Free Stories 2018

by Baen Books

  It was always a rush of adrenaline, climbing the ladder through the conning tower, opening the bridge hatch. Because they never knew quite what was waiting for them. Goond went first: it was his privilege, as well as his responsibility.

  The onrush of stale contaminated air from the interior of the boat boosted him up and through onto the bridge so persuasively that he knocked his head against the hatch while still in the process of opening it. Bad air out. Good air in. Below they would be crowding around the air-well, and drinking that clean fresh sweet cold oxygenated air in greedily. Even from the bridge Goond could hear the interior ventilator fans that had been switched on, but his watch were the lucky ones. They got first crack at it all.

  Goond hurried on up and out, his head spinning from the blow it had taken against the hatch, stumbling forward to fetch up against the high wall of the bridge and hang there, sucking the air into his lungs. His confusion started to clear. But not quickly enough.

  There was something wrong. What was it? The seas were calm, the stars outside the halo of the full Moon’s gracious white-pearl light were bright and beautiful. Pushing the hood of his anorak back and away from his face Goond turned his face to the sky, guzzling the air. Visibility was excellent all around; no fog rose on the horizon to disguise a destroyer, no clouds gathered overhead to conceal the approach of a bomber until it was too late to avoid being spotted. What could be wrong about that? What did he smell that was so out of place?

  The merciless wind did not whip the exposed portions of his face raw within an instant of its first exposure. His gloved hand did not freeze to the cowling of the bridge when he steadied himself against the bulwark. It was cold, but temperately so, cold like Christmas at home in Germany, not cold like northernmost Norway; barely freezing. The Moon was full. It had no business being any of those things. It was all wrong.

  “Herr Kahloin,” Goond called down the narrow hatchway, forcing the words out past the knotted fist of perplexity in his throat. “Your presence requested on the bridge, please.”

  Lachs clearly knew it, too, or at least part of it; that was what Goond had sensed in Lachs’ voice. Lachs had seen the light: that of the full Moon. Lachs knew as well as Goond did that they’d set out from Hammerfest in the dark of the Moon with only the Northern Lights to betray them on the cold black choppy sea, and even those obscured by fog and rain. The Arctic waters were never so warm as this, not in February, maybe not ever. Nor was that the whole of it.

  Lachs came up the ladder with deliberation, as if reluctantly; perhaps he was afraid the moonlight he’d seen through the periscope had been a hallucination—but if it was, it was a shared delusion, because Goond and the men of his watch could see it too. Goond waited. Lachs tasted the air; then Lachs took off one glove and dipped his fingers into a little pool of water that had puddled in a dimple in the rim of the bridge cowling, bringing a few drops to his mouth, tasting of it, raising his eyes to meet Goond’s waiting gaze with wonder.

  Yes. Goond nodded. The air was not salt. The water was not salt. That was the final thing that was wrong about this, they were not even at sea, they lay in fresh water. There were rivers in the world as wide as the many miles from horizon to horizon that stretched all around them, yes, that was so, but they were all in warmer places than this—the Amazon, the Indus, the Ganges, and all of them with current.

  It was not a river. It was a lake. It was an immense lake. How they’d gotten here, where they were, when they were, these and so many other questions were too vast and numerous to be grasped in the moment; there was only one thing of which he could be absolutely, completely, categorically certain.

  “Don’t say it,” Lachs warned. So Lachs knew, too. He and Goond had seen the same movie, after all, in 1939 at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in California with their hosts from the local German community, just before they’d had to hurry home to Germany, just before the declaration of war.

  But Goond had to say it. The conviction grew in his mind into an imperative of Irresistable force. “I mean it,” Lachs said. “I’m not joking. Don’t.”

  It was no good. Not all of his training, not all of his self-discipline, not all of his affection for Lachs as a friend and respect for Lachs as his commanding officer, not all of his conviction that Lachs was going to kill him if he said it could stop him now. He was cursed to say the words, and die.

  Weren’t they all cursed? Was this the revenge of the ghost ship, was this the fate to which they had been condemned since the moment they had all seen that phantom off the west coast of Africa three years ago? Was this the curse of the Fliegende Höllander, the Flying Dutchman?

  “Toto,” Goond said. Teeth clenched and eyes flashing Lachs snarled through clenched teeth don’t say it don’t say it don’t say it, but not even that could stop Goond now. It was his doom. There was no help for it. “I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

  Lachs clenched his gloved and ungloved hand alike into fists and shook them at the sky in outraged protest, crying out “Alarm!” with impassioned determination. Dive.

  They all fell down the hatch and through the conning tower to the decking of the command center below, but not without a thorough drenching before Goond could get the hatch secured. Because the water was calm but the boat sank that much more willingly and readily and quickly in fresh water. They were heavier here. Vilsohn had already noticed the difference, Vilsohn was the engineer, it was his business to notice such things.

  Vilsohn would assume there was some undetected damage in the ballast tanks, taking on water prematurely, weighing them down. There might well be. But that was not the reason. “We say nothing as yet,” Goond told his watch, quietly, as the controlled chaos of an emergency dive exploded all around them. “We give Herr Kahloin time to chew on this, yes?”

  And to sink down into the comfort of a familiar environment, a watery one, to give themselves time to process what they’d seen. But now Goond knew why he’d been dreaming of that evil day. They had seen the Flying Dutchman; they’d taken the cursed packet of letters offered them. But they hadn’t actually touched hands. Did that mean they were only partially cursed? Was that why they found themselves here in fresh water under the light of a full Moon, and not dead on the bottom of the Arctic ocean?

  Goond fled from Zentral to the radio room to evade Lachs’ wrath and see whether Bentzien could find an answer to where, what, when, and why that did not bear the towering sails and cursed habilments of the Fliegende Höllander.

  ###

  Verricht Lachs leaned up against the jamb of the doorway into the radio room, tiny as it was, listening as his radio-man—it was Zoller’s watch—tried to find the signal from the Goliath high-frequency transmitter, trying to make contact with U-boat Command. There should be a transmission. Goliath sent regular updates. Command sent a registry signal over VLF as well, a comfortingly familiar point of contact with their homeland.

  They’d never replied—there was danger in that. The Allies were listening, and though the enemy could not cover the entire ocean, if you were the boat unfortunate enough to be caught on intercept you were found. But they should be able to hear Goliath. Shouldn’t they?

  The Western Allies had landed in Europe in June, last year. It was February. The Soviets had been advancing from the east. Was Goliath overrun? Because if Goliath had been captured, by whose army? And what had become of Berlin itself?

  Nothing. Zoller tracked slowly across the twelve-meter band, listening for anything. Even the English propaganda stations would be worth something, a point of reassuring contact with reality as they understood it, some solid evidence that they had not simply fallen somehow off the map of the world. Zoller had already scanned and scanned for weather reports, because there should be some explanation for how a wintery Arctic environment had resolved within less than two days to a so much milder temperature, cold, but calm, the Moon phase impossibly and inexplicably advanced.

  No weather report could explain the turning of the entir
e ocean from salt to fresh. Lachs had only the wildest surmises to explain that. German scientists had been working on some astounding breakthroughs in weaponry; the Old Lion, Admiral Dönitz, assured them of that with increasing urgency and sincerity, even as the credibility of their beloved commander declined.

  So the Allies logically been doing the same as well. Could the first deployment of some cataclysmic doomsday weapon have so altered the chemical balance of the arctic waters that they were as fresh? If that was the answer, could it not explain the silence of the radio equally as well, something had gone wrong, Goliath gone mute, radio traffic stunned into silence by an incomprehensible catastrophe?

  “Twenty meter band,” Lachs suggested. Zoller switched to the main receiver; then suddenly Zoller found a channel. A crescendo of radio contacts piling up on either side of a control frequency like an avalanche that was relentless, almost terrible in its density. Code, in blinding speed. Data pairs. The operational shorthand he’d learned during his school days with the radio program offered through the Hitler Youth, British convention for hailing, CQ, CQ, CQ, all signs repeated in rapid bursts.

  Lachs thought he knew what they were hearing: had the world not been at war it could be a contest, one of the great joys of the amateur radio service. Operators from all over Europe—from all over the world—would be reaching out to one another along one narrow band, trying to make as many far-flung contacts as they could within some limited period of time. CQ. CQ. CQ. Shorthand in Morse code.

  The world was not ended. But apart from that, there was no information to be drawn out of the noise other than that there were people talking to one another, Jim in Milwaukee, Hans in Unterramingen, Toshi in Hitachinaka, Debreeze in Kent.

  He was wrong, Lachs realized. It was information. He could hear operators identifying themselves from all over the world. They did not seem to be partitioned by politics: it was hard to imagine Japanese talking to Canadians, French with Russians, Germans with Egyptians without any apparent notice taken, if they were still at war.

  Zoller glanced over his shoulder at Lachs, who nodded. Scan on. So intense was the range of signals all aimed for the same frequency that the dropping off of information came as a relief; but now that they’d found traffic, there was more. Much of it incomprehensible, welcome to the Fipps repeater, what was that? Some Allied piece of equipment?

  And that was not all. As Zoller scanned further through the twenty-meter band, catching fragments of voice traffic in amongst the familiar music of Morse code, one message seemed to leap out of the transceiver with explosive force for all that Lachs was only listening to the sound from one ear-piece of Zoller’s head-set, that Zoller had left cocked to one side so that the sound could be shared.

  U-818. U-818. U-818. Lachs.

  Calling for them out of nowhere. U-818, Lachs. U-boats were frequently called by the names of their commanders. But how could they possibly respond? There was no secured traffic on this frequency, and the call was in the clear, so there was no sense in encoding a response.

  They were still within the twenty-meter band, yes, but that covered a lot of territory, and they’d left all of that confusing traffic—the contact frequency—well behind them. The code-stream offered no additional information, no explanation for the call. Was this a trap?

  If it was a trap, wouldn’t the enemy have taken care to conform more closely to a signal they would have responded to without thinking twice about it, suspecting nothing?

  Straightening up Lachs turned his back to the doorway with his hands flattened to either side of his head, thinking. The ZweiVo and Ellie were both here, but they did not speak Morse code as Lachs and Zoller—and Goond Hols, for that matter—did. They wouldn’t know that U-818 was being hailed.

  Lachs was not a reckless man, but he had the capacity for swift decision within reasonable parameters. And he knew how to take risks. Their situation defied all logic. They had to find some explanation.

  Every man on this boat knew that things were not going according to plan: they were not returning to their base at Hammerfest. They were not traveling to intercept a convoy; they were making enough speed—on the surface, since it was dark night—to recharge the batteries; and apart from that there was no information shared because nobody had any. Everybody knew by now that the water was fresh and the Moon was full. He owed it to the crew to seek out a solution. It was time to take a chance.

  He nodded to Zoller. “U-818,” he said. “Reply.” He was afraid that everyone within earshot was to be robbed of the sudden hope he could see in the expressions of his subordinate officers, because he had not taken time to lay out a rationale for his actions and they would not know what he and Zoller knew. He wished he had Goond beside him, because Goond could read Morse code as well as he did; but Goond was in the control room, and Lachs didn’t care to send for him, because it would create more strain in what was for now a calm if perplexed boat. He shook his head at Sclavie and Vilsohn. Sorry. Nothing to report. Stand by.

  Zoller keyed the response. U-818 Lachs, U-818 Lachs, U-818 Lachs. Calling station identify. That would be innocuous enough, perhaps, if someone heard: standard format, someone calling themselves U-818 Lachs responding to someone not transmitting according to customary practice.

  But there was silence. Were there technicians being placed on alert in some Allied operations room, retransmitting messages to listening stations, alerting remote observers to relay the information that would let them triangulate on U-818’s position and send bombers? Destroyers?

  If that were so, would U-818 not at least find out where they were? Or did the enemy have as little knowledge of where U-818 had gone as they themselves did?

  The code came back at a much slower speed, hesitant, surprised. Or perhaps playing for time. Zoller reached out for the controls of his locator apparatus, with a questioning glance. Lachs nodded emphatically. Two could play the game.

  U-818. Okay. Who’s the joker? Lachs.

  In English: another piece of potential evidence. Surely the Allies would have a German speaker to lure a German boat. The calling station was calling himself Lachs, then, not calling for U-818 Lachs by name. It was a point of clarification. “Ask him for German,” Lachs said, turning back to lean up again half-in, half-out of the radio room so that he could better hear the muted sound from Zoller’s headpiece. “No, but wait—” Lachs held out a warning hand as Zoller reached for his Morse set. He had to say something to his officers, even if it could not make very much sense.

  “We have a radio contact. They ask for us, but in English. I don’t know if they’re enemy. I’m going to risk it.” More later. Dropping his hand away Lachs nodded to Zoller, whose hand betrayed a certain degree of hesitancy on his own part; something Lachs knew because he knew Zoller’s touch on the Morse transmitter key, something only two other people on board—Goond and Bentzien—and certainly no outside contact, was likely to be able to interpret, except by instinct. Lachs did not discount the instinct of a telegrapher. He had just made his own assumptions, after all.

  I ask who is the joker. The calling station’s German was hesitant; German was not his first language, apparently. The German that the Allied propaganda stations spoke on their broadcasts was indistinguishable from that of a native speaker, right down to the reproduction of a recognizable dialect—because they were native speakers, though they were working with the enemy. If the calling station was an Allied double agent his German should be better. Name and call sign please.

  You first, Lachs thought. But rudeness raised barriers to communication, and he wanted information out of whomever he was talking to. The calling station already apparently believed he was not in earnest: so Lachs decided to try an honest answer.

  “This is U-818,” he said slowly, so that Zoller could keep up on the Morse key. “Believe me or not. My name is Verricht Lachs. And you?”

  His officers reacted with predictable unease, but Lachs felt confident of their trust in him. Not as if any of them had much cho
ice on the issue of trust. It was also a matter of military protocol, whether or not they had established a strong relationship over the course of so many shared war cruises. He and Goond went even further back.

  U-818. Get real. If you’re U-818 you went down with all hands on the tenth of February. 1945. Lachs.

  Zoller started in his seat, but kept his station. Lachs stared at the floor to process this information. Of course U-818 had gone down in February of 1945. And with all hands. But they’d come up again. The Allies could easily have deduced their identity; there were spies in Hammerfest as at every U-boat base, and the security of their transmissions to and from Headquarters were consistently being compromised for all the care in the world that they could take.

  The calling station owed him information. Lachs waited. Here it came. And Verricht Lachs was my father. A break; and then in English, come on. Share the joke. George. It’s you, isn’t it? And then, as an afterthought, the customary declaration of call sign, this time with a name attached. This is Charlie. Lachs.

  Then he was not Lachs’ son. Lachs’ son was named Pieter, Rudolph Zimmer Mattias Ulrich Pieter Lachs. Five years old. Lachs made it a practice to think seldom of his family while he was on war cruise, because there was no sense in dwelling on the fact that he might never see his wife and child again. During the dark hours past—not knowing whether they would return, this time—he had sent a silent parting prayer to God for them, but the circumstances had been exceptional.

  Before he had time to puzzle out what he should say next he heard a new signal, weaker, English; not me, Charlie, what’s up? Just bringing the DPK repeater back up. WVREF George. It was slightly off frequency, then, but Zoller didn’t try to adjust, concentrating on his task. Acquiring a fix. Locating the original signal. The original caller had not moved off frequency to match.

  Eh, somebody out there having a go at me, that’s all. I make the station out as offshore. Middle of Lake Superior somewhere, as if. Someone out on a boat, maybe.