No matter what your view of things political was, though, you couldn’t afford to seem lukewarm about the powers that be, not in the Third Reich you couldn’t. Five arms shot out in unison across the table from him, each with more gold at the cuff than he’d ever wear. Five throats chorused, “Heil Hitler!” No one was perceptibly behind anyone else.
The rear admiral produced two small, hinged imitation-leather boxes from his briefcase and shoved them across the table at Lemp. “Here are your new shoulder boards, with the appropriate pips, and here are the new stripes for your sleeves. Congratulations. Belated congratulations, maybe, but congratulations even so-Lieutenant Commander Lemp.”
“Danke schon, mein Herr.” Dazedly, Lemp took the boxes. Each was stamped in gold leaf with the Kriegsmarine’s eagle-which, like the Army’s and the Luftwaffe’s, clutched a swastika in its claws. He stowed them in the jacket’s pockets: pockets he hardly ever used. When he put it on, he’d found a ticket stub in an inside pocket from a film he’d seen before the war started.
“Have we got anything we really need to know about U-30’s latest patrol right this minute, gentlemen?” the rear admiral asked his colleagues. His tone warned that they’d damned well better not. And they didn’t. He nodded once more, with an older man’s dour satisfaction, and gave his attention back to Lemp. “Sehr gut. You are dismissed. I hope you enjoy your liberty while the repair and replenishment crews go over your boat.”
“Danke schon,” Lemp repeated. Liberty! He hadn’t even thought about that. He’d have to go out and get drunk. Not only that, he’d have to get the whole crew drunk, from his exec and the engineering officers down to the lowliest “lords”: the junior seamen who bunked in the forward torpedo room.
How much would the carouse cost? More than the jump in pay from lieutenant to lieutenant commander brought in for a couple of months-Lemp was only too sure of that. Well, you couldn’t make an omelette without chocolate and powdered sugar and whipped cream. And it wasn’t as if a U-boat skipper who spent most of his time at sea got a lot of chances to throw his cash around. He could afford it. Whether he could afford it or not, he knew he had to do it.
He saluted the board again, this time with a proper military gesture rather than the one from the Party. Did the senior officers show a touch of relief when they gave back the same salute? If they did, Lemp didn’t have to notice, not today he didn’t.
His feet scarcely seemed to touch the ground as he walked back to his U-boat. Ratings and junior officers saluted him. He returned their gestures of respect and gave back his own to the handful of men he passed who outranked him. The journey from the board room to the boat was more than half a kilometer, but seemed to take no time at all.
That tall figure on the conning tower could only be Gerhart Beilharz. The Schnorkel expert greeted Lemp with an enormous grin, a salute-most unusual on a U-boat, where such surface-navy formalities went down the scupper-and the words, “Congratulations, Lieutenant Commander!”
Lemp gaped. “How the devil did you know, when I just now found out myself?”
Beilharz’s grin got wider. Lemp hadn’t thought it could. “Jungle telegraph, how else?” the younger man said.
And that was about the size of it. Lemp knew he’d never get anything that came closer to a straight answer. Nothing went faster than the speed of light … except gossip at a naval base. Maybe somebody from the repair crew had heard something and brought word to the boat. Or … Oh, who the hell cared?
The sailors who hadn’t yet headed out for the taverns and brothels of Wilhelmshaven made a point of shaking their skipper’s hand and thumping him on the back. “About time!” they said; several of them profanely embroidered on the theme.
They like me. They really like me, Lemp realized, more than a little surprised that they should. He knew himself well enough to know that he wasn’t an enormously likable man. His focus was too inward; he had next to nothing of the hail-fellow-well-met in him. And he was the skipper, the great god of his small, stinking world. You could respect a god. You could admire one or fear one. Loving one, despite what the preachers claimed and proclaimed, was a lot harder. Gods and mortals didn’t travel in the same social circles.
Except sometimes they did. Lemp gathered up the officers and ratings still aboard the U-30. “Come along with me, boys,” he said. “We’ll see how many crewmates we can gather up, too. I’m buying-till you head for the whorehouses, anyway.”
“Three cheers for Lieutenant Commander Lemp!” Peter shouted, and the sailors lustily followed the helmsman’s lead. Turning back to Lemp, Peter added, “You should get promoted more often, Skipper.”
“Damn right I should,” Lemp replied, which made his men laugh raucously. They hadn’t started drinking yet, so it must have been a good line for real.
Despite flak guns on rooftops and in parks and little squares, Wilhelmshaven had taken bomb damage. Of course a German naval base near the Dutch border would make a juicy target for the RAF. But the air pirates wouldn’t come over while brief winter day lit the landscape (not so brief here as it was up in the Baltic or, worse, the Barents Sea, where the sun stayed below the horizon for a long stretch around the solstice).
The men poured down beer and schnapps. Lemp bled banknotes. Well, he’d known he would. If he got plastered himself, he wouldn’t care … so much. He drank till his head started spinning. When the men sought pleasures even more basic than beer, Beilharz guided him to an officers’ maison de tolerance. Hearing that he was celebrating a promotion, the madam let him go upstairs with a pretty, round-faced young redhead for free.
“I’m a patriot, I am,” the madam declared. “Heil Hitler!”
“Heil!” Lemp echoed. He patted his girl on the backside. Before long, he’d salute her in a way older and more enjoyable than any Party rituals.
These days, leathernecks and swabbies aboard the Ranger walked soft around Pete McGill. It was a compliment of sorts, but one he could have done without. When you showed you could damn near kill a guy with your bare hands, naturally people on the carrier would notice. Just as naturally, they’d go out of their way to make sure you didn’t want to do unto them as you’d done unto Barney Klinsmann.
Barney was out of sick bay at last, and back on light duty. He still insisted he’d fallen down stairs. Nobody believed him, but the polite fiction kept Pete out of the brig.
Two new carriers had steamed to Pearl from the West Coast. They were both makeshifts. Their official title was escort carrier. Everybody called them baby flattops or sometimes jeep carriers, though. They were freighters with flight decks, was what they were. They could hold only half as many planes as a fleet carrier like Ranger, and they couldn’t make better than eighteen knots unless you dropped ’em off a cliff.
That was the bad news. The good news was, they were here now. New fleet carriers were supposed to be in the pipeline, but it hadn’t spit them out yet. They were expensive and complicated and slow to build. You could make baby flattops in a hurry. Okay, they had their drawbacks. Drawbacks or not, they let Uncle Sam fly more planes in the Pacific. Pete was all for anything that did that.
Bob Cullum pointed out another flaw the escort carriers had: “Goddamn things are ugly as sin.”
“Well, so are you, but the government still thinks you’re good for something.” Pete smiled when he said it-the other sergeant was senior to him. And he was just needling Cullum. He didn’t want to get into another fight. No one would have accused him of being a peaceable man, but he aimed as much of his rage as he could at the Japs.