threatening to broadcast the information about the gold, Donitz retracted his general order to sink U-691. But there is the possibility that some ship might have received the first order but missed the second one, so he still has to watch himself.
Big deal. There is hardly any German Navy left to sink him anyway. He can worry about being sunk by the Allies instead. They will be intently irritated when they figure out that he has been shadowing this convoy for two whole days. Bischoff is pretty irritated himself, it is a fast convoy that protects itself by zigzagging, and if U-691 does not zigzag in perfect unison with the ship above it, it will either be crushed by her, or blunder out of her shadow and be noticed. This has put quite a strain on skipper and crew, and quite a drain on the boat's supply of benzedrine. But they've covered five hundred miles! Soon, fatal Biscay will be behind them, Brittany will be off to starboard, and Bischoff will have a choice: hang a right into the English Channel, which would be suicidal; head north between Britain and Ireland, which would be suicidal; or veer to the west around Ireland, which would be suicidal.
Of course there's always France, which is friendly territory, but it is a siren whose allure must be sternly resisted. It's not enough for Bischoff just to run the U-boat aground on a godforsaken beach somewhere; he wants to get the thing back to a proper base. But the skies above the proper bases are infested with Catalinas, illuminating the sea with the satanic light of their radars. It is much cleverer to make them think that he's headed for France, and then head for a German port instead.
Or at least it seemed that way two days ago. Now the complexities of the plan are weighing on him.
The shadow of the ship above them suddenly seems much longer and deeper. This means either that the earth's rotation has just sped up tremendously, moving the sun around to a different angle, or that the ship has veered towards them. 'Hard to starboard,' Bischoff says quietly. His voice travels down a pipe to the man who controls the rudder. 'Anything on the radio?'
'Nothing,' says the Funkmaat. That's weird; usually when the ships are zigzagging, they coordinate it on the radio. Bischoff spins the periscope around and gets a load of the transport, still trying to shoulder its way into them. He checks his course; the bitch has veered a full ninety degrees!
'They've seen us,' Bischoff says. 'We'll dive in just a moment.' But before he loses his ability to use the periscope, he does one more three-sixty, just to verify that his mental map of the convoy is accurate. It is, more or less; why, there's a destroyer, right there where he thought it was. He steadies the 'scope, calls out target bearings. The Torpedomaat echoes the digits while dialing them into the targeting computer: the very latest fully analog technology. The computer grinds through some calculations and sets the gyroscopes on a couple of torpedoes. Bischoff says:
As has always been the case, and as will continue to be the case for at least another half century, batteries suck. The convoy seems to bolt forward as U-691's speed drops to a pathetic wallow. The destroyers can go about five times as fast as they can now. Bischoff hates this part.
'The destroyer is taking evasive action,' says the sound man.
'Did we have time to get the weather forecast?' he asks.
'Storm front moving in this evening. Foul weather tomorrow.'
'Let's see if we can stay alive until the storm hits,' Bischoff says. 'Then we'll run this bucket of shit straight up the middle of the English Channel, right up Winston Churchill's fat ass, and if we die, we'll die like men.'
A terrible clamor radiates through the water and pierces the hull. The men cheer sullenly; they have just sunk another ship. Whoopdy-doo!
'I think it was the destroyer,' says the sound man, as if he can hardly believe their luck.
'Those homing torpedoes are bastards,' Bischoff says, 'when they don't turn round and home in on
One destroyer down, three to go. If they can sink another one, they have a chance of escaping the remaining two. But it's nearly impossible to escape from three destroyers.
'There's no time like the present,' he says. 'Periscope depth! Let's see what the fuck is going on, while we've got them rattled.'
It is like this: one of the destroyers is sinking and another is heading towards it to render assistance. The other two are converging on where U-691 was about thirty seconds ago, but they are hindered by having to make their way through the middle of the convoy. Almost immediately, they begin to fire their guns. Bischoff looses a spread of torpedoes towards the assisting destroyer. Water is spouting up all around them now as they are straddled by shells from the other two. He does another three-sixty, fixing the image of the convoy in his mind's eye.
'Dive!' he says.
Then he has a better idea. 'Belay that! Surface and go to flank speed.' Any other U-boat crew would cut his throat at this moment, then surrender. But these guys don't even hesitate; either they really do love him, or they've all decided they're going to die anyway.
Twenty seconds of raw terror ensue. U-691 is screaming across the surface, banking like a Messerschmidt as shells pound into the water all around her. Crewmen are spilling out of her hatches, looking like prison camp inmates in the bright sun, trying not to slide off the deck as it tilts this way and that, diving to snap the carabiners of their safety lines onto cables before they are blown out of their shoes by the waterspouts from the exploding shells. They are manning the guns.
Then there's a big transport ship between them and the two destroyers. They're safe now, for a minute. Bischoff's up on the conning tower. He turns aft and gets a load of the other destroyer, spiraling crazily in an effort to shake off those homing torpedoes.
When they come out from behind the shelter of the big transport, Bischoff sees that his mental map of the convoy was more or less accurate. He speaks more orders to the rudder and the engines. Before the two attacking destroyers have a chance to open up with their guns again, Bischoff has got himself positioned between them and a troop transport: a decrepit ocean liner covered with a hasty coat of wartime camo. They can't shoot at him now without blowing hundreds of their own troops to shreds. But he can shoot at them. When Bischoff's men see the liner above them, and gaze across the water at the impotent destroyers, they actually break out into song: a congratulatory beer hall ditty.
U-691 is topheavy with weaponry, armed to the teeth because of the aircraft threat. Bischoffs crew opens fire on the destroyers with all of the small and medium-sized stuff, to give the deck gun crew a chance to line up its shot. At this range, the danger is that the shell will pass all the way through the destroyer's hull, and out the other side, without detonating. You have to be patient, take your time, aim for the engines. Bischoff's crew knows this.
A skull-cracking explosion sounds from the barrel of the deck gun; the shell skims the water, hits the closest destroyer right in the boilers. The destroyer doesn't blow up, but it does go dead in the water. They take a few more shots at the other destroyer and manage to knock out one of its guns and one of its depth charge launchers. Then the lookouts see airplanes headed their way, and it's time to dive. Bischoff does one final periscope scan before they go under, and is surprised to see that the destroyer that was trying to evade the torpedoes managed to do so; apparently two of them curved back and hit transport ships instead.
They go straight down to a hundred and sixty meters. Destroyers drop depth charges on them for eight hours. Bischoff takes a nap. When he wakes up, depth charges are booming all over the place and everything is fine. It should be dark and stormy up there now: bad weather for Catalinas. He evades the destroyers by (in a nutshell) doing clever things he has learned the hard way. The U-boat is as thin as a knitting needle, and when you turn it directly toward or away from the source of a ping, it makes almost no reflection. All that's required is a clear mental map of where you are with respect to the destroyers.
After another hour, the destroyers give up and leave. Bischoff takes U-691 up to schnorkel depth and points her straight up the middle of the English Channel, as advertised. He also uses the periscope to verify that the weather is, also as advertised, awful.
Those bastards have a big fat red pin on the map marking his position as last reported by those destroyers. Around that pin, as the hours go by, they will draw circles of steadily increasing radius, widening gyres enclosing the set of all points in the ocean where U-691 could possibly be at the moment, based on their assumptions about
