by Homer Hickam
Max heard Krebs out, then turned away, satisfied that the captain’s explanation was logical, though cold-blooded. “You men,” he barked at the gun crew, who were still congratulating themselves for chasing away the Liberator. “Stop fucking off and keep your eyes peeled!”
Krebs puffed once more into the speaking tube. “Hans! Dammitohell! More turns, man! The Russkies are getting away. If you can’t bang your whores, I’ll come down and do it for you!”
A muffled reply came back, something to do with his engines not being whores but pretty little girls. Krebs laughed. He was having a good time. “Chief, tell the torpedomen in the forward and stern rooms to choose the best eels they’ve got. Then tell both crews to stand by.”
The Chief acknowledged from the tower control room just below the main hatch. His job was to keep the boat trimmed and maneuvered according to orders, and the various stations prepared for the captain’s orders. He was, therefore, a man of great experience and knowledge who was spared only the weight of making the decisions that ultimately determined the fate of the boat. That was Krebs’s job, with Leutnant Max backing him up.
Krebs rubbed his hands together in happy anticipation of the attack and also in an attempt to get some circulation in them. Max, ever watchful, handed him some fur-lined gloves and Krebs pulled them on, slapped them together, then cupped them to his face. His beard was filled with ice crystals but he wasn’t cold. He stepped up to the torpedo aimer and sighted in on the fleeing freighter and then the stalled Russian ship. He called down the coordinate numbers. “Chief, are my torpedoes ready?”
“Ready on both ends, Kaleu!”
“On my mark. Forward and aft! Wait for my command. We’ll launch from the stern first, then give it to them from the forward tube. Understood?”
At the Chief’s response that he understood very well, Krebs again sighted into the torpedo aimer and called down more numbers. They had passed the damaged freighter, the men on the tower hooting and waving at the Russians. Most of the Russians had simply watched, their faces sullen and grim, but two huge women on deck had taken off their coats and exposed their massive, hanging breasts. They used their hands to lift them, pointing them at the U-boat.
The lookouts whistled at them. One of them called out, “O sweet milk cows, you would like us to rescue you, wouldn’t you?”
“Shut up, you!” Max snapped. “They are trying to survive. You would, too, if death was staring you in the face.”
“Look, they’re shooting them!”
A man with a pistol in the crowd of Russians had shot one of the women. She had fallen, blood spouting from her head. The other woman was running, but the man, dressed in a brown army coat, fired into her back and she collapsed. Krebs looked over his shoulder and gave a calm, professional appraisal. “The Communist Party commissar on board, no doubt. Have a look, fellows. That’s the kind of men we’re fighting, cowards and murderers who shoot their own women.” Out of the corner of his eye, he noted Max shaking his head.
“The Liberator!” Winkler yelled.
“Coming in low at six o’clock, Herr Kaleu!” Max called with precision.
Krebs knew he had no choice in the matter. He yelled through the hatch. “Take us down, Chief! Everybody below!”
The lookouts and gun crew dived for the hatch as the U-560 started under. Nearly all the crew inside were racing forward into the bow torpedo room to make it heavier so the U-boat would plunge faster. It was a race with death.
Krebs was the last man off the tower. He jumped through the hatch and landed hard on the control-room floor. There was a loud pop and it felt as if somebody had hammered a huge nail into his left knee. He pitched over, grabbed his knee, his eyes screwed shut against the terrible pain. Startled crewmen looked his way but no one reached out to help. They might touch him for luck when he wasn’t looking, but to touch him openly without his permission was something they were afraid to do. Krebs forced himself not to scream. It would terrify the men. Inwardly he railed at himself. Stupid! He’d hurt that same knee during a skiing holiday. He knew it was weak. A crewman pulled the hatch closed and clamped it shut.
Max crawled over beside Krebs, who’d found a spot by the periscope. “Kaleu, are you all right?”
“No, damn it,” Krebs answered through gritted teeth. Then he said, “Max, you know I think we may have just bought it.”
Max looked at his captain in disbelief. He’d never heard such pessimism out of Krebs’s mouth. Then he heard the rattle of the sea closing over the U-boat and a moment of peaceful silence followed by the distinct sound of two splashes, like big stones tossed in a pond. In an instant, Max knew Krebs’s assessment was hideously correct. If he could hear the Liberator’s depth charges when they hit the water, it meant the U-560 was too shallow. The deadly canisters were probably drifting down alongside the U-boat at that very moment, waiting only to go a little deeper before detonating with crushing force. Below was at least a mile of freezing black water, ready to take them for all eternity. He heard the Chief, as tough a man as ever existed, who’d probably not seen the inside of a church for decades, begin to say aloud a hurriedly fashioned prayer: “Sweet Jesus, sweet Jesus, save us . . .”
Max lowered his head, took a breath, closed his eyes, and thought of his wife, Giesela, and the baby, now barely a year old. That was when Krebs seemed to wake up. “Chief?” he called across the tiny control room.
The Chief raised his head. “Sir?”
“Surface! Blow all tanks!”
The Chief hesitated for a fraction of a second, then leaped for the control valves. The U-560 hissed and shuddered, but since it was already shallow, it only took a few seconds to respond to the rush of air into the buoyancy tanks. The submarine popped back to the surface while the depth charges kept dropping. When they went off, the crew yelled and cursed as their submarine rolled and pitched, but its pressure hull did not crack. The men of the U-560 were still alive. What Krebs had come up with had been absolutely brilliant. Max confessed to himself that he would never have thought of it.
Krebs calmly ordered the Chief what to do next. “Dive deep. Then hard to port. Those bastards are surely coming around for another try, but they always seem to bank to port, the side on which the pilot sits. We’ll be off their track. It’ll take them a bit to find our shadow.”
The U-560, miserable and stinking and battered and corroded though it might be, responded smartly and fell beneath the waves while the crew whispered prayers of thanksgiving not to God but to their captain. For his part, Krebs clutched his sore knee, which had already swollen to the size of a melon. Max looked at Krebs, astonished at what he had done. By his quick thinking, the man had saved all their lives. But then Max thought again. If Krebs had listened to him in the first place, they wouldn’t have been caught so unawares by the Liberator.
Minutes passed. The eyes of the U-boat crew stared upward at gray steel, imagining the increasing layer of protective water between them and the air. Lips moved in silent prayer, this time to God since Krebs wasn’t doing anything. The Chief eyed Krebs. “Tell us what it is like to be raised in a castle, Captain.” He nodded at the wide-eyed boys in the tower. “They’d like to hear it.”
Krebs laughed. “The difficult part, Chief, is trying to remember which pretty fräulein is the upstairs maid and which is the downstairs.”
“You bedded them both, just to fix them in your mind, didn’t you, sir?”
“Well, of course. I knew someday I was going to be a U-boat man and would have to be a good lover. It is a requirement!”
The boys snickered. Their minds were, for the moment, off their predicament. Elbows were stuck into adjoining ribs over some private joke or memory. The Chief had cannily gotten them to thinking of fräuleins or perhaps mademoiselles. Krebs had, of course, known exactly what was up.
Then there were two splashes above. A man called out, “Here they come again!”
“Scheisse!” Max groaned.
Krebs laughed through the pa
in of his knee. “Really, Max. Such language!” He lowered his voice to a whisper so only Max could hear. “You know, there is nothing left to do except what has already been done. We’ll either make it or we won’t. Relax. Not a bad way to die, is it? Doing our duty for the fatherland and Uncle Karl?”
Max closed his eyes and held his breath. Come on, you bastards, he thought to himself. He was suddenly angry at the English, so angry he wanted them all to die. Why did they keep fighting? He hated them all, the dirty, stinking bastards! Come on. Come on, you English. Kill us if you can!
4
Josh rose well before sunup, dressed in his khakis, which Queenie washed and ironed once a week whether they needed it or not, and went down to the dining room to be served his usual big breakfast of clabber biscuits, boiled drum, and a half dozen fried eggs. “I see the wind’s picked up a tad,” Queenie said, dishing the eggs directly onto Josh’s plate from a big black frying pan. “Did you get to sleep last night at all?”
He answered with a lie. “I slept like a log. How about you?”
“The same,” she fibbed similarly.
Josh ate heartily. His mood was always better in the morning, and the anticipation of soon being on the sea was a good part of elevating his disposition, not to mention Queenie’s good cooking. He emerged after breakfast in the brown leather jacket he wore to sea, feeling contentedly full, and finding the three gulls and old Purdy still dozing. This time, their presence didn’t irritate him. “Well, howdy, boys,” he said. “Still working on your nap, are you?” Not a bird moved a feather, which pretty much answered his question.
Since Whalebone City was a fishing village, nearly everyone in town was already awake, even though the pale November sun was just barely thinking about pushing up from the Atlantic. Josh spotted Doc Folsom outside his infirmary. He was wearing his derby hat at its usual rakish angle, and his fingers were tucked into his bright red suspenders. Doc spat in the sand and said, “Hello, Josh, my boy. Another glorious day along the Outer Banks, is it not? ‘So here hath been dawning, another blue day: Think, wilt thou let it slip useless away?’ That would be Mr. Carlyle, Thomas Carlyle, sir.”
“A pretty poem, Doc, that’s for sartain,” Josh said, his contentment draining away. Although he’d forgiven Doc for his letter, he’d not forgotten it.
Doc was in an expansive mood, which was the usual case. “Why the poem’s not pretty at all, Josh! It’s deep, and I’m surprised you don’t recognize how deep it is, you being a college man and all.”
Few on Killakeet would ever challenge Doc his opinions, and Josh was no exception. Doc knew books, poetry, music, and would probably recognize an artist’s brushstrokes just by looking at them. Josh was college-educated, but as an engineer, matriculating at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute on a Coast Guard stipend. After he’d graduated, he’d taken his commission in the service and gone off to Alaska. Josh figured he knew something about engineering and he knew the sea and the stars and boats, but he wasn’t a learned man like Doc. Doc was even a bit of an anthropologist, keeping detailed records on every child born on the island since his arrival, which had been just after the Great War. He was going to write it all up in a scientific journal, he said, one of these days, when he got around to it. He measured the babies when they were born and kept track of their growth. “Killakeet is my Galápagos,” he liked to say, “but instead of Darwin’s finches, I have Folsom’s babies.”
Josh didn’t want to get into a conversation with Doc so he headed on down Walk to the Base, seeing up ahead Hook Mallory sitting in a rocker watching his daughter Willow sweep the pizer of his general store. Willow was a pretty girl, everybody said that, only she wasn’t quite right, which everybody said, too. Willow had started out normal enough. She’d even been Jacob’s playmate for much of those first two years of his life. They’d been born only a week apart, and both had seemed so bright, playing together out in the sand and building castles and such. But, not too long after Jacob was lost, Willow had taken an odd turn, inwardlike. At first, people thought she was never going to talk again, and when she finally did, she never had much to say except things that made people suspect she was something of a hoodoo, what Killakeeters called someone who could tell your fortune and place curses and such. Doc, as always, had another opinion. “The only thing hoo-doo about Willow is that she pays attention where most of us don’t,” he’d told Josh.
Hook and Josh nodded to one another and Hook said, “I think we’re due a change in the temperature, one way or t’other.”
“Most likely,” Josh said, “and the wind will turn before the day’s out.”
Willow stopped her sweeping at the sound of Josh’s voice. She had eyes that were a strange though beautiful color, like purple sage. Doc said he’d never heard of anyone having eyes that grand a color. He also said if Willow ever got married, it was going to be interesting to record if the trait was carried over to her kids. Willow was all of nineteen, just a few years shy of being an old maid by Killakeet standards. It wasn’t likely she’d find a husband, being a hoo-doo and all, and fishermen being the most superstitious of fellows. Her hair was also red, unusual among Killakeet women. Hook said he must have had an Irishman on a limb of the old family tree.
Abruptly Willow said, “ ‘The waves have a story to tell me, as I lie on the lonely beach. Chanting aloft in the pinetops, the wind has a lesson to teach.’ ”
Josh looked at Hook, who shrugged at Willow’s pronouncement. Doc came up and lifted a book from the corner of Hook’s pizer. “What’s this?” he asked.
“It’s a book of Robert Service poems I brought back from Alaska,” Josh said. “I gave it to Willow. Her mama told me she liked poems.”
Doc opened the book, ran his fingers down the page of contents, then turned to another page. He said, “ ‘But the stars throng out in their glory, and they sing of the God in man.’ ”
Willow didn’t look at Doc but she allowed a distant smile, replying, “ ‘They sing of the Mighty Master, of the loom his fingers span.’ ” Then, losing her smile, she went back to her sweeping.
“Impressive,” Doc said. “I believe she’s memorized every word.”
Hook looked doubtful. “Likely she just read that very part, that’s all.”
“What do you think, Josh?” Doc asked.
“I think I couldn’t have remembered that even if I’d just read it,” Josh said.
Doc studied Willow. “Yes,” he answered to a question unspoken. “Yes, indeed.”
The only church on Killakeet sat at the end of Walk to the Base, a sign tacked to its front proclaiming it the Church of the Mariner. Josh found Preacher sitting on the front pew, reading his Bible. Preacher, which was the name he went by as well as his vocation, had a drooping shoulder smashed to pieces in a West Virginia coal mine by a slab of slate rock. The rock had struck him like a sledgehammer, producing a day of hideous pain that had transformed coal miner Jeremy Fowler into Preacher of Killakeet Island. It had been God’s will, Preacher said, considering the slate rock was a booby trap only God could have set.
“How do, Josh,” Preacher said in a voice some maintained was like fingernails on a chalkboard. “Need a proverb for the day?” Being an outsider, he nearly always forgot to first comment on the weather.
“No thanks, Preacher. I just want my minute.”
“The Lord’s always got a minute,” Preacher replied, and went back to his Bible.
Josh stood in the church between the pews and bowed his head. He wasn’t particularly religious, but like all men who work on the sea, he had a sense of the enormous power of the Creator of vast waters. Josh made his prayers for Jacob, and for his mother, and his father, and for Naanni, the Inuit maiden he’d married in Alaska according to her tribal ways and who’d died in his arms. That was a story he kept to himself, even from his father. On the island, only Eureka Phimble knew it, and that was because the bosun had also served on the Bering Sea with Josh aboard the old Comanche.
After Josh was don
e with his prayers, he put a quarter in the collection plate and started on, but Preacher stopped him. “Josh, I’ve been thinking,” he said. “This church was built from the planks of the schooner Frances Clayton. It is a goodsome building, tight against the wind, hardly leaks when it rains, nearly warm in the winter and almost cool in the summer, and a great enhancement to our community. But it is the result of tragedy. So how can it be good?”
Josh scratched up under his officer’s cap. “Awful early in the morning to be considering that kind of thing, Preacher. I don’t know. Ain’t it in your book there?”
“I keep looking but I can’t find it, if it is.”
Josh had always found it best to keep his thoughts unencumbered of religious philosophy. He decided to believe in the Almighty, and be impressed by His works, but it made him uncomfortable to wonder how the Lord thought about things. “Well, I guess good can come from bad,” he replied, lamely. “I mean here’s the example with the church, if you want to look at it that way. Is that the topic of your sermon this Sunday?”
Preacher shrugged. “It don’t seem to matter what I say. The men sleep through it, the kids all squirm, and the women think about what they’re cooking for Sunday dinner. I can see it on their faces.”
“Well, it’s not that they don’t appreciate you trying,” Josh offered, glad to change the subject. “Killakeet went many a year without a real preacher. You were needed. I guess it’s just that you’re a landsman, you know. Maybe you ought to go out and fish some and then talk about that. The men will always stay awake when they hear talk of fish.”
Preacher’s eyes lit up. “Maybe I shall! Why, I could join someone on their workboat. Who do you think I should ask?”
Josh appraised the thin, clumsy preacher and knew there was no fisherman who’d want him. Likely, he’d get seasick and otherwise get in the way. “Try Pump Padgett,” he said finally. “Pump’s boy’s off lodging in Morehead City to go to school. He could use a hand. But don’t tell him I sent you. Make it like it’s your own idea. It’ll go down better that way.”