The following morning headquarters sent another message ordering Lorenz to attack once again, but this time he was to target only the escorts. Lorenz suspected that more U-boats were on the way and that it had been decided that the convoy’s heavy defenses should be weakened prior to their arrival. The moon coasted between patches of cloud and laminated the waves with silver. A clot of shadow was observed on the port bow and as U-330 drew nearer the ill-defined shape became increasingly recognizable as a Flower-class corvette. Falk was standing behind the aiming device, eager to repair his injured pride. The fact that he had missed the steamer the previous day had made him somewhat nervous and irritable. Lorenz caught his eye and said calmly, ‘We’re not in a hurry.’ Falk nodded before peering through the lenses.
A fitful breeze brought with it the smell of diesel fumes and a hint of bacon. Lorenz couldn’t help thinking, as he always did, of ordinary sailors sitting around a breakfast table, talking about nothing in particular and drinking tea. The corvette was over sixty meters long, sitting low in the water, with a blockish superstructure situated just in front of a conspicuously high central funnel.
‘How many tons?’ asked Pullman.
‘Just over nine hundred,’ Lorenz replied. ‘Four-inch deck gun, Asdic. It’ll be quite fast — sixteen knots — perhaps more.’
Falk had already begun his numerical incantations: range, bearing, speed, torpedo-speed, angle of dispersion…
Suddenly a flare ignited in the sky above them. The faces of the men on the bridge became vivid and white, the unnatural, brilliant white of rice-powdered geisha girls or clowns in a circus.
‘Shit!’ said Juhl.
Müller threw his head back and gazed up into the sizzling glare. It looked like a vengeful archangel descending from the heavens. ‘Someone aboard that ship has very good eyesight,’ he muttered.
Falk fired two torpedoes, and Lorenz shouted into the communications pipe, ‘Hard about. Reverse course, full speed.’ An enormous explosion followed and where the corvette had formerly floated there was now a column of flame rising up to an extraordinary height. Its size and vertical energy suggested the handiwork of a minor god. They could feel the heat of the conflagration on their cheeks and hear the roaring of rapid, chemical transformations — the vaporization of iron and flesh, the sound of something becoming nothing. Lorenz considered the number of warships in their vicinity and the brightness of the flaming column. The conning tower would be highly visible. Leaning over the hatch he shouted ‘Alarm!’
U-330 descended at a fifteen-degree angle, traveling at five knots. At twenty meters Lorenz said, ‘Rudder, hard over to starboard.’ The boat accelerated to seven and a half knots. ‘Level out at thirty meters, Chief — silent speed.’
‘Planes at zero,’ said Graf.
After a few more course-changes, Lorenz ordered the boat up to periscope depth. The corvette was still burning, and in the distance he could see another flickering red light. The work of U-689, he supposed.
‘Let’s just circle around here,’ said Lorenz to Graf. ‘One of the other escorts will come along soon enough looking for survivors. It’s getting light now so we’ll be able to mount a submerged attack.’ As he said these words Lorenz was sickened by the moral turpitude of war. It felt cowardly to attack a rescue ship, even more so given that it was extremely unlikely that any of the British crew could have escaped the inferno he had witnessed. Ordinarily he would have ordered their stealthy departure. But this was a joint operation, and if word got back to headquarters that he had acted in a way incompatible with the mission’s objectives then there would be consequences.
After only twenty minutes a large, heavily armed destroyer appeared. Lorenz offered the periscope to Graf whose pensive grumbles eventually became intelligible: ‘Must be two thousand tons.’
‘I think it’s a Tribal,’ said Lorenz.
‘Yes,’ Graf agreed. ‘Automatic mountings and substantial anti-aircraft armaments. A real beauty.’
Lorenz climbed into the conning tower and sat at the attack periscope. After switching on the motor he raised the ‘stalk’ and applied pressure to the pedals with the balls of his feet. He swung around to the left, and then to the right, until the burning corvette came into view. The huge column of flame had been replaced by a roughly equivalent volume of black smoke. Leaning off the saddle he called into the control room, ‘Ten degrees starboard.’ Falk was already tapping the dials and buttons of the computer, performing his preparatory rituals.
The wind changed direction and the column of smoke leaned toward U-330. It collapsed onto the water like a demolished building.
‘Damn!’ Lorenz growled.
‘What?’ asked Falk.
‘I can’t see anything. There’s too much smoke. We’ll have to wait for it to clear.’ After several minutes the situation had not improved. A solid black cliff was traveling across the crests and troughs, and if the wind continued to assist its progress the periscope would soon be enveloped and blinded.
Graf called up: ‘Lehmann can hear propellers, getting louder.’
Lorenz depressed the right pedal and rotated the saddle a full 360 degrees. Smoke — empty horizon — smoke. There were no enemy vessels approaching from behind.
‘Getting louder,’ Graf called again.
A grey V-shaped bow cut through the cliff face and suddenly the destroyer was plowing toward them at high speed. Lorenz was momentarily stunned. Surely the British lookouts hadn’t spotted the periscope hood through the smoke. That was impossible! Yet the destroyer’s course was direct. Was U-330 leaking oil? Had a passing aircraft reported their location? If they didn’t get out the way quickly they would be rammed and sliced open.
Lorenz snapped out of his confused state and shouted, ‘Destroyer! Hard a-port, take her down to thirty!’
The boat began its descent, and Lorenz and Falk dropped into the control room. Almost immediately there were splashes and detonations. As the boat leveled, Lorenz climbed through the forward hatchway and stood next to Lehmann. The hydrophone operator had his eyes closed and he was not turning his wheel. Aware that Lorenz was standing next to him he said, ‘They’re following us.’
‘We must be leaking, chief,’ said Lorenz. Graf whispered some orders and two seamen removed their boots and went off in opposite directions. Lorenz passed through the hatchway again. ‘Hard a-port, another ten meters. A Tribal has a top speed of thirty-five knots. Losing it isn’t going to be easy.’
At first, the sound of the destroyer’s propellers could be heard through the hull as a soft, rhythmic patter, but a swift crescendo soon amplified this distant, fluid rattle into a brazen declaration of formidable propulsive power. Each revolution suggested the cyclonic movement of vast quantities of water. Every man on board checked the flow of his breath. The destroyer’s underwater detection system filled the air with transparent, gelid pulses. Lorenz watched Falk reach out to touch the ‘lucky’ flower they had cut from the ball gown at the beginning of their patrol. It was no longer bright yellow, but a repellent brown color, soiled by smuts from the fire and repeated fondling with filthy fingers. This particular talisman hadn’t brought them much luck, Lorenz reflected, and Falk’s pathetic, naive gesture emphasized the terrible extremity of their predicament. Men were biting their knuckles, cowed, already reduced to quivering helplessness. A faint acridity in the nostrils betrayed private terror, fear so great that it stripped a man of his dignity and returned him to the nursery. Splashes — then ticking. Time slowed and it seemed to Lorenz that he was standing next to a prodigiously resonant clock. He gripped the valve wheel above his head with both hands and readied himself for the inevitable.