The U-19's Last Kill

by Jack Finney

  I grinned, too, and nodded. “Yeah,” I said. “These are good.” And I handed the snaps up to Frank. “Who took them?

  Frank nodded at the letter in his hand. “Walther, the man who writes me. He is employed in the Kroll household; he is there twelve days now, as a sort of houseman. Highly recommended to Herr Kroll”—Frank grinned again—“by a man who quit suddenly two weeks ago. Walther took his photographs from inside the house through windows above the garden; he is a competent man.”

  Frank opened the letter and began scanning the angular script. “Kroll comes to New York at some time in the next two days, Walther says. He will fly from Buenos Aires, bringing his trunk, in a private plane belonging to a friend—simply to visit New York, as far as American officials are concerned, and entering on his own Argentine passport. But actually he will leave the United States almost immediately, using the name and American passport of someone else. This is all Walther has been able to learn; whose passport this will be, he does not know, but Kroll does not have it now. He will receive it in New York; Walther does not know where, or where he will stay. Walther gives his description.” Frank looked down at his letter again. “Kroll is of medium height, weighs about a hundred and sixty pounds, a little heavy in the belly, and he has brown eyes and black hair, turning gray at the sides and back.” He looked up, glancing around at all of us. “We will find him all right.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “if he’s there to find. What if he flies, Frank? And why shouldn’t he? He’s flying here; why not all the way? Why come to New York at all, in fact? Why not go directly from Buenos Aires?”

  “No.” Frank shook his head, smiling a little. “He must come to New York in order to leave on an American passport—with hundreds of other American tourists, inconspicuously and secretly under a false name. Reinhold Kroll cannot openly leave Argentina directly for Europe; he might not be welcomed on the other side. Nor can he fly from New York in a commercial plane; it is impossible; Walther has heard this discussed a little.” I raised my brows questioningly, and Frank softly explained. “The trunk, Hugh; it is too big, too heavy. You are allowed only hand luggage to keep with you on a commercial plane overseas; the trunk he would have to send separately by air freight, and undoubtedly not even on the same plane. And this is unthinkable; Kroll will not do that. The trunk must be with him at all times.” Frank smiled. “Do not worry; he will not fly past New York. He will travel as arranged, Walther assures me.”

  Very softly Linc murmured, “So we’re all set,” almost as though he’d never quite believed, until now, that we would be. Then, while Rosa began fixing supper, Frank, Vic and I studied the photographs, passing them around among us, memorizing the heavy face of Reinhold Kroll.

  We worked that night, but only till about ten. Frank had knocked together a set of deck gratings during the afternoon, and now, propping them up against the end of the dock, he and Vic began to paint them—black. And I rigged my chargers down in the sub and got them started. But mostly we just wandered through the sub, looking her over, Tooling with this or that, not doing much of anything, really. There wasn’t much left to do any more, and we had two more days and nights left; this was May fourteenth, and we were to sail on the morning of the seventeenth.

  We tested the sub around noon the next day. We moved out as before, this time towing the rowboat, and found a hundred feet, sounding with the boat’s anchor line. Then Vic and I climbed into the boat, untied her and rowed clear. Moreno was back at the dock finishing up his torpedoes; Lauffnauer and Linc were going to make a stationary test dive.

  Linc climbed down, and we heard the hatch slam after him, Then, waiting a hundred and fifty yards clear, Vic and I saw the deck lower and disappear; then the water crept up the rusting side of the tower and closed over it. We waited—five minutes, then six, then seven. Suddenly the water boiled, continued to boil, and the conning lower broke surface, then the decks, the water gurgling from the sub’s drain holes. Linc broke open the hatch then and waved his arms, hands clasped together, and we paddled over to her.

  She’d tested out as we’d expected, yet after the sub was back in the dock, drying from black to dull orange again, I stood staring down at her with the others, wondering what was going to happen out in the ocean in this little boat far beyond any help. She was so little! Standing on the dock beside her, I knew I could jump over onto her bow and actually make her bob in the water from my weight. “Damn it!” I said, swinging angrily to the others, “Let’s get this thing painted so it at least looks like a sub!”

  Moreno, standing beside me, arms folded on his chest, nodded. “Yeah,” he said, and grinned, “I’ll feel better too. You get the paint, Frank?” Frank nodded, and Moreno said, “We’ll paint her today, soon as she’s dry, right after lunch, Maybe the paint’ll help hold her together.”

  The next day, the Sixteenth, there was almost nothing to do. We’d painted her the day before, right down to the water line at low tide, using ordinary gray house paint and just slapping it on; we didn’t care how long it lasted.

  Around three in the afternoon we loaded the torpedoes in, lowering them down into the sub one at a time with the chain hoist in the dock, then manhandling them forward until we could lift them with the sub’s hoist in the forward compartment. We loaded the first two right into the firing tubes, and Moreno scratched an X into the paint just above one of the tubes. “This is the one we’ll try first.” he said. “I think it’s in the best condition.”

  Then suddenly, in the late afternoon, there was nothing more to do. Rosa brought down a plastic hamper full of waxed-paper-wrapped sandwiches, fruit and cookies. And she had three vacuum bottles washed and drying on the drainboard of the sink, ready to fill with hot coffee in the morning. At supper we ate almost in silence, each of us quiet with thought. When Rosa had finished the dishes, she and Moreno set up an extra cot, in the kitchen; Rosa was staying here tonight. Then Moreno, Linc and Rosa began a rummy game, sitting on a cot, dealing the cards out on a blanket, while Vic, Frank and I lay on our cots.

  But around nine-thirty the rummy game died, and Moreno stood up. “Let’s have a drink,” he said, and Rosa got our half-filled whisky bottle from a cupboard. Standing in the little kitchen area then, we all had a drink—straight, without ice or water. “Here’s luck,” Vic said. Moreno growled, “We’ll sure need it.” And we all grinned wryly and tossed the drinks down.

  Then Moreno set his glass on the wooden drainboard of the sink. “Celebration’s over,” he said. “In bed now—everybody.” From his pocket he brought out a little brown-tinted bottle, unscrewed the white plastic top and began shaking the little capsules it contained toward the bottle mouth. “Here,” he said, offering them around. “These arc sedatives; I want a full night’s sleep for everybody.” and we all held out our palms. I was glad to have one; I was wide-eyed and tense—rigid with excitement, and sleep would have been impossible without it. We went to bed then, sleeping half dressed; Rosa in her black slacks and sweater, sleeping fully dressed; and before ten o’clock the little shack was silent. Then I was asleep.

  TO BE CONTINUED

  It was the most daring attack in all the history of piracy.

  “To the U-Nineteen!” said Vic, raising his glass. “May she have better hunting her second trip out.”

  Frank Lauffnauer had found the little sub lying under 100 feet of water off Long Island, where, in 1918, as a young German sailor, he had abandoned her. But, even after more than forty years, the sub was still watertight. Through hard labor Frank and his confederates—Vic, Moreno, Linc, Rosa and Hugh raised the U-19 and restored her to operating condition. Frank’s plan was to use it somehow to seize $1,500,000 from a man named Reinhold Kroll. Once a notorious Nazi. Kroll was taking the money to Germany to use in establishing his own neo-Nazi regime.

  When Hugh joined Lauffnauer’s project, he cast aside Alice Muir, the girl who loved him. But ahead lay even greater sacrifices. Here Hugh describes the tension as the U-19 put to sea on her astounding e
scapade.

  V

  We sailed in the dark, just past high water on the ebb tide. Our one alarm clock had rung thirty minutes before, in the dead of night, and I turned my face into my pillow, shaking my head; suddenly I didn’t want to wake up to this day. Almost immediately Moreno shut off the alarm, it was beside his bed, and he must have been lying awake waiting for it. Someone moaned, coming out of sleep—Linc, probably; he’d done it before. Then I heard the slap of bare feet, Frank Lauffnauer, and the overhead light snapped on, a single naked glaring bulb, and I wanted to shout at him to turn it off. Vic said, “Well, this is it!” parodying the worn-out phrase, and I knew he was alive with excitement, actually happy, and I could have killed him. Moreno growled, “Yeah,” and I heard Rosa mutter something, A little later, all of us dressed and standing in the kitchen, drinking coffee, Rosa said irritably, “Someone should wear a black eye patch; you look like pirates.” We all wore heavy, knit pullover sweaters, mine and Linc’s gray, the others navy blue. Vic, Lauffnauer and I wore navy-blue pants, and Linc and Moreno blue denims, and we all had heavy, high-topped work shoes of unfinished leather, our pants stuffed into them and bloused over their tops. In appearance, anyway, we were a submarine crew—hard, dangerous and competent—and that’s what we were in fact, too, I thought, feeling a little better now, the coffee inside me.

  “All right, let’s move,” Moreno growled, setting his empty cup on the drainboard of the little sink. The sub was ready. There was nothing to do but start. Even the dive planes were already in position, and all of us but Moreno, who stayed in the tower, climbed down into her, and I went directly back to the engines. They were cold, of course, and it took me several minutes to start them. I cursed at them, but all the time in the back of my mind lay the hope that somehow they wouldn’t start at all. Then presently they stuttered into life; I nursed them along, warming them, then shouted up to Moreno, “Engines ready!”

  “All right,” he called down, “let’s go.” And now, the old diesels growling rhythmically, we moved out of the dock to sea. A thousand yards out, curving onto a northeast course, Moreno ordered, “Blow main ballasts,” and the air surged into the tanks, the deck pushing against my feet. Now we rode high in the water, as we would till dawn.

  There wasn’t much to do now. I had my engines to watch, making sure they didn’t run too hot, but they seemed all right, and I walked forward to the switchboard just it or this control room and checked my batteries: they showed a good, full charge. Lauffnauer had the trim tanks to handle, adjusting them as needed to compensate for fuel loss. Linc sat at his radio in the control room, his headset covering one ear only just now, slowly twisting a dial, monitoring whatever transmissions he could hear, which weren’t many, he said. Vic sat at the rudder wheel, and Rosa stood by.

  Moreno called down occasionally, whenever he saw running lights. But he saw very few, and never very close; we were well out to sea now-, We moved on, a black speck crawling steadily across the vast face of the ocean in the beginning dawn; and for hour after hour through the morning we continued, at a steady eight and a half to nine knots, the coast just visible far to port. Twelve times we sighted ships—freighters, an ocean-going tug, a Navy transport, two destroyers, several Coast Guard cutters. But they were far off, and we knew that our little tower, half submerged now, was invisible to them.

  Sometime around noon Rosa began laying out sandwiches from the hamper she’d brought and opening warm soft drinks on the drainboard of the little galley sink. I was sitting on the control-room deck, hands loosely clasped around my knees, staring absently at Vic sitting on the periscope seat idly rubbing at the brass housing with a thumb. Now I got to my feet and stepped over the control-room coaming into the aft compartment to check my batteries.

  At least I told myself that’s what I was doing, and I did; they were O.K. I turned and looked at Rosa, her back to me, for a moment; then I stepped over beside her, and she looked up at me questioningly. I put my hands on her waist, just over the swell of her hips, and turned her toward me. Then my arms moved around her, and I drew her to me. She neither resisted nor helped; her hips close to mine, she hung back from the waist, almost limply.

  “We are coming closer now,” she murmured very quietly. “Soon it will begin, and you are frightened.” After a moment I nodded. I was frightened—not panically, but with a perfectly healthy fear, a realistic awareness of what was coming—and now Rosa nodded too. “And I may be the last woman you’ll have a chance to touch,” she said then. “All right; I am frightened, too, now. Go ahead, Hugh,” she whispered, “hold me, kiss me,” and she lifted her arms to my neck and drew herself tight to me. I kissed her then, and she kissed me hard, and we had a long, long moment in which everything else was blotted out and disappeared.

  Then our arms relaxed, she drew back again, and we stood, eyes searching each other’s face. I began to draw her toward me again, my breathing shallow and rapid, but Rosa stepped back, twisting out of my hands. “There must be no more trouble,” she said; “not today. Go back to your engines—and wipe your face.” Then she turned to the little sink, uncapped a bottle, and I walked back toward my engines, pulling a handkerchief from my hip pocket; I fell Hue, ready for whatever was going to happen.

  It was much later, well after three o’clock, when Lauffnauer in the control tower with a sextant—he’d relieved Moreno for the last forty minutes—called down a sighting. Vic worked out our position, then called through the ship. “We’re there; or close enough, anyway. Moreno had the rudder wheel now and called for quarter speed and, as I walked back toward the engines, he began heaving on the wheel, turning the bow into the swell.

  No one pretended now that he wasn’t nervous. Moreno, in the tower again, checked our drift regularly, occasionally calling for a change in position, singing out the commands; then we‘d maneuver the sub, getting her back into position. Later, Vic was spelling Linc at the radio, and I decided to go topside. I climbed the ladder and stepped out into the little tower beside Lauffnauer, who had relieved Moreno on the bridge.

  We were riding high now, the decks above water. The sky, I saw, was clear, and the sun was warm on my face. We lay riding the gentle swell, the choppiness and spray gone, and I climbed out onto the deck. Smiling, Lauffnauer said, “Let us just stay here, Hugh, all of us, out at sea forever; there is nothing on the land for any sensible man.”

  “Suits me,” I said, nodding; I knew what he meant.

  Vic appeared now, relieved at the radio by Linc, Moreno at the rudder wheel below, and he climbed out onto the deck and stood looking around the horizon. There was always someone up here now, and none of us spent much time on deck without turning to study the southwest horizon. I wandered to the stern and stood looking off toward the almost-invisible shore, and after a moment Vic joined me. I glanced up at him, and his eyes were happy. Quietly he said, “I promised you adventure, Hugh, and now we’re going to have it; no one in the world has ever done what we’re going to.”

  I nodded and said, “Yeah.” I wasn’t really agreeing; it wasn’t worth it to me if I died or went to prison for what we were about to do, but I didn’t argue it.

  Maybe five minutes later Moreno relieved Lauffnauer in the tower, then called to me, and I turned. He was holding Linc’s white British chief’s cap in his hands, thumb rubbing the ornate gold-embroidered cap ornament. I came over, and he held it out to me. “Linc sent this up,” he said. “Better start wearing it now.” I put it on; I was to wear it because it wouldn’t fit Vic or Frank. It was the only scrap of actual uniform we had, but in our sweaters and navy-blue pants. Vie, Frank and I looked like submarine personnel at sea anywhere.

  Some twenty minutes later I was back at the engines, Vic was at the rudder wheel in the control room and Linc at his radio. Moreno was in the conning tower, Lauffnauer and Rosa on deck. Suddenly Linc’s voice—raw with excitement—called through the ship. “I’m getting her!” he yelled. “Straight voice transmissions, loud and clear!”

  Vic y
elled—a wild and triumphant “Yahoo!” Then he shouted to Moreno. “Permission to leave the wheel, Ed! We can drift now!”

  “Yeah, come on up!” Moreno shouted back, and I shut down the engines, then ran through the ship and clambered up the ladder.

  They were clustered around the conning tower, staring to the southwest.

  Then Moreno, binoculars raised, shouted loud enough for Linc to hear below. “Smoke on the starboard bow!” We stood motionless, staring, for a minute or more. And then there it was, just the tiniest unevenness, a faint alteration in the ruler-straight line of the southwest horizon, and I became aware of the steady pound of my heart in my chest. Through several long seconds we stood staring, and once again Linc called up excitedly; my eyes were narrowed, straining to see, then I blinked, and as my eyes opened again the speck was perceptibly larger, and Moreno lowered his glasses. “That’s it.” he said quietly, and now we all moved our heads turning to search one another’s faces, and I don’t think there was one of us who didn’t wish that somehow we were anywhere but here.

  “Transmitting steadily,” Linc called up again, his voice quiet now. “Routine stuff only,” he continued, “No code and no scrambling.” A moment later he said, “Receiving, too; also straight voice. I’m preparing to send, Ed,” he called, then repeated it. “Preparing to send,” Standing staring at that tiny, far-off ship, I knew Linc was twisting his dials slowly and carefully; he’d installed his radio so that it could transmit a weak signal only, detectable at no more than horizon distance. Now the distant smudge was the size of a thumbnail, and as we stood watching, it suddenly turned into a tiny ship, hull well up and moving fast; and I could feel that my face was flushed.

  Within minutes as we watched, no more than three or four, the tiny ship had swelled in size; and then suddenly it was no longer tiny, no longer distant, and I stood watching it acquire definition and color. We were in good position, I could see now, the ship, steady on her course, was moving toward us at an angle that would bring her within perhaps six hundred yards of us in passing. The incredibly long, tall, black hull, the white superstructure, yellow cargo booms, and three enormous red stacks were vivid against the blue sky, and as I stood staring, the sun winked for an instant on the blur of gold at her prow that was. I knew, the string of great gilded letters which spelled Queen Mary. We were almost in sighting distance for her. Moreno, his binoculars raised again, stood motionless, staring at her; then he dropped them, and yelled, “Send!” his voice exultant.