Beilharz went on talking: “Nice to get up here every once in a while-not just for the fresh air, but so I don’t have to worry about banging my stupid head.”
“You’re not tall enough to bump it on the sky,” Lemp agreed. He went on swinging his binoculars through their automatic arc. He had no trouble carrying on a conversation at the same time without getting distracted. A U-boat skipper who couldn’t do several things at once would quickly discover he wasn’t up to filling the role.
“Everywhere else, though,” Beilharz said. Everywhere certainly included the U-30’s pressure hull. The inside of the steel cigar seemed cramped even to men below average height. The passageway was barely wide enough for two sailors to squeeze past each other. Getting through the four circular pressure doors inside the boat’s hull was an exercise in gymnastics. And all sorts of pipes and fittings, many of them with points or sharp edges, hung down from the top of the cylinder.
You could easily gash your scalp even if you weren’t tall. All you had to do was hurry or just be careless for a moment. Every patrol, the pharmacist’s mate sewed up several cuts like that.
Even barefoot, there were two meters of Gerhart Beilharz. He was too big a sardine to fit well into his tin. He had to fold up like a carpenter’s ruler to sleep in an officer’s bunk. (As captain of the U-30, Julius Lemp boasted a cabin-a tiny cabin-to himself, complete with a cot. He was the only man aboard who did. Anywhere else, the space would have seemed claustrophobic: it was, for instance, much smaller than a jail cell. It remained the height of luxury on the U-boat.)
Beilharz couldn’t hurt himself while he was asleep, not unless he fell out of the bunk. Awake and on the move, though … Hurrying forward and aft in an apelike stoop wasn’t enough to save his noggin from the slings and arrows of outrageous ironmongery. Whenever he went below, he wore a Stahlhelm. That protected his cranium, at the cost of occasional repairs to ceiling fixtures when he forgot to duck.
One of the ratings on watch with Lemp tapped him on the arm. “Skipper, I think there’s something off to the northwest-bearing about 295.”
“Ach, so?” Lemp came to a hunter’s alertness. “Here’s hoping you’re right, Rolf. Been a quiet cruise so far.” He swung his own field glasses a little north of west. He frowned as he studied the horizon. “Something … maybe.” Mounted on an iron post on the conning tower was a pair of larger, stronger binoculars. He peered through them. The frown lines got deeper. “Looks like a diesel plume, I think-one a lot like ours.”
“Another U-boat?” Rolf and Lieutenant Beilharz asked the same thing at the same time. You didn’t need to solve crossword puzzles or read detective stories to jump to that conclusion.
Lemp nodded. “That’s my guess. First thing we have to do is make sure it’s not one of ours. Nobody else is supposed to be in the neighborhood, but you can never count on that stuff. If it’s not, we’ll sink the steel turd.”
“I couldn’t see the hull-only the exhaust,” Rolf said.
“Same here, even with the big glasses.” Lemp nodded again. “Let’s go below. We’ll take her down to Schnorkel depth and get in closer to find out what we’ve got. It’ll be a lot easier for us to see them than for them to spot us.”
Bootsoles clattered on the steel rungs of the ladder down to the pressure chamber. Lemp was the last man off the tower. He closed the hatch behind him and dogged it tight. Water gurgled into the ballast tanks. Beilharz raised the Schnorkel tube as Lemp raised the periscope.
“Snort behaving?” Lemp asked.
“Sure is, Skipper,” the engineering officer answered.
They chugged toward the other U-boat at seven knots. Lemp peered through the periscope. He had to be sure before he loosed an eel or two. No career would survive sinking a Kriegsmarine U-boat.
Whatever the other boat was, no one aboard it had any idea he was stalking it. He soon became sure it wasn’t a Type VII like his own or one of the large Type IXs. They didn’t have that smooth bump at the bow. As he recognized it, excitement tingled through him.
“It’s an English U-boat, a Type S or maybe a Type T,” he said. They were bigger than his boat, about the size of a Type IX-and that bow bump let them carry ten forward torpedo tubes, which made them very bad news if they found you first. But they hadn’t, not this time. Lemp went on, “I can see … Ja, I can see the White Ensign flying from the conning tower. And they don’t know we’re around.”
He began setting up the problem, juggling speeds and courses and angles. It was almost like a training exercise-except that in a training exercise the quarry wouldn’t dive and start stalking him if it realized it was being hunted. Leopards didn’t usually hunt other leopards through the jungle. If one took another by surprise, though …
His heart thudded with tension as they slid up to firing range. An alert seaman on the Royal Navy submarine was bound to spot the snort and the periscope … wasn’t he? Lemp ordered the Schnorkel taken down. They’d do the rest on the batteries.
He launched two torpedoes. Away they whooshed on charges of compressed air. They had about a kilometer to run. They’d gone a little more than half that distance when the enemy U-boat began a sudden, frantic turn. One eel missed the target, but Lemp watched the other strike it in the stern-square in the engine room, in other words.
The English boat went down in a twinkling. The German U-boat men didn’t celebrate the way they usually did when they sank an enemy vessel. They seemed uncommonly subdued.
Lemp wasn’t surprised. He felt the same way. A tiny swing of luck, and the English boat might have sunk them. They’d done what they had to do, but they weren’t proud of it.
Chapter 21
Sarah Bruck was peeling turnips when the air-raid sirens began to shrill. She looked at her mother. “Are they crazy?” she said. “It’s one in the afternoon.” The RAF never came over Munster in broad daylight. Hanna Goldman shrugged. “Maybe it’s a drill.”
“Then the people who run the drills are crazy,” Sarah said. When she started thinking about it, that didn’t seem at all unlikely to her. They were Nazis, so they might well be meshuggeh.
But, through the sirens’ warble, she soon heard the drone of aircraft engines overhead. She and her mother lay down under the dining-room table: not much protection, but the best they could do.
Bombs whistled down on their city. After a couple of minutes, flak guns all over Munster thundered to irate life. Sarah thought she understood the reason for the delay. The gun crews wouldn’t have been standing by their weapons in broad daylight, the way they did at night. They would no more have expected a daylight raid than Sarah had.
Whether they’d expected one or not, they’d got one. She thought some of the engines roaring up there high in the sky belonged to Luftwaffe fighters, not bombers from England. She didn’t know what to feel about that. Like the gunners, they supported the regime that tormented her and the rest of Germany’s Jews. But they were trying to drive away the English pilots dropping bombs on her head. One of the young Englishmen up there right now might have dropped the bomb that had killed her husband and his family.
So shouldn’t she hope a German pilot in a Messerschmitt shot down that Englishman? An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth? The way things were going, a blind world would gum its food from now until eternity.
A great crashing roar shook the house and rattled the windows. That wasn’t a bomb going off; that was a plane’s whole bomb load blowing up at once as it smashed to earth. At least one fighter pilot or flak-gun crew had scored a success. No more than a minute later, another bomber crashed down a little farther away.