel compartment, request help.’ Lorenz crossed the control room and shone a flashlight through the aft hatchway. The petty officers’ quarters were empty; everyone who had been lying on the bunks had responded.
Although the boat was equipped with pumps, these could only be employed when the depth charges were exploding. As soon as the roaring stopped, the pumps would have to be switched off again or their noise would give away the boat’s location. If the boat admitted too much water it might grow too heavy. It would become impossible to surface, an increasingly likely possibility given that evading destruction would almost certainly require diving deeper. Lorenz consulted his mental model of the engagement and struggled to make a decision. He didn’t have much time — a few seconds, perhaps. The air smelled badly of oil, sweat, urine, and vomit. Wafts of chlorine, which meant that the batteries had been damaged, were much stronger by the aft hatchway. His order owed more to instinct than the exercise of judgement. ‘Down another fifteen meters, hard a’starboard.’
Graf aimed a beam of light at the manometer and issued commands that should have resulted in the boat leveling out after its descent, but the deck remained stubbornly angled. The hydroplane operators turned to look back at Graf, their eyes almost comically super-enlarged. Peering at the manometer needle, the engineer registered each fateful increase: One hundred and five, one hundred and ten, one hundred and fifteen, one hundred and twenty…
‘Are the dive planes jammed?’ Graf asked.
‘Not responding,’ one of the operators replied.
One hundred and twenty-five…
Graf placed a clenched fist against his mouth and withdrew it an instant later. ‘Switch to manual.’
The power-assisted system was switched off, and the hydroplane operators gripped their big, heavy wheels. Each movement was effortful.
One hundred and thirty, one hundred and thirty-five…
‘Please, please…’ Graf addressed the submarine as if it were sentient.
One hundred and forty, one hundred and forty-five…
Finally, the angle of the deck changed and the boat leveled off twenty-five meters lower than intended. The emergency lights began to glow and produced dull yellow halos. Some of the crew were on all fours while others had squeezed themselves into tight corners. A few of them, suddenly self-aware, began to stand, but before they were upright, they were all knocked off their feet again when the raging Titans returned. More dial covers shattered and an overhead lamp burst. Fragments of glass rained down on the matting. When the detonations stopped, the humming of the electric engines was lost beneath the hiss of continuous spraying.
‘Very tenacious,’ said Lorenz. The gaskets and seats of numerous valves had loosened and were letting in water. Countless rivulets were trickling into the bilges.
The control room mate had started to whisper a prayer.
Lorenz laid an avuncular hand on Danzer’s shoulder. ‘Think of it this way: back home, your coffin would have been cheap, a horrible little wooden box. This coffin costs four million marks. Kings settle for less.’
In spite of the gravity of the situation a few of the men managed to smile. Lorenz had to keep the confidence of his crew to retain his authority; he had to make them believe that he could think clearly even when the merciless, rolling thunder was at its loudest. He was obliged, like all commanders, to service the myth of his own infallibility. The beneficial effect of his bravado was brief. He watched the smiles fade as a strange, eerie sound penetrated the hull, a high-pitched, short pulse, the timbre of which suggested extreme, shivering cold. Its repetition felt like a form of psychic water-torture, every frigid note dropping like a shard of ice directly into the soul.
‘Asdic’ said Falk.
Although the British underwater detection system couldn’t determine depth, it could certainly determine bearing and distance.
‘Hard a’starboard,’ said Lorenz. ‘Both motors, full ahead.’
The barrage that followed was protracted and unimaginably violent. It left the crew stupefied, their faces devoid of expression. They had retreated so far into themselves that the connections between mind and body had become attenuated. There was only vacancy, blank staring — transcendent terror.
Lehmann craned out of his room. When he spoke, his voice quivered: ‘Sounds bearing two hundred and fifty degrees. Getting louder.’
The attack continued. It was no longer possible to distinguish one detonation from the next. Everyone was cowing now, expecting the boat to break in two, and the North Atlantic to rush in. The steel ribs were under so much pressure that they howled, hydraulic oil spouted across the control room, and all the motor relays tripped. A faint reverberation seemed to persist after the bombardment. Someone had the presence of mind to throw the relays back, and Lorenz reduced speed to dead slow.