Free Stories 2018

by Baen Books

  “So you’ve gone through the records. For some sick reasons of your own. Are you from the old country? Because I want nothing to do with any of those people, the way they treated my mother.”

  That blow had struck home. It was what Charlie had said about his mother; that look of grief and sorrow was too real. But it went quickly—masked with deliberation and skill. “This is getting nowhere. I’m sorry about the beer.” Which meant nothing. And what the man said next, that should have put an end to this farce once and for all—it was certainly put to Charlie in what started out as a tone of considerable finality. “We will go elsewhere. But you may wish to reconsider whether you call yourself U-818 Lachs, does your mother know?”

  “Why don’t we ask her?”

  The words were out of his mouth before he realized what they were. And once they were said he could not un-say them. There was no questioning the sincerity of the emotion on the man’s face: and yet there was no explanation for it, either, absolutely none, no possible explanation, not within a rational world in which science ruled the physical universe and the stream of existence ran one way and cause led to effect in a chartable and reliable manner with logic and reason.

  “My Papadum,” the man said. “My kaiserling. She is still alive?”

  Charlie had no intention of letting this man anywhere near his mother. She was nearly eighty-five years old, no matter the health of her heart and her spirit. No manipulative schemer would be allowed to cross the threshold of her apartments: he would come up with some excuse why she could not take her turn around the garden, the daily exercise she insisted upon rain or shine. For as long as these people were here he would have to keep her closed away, somehow.

  He would give them three days. Because there was a picture with an inscription on the back from his birth-father to his mother, with love from “Fergie” to his “Papadum,” his precious “kaiserling.” That was a mushroom. He’d looked it up when he’d been thirteen. He’d asked her about it. She’d just laughed.

  “Her Fergie has been dead for sixty years.” Charlie said it deliberately, watching for the reaction. Only those people on the other side of the water could have known what his parents called each other, and that meant this man was his enemy. Or his father. Which was self-evidently impossible. He’d keep them for a few days and he’d be doing his research, too. “Shouldn’t he stay that way? Come on, I’ll give you the keys. Your people can stay through Saturday. You’ve got a bus?”

  “In a manner of speaking. Yes. Come with me, I’ll show you.” All right. No more talk of credit cards, then. No offered identification. There was no law requiring him to demand any, though, and it was Charlie’s resort, it belonged to him and his mother free and clear. He could let them use his cabins if he pleased. Whether he was going to feed them he had yet to decide. “And oh, you’ll want your binoculars, if you have any,” the man said, as an afterthought, starting for the door.

  Charlie swept the peg-board behind the service counter clear of the keys to all twenty cabins and dumped them into one of the bags he kept there for peoples’ purchases. He grabbed his field glasses. He followed the man out, locking the door behind him, since his mother would still be asleep at this early hour.

  They weren’t going to the parking lot in front of his small restaurant, fine, closed for the season anyway. No bus, no RVs, the man—what was Charlie going to call him? Because “Lachs” was out of the question—headed off down toward the dock anyway, straight for the flagpoles. There wasn’t anything out there on the water. There was only an inflated rubber boat, and an old-fashioned one by the looks of it.

  So there was a boat standing far enough out that it took binoculars to see it? If these people were smugglers, criminals, had Charlie just put his mother in jeopardy? He could call for help. He had more than one nook and corner where he had a radio, and could get a signal out.

  The man shaded his eyes with the flat of his hand against the early morning light. Then he waved, with his arm high overhead, and took Charlie’s binoculars. Pointing with them at the flagpoles, at the Smoking Salmon banner—a sanitized version, of course, because Charlie had no intention of glorifying the war—the man stared into Charlie’s eyes with a certain degree of humor in his face.

  “That is not U-818 Lachs,” the man said, emphatically. Taking a sight through the binoculars he nodded toward the water, waiting until he could tell that Charlie had seen something to aim at before holding the binoculars out for Charlie to take. “That is U-818 Lachs.”

  Because there was something out there. Charlie hadn’t really noticed it at first, a stick bobbing in the water, except that it wasn’t bobbing, and it was getting taller. Quite tall. On top of something. On top of a structure of some sort, rising from the waves with a frothing of water from the sides of something long and low and grey. Suddenly sure of what he was going to see, horribly reluctant to see it, Charlie raised the binoculars to his eyes and focused.

  There, on the side of the structure rising up inexorably out of the water. The original Smoking Salmon, a fish with a pipe in its mouth and a stream of black haze rising from a wrecked ship in the bowl, one lateral fin brought forward and enlarged as though it were a hand with its fingers splayed to show its blissful enjoyment of yet another enemy freighter going down, sending its billowing clouds of burning oil up to Heaven as if in an unspoken and unanswered prayer.

  The utter and surreal insanity of it all was too much for Charlie, and he laughed. “All right,” he said. He understood it, now. “Come on ashore. Detail me one or two of your, er, crew, to prepare the cabins.”

  World War Two Kriegsmarine re-enactors. That was the answer. Intense young nut-cases bent on recreating conflicts safely in the past, focused so completely on the technical challenges of building obsolete technology that the manifest tastelessness of what they were doing escaped them completely.

  They weren’t dangerous. These weren’t neo-Nazis or white supremacists. Nobody with anything truly serious in mind would build a U-boat. Nobody who built a replica U-boat would have any money left over to buy beer, but who was to say whether the amusement value of their presence wasn’t return enough?

  He felt much better about the whole thing: so long as he didn’t think too hard about the look on the man’s face when Charlie had suggested that they ask his mother about U-818.

  ###

  Lowering his binoculars Herr Kaleun Raimond Dietsch shook his head, the corner of his mouth quirked toward the front of his mouth in a characteristic grimace of perplexity. “H’mm,” he said, although he knew how frustrated his men would be. “It’s not a tanker. It may be a troop ship. Let’s get closer.”

  They’d been on their way back to Bordeaux, stopping near the Cape Verde Islands to refuel a sister U-boat outbound for the Indian Ocean. They’d been located, attacked, depth-charged in high style by the “hedgehog” depth charge bomb clusters that the enemy delighted in dropping on the heads of U-boats. When they had surfaced they had been safe from Allied attack, but much closer to South America than to Africa; of the coast of Brazil, in fact, which meant Allied territory.

  The radio equipment had been too badly damaged during the depth-charge attacks to find a friendly voice at any frequency, or any voice at all. Dietsch had decided to run down to Mar del Plata, in Argentina. Yes, Argentina was technically neutral—they’d broken relations with Germany in January. But a small party might hope to slip ashore and gain some intelligence; and, with luck, a blind eye turned to refueling and refurbishment prior to setting course for France once again.

  There had been no U-boats in the coastal waters of Brazil since 1943, no convoy traffic south of Bahia. He’d felt safe proceeding on the surface to sustain his crew, give them all some relief from the hellish heat that built up in the boat in these warm waters.

  They’d had a chance to air the boat out, dry their clothing, touch up the ship’s seal on the conning tower—Moby Dick. Someone had told some of his crew that he, Dietsch, was as fixed on the hunt a
s Captain Ahab from that novel, and the white whale was what the crew had painted on the conning. They hadn’t asked him. He really didn’t object. It wasn’t his place.

  They’d seen no traffic worth remarking, certainly no targets, but on the positive side no American destroyers or bombers looking for them to kill them for good and all this time. Nobody seemed to be looking for them. But he was always looking for something to eat, so it was wonderful to see the huge ship on the horizon. It was like no ship he’d ever imagined: a large box, as much as anything else, and so brightly painted that it might be taunting him.

  Since he didn’t know what it was he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a warship. He’d sent his engineer to consult Jane’s; now Englhardt was back, shaking his head in turn. “There is nothing like it in the book, Herr Kahloin,” he said. “It must be a new building program. Something from the Americans?”

  Yes. That would make sense. They were a diabolically inventive people, but he would test them out all the same. “Periscope depth,” he told the watch officer. “Dive.”

  The sun was blinding on the bright water. It was worth the risk that his periscope would escape observation, and the hydrophone operator didn’t hear more than one strong almost overwhelming noise of the single ship. The watch officer saw no escort ships as they ran closer in: just row upon row of what seemed to be windows rising in ranks into the heavens.

  Troop ship. A repurposed pleasure craft, of monumental proportions. Dietsch climbed into his conning tower and gave the order to raise the attack periscope. He was the eyes of U-797. He was its Ahab. He had a full load of torpedoes for harpoons.

  The target was so large there was no fear of misdirection; no need to finesse his course and speed, and the ship showed no signs of even the most basic of defensive maneuvers, but sailed in a straight line. He brought the boat into perfect position—nose on to broadside—and issued his command, three torpedoes to launch, in a fan; there, he said to himself, with satisfaction. That will serve you out for those depth charges.

  Then he—and everybody else—waited, counting out the seconds either under their breath or, like Englhardt standing on the ladder half-way between Zentral and the conning tower where Dietsch sat at the attack periscope, on his stop-watch.

  They were late. The size of the ship had confused him, Dietsch realized: it was farther away than he’d realized, the figures of the passengers he’d seen on one upper deck too indistinct to judge the distance by their height.

  Late, but on target, and Dietsch rejoiced in the sweet sound from the hydrophones of the eels sinking their teeth into the hull of a juicy Allied transport. Once. Twice. Three times. Eye pressed to eyepiece of his periscope he scanned the ship to see what it would make of the gift that he had brought to their first meeting.

  It didn’t seem to have made much of an impact. The ship had not slowed down. It didn’t seem to be taking on water. He knew his torpedoes had hit. All three of them. He knew a ship in ballast could eat up two, three torpedoes and still float, but that was a troop ship, it would logically be carrying people rather than ballast, why wasn’t it showing him that it was wounded? Hadn’t it noticed that it had been attacked?

  He’d heard of that happening. When Prien had torpedoed the Royal Oak none of its crew had realized what had happened until it was far too late. This ship showed no sign of turning turtle. He needed more information than he could acquire from the conning tower. “Surface,” he told the watch officer. “Get a little nearer. And join me on the bridge.”

  But it didn’t get any better when he climbed into the daylight to train his binoculars on the scene. Nobody was manning the ship’s boats, if that was what they were, those peculiar yellow objects like a cannoli or a tube-balloon. He could see some wisps of black smoke rising from the hull at the water-line, but when he looked up to the top of the boat he saw no signs of panic, or even alertness. And he was closer to the target than he’d been before. He could see things better.

  What he saw made his heart sink. Those weren’t soldiers. There were men, yes, but there were at least as many women, and there were children there as well. This was a mistake. He’d made an error. He had to get away as quickly as possible, before he was seen, before he was identified, before the news of a U-boat attacking a defenseless passenger ship—a refugee ship, perhaps—could become a weapon in the propaganda war. He didn’t hesitate. He stooped over the hatch and yelled at the top of his lungs. “Alarm!”

  Emergency dive. U-797 was a VII-F, they were the heaviest VII series made, they could dive like a cormorant. Hatch secured. Decking, already awash, now underwater. Conning tower slipping fast beneath the waves. Bridge flooded. Boat—disappeared. Had they been seen?

  Should he go back and try again?

  It was too late for that now. The word would spread throughout U-797 too quickly. No wise commander risked an order that would raise too many questions in men’s minds. Slumping against the chart table—his hands braced to either side of his rump to keep himself steady as the boat drove down into the deep—Dietsch listened to his engineer count off the meters. Twenty. Forty. Sixty. One hundred. He straightened up.

  “That will do,” he said. Now he had to take control of his larger situation, define for his crew what their reality was going to be going forward. “I was misled by the unfamiliarity of the ship.” That was true. It cost him nothing in the eyes of the crew to admit to his mistake right away, and take any potential guilt on himself. “However, they do not appear to have been damaged very badly. We have avoided a grave error.”

  Was there anything he could have done differently? Would any rational man have looked upon so large a target and risked an open hail, not knowing whether or not the ship was armed? That would have endangered the boat and its crew. No. No man would have gotten close enough to see women and children on so high an upper deck before launching his torpedoes, and by then it was too late.

  They had been sent into the Indian Ocean with their load of torpedoes to replace ones whose batteries had degraded to uselessness in the damp heat of the tropics. Those of U-797 had clearly been affected as well. That would explain their failure to do significant damage, with three clearly heard detonations.

  “We resume our course. We surface when we have some distance between us. Next stop Mar del Plata, gentlemen. That is all for now.”

  A ship so much bigger than the Bismarck, one torpedoes did not sink, sailing blithely along on holiday as though there was no war on at all. Where was the shipyards in which such a monster could be built? Who was the national genius behind such an innovation? What nation in all the world was not at war?

  And when, when would they find a true target against which to unleash their fury, and burn away the embarrassment and shame of having almost murdered a cruise ship full of women and children?

  ###

  It was a beautiful day. Verricht Lachs stood on the low veranda of the command cabin—the one he shared with his senior officers, First Officer Goond Hols, Second Officer Theodor Sclarvie, Engineering Officer Joachim Vilsohn—facing the crew leaders, who stood on the lawn facing him. Out beyond his men Lachs could see the lake, glittering in the light of the Sun in a cloudless sky.

  “We have considered the situation, Herr Kahloin.” Their navigator, Harald Rathke. “As you have asked. We can derive no explanation for how we got here. And in the absence of any other information our only suggestion is that we go out the same way we came in.”

  They had to escape from the trap they were in if they were to hope to survive in the long term. Lake Superior was a very large body of water, and deep, four hundred meters in places; but it was less than half the extent of the Bay of Biscay, and it had been proven that a U-boat had to have luck on its side to traverse Biscay safely now that Allied air carried the new radar. The newer radar, Lachs reminded himself.

  It had been difficult to hide in 1945. In 2005 it would be that much harder, if anybody started looking for them, which meant that Lake Superior offered no long-term sanc
tuary that could be safely relied upon, not even here at the Salmon Shore resort.

  Sooner or later someone would happen upon their boat. They had to get out of here. A U-boat did not belong in Lake Superior, and there was a route from the lake out to the Atlantic Ocean, but to get there one had to traverse the complex system of locks that was called the Saint Lawrence seaway and there was no way to sneak a U-boat through those.

  “I risk the lives of everybody in our crew,” Lachs pointed out. It was his decision, absolutely; any hint of collective action was entirely out of the question. Nobody wanted to invoke the shameful shadow of the Kiel mutiny. Nobody hated Communists more than a U-boat crew. “I risk the boat. Have we really no alternatives, in your view?”

  Now there was a little uncomfortable stirring amongst the gathered officers, the chief diesel man, the top torpedo man, one of the radio operators. The navigator, of course. The warrant officers assigned. What?

  “A point of interest, Herr Kahloin,” Heimsat—one of the machinists’ mates—said, diffidently, when Rathke didn’t speak. “There was U-728. Does Herr Kahloin remember? They also saw the Höllander. And when they were depth-charged their position was off Jan Mayen Island, but by the time they got their radio working they were near Gibraltar, and there was no explanation.”

  That was not a completely accurate statement. There had been several explanations proposed. “I have heard of that,” Lachs said slowly, wondering how much was known amongst the crews of what was said amongst the officers. Also vice versa. “It was said there was an error in navigation. Milrauch insisted there had not been any such thing.”

  Milrauch had been transferred away from his boat, condemned to shore duty. There had seemed little doubt that the boat had sustained severe damage in a massed Allied attack in the Arctic Ocean; Milrauch had lost his nerve, it was said, and fled the scene. Lachs had heard some perplexity as to how the boat had gotten from Jan Mayen to Gibraltar with its fuel tanks so little depleted, but since there had been a suspicious whiff of cowardice about the only possible explanation the matter was not much discussed.