Riley and Jack looked at each other, concerned, and opened the shirt to find a quarter-inch hole just above his navel.
“It . . . it doesn’t hurt,” Kirchner said, staring at them.
“That’s a good sign,” Jack lied.
Kirchner gave him a revealing look. He knew as well as they that without immediate medical attention, a bullet in the intestines would surely lead to a slow and painful death. And he also knew he wouldn’t get that medical attention.
Riley took off his jacket and quickly removed the bandage around his ribs to give to Kirchner. “Help me, Jack.” He tore off a piece of Kirchner’s shirt, folded it over a few times, and applied it to the wound. “We’ll try to stop this up a little,” he said, helping Kirchner sit up with Jack’s help and wrapping the bandage around his torso.
“You washed your hands first, right?” Kirchner joked. “I don’t want to get an infection.”
“I’m sorry things went so badly,” Riley said in a pained voice. “Maybe if we’d listened to you and hadn’t come, this wouldn’t have happened. I’m very sorry. I should’ve gotten the bullet, not you.”
Kirchner gently patted Riley’s shoulder. “I completely agree with you there.”
Riley was about to apologize again when he heard the sound of hurried footsteps coming from the hatch above their heads. He jumped up and climbed the ladder, reaching the latch just as its wheel began to turn.
“Jack!” he screamed, gripping it with both hands. “Give me something to lock it!”
Jack was already dumping the supply box out in search of anything useful.
“Hurry!” Riley felt the wheel slipping in his fingers. “I can’t hold it.”
Screwdrivers, hammers, and wrenches were strewn about the floor, but there was nothing large and strong enough.
“Fuck, Jack!” Riley grunted. “Give me whatever!”
Then, on the brink of desperation, Jack saw a steel pipe tossed to the side that he hadn’t noticed before in the dim light. In a show of agility, he snatched it up in one hand and used the other to climb the ladder, sticking it in the latch as it slipped from Riley’s hands.
“You know we only delayed them a little, right?” Jack gasped, seeing the latch still shaking from above. “Just a matter of time till they get a torch.”
“I know,” Riley said. “Time is good.”
“Anyway,” Jack said, looking around the dark room, “we’ve gotta make sure there’s no other way for them to get in.”
“They’d be here already if there were.”
“Either way . . .”
“Okay, Jack. If it’ll make you feel better, we’ll take a look.”
First they leaned over Kirchner and asked how he was.
“Dizzy,” he said. “But I think I can walk.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”
Kirchner looked at them sadly. “It really won’t make a difference, will it?”
Riley hesitated, then shook his head.
They helped Kirchner up, and gritting his teeth, he leaned on the door they had come in through.
“Where the hell is the light switch?” Jack asked, feeling the bulkhead. “I’m sick of this red light.”
“I think there’s something here . . .” Riley murmured. “Aha, here it is.”
There was a series of clicks and buzzes as the lights on the ceiling lit up one by one until reaching the back of the room. They revealed a wide, long, tapering space—the forward-most part of the bow. It was full of pipes, levers, valves, and dozens of indicators. On the side were rails stacked with steel cylinders more than two feet wide and twenty feet long. They were gray, with a propeller and rudder on one end and a rounded red warhead on the other.
“Mein Gott,” Kirchner said in disbelief, seeming to forget his wound as he took a step forward. “We’re in the torpedo room.”
59
“Can we use them?” Jack asked, passing his hand carefully over one of the torpedoes as if it were a fearsome, sleeping beast.
“I don’t see how,” Riley said, pensively walking beside him. “We don’t know how they fire, and if we did, we couldn’t shoot them ourselves.”
“But there has to be a way to detonate them,” Jack said. He patted its bulbous nose when he reached the front of the projectile. “Hit the nose with a hammer? These things detonate on impact, right?”
Riley massaged his temple, trying to think. “That won’t work either. They have safeties that keep them from detonating until they’re over two hundred yards away.”
“Damn it!” Jack shouted, slapping its red nose. “There’s gotta be something we can do with all these!”
“Relax, Jack.”
“Relax? We have to sink this fucking ship before they get in, and we’re surrounded by tons of explosives we can’t use. How can I relax?”
Ignoring him, Riley went up to the launch hatch, full of valves and equipment he couldn’t understand.
“If you’re thinking of flooding the torpedo room using the launch tubes,” Kirchner said, “you can forget it. I’m sure there’s a mechanism that prevents that.”
The two sailors turned to him with the same frustrated look on their faces that said, “Do you have any ideas?”
“You guys want to blow up the ship?”
“We can’t take the virus now,” Riley said, pointing to the hatch locked with a wrench, “so the only thing we can do is sink the ship somehow.”
Kirchner’s condition was clearer in the white light. His face had lost its color, in contrast to the dark bloodstain seeping through the bandage on his stomach. Meanwhile, his pupils seemed to be fading like candles running out of oxygen.
Riley shook him by the shoulders. “We need you to help us, Helmut.”
“I . . .” he said, touching his forehead, accidentally making his glasses crooked. “I don’t know what I could . . .”
“Come on, Doctor. You’re smarter than Jack and me put together. We need you.” He added in an urgent whisper, “Your friends, your family . . . millions of people need you, Dr. Kirchner. The whole world needs you.”
Gritting his teeth, Kirchner leaned on Riley’s shoulder, straightened his glasses, and blinked hard. “Help me,” he said, taking Riley’s arm. “Let me see the torpedoes up close.”
With Riley’s arm under his, Kirchner stood looking at the enormous projectile as if he had X-ray vision.
“It’s a G7e, driven by an electric motor,” he mumbled weakly, “with a payload of six hundred fifty pounds of trinitrotoluene, hexanitrodiphenylamine, and aluminum . . .”
Jack looked at him as if he’d said an Our Father in Aramaic. “How do you know all that?”
“There were many other military research departments in the Peenemünde facilities where I worked.”
“Can you make it explode?” Riley snapped.
Kirchner shook his head. “Like you said . . . it has a safety that prevents that.”
“We can’t bypass it?” Jack said.
Kirchner coughed, spitting little red drops on the torpedo’s polished metal surface, and wiped his mouth. “Without a detailed diagram of the mechanical and electrical systems . . . it’s impossible. You’d have to be an expert, and I am not.”
“Then there’s nothing we can do?” Jack asked.
Kirchner looked at him strangely over his glasses. “I didn’t say that.”
“Quit playing games, Doctor,” said Riley. “We don’t have much time.”
“I know,” he gasped, examining the seams and screws of the torpedo shell, then added, pointing his shaky hand, “Bring that toolbox over here.”
A minute later, Kirchner was holding on to a chain in the launch system with one hand and his wound with the other. Riley and Jack stood on either side of him, busy removing with a wrench the nuts Kirchner pointed at.
“Now,” he said when all the nuts on the warhead were out, “take off the case.”
Riley and Jack obeyed without question, using all their strength to t
ake the long, heavy shell off. Then the full intricacy of the machine was on display. Riley thought it looked like a strange combination of a stretched-out car engine and the inside of a radio—a dense tangle of wires, transistors, and narrow conduits without any apparent pattern.
“This is a mess,” Jack said.
“What now, Helmut?” Riley asked.
“This should be the impact fuse,” he said, pointing to a piece in the front shaped like a cork. “That on the side looks like the gyroscope, and that glass piece full of liquid might be some kind of inclinometer or the depth sensor . . .”
They heard several dull thuds on the other side of the door followed by a dirty hiss. A few seconds later, an orange dot appeared on the lower half of the thick steel. The small point got larger, turning white and brightening. Small sparks of hot metal glowed like a sparkler.
“They’re here,” Jack said.
“Shit,” Riley said, looking at Kirchner urgently. “Hurry, Doctor, please. Forget the descriptions. Tell me how to blow this damn thing up.”
“I think . . .” he said hesitantly, touching an aluminum cylinder almost as wide as the torpedo, “this is the warhead.”
“Where’s the explosive?”
“That’s it, I hope,” Kirchner said, nodding.
“And how do we detonate it?” Jack asked. “Hit it? Burn it?”
Kirchner shook his head hard. When he was about to answer, his eyes rolled back and he fainted. Riley and Jack held him so he didn’t fall. They carefully laid him down on his back and put the toolbox under his feet so blood would flow to his head.
“Come on, Helmut!” Riley slapped him. “Wake up!”
Kirchner opened his eyes and blinked in confusion, looking at Riley and Jack as if for the first time. He opened his mouth to ask a question.
“You fainted,” Riley said. “You’re losing a lot of blood.”
He tried to sit up, but Riley stopped him.
“Stay on your back. Time is running out.” Riley turned and saw they’d already cut through a foot of the steel plate with the torch. “Just tell us how to detonate the warhead.”
Kirchner squinted, apparently bothered by the lights. He lifted a shaky finger. “Electricity . . .”
Riley and Jack exchanged a puzzled look, then looked up and realized what Kirchner was trying to tell them. They started searching desperately for a piece of wire.
They found none. They tried to pull one from the lights, but they were enclosed in pipes solidly attached to the ceiling, and there was no way of getting to them.
“A fucking wire for God’s sake!” Jack shouted, looking around. “We just need a fucking piece of wire!”
Kirchner’s voice sounded over the crackling of the unyielding blowtorch. “In the torpedo. Take a wire there . . .” He passed out again.
“Damn it, he’s right!” Riley cried, rushing over to the torpedo. “Help me, Jack!”
They ripped out several pieces of copper wire, which together stretched more than five yards. It would have to be enough.
Without a word, Jack spliced the pieces together, frequently glancing at the door where the crew members of the Deimos were cutting a second section, making an L in the gray steel.
Riley climbed up to the nearest lamp, unscrewed the bulb while ignoring his burning fingers, and ripped out the socket. “Jack, how’s it going?”
“I’m done!” he said as he made the last connection. He threw the wire to Riley so he could join it with the two cables he’d taken from the lamp.
Riley tried to calm down so he wouldn’t electrocute himself. Wiping off the sweat that was burning his eyes, he brought the wire to the cables. “There,” he said, jumping to the ground.
Jack had opened a couple of holes with a screwdriver in the soft aluminum cylinder containing the explosive warhead. He already had one end of the wire in his hand, ready to cause a short circuit that would blow up the six hundred pounds of TNT and the ship.
“Ready?” he asked with determination.
Riley nodded gravely. “Ready, my friend.” They shook hands.
Jack nodded with a look of resignation. “See you on the other side.”
They each took one end of the wire and fed them through the small openings.
60
When Riley’s end was less than a quarter inch away, something grabbed his ankle and made him jump.
He looked down and saw Kirchner clutching him tightly. He glanced at the door. The torch had now completed a U, and Riley estimated they had less than five minutes before the Nazis got through. He crouched next to Kirchner, who was barely capable of opening his eyes. “Helmut,” he said, taking his hand, “we’re going to blow up that torpedo.”
Kirchner shook his head. “No.” He grabbed Riley’s shirt.
Riley thought the repeated losses in consciousness had affected the man’s ability to reason. “I’m sorry, Helmut, but there’s no other way. We have to destroy the ship.”
Kirchner nodded as vigorously as he could. “Yes,” he said. “But not you . . .” He took a deep breath and added, “I’ll do it.”
Jack crouched down too. “There’s no time for that, Dr. Kirchner. We have to do it now.”
“If you do it, you’ll die.”
“Of course we’ll die, along with everyone on the ship.”
“No . . . You can save yourselves still . . .”
“What are you talking about?” Riley asked. “Don’t you see we’re trapped? There’s no escape.”
Making a superhuman effort, Kirchner sat up on his elbow and turned to point behind him. “There is . . . through the tubes.”
They followed his finger to the four white hatches that launched the Deimos’s torpedoes.
“Impossible,” Riley said immediately. “The pressure of the launch would obliterate us.”
“Not to mention if we’re in there for more than a minute we’ll drown,” Jack added, “and we have no idea how to fire them.”
Kirchner coughed from the strain of sitting. “I do . . . And I won’t fire them . . . Just flood the tube when you’re in . . . and you can swim out.”
Riley shook his head. “We can’t take that risk. We have to detonate the torpedo ourselves. You could faint at any moment.”
Kirchner managed to get to his feet with Jack’s help and took a few steps toward the exit, bracing himself against the bulkhead. “I’ll do it,” he insisted. “I’ll help you get off this ship . . . and then I’ll blow it up.”
“No, Doctor, you can’t—”
Kirchner raised a hand to cut him off. “I have little life left . . .” he said, bending down to pick something up with a burst of pain. “But enough . . . to do it.”
“And if you faint again?” Jack said. “Who’ll activate the explosive?”
“That won’t happen!” he replied furiously. He raised the Luger that Riley had dropped and pointed it at them. “Put on life vests . . . and get in the tubes.”
“Helmut,” Riley said, shocked, taking a step forward. “Don’t be stupid.”
Kirchner took a step back, still aiming at them. “Get in the tubes . . . or I’ll have to shoot. I’ll eject you . . . and detonate the torpedo. Trust me.”
“You won’t shoot,” Riley said, reaching for the pistol.
But he did.
The bullet grazed Riley’s left shoulder, tearing a hole in his jacket.
“Fuck!” Riley screamed, stopping short. He touched the wound and looked at his fingers in disbelief. Blood. “Are you insane?”
“I’m sorry, I . . . aimed at the ceiling. But listen to me . . . we don’t have much time . . . get in the tube.”
Riley and Jack looked at each other, dazed. Overwhelmed by the absurd situation, they had no choice but to obey the dying man. It was the Galician who in the end made the decision for them both.
“We’ll do it,” Jack said, “and pray you succeed.”
Riley looked at the door. They had less than a minute. “Damn it,” he grumbled, looking at h
is bloody hand. “Let’s go. Devil take us.”
Wasting no time, Riley and Jack put on life jackets and got into the claustrophobic torpedo tube number 4, crawling twenty feet to the far end.
Kirchner’s sickly face appeared in the opening. “Good luck,” he said, ready to close the hatch he was leaning on.
Riley wagged a finger. “Follow through on your word,” he demanded. “Blow up this damn ship.”
Kirchner nodded. “Take care of Elsa.”
The hatch shut with a dry thud, leaving them in absolute darkness. A moment later, they heard the cranking of the lock, sealing them in.
“I hope that old nut knows what he’s doing,” Jack grumbled from a couple of yards in front of him.
“Me too.” The chamber started filling with freezing water, and Riley took a deep breath that could be his last.
In less than five seconds it was full, and they were pressed against the ceiling like magnets by their life jackets. Jack flailed in front of him, also surprised by the unexpected buoyancy. The exit port slid sideways with a faint click and revealed a circle two feet in diameter that let in long-awaited sunlight, filtered through tons of water.
Jack immediately started pulling himself toward the opening. Riley followed him, hindered by the bulky vest, which he considered taking off. He struggled to the exit, but when he got there, he realized he couldn’t go any farther. The force of the water rushing past the Deimos at twenty knots pushed them backward with irresistible force. Jack had managed to get out somehow, but Riley’s many injuries were causing him incredible pain under the pressure. He was running out of energy and air.
In a desperate effort, he managed to hold the outer edge of the tube with both hands, fighting against the brutal force of the water. There was no place for him to rest his feet on the smooth walls of the tube, so all his strength came from his arms.
The pain in his ribs was unbearable, and his lungs felt like they were going to explode. He managed to get his head out of the tube, but he couldn’t go any farther.
His thoughts were interrupted by an explosion that compressed the water around him as a shock wave flung his body out like a cannonball.
Captain Riley (The Captain Riley Adventures Book 1) Page 36