Night Crossing

by Robert Ryan

  They’d been spotted silhouetted against the twilight sky an hour after sinking the SS Cook Star. For two hours they’d been hanging quietly at thirty-five metres, hoping that the searchers would miss them, but now the enemy were on to them. They could clearly hear the grinding of screws bouncing through their hull.

  ‘Depth?’

  ‘Ninety metres!’ It was deep, but still safe.

  ‘How’s the leak?’

  ‘It’s closed itself.’

  ‘All stop. Level her off at a hundred metres.’ This was around the recommended dive limit.

  ‘Both planes zero. Levelling off,’ said the Chief.

  ‘What’s that damn’ noise?’

  ‘Bearing in the propeller shaft.’

  ‘Can’t you quieten it down? It’s like a drum signal.’

  A fine spray at high pressure started to enter a few feet away from Erich. He pressed himself back against the metal, out of the way.

  ‘Boat balanced,’ the Chief said, scanning the bank of depth and pressure indicators.

  ‘Now quiet. Let’s listen—’

  Forty-eight men held their breath, letting it out through their noses in a slow stream, wondering if the others could hear the jackhammer of their hearts.

  The thunder started as a low grumble and grew louder, until the world blurred and the boat shuddered under impact after impact, punched in a series of sharp jabs from stem to stern, tossing the crew’s heads around until Erich thought his neck was going to snap. He had an urge to scream as more depth charges sank through the water and detonated around the craft.

  There was another round of explosions and one of the crew head-butted a valve, his nose splaying open, flicking blood around the control room. A bulb blew, and the lights died. Flashlights cut through the blackness.

  ‘Fuse!’ shouted the second engineer.

  The boat shook again as more charges pounded it. Erich felt as if hot needles were being driven into his eardrums. His eyes refused to focus as the pressure waves hit again and again.

  ‘Damn!’ Prinz banged his periscope.

  The boat settled down, creaking and groaning as she did so. The main lights blinked on.

  ‘They are turning round.’ The hydrophone operator started to spin the small wheel in front of him, changing the direction of the detector located on the top deck.

  ‘Relax,’ said the IWO. ‘Those wabos are fifty metres above us. Just hope they don’t reset—’

  Becker’s teeth chattered the words as another salvo blasted its shock waves through the water. U-40 bucked under the impact, flexing as if she were about to break her back, and the boat filled with the sound of smashing glass and crockery.

  ‘We are going to have to run,’ spat the Captain. He crouched down, the better to see the hydrophone operator. ‘Do they have us or are they guessing?’

  ‘Guessing.’ But his voice suggested that he wasn’t certain.

  ‘Take her to one hundred and fifty metres,’ Prinz said. ‘Then creep speed. Due south.’ Schleichfahrt, creep speed, meant running the electrical motors at around 100 r.p.m., with a speed of less than three knots. It was the quietest form of propulsion, but agonisingly slow.

  ‘Bow fifteen, stern five,’ said the Chief. ‘Full left rudder.’

  They felt the boat turn and the nose dip, taking it down. New noises rippled through the hull as the plates twisted and settled. There were many rumours and legends about how deep you could go in a Type VII. Two hundred metres, some said, two hundred and fifty, others claimed. However, once you discovered where the limit was, you weren’t coming back to boast about it. He hoped that the Chief had checked the welds and the plate bolts properly at Kiel.

  ‘One-forty.’

  ‘Start to bring her out.’ The boat responded to the planes-men, but sluggishly, as if unwilling to stop until it reached the ocean floor.

  ‘Planes zero. Boat balanced.’

  Erich knew that letting the crew of the Cook Star abandon their ship had been a nice gesture of old-fashioned gallantry, but it had kept them in the area for too long. The British had been able to get three ships, at least one of them a destroyer armed with Wasserbomben—wabos—on their tail.

  Prinz crouched again. ‘Phones?’

  ‘He’s doing another run, I think. Turning. He’s going to pass to the stern.’

  ‘Brace.’

  Erich held on to a pipe, aware that he could taste blood in his mouth. He had bitten through his lower lip. The churning of screws seemed to swell through the boat, bouncing off the glistening internal surfaces.

  ‘Wabos in the water.’

  Erich pictured the cylinders falling through the water, the pressure triggers bulging until …

  It sounded like summer thunder in the mountains, a distant warning, something happening elsewhere, to someone else. The shock waves hit the boat, but from the stern, causing a pitching that soon passed. There was the mass sound of breath being exhaled. Lucky, thought Erich, as he relaxed his grip on the pipe. Everyone down here always claimed that a year in a submariner’s life was worth five of any other sailor’s. Now he knew why.

  They surfaced the next morning in the first red-tinged light of day, cautiously bleeding the compressed air into the ballast tanks to bring U-40 up gingerly, the pressure pain in the crew’s ears compensated for by the welcome blast of fresh oxygen that the ventilators sucked into the interior.

  Erich listened as the diesels started up and one was decoupled to charge the electrical motors. The damage report was long, but nothing too serious. Some of the vents were buckled, which meant the tanks couldn’t be blown quickly for an emergency surface. A cover had been ripped from one of the diesel exhausts, which also had a pressure deformation in it. That would need repairing before they could dive again. They had been fortunate. And now the crew of U-40 knew that they could survive a depth-charge attack.

  While the repairs were being carried out a short-wave message came from BdU instructing them that they were to stay hunting on this side of the Atlantic. Two big convoys had made it past the East Coast Rudel already. U-40 was to position herself at the top of Ireland, and sink them in sight and smell of their home.

  Prinz interrupted the gramophone records that Schnee was playing and addressed the crew while the five-man watch in the tower scanned their quadrants, more alert than ever. From now on, he said, no warnings for their targets, no abandoning ship for the targets’ crews. He didn’t mention the brandy, but he didn’t have to. The old type of war that their fathers had fought was over. From now on, it would be the unexpected torpedo from an unseen enemy who would then slip away and be swallowed by the ocean. There was no cheering, only a resigned acceptance of what they had to do next time they found their prey.

  Thirteen

  JUNE-JULY 1940

  Fritz Walter had guessed, even while they were packing, that the authorities were not going to keep the men and the women together. As they piled their clothes onto the bed, Uli’s father had pressed a small leather journal into her hands and told her to read it when things calmed down. She had slipped it into her handbag and helped Fritz pack his battered suitcase one more time, making sure that he had warm clothing. It might be summer in London, but who knew where they might end up?

  Uli thought of the book, still unopened, bouncing against her thigh as the ancient bus wheezed into the entrance of the racecourse. She had little idea where they were. All identifying marks and signs had been removed from the course itself, but once inside there were the white poles with their pointed markers from the pre-war meetings, directing visitors to members’ enclosures and somewhere called Tattersalls. Presumably knowing which category of racegoer you were would be of little help to invading German parachutists.

  The parts of the course that hadn’t been ploughed up were dotted with ugly brown tents of some considerable vintage. Barbed wire was slung around the perimeter, and tin-helmeted soldiers seemed to be everywhere, trying to instil some order into the gaggle of hapless civilians who
stood around their new quarters, bewildered.

  An open-air altar had been set out at one end of the course and a group of men of all ages with skullcaps or handkerchiefs over their heads swayed back and forth in prayer. A small number of soldiers and other internees stood watching. A few were sneering. Uli spotted what had been scrawled on one of the bivouacs. ‘No Jews.’ Even here, she thought.

  There was a long, straggling queue of men waiting for processing outside a building marked Tote. Uli’s bus slid past them towards a smaller white wooden building at the far end of the main straight. Here a red double-decker bus was disgorging women, many red-eyed from crying, others with the vacant expression of the shocked and bereaved and a few of them fiercely defiant, fixing their minders with vengeful stares. Some had children in their arms or clutching their skirts, and Uli realised that the women were being further segregated. Her group was clearly made up of those not encumbered by children.

  Another small knot of childless women was being escorted by the soldiers to a long, low building, where piles of dirty hay had been pitched outside the doors. It was the stables. They were to be housed in horse stalls.

  Uli turned to the young Austrian girl next to her, who was sobbing.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Hilda.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Hilda. It won’t be for long.’

  Uli thought of her interrogation at the police station, the reclassification from ‘C’ to ‘B’—a ‘doubtful case’—because, it seems, they had discovered Uncle Otto. How had the British police made that link? He wasn’t a real uncle, after all. She hoped that her father would be all right. He had put on a brave show, but she knew that he felt angry and humiliated.

  She mainly felt grubby, in need of a decent shower or bath. But, looking at the stables, she guessed that wouldn’t be forthcoming for some time.

  ‘Do you really think so?’ asked Hilda, finally.

  The doors of the old bus swished open and a man’s ruddy face appeared. He shouted an instruction that they were to get off and be registered once more, this time at the building labelled The Jockey Club.

  Uli smiled with a confidence that she no longer felt. ‘I’m certain. You’ll be back home within a few weeks.’ They both tried to ignore a derisive snort from an older woman nearby. Hilda took Uli’s hand and squeezed it as they shuffled along the central aisle to the exit.

  Ross found himself growing impatient for Emma’s visits. He enjoyed her company. He was still making the transmissions to some distant spot, no longer submarines, probably a base in Holland. He received back a variety of increasingly odd questions which, he now assumed, contained within them a coded subtext, as did his answers.

  He wondered if his father was telling him the whole truth. Uli would know, he thought. He wished she was here. At least, he did most of the time. He heard the growl and grind of Emma’s truck coming down the back lane, and he placed the kettle on the gas, checked his new haircut and stepped outside as nonchalantly as he could.

  There were fewer files on this occasion, Emma’s third visit, so they could take their time with the digests. As usual they worked in silence, except for the occasional question to the other about the exact meaning of a word or phrase.

  ‘What’s TVA?’ she asked after a couple of hours.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘This chap says he worked at TVA.’

  ‘Didn’t the interrogator ask him to explain?’

  She rustled some papers. ‘No.’

  ‘Typical.’ One thing had become clear from reading the documents: the standard of questioning by the British was wildly variable. Some—ex-policemen or serving intelligence officers—were excellent. With others, he could almost see the circles that were being run round them. There needed to be some kind of standardisation. He would mention it in his report.

  ‘Who was the subject?’

  ‘Sailor. Picked up in the Channel.’

  ‘Put it to one side. I’ll take a look later.’

  Emma nodded and picked up another file. Thirty minutes passed to the accompaniment of the constant shuffling of paper and sharpening of pencils.

  ‘Aren’t you rather young?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Ross asked, taken aback. ‘Rather young for what?’

  ‘A police inspector.’

  ‘Ah. Yes. Well, some thought so. Because I had a university degree, one in foreign languages at that, I was allowed to enter the Rapid Advancement Programme.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning the regulars who have been busy clocking up their service years and diligently taking their exams resented me something rotten.’ ‘Gentstables,’ they called them, anyone who had a decent education before entering the police training college. He’d had his fair share of ribbing over the years about his accent and his tastes in everything from alcohol (preferring wine to beer with meals was tantamount to an admission of homosexuality) to books.

  ‘Yes, I can see that. Do you miss it? Scotland Yard? Blue lamps, whistles, car chases and all that.’

  Ross leaned back in his chair, ran a hand through the stubble of his shorn hair and shrugged. ‘Well, I didn’t get to do too many car chases.’ He thought of the blazingly fast Railtons that the Flying Squad used. ‘Not enough, really. I did miss it. Yes, I think I still do. It was more satisfying somehow. Than this. More important.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘You agreed with me before.’

  ‘We agreed that the Colonel must know what he is doing. You don’t know you are wasting your time.’ Ross wondered if Emma had spoken to his father about his attitude, had been told to gee him along, then dismissed the thought.

  ‘No. But let’s call it an educated guess.’

  They took Bess for a walk, ate a meal of some suspect sausages that she had brought from London—unrationed, bangers were often more bread than meat—with a couple of potatoes and the carrots he’d foraged in the village. As everywhere, though, real onions were impossible to find. Afterwards they resumed work, but around nine he finally said, ‘Well, I think that’s it. My eyes feel like they’ve got half of Blackpool Beach in them. I’ll walk you back to the Dolphin.’

  ‘There’s no need to do that.’

  ‘No, I insist, can’t have you saying I’m not a gentleman.’

  ‘No, what I meant was … well, I haven’t bothered to book into the Dolphin this time.’

  ‘Oh.’ Ross felt himself flushing. He did have a spare room, after all, it just hadn’t occurred to him that it might be in any way seemly for Emma to take it, and the bed was cold and dank, the sheets musty.

  He explained this to her, and her face broke into a broad grin as she watched him redden and fumble his words. ‘What I mean is, a girl could grow old waiting for you to ask, Inspector. I wondered if I could share your bed tonight.’

  Uli was billeted in the stables for a week before they were moved again, by slow, overcrowded train this time. The next stop was a half-completed housing estate outside Liverpool, prosperous-looking flat-fronted homes, strangely naked without their garden fences and, in some cases, a full complement of windows. Most of the wire-wrapped estate held men; ‘female aliens’ were assigned just one street and a close, and Uli and Hilda found themselves sharing a room with five others, including Frau Menkel, the older woman from the bus.

  There was, however, proper bedding, and running water—not hot, but you couldn’t expect everything—and Frau Menkel set up a washing rota. Uli was fairly certain that Frau Menkel was, if not a Nazi, at least a sympathiser. She caught her looking at Hilda and the other Jews in a way that suggested she would rather not share a room.

  The first task assigned by the soldiers—none in the first flush of youth—who guarded them was to organise a blackout. The guards were at a loss about what they should use, so for several hours skirts were unpicked, headscarves unfolded and old newspapers scavenged to seal the light in. The odd precious blanket had to be used as well.

  There were no
radios and the newspapers were months old, but people gossiped with absolute conviction about the German parachutists who had landed in Oxfordshire and were marching on London, about the destruction of the Royal Air Force, about the British capital having been reduced to smouldering ruins by the Luftwaffe in savage retaliation for the pinprick raids on the Ruhr. Frau Menkel seemed to be enjoying the rumours, and she wasn’t alone. As they settled down for the night Uli heard faint singing from one of the male households. She strained her ears. ‘Wenn das Judenblut vom Messer spritzt.’ When the Jewish blood spurts from our knives.

  Uli found the notebook that her father had given her and turned it towards the spluttering light of her candle. It was written in his old-fashioned Gothic hand, dense and hard to decipher. It began sixteen years previously. The sentences were short, but were usually followed by a single word or phrase with an exclamation mark. Thrilled! Wonderful! So proud! It was his record of her violin-playing, from the first awful scrapes and scratches until days before her accident. As she read it, her wrists began to throb, and pains shot up her arms. Excellent! A privilege to hear!

  For the first time since she had been taken, Uli rolled over and began to cry, letting tears of shame and guilt soak the thin sacking of her pillow. She never knew, had never realised how he had felt. Such pride and passion leaping off the page. Yet she hadn’t been able to detect any of it in her father’s face at the time. So much for her damned Duchenne gift. Or perhaps she hadn’t been looking hard enough.

  She felt a hand on her shoulder and turned, expecting to see Hilda, but it was Frau Menkel kneeling next to her, her silver-streaked blonde hair tied into braids, ready for bed. ‘Shush. Shush. All will be well, I promise you.’

  But Uli suspected that she and the Frau had a very different idea of what constituted everything being well.