He stiffened in dismay at the same time as Adi let out a horrified yip: “Fucking Ivans!” Where the devil did they come from? One second nothing, the next a swarm of riflemen springing from the ground like the warriors old what’s-his-name, the Greek, got when he sowed the dragon’s teeth.
Well, Theo had some dragon’s teeth of his own. The bow machine gun chattered, spitting brass out of the side of its mouth. The turret machine gun hammered away, too. The Russian infantrymen went down in waves like threshed barley. But the ones who didn’t get shot kept coming. They were brave, too, damn them.
And they wouldn’t just have rifles. Some of them would carry Molotov cocktails. Theo didn’t want to think about blazing gasoline dripping into the panzer-no, not even a little bit. So many things that would catch fire, from paint to explosives to precious flesh. They’d have grenades. One of those through a hatch could ruin your day. Or bigger charges would blow off a track. A stuck panzer was like a hamstrung bull waiting to be slaughtered.
Firing short, steady bursts wasn’t easy. He wanted to burn out the MG-34’s barrel so he could kill as many Russians as fast as he could. Discipline held, though. In its own harsh way, Wehrmacht training was a marvel.
So was whatever the Ivans did to their men. Theo was sure he would have run away. The Russians stolidly kept coming… till two Stukas screamed down out of the sky and landed big bombs on them, close enough to the Panzer III to make it try to rear. That did the trick. Not even the Reds could take a dive-bombing in stride. The handful still on their feet-none near the panzer-skedaddled.
Adi laughed shakily. “All in a day’s work,” he said.
“Aber naturlich,” Theo answered.
After refueling and resupplying at Narvik, which the Kriegsmarine had quickly fitted out as a bare-bones U- boat base, Julius Lemp took the U-30 back up to the Barents Sea. He understood why the navy wanted to use the little town; it lay pretty close to the Barents Sea itself.
As far as he was concerned, that ended its advantages. The U-boat had got what it needed at Narvik. His men hadn’t. They couldn’t drink and screw and blow off steam there. A U-boat base without a brothel! What was the world coming to? There was a club for sailors, but it seemed a halfhearted affair, with bad, watery beer and not enough of it. No wonder the ratings grumbled when they put to sea again. In their shoes, Lemp would have grumbled, too. He would have grumbled in his own shoes, except a skipper had no one aboard to grumble to.
He intended to take care of that when he got back to the Reich. He didn’t want to put anything in writing, but some of his superiors would get an earful.
The one good thing was, his men were too busy to complain as much as they would have with more time on their hands. Here up past 70° north latitude, the sun stayed above the horizon most of the summer. Perpetual daylight kept everybody hopping all the time. You never knew when you might spot a British convoy bound for Murmansk or Arkhangelsk-or when it might spot you. Prowling Russian seaplanes were another danger. Lemp had met one of those in the Baltic. He didn’t care to repeat the experience.
Topside watches took all the concentration a man had. You couldn’t stretch people out past two hours. With unending daylight to face, ratings who’d never stood a topside watch before got the chance to try it. Lemp got the chance to worry that they might miss something an old hand wouldn’t have. He gulped bicarbonate of soda to soothe an acid stomach, wondering why he’d ever wanted to become a naval officer.
Navigation also got… interesting. The compass deflection was enormous. Accurate sun shoots became vitally important. With no stars in the sky, the sun was the only clue to direction they had. None of the manuals talked about times like this-U-boat men hadn’t needed to worry about them in the last war. That was another discussion Lemp wanted to have with his superiors.
And, even in summer, the ocean was bitterly cold. Without the Gulf Stream, it would have been colder yet. Without the Gulf Stream, Murmansk and Arkhangelsk-and likely Narvik as well-would have been as icebound as Antarctica. Then I wouldn’t have to come up here, Lemp thought. That wouldn’t be so bad.
Black-and-white auks and puffins and murres bobbed on the sea, now and then diving after fish or taking off with small, hard-working wings. They weren’t quite penguins, but they came close enough to satisfy anybody this side of a relentless nitpicker.
The Kriegsmarine sent out a coded message that a convoy had sailed from Aberdeen, bound for one Russian port or the other. Lemp admired the British sailors’ courage and decided his own superiors weren’t the only ones with problems. That convoy would have to face not only U-boats but also land-based planes from Norway. Talk about running the gantlet…
Sure enough, the planes soon found the convoy. Not only did they raid-they also shadowed, relaying its position, its course, its speed. Diesels thrumming through the soles of his shoes, Lemp brought the U-30 southwest to block its path.
He had to be careful. Destroyers or corvettes would be escorting the convoy. On the surface, they could sink him. And he wouldn’t be able to submerge, then come back up later and escape under cover of darkness. Here there was no darkness.
So he made sure he had men who knew what they were doing up on the conning tower when the U-30 neared the advancing convoy. That convoy had already taken damage-he didn’t know how much. U-boats transmitted only when they had to, to keep the enemy from using their signals to work out where they were.
One thing he was sure of: the freighters in the convoy would make more smoke than the U-30 did. He’d find the British ships before they knew he was around. After that was when things would get interesting.
The sun skimmed low above the northern horizon when one of the ratings spotted the smoke from the enemy. Lemp changed course so he could attack with the sun at his back. The harder he could make things for the English, the happier he would be-and the better his chances of doing it again soon.
Up went the Schnorkel ’s stovepipe. By now, Lemp took the gadget for granted. More and more of the Kriegsmarine ’s U-boats used it these days. It wasn’t a punishment any more. It was a tool of war, one he’d come to rely on.
But the Royal Navy had its own tools of war. Sharp, almost musical pings echoed through the U-30’s hull after the boat went to Schnorkel depth. “What the fuck is that?” Gunter Beilharz asked, reaching under his Stahlhelm to scratch his head.
“They have an echo locater,” Lemp answered. “It’s mentioned in my latest briefing reports. It isn’t perfect, but it’s better than anything they used before.”
Beilharz eyed him in something approaching horror. “They can get range and bearing from the echoes?”
“That’s the idea,” Lemp allowed. “Their toy isn’t everything it ought to be, though.”
“It had better not be,” the Schnorkel officer said. “If they can find us whenever they please, they’ll sit on top of us and drop ash cans till we either cave in or have to come up and fight it out on the surface.”
A U-boat that got into a surface engagement with a warship designed to fight up there was dead meat. Everybody knew it. Lemp would have been happier not to get the reminder. And he would have been much happier if the periscope hadn’t shown him a Royal Navy corvette speeding his way with a bone in her teeth. That damned echo locater did work.
He didn’t want to take on a warship. He could sink her with an eel before she got close enough to hurt him. He could… if he was good enough, and if he was lucky enough, and if he felt like telling the other English warships where he was. Ping! Ping! With that miserable gadget, they already had a pretty good notion.
But then other noises came through the U-30’s steel hull: the unmistakable heavy crump! of a torpedo exploding, and after that the sound of a ship breaking up. That dreadful creaking and crackling made any man who went to sea flinch.
It also made the Royal Navy corvette spin through as tight a turn as she could make and dash back toward the vessels she was shepherding. Half a dozen men inside the U-30 gave forth with various profane variations on What’s going on?
“Well, I don’t know for sure,” Lemp answered, “but unless they’re sinking their own ships I’d say we aren’t the only U-boat in the neighborhood.” An elk struggling through deep snow would draw a pack of wolves. A convoy crossing dangerous waters might draw a pack of submarines.
Another torpedo slammed into a freighter. This ship, by the sound of it, didn’t break up right away. Maybe the sailors would have a chance to make the boats and get picked up. For their sake, Lemp hoped so. The poor devils wouldn’t last long bobbing in the Barents Sea.
Those two hits made the enemy forget all about Lemp’s boat. The escorting warships were hellbent on hunting down the wolf that had already bitten them. With the Schnorkel, getting into range of a fat freighter
