“Hard right rudder,” Paul the helmsman answered, sounding calmer than he probably was. “Down past twenty-five meters, now thirty …”
Wham! The first depth charge staggered Lemp. Light bulbs blew out with pops that sounded too much like gunshots. The U-boat shuddered as if it had just taken a body blow from Max Schmeling. Sailors swore when the explosion flung them into some of the boat’s many sharp projections.
Wham! There was another one-farther away than the first, and not quite so horrific. The U-Boat lost a few more bulbs, but only a few. Lemp dared breathe again. He’d guessed right. And he didn’t think a Swordfish carried more than two depth charges.
Now, would the pilot loiter to see if he could machine-gun a surfacing submarine? To say Lemp didn’t want the pressure hull colandered proved the power of understatement.
“Bring us down to all ahead one-quarter,” he told Paul, who relayed the order back to the engine room. “And take us up to periscope depth. I want to see what’s going on upstairs before we come up for air.”
He swept the periscope around in a complete circle. At the very edge of visibility, he spotted the Stringbag flying away. It had done what it could do. The crew wouldn’t know whether they’d damaged the U-boat or not. They would know they had to get back to their carrier to rearm before they went out on another patrol.
That thought sparked another one in Lemp as the plane vanished over his short horizon. He noted its course. “Raise the Schnorkel,” he ordered. “I want eight knots at Schnorkel depth. Paul, turn us to course 320.” That was more or less northwest, and the direction in which the Swordfish had flown away. “Maybe they’ll lead us back to where they came from.”
“That’d be nice, eh, Skipper?” Paul swung the U-30 to the heading Lemp wanted. They exchanged sly grins. A U-boat couldn’t ask for a more important target than an aircraft carrier.
Sinking one just might get me promoted at last, or at least win me the Knight’s Cross, Lemp thought as the diesels roared to life and the familiar vibrations rose up through the soles of his shoes to fill him again. With the Athenia to blot his escutcheon, even sinking a carrier might not haul him up to lieutenant commander.
He knew he’d have to be lucky to get to launch a spread of eels. The carrier would have to be somewhere close by. And he’d have to find it in the vastness of the sea. Well, all he could do was try.
A rating brought him something from the galley: sliced tinned meat on sliced tinned bread. It was the body’s diesel oil. He fueled mechanically. The less he thought about what he was swallowing, the better.
He turned the periscope back and forth, back and forth, sweeping as wide an arc as he could. He didn’t expect to see anything for quite a while. (He didn’t really expect to see anything at all, but you had to go through the motions as if you did. They would have been in the soup for sure if that rating hadn’t spotted the Swordfish.) Patience paid. Patience always paid, even if it didn’t always get its reward.
No way to know what course the carrier was steaming. No way to know how far off it was. Darkness came early in these latitudes at this season. If it put paid to his search … I’ll go out into the Atlantic and hunt freighters. What else can I do?
Back and forth. Back and-Lemp stopped swinging the periscope. Something stuck up on the horizon. “I will be damned,” he whispered. Then he spoke aloud: “Change course to 295, Paul. And I want eleven knots from the engines.”
The engines weren’t the problem. When the U-boat made much over eight knots at Schnorkel depth, though, it shook as if it were coming to pieces. But if that was the carrier, and if he was going to have any chance at all to hit it … Things started rattling as speed picked up.
It was the carrier. It loomed out of the water like an enormous cliff. A pair of destroyers shepherded their charge. Both sent out pings from their dangerous new fancy hydrophones. Neither was close, though, and neither changed course as if catching an echo from the U-30.
Lemp wanted to sneak within a thousand meters of the carrier before firing his torpedoes. What you wanted and what you got turned out differently too damn often in this world. He had to shoot the eels from a kilometer and a half. Aiming got harder. The target was smaller. Travel time stretched. If the limeys were alert, they might be able to turn away.
They started to. One torpedo missed, but two struck home: one at the bow, the other back toward the stern. The carrier began listing and settling in the water right away. Lemp could see she wouldn’t stay afloat.
He didn’t need to see that the destroyers would do their best to pay him back for shooting their big friend. Their pinging picked up. They might have the torpedo wakes to guide them toward him. He dove deep and steered near the sinking carrier. Let all the noise coming from that shattered ship confuse their detecting gear.
It must have worked. The destroyers dropped depth charges, but none near him. When the U-30 surfaced after sundown, it was in the middle of a broad, empty ocean. Lemp ordered a bottle of beer for every crewman from the crates the boat carried for celebrations. The first depth charge had smashed some of the bottles, but there were still plenty left. And how the ratings cheered him!
Peggy Druce delicately turned the radio dial. All of a sudden, she heard Edward R. Murrow’s voice, and there was London, right in her living room. The wonders of living in modern times! A set that could get shortwave transmissions brought the whole world to your door.
“The British Admiralty has confirmed the loss of the Ark Royal northeast of Scotland,” Murrow said mournfully. “German naval authorities claimed the sinking yesterday, but the Germans, during this war, have claimed a good many things that later proved not to be true.”
That was slightly unfair. The Luftwaffe, from what Peggy had seen while she was in Europe, lied whenever its lips started moving. German land forces told lots of what they’d called stretchers in the old days, but you could usually tell what was in fact going on from what they said. And the Kriegsmarine, most of the time, stuck close to the facts.
“Loss of life on the torpedoed aircraft carrier is believed to be heavy,” Murrow went on. “Some sailors were killed while struggling in the water when the destroyers escorting the stricken carrier depth-charged the U-boat that had attacked it. There is no evidence the submarine was damaged.”
“Well, shit,” Peggy said. Alone in the big house, she could come out with whatever she pleased. For that matter, she could have come out with the same thing if Herb were home. The most he would have done was cluck. More likely, he would have laughed.
Static hisses and pops rode the shortwave signal. As long as Peggy could make out what Edward R. Murrow was saying, she didn’t mind. In fact, she liked the noise. It reminded her how far away the American broadcaster was.
“England eyes the American Congressional elections with more worry than usual,” Murrow said. “Gains by the isolationist wings of the two parties could make the USA concentrate on the war in the Pacific and slow efforts to keep Europe’s democracies supplied with the arms they need to boost the fight against the totalitarian powers.
“And that supply is vitally necessary if England and France are to continue the struggle. Many here and more across the Channel were happier with their stitched-up peace with Germany than they are at the moment.”