'Oh, ho ho ho ho ho!' Bischoff says. He rolls onto his back and stares up into the plumbing for a while, considering this, and then continues. 'Ho ho ho ho ho ho ho!'
'What, did I just say something secret? Fuck you and your mother if I did,' Shaftoe says.
'Beck!' Bischoff screams. 'Achtung!'
'What're you doing?' Shaftoe asks.
'Getting you your morphine.'
'Oh. Thank you.'
Half an hour later, the skipper's there. Pretty punctual by officer standards. He and Bischoff talk for a while in German. Shaftoe hears the word morphium several times. Finally, the skipper summons the medic, who pokes the needle into Shaftoe's arm and injects about half of it.
'You have something to say?' the skipper asks Shaftoe. Seems like a nice enough guy. They all seem like pretty nice guys, now.
First, Shaftoe addresses Bischoff. 'Sir! I'm sorry I used harsh language on you, sir!'
'It's okay,' Bischoff replied, 'she was a whore, like you said.'
The skipper clears his throat impatiently.
'Yeah. I was just wondering,' Shaftoe says turning to the skipper, 'you have any gold on this U- boat?'
'The yellow metal?'
'Yeah. Bars of it.'
The captain is still nonplussed. Shaftoe is beginning to feel a certain mischievous satisfaction. Playing with officers' minds isn't as good as having a brain saturated with highly refined opiates, but it will do in a pinch. 'I thought all these U-boats carried it,' he says.
Beck dismisses the medic. Then he and Bischoff talk about Shaftoe for a while in German. In the middle of this conversation, Beck drops some kind of a bomb on Bischoff. Bischoff is stunned, and refuses to believe it for a while, and Beck keeps telling him it's true. Then Bischoff goes back into that strange ho-ho-ho thing.
'He can't ask you questions,' Bischoff says. 'Orders from Berlin. Ho, ho! But I can.'
'Shoot,' Shaftoe says.
'Tell us more about gold.'
'Give me more morphine.'
Beck summons the medic again, and the medic gives him the rest of the syringe. Shaftoe's never felt better. What a fucking deal! He's getting morphine out of the Germans in exchange for telling them
Bischoff starts interrogating Shaftoe in depth, while Beck watches. Shaftoe tells the whole story of U-553 about three times over. Bischoff is fascinated, Beck looks sad and scared.
When Shaftoe mentions that the gold bars had Chinese characters stamped on them, both Beck and Bischoff are floored. Their faces come aglow, as if lit up by the scanning beam of a Leigh light on a moonless night. Beck begins to sniffle, as if he's caught a cold, and Shaftoe's startled to realize that he's actually crying. He is crying tears of shame. But Bischoff is still fascinated and focused.
Then a mate bursts in and hands Beck a message. The mate is clearly shocked and scared out of his wits. He keeps looking, not at Beck, but at Bischoff.
Beck gets a grip on himself and reads the message. Bischoff lunges out of his bunk, hooks his chin over Beck's shoulder, and reads it at the same time. They look like a two-headed circus geek who hasn't bathed since the Hoover Administration. Neither speaks for at least a minute. Bischoff is silent because his mental wheels are spinning like the gyroscope of a torpedo. Beck is silent because he's on the verge of blacking out. Outside the cabin, Shaftoe can hear the news, whatever it is, traveling up and down the length of the U-boat with the speed of sound.
Some of the men are shouting in rage, some sobbing, some laughing hysterically. Shaftoe figures a big battle must have been won, or lost. Maybe Hitler's been assassinated. Maybe Berlin's been sacked.
Beck is now visibly terrified.
The medic enters. He has adopted an erect military posture-the first time Shaftoe's seen such formality on the U-boat. He addresses Beck briefly in German. Beck nods continuously while the medic is talking. Then he helps the doctor get Bischoff out of his straitjacket.
Bischoff's a bit stiff, a bit unsteady, but he limbers up fast. He's shorter than average, with a strong frame and a trim waist, and as he pounces from bunk to deck, he reminds Shaftoe of a jaguar deploying itself from a tree. He shakes hands heartily with the medic, and with the miserable Beck. Then he opens the hatch that leads towards the control room. Half the crew is jammed into the gangway, watching that door, and when they see Bischoff, ecstasy floods over their faces and they erupt into wild cheering. Bischoff accepts handshakes from all of them, making his way towards his duty station like a politician through an adoring crowd. Beck slinks out the other hatch and loses himself among the hammering diesels.
Shaftoe has no idea what the fuck's going on until Root shows up a quarter of an hour later. Root picks the message up off the deck and reads it. His perpetually bemused affect, normally so annoying, serves him well at times like this. 'This is a broadcast to all ships at sea from German supreme naval command, Tirpitzufer, Berlin. It says that U-691-which is this boat we're on, Bobby-has been boarded and captured by Allied commandos, and has already attacked and sunk a milchcow in the Atlantic. Now it appears to be on its way towards continental Europe where it will presumably try to infiltrate German naval bases and sink more ships. All German naval and air forces are ordered to be on the lookout for U-691 and to destroy it on sight.'
'Shit,' Shaftoe says.
'We are on the wrong boat at the wrong time,' Root says.
'What's the deal with that Bischoff character?'
'He was relieved of command earlier. Now he's back.'
'That maniac's running the boat?'
'He is the
'Well, where's he going to take us?'
'I'm not sure if even he knows that.'
Bischoff goes to his cabin and pours himself a slug of that Armagnac. Then he goes to the chart room, which he's always preferred to his cabin. The chart room is the only civilized place on the whole boat. It's got a beautiful sextant in a polished wooden box, for example. Speaking tubes converge here from all over the boat, and even though no one is speaking into them directly, he can hear snatches of conversation from them, the distant clamor of the diesels, the zap of a deck of cards being shuffled, the hiss of fresh eggs hitting the griddle. Fresh eggs! Thank god they managed to rendezvous with the milchcow before she was sunk.
He unrolls a small-scale chart that encompasses the whole Northeast Atlantic, divided into numbered and lettered grid-squares for convoy-hunting. He should be looking at the southern part of the chart, which is where they are now. But eyes are drawn, again and again, northwards-to the Qwghlm Archipelago.
Put it at the center of a clock. Then Great Britain is at five and six o'clock, and Ireland is at seven o'clock. Norway is due east, at three o'clock. Denmark is just south of Norway, at four o'clock, and at the base of Denmark, where it plugs into Germany, is Wilhelmshaven. France, home to so many U-boats, is far, far to the south- completely out of the picture.
A U-boat that was headed from the open sea towards a safe port on Fortress Europe would just go to the French ports on the Bay of Biscay-Lorient, most likely. Getting to Germany's North Sea and Baltic ports would be a far longer and more complicated and dangerous trip. The U-boat would have to get around Great Britain somehow. To the south, it would have to make a dash up the Channel, which (setting aside that it's a bottleneck, crackling with British radar) has been turned into a maze of sunken block-ships and minefields by those Royal Navy spoil- sports. There is a lot more room up north.
Assuming Shaftoe's story is true-and there must be
