Unhappily, Lemp shook his head. "Afraid not," he said, and then, "Prepare to surface."
Beilharz grunted as if the skipper had elbowed him in the pit of the stomach. The youngster wanted his pet miracle-worker to solve every problem the sea presented. Well, no matter what he wanted, he wouldn't get all of it. Lemp wanted to be taller and skinnier than he was. He wanted his hairline to quit receding, too-actually, he wanted it never to have started. He wasn't going to get everything his heart desired, either.
Compressed air drove seawater out of the ballast tanks. Up came the U-30. Lemp scrambled up the ladder and opened the conning-tower hatch. As always, fresh air, air that didn't stink, hit him like a slug of champagne.
He knew he would have to dive again soon no matter what. British binoculars weren't as good as the ones Zeiss made, but even so And he had ratings scan the sky to make sure they spotted enemy airplanes before anyone aboard the planes saw them. How close could U-30 cut it? That was always the question.
Then one of the petty officers yelped. "Airplane!" he squawked, sounding as pained as a dog with a stepped-on paw.
"Scheisse!" Lemp said crisply. Well, that settled that. "Go below. We'll dive." He knew the U-30 had no other choice. Shooting it out on the surface was a fight the sub was bound to lose. And if machine-gun bullets holed the pressure hull, she couldn't dive at all. In that case, it was auf wiedersehen, Vaterland.
The ratings tumbled down the hole one after another. Again, Lemp came last and closed the hatch behind him. The U-boat dove deep and fast. He hoped the plane hadn't spotted it, but he wasn't about to bet his life.
Sure as the devil, that splash was a depth charge going into the water. The damned Englishmen had a good notion of what a Type VII U-boat could do-the ash can burst at just about the right depth. But it was too far off to do more than rattle the submariners' teeth.
"Well, we're home free now," Lieutenant Beilharz said gaily.
"Like hell we are." Lemp had more experience. And, before very long, one of the warships from the convoy came over and started pinging with its underwater echo-locater. Sometimes that newfangled piece of machinery gave a surface ship a good fix on a submerged target. Sometimes it didn't. You never could tell.
Splash! Splash! More depth charges started down. Unlike an airplane, a destroyer carried them by the dozen. One burst close enough to stagger Lemp. The light bulb above his head burst with a pop. Somebody shouted as he fell over. Someone else called, "We've got a little leak aft!"
Lemp didn't need to give orders about that. The men would handle it. He waited tensely, wondering if the Englishmen up there would drop more explosives on his head. They were waiting, too: waiting to see what their first salvo had done. Only a little more than a hundred meters separated hunter and hunted. It might as well have been the distance from the earth to the moon.
Splash! Splash! Those sounded farther away. Lemp hoped he was hearing with his ears, not his pounding heart. The bursts rocked the U-30, but they were also farther off. Lemp let out a soft sigh of relief. They were probably going to make it.
And they did, even if they had to wait till after dark to surface. By then, of course, the convoy was long gone. The English had won the round, but the U-30 stayed in the game. VACLAV JEZEK POINTED to a loaf of bread. The French baker in Laon pointed to the price above it. The Czech soldier gave him money. The baker handed over the torpedo-shaped loaf. Jezek knew only a handful of French words, most of them vile. Sometimes you could make do without.
Off in the distance, German artillery rumbled. Vaclav started to flinch, then caught himself. If the Nazis were hitting Laon again, he would have heard shells screaming down before the boom of the guns reached his ears. They had plenty of other targets in these parts: a truth that didn't break his heart.
They hadn't got into Laon. Along with French, African, and English troops, most of a regiment's worth of Czech refugees helped keep them out. Vaclav had fought the Germans inside Czechoslovakia. He'd got interned in Poland, figuring that was a better bet than surrendering to the victorious Wehrmacht. And he'd gone to Romania and crossed the Mediterranean on the most rickety freighter ever built, just to get another chance to let the Germans kill him.
They hadn't managed that, either. He'd done some more damage to them, especially after he got his hands on an antitank rifle a Frenchman didn't need any more. The damned thing was almost as tall as he was. It weighed a tonne. But the rounds it fired, each as thick as a man's finger, really could pierce armor. Not all the time, but often enough. And what those rounds did to mere flesh and blood… Its bullets flew fast and flat, and they were accurate out past a kilometer and a half. Just the shock of impact could kill, even if the hit wasn't in a spot that would have been mortal to an ordinary rifle round.
The Germans hadn't got into Laon, but they'd knocked it about a good deal. Stukas had bombed the medieval cathedral to hell and gone. No using those towers as observation points, not any more. The Nazis had blasted the bejesus out of the ancient houses and winding streets up on the high ground, too. The lower, more modern, part of the city was in better shape-not that better meant good. Loaf under his arm, Vaclav trudged past a Citroen's burnt-out carcass.
He wore new French trousers, of a khaki not quite so dark as Czech uniforms used. His boots were also French, and better than the Czech clodhoppers he'd worn out. But his tunic, with its corporal's pips on his shoulder straps, remained Czech. And he liked his domed Czech helmet much better than the crested ones French troops wore: the steel seemed twice as thick.
He had the helmet strapped to his belt now. He didn't want that weight on his head unless he was up at the front. He smiled at a pretty girl coming past with a load of washing slung over her back in a bedsheet. She nodded with a small smile of her own, but only a small one. Vaclav was a tall, solid, fair man. When the French saw him, half the time they feared he was a German even if he did wear khaki. That he couldn't speak their language didn't help.
From behind Vaclav, someone did speak in French to the girl with the laundry. She sniffed, stuck her nose in the air, and stalked away. "Oh, well," the man said, this time in Czech, "they can't shoot me for trying. She was cute."
"She sure was, Sergeant," Jezek agreed.
Sergeant Benjamin Halevy was a Frenchman with parents from Czechoslovakia. Fluent in both languages, he served as liaison between the French and their allies. Parents from Czechoslovakia didn't exactly make him a Czech, though. His curly red hair and proud nose shouted his Jewishness to the world. Jew or not, he was a good soldier. Vaclav didn't love Jews, but he couldn't quarrel about that. And Halevy had even stronger reasons to hate the Nazis than he did himself.
Those German guns in the distance thundered again. Halevy frowned. "Wonder what the fuckers are up to," he said.
"They aren't shooting at me right now," Vaclav said. "As long as they aren't, they can do anything else they want."
"There you go. You're an old soldier, sure as shit," the sergeant said. Other guns started barking: French 75s. Halevy listened to them with a curious twisted smile. "I wish we had more heavy guns around Laon. We could hit the Nazis hard. They've got this long southern flank just waiting for us to take a bite out of it."
"That would be good," Vaclav said. Hitting the Nazis hard always sounded good to him. If only he were doing it in Czechoslovakia.
"Of course, by the time the brass sees the obvious and moves part of what we need into place for a half-assed attack, the Germans will have seen the light, too, and they'll hand us our heads," Halevy said.
Vaclav wondered if the Jew had been that cynical before he became a noncom. Whether Halevy had or not, what he came out with sounded all too likely to the Czech. "Maybe we ought to move up without waiting for the brass," Jezek said.