Asi es la vida, she thought. If I ever have grandchildren, what will I tell them about What I Did in the Great War? That I cut the throats of Frenchmen in a German’s company and piled their bodies in a hotel bathtub to disguise the blood?
“War booty,” he said. “Very economical of fuel, too, though we will not be as short now with the Galician and Rumanian fields under secure control, and soon Baku. Perhaps in a few years we can convert our surface warships to oil fuel, as the English have done. Driver, back to the U-boat pens,” he added with a snap as he took the front seat.
Luz set her suitcase on her knees. It held everything she and Ciara would absolutely need on a voyage where nobody would be doing much in the way of washing or changing their clothes, and her clandestine gear as well . . . all but the package of developed film. That was in her brassiere, a bit uncomfortably but unlikely to come to anyone else’s attention. Ironically enough, Horst had sent Ciara’s single trunk and her two to an address in Mexico; provided the freight got out of Germany to neutral Denmark in the next couple of weeks they’d probably get them back, since the address was a former revolucionario safe house in Veracruz that the Chamber had turned courtesy of the real Elisa Carmody and now used like an ant-lion trap.
Ciara craned her head openly to see as much as she could as they drove down the busy through-road behind the docks. It was a slow passage, since the traffic showed no sign of slackening for sunset and there were thousands on foot as well, in uniforms or worker’s coveralls, shifts coming on duty or off. Instead a set of shielded streetlamps came on, and the work continued unabated by night or bad weather.
“That’s interesting!” she said. “Look at the big ships—”
She pointed out the great gun-wagons they were passing, looming over them out of the gloom; a Bayern-class superdreadnought, and a Derflinger-class battle cruiser. They showed newly repaired combat damage, but what had caught Ciara’s eye were sparks and flames on their upperworks where welders and riveters were at labor. Similar lights showed from more distant berths, and there was a smell of hot metal and ozone added to the harbor stinks.
“They’re all getting the same modification to their superstructure. That big horizontal rectangular thing they’re having fitted to their main masts over the bridge, just where the lower tripod section ends and the pole mast begins. Saints, I do wonder what that is; it’s not like anything I’ve heard of. Look at the armored conduits for those cables; my goodness, that’s massive. Something electrical, and with a high power demand! Far too big for a wireless transmitter, though. Oh, and how I wish I could take a closer look—”
“Fräulein Whelan,” Horst said; there was amusement in his voice, but sternness too. “I suggest you contain your curiosity. That is a range-finding apparatus. And even so much is more than you need to know. Eyes front, please, and not another word about such matters.”
“Sorry, sir,” she said in a small voice . . . but she didn’t stop looking, albeit now out of the corners of her eyes.
Horst chuckled. “If you were not needed on this mission, I would be strongly tempted to put you in a box and post you to the Siemens & Halske laboratories in Berlin, Fräulein Whelan.”
The amusement died in his eyes as he looked back and forth between Luz and Ciara for a moment.
“Extraordinary,” he murmured, then seemed to shrug and return his attention to the docks.
The big ships were coaling too, leaving a pall of black dust over everything, and net loads of unidentifiable cargo were being slung aboard. Smaller ships, tugs and tenders and barges and less identifiable craft, were chuffing about in busy throngs on the water as well.
Something big in preparation, for them to continue on into the night and with only a partial blackout, Luz thought. Not just the Breath of Loki, though it’s probably coordinated with that.
The sense of raw power was palpable here, the hundreds of thousands of tons of Krupp steel and cannon and turbine horsepower and engineering skill coiling to strike. The German Kaiserliche Marine hadn’t cut a very glorious figure so far in this war, except for the U-boats, and stealthy sinking of merchantmen wasn’t what most of them had had in mind for den Tag in their long rivalry with the Royal Navy before the war. A few raids, a few skirmishes, one completely inconclusive fleet action that a cruel wit had described as the Kaiserliche Marine assaulting its British jailors and then returning to its prison cell. What they’d dreamed of and wanted was something like Trafalgar—or Tsushima, to be a bit more modern—with themselves as Nelson or Togo, and the British playing the hapless French or Russians smashed into burning splinters.
Evidently they thought they were due for a rematch, with the gun lines bellowing at each other in engagements lighting the horizon from one edge to the other, and probably someone like Privatdozent von Bülow had given them some sort of new toy to play with. It was turning out to be that sort of war, and every time springing a new toy on your enemies worked out, everyone—including the enemies—started working even harder on finding unpleasant surprises of their own. Sometimes she wondered where it would stop; in her more pessimistic moments she wondered if it ever would.
Sitting in harbor because you weren’t strong enough to fight the people cruising around outside wasn’t good for a fleet’s morale, but her eye caught the indicators—quick steps, cheerful cursing, a snap when orders were given—of men eager for a rematch and expecting a better result.
Luz carefully filed the information; it wasn’t as important as the Breath of Loki, nothing could be, but it was important. The First Sea Lord of the British Navy, a plump politician named Churchill, had defined his admiral commanding the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow as the only man on either side who could lose the war in one afternoon. Taking command of the North Sea, even for only a few weeks or months, would give the Reich mastery of Europe—cutting the British armies off from their sources of supply, and Britain’s people and factories from the seaborne food and fuel and raw materials they needed every single day.
I hope we have someone on that, Luz thought unhappily; she had no earthly idea, of course, and it would have been horrifyingly bad practice if she did. I hope the British have someone on it. Or that someone does, Japan or . . . Bolivia or Siam, maybe, but someone.
The submarine pens were in their own section of the harbor, with antiaircraft guns poking skyward not far away and the ground stations for barrage balloons winched down and deflated. The formerly French or possibly Belgian taxi halted for guards in naval sailor-suit uniforms—but with steel helmets and Mausers or machine pistols—to inspect Horst’s documents. Those included those giving Luz and Ciara permission to exist here. He’d kept them on his own person, and without them neither of the women could have moved a hundred yards.
Meters, Luz thought. Here, it would be a hundred meters before someone said: Papiere, bitte. Or didn’t bother to say please. Apart from a few clerks and barmaids, this looks like a very masculine part of town.
Many of the U-boats were docked three or four deep, with an occasional clank of steel on steel even here in the pond-calm harbor waters as men walked back and forth over bridging gangways on their errands.
Others had a dock to themselves. Several of those had conventional-looking hulls but were much bigger than the usual. Luz controlled the information-gathering itch she felt at the sight of them. These were probably the rumored cruiser submarines, built to operate at extreme range along the coasts of the Americas or in the southern oceans, and strongly suspected as the reason for the recent heavy losses in merchantmen across areas that grew wider every day. Rumor also said that cargo supply submarines brought them reloads of fuel and torpedoes and spare parts and food to make their cruises even more destructive.
Of course, rumor also says that they’ve got a secret base called Caprona in the South Pacific that has dinosaurs and cavemen on it, she thought. Rumor has . . . what do the wireless technicians say . . . a lot of noise in the si
gnal.
And a dozen of the subs looked entirely different, each at its own dock and with additional guards manning yet another checkpoint. There were heavy rolls of camouflage netting nearby and knock-down frames, apparently just recently removed. All submarines to date were essentially like decked-over submersible torpedo boats or destroyers, and shared the spearlike hull form and narrow clipper bows of those classes. These were something else again. They were big, at least as big as destroyers in terms of displacement, but stubby and tubby and much less martial-looking, with a smooth overall shape and few protrusions.
The closest ready analogue she could think of for their shapes was the sort of French-inspired sourdough bread they used in San Francisco to make an oyster loaf—shaped like a fat bulging cylinder rounded at both ends. To add further strangeness, the conning towers were simple shark-fin shapes only about a third of the way along from stern to blunt bow, and there was no real deck on the forward part, just an elevated faring forward of the tower and then the bare curve of the hull, all painted in blue-gray. As the automobile halted a chugging, blatting sound came from within the nearest, and then a grating rumble and a burned-chemical smell along with a drift of black fumes from one of the tubes that stuck up from the conning tower.
“Starting the diesel engines,” Ciara said. “Using electrics to turn it over. And they’re not connected to the dockside power or water, see? They must be nearly ready to go.”
“They are, Fräulein,” Horst said.
Luz suspected that he’d come to view Ciara as a sort of holy fool, precociously brilliant at one aspect of life but rather mad otherwise. It wasn’t altogether wrong, but it was an example of making snap judgments from inadequate information, too.
“This is very good timing,” he went on. “Because we were delayed, of course, but it was a fortunate accident.”
And we’re being put on board at the very last minute for security’s sake, Luz thought. If we’d gotten here sooner we’d just have sat in the train car longer looking at those boards. The Germans are bad spies because they’re bad at getting into the skins of people who aren’t like them, but when it comes to keeping an eye on detail, they’re very good indeed. Except that they tend to overconfidence in their security measures, of course, possibly because they’re so meticulous. They really should change their codes more often, too, and their armed forces use the wireless too much.
Horst dismissed the auto, hefted his own duffel, and strode to meet the officer waiting on the stained concrete of the deck with his arms crossed. The salute he received in return for his own—a ship’s captain outranked Army officers of equivalent grade on his own vessel—was both a good deal more casual and a little reluctant. The German sub commander was stocky and powerful-looking, brown-haired and blue-eyed. He was Horst’s age or a bit younger . . . which was very young for warship command, and he also wore a short-cropped beard that had an unflattering tinge of orange. Luz had heard that U-boat sailors often went bearded, or just stopped shaving when their craft left port and didn’t start again until they got back.
U.S. Navy sailors called their submarines pigboats or sometimes sewer pipes, and had the same habit. Undersea warfare wasn’t a specialty for the fastidious. Probably if you wanted spit and polish you stuck to battleships.
“The best I can do is give them one curtained bunk together,” Kapitänleutnant Karl Denke said, ignoring the women after a brief irritated glance. “It’s damned bad luck to have damned useless women on a submarine anyway, and it’ll cause no end of trouble. The crew won’t like it. Or will like it too much. Your Colonel Nicolai is making a—”
“First, Herr Kapitänleutnant, these ladies both speak German,” Horst said. “Very well indeed for Fräulein Carmody if you don’t mind a tinge of Bavarian, and passable fluency for Fräulein Whelan, respectively.”
The naval officer gave Luz and Ciara a startled look and had the grace to flush a little. Luz glanced at him with cool hauteur, smiled and nodded, then shifted her view to the conning tower. Someone in a peaked naval cap was standing there, behind the chest-high bulwark on the top, and looking at them through a powerful pair of binoculars.
“Second, they are not essential to the accomplishment of our mission.”
The naval officer looked surprised, then opened his mouth, and Horst cut him off.
“But they are absolutely essential to any of us surviving the mission. The secret state police in America are very efficient and it will be hard for twenty-seven . . . twenty-eight including myself . . . Germans to evade them across thousands of miles until we reach sanctuary among the guerillas in Mexico and can be picked up, even if many of your men speak English of a sort.”
Aha, Luz thought. They made that one of the selection factors; not that it’s all that rare for Germans to speak English, given how many have relatives in America. Still, that was clever.
Horst went on like a trip hammer: “Or do you think if we are captured on their soil the Yankees will give us a kiss on both cheeks after we . . . have done what we plan to do? Or treat us as ordinary prisoners of war, even?”
“Well . . . no, Herr Hauptmann. They should, but I do not think they will.”
Horst drove the point home like a bayonet: “If we were summarily shot . . . or as their so-charming habit is when the common people are angry at some outsider, lynched and burned alive . . . and no, that is not just propaganda . . . we would be more fortunate than I anticipate is likely. Have you heard of die schwarze Kammer and das Bundesamt für Sicherheit?”
From his blink and almost imperceptible wince, evidently he had heard of the Black Chamber and the Federal Bureau of Security.
“So, they come with us, Herr Kapitänleutnant. You will please instruct your personnel that they are to be treated with every courtesy, that their security clearance is of the highest, and that our lives depend upon them? I am willing to die for the Fatherland and the Emperor, but I would very much prefer to live on and serve them further.”
“That is understood, Herr Hauptmann,” the man said a little stiffly. “I knew that there would be Abteilung IIIb personnel aboard all the boats in this operation to arrange extraction for the crews, since your people are handling this rather than naval intelligence. I simply did not anticipate that such . . . charming ladies . . . would be among them.”
He gave a heel click and bow as Horst introduced them, obviously wishing he could rewind the whole affair like a cinema film and start with a different script, and gave some emphatic low-voiced orders to a petty officer who hurried off. Luz was willing to go along with the rewind . . . but she squeezed a little when they shook hands, which made his eyes widen; men were always surprised when a woman had a strong grip.
Acrobatics and climbing did wonders for your hands, if not the sort of wonders her manicurists liked. She’d reduced a couple of those specialists to tears, though she did enjoy a full treatment and a pedicure.
“I do hope we can work together in an efficient manner, Herr Kapitänleutnant,” she said in her most dulcet tones. “This is a mission of world historical importance, after all.”
“Your boat is from a usual breed submarine very different, Captain Denke,” Ciara said artlessly, after the formalities; the word she used for breed usually referred to different types of livestock, but it was understandable in context. “Isn’t she by much and much larger?”
Brava, querida, Luz thought. That’s genuine interest, but you’re learning to use it! Then: And you must be very used to men being astonished when you understand technical things. I’ve run into enough of that myself.
“Yes, Fräulein, the original design was for a cargo submarine,” Denke explained, blossoming as men often did when they had a chance to explain something they cared about to an interested young woman.
“Ah, is that why the hull to its length broader . . . is broader, shall it say . . . in proportion?”
“Exactly! Origina
lly they were intended to carry cargo through the blockade, or to refurbish U-boats on distant patrols at sea. Though that form turns out to have other advantages.”
“It is of a hydrodynamic shape more effect . . . efficient . . . when beneath the surface water is?”
“Yes! Why would you think that, though?”
“Because rapid fish . . . swift fish . . . some likeness in shape have?” Ciara said. “Such fish as sharks or—”
She turned to Luz and dropped into English for a moment: “What’s tunafish in German?”
“Thunfisch.”
“Such fish as Thunfisch. Also most recent Luftschiffe, which have comparable problem of”—suddenly her German became more precise as she used a complex technical term—“traversing a resisting single-phase fluid with minimal drag in a certain range of speeds.”
“That turns out to be very true. We had not placed any importance on it before because U-boats spend most of their time on the surface.”
“How large?”
“Twenty-two hundred tons submerged displacement,” he said proudly, pointing. “Much larger than the previous classes. Though that is only a little larger than the latest cruiser class of long-range war boats, the ones that we began to launch late last year, like my last command. Then it was determined that the planned cargo class be renamed Loki and the design be altered for this . . . special mission.”
“Done with time enough to test much? Sufficiently? New designs always small problems of a many have, need to make better after . . . after testing in life as it is.”
Denke was surprised into a bark of laughter. “You know which questions to ask! I very much hope so, Fräulein, and the shakedown cruise went . . . reasonably well.”
Luz looked at the U-boat with interest as they spoke; she had long ago mastered the art of following a conversation inconspicuously and watching something else at the same time. There were no torpedo tubes in the rounded bow that she could see, and no deck gun, only a couple of light machine guns on the conning tower that could be easily taken down into the hull when the craft submerged. Rising from it behind the periscope was the reason it really needed no surface armament even to defend itself.
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