needed to get rid of. He didn’t have much room to piss under here unless he wanted to lie in it.
Some more sausage, some chewy barley bread… This wasn’t the Ritz or the Adlon, no two ways about it. Where was the barmaid with the big tits to bring him another bottle of bubbly?
Wherever she was, she wasn’t anywhere around here. He didn’t find any more overbearing officers to shoot at. You could peer through a sight for only so long. Once he decided he wouldn’t spot anything more, he pillowed his head on his arms and fell asleep.
It was dark when he woke up. Under the iron sheet, it was black as Hitler’s heart. He needed a second or two to realize he hadn’t died or been buried alive. He had a way out, a way back to his friends.
“Fuck!” he muttered. He had to give his own heart stern orders not to try to pound its way out of his chest. His hands shook. Of course, that was partly because he hadn’t had a cigarette in much too long.
He carefully backed out of the little artificial cave where he’d sheltered. It was still raining. No one in the line challenged him till he was clambering over the parapet.
“Good going, guys,” he said as he dropped down into the forward trench and fumbled for his cigarettes. “I could have been a Nationalist with a machine pistol. You never would have known the difference till I opened up.” He cupped his hands so he could strike a match in spite of the waterworks from on high.
“Nah. You would’ve made more noise getting through stuff if you were,” one of the other Czechs answered.
“You hope I would,” Vaclav said. “Some of those guys know what they’re doing, though.” It started coming down harder. He kept a hand over the cigarette so the raindrops wouldn’t put it out. After so long without, he needed more than just a drag or two to feel right.
“We heard you fire,” the other Czech said. “Get the guy you were aiming at?”
“Bet your ass,” the sniper said, not without pride. “ He won’t be telling anybody what to do again.”
“So some other jerk will do it instead.” That cynicism came from Benjamin Halevy.
With exaggerated patience, Vaclav answered, “The idea is, if we kill enough of them, they’ll run out of men-or the ones they have left won’t be worth shit.”
“Yeah, that’s the idea, all right,” the Jew agreed. “Sure is taking it a long time to work, though.”
Vaclav looked at him-looked through him, really. “If you don’t like it, you can always go back to France. The rest of us, we’re fucking stuck here. We aren’t going back to Czechoslovakia-that’s for goddamn sure.” The Nazis held-held down-two-thirds of what had been his country. Slovakia, the remaining chunk, called itself independent. It might be able to sneeze on its own. It couldn’t wipe its nose afterwards, though, till Hitler countersigned the order.
“Bite me, Jezek,” Halevy said without heat. “I’m not going anywhere, and you know it. I volunteered for this shit, same as you.”
“Maybe that proves you really are a dumb sheeny after all. You don’t usually talk like it, though,” Vaclav replied. They swore at each other in a companionable way. Nobody would be going anywhere much till the rain quit for a while, and they both knew it.
Rain. Sleet. A little snow mixed in for good-or bad-measure. Julius Lemp wondered why he’d brought the U- 30 up to the surface. He could hardly see the U-boat’s bow from the conning tower, let alone anything farther away. Stumbling over a target in the storm-tossed Barents Sea would be purely a matter of luck.
True, the boat could go faster surfaced than submerged. Again, so what? If all he saw was this tiny circle… Yes, he’d sweep out more area cruising along at fifteen knots, but enough to matter? He doubted it.
Still and all, that didn’t mean he didn’t try. He wore oilskins over his peacoat, and a wide-brimmed, waterproof hat. He was soaked anyhow. Sleet stung his cheek whenever he faced into the wind, which seemed to have come straight down from the North Pole. The waves that slapped the submarine had taken a running start from that wind, too.
One of the ratings on the conning tower with him tried to clean salt spray off binocular lenses for the third time in ten minutes. He looked through the Zeiss glasses again, then let them thump down to his chest on their strap with a disgusted growl. “Lousy things are worse than useless,” he complained to Lemp, or possibly to God.
God didn’t answer. Lemp did: “I know, Franz. I’m not using mine, either, not right now.”
“We don’t have to worry about planes, anyway, not in this crap we don’t,” Franz said. “You’d have to be nuts to take off to begin with. If you didn’t kill yourself doing that, you’d never spot a U-boat. And if you did spot one, you’d lose it again before you could do anything about it.”
“We hope,” Lemp said. And Franz had to nod to that, because you never could tell. Life was a bitch sometimes. You just never could tell. The Russians were nuts enough, or stubborn enough, to put planes in the air regardless of the weather. And they were used to operating in awful conditions, more used to it than the Germans were. If one of their seaplanes came out of nowhere, it might be able to deliver an attack before the U-30 vanished in the swirling snow and mist. U-boat skippers who didn’t stay nervous all the time didn’t come home again.
U-boat skippers who did stay alert all the time, and who insisted their crews do the same, were iron-arsed sons of bitches. All you had to do to know that was talk to any sailor who’d served under Julius Lemp. He’d recite chapter and verse-and book, too, if you gave him time and fed him a couple of seidels of beer.
Normal watches up on the conning tower lasted only two hours. You could sweep your field glass across the sky just so long before you stopped noticing things. As Franz had seen, sweeping field glasses across the sky on a day like this was a losing proposition. Lemp sent the ratings below at the appointed hour. New men, also dressed in foul-weather gear, took their places.
Lemp stayed topside himself awhile longer. He made and enforced the rules; he could break them if he chose. A gull scudded by. He would have sworn its golden eyes bore a fishy look that had nothing to do with herring or cod. What’s this crazy human doing out here in weather like this? Why isn’t he back on land where he belongs?
A big wave slapped the U-30 when the boat was already rolling to port. The crest tried to throw Lemp and the ratings on the conning tower with him into the sea. He grabbed the rail and hung on tight, spitting frigid salt water. More seawater cascaded down the hatch. Along with the U-boat’s usual foul smells, volleys of foul language poured out of the hatch a moment later. The men in the pressure hull would have to get rid of the water as best they could-and fix whatever the unexpected bath had shorted out.
“Alles gut?” Lemp called down, rubbing at his stinging eyes.
More profanity from below made it clear that nichts was gut. The diesels didn’t miss a beat, though. Whatever the sudden flood had done, it hadn’t soaked the engine room.
Which turned out to be a good thing, because a rating let out a horrified squeal: “Ship dead ahead!”
Too many things were happening too fast. Lemp spun like a man suddenly hit from behind. If it was a destroyer, they were dead. No matter how alert you were, you couldn’t hope to fight it out on the surface taken by surprise.
But it wasn’t a warship. It was a big, rusty freighter, maybe a straggler from a convoy on the way back to England. “Hard left rudder! Emergency full power!” Lemp screamed down the hatch at the same time as the freighter’s whistle blared a warning. Peter was down there. He would obey instantly. Whether instantly was fast enough to do any good… they’d know much too soon.
The steam whistle shrilled again. If the freighter turned with the U-30, the U-boat was sunk-literally. Sailors at the ugly old ship’s bow pointed at the submarine. They were close enough to let Lemp see their open mouths and staring eyes as the U-30 and freighter slid past each other. Then one of the sailors caught sight of the U-30’s wind-whipped ensign. His eyes got even wider. Lemp thought they’d bug right out of his head.
He must have figured we were Russians, the U-boat skipper realized. The freighter’s captain must have thought the same thing, or he would have rammed the boat. Some English admiral-maybe even the First Sea Lord- would have pinned a medal on his chest. That wasn’t going to happen now.
One of the sailors up on the conning tower asked, “Are we going to track that damned pigdog and do for him, Skipper?”
No one would have claimed Julius Lemp was not aggressive. Certainly no one from the torpedoed Athenia would have claimed any such thing. All the same, Lemp wasn’t sorry to see the freighter vanish into mist and spray and sleet as abruptly as it had appeared.
And the more he thought about pursuing it, the less he liked the idea. “No, we’ll throw this one back,” he answered. “Her skipper will be dodging and zigzagging for all he’s worth-and chucking every gram of coal he’s got
