Rolf decoded the latest message from U-boat headquarters and breathed a sigh of relief. No instructions for Kommandant Baumann to throw his funkmaat in the brig because the man’s wife had been caught assisting enemies of the Reich. Not that a U-boat had a true brig, but they’d been on patrol long enough to empty the food out of one of the storage compartments. There was space enough to lock a man inside, if needed. Rolf shut his eyes and held back a shudder. A U-boat was claustrophobic enough without thoughts of being locked in a closet.
Frieda hadn’t promised to stop her clandestine activities, had only promised that she wouldn’t help anyone who might end up on an enemy ship dropping depth charges on her husband or up in the air bombing her country’s cities. She’d pointedly changed the subject the few times he’d brought it up after that day in the woods. He hadn’t wanted to ruin leave by arguing, so he’d gone along with it, but now he regretted not pushing a little harder while he’d had the chance. He couldn’t very well include pleas to refrain from committing treason in any of his letters. He could handle the risks he ran on patrol, but worry over his family was eating away at him.
He took his headphones off and ran the message to the kommandant on the bridge. The fresh air washed over him, and Rolf told himself his family would be fine. In the open air, with the sky a pale overcast blue, he could almost believe it. “A new message for you, kommandant.”
Baumann took the message, read it, and climbed down the ladder to look at the maps. Rolf followed. They’d had a successful patrol thus far—sunk more tonnage than ever before. Pride and accomplishment should have been his overriding emotions, but instead, the worry and guilt gnawed at him. Betray his country? Or betray his wife?
When Baumann gave the orders for a steering change, it was just as Rolf had predicted, because the message had given them the location of another enemy convoy. A chance to hit the enemy hard and increase their tonnage to something legendary. The U-115 was on the hunt again.
* * *
Karl glanced at the wireless operator when Dykes grabbed a pencil and held the headphone to his ears. Both worked in the HMS Fireweed’s wireless room on the starboard side of the ship, which was currently escorting a convoy west.
Dykes picked up the phone to the bridge. “SSS message from the Pawtucket, sir. . . . No, no damage report yet . . . Aye, aye, sir.”
“Enemy sighted or ship hit?” Karl asked.
Dykes shook his head. “Didn’t say.”
“Pawtucket is in one of the port columns, isn’t it?” That would mean the U-boat was attacking from the south.
“You seem to remember that type of thing better than I do.” Dykes tapped his pencil against the desk.
“Must be all the time I had on a ship in convoy instead of on escort.”
A look of concentration crossed Dykes’s face, and Karl quieted. Dykes put a hand to his headphone and jotted down the message. He slid it over to Karl as he called the bridge. The signal hadn’t been encoded. NO DAMAGE PROCEEDING AS BEFORE STOP TORPEDO FROM PORT QUARTER PAWTUCKET
The next message that came through was from the destroyer HMS Achilles, the lead vessel in their escort group, and it was coded. Karl made quick work of the decoding and called up the message to the bridge. The Fireweed was to search for the U-boat.
The call-to-action stations sounded.
Karl glanced at the clock. Another coder would come on watch soon, and when that happened, coders, like off-duty stokers, were assigned to help with the depth charges. By the time they found the U-boat, he might be up on deck helping to sink her.
* * *
Rolf’s ears had already delivered one piece of bad news that morning: silence, which meant the torpedo had either missed its mark or malfunctioned. Either way, all those hours stalking the convoy and getting into perfect firing position had been for naught. They couldn’t catch the convoy while submerged, and the escorts would make it far too dangerous for them to breach the surface again before nightfall, some twelve hours away.
Now his ears gave him more bad news. A ping from the enemy’s asdic echoed through the hull. Rolf swallowed, waiting for the next. Maybe they’d be lucky, and the destroyer or corvette wouldn’t notice. But then a second ping echoed and a third. The space between pings meant the ship that hunted them was still somewhat distant, but surface ships could easily outpace a submerged U-boat.
“Take her deep. One hundred fifty meters.” Kommandant Baumann’s voice was barely louder than a whisper, but it carried because the U-boat was silent, other than the hum of the Siemens electric motors. No one wanted to risk their voices rising to the surface ship even now hunting them.
The groans and pops of the pressure hull were music to Rolf’s ears. Safety. The depths of the ocean offered them escape. The U-115 had missed its target today, but they had torpedoes and provisions enough for some weeks yet. They would escape the escorts and find another convoy. With favorable conditions, perhaps they’d even catch up to this one again.
The pings from the asdic disappeared, but only for a moment before they knocked into the hull again. Then the sounds above turned their situation from dangerous to desperate.
Splashes. All eyes on the U-115 drifted upward, toward the falling depth charges.
* * *
Karl rolled another depth charge into the launcher. The so-called ash can was eighteen inches in diameter and three feet long. The one he currently guided into place weighed 300 pounds, though some were larger. If it exploded within fourteen feet of the U-boat’s hull, it would likely crack it. It could cripple the U-boat from even farther away.
When a corvette ran across the suspected path of a U-boat, the forward-facing asdic lost contact. If the target wasn’t destroyed by the depth charges, the agitated water would make it even harder to find the U-boat again. Karl hoped they were in the right spot and that the depth charges were set to explode at the proper depth. He didn’t want the U-boat to slip away.
In the distance, the convoy disappeared. Good. The merchant ships were escaping. At the very least, the Fireweed would keep the U-boat from pursuing them. But Karl didn’t want to simply make the U-boat run away. He wanted to sink it.
Another run over the latest asdic contact, another pattern of depth charges. Karl watched the water to the stern of the Fireweed as the corvette sped past the target. He had been counting the seconds since the release of the depth charges. They sank at roughly ten feet per second, though that could vary depending on sea conditions. The first was set to explode at 100 feet below the surface, so it ought to go off . . . now.
Nothing happened for several long seconds, then an explosion echoed around the Fireweed and the water behind them erupted in a thick geyser that sent water high above the ocean’s surface, then melted into a churning mass of white and pale-blue bubbles. More blasts erupted in rapid succession, sending up fountains of water.
The Fireweed turned and circled the latest target zone.
“Did we get it?” one of the ratings asked Sublieutenant Randall, the officer directing the Fireweed’s attack.
Randall shook his head. “If we had killed her, we’d see more than bubbles. Oil, bits of the ship. Sometimes pieces of bodies. Prepare another pass.”
Karl and one of the stokers armed another set of depth charges. The Achilles steamed toward them in the distance. Now the U-boat was up against a corvette and a destroyer, and that seemed to make it more and more likely that Karl would earn a little justice for the sinking of the Gracechurch, the Hillingdon, and the hundreds of other merchant ships destroyed by U-boats.