Suddenly, bubbles started rising to the surface, a lot of bubbles, and the water began moving, churning, frothing.

“It’s coming up!” Straub shouted. “Look there!”

And sure enough, a dark shape emerged from the depths, rising little by little into the space where the sunlight penetrated down into the water. The higher the shape rose, the more distinct it became, with a clearer outline and color. The bow. The forward deck gun. The tower. Finally, the deck—though not high enough to clear the waves.

It must have been damaged, because that was as far as the U-boat could surface. The hatch opened on the tower, and we saw hands first—raised hands as a German sailor climbed out and onto the deck, where he had to stand in a good foot of water. The waves continued to roll over the deck and around his legs, and the legs of the sailor who followed him, and the one after that and the one after that. Soon, the whole crew was standing, lined up with their hands in the air, and then the officers emerged.

They were directly port side of our ship. Half of our crew was perched along the rail, rifles and machine guns aimed and ready. Straub and I stayed with the big deck cannon, though we were too close to the sub to fire at it if anything happened.

Lieutenant Talley shouted something from the bridge—in German, which surprised me. I didn’t think any of us knew he spoke the language.

“Probably learned it in college,” Straub said.

Somebody told him to shut up so we could hear.

The captain kept speaking in German, and an officer, who I guess was the U-boat captain, answered him. I whispered to Straub, asking if he knew what they were saying, but he shook his head and whispered back that his parents didn’t want him to learn it. “Probably so they could talk about me when I was in the same room, but I wouldn’t know what they were saying,” he joked.

Somebody shushed him again.

Lieutenant Talley and the German officer talked for a while longer, and then a couple of the U-boat crew members broke ranks and climbed down the hatch back into the sub. They returned a few minutes later with one of their crew, clearly injured, strapped to a stretcher, and they handed him off to others on the deck. The sailors on deck couldn’t put the stretcher anywhere because of the waves, so they just held him there, swaying as the sub rocked, a couple of times scrambling to keep their balance. The injured submariner’s face was filthy with smoke or grease, and I wondered if he’d been in their engine room. It made me think of Woody.

The Germans brought up three more stretchers one by one, with more injured crew members. One was covered in blood, but at least he was still alive. There was a sheet pulled over the face of the last man they brought out. All the German sailors pulled off their caps and bowed their heads.

Half an hour later, the U-boat crew—all living except the one—were on board our ship, sitting in a tight circle near the stern, with several of our crew, me included, standing watch over them with our weapons. I felt important, but at the same time I also felt like I didn’t belong there, that I would never be able to shoot my rifle at anybody—and definitely not at any of the German U-boat crew, even knowing that they might have been the ones who sank one of our ships. They just looked young and scared.

The captain ordered water for them and we brought them water. He ordered food for them and we brought them the lousiest food we could find—stale bread, meat that was going bad, some black bananas. I didn’t feel sorry enough for them that I was going to give away anything very edible, especially since we had even more survivors on our side now we had to take care of.

The engineers got to work hooking cables from our stern to the bow of the sub so we could tow it back to Key West. But then we got a message to sink it instead. The navy didn’t want us to waste any more time on this voyage than we had to and risk being unnecessary targets for the remaining U-boats. We would take the prisoners with us.

A boarding party went over from our PC and stripped all the communications equipment along with any and everything else that might be useful. They might have also rifled through the German submariners’ personal effects, because later one guy showed me a wallet filled with German money, not that it was probably going to do him any good. Unless he thought Germany was going to win the war.

Once they finished and came back, the engineers cut the cables. Our PC backed off several hundred yards. Then the gunnery chief aimed the big gun and we fired—and missed.

Too high.

So we loaded another shell and fired again and missed again.

This time too low.

The third time we scored a direct hit and an enormous explosion split the U-boat in half. A couple of the German sailors gasped. Some shook their heads in what looked like despair. One even started silently weeping.

The U-boat sank faster than our cargo ship had a few hours earlier, but it was a lot smaller. In fact I was surprised at how small it was. In my mind, the one that attacked me and Danny had been gigantic, the size of a whale, like Moby Dick.

Just before we rejoined the convoy we got the good news: Everyone on the merchant ship had gotten off safely before it sank, though several were injured and needed medical treatment. The other cargo ships were now crowded, with the survivors mostly huddled on deck—the same as us with all our prisoners—but we cheered anyway. All the explosions, all the depth charges and the rockets and the shells and the torpedoes, and only one person, that German sailor with the sheet drawn over his face, had died.

“I think it’s a miracle,” Straub said.

Somebody else, one of the older guys on the crew, just laughed. “Wasn’t nothing but pure dumb luck,” he said. “Just pure dumb luck. Another time, another torpedo, another depth charge, another ten feet this way or that, and either we could have all been dead or they could have all been dead. You go along thinking your life is something so special—until you learn the hard truth that in war it just ain’t.”

*   *   *

The U-boats weren’t finished with us yet. The rest of the wolf pack kept following us up the Florida coast. We’d see traces of them—a glimpse of a periscope, the wake of one that just dove under, some faint pings on the sonar. They bided their time when we pulled into Jacksonville to drop off our prisoners and the cargo ship survivors. They were still out there when we left Jacksonville to continue on up the coast back to New York.

Another storm kept them away for a couple of days, but then it got calm again, and clear, with a full moon at night and no clouds, which meant we had to be more vigilant than ever as the convoy crawled slowly north.

We spotted one, gave chase, and lost it. One of the other PCs guarding the other side of the convoy chased U-boats twice, though they didn’t get close enough to fire cannon or launch rocket bombs or depth charges.

“How can they stay out so long?” I asked Chief Kerr. “I mean, don’t they have to refuel some time?”

It was a night watch and we were leaning on the rail below the bridge, feeling, more than seeing, the ocean splitting in two as the bow sliced through the water and waves rushed under and around us. There was a soft rolling motion that if I was in my bunk just then would have put me right to sleep, no matter how bad it smelled down there.

“I guess they didn’t teach you about the milch cows,” he said.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Special subs the Germans designed that they send out to rendezvous points around the Atlantic. They meet up with the wolf packs to refuel and rearm them with more torpedoes so they don’t have to go all the way back to their bases in Europe, which can take weeks. So, milch cows.”

Then he added, as if he didn’t think I could figure it out on my own, “Milch means ‘milk’ in German.”

We were running dark the way we always did at night, relying on visual contact to keep the ships from coming too close to one another—and hoping we were hidden well enough that the wolf pack wouldn’t be able to see us to aim and fire their torpedoes. But there was nothing we could do about the full moon, except keep to a zigzag course with the entire convoy. The problem with that was it slowed us down even more and might have even made us easier targets. But it was the ranking officer on one of the other PCs who got to make the decision and we followed it, though Chief Kerr kept spitting and cursing, not pleased with what we were doing.

“Full speed ahead is what I say,” he fumed. “Those cargo ships might not go fast, but they can sure go faster.”

Other than saying those things to me, though, I was pretty sure the chief kept his opinions to himself.