The two divers had seen graphs depicting the depth, putting New York’s Empire State building on the bottom for comparison alongside Paris’ Eiffel Tower and Toronto’s CN Tower—all dwarfed to the size of a needle. It was a miracle that Robert Ballard had ever found Titanic, and even more of a marvel that he’d managed to locate the Bismarck in 1989 at such depths. All thanks to the advanced underwater sonar developed by the US Navy.
The exterior lights flickered, came back on and held, causing the men to gasp as a swarm of krill suddenly engulfed the sub. The swarm had to number in the trillions, the cloud a thick mask blotting out all else.
“Damn, it’s like a white out in the Ukraine!” shouted Ryne, who’d spent some time there.
Horst nodded. “Like a million diamonds blinking down on—” Caught in mid-sentence, the implosion of Blitzmariner instantly killed the three men aboard, the two German divers and George Fleet, the Netherlands-born salvage operator who was at the controls. It happened so fast, they did not have time to see or even feel their own deaths.
Above on radar the men of Victory realized that the submarine had slammed into Bismarck’s hull like an airplane hitting a mountainside. The krill had blinded Fleet long enough for the Bismarck to kill them all.
At the surface, everyone aboard the Victory—an oceangoing scientific and salvage ship monitoring the sub’s progress sat in stunned silence, aghast, knowing the expedition was now over, doomed to failure before it had truly gotten underway. One man had noted the sudden cloud on the radar screen that had engulfed the submarine with the three men inside her. The incident occurred with the suddenness of a storm at sea. At the last possible moment, Fleet, steering the sub, had shouted out a single word into his headset, something heard above: “Whale!”
Where there was krill, there were whales gorging themselves.
Fleet, ironically the same name as the man who’d first spotted the iceberg that Titanic had hit, had most likely—though no one would ever know for certain—cut away from the whale or whales to avoid a catastrophic collision only to crash instead into the Bismarck—the only whale-sized object below made of metal. Hardly the soft landing planned by the team, and a sure end to the entire expedition.
Chapter Two
On the day after Adolf Hitler had been aboard Bismarck, Erwin Hulsing stood in the area where Hitler had addressed the seamen of Bismarck. He was halfway up a set of stairs leading to Admiral Lutjens’ quarters when he noticed the door hidden in dark shadow. This was the same door where Hitler had re-emerged to inspect the crew after his earlier visit with the admiral now bathed in darkness. Erwin stared at the doorway for a long time as he thought he saw something move there, but no he was alone. He chalked it up to looking through the smoke from his fast-burning, Turkish cigarette. He’d picked up the smokes in Poland at a dingy little shop, bought them while the ship awaited orders. He’d wandered the cramped and narrow streets of the Polish town of Gotenhafen. As he did so, he had sized up the Polish people—bakers, beer-makers, sausage grinders, comparing them to the people of his homeland and to the people of Great Britain, who he’d met while attending Oxford University. What he found most odd in Poland except for the monster battleship in the harbor, was the sheer lack of any sign in Gotenhafen that a war was even going on.
Erwin’s thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a hatchway opening and the approach of an officer’s boots over the metal catwalk. Heinrich Dobberhagen joined him at the starboard side of the ship near the bridge, begging for a smoke.
“They’re absolutely black,” Erwin warned, shaking a single cigarette from its pack, handing it to Dobberhagen, and lighting it for the seaman.
“Are you off duty?”
“What do you think?”
The sound of laughter between them wafted across the water, but it was quickly drowned out by Bismarck’s cutting through the waves as it moved in and out of the Balkan Islands, creating a frothy wake along with the roar. They’d made good time and were already out of the tricky straits between Germany and Sweden. They’d soon be in the North Sea, followed by the Denmark Straits, and from to the North Atlantic.
“So peaceful aboard at night here; did I catch you looking out over the sea?” asked Dobberhagen.
“I love the being at sea. Can’t stand all the time we spend in port, especially that town we just left.” Erwin took a deep drag on his cigarette and shook his head. “Thought I’d go out of my mind; I was that bored.”
“At least you had the engines to tend to. That bastard Hessman had me on 12-hour shift.”
“Painting the camouflage, I saw. It’s not right that a junior officer should be put on such duty. Why does he have it in for you?”
“He’s an ass, and I guess he knows that I know he’s an ass.”
“Ahhh, yes,that would definitely make you fair game, but at least now you get to play with the Marconi.” Dobberhagen was one of several radiomen who rotated in the nearby radio room.
“We all sent off messages to home. Me, I sent one—just one—to my girlfriend, Greta.”
“And I’m guessing you were the one caught?”
“Yes, afraid so. How ’bout you? Did you get a message off?”
“Yeah, sure,” Erwin lied. He had no one to send a message to, but Dobberhagen, who lived up to his profession as communicator, would have it all over the ship if he told him he had no one back home. His grandfather had died in ’38, and his mother had contracted a horrible disease that took her far too quickly—a brain cancer. She died pleading for her husband to end her life. She attempted several suicides until she was successful. She left a note asking that she be cremated and her ashes spread over the ocean, but his father, in the end, could not grant such a wish, and she was buried at the cemetery beside the church in the meadow near their home. Erwin was only glad that she was now out of pain and together with her parents in eternity, buried alongside them. Meanwhile, his father was in a cell in Berlin, placed there by the damnable SS, suspected of sedition.
Part of the old home’s tree-studded acreage had been sold to pay off a series of bad debts, the last being his mother’s funeral costs. Next Erwin had lost a good portion of the family estate to the Nazi Party, confiscated ‘for the good of the Third Reich’, but more so due to his father’s politics. In recent years, much of the Hulsing family estate had been turned into a Hitler Youth camp where young boys and girls were ‘properly raised’ in the understanding of the Nazi Party. Many such camps were popping up all over Germany—the children being taken from their parents and placed on farms and fed a daily dose of propaganda. Erwin had thought it wrong then, and his beliefs hadn’t changed since. By this time, many of the boys who had been raised in the Hitler Youth movement were now enlisted in Hitler’s land and naval forces.
“Did you see the size of that box of oranges that Herr Hitler brought to the Admiral?” asked Dobberhagen in a near whisper. “Imagine it, getting a present like that from our Fuhrer.”
“Yeah, I saw it. Hell, everyone of consequence saw it. We all saw the damn oranges, but don’t expect any to trickle down to you, Dobberhagen.”
“I think we have oranges in the galley, just not like those; I mean given to you from—”
“I get it, der Fuhrer, der Fuhrer—some special oranges. Maybe he irrigated them personally with his own piss.”