Where the torpedo struck below decks, fire was instantly smothered by sea. The explosion flared blazing-yellow along a swath of tearing, buckling steel. Against this bright horizon, the spy Kroger’s body was silhouetted as he hurtled back toward the watchers.
Alma, dazed by the blast, came to awareness in the top of a shattered crate. She lay crumpled against its cargo, the mini-submarine. She didn’t feel injured as she tried to move, just numb and sore—both at once, and all over. Dirk Kroger’s bulky body lay on top of her, pressing her bare skirted legs against the cold metal of the sub. The Dutchman wasn’t moving.
Beside them in the dimness, amid a tilting chaos of explosive flares, splintered wood and surging water, Matt appeared, wet and disheveled. He immediately began trying to lift the moaning, semi-conscious spy off her.
“Alma, are you hurt?” he said as he rolled the inert body clear. “Careful, don’t try to move too quickly.”
“I’m all right,” Alma said, struggling to get her bruised legs under her. “He’s alive?”
“Yes, but badly injured. He must have absorbed the blast and shielded us from it.”
As Matt took Kroger’s pistol out of his pocket and flung it away, Alma could see that his hand was smeared with blood.
“Dirk,” he asked, shaking the spy, “can you move?”
No reply, just a groan.
“What can we do?” Struggling up to her knees, Alma looked around the deepening chaos. She felt the ship tilting and saw foamy seawater rising, with chemical fires or ammo still flaring and gouting underneath the surface. Suddenly again she felt faint. “It’s all over, isn’t it?”
* * *
Matt, as he toiled to free Alma, saw the hopelessness of their position. But he couldn’t accept it.
Water surged in through the now-invisible hull breach, foaming and fountaining below them in the faint electric light that still burned from the top of the hold. Cold salty droplets sprayed up into their faces from the inflow. Worse, a nearby cavernous roaring told him that the sea must be filling the huge empty coal bunker just astern. Bad luck if the torpedo strike had penetrated both compartments, and God knew wherever else.
As he tried to help Alma to her feet, the ship steeply tilted, bringing the seething maelstrom up toward them all the faster. The lightest crates floated and tumbled in the flood, while other cargo ignited with churning flashes underwater. Likely it was the thousands of rifle cartridges cooking off after the main blast…harmlessly, or so he hoped.
“There has to be a way out,” he told Alma as she clung shell-shocked against him. “Come on, darling, let’s get going! We need to live to tell this story. It may be too late for Dirk.”
Suddenly, sickeningly, the submarine crate and its rounded contents moved beneath them, sliding down into the hungry abyss. As Lusitania’s list grew more severe, all the cargo shifted toward her wounded side, the hundreds of tons of metal and ammunition crushing and displacing any lighter goods. Above them the tethered ambulances strained and slid forward in their harnesses, striving to tear free and roll down the unstable slope.
Then just beside them, the largest and heaviest crate started to splinter. It was the bizarre metal monster, the weapon labeled Tank, nuzzling free and rearing up on massive treads. The steel prow, sharply pointed like a steam locomotive, crushed and parted the planking of the beast’s flimsy cage. Twin gun barrels broke out through the brittle top, emerging in their heavy casemates as the tracked wheels trundled forth onto the wreckage. The nearest chain of metal treads splintered deep into Matt and Alma’s crate. The behemoth threatened to smash it down into the flood, and them along with it.
But even as Matt clung to buckling wood and tried to pull Alma clear, a new menace caught his eye. Lightning flashes from the seething water flared up brighter than ever, blinding enough to paint the entire hold with stark shadows like a flash picture. Cargo cases were igniting underwater, letting off bursts of frothing white smoke.
“It’s the aluminum dust,” a voice gasped from beside Matt, where the reviving spy Kroger struggled up to a sitting position. “In seawater it can touch off the other explosives. Find cover!”
As he groaned out his warning, the wounded man rolled and dragged himself over to the open hatch of the mini-sub, to dive in through it out of sight. Matt, hardly thinking but alert to the danger, lifted Alma up bodily, led her forward and lowered her down after the spy.
As he turned to grab his camera bag, he glanced again at the underwater detonations. Outlined by their brilliance as they tumbled about in the flood were dozens of light, buoyant boxes—the cheese crates that Kroger had identified as gun cotton, high explosive and more dangerous when wet. Moving fast and shoving the camera bag ahead of him, Matt dove in after Alma through the open hatchway.
Landing on top of her, or Kroger or both in the near-total darkness, he reached up to close the circular hatch—just as its cover was blown shut by the shattering force of the second, larger explosion.
* * *
The rolling, hammering impact of the second blast was muted by the submarine’s hull, but the shock of it bruised Alma where her back touched hard metal. The glare lit up the thick glass portholes in the turret above her, fore and aft and to either side. But their light was quickly dimmed to the faintest outlines as seawater surged over them, lifting the tiny craft. As first she thought the frail shell would be crushed, but now it felt as if it was going to roll over.
“Alma, are you OK?” Matt had been reaching up, tightening the latches around the hatch lid. He must have succeeded, because the cold salty drops stopped streaming down into her face.
“I don’t know—I guess so. This motion is making me ill.”
Now in pitch dark she struggled to sit upright, rolling and bumping with the sub, which must be sliding free amid the wreckage. She felt Matt reach past her to delve into his satchel. When he found and switched on the battery lamp, its waning beam was enough to light the submarine’s interior. Matt’s haggard face brightened as he saw her—though she must be a fright, with wet hair across her face and seawater smarting in her eyes.
“What can we do?” she appealed to him. “Do we have to stay in here?”
“Well, we’ve made it so far,” he said, touching her damp head. He leaned forward to kiss her cheek in an obvious effort at reassurance. “Out of the frying pan into the…kettle.”
His joke fell flat as he shone the lamp beam on riveted metal all around them—a shiny oval prison, or so it seemed to her. She saw batteries beside them, and an electric motor behind, but the levers and gauges meant little to her, even though some were labeled in English: Depth, Ballast, Dive Angle.
“Matt, darling, what’s going to become of us?”
She clutched his shoulder, claustrophobic panic and hopelessness battling inside her as the metal capsule’s hull slid beneath them and clashed against some obstacle.
“For Gott’s sake, just get us out of here,” a third voice rasped…the wounded Kroger, who lay curled in the engineer’s seat behind them.
“Dirk, how are you doing?” Matt turned his beam on the stricken man. The shirtfront inside his open fur coat was bright with blood. “Can you breathe all right?”
“Yes, but it hurts,” the spy said, tentatively probing his own chest with bloody fingers. “Some ribs broken, I think. When that torpedo hit, rivets shot out of the hull like Spandau bullets.”
“Have you tried to stop the bleeding? Alma, do you know what to do?”
“Let me see.” Feeling suddenly useful, she squeezed past Matt in the cramped space. Here her training would help. Kneeling over the half-prone spy in the rear seat, she peeled back his shirt to examine his fleshy, hairy chest by the light of Matt’s flash. A wound in Dirk’s right breast oozed badly, but it wasn’t bubbling as he breathed, and he didn’t seem to be choking on blood. Probing gingerly and then applying pressure with her bare palm, she found no bone splinters or embedded metal.
“Turn on a light,” Kroger gasped in pain. “There’s power in those Galvanic cells, they’re a type I’ve never seen. Use the main switch.” He gestured feebly with his left arm.
“Here, you mean?” Matt asked from the front seat. He threw a switch, and immediately blinded them all with electric glare from a bulb set astern in a wire cage. Then he found a way to dim it. “Seems to be no lack of current.”
“Good then, use it to steer us out of here.” Kroger spoke brokenly as Alma, doubling up his bloody shirtwaist, applied gentle pressure to his chest wound. “Move the tiller forward for speed, left or right for the rudder. Arrgh, woman, enough!” he begged Alma, grasping her shoulder to ease the pressure.
“Here, then, Dirk, can you hold this in place yourself?” Alma guided his hand to the makeshift poultice and pressed it firmly there. “I have to cut a bandage.”
“Ach, that feels better! Here, use this.” Kroger dragged a pen knife out of his pants pocket with his free hand. Then he called, “Matt, set the gear lever for the dive planes, up or down! But don’t get us fouled up in wreckage.”
“How will I know where to go?” Glancing over her shoulder, Alma saw Matt peering through the glass apertures around his head in the turret. “I only see bubbles out there.”
“Try the outside lights, dummkopf,” Dirk snarled, irritable with pain, as Alma sawed at his shirt with the tiny knife blade. “The headlamps, dummy!”
“This one?” Trying another switch, Matt caused the forward view slit to light up visibly from outside the sub. “That works—we’re drifting free, or nearly so, submerged,” he reported to the others. “The ship’s hold is filling with water.”
Alma caught her breath. “We’re going down, then? The Lusitania is lost?” The realization felt like a bullet deep in her own chest. “What about our friends, Winnie and Flash, and…” She couldn’t hold back a sob as her eyes became suddenly wet. “The children and women aboard, all the men passengers too! What will happen to them?” As she shook away the hot tears, her grief turned to bitterness. “How could the Germans do this?”
“It was the verdammten munitions,” Kroger growled beneath her faltering hands. “The gun cotton and artillery shells, that’s what has blown the bottom out of your fine ship!” While arguing, he shifted in his seat to let her pull his shirtwaist clear. “Even if there was a torpedo—just one—that second blast was no German weapon!”
The cruel folly of it overcame her. “Oh, Dirk, even so,” she appealed to him, “how could your U-boats attack us?” Alma found that her bitterness didn’t keep her from caring for the patient, as she nicked the cleanest part of his shirt with a penknife and tore off a makeshift bandage. “You were ready to do the same thing,” she added, “or risk it at least, to blow up this submarine.”
“Enough now, Alma,” the spy pleaded. “What’s done is done. It’s a war, for Gott’s sake.”
Turning his attention forward, he called out, “Matt, what are you doing up there? Have you tried the throttle yet? If we cannot drive this boat out of here soon, we’re tot, dead!”
Alma worked on in silence, trying to contain her emotions. Mere moments ago she’d gotten over feeling trapped, doomed. Now suddenly she heard that all was lost, everything of value gone. What was the point?
Her patient at least, the German saboteur, looked as if he would survive, without a lung puncture or severe blood loss. But caught in the hold of a sinking ship, could any of them get out, much less help the others? Even the great Houdini would find this an impossible escape.
“Alma, can you tell me what you see? Look outside, here.”
Matt had been peering out through the portholes. Now Alma, after knotting the last bandage tight, shifted forward and put her head up beside his in the low turret, sharing the view. Out the narrow front glass slit, by the glare of the headlamps, she saw only the nose of the sub and jumbled crates. But through the right porthole, which Matt tapped with his finger, something else was visible.
It was a pale blue radiance the color of Neptune’s deeps—faint and ghostly, but real, as proven by the shapes of boxes and loose wreckage that tumbled toward it. Framed inside a crooked outline, the light dimmed and shaded to darkness as it fell away from its brightest part—the radiance of sun in shallow sea.
“I’m looking out through a hole in the hull,” she told Matt, feeling breathless with sudden hope. “The ship’s plating is blown open. A huge gap, and I can see daylight through it. It’s blue-green, and beautiful! If only we could…”
“That’s what I thought, dear. Well, hang onto something. I’ll try to get us out there.” Matt took hold of the sub’s tiller, his arm flexing up tautly against Alma’s side.
“Forward and up for power,” Kroger called out gruffly behind them. “Or back down, to reverse. Rudder right or left to turn. The propeller is set in a ring, so it shouldn’t be jammed.”
Alma edged aside to let Matt raise the throttle. Looking past Dirk to the rear of the sub, she could see the dynamo spark to life and the propeller shaft begin to spin. The inside lights dimmed and there was a churning sound, but no forward motion. The vessel barely twitched beneath them.
“I think we’re hung up on something,” Matt told the others, his low voice denying any hint of despair. “What should I do?”
“Ach, try the rudder,” Dirk growled. “If it won’t go forward, use reverse.”
Swinging the tiller firmly from side to side, Matt seemed to hit resistance on the left—the side from which the giant tank behemoth had been crushing into their crate. “Alma, help me with this,” he appealed to her.
When she put both of her hands on the metal pipe and they shoved together, she felt something give—loose planking, perhaps—and she could hear the propeller grinding against wood. Then, with a giddy lift, the small craft surged forward in the water.
“We’re free,” Matt said to exultant cries from both his shipmates. In joyful relief, Alma gave him a quick hug and kissed his cheek. But with a glance toward the right porthole he warned her, “We don’t dare lose sight of the hull breach, or we’ll get lost. What do you see?”
“I’m not sure,” she said, turning to wipe the fogged glass with her hand.
As Matt dimmed the headlamps to help, she could barely make out the rift. “It’s still there, but it’s fading and dropping away,” Her heart sank with the waning blue patch of light. “We must be going up in the hold.”
“The dive planes!” Kroger grunted as he raised himself to see from behind. “You have them set too high.”
“Right.” Constrained in the tight space, Matt said, “Alma, depress that lever.”
Reaching forward to the handgrip, she moved the tubular control down, feeling faint resistance from the water flowing outside. A pointer on a forward gear wheel showed what must be the fin settings.
“That’s good,” Matt urged her, “all the way down to thirty degrees.”
The pointer moved, but to her dismay she felt no change in the sub’s angle. “It’s not doing anything, is it?” she asked.
“More throttle,” Kroger rasped from behind, “to give the fins some bite, yes?”
Alma felt the sub level, but saw the light fading. “It’s no good, we’re still rising,” she said. “At this rate we’ll bob up to the top of the hold like a cork.”
“By now the hold is flooded,” Matt said. “No escaping up there.” Looking around, he gripped a valve wheel at one side. “What about Fill Ballast?” he called back to Kroger, reading from the painted placard. “Should I open up the tanks?”
“Nein, do not!” the spy yelped at once. “With the three of us in here we don’t need more weight. This boat is made for two, and I am no featherweight! If you make us any heavier, we’ll never see the surface again! Just do as they do in the U-boats–shift your weight forward and bring down the nose. Alma, go to the front—get along, there’s a good fraulein!”
In the emergency, Alma ignored the German’s brisk pat on her rump as she moved to comply. It wasn’t easy in the cramped space, but she ended up perched on one knee, leaning forward against the dive control. Matt huddled close against her, their recent intimacy a help. But his voice in her ear was grim and urgent.
“No good, we’re still rising! Not enough weight for’ard. Alma, you take the controls.” He shifted behind her, letting her ease into the driver’s seat. As he hunched forward, she felt the nose dip slightly more.
“Fine, now give it some throttle,” Kroger instructed from behind. “You steer with fins and rudder, not like a motorcar.”
“Good thing I never drove a car,” Alma said, pressing the tiller forward.
Better than any dial pointer was the surge and dip of the sub’s nose, and the brightness outside confirmed—they were diving.
“Excellent,” Kroger said as he eased his bandaged bulk astern. “Throttle back gently and keep the keel steady. Back off a little, dive planes to half. Alma, can you see where to go?”
“Yes, down and to starboard. We’ll have to dive deep to get out because the Lusi’s listing so badly. The light is still below us, but dimmer.”
As she steered, the blue patch swung forward in her viewport. The sub’s nose was down steeply now, and Alma had to brace herself to keep from sliding forward.
She decided not to worry about whether they had enough battery power to get out. Or enough air, for that matter, even though the tiny metal egg stank of grease and ozone. The dimmed headlamps showed no obstacles between them and the faint daylight. But scrapes and bumps alongside told her they must be striking unseen objects. “I can see the hull breach just ahead of us, further below,” she said. “It’s dreadful, but lovely.”
The rift in the hull, with pale blue sea shining through, was immense. At least two deck levels had been blown open, with cargo crates and wreckage from the explosions still spilling out in a slow-motion avalanche.
“You see those jagged pieces of plate hanging down, don’t you?” Matt asked, peering out the side slit.
“Yes—we’ve got to avoid damage from those.” As they sank toward the gap, she felt something shift the sub’s nose aside. She shoved the tiller to counteract it.
“There’s a current here,” she said, suddenly doubtful. “The water’s moving, more than just the inflow. It’s the ship, still steaming…is that possible?” She played with the tiller, testing the current. “It’s going to take all our power to get clear.”
Kroger’s voice came up gruff in Alma’s ear. “If the ship is moving, you must dive forward to avoid a smash. Gravity may help, but let us hope the Lusi’s not at full speed!”
Alma understood the danger. The sea rushing astern and inward could drive them up against the jagged rent in the hull, or trap them in the hold. At nearly full throttle now, she was barely holding their place inside the big ship. They were fighting not just Lusi’s forward speed but the force of her vast weight sinking. It was drawing volumes of water up through the wound in her hull, the sea bleeding inward.
“I’ve got to try for it,” she told her crewmates. “We can’t stay here just wasting power.”
“Yes, go!” Kroger barked from behind them. “Matt, all of us, must bear forward like in the U-boats.”
“It’s now or never.” As Alma shoved the control over the sub veered out and down, drawn into the flow. The current caught and spun them, toppling Matt sideways in his awkward crouch. For one wild moment Alma knew how a goldfish feels, darting inside a tiny glass bowl for imaginary safety.
Waiting for the crash, she instead felt the craft slowing, its keel leveling upward in direct light. By the time she regained her view out of the turret, the sea was pale all around them. The Lusitania’s dark, scarred bulk slid overhead just outside the right porthole, already leaving them behind.
“We’re clear,” she breathed, feeling fresh, reborn.
“Yes we are,” Matt said, giving her an embrace and a kiss. “Now get us out from underneath, my love, before the poor old ship rolls over and takes us with her.”
“Dive planes up,” Kroger added. “We head for the surface!”