In a dense, swirling fog, Krebs kept hurling invectives from the U-560’s tower. “Come on, you bastards! Show yourselves!”
“We’ve lost them, Kaleu,” Max said tiredly. “Let’s submerge. The men need sleep. So do I and so do you.”
Krebs, his dense beard coated with ice crystals, ignored his second-in-command. “Just show a shadow, that’s all I ask,” he snarled, but his voice was sucked away by the fog. Even the sea was muffled. He crashed his gloved hand on the rim of the tower fairing and cursed.
Max yawned, as if he were bored. When trying to convince Krebs of anything, he’d learned it was necessary to keep emotion out of his voice and his demeanor. “You know it’s tricky business up here,” he said reasonably. “The water is cold, and it can fool Pretch’s sound-detection gear. Those propeller sounds he heard could have been a hundred miles away. Anyway, that was sixteen hours ago.”
Krebs raised his nose to the air. “Can’t you smell the ships, Max? I can. They’re all around us. I can feel them, too.”
Max fell silent. He’d done his best. And he felt nothing except the bone-chilling wind that cut through every seam of his leather coveralls. Only the day before, the U-560 had been mercilessly battered by a Liberator bomber. After Krebs had come up with a brilliant tactic to avoid the first two depth charges, the next ones had holed one of the U-boat’s fuel tanks and blown gauges and air lines apart in the control room. God only knew how they’d survived the attack. Krebs, still gritting his teeth from the pain of a badly twisted knee, had taken hold of the situation and sent the sub on a wild, gyrating descent. More depth charges followed, but an aircraft’s advantage was lost after the first attack. If a U-boat could put some water between it and the sky, there was always a chance. With a captain like Krebs, the odds were even better.
To get his blood moving, Max made a tour of the tiny tower, checking to see that each lookout at least had his eyes open. It was probably too much to also expect them to be paying attention since they couldn’t see more than a few feet in the damnable fog. They were all nearly frozen by the bone-numbing Norwegian wind.
For his part, Krebs had taken enough aspirin to stop an elephant and drained his private store of schnapps until finally his twisted knee had gone numb. In any case, he wasn’t going to let his knee get in the way of his duty. Based on the excited chatter going back and forth from BdU, dozens of small convoys were streaming out of English ports, heading north. The British and the Russians had apparently decided to make a big push to get supplies to the Red Army. Admiral Doenitz had vectored in as many U-boats as possible into the Sea of Norway. Krebs’s boat had been kept the farthest south to serve as a trip wire. But nothing, since the first convoy, had been seen. There had only been continued frustration. And now all this goddamned fog!
Krebs sniffed the air. “Wait. I smell something. It smells like . . .” He stopped and considered the odor. It was sweet petroleum, slightly burnt. “There’s a destroyer out there,” he said, so softly no one on the tower heard him. “Max?” he called.
“Yes, sir?”
“Take the boys below. Chief, take us down.”
But it was too late. In an instant, a ship plunged out of the fog, her bow aimed straight at them. One glance was all Max needed to identify it as a very angry English destroyer. “Chief, down, down!” Max roared.
“No!” Krebs barked. He flipped the lid of the voice tube to the engine room. “Hans, give me full turns! Chief, hard to starboard! And send the eighty-eight crew up here. Hurry!”
“Kaleu!” Max yelped. “We must dive!”
“Not enough time, Max.”
Max took another look and saw Krebs was right. There was a puff of smoke from the destroyer’s deck and an explosion erupted behind the U-560. Water pattered over the men on the tower. The next shell would probably be on top of them.
The deck gun crew scrambled out of the tower hatch and down to their piece, pulling out the barrel tampion, throwing a shell into the breech, and cranking it around toward the destroyer. These were old hands, practiced and quick.
“Wait, boys!” Krebs yelled at them. “Fire only on my command.” Another round whistled past, just missing the tower. The lookouts flattened themselves on deck. Then a few of them raised their heads, astonished that the captain and Leutnant Max were still standing as if nothing had happened. “Hard a port, Chief!” Krebs said. He was suddenly exuberant. “I’m going to hug that old English lion!”
Max clutched the rim of the tower fairing. What the hell was Krebs doing? But then another part of his mind, the analytical part, wondered how it was the British had managed to catch them. They’d been on a collision course as if they knew exactly where the U-560 was. But how was that possible in this fog?
Krebs maneuvered until the U-boat was bows-on with the destroyer. The English had stopped firing and Max realized why. Krebs had brought them in so close the destroyer crews couldn’t crank their guns low enough to hit them. But the U-560’s deck gun was perfectly leveled. Max could count the rivets on the destroyer as it flew past on an opposite heading. Startled faces popped along the rail above them. If any of them had a sidearm, he could have shot the U-boat crew as they sped past. But Krebs had completely surprised the English. The tables had been turned. He had them! “Give them hell, boys!” Krebs yelled. “Fire!”
There was only time for one round but it was well placed, pounding the destroyer in its fat stern. Max and all the men on the tower ducked as steel-plate shrapnel burst from the explosion. A man screamed, a lookout, and fell on his back. Max looked to see Winkler with a jagged shard of English steel stuck in his throat, a fountain of blood erupting around it. The other lookouts turned, goggle-eyed, frozen in shock.
Krebs glanced at Winkler and grimaced. “All right, boys,” he said as calmly as if it were part of the usual routine. “Let’s go below.” He called through the hatch. “Chief, take us down.” The lookouts pushed to get to the safety of the tower control room, dropping one by one below. Winkler was left lying in a spreading pool of gore.
The U-560 began to drop by the bow. The destroyer had stopped dead in the water. Her stern was on fire. From the top of her wheelhouse, machine guns opened up. Rounds pounded into the tower. Krebs ducked below the fairing, careful to protect his knee. One of the eighty-eight crew fell clambering up the tower ladder. At first, Max thought the man had slipped in Winkler’s blood but then saw he was clutching his arm, blood streaming through his fingers. A ricochet had caught him.
Krebs crawled over beside Winkler. The man’s eyes were open, wide and staring, but still had a spark of life to them. When Krebs took his hand, it was soft, and cold. “You did well today, Winkler,” he said. “You did your duty.” Krebs looked up and saw Max. “Number One, help me with this man.”
A shell from the destroyer shrieked over the narrow U-boat stern and exploded. The British, though still adrift, had gotten the U-560 back into the sights of their big guns. Max and Krebs grasped Winkler under his arms and gently handed him down. Another round whistled in, this one so close Max thought he could feel its hot breath. When it exploded, it sent him flying into the tower fairing. Dazed, he searched for the pain of wounds or broken bones. He looked up to find Krebs beside him. “Really, Max. All those gymnastics at your age!” Krebs dragged him to the hatch.
Dully, Max knew that it must have murdered Krebs’s knee to put both their weight on it. “Am I dying?”
“Just the wind knocked out of you, I think,” Krebs answered through gritted teeth.
Krebs was the last man down, descending the ladder by hopping on one foot to save his knee. He pulled the hatch shut and threw over the latch just as the water closed over the U-boat. Winkler, lying on the floor near the attack periscope, made a horrible, gurgling sound, then stopped gasping. Men who had knelt around him stood up and moved away. The smell of his blood, like hot iron, filled the control room.
“Down to twenty meters, Herr Kaleu,” the Chief announced in a formal voice.
“Let’s take a look at the enemy,” Krebs said. He stiffly lowered himself onto the periscope tractor seat, reversed his cap to get the brim out of the way, and pushed his face into the eyepiece. He swiveled the periscope and ran it up and down. “Fog. It’s all I see.”
“Engines are up on the destroyer,” Pretch called from the sound closet. “She’s maneuvering.”
“Take us down to sixty meters, Chief,” Krebs said. He lowered the periscope and took a towel from someone and wiped his face. The towel came away smeared with the scarlet streaks of Winkler’s blood. “We’re going to catch hell from that destroyer up there, I suppose.” He looked around at the eighty-eight crew. “But our boys gave the English a kick in their ass as we went by, didn’t you?”
The deck gun crew grinned at their commander but the others in the control room kept their worried expressions. They anxiously craned their faces toward the surface as if they could make out the destroyer coming after them. All they saw, of course, was grimy, rusted steel.
Max crawled over to Winkler and closed the man’s eyes. “We must clean up the blood,” he said, but before anyone could respond, the first depth charge detonated. The U-560 rang as if it were a bell suddenly struck by a great hammer. It lurched over on its starboard side, then rocked violently back. The crew in the control tower shouted and held on as they were lashed and whipsawed by a dozen more explosions. Some men closed their eyes, their lips moving in silent prayer. Others cursed. All found any kind of protrusion, a stanchion or a wheel, and clung to it as if it might save them.
Krebs kept his voice low and steady. “Rig for silent running, Chief, and take us to ninety meters.” He took off his white captain’s cap, splattered with blood, and ran a hand through his greasy, reddish brown hair, and toted up the odds while hell descended on his boat. Every eye was on him, each man filled with desperate hope that Krebs would come up with something yet again to save them.
Krebs ran his eyes across his boys and saw their fear. Then he had a startling revelation. Radar. It had to be aboard that destroyer to find them in the middle of that miserable fog. And if a small destroyer had radar, then that meant the English were putting the sets on every antisubmarine ship they had. If that was so, it was only a matter of time for the Unterseeboot. Each of them was going to be picked off, one by one. Radar would seek them out on the surface and ASDIC beneath the waves. There would be no place to hide. The revelation was so startling, it must have registered on his face. “Kaleu,” one of eighty-eight crewmen said, “shall we make it this time?”
“We’ll make it,” Krebs said confidently. “Don’t you worry. We’ll make it and then I’m going to take all you boys home.”
As their U-boat writhed in agony from the bombs exploding all around them, the men of the U-560 stopped praying and cursing and instead cheered. Max had to smile. Krebs had said exactly the right thing at the right time. Talk about Fingerspitzengefühl. “Home” had been the word the crew most needed to hear. All they had to do was survive one more terrible attack and that’s where they were going because Krebs had told them so. “Hoorah for our Kaleu!” someone yelled as the word spread throughout the boat. Then the entire crew picked up the cheer and added, “Hoorah for the fatherland! Hoorah for home!”
Max did not cheer. Instead, he listened in amazement and smelled blood in his nostrils. Surely, he thought, we are all insane.