Somebody out there in the night said something else, something with Sergeant Fujita’s name in it. “I’m here,” Fujita called. “What was that? So sorry, but my ears are ringing like a bell.”
Ringing or not, he got the answer very clearly: “You’re in command of the platoon till we get a new officer. Sergeant Jojima got his hand blown off, and Sergeant Iwamura’s hurt, too. So you’re the senior noncom.”
“What do we need to do now?” Fujita asked. But the other soldier couldn’t tell him that. Only an officer could. And if any officers were left in the neighborhood, he wouldn’t find himself in charge of the platoon. So he had to figure it out for himself. One thing looked blindingly obvious: if he ordered the men to retreat, somebody would hang him. “Hold tight!” he yelled as loud as he could. “If the Russians come, drive them back.”
That sounded brave-braver than it was, probably. With any luck, the round-eyed barbarians would no more be able to attack than the Japanese were to defend.
So it proved. The rest of the night passed with hardly a shot fired by either side. When morning came, Fujita could see what a mess the bombs had made of the platoon’s position and order his men to start setting things to rights. He didn’t need to be an officer to see that that needed doing. How much did you need to be an officer to see? Not for the first time, he suspected it was less than officers claimed.
* * *
If Copenhagen wasn’t a miracle, Peggy Druce couldn’t imagine what one would look like. The lights were on. Cars ran through the streets amidst the swarms of Danes on bicycles. Somehow, nobody seemed to get clobbered. No one looked shabby. No one seemed to have even heard of rationing, let alone suffered under it. You could buy all the gas you wanted, and all the clothes you wanted, too.
And the food! My God, the food! Peggy gorged on white bread and butter, on fine Danish ham, on pickled herring-on everything she wanted. She poured down good Carlsberg beer. The only things with which she didn’t stuff herself were potatoes, turnips, and cabbage. She’d had enough of those in Germany to last her about three lifetimes.
She did her best not to think of Constantine Jenkins. She was back in touch with Herb. All the cable lines between America and Europe passed through England, and the English allowed no traffic with the continental enemy. But Denmark was a neutral, just like the USA. She and her husband could catch up on what had happened since last October.
On most of it, anyhow. Of course Peggy wouldn’t put anything about the embassy undersecretary in a wire, or even a letter. She didn’t think she’d ever be able even to talk about what happened with him. I was drunk, she told herself, over and over. And she had been. But she’d been horny, too, or she wouldn’t have gone to bed with him no matter how drunk she was.
That wasn’t the worst of it, either. Would Herb have got horny, too, there across the Atlantic? Sure he would; Herb was one of the most reliably horny guys she’d ever known. What would he have done about it, with her away for so long? What wasn’t he putting into his telegrams and letters? What wouldn’t he want to talk about after she got home?
Every time that crossed her mind, she muttered to herself. It wasn’t that she’d mind-too much-if he’d laid some round-heeled popsy. But not being able to talk about things with him… That wasn’t good. That was about as bad as it could get, in fact. They’d always been able to talk about everything. If they had to put up walls against each other, something precious would have gone out of their marriage-part of the whole point of being married, in fact.
Before long, she’d have the chance to find out about all that. Travel between Denmark and the UK was more complicated than it had been before the war. Because of mines and U-boats, few ships cared to cross the North Sea. Airplanes flew between one country and the other, but they carried far fewer passengers. Peggy couldn’t book a flight to London any sooner than three weeks after she got to Copenhagen.
In the meantime… In the meantime, she made like a tourist. She rented a bicycle herself, relying on the polite Danish drivers not to run her down. She shopped. You could buy things in Copenhagen! The shop windows weren’t mocking lies, the way they were in Berlin. If you saw it on display, you could lay down your money, and the shopkeeper would hand it to you. He’d even gift-wrap it for you if you asked him to. Quite a few Danes knew enough English to get by. A lot of the ones who didn’t could manage in German. Peggy wasn’t fond of the language, but she could use it, too.
Danish radios picked up not only Dr. Goebbels’ rants but also the BBC. The International Herald-Tribune reported both sides’ war bulletins. After so long with only the German point of view dinning in her ears, that seemed almost unnatural to Peggy. She presumed Danish papers did the same thing, but she couldn’t read those.
The Danes might publish both sides’ war news, but they didn’t seem the least bit military themselves. She saw very few soldiers. Like so many other things, that reminded her she wasn’t in Berlin any more. At the heart of the Third Reich, more men wore uniforms than civilian clothes. And she had trouble imagining German soldiers pedaling along on bicycles, waving to pretty girls as they passed. German soldiers always looked as if they meant business. The Danes seemed more like play-acting kids in uniform.
At Amalienborg, off Bredgade, the royal guard changed every day at noon. The soldiers there looked a little more serious, but only a little. The cut of their tunics and trousers and the funny flare of their helmets still kept them from being as intimidating as their German counterparts. Or maybe that was because Peggy had seen Wehrmacht men in action, while only the oldest of old men remembered the last time Denmark fought a war.
Between two and half past five every afternoon, young people promenaded from Frederiksberggade past the best shops to Kongens Nytorv, near the palace. Peggy found the parade oddly charming. It was something she would have expected in Madrid (before Spain went to hell, anyhow) or Lisbon, not Scandinavia.
Days slid off the calendar, one by one. Getting her exit visa from Denmark and an entry visa cost some money, but not a speck of stomach lining. Examining the Czechoslovak and German stamps, the minor official at the British embassy who issued the entry visa remarked, “Seems as though you’ve had a bit of a lively time, what?”
If that wasn’t a prime bit of British understatement, Peggy had never heard one. “Oh, you might say so,” she answered-damned if she’d let the American side down.
She wondered if the functionary would ask her about what things were like in the enemy nation, but he didn’t. He took her money, plied his rubber stamp with might and main, and used mucilage to affix the visa in her passport. “Safe journey,” he told her.
“Much obliged,” Peggy said. The phrase was a polite commonplace. Suddenly, though, she felt the words’ true meaning. “I am much obliged to you-everybody who’s finally helping me get home.”
“I am here to assist travelers, ma’am,” the official said, a trifle stiffly.
“Yes. I know. That’s why I’m obliged to you,” Peggy replied. He didn’t get it. He was an Englishman, but maybe the war and all the accompanying madness seemed no more real to him than they did to the Danes. How long had he worked here?
Well, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she had the documents she needed. Nothing would keep her off that airplane. Nothing!
She sent a wire to Herb: EVERYTHING SET. FIRST ENGLAND, THEN USA. WHOOPEE! LOVE, PEGGY. The clerk at the telegraph office had to ask her how to spell Whoopee. She was happy to tell him.
Herb’s answer was waiting at the hotel when she finished spending money for the day: WHOOPEE IS RIGHT, BABE. SEE YOU SOON! LOVE, ME. She smiled. He always signed telegrams to her like that. And, like her, he’d stayed under the ten-word minimum-rate limit. They were nowhere near poor. When you’d been through the Depression, though, you watched every penny from habit. When you weren’t shopping, of course. Well, sometimes even then, but not always.
She ate another splendid Danish breakfast the next morning. One day to go. She was all packed. The onl
y thing she’d have to do tomorrow would be to put the clothes she had on now into her suitcase. What she’d wear then was already draped over a chair in her room. She intended to go to the airport very, very early. She didn’t care how bored she’d get waiting for the plane. As with the train out of Germany, she wasn’t going to miss it. She wasn’t, she wasn’t, she WASN’T!
She had lunch at the Yacht Pavilion. A guidebook called it delightful, and she agreed. She could see the statue of the Little Mermaid staring out into the sound. The smorrebrod was good, the aquavit even better.
Men started getting off a couple of freighters in the harbor and forming up in long columns on the piers. Peggy’s eye passed over them, then snapped back. “No,” she whispered. But yes. She’d never mistake the color those men were wearing. She grabbed a passing waiter by the arm and pointed across the almost waveless water. “Those are German soldiers! You’re being invaded!”
He looked at her, at the troops in Feldgrau and beetling Stahlhelms, back to her again. Laughing, he shook his head. “No. It cannot be. Someone is making a film, that’s all.”
Briskly, the German soldiers marched off the piers and into Copenhagen. They looked as if they were heading straight for the royal palace. Well, where else would they be going?
A few rifle shots rang out, then a sharp burst of machine-gun fire. Faint in the distance, Peggy heard screams. Blood drained from the waiter’s face, leaving him pale as vanilla ice cream. All over the Yacht Pavilion, people started exclaiming. “But it cahn’t be!” someone said in clear British English.
More gunfire. More screams. It could be, all right. And it damn well was. That plane wouldn’t fly to England tomorrow, or anywhere else. Peggy burst into tears.
Chapter 16
Julius Lemp felt happier about the world, or at least about how his little part of it worked. Now the U-boat skipper understood his orders. And he was pleased with himself, because he’d had a pretty good notion of what they were about even before the balloon went up.
If the Reich had decided to forestall the Western democracies by occupying Denmark and Norway before they could, of course France and especially England would try to do something about it. And one of the things they would try to do would be to rush as many warships as they could to Scandinavian waters. If they did that, they’d likely storm right through Lemp’s patrol zone.
No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than one of the ratings on watch sang out: “Smoke to the southwest, Skipper!”
“Ha!” Lemp swung his own binoculars in that direction. “Now the game starts!” He peered and studied. “Looks like… three plumes.”
“I think so, too,” the sailor said, and then, after a moment, “They’ve got wings on their feet, don’t they?”
“Ja.” Lemp nodded. “Destroyers. They have to be. Nothing else will go that fast.” By now, England had to know Germany was using her warships to move troops into southern Norway and fight the coastal forts. Destroyers could get to the battle in a hurry, and their crews were practiced with both guns and torpedoes. They were also quick and cheap to build, which made them more readily expendable than bigger, slower ships.
“Can we get to them?” another rating asked.
“We’re going to try,” Lemp answered. They couldn’t make a surface approach, not unless they wanted to get blown out of the water long before their could loose their own eels. “Go below,” he added. “We’ll see how much help the Schnorkel can give us.” He followed the men off the conning tower. As he slammed the hatch behind him and dogged it, he called, “Dive! Schnorkel depth! Change course to”-he calculated in his head-“to 195.”
“Diving to Schnorkel depth. Changing course to 195,” the helmsman said. Nothing flustered Peter. That was one of the reasons he was at the helm.
Lieutenant Beilharz appeared. The matte-black paint on his helmet had a fresh, shiny scratch. He really needed the protection to keep his skull from being gashed. Lemp pointed at him. “Just the man I’m looking for, by God! If we go all-out with your infernal device, how fast can we manage underwater?”
“They say thirteen knots, Skipper,” the Schnorkel expert answered. “Everything shakes and rattles like it’s coming to pieces, though.”
“We’ll try it anyway,” Lemp declared. “Three destroyers are heading east as fast as they can go. Without the snort, we don’t have a prayer of getting into firing range before they’re past us. With it… Well, we’ve got a prayer. I think. We’ll give it our best shot, any which way. You keep the damned gadget working the way it’s supposed to, you hear?”
“Jawohl!” Beilharz said. Lemp had to hope he could deliver. The device was still experimental. And experimental devices had a way of going haywire just when you needed them most.
All he could do was try. He spoke into the voice tube to the engine room: “Give me thirteen knots.”
“Thirteen, Skipper?” The brassy response didn’t come right out and ask Are you out of your bloody mind?, but it might as well have.
“Thirteen,” Lemp repeated firmly. “If that’s more than we can take, we’ll back it down. But our targets are making better than twice that. If we want to meet them, we have to give it everything we’ve got. Thirteen.” He said it one more time.
“Aye aye, Skipper.” The men who minded the diesels would do what you told them to. What happened afterwards wasn’t their worry… unless, of course, it turned out to be everybody’s worry.
They’d done eight knots submerged plenty of times, ten or eleven often enough. Above that, Beilharz had been reluctant to go. War sometimes forced you to do what you’d be reluctant to try in peacetime, though. If the U-30 could knock out one of those destroyers, how many soldiers’ lives might that save? Hundreds? Thousands? No telling for sure.
The diesels surged. They had to work hard to push the U-boat through the resisting water. Lemp felt the power through the soles of his feet as he looked through the periscope. Without taking his eyes off the destroyers the optics displayed, he said, “You there, Klaus?”
“Sure am, Skipper,” Klaus Hammerstein answered. Lemp hadn’t expected anything else. Hammerstein might be a pup, but he was a well-trained pup. The exec’s place in an attack run was at the captain’s elbow. He’d have to do most of the calculating… if they could get close enough to the destroyers for it to matter.
Lemp fed him speed and range. He had to shout to make himself heard. As Beilharz had warned, everything inside the U-30 rattled as if it were getting massaged by an electric cake mixer. Lemp hoped his fillings wouldn’t fall out. And that was no idle worry; every U-boat sailor dreaded a pharmacist mate’s amateur dentistry.
“Skipper, there’s no good solution if the numbers you fed me are anywhere close to right,” Hammerstein said. “They’re going to get past us before we close within three kilometers.”
“Scheisse!” Lemp exclaimed. “Are you sure?” Here he’d done everything but tear his boat to pieces, and it hadn’t done him a goddamn bit of good? That wasn’t fair. That wasn’t how life was supposed to work.
But sometimes life worked that way anyhow. The destroyers were making better than thirty knots. As Hammerstein had said, they raced past the U-30 before the sub could approach near enough to launch with any hope of success. You wanted to get inside of a kilometer if you could. Even the exec’s three seemed optimistic.
“Scheisse,” Lemp said again, resignedly this time. He spoke to the engine room again: “You did all you could, but we can’t catch them. Bring us back down to six knots.”
“Six knots. Aye aye.” Even through the long metal tube, the skipper could hear the relief in the answer. All the same, the Schnorkel had paid its dues. Without it, he wouldn’t even have tried the attack run: it would have been obviously hopeless.
“What do we do now?” Hammerstein asked, his voice falling as the boat stopped trying to come to bits around him.
“We stay submerged till those Royal Navy ships get farther away-I don’t want them turning around and
coming after us,” Lemp said. “Then we surface and radio their position and speed to the Vaterland. We aren’t the only U-boat in the sea. And the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe will have planes flying out of Germany-out of Denmark, too, by now, I suppose. Someone may pay them a call.”
“All right.” The exec still sounded unhappy, and explained why a moment later: “I still wish we could have done the job ourselves.”
“So do I. If we could have made twenty knots submerged, we would have got them. But you can imagine what the boat would have been like at twenty knots. I don’t think I’ve got the nerve to try thirteen again,” Lemp said.
He went into his tiny cabin to prepare the encoded message he would send when the boat surfaced. The machine that filled most of his safe gave him the groups he needed. Experts assured him the code the machine generated was unbreakable, as long as the other side didn’t get its hands on one of these machines. His orders were to sacrifice anything, including his own life, before he let that happen. He hoped-he prayed-he never had to make the choice.
He carefully scanned the whole horizon through the periscope before surfacing. As soon as he could, he sent off his carefully composed code groups. Then he ordered the boat down to Schnorkel depth again. However little he’d wanted to at first, he’d come to rely on the long, ugly stovepipe. It did what the Dutchmen who’d invented it said it would do. You couldn’t ask for more.
Or could you? A U-boat that would make twenty knots submerged… That would be a weapon the likes of which the world had never known. With U-boats like that running around, how long could a surface navy survive? Days-weeks at most.
But how would you get such a weapon? Better streamlining came to mind right away. The U-30 wasn’t made for high-speed underwater travel. The engineers who’d designed the boat had assumed such a thing was impossible. And it was-when they’d designed the boat. Was it now, with the Schnorkel and whatever other clever notions the boys with thick glasses could come up with?
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