16

In the mini-submarine at night, skirting along the black edge of the world, the thinnest cloud covering created a perfect inky darkness that rolled in and away with the waves. I forgot about my old life. Being in the submarine, it was as if I had no past. My life simply started as a sailor, and that sufficed. In the open water during training exercises, I thought about throttle levers and current strengths, and never about what life was like before coming to Kiel. Being on the water was an empty slate.

When my fuel levels and time chart told me it was time to return to the base at Kiel, I turned the Negro back to shore. At the base, the Negros sat moored side by side along the pier, like giant cast-iron water slugs.

Major Oldif’s fierce eyes moved from the boats to me walking down the pier. His pupils seemed to grow and his brow furrowed. He put his head down and read something on his clipboard and walked toward me, moving to the dock as if feeling his way with a pair of antennae.

“Ensign Koopman,” he said, “your training run went well?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. You keep this up and you may be a credit to the Dutch.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Another Negro was docking, and after the sailors roped it off, I saw it was Pauwel’s sub.

“It’s hotter than a snake’s asshole in here,” Pauwel said from the seat of his boat. He was coated in sweat and his face was drained of color, but he bit off a short smile and pushed the glass dome open higher so he could get out.

“Good god, I hate that thing,” he said to me as we walked down the pier. “Those are going to be the end of us.”

After our training exercises, which consisted of taking our subs out for a cruise of the harbor where we stayed on the surface, and then another that included a brief submersion, the Negros were loaded onto a battleship by a flat crane mounted on a hopper barge. Major Oldif had given us our orders.

“Our entire unit will load the ship on March fourteenth. We will sail for two days beyond the German naval blockade to the open Atlantic. There you will be released to hunt for live targets.”

During that two-day cruise I saw what Uncle Martin had been talking about with the heavy traffic of German naval ships arching across the ocean, sealing in most of northern Europe.

We were allowed out on deck at night while the ship was sailing with all its running lights off. No one was allowed to smoke on the decks at night. Almost every hour planes could be heard crossing overhead. Both British B-17 and Grumman P-65’s, and German Ju 88s and Dornier Do 177s lobbed bombs at one another. Then came the lone whine of long-range Messerschmitt reconnaissance planes thrumming through the dark sky. On March 16, when the battleship we were on was due south of Iceland, we were given our orders by Major Oldif. Each Negro pilot was to push off from the ship in his assigned direction and engage any Allied vessel, either navy or merchant. The battleship would do a wide circle, dropping off Negro subs at a prearranged dot on the ocean map close to shipping lanes. Each sub would sail from its drop-off point and return to that spot twenty hours later, where the battleship would collect it on its second circle.

“Timing and precision will be the measure of success for this mission,” Major Oldif said. “This mission is part of a large-scale Atlantic attack force beginning tonight. Do your country and your Führer proud.”

With that we were ushered to the holding bay. Pauwel drummed at his hips with his open hands, hammering out some wild beat. When he shook my hand, his eyes were wide with fear of the unknown and he said, “I hope to see you again.”

Seven subs launched from the cargo bay door of the battleship before Pauwel went. Ten more subs deployed before it was my turn.

“Ready, Dutchman?” Major Oldif asked.

“Yes, sir,” I said. The sailors around my sub closed the glass cockpit case, clicked it shut, and looked down at me through the little half-bubble. One of the sailors held up his hand to me with his fingers splayed. Then he tucked in his thumb, then his pointer finger, and then the next until his pinkie wrapped into his fist, and with that they pushed my Negro down a sliding ramp out the cargo hold into the sea.

The nose submerged and then scooped upward to right itself. The small chop of the waves rolled the Negro from side to side, until I hit the ignition and the hum of the motor growled to life. The engine rattled the whole sub and the torpedo connected beneath. A wave from the wake of the battleship rolled over the glass and the white foam rolled off.

Panic ran through me as the ship sailed away, leaving me in my tube in the middle of the vast ocean. That night a blue haze slid from the sky. I steered my boat on its designated course and then focused on the sliver of moon to calm my nerves. I breathed in the moonlight. My father had told me and my brother to “breathe in the moonlight” when we were younger and lay scared of the dark in our beds. “Breathe the moonlight into your lungs, let it beat through your veins, fill your heart like a lightbulb, then exhale it and send it all the way back. That’s how you become one with the night and stop being afraid of it.”

But there in the sub, breathing deep in the hold, I only tasted burning diesel and the heartburn bile that the food supplement pills had left. The silver light on the endless dark water scared the living hell out of me. It was the first real emotion I’d felt since leaving my mother on the wheelhouse deck of the Lighthouse Lady. I’d sealed up that part, the feeling part. Now, whatever cord that had run so taut between my mind and my heart tore loose. There in the hold, I focused on the chart to quell my rising fear.

My chart had me follow a northwest track to the southern end of Iceland for several hours. In the mini-sub, my thighs itched, my legs were sore from the vibrations, and being crammed in upright made each link of my spine feel welded together. After several hours, everything in me ached to be out of that machine and a newly formed claustrophobia seized me. Where the clouds broke, a wide swath of stars above poured through. Where the cloud cover was dense and hid everything, I felt like the last living person on earth.

I cruised on course for five hours without seeing anything. Then, in the distance, something shifted in the dark. Through my lenses, the small halos of light beneath the running light covers of a large ship slipped past. The ship had a conning tower and large guns mounted on the fore and aft decks. The flags were dark but the white paint trim along the bow told me it was an Allied troop transport vessel. A British light cruiser of the Aurora class. It was sleek and graceful, low to the water and slow as it cut through the swell. I marked my exact position on the chart and deviated my course forty-two degrees to face ahead of it. The ship didn’t have spotlights on so I stayed on the surface to close the gap faster. Within ten minutes I was five hundred meters away and could make out the transom, stern, antenna mast, funnel, and the ship’s boats.

I wish to god I had another story to tell—but I have only this one.

I fired.

I led my shot ahead of the ship to hit aft of the centerline at its fuel tanks. The torpedo disengaged from the hull, its propeller roiled up the water as it dug forward and made a tunnel of white bubbles for about fifty meters before it disappeared. For a moment, just as the weapon released, I felt an overwhelming mixture of exhilaration and power.

Fifty-six seconds later by my watch, a volcanic blast of water leapt up from the ocean. The ship flinched like a wounded creature. An explosion from the ribbed framework of the ship and the long waterline of the vessel bent off the surface and slammed back down. The concussion of the blast rippled through the water and wobbled the jelly between my bones. The echo rocked my sub in waves.

The hit broke the ship’s back, and it heeled to starboard. A large fire billowed out of the hull even as the hole the torpedo created flooded with seawater. The shot hit right at the watertight doors separating the middle and aft sections at the fuel tanks.

Watchmen shot white incendiary flares off the sides, which flew up and glowed on the placid water. The reflection pierced the darkness and I breathed in the light. For a moment I was calm inside the hull of the Negro. But the glass top of my fuselage reflected the flash and the ping of a watchman’s gunfire pierced the bow of the Negro.

My boat was shot at once more before the whole aft of the British ship exploded into flame, and the top decks became brilliantly illuminated by a deep orange glow. Fire rose up into the air in a giant column. The starboard-leaning burning section of the aft tilted toward the waterline at an impossible angle. The middle and bow of the ship cruised forward, both sections intact but no longer connected. In the eerie light of the flares and orange glow of the flame, the ship’s conning tower leaned down to the sea, which pushed its bow into the sky. Water around the tower bubbled up, drinking the ship down, gulping up its side until it vanished, pushed under by the upright and sinking bow. There was a large white churning of water after the bow sank.

The aft of the ship was still a billowing tower of black smoke and flame and in the distance, the crew who made it up to the deck leapt off the sides into the burning water below them. One of the jumpers was on fire. His arms and legs kicked at the air to shake the flames loose as he plummeted toward the waterline.

The shadows of burning men jumping from what I had convinced myself was only machinery, tonnage, and supplies seared hot and terrible into my mind.

When the aft tilted forward into the sea, the last of the white flares dropped to the water. Deck by deck the flaming ship’s aft half-sank, leaving the wide gas spill burning on the surface.

My mind took in every detail like a camera taking hundreds of shots per second, all of which settled at the stem of my head, deep in my snake brain. I imagined being onboard, iron sheets squealing as they unhinged. Rivets wrenched loose. Overheads in the passageways sucked down by the blast of heat, and the mêlée of movement of all the sailors running into the smoke filling the holds with clotted air. Charred armament. The sibilant wheeze of air pumping from the bilges. The gunmetal gray world buckling in around them. All those men billeted there. The bunk room now a bellows. Warping. The dizzying truth of what was to come. The vitals of the ship gutted by fire. Paint boiling off the bulkheads.

These flecks of images sliced beneath my skin. There was no returning to who I was before. There was no being someone who did not take that shot again. I was now something different. Those images would never be dislodged.

I steered the Negro to pass through the wake of the troop carrier to avoid any of the wreckage. That’s when a yellow dog swam by me. It barked, and barked, and barked, and the sound of it filled the capsule of my submarine. The dog swam away from the burning surface of this ship, farther from any direction where there could possibly be land. It swam and barked, moving deeper into the ocean. This was something I had not prepared for. The cold language of class, of ship, and of tonnage made it all sound like a game, and removed any talk of people and their lives. I’d been trained to sink floating sections of warehouses and had done so. But the sound of the dog barking, barking like Fergus, barking until the cold pulled it under, coupled in my brain with the images of the burning man jumping into the sea.

A garbled swishing rose in my stomach, then a familiar stabbing pain. Wet heaving noises croaked up from between my ribs. Yellow bile splattered against my lap and ran off in runnels of spew down my thighs. After recovering, I turned the Negro around and set my course for the German battleship’s rendezvous point. I used my neckerchief to clean vomit from my lap, and where it soaked into my jumpsuit down my leg. All the thoughts in my head dissolved into something dark and grainy, and my bowels felt like they were on the verge of collapse.

I lit a cork with a match to mask the smell of the sour bilge.

Heading back to the meeting point with the German battleship, I retraced my exact movements so as not to make the slightest calculation error that might send me off course into the middle of the ocean. It took me six hours to get back, working against the current. By then it was well past sunup, when the sky opened and I hoped that any plane that saw me would mistake me for an algae patch, driftwood, a naiad, the back of a rippling wave. At 0800 hours, I was at the correct meeting point at the meeting time, but the battleship still had not appeared. By 0900 hours my sub was almost out of fuel. I cut the engines and let myself drift, then restarted and worked my way back to the meeting point. With each passing minute came the terror of being in the wrong spot. I checked and rechecked my calculations. As I waited, a profound regret for sinking the ship built up in me, and I realized that it would have been a worthy punishment to be abandoned for such a sin.

Now, I think, perhaps I was cast off.

Then at 1000 hours, with aprons of bright white clouds bordering the sky, the battleship steamed over the horizon toward me with the white waterline pulsing where the bow turned up the swells. It was broad daylight now, a poor time for any motion in these waters, but the ship gave me such a lift of hope. I’d managed to stay alive. A man on the bow used signal flags to communicate with me, but I did not understand what he was trying to say.

When the ship was alongside, they lowered a sailor on a cargo line by crane. When the sailor stood on the bow of my submarine, he raised his hand and saluted me. His body looked like a statue riding on the swells. Then he tied a line off to the bow that the crane pulled into the open cargo bay door, where it was hooked up to more lines and winched aboard. In the cargo bay there were only three other Negro subs. I’d been the nineteenth to launch, so there should have been eighteen boats. The three Negros in the hold had their torpedoes still adhered to the bottom. Crew members unlatched my cockpit cover and pushed it up.

“Ensign Koopman,” Major Oldif said. “Where is your torpedo?”

“I fired it, sir.”

“Did you make contact?”

“Yes, sir.”

“With what?”

“A Class 8 armed troop carrier, sir.”

“Yes. Yes. Yes. You’re the one then. We had radio transmission from the ship that went down. That was you. God damn it, good job, Dutchman.” Major Oldif reached into the sub and squeezed my shoulder and gave it a shake. I wanted to hug him for touching me, for bringing me away from the endless drift. Then he looked at me and noticed the vomit on my clothes. He pulled his hand off my shoulder and wiped it on the leg of his trousers. “Sailors, get this man out of here. He’s a goddamn hero, help him up and take him to the medics.” They lifted me out of the submarine. A heavy-caliber bullet had punctured the forward planking. My legs were so stiff they locked up on me and the men had to drag me to the medic.

“Why are there only three boats?”

“We’ll find more,” the sailor said.

In the medic’s office, Pauwel was lying on a cot and mumbling to himself, thrashing around under a sheet.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“CO poisoning,” the medic said.

Pauwel turned toward me and squinted. “Thank god it’s you. Thank god.”

The medic helped me out of my jumpsuit. On the cot he started checking all my vital signs. He squeezed the black egg of the blood pressure cuff, which inhaled tighter around my arm. There were two other ensigns in the bunks next to Pauwel. One had his hands in a prayer tepee covering his face and the other was asleep on his side with a blanket over his head. After the medic checked me, he told me to go get something to eat and get back to my bunk.

“Pauwel. Are you okay?”

“I will be.”

“What happened?”

“There’ll be time for all that,” the medic said. “Go get something to eat.”

Pauwel nodded his head and waved me away. “I’m fine.”

I was starving, and I got myself a meal. I took a slice of sausage for Pauwel and brought it to the outer deck of the vessel to watch the rest of the Negros getting picked up. The sun was full and rising to the middle of the sky. The open water all around the ship was calm in that dull blue-glossed-brown color. In the distance was a glint of steel, the next Negro to be retrieved. When we got closer what I thought was the glass cockpit of the fuselage I saw to be the long cylinder of the torpedo. The Negro was upside down. When the crane hooked the boat up, I peered over the deck to see them hook enough lines to flip the boat right-side-up. When they did the slumped head of the pilot slapped against the glass. When the upturned Negro was pulled in, the ship picked up its speed to meet the next vessel, which was not there. We slowed for a moment and then moved along to the next.

“All day, like this,” a watchman standing by the 16mm guns said. “All day these subs aren’t there.” The man wore a leather jacket and a fur hat with long ear flaps cinched tight by a thin cord tied in a bow under his chin. His fur collar was pulled up high over his neck.

The rest of the afternoon the ship picked up seven more Negros. Two had dead pilots from CO poisoning. One of the Negro pilots poured yellow dye into the sea to make himself more visible. It was only to be used if we had drifted off too far, out of reach of the support vessel. The pilot must have been frightened out there waiting for the missing ship. He must have deployed the yellow dye, which in turn hailed an Allied plane out of the sky that strafed it with machine-gun fire. A stripe of fighter plane bullets ran up the length of it and had shattered the pilot’s lap, chest, and head. The next stop had a loosening slick of yellow without a sign of a sub. That made eleven survivors from the forty-nine that had set out. When the battleship spent the rest of the day doing another circle to check for lost boats, I went back to the medic’s office to sit with Pauwel.

He opened his eyes and looked at me. “If I’m dead, you’re one ugly angel.”

In the medic’s office the pilots discussed what happened to the rest of our rank. Some pilots were lucky, they decided, as they probably fell asleep through strain or lack of oxygen under their tiny glass domes. The vessels had been tested for making headway against the current so that the sub could go out on the ebb tide and return home on the flood, but in the open waters, some of the boats would have made no progress and, sooner or later, would be lost. All of us in the medic’s office who had returned had not submerged our ships. We figured some that had submerged never came up. Others may have fired their torpedoes but the clasps failed and they were carried along on the backs of their own bombs. We each sat in our own bunks and talked of the ways the lost men did not come back.

“I thought they figured out the CO problems.”

“Apparently not.”

“What about the ones that are left out there?”

“They’re smart. They’ll send a recon plane out for them.”

“Yeah, but the recon plane will probably make sure they sink so that no one else gets their hands on them.” This made everyone quiet for a while.

Then one of the pilots confessed. “I didn’t go anywhere. I circled the same spot over and over.” He gave us a nervous smile and kept rubbing the palm of his hand over his chin so his fingers squeezed into his cheek. Then he shook it off as if it were a joke.

“Didn’t they want to know what happened?” I asked.

“I told them it was a technical fault and that I had to turn back early.”

None of us questioned why he had done this as on the battleship’s third loop around, no more Negros were found.

On the final evening of the two-day trip back to Kiel, Major Oldif sent a sailor to bring me to the bridge. In the conning tower, the major paced back and forth, and looked out at the water. Low growls of static trundled from the radio console. A machine beeped every twenty seconds. Soft. Steady. I counted to twenty. To twenty. To twenty, until Major Oldif turned and waved me forward.

“Ah, Ensign Koopman. Good, good, come in. Are you feeling okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good, that’s good. I want to congratulate you, son. You made this mission a great success. That ship you sunk was a big victory for us. Do you know how much manpower and effort it would be to deal with those soldiers and supplies once they landed in Europe? Every ship we take down is the equivalent of a land battle won. And you won a big one for us, ensign.”

“But the lost subs, sir.”

“Yes, a shame, but you’re not seeing the big picture. We tested the Negros and they work. They will work better running along the shores. When the Allies mount an invasion force, we now know we have these weapons to use against them. Now, maybe we can get you some publicity for your success, and we can use that to round up some more fine Dutch to come captain for us.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, feeling sick all over again, knowing this meant the pilots who spent the night circling the same spot of ocean would have to go out again. This would become a tactic now. The major made to squeeze my shoulder, but maybe the memory of seeing me covered in vomit made him stop short.