And by this time tomorrow he’d have been on his way to Berlin. To Trudi, whom he’d married only four months ago. Trudi’s father was a general, now on the Eastern Front with the Sixth Army, advancing against Stalingrad … But there’d be at least a day’s delay now, Looff guessed, in his own take-off for Berlin, and more than that if anything else went wrong. The thought gave him a feeling of a barrier erected between himself and Trudi: of Trudi always a little out of reach, like a retreating figure in a dream … He turned, feeling the sick depression again as Grewe arrived from aft with the second engineer in tow. “Reporting on the leaks, sir …”
Looff looked at the depthgauges. Thirty-five metres, and she was rising steadily on an even keel. He moved towards the search periscope. “Stern glands again?”
Gebhardt nodded. Deathly pale, and glistening with sweat—or with spray from those leaks … “The port gland, the one that was bad before, was fairly hosing in. When we were deep it—”
Irritation was sharp, intense: he snapped, “How is it now?”
“It’s—less, sir, a lot less, but still—sizeable. Bilge pump will need to be run every ten minutes in thirty, say. But the starboard gland’s no more than seepage now.”
“Very well.” He told Walther and Grewe, “If the RAF have gone home, we’ll surface and see what’s what.” Turning to the search periscope as the boat rose smoothly towards the ordered depth. This search periscope was operated from the control room, but the attack ’scope you worked from the conning tower, on a saddle-seat that turned with it. He couldn’t in fact have used it now because it was jammed solid, one of the effects of those Canadian depthcharges. Looff was busy sky-searching, swivelling slowly around with his eyes pressed against the rubbers while behind him Walther struggled with the awkward trimming job. You needed motive-power, some motion through the water, for the hydroplanes to grip and take effect, like horizontal rudders. Now, with the screws motionless, the engineer was having to adjust his trim by no more than pints flooded in or pumped out: and there was enough motion at this depth to make it a losing battle.
“Can’t hold her, sir, we’re drifting up …”
It would be worse to over-flood, blind the man at the periscope by dipping it. Walther’s eyes were on the Papenberg, the sensitive watertube depth-meter between the two clock-face ones. The Papenberg showed depthchanges with great accuracy and was used primarily for periscope work, especially during dived attacks when it was important not to show an inch more stick above the surface than you had to.
“All right.” Looff stepped back. “Surface.” He told Grewe, “I want the twenty millimetres manned.” The AA guns, a quadruple mounting abaft the bridge on a railed platform that was known for some obscure reason as “the conservatory.” He’d have the gunners up there because if you had no motive-power you couldn’t dive quickly, and it would be safer to stay up and fight than wallow slowly, defencelessly into the waves, a sitting duck for aircraft bombs or depthcharges. The British aircraft had RDF in them now, which made them much more dangerous than they had been and presumably accounted for the recent losses. U-boats had been promised search-receivers as a counter to this: some kind of device that would give warning when an airborne radar fingered you.
“Blow all main ballast!”
The gunners were standing by. Looff climbed into the tower. Alone for a few seconds he paused with his eyes shut while the sweat broke out like fever and his body shook with the release of tension. Air was ripping into the tanks and his boat tilted, lifted:Walther’s voice rang hollowly from below, “Standards awash …”
One whole day lost, was what it boiled down to.
The tug—from St Nazaire—escorted by one Möwe-class torpedo-boat, had taken seven hours to get to them. Another Möwe had arrived before that and stayed with them, and there’d been fighter cover overhead most of the time.
U 122 had been completely immobilised by those bombs. Both screws smashed … Looff had sent a diver over the stern, and he’d reported that the propeller blades were all either twisted or shorn off. And one shaft was bent, too. So there’d been nothing to do but wait, with the hydrophones manned to pick up any sound of approaching screws. With air cover to protect them from further bomber attack, the threat to guard against had been the chance of a British submarine finding this easy target.
But it was close to noon now—the attack had been yesterday after-noon—and they were well inside the Loire estuary, the tug making an extra couple of knots in the land’s shelter. One torpedo-boat had gone ahead into St Nazaire, and the other hung astern. Air attack was still very much a possibility.
From the partly-raised search periscope, four white pennants fluttered—white because the four ships sunk on this patrol had been merchantmen. When you KO’d a warship, you marked the success with a red pennant. The four streamers looked good, up there: they were the signs a welcoming crowd always looked for and applauded. Looff was dressed for the return to harbour, ready for that welcome, wearing a clean white cap and also his Knight’s Cross. The white cap was a U-boat commander’s badge of honour and special privilege: they stopped you in the street, women tried to kiss you, and if they were pretty enough you’d permit it.
Max Looff, ace ship-killer. His tonnage sunk had passed the quarter-million mark last time out. The four kills on this patrol added another estimated 33,000 tons to the bag; so a third of a million was in his sights. The old dream becoming fact, the burning ambition he’d had of following in the footsteps and the fame of Prien, Kretschmer, Schepke, Frauenheim, Endras …
Endras’s nerves had been in ribbons, before he’d sailed on that last patrol. They shouldn’t have let him go. And Prien, Schepke and Kretschmer had all been lost in the same month—in March of last year. None of it had seemed to spell out any kind of lesson: those were the tragedies of war and it was always the other guy it happened to. In March of 1941, it seemed to Looff now, he’d been a kid, a brash youngster, new to the white cap and blinded by its glory. In nineteen months he’d aged by—what, twenty years? He could see himself as he had been then when he looked now at the new, young COs: strutting, desperately impressed with themselves, believing in the Reich’s destiny and their own involvement in it. Max Looff would look at them and think, You’ll grow up: or you’ll drown.
He’d grown up, all right. And now, he’d be all right. After this break, three weeks in Trudi’s warm, enclosing arms, he’d be as right as rain. The signs he’d read in himself, all the forebodings and introspection, had been symptomatic of nothing more than exhaustion, over-strain over too long a period. Nerves on edge, certainly, but that was an entirely different thing from nerve lost. If that had been on the cards it would have happened long ago: there’d been plenty of tough patrols before this one. It was important to bear it in mind: and a question of self-discipline, not to allow the imagination to play such games. Also—and oddly enough—another way of steeling oneself against any such weakness was to think of Trudi: she’d been swept off her feet by a famous U-boat commander, a national hero whose hand had been shaken by the Führer himself: and this same man would be returning to her now—tomorrow, or the day after. The same man, the same lover …
What if he—well, talked in his sleep, or—
Christ …
Imagination off the leash again: seeing it, the bedside light switched on, Trudi up on one elbow, golden light bathing those perfect breasts, her hand on his shoulder and her voice urgent, waking him from nightmare and the echo of his scream still ringing. The shock, disbelief in her face, tears streaking his …
“One man on the bridge?”
He imagined, as he bent towards the voice-pipe, how it would be to have Trudi’s sympathy, how long it would be before sympathy became contempt. He answered that request: “Affirmative.” It was Franz Walther, the chief engineer, who came up, clambering past the helmsman in the tower, emerging into the bridge with an unlit cheroot clamped between his teeth.
“Time for a smoke before we dock, sir?”
Walther lit up, then inhaled luxuriously, smoke eventually trickling from his nostrils while he gazed around—at the tug with its mound of churned froth ahead, the torpedo-boat with its clean, warlike lines back on the quarter, the smoothly swelling rush of grey-green water surging into froth along the U-boat’s saddle-tanks, her wash spreading in a widening V towards land encroaching on both sides. Looff was glad to have had that sequence of thought interrupted. In fact it hadn’t been thought, it had been imagination, the very thing he had to avoid, forbid. It was unreal, a lie, you had to shut your mind against it and keep it shut. He asked Walther, “Looking forward to some leave, are you?”
“Well.” Expelling smoke. Even through its heavy pungency you could smell him. “I expect I’ll stick around the boat, pretty well. Make sure they don’t cock anything up.”
Walther wouldn’t trust any shoreside engineer farther than he could spit. He was like a jealous husband, with his boat. Looff advised him, “You ought to get yourself away for at any rate a short while. Pick a stage when they can’t do much harm. I don’t want you getting stale, or sick, you know.”
He knew the engineer was staring at him: out of the side of his eye he’d seen the black cheroot swing, jutting like a gun-barrel. But silence, no comment at all: Looff remembering the way this man had looked at him yesterday—that doubting, assessing stare. There might be the same sort of question in Walther’s face now, if he’d cared to look back at him. The connection being the warning he’d just given him, about getting stale, when yesterday Walther had seemed to be wondering whether his skipper might be going off his head … He mumbled, finally, “I might take a few days. Week, at most—once the work’s properly in hand. Maybe Paris.”
Looff smiled. “Ah.”
“Well, for shit’s sake, the local tarts—”
“Quite.” It occurred to him that if one of the local whores took anything like a close look at Franz Walther, she might feel very much the same degree of caution. “We don’t want you with that sickness, either.”
“The Maquis’ secret weapon.” Walther hawked, and spat to leeward. “I suppose you’ll be off to Berlin, sir?”
“Bet your boots.” Looff was conscious of the constraint between them, and the mutual effort to break through it. It might be quite a while before the incident really faded. He added, partly by way of a fresh, oblique apology, “Three weeks, and I feel I need every day of it. Every hour. I’m going to forget I ever saw the inside of a U-boat.”
“Fat chance of that, sir.” The engineer shrugged. “They’ll have you making speeches, lecturing, signing autographs, taking the salute at parades of Hitler Youth—etcetera, etcetera …”Walther belched, and cheroot-smoke seeped through his facial hair. “Kapitänleutnant Max Looff—in Berlin—ye Gods, they’ll be climbing over each other to get their hands on you!”
He was right, at that. It wouldn’t be possible to evade it all. The heroes of “Dönitz’s private navy” were a major propaganda asset. Dönitz himself had referred to them as “the bravest of the brave.” They were the stars, the gladiators …
“Knights in shining armour.” The captain of the flotilla’s smile had irony in it. “That was the C-in-C’s own expression.” The captain was a large man, about the same height as Looff but much burlier. Duelling scars on his cheeks. “And you’re one of the shiniest, my dear Looff.” He moved round behind the desk. “Sit down. How about a touch of cognac? Or schnapps?”
“Not just at the moment, thank you.”
“Dare say you’re wise. It’s early, and you’ll be painting the place scarlet tonight, I suppose.” By “the place” he’d be referring to La Baule, ten or a dozen miles away, to which submarine personnel were transported each evening. This base was too much of a target for bombing, not to mention for British commandos, who’d paid the main port of St Nazaire a highly destructive visit earlier in the year. “But—I was saying—one of the shiniest. You’re very well thought of—which is hardly surprising, the way your bag’s mounting and the fact that aggregate monthly tonnages destroyed are the figures by which our lord and master stands or falls. Eh?”
“Admiral Dönitz.”
A nod … “What I’m telling you is he was talking about you, Looff.” The captain pointed at the telephone on the desk between them. “Over that thing, two or three hours ago.”
Looff fingered the Kriegsabzeichen, the gilt U-boat badge on the left side of his jacket. C-in-C talking about a U-boat CO to the flotilla captain could mean very little, or it could mean something like promotion, or—well, something quite different. There was a suspicion in the back of his mind now, a small seed of anxiety. He inclined his head: “I’m honoured.”
“That’s a hell of a long defect-list your engineer’s presented, I’m told.”
Abrupt change of subject. But there had to be some link. The seed swelled, a little. Looff explained, “Most of the damage was done by the Canadians. Or one assumes they were Canadians, right on that coast. I was—well, to be frank, lucky to get out of it … But there was also an earlier pasting, out in the air-gap, and finally as you know this damn bomber—another extremely close shave.” He could hear a shake in his own voice, and he was worried that the other man might detect it too. He thought, I’m talking too much, running off at the mouth: better dry up … But it was necessary to finish—”also some of the minor items were held over from our last spell in harbour, if you remember—because that was only a short stand-off, whereas this time—” he smiled, rather uneasily—“well, personally, I’m off for my three weeks in Berlin, while they put us back in shape.”
He noticed a slight deepening of the lines around the captain’s eyes: eyes which did not, now, meet his own. It was out of character: and the seed was active, germinating.
“Not this time, old chap, I’m afraid. As I was saying—or rather, beginning to say—”
“But—”
“Wait, let me—”
“Sir—I’ve absolutely got to—”
“I said wait!”
A roar: then silence. A slow blink: and now an understanding smile. But the eyes were like steel. Looff staring back at him: Looff’s fingers gripping the edge of the desk. The captain’s hands moved too, joined each other on the blotter in front of him, linked and seemed to be trying out each other’s strength. He murmured, frowning down at them, “Von Rosenow was a friend of yours?”
Was. So it was true, Horst had gone …
“I’m sorry to have to confirm it. But there’s no doubt now. We’ve no idea how or even exactly where, but—”
“That’s terrible.” Staring at the motionless, grim-faced man on the other side of the desk, he remembered another question he’d meant to ask—about young Neumann of U 102: Neumann had been out there with him in that first pack attack, and after it there’d been several days of unanswered “Report your position” calls to him—just as there’d been to Von Rosenow earlier.
“The point is this, now. Rosenow was to have taken over a brand-new boat. U 702. Not only spanking new, but she has the added strengthening, the deep-diving capability. Oh, and a search-receiver. A few other small improvements … Anyway—she’s yours. This is the personal decision of Flag Officer U-boats, a decision which I personally applaud and also, as you’ll appreciate, something of an honour. But it certainly means you’ll have to postpone that leave. 702’s ready for sea, there’s a particular task for her—for you, Looff—and you’ll sail the day after tomorrow.”
The room was turning, swimming … He closed his eyes to stop it. Then wet his lips and found his voice: it sounded like someone else’s. “Special task?”
“Well. You’ll get your orders and full details from Operations, of course. But—briefly—and bear in mind this is not to be discussed either here or in quarters, right?” “Naturally.”
There was far too much talk, and far too many French ears listening to it, and some of them weren’t listening by chance or out of mere curiosity, either.
“The Black Pit.”
A nod … “So it’s a good hunting ground in any case. Your startingpoint will be due east of Santa Maria. It’ll take you a few days to get there, of course, and you’ll need to get a move on. There’ll be seven, possibly eight other boats joining you, to form a patrol line and then move southward towards Freetown. Your pack’s been allocated a code-name—which is on the tip of my tongue but for the moment seems to elude …” The big hands separated: then the fingers of one of them snapped like a pistol-shot, and the captain smiled. “Drachen. You’ll command the Drachen group.”
Drachen meaning “dragon.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
German Naval Staff to Flag Officer U-boats:
In the event of an operation against Dakar all U-boats within reach are to be concentrated for attacks against enemy supply ships. FO U-boats … should report number of boats expected to be available for this task.
Eagle, this is Gannet … Asdic contact two-nine-five, range three thousand yards …
“Gannet” was Paeony’s talk-between-ships call sign, and “Eagle” was Harbinger’s; this was the first contact (or alleged contact) with an enemy since they’d left Freetown three days ago.
Ship’s time—Nick checked his watch—1900, 7 pm. Harbinger was already at dusk action stations. Asdics pinging, the Type 271 RDF aerial revolving steadily, HF/DF manned and listening, guns’ crews and depth-charge crews closed up. Bearcroft, the Chief Yeoman, had acknowledged Paeony’s message. There was no need to tell Guyatt what to do: at least, one hoped there was no need. He’d investigate this contact, and if it was confirmed as a submarine target he’d attack it with depthcharges. Then Nick would move over to that side to support him. Not before … The convoy’s mean course was 335 degrees and Paeony’s station was six thousand yards ahead of the left-hand columns, so the reported bearing of 295 degrees and distance of one and a half miles indicated that the U-boat—if it was that, not a whale or a patch of denser water—was well out on the port bow.
The Torch Bearers: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 5 Page 13