“Perfidious Albion,” Lemp muttered. His breath smoked. Spring might be here, but the North Sea was damned if it wanted to admit it.
“What’s that, Skipper?” Hans asked.
“Nothing. Just swearing at the damned limeys.”
“They’re a pain, all right,” the rating agreed.
“How’s your insides?”
“Not too bad, as long as I don’t think about ’em. Maybe I’ll cuss England out, too.”
Somebody-whether it was Hans or not, Lemp didn’t know-gave back a meal inside the hull before they put in at Namsos on their way north. That made the stink in there worse, but not by so much as an outsider might have expected. It wasn’t the first time somebody’d heaved in the boat, and an overturned bucket meant the nasty stuff had got into the bilgewater. Once that happened, a stench would stay with the U-30 as long as the boat lasted.
The Kriegsmarine had started to fit Namsos out as a U-boat base after the town fell. Then, with the war against England and France suddenly forgotten, the work was forgotten, too. Now the war-or part of it, anyway-was on again, and so was the work.
Namsos probably hadn’t been an exciting place before the Wehrmacht took it away from its defenders. It was a real mess now. German crews with torches went about carving up the English warships and freighters that had gone down in shallow water trying to resupply and evacuate the town. The steel would be useful; whatever could be salvaged intact, even more so.
Namsos itself could have used cutting up and salvaging, too. Bombing and artillery meant hardly a building didn’t have a chunk or two bitten out of it. Lemp saw only a few Norwegians. Most of them looked sullen. If they were delighted to have come under German occupation, they hid it very well.
Two or three men wore the uniform of the Nasjonal Samling, the Norwegian equivalent of the German NSDAP. The head of the NS, a former officer named Vidkun Quisling, helped the Germans govern Norway. The only problem was that his party, unlike the Nazis, enjoyed next to no popular support. German bodyguards accompanied the NS men walking through the harbor.
The head of the base, a Kapitan zur See named Waldemar Bohme, was blunt when he discussed the issue with Lemp as fresh food went into the U-30. “Anybody who doesn’t belong to the
NS figures anybody who does is a traitor,” Bohme said gloomily. “And nobody belongs to the NS.”
Lemp glanced toward one of the uniformed Norwegians. It wasn’t quite a German uniform, but it was in the same general style. “He does,” the U-boat skipper remarked.
“There are a handful of them,” Bohme agreed. “It would almost be easier if there weren’t any. Then we wouldn’t have to waste our own men keeping the rest of the Norwegians from murdering these… people.” Had he known Lemp better, he might have called the NS officials worse. But you never could tell who might report you. Staying innocuous was safer.
“Quisling must have some support,” Lemp said.
“Some, ja.” Bohme still sounded glum. “The Nasjonal Samling got less than two percent of the vote in 1936, down from a hair over two percent in 1933. And as soon as the fighting started here, half their members-more than half-bailed out and picked up rifles and tried to shoot us.”
Shrewdly, Lemp said, “But now that the fighting’s over and we won, going along with us will look like a good idea to some people.”
“That has happened-a little,” Bohme admitted. “Most of the squareheads would still sooner spit on us, though.”
“As long as we can get on with the war, what difference does it make?” Lemp said.
“With England back in it, who knows?” Captain Bohme seemed determined to look at the cloud, not the silver lining. “Now the Norwegians won’t have to be Reds to have somebody who’ll help give us trouble.”
“I’m sure you’ll manage, sir,” Lemp said, by which he meant I’m damn glad it’s your worry and none of mine. The wry quirk of one of Bohme’s bushy gray eyebrows meant he understood that all too well.
Narvik, north of the Arctic Circle, was a smaller, even more battered base than Namsos. Because it was so inaccessible except by sea, it had stayed in Allied hands longer than the country farther south. Without the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, the place would have been uninhabitable. And without the last gasps of the current from the far southwest, Murmansk and Arkhangelsk would have stayed frozen up the year around, and Lemp’s mission would have had no point.
But up toward the Barents Sea the U-30 went. It wasn’t summer yet, but daylight stretched and stretched in these latitudes. Lemp had heard about the white nights of St. Petersburg-Leningrad, these days. He was ten degrees of latitude north of St. Petersburg now. The sun set in the far, far northwest and soon rose again in the far, far northeast. While it ducked below the horizon, twilight never got dark enough to show any but the brightest stars.
That meant the U-30’s crew had to stay alert around the clock. A rating might spot a troopship at any hour of the day or suppositious night. On the other hand, an English plane, or a Russian one, might come across the U-boat at any time.
Or nothing might happen. No matter how long it stayed light, the ocean was vast. Troopships full of Tommies might slip past unseen. For all Lemp knew, there were no troopships full of Tommies. The Kriegsmarine brass had plenty of bright ideas that didn’t pan out.
A whale spouted a couple of hundred meters to port. The great beast wasn’t that much smaller than the U- boat. Lemp watched it with awe from the conning tower. It paid the U-30 no heed. That suited Lemp fine. A collision with a whale would be like a truck hitting an elephant on the Autobahn — except the truck wouldn’t sink afterwards.
He cruised his assigned area, awaiting new orders from Berlin-or even from Namsos. In due course, new orders came. Once decoded, they read, Continue current assignment. Lemp was anything but thrilled-as if his superiors cared. Continue he did.
Luc Harcourt had just got a fire going on the floor of a half-wrecked peasant hut when a private stuck his head through a hole in the wall and said, “Excuse me, Sergeant, but could I please talk to you for a little while?”
Sighing, Luc asked, “What d’you want, Charles?” Whatever it was, it would be trouble. Whenever a private asked that question in that tone of voice, it had to be trouble. Maybe Charles’ father was desperately ill, and he wanted compassionate leave. Right now, of course. Maybe his girlfriend was two-timing him, and he needed a shoulder to cry on or permission to go back to France and whale the stuffing out of the loose, stupid bitch. Or maybe…
“What are we doing here, Sergeant?” Charles couldn’t have been more than nineteen. His voice still cracked sometimes. He was trying to grow a mustache, but only looked as if he had dirt on his upper lip.
After hacking the top off a ration tin with his bayonet, Luc heated monkey meat over the flames. “What do you mean, what are we doing here? Do I look like a priest, to answer a question like that?”
He sounded even more like Sergeant-now Lieutenant-Demange than he realized. Almost everything he knew about soldiering, and about dealing with inferiors in the army, he’d learned from the veteran. Demange’s sarcasm had rubbed off on him, too.
Charles flushed. “I don’t mean it like that, Sergeant. I mean, what are we doing here in Russia? The Englishmen packed it in. Why can’t we?”
As far as Luc was concerned, that was a damn good question. He gave the only reply he could: “When Daladier wants us to quit, we will. Till then, you’d better fight. You think the Ivans won’t cut your dick off, you’d better think again.”
“It isn’t fair,” Charles whined.
“Since when is life fair?” Yes, Luc sounded like Demange.
“You can joke all you want,” Charles said, which, since Luc was a sergeant, was true enough. “But we’re liable to get killed for no reason at all, and that isn’t funny.” His nostrils twitched as if he were an angry rabbit.
As a matter of fact, he was wrong. Luc had seen both enemies and friends die in ways idiotically ridiculous enough to make him laugh like a jackass. Anyone who’d been up at the front for a while could say the same thing. Most of the laughter sprang from relief that you were still alive to giggle.
