Crucified

by Michael Slade

"Easy," Wyatt replied. "My friend Rutger—the fellow who set up the Ace of Clubs pass for me—knows the records the Nazis kept better than anyone. To my mind, he's the best historian of Hitler's Reich. With the date of the crash and the location of the unearthed plane, he was able to search Gestapo files. He found a record of your arrest and the statement given by the farmer living nearby. I phoned the farm this morning to confirm."

  "Elke turned me in?"

  "No. In fact, the Gestapo gave her a very rough time. What saved her from execution was your 'admission' that you had threatened her and her child."

  "I was afraid for them."

  "And rightly so," said Rook. "She could have been shot for helping the enemy to escape."

  "What put the Gestapo on to me?"

  "Your parachute caught in the tree. What's interesting is that earlier that night— before your plane was shot down—the Gestapo throughout this region got orders to take any downed RAF airmen alive, and to separate them from one another."

  "Judas?"

  "That's another piece that seems to fit our puzzle."

  A lazy river with wooden bridges meandered through the hills and dales, fields and pastures. Man and horse worked the fields together as they had for centuries. With the help of German shepherds, farmers in funny-shaped hats and leather pants that never wore out herded cows for cheese and pigs for sausage. Apples shone red in the orchards. Soon, this world would be forced to give way to modern times, when the autobahn brought Fahrvergniigen—"the pleasure of driving"—to pollute its tranquility.

  "That barn!" said Sweaty, pointing. "That I remember. Its beamed sides reminded me of Shakespeare country, and its roof drapes down like a nun's cowl."

  "Check the map," Wyatt said to Liz in the back seat.

  She laughed. "I assume the German cross you scrawled means X marks the spot?"

  "Yes."

  "Okay. We're here."

  "And that's the farmhouse," Sweaty said, finger pointing again. "I hobbled across from that windbreak of trees, leaving my chute billowing in the branches."

  Wyatt turned up the long driveway that led to the farmhouse door. They bumped about until they reached the end, where a woman was watching from the threshold. When they parked and got out, Sweaty smelled smoke in the air. It reminded him of childhood autumns back home in Wisconsin.

  "Welcome," said the woman with gray streaks in her back-combed hair.

  "Hello, Heidi. You've grown up," replied the old airman.

  Holding out a metal box in one callused hand, the German raised its hinged lid and flashed him a smile. The same smile he'd seen when he'd fed candy to her doll.

  "Have one," she offered. "I order them from London. You left me with a sweet tooth for barley sugar."

  Selecting a candy, Sweaty placed it on his tongue. More than half a century had passed since he'd last sucked one, but the distinctive taste flew him back to the war. Never again had he felt such camaraderie. And after all the faceless Germans they had killed from the air, this woman's mother was the one he'd saved.

  Down memory lane, he thought.

  The parlor hadn't changed much since the war. There was even a blaze on the hearth to ward off autumn's chill.

  Heidi motioned Sweaty to the same overstuffed chair as Elke had, then served her guests coffee and a Bundt cake.

  "Karl?" inquired the sergeant, eyeing the photo of the young man in the Luftwaffe uniform still displayed on the mantel. "Did he come back from the war?"

  "Ja," said Heidi. "From a prisoner camp. That's where he learned English, which he later taught to me."

  "Your English is good."

  "I watch English-language films." A TV and DVD player were the only updates to the room.

  "And your mother? Elke?"

  "She died in a farm accident when I was a teenager. After that, my brother and I worked the land."

  "That's a lot of work."

  Heidi nodded. "Now he's gone, so I plan to sell."

  "It's good to see you."

  "You, too," she said. "I've waited a lifetime to thank you for not betraying my mother. Did they beat you?"

  "No, they were decent. But I didn't want the Gestapo hurt-ing your mother for helping me."

  "You were Karl."

  "I know," Sweaty replied.

  Heidi offered Liz a second piece of cake. "I hear your grandfather piloted the plane?"

  "Yes," said the younger woman. "He vanished that night.

  I'm here in hopes of unearthing what happened to him.

  Wyatt found no trace in the Gestapo files."

  "That's because the Gestapo didn't capture him."

  Liz sat bolt upright. "You know his fate?"

  "Ja," Heidi replied. "My childhood playmate grew up on a nearby farm. That night, he was awakened by the noise of a descending bomber. His father grabbed a pitchfork and ran off across their fields to intercept a parachute he spotted in the sky.

  The next morning, he gave his son new toys."

  From beneath her chair, Heidi retrieved a rusting biscuit box. With both hands, she passed it to Liz.

  "When I heard you were coming, I went to my friend. He wants to remain anonymous, but he gave me this to give to you.

  These are the 'toys' his father gave him that morning."

  Liz took a deep breath and thumbed off the lid. Inside, she saw the insignia of a pilot's battledress, including the wings of RAF Bomber Command. One by one, she removed the trophies from the box, examining the gadgets designed for escape and evasion by the brains of MI9. Finally, she turned the box upside down, and into her palm fell a wedding ring.

  "For Fletch, with love" was etched into the band.

  "What happened?" Liz asked.

  "Your grandfather landed where the farmer was waiting.

  He'd lost his parents when Nuremberg was bombed."

  "Oh," said Liz.

  "That's why we were always told," Sweaty interjected, "to give up to the military, and not to civilians."

  "When the farmer heard that the Gestapo wanted to take the crewmen alive, he feared for his life. He swore his family to secrecy, and no one found out, except me. I said nothing, until now."

  "Thank you for telling me."

  "If Karl had been killed in England, I would have wanted to know. Not far from here is a magnificent tree. The pilot was secretly buried beneath its canopy. If you'd like to go for a walk in the country, I'll accompany you to his grave."

  U-BOAT

  GERMANY, 1944

  Entering the U-boat was like crawling through the neck of a bottle. With the hatch closed, you said farewell to the sun, the moon, the stars, the earth, and everyday life. Suddenly, your world shrank down to this oppressive, claustrophobic, constricted steel tube. The Elektro boat—a new weapon in the arsenal of the Reich—was half the size of the submarines that had begun the war. Less than ten feet wide, it wasn't designed for the comfort of its crew. The sub was a battle engine stuffed with machinery and torpedoes. It gave the men just enough room to vegetate and perform the chores essential to their mission. For weeks on end, the fourteen-member crew would stoop, step up, slip sideways, and bang their heads on pipes and hand-wheels as they moved along the central aisle. The Judas agent felt like Jonah inside the whale as this mechanical predator slipped silently beneath the sea toward its target.

  His codename was Sturmer.

  Daredevil, in English.

  And daring indeed was this plan to smuggle Hitler's atomic secrets to Churchill in the Black Devil.

  The tide had turned in the Battle of the Atlantic. In the early years of the war, wolf packs of U-boats had attacked convoys on the surface, then submerged to escape from destroyers. But by the end of 1943, sub losses were greater than the number of ships torpedoed. What tipped the scales against Germany were aircraft equipped with radar. Forced underwater, the wolf packs were deprived of surface mobility, and solitary hunters had little chance against an escorted convoy. Clearly, Germany required a new type of sub.

  The Judas age
nt had been sequestered in a hideaway on the Baltic Sea for a crash course on the revolutionary Type XXIII Elektroboot. Diesel power, Sturmer learned, was obsolete. By replacing it with electric motors juiced by high-capacity batteries, the Germans had built a machine that could stay submerged for 194 nautical miles, so it couldn't be "starved out" by surface pursuers. The electric boat could maintain a lightning attack for over an hour, and it was almost immune to echo-detection by sonar-probing destroyers. With double the attack speed of other submarines, the Type XXIII had the option of silence over swiftness by switching to an auxiliary electric "creep" motor.

  Run silent, run deep.

  That was the Black Devil.

  Sneaking Sturmer aboard the sub had not been difficult.

  By 1944, the mauling of the wolf packs had bled experienced crews dry. The Kriegsmarine had to take whatever manpower it could get. From the hideaway on the Baltic Sea, Sturmer was sent to the main torpedo-training school for officers at Miirwick.

  By then, his German was up to snuff and his papers were real.

  He was just an ex-Luftwaffe marksman going to sea. His studies focused on torpedoes and how to launch them. Practical lessons took place aboard a converted minesweeper, which had a pair of torpedo tubes mounted on the forecastle and a simulated U-boat control room below deck. So dire was the need to get subs and men into combat that Sturmer was sent directly to the Black Devil for the first Elektroboot test run in the North Sea.

  When he first spied the sub in its Hamburg pen, he had marveled at its small size. Built in four separate sections, the boat could be shipped by rail and reconstructed for operations in the Mediterranean and Black Seas. The conning tower was large in proportion to the hull, as it housed the periscope, snorkel, and torpedo computer. That tower was his battle station in the sub.

  He was the erste wach offizier, or the first watchkeeper.

  The 1WO.

  The second-in-command.

  His primary responsibility was the sub's weapons system: the torpedoes and the computer used to aim and fire them.

  His other task was to assume command if the CO died or fell ill.

  The forward compartment of the Black Devil had two torpedo tubes. Called an Aal—an "eel"—by the crew, a torpedo was twenty-three and a half feet long. Instead of being inserted nose-first into the rear of the tubes like shells in a shotgun, the torpedoes were dropped in externally like the balls of an antique muzzleloader.

  No reloading meant the sub had just two shots.

  As 1WO, Stiirmer had supervised the arming of the boat.

  First, the Black Devil was ballasted at the stern to raise the bow clear of the water. Then, using cranes and pulleys on a barge, the torpedo boys had hoisted the heavy, unwieldy, greased eels and slipped them into the tubes.

  Tube caps sealed, the sub had gone to sea.

  The trip up the coast of Britain had proved a piece of cake.

  All the way, the sub had lurked beneath the waves. Even when the diesel engine was used to recharge the batteries, nothing had broken the surface except the head of the snorkel.

  Extended high above the tower, it had sucked in fresh air and exhaled exhaust fumes. Sturmer could see why the Judas traitors were using the Black Devil to deliver their package.

  As disaffected members of the German military, they had selected the safest machine in their arsenal, and the route that offered the least suspicion to the Gestapo.

  On setting sail, the sub had looked like a butcher shop.

  Sausages and smoked hams hung from ceiling pipes. Hammocks overflowed with loaves of hard, dark navy bread. With space at a premium, every nook and corner was crammed with edibles.

  The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Sturmer thought.

  The bread turned moldy as the days went by, for humidity in the sub was intolerable. The crew called the mildewed loaves

  "white rabbits." Grabbing them by the "ears," they tore out the edible innards. Food produced by the tiny galley tasted like diesel oil.

  Clammy clothes never dried, and draping them on machinery had little effect. Fresh water was strictly for cooking and drinking. The men cleaned themselves—if at all—with saltwater sponge baths and a cloying cologne that fouled the already reeking air. If the sub sank below eighty feet, the toilet in the overused head refused to flush. Woe betide the sailor who lost track of depth, for the outside water pressure reversed the flow.

  Hygiene was a joke. Underwear was dyed black so it wouldn't look grubby. Whores' undies, they called it. Because denim withstood oil and grease from the machinery, that was their uniform. Bunks were built into both sides of the passage, aft of the torpedo tubes. A man coming off a shift would flop, fully clothed, into the bed just vacated by the man relieving him. Hopefully, neither man had crabs or head lice.

  Day and night were the same in the Black Devil. With no skylights and no portholes, the sun and the moon were the perpetual glare of electric lights. Privacy didn't exist.

  Even the captain's quarters was simply a cubicle shielded from the central passage by a green curtain. Sleep was constantly torn to shreds by light, noise, and motion. The slightest transfer of weight—a single seaman moving forward or aft—could disturb the underwater balance and set the U-boat swaying.

  Sometimes, Stiirmer would lie on his back in the hot bunk, staring up at the curve of the pressure hull, and ponder the twist of fate that had put him here.

  His father was English. His mother was German. And he was born in London just after the First World War. Through all his boyhood years, he'd kept his background secret, for Germans were hated by the British people. In every town around the isle, there was a common with a cenotaph listing the names of local men slaughtered by the Hun. Still, his mother taught him German and told him about the prewar history of his Teutonic ancestors.

  He was descended from knights!

  Imagine that.

  In school, of course, he was taught about God, king, country, and the white man's burden. By then, the world was gearing up for another war, and to make sure they were primed for the fight, he and his classmates were taught the atrocities of German barbarism.

  He remembered most the story of the crucifixion.

  According to his teacher, the incident had occurred in 1915, near the Belgian battlefield of Ypres, on the Western Front. A Canadian soldier had been crucified to a barn door with German bayonets. The outrage was depicted in the film The Prussian Cur, and a statue called Canada's Golgotha was displayed at a London exhibition of wartime art.

  He had told his mother.

  "That's a lie," she replied. "We call it propaganda. Do you know what that means?"

  His mother's hatred of Hitler had peaked on Kristallnachl, when her stepfather, mistaken for a Jew, was beaten to a pulp by Nazi storm troopers. How thankful she'd been to see her son enlist in the RAF. His hatred of Hitler had climaxed during the Blitz, when a Luftwaffe bomb destroyed his childhood home, killing his father outright and crushing his mother beneath a beam, where she burned to death.

  Put it all together, and that's why he was here.

  "The wingco wants to see you."

  That's how this had begun.

  For instead of the wing commander, he was met that day by a mystery man from MI 13, a branch of military intelligence so secret it didn't exist. MI 13 knew everything there was to know about him, plus a thing or two he didn't know himself.

  "How many men have you killed for your country?" the shadowy officer asked.

  "Thousands, I guess."

  "How far would you go personally to overthrow Hitler?"

  "All the way."

  "Would that include snuffing one of your own countrymen, if it was deemed necessary?"

  "To stop Hitler?"

  "To save millions. Millions of us. And millions of good Germans, like your mother."

  He thought about it.

  He nodded.

  "Including that," he said.

  So here he was in the Black Devil—a secret agent so secret t
hat only a handful of people knew he existed—on the verge of delivering a package that would topple Hitler. If only his mum could see what he was doing for her.

  He wondered if he would survive.

  Maybe not.

  But the odds were no worse than they were flying in the Ace.

  Now that they were here.

  Having churned its way up the "liquid triangle" of the North Sea, the Black Devil had entered the inland jut of the Firth of Forth, along the north shore of Edinburgh. Their mission was to test the sub, so this was a dry run of how it would be. Get in, sight the enemy through the periscope, and get out without detection. Combat was authorized only if sub hunters closed in on the U-boat.

  Self-defense.

  That was their rule of engagement.

  The single propeller in the stern was being powered by the creep motor for low-noise, low-speed cruising into the heart of Scotland. The engine room was manned by machinists wearing gloves to protect their hands from the hot parts of the propulsion system. A confusion of pipes and cables wormed everywhere. The sub was constructed of two superimposed pressure hulls, the one up here for the crew, their equipment, and their battle stations, and the one underfoot for storage batteries and the fuel and dive tanks. No smoking was allowed in the sub because explosive gases were emitted when wet batteries were charged. The men wore felt shoes to muffle their footsteps on the floor plates, in case sub hunters were listening for telltale sounds, or it became necessary to play possum to deceive British destroyers.

  A bulkhead divided the engine room from the control center.

  Here, amid a maze of valves, gauges, and wheels, technicians manipulated controls to stabilize the vessel, monitor its vital signs, and steer this sliver of steel deeper into the Firth of Forth.

  This nerve center was also home to the radioman, the only crewman who had contact with the outside world. He used just one headphone over his ears so he could hear both incoming signals and orders within the sub. Since leaving port, he'd kept stumm because high-frequency direction finders—HF/DF, called huff-duff—could home in on radio transmissions between a U-boat and its headquarters.