"Torpedoes ready?" Lemp called into the speaking tube that led to the bow. The boat had an electrically powered intercom, but nothing could go wrong with the tube.
"Yes, Skipper. Four eels loaded and ready to swim." The answer came back by the same route. It sounded brassy but perfectly comprehensible.
"All right. Won't be long." Lemp fed speeds and angles to Klaus Hammerstein. The exec turned them into a firing solution. The camouflaged destroyer swelled in the periscope's reticulated field of view. She went right on shelling whatever shore target had raised her ire. No sudden evasive moves, no sign she had the faintest idea death and ruin were slipping up on her. Things were supposed to work that way. They seldom did. Every once in a while, though…
He got within a kilometer. He could have have fired at her without Hammerstein's calculations, but he was glad he had them. The Englishmen went right on with their shore bombardment. Lemp turned the periscope all about, walking in a circle there under the conning tower. No, no one was sneaking up on him.
"Fire one!" he barked. "Fire two!"
Wham!… Wham! The eels shot out of the tubes. Running time to the destroyer was a little more than a minute. Lemp watched the wakes. Both torpedoes ran straight and true. That didn't happen every time, either. Now… How long before the Englishmen saw what was coming at them? Would they have time enough for evasive action?
As the seconds ticked off, that became less and less likely. The destroyer showed sudden urgent smoke… bare seconds before the first eel slammed into her, just abaft the beam. The second hit a moment later, up near the bow. Over and through the deep rumbles of the explosions, the crew whooped and cheered.
Destroyers weren't armored. They depended on speed to keep them out of harm's way. When speed failed, they were hideously vulnerable. The first hit would have been plenty to sink that ship.
"Back's broken," Lemp reported, watching the enemy's death agonies through the periscope. "She won't stay afloat long."
"She's not far from shore. Some of her crew may make it," Lieutenant Hammerstein said. "Our boys on land can scoop them up when they take Trondheim."
Lemp didn't answer. Even in summer, the North Sea was bloody cold. He wouldn't want to have to swim ashore, with or without a life ring. He didn't think the destroyer would be able to launch her boats. Those might have given the limey sailors a fighting chance to live. If the exec wanted to imagine he hadn't just helped kill a couple of hundred men, he could. Lemp knew better.
He spoke to the helmsman: "Give me course 305, Peter. We don't want to stick around, do we?"
"Folks up top might not be real happy with us if we do," the petty officer agreed. "Course 305 it is." He swung the U-boat around to the north and west, away from the Norwegian coast.
"Break out the beer!" somebody yelled. They kept some on board to celebrate sinkings and other notable events. It wouldn't be cold-the U-boat had no refrigerator-but no one would complain.
Lemp swung the periscope around through 360 degrees again. No hunters. Only ocean and the ever more distant shore. He nodded to himself. "We got away with it," he said, and the sailors cheered some more. "And England and France won't get away with trying to take Norway away from us, or with stopping the Swedes from shipping their iron ore to us through Norwegian ports."
The crew didn't cheer about that. They weren't grand strategists. Neither was Lemp, but he had some notion of how important the iron ore was. The Baltic froze in the winter, the North Sea didn't. If the Swedes were going to keep shipping the stuff when the weather got cold, they'd have to do it through Norwegian ports: through ports the enemy couldn't interfere with. Well, the Reich was taking care of that, sure enough.
One more check. No, no other Royal Navy ships in the neighborhood. "Yes," he said. "Break out the beer!" Even inside a cramped, stinking steel tube, life was good. "OUR MISSION," Colonel Borisov announced, "is to bomb Warsaw."
Most of the pilots and copilots in the squadron just sat there and listened. Some of them nodded, as if in wisdom. Sergei Yaroslavsky sat tight like the rest. The less you showed, the less they could blame you for.
"Any questions before we carry out the mission?" the squadron commander asked.
"Excuse me, Comrade Colonel, but I have one." Of course that was Anastas Mouradian. He'd never fully mastered the fine art of keeping his mouth shut.
"Well? What is it?" Borisov growled. He never wanted questions.
"Warsaw is the capital of Poland. It is a large city. Are we supposed to bomb some special part of it, or do we let the explosives come down all over?" Mouradian asked.
Borisov glared at him. Yaroslavsky wondered why-it was a perfectly good question. Maybe that was why. "The orders transmitted to me say 'Warsaw,'" the colonel answered. "They give no more detail. We shall bomb Warsaw-with your gracious permission, of course, Comrade Lieutenant."
"Oh, it's all right with me, sir," Mouradian answered, ignoring Colonel Borisov's heavy-handed sarcasm. "I just wanted to make sure of what was required of us."
"What is required of you is to do as you are told," Borisov said. "Now you have been told. Go do it, all of you." The meeting broke up immediately after that. There didn't seem to be anything left to say.
"Well, well," Mouradian remarked as he and Sergei strode toward their SB-2. The Chimp was already watching the armorers as they bombed up the plane. "Warsaw. How about that?" He sounded bright and cheerful. Maybe that was maskirovka: camouflage. Then again, maybe he'd gone out of his mind.
"As many antiaircraft guns as the Poles can beg, borrow, or steal," Yaroslavsky said. "All the fighter planes they've got that still fly. As many Messerschmitts as the Germans can spare."
"Now, Sergei, how many times have I told you?-if you're going to piss and moan about every little thing, you'll never get anywhere." The Armenian reached over and patted him on his stubbled cheek, as if he were a little boy fretting about hobgoblins under the bed. Sergei spluttered. What else could he do?
Ivan Kuchkov had already got the word, even if he wasn't at Borisov's meeting. "Warsaw, huh?" he said cheerfully. "About fucking time, if you want to know what I think. Time to start hitting those Polish cocksuckers where they live. Then they'll know better than to dick around with us."
What would he do without mat? He probably wouldn't be able to talk at all. Sergei waited till the armorers had finished their work, then climbed into the cockpit. He and Anastas ran through the preflight checklists. The engines fired up right away. He eyed the gauges. Things looked better than usual. They would, he thought darkly. He waited his turn to take off. The SB-2 seemed eager to fly. Would it be so eager to come back to the Motherland? He could only hope.
"One thing," Mouradian said consolingly as they took their place in the formation. "It's a big target. Borisov can't very well gig us for missing."
"Well," Sergei said, "no. He can gig us for getting killed, though."
"We won't have to listen to him if he does." Anastas seemed to think that was good news. He was welcome to his opinion.
The Poles and Germans were still holding the Red Army east of Warsaw. The line wasn't too different from the one Marshal Pilsudski's forces had held in the fighting after the Revolution. The stakes were higher now, though. The Soviet Union had already punished Poland then. Poland hadn't threatened the peasants' and workers' paradise any more. Smigly-Ridz's Poland and Hitler's Germany now… That was a different story. Hitler's Germany threatened everything it could reach, and its arms seemed to stretch like octopus tentacles.