North Sea Hunters

by Harmer-Barnes, Brad

  There was no sign of any impact.

  The Freyr could be no more than three quarters of a kilometre away. That meant that the torpedo should have impacted in – he quickly did the maths – forty-five, fifty seconds, maybe? “Time since launch?” he asked.

  “Twenty three seconds, sir,” said one of the crew. Krauser nodded his thanks and continued to watch through the periscope.

  Forty…forty-five…fifty…

  “Any moment now…” the crewman added.

  Fifty-five…sixty…sixty five…seventy…

  “Dud round,” said Krauser, cursing under his breath. The steam driven torpedoes were more reliable than the electric ones, but not by much. He didn’t know the official figures, but going on personal experience, he estimated that as high as one in two torpedoes could be a dead duck. It was a frustrating and dangerous way to attack an enemy vessel, and it was why he had learned to fire his torpedoes in braces of three.

  “Torpedo tubes two and three are locked and loaded, sir,” came Hertz’s voice. Krauser didn’t take his eyes from the viewfinder. When the torpedo hit, he wanted to see the damage it did. Fighting blind was not satisfying. “Fire Two.”

  Again the echoing of his order, firing like synapses down the length of the U-Boat. Orders relayed, preparations made, controls operated until, finally, the torpedo slid forth from the submarine. The shudder, again, reverberated through the command room. Hertz actually wobbled on his feet a little, reaching out to grab a nearby strut for support. Krauser barely noticed anything, all his concentration focused on the periscope, as he counted again under his breath. Forty-five…fifty…

  “They can’t both be duds, surely?” whispered Hertz.

  A couple of the crew whispered among themselves, but Krauser remained silent. Sixty…sixty five…nothing.

  “Someone run down to the engine room,” he said. “See if there’s a problem.”

  A crewman turned and left. The control room had gone deathly silent, except for the gentle chugging of the diesel engines. Krauser could feel his jaw aching from the clenching of his teeth. He refused to let himself relax, his discomfort serving to fuel his frustration and anger. Hertz stepped up beside him and made as if to speak, but was cut off.

  “Hertz, if you mention that deck gun, I shall fire you out of a torpedo tube myself. We’re much too far away to make the range needed, and the wind is still far too strong. If this last torpedo does not do the job, we call off the hunt. I won’t keep wasting ammunition like this.”

  The clanging of footsteps on the grating heralded the return of the crewman, who squeezed his way into the control room again. “Captain, all is running smoothly in the forward tubes. The gunners and loaders can only surmise that both were either dud rounds, or failed to make the range.”

  Krauser grimaced. “Move us closer.”

  The submarine shuddered again as the diesel engines revved up, spinning the rear propeller, speeding the U-616 in pursuit of its target. Krauser once again rattled off some mental arithmetic, calculating the estimated distance to the Freyr and the speed he guessed they were going, finally calling a halt when he reckoned them to be five-hundred metres from the target. Looking into the periscope again, the magnification allowed him to see people moving around on the deck of the large freighter. Definitely not military. Attacking civilian targets wasn’t exactly satisfying, but it was safer. They were far less likely to be able to radio in for air support than a military vessel. Much less likely to return fire, too.

  Krauser studied the ship through the periscope, then ordered “Fire three!”.

  The torpedo shot smoothly from the submarine and powered through the water, leaving a jet of bubbles behind it as the steam propulsion did its work. Krauser counted again, out loud this time. “Twenty…twenty five…”

  The Freyr visibly lurched to starboard as the torpedo hit its mark. The crew on deck panicked and grabbed for whatever handholds they could reach as the ship rocked sharply to the side under the impact.

  “Target hit!” cried Krauser, eliciting a cheer from some of the crew, and a sigh of relief from Hertz. He headed straight for the hatch up top to get a better look at the damage. This was hardly standard operating procedure, but after the tension and the problems with the first two torpedoes, he was desperate to get a better look at U-616’s handiwork. Hertz and Kleiner followed up shortly afterwards.

  The Freyr was still visibly rocking from the impact. Strangely, though, no smoke or fire was immediately apparent. The warheads of the torpedoes carried a hefty wallop behind them – they had to, for penetrating a ship’s hull was no small feat – and they frequently caught the ammunition or fuel aboard their target, resulting in large flames and smoke clouds that could hang over the area for days. Krauser squinted through the salt spray and tried to get a better look at the damage he had wrought.

  Hertz studied through a pair of binoculars. “They’re abandoning ship, sir.”

  Krauser held out his hand and Hertz handed the binoculars to him. He focused on the life boats, and was surprised to see that Hertz was right. “We must have really hit them good, if they’re already abandoning their ship and cargo…”

  “Maybe they’re carrying something volatile? Fuel, or chemicals, perhaps? If a shipment like that were to go up, it wouldn’t leave a man jack of the crew alive to tell the tale.”

  “I don’t know so much. You would think that they’d at least spend some time attempting repairs, or to…I don’t know. I mean, it’d take some serious damage before I gave the order to abandon our boat.”

  “We don’t have the luxury of life boats, sir.”

  “You know what I mean,” Krauser snapped, “These men are panicked beyond what you would expect. Do you think maybe one of the earlier torpedoes did hit, without us noticing?”

  Hertz rubbed his straggly beard; shaving was forbidden while at sea, as a waste of water. “Unlikely, sir. We noticed that impact straight away, and the G7a torpedoes are a little…how can I put this…inconsistent?”

  “You’ll get no argument from me on that matter, Mr Hertz. In any event, this ship is as good as sunk. Tell the men of our victory, and let’s get underway.”

  Krauser was climbing back down the ladder to the control room, when Kleiner’s voice stopped him. “Sir? There’s something…strange, sir.”

  Krauser looked over. He had once again forgotten his windbreaker, and didn’t appreciate the delay in getting back down in the warmth of the control room. However, Kleiner was not a man who was easily rattled, and his vision was second to none on board.

  “The lifeboats, sir.”

  “What of them?”

  “They’re…they’re sinking, sir.”

  -THREE-

  Krauser didn’t quite know how to react to this news. He hesitated, half in and half out of the conning tower. “Sinking?”

  Kleiner raised his binoculars back to his eyes and turned to the rapidly sinking Freyr. “Yes, sir…there goes one…my god!”

  Krauser clambered back up onto the deck, barging past Hertz and snatching the binoculars from Kleiner, the poor chief engineer nearly choking as the strap was pulled against his neck. He swept his gaze across the length of the Norwegian freighter. The crew was still running back and forth in a panic, like ants whose nest has been kicked, scrabbling back and forth to protect their Queen and repair the damage as quickly as possible. Arms waved, and he could almost imagine that he heard the shouts and calls of the crew, though he was too far out to hear anything beyond a general cacophony.

  He watched through the darkness as a lifeboat, loaded up with fifteen, perhaps twenty men, was lowered jerkily into the foaming sea. The small crew desperately tried to distribute their weight and settle supplies comfortably, then set to rowing, fleeing the sinking freighter.

  “It just…disappeared,” muttered Kleiner, next to him.

  Krauser shushed him, and continued to observe the sinking ship. There were now five lifeboats dispersed about a hundred metres out from the lis
ting hull of the Freyr - some of the men panicked, others eerily calm. One boat, the nearest the stern of the freighter, was much more excitable. The men were all standing and pointing to a spot on the sea fifty or sixty yards from them. The crew were almost jumping up and down in their excitement. Had they perhaps spotted some supplies that were bobbing in the water? Or had one of their number fallen overboard and was in desperate need of assistance?

  Hertz called him from near the entrance hatch, causing him to look away for a moment. “Sir, we need to move. The crew of the freighter may have already called for assistance. The Navy or the RAF could already be on their way, and we need to be long gone when they arrive.”

  Krauser waved him away. “Head below and prepare to move out, Mr Hertz, but wait for us to return. Mr Kleiner and I will observe a little longer.”

  Hertz hesitated, before replying coldly. “Your orders, sir.”

  The dull clanging sounds as his second in command headed back to the control room felt like a physical relief to Krauser. He was beginning to feel increasingly tense whenever the man was around, as if preparing himself for another confrontation like earlier that day, or perhaps even for a physical attack. He made a mental note to suggest Hertz for promotion to another boat when he finished this patrol. Life was tough enough at sea without extra challenges.

  Krauser looked back across the sea at the Freyr, the night time darkness that had aided their initial attack now becoming a hindrance as he tried to trace the movement of the lifeboats across the dark water. He again found the spot that the crew of the last boat had been pointing to, and tried to focus on what they had found. There, something flashed in the darkness, a little particle of white in a pot of black ink. The waves swelled again, obscuring his vision for a moment before the whiteness flashed again. He adjusted the focus and held his breath to steady his movements a little.

  A white piece of driftwood bobbed up and down in the water, then another. The wood looked as though it had been shattered at one side, the jagged edge spinning this way and that in the water.

  He panned quickly back to the nearest lifeboat. The crew were still pointing excitedly, some seeming to be shouting, while those at the oars rapidly rowed away from the driftwood. Krasuer felt the hairs on his arms rise as realisation dawned. The boats were the same colour and material as the gently spinning debris.

  A scream echoed across the water towards them, and he quickly span to what he assumed to be the source. A large wake spread in between two of the other lifeboats…but one of them was gone! Rocked up and down in the large waves spreading from the centre of the wake, the men, like the crew of the other boat, started panicking and screaming.

  “Did you see that?” asked Kleiner.

  “Could they have been carrying explosives, or something like that? Not sea mines, but maybe Mills Bombs, or landmines? Perhaps the cargo broke loose and two of the lifeboats were unfortunate enough to bump into them?”

  “No, sir…that last one…Hell, sir…it went straight down. There was no explosion, nothing like that. It just…sank. Down.”

  “Then what the hell could cause that? A structural fault with the boat?”

  Krauser trained the binoculars back on the new spot. White planks of wood surfaced…and then the chilling sight of a man, face down, his orange life jacket making him stand out in the darkness.

  Kleiner managed to slip his neck out of the binocular strap and stand upright. “I don’t know, sir. Maybe…but with two of the boats?”

  “A defective batch, maybe?”

  He returned his gaze to the floating man in the water. He knew he had to be dead, but one of the lifeboats was rowing toward him, a man at the prow extending a billhook to try and fish the sailor from the water. It took a couple of tentative jabs – the billhooks were hardly precision instruments – but the sailor finally managed to catch a hold of the man’s lifejacket. Two more of the crew came to his aid in hefting him from the water, but the lone man could probably have done it himself.

  The darkness and the moonlight made the sight of the man’s torso - raggedly cut off at the waist, the one remaining arm trailing in the water - even more ghoulish than it would have been in broad daylight. As one, the crew of the lifeboat screamed, the leader dropping the billhook in the water, and the men at the oars chaotically rowing away from the grisly scene.

  “What the hell?” cried Krauser, dropping the binoculars to the deck.

  “That’s no landmine, no mechanical failure…” gasped Kleiner. “That’s a shark attack.”

  “A shark can’t sink a lifeboat!” shouted Krauser, heading for the entrance hatch.

  “I saw one do it myself, sir. I was stationed in the Pacific and I saw one smash straight through the hull of a fishing boat.”

  “Did the boat sink?”

  “Eventually, sir. The crew were all rescued, but it was scary as hell for all the men on board.”

  “These lifeboats are not sinking slowly enough for that. These ships are just…dropping!”

  Another scream carried across the water. Krauser span, and squinted across the darkness. Kleiner grabbed the binoculars, and gasped. “Another one…it’s…the…God, the size of it!”

  Krauser, buffeted by the wind, hurried to the chief engineer and snatched the binoculars, fumbling them as a large wave rocked the U-Boat. He cursed as they bounced off the hull and into the ocean. “What?” he demanded, gripping the rail again “What was it?”

  “Shark!” the chief engineer shouted. “I saw the fin as it went below again and…Captain…it must have been two metres high.”

  A loud booming wave came from the direction of the freighter, and Krauser span, expecting to see an explosion bursting from the hull of the Freyr, but instead all he saw was a massive spray of foam near where one of the lifeboats had been. Only one now remained, the men inside screaming as they rode the tumultuous wave of foam, driftwood and blood that swelled under, around and over them. From the ambient lighting of the rapidly sinking freighter, he saw the shadow of a fin, easily two metres high, glide through the water. What the hell could be so large?

  He’d seen Great White sharks swimming two or three times when stationed in the Atlantic, and their fins could only have been half a metre high. A three metre dorsal fin just…wasn’t possible. Maybe the light and shadow from the sinking ship had thrown out his vision, the swell and movement of the water making the size impossible to judge accurately. Perhaps it could even be something else. An experimental submarine operating in these waters that he hadn’t been informed about.

  Impossible. In any event, the Kriegsmarine wouldn’t launch a submarine whose sole purpose was to destroy lifeboats. There was a war on, but their mission was to sink the cargo and the ships; most captains – himself included – attempted to spare and save as many of the sailors’ lives as they could. It helped to alleviate the guilt some of them felt over how clandestine and underhanded submarine warfare was by its very nature.

  Also there was the ragged, torn torso that the survivors of the Freyr had fished out of the water. No submarine would do that. No submarine could do that. An explosion, perhaps. A man dragged into a propeller, maybe. But not a sinking lifeboat.

  He had a sick feeling in his stomach as he rushed to the entrance to the control room, bracing his feet on the sides of the ladder and sliding into the red, humid stink of the control room. “Half speed ahead. Those sailors are in serious danger, and I intend to assist them.”

  “We don’t have space to take on fifty survivors, Captain!” snapped Hertz. “Where could we put them? Even one of the toilets is filled up with food supplies. There’s simply not the space.”

  “We don’t take them on board, Mr Hertz. I merely said that I intend to assist them. Three of those life boats have been sunk by shark attacks already, and I intend to make sure that the last one survives.”

  “Shark attack? What sort of sharks does one find in the North Sea, Captain?”

  Kleiner had followed them down and cocked an eye c
ontemptuously at the second in command. “Angel Sharks, Blue Sharks, Thresher Sharks, Catsharks, Basking Sharks…”

  Krauser suppressed a smile at seeing Hertz sufficiently berated. “Plus whatever that is out there. It’s big enough to sink three lifeboats so far. Could be a Great White. Perhaps they come here sometimes.”

  “It’s possible,” shrugged Kleiner, “but that thing looked far too big to be a Great White to me, sir.”

  Krauser nodded acknowledgment as he felt the engines kick in, powering the U-Boat towards the last lifeboat. “Let’s get some men up top ready to provide assistance if needed. Small firearms at the ready, in case our Norwegian friends are feeling a little excitable. I’d like Doctor Arnold informed. He may have some patients very soon. Warn him about the possibility of shark wounds.”

  “Sir!” snapped Hertz and rushed off to inform the doctor.

  Krauser estimated they could be on top of the lifeboat in as few as five minutes, and he intended to be ready to provide assistance - personally if need be. He ran to his bunk, grabbed, checked and loaded his Mauser pistol, and…for the first time today…managed to stop and grab his windbreaker before heading up the ladder, and onto the deck.

  One lifeboat remained, and it was in a sorry state.

  -FOUR-

  The U-616 was a hive of activity as the submarine rushed to the aid of the last lifeboat. Captain Krauser was already up on the main deck, sprayed with salt and foam. Gripping tightly onto the handrail, he kept his eyes firmly fastened on the last lifeboat. With just a crew of four, the small vessel was thrown around, up and down in the chaotic waters around the sinking Freyr. The men inside shouted to each other in Norwegian, their hands tightly gripping the seats, the sides of the boat, the oars – anything they could grab a hold of in order to avoid being hurled into the freezing cold North Sea. The waves splashed up and over the prow, and the men were now ankle deep in the freezing cold water. They had pulled on life jackets, but Krauser knew that they would do little to protect them from either the freezing, black water – or the silent teeth and jaws that hunted them.