North Sea Hunters

by Harmer-Barnes, Brad

  “I am still undecided,” sighed Krauser. “Although I suppose I know that turning back is the only option. We cannot continue like this. I will not – I cannot - risk my men’s lives any more than I have already.”

  Dahlen nodded, his gaze on the horizon. “There is an alternative.”

  “And what is that?”

  “We go fishing.”

  Krauser chuckled, but stopped when he saw the granite face of the prisoner. “You are serious?”

  “You have firepower and armour here. I say we hunt that which hunts us.”

  “You mean…?”

  “Yes. I say we stay here and kill this thing.”

  Krauser laughed - a full laugh, this time. “My friend, Admiral Dönitz is not paying us to explode sharks.”

  “He is not paying you to bring home unspent torpedoes, either. How many torpedoes does this ship carry?”

  ­“We start our patrol with a full complement of fourteen torpedoes; a mixture of steam and electric driven.”

  Dahlen turned, and leant his back against the railing, inhaling on his cigarette. “And that thing?” he asked, indicating the deck gun.

  “Two hundred and twenty rounds. Eighty-eight millimetre. It only works against surface targets, though.”

  Dahlen shrugged. “We’ve both seen this thing surface. Now, how many torpedoes would you say that you expend in a single attack on a vessel? The Freyr, for example.”

  “We fired three torpedoes on the Freyr, although I was ready to fire more. The torpedoes have their strengths, you see. When a torpedo hits, it hits very hard indeed. They have good range. We can fire them unseen by the target. Between you and I, however, they are far from reliable. I don’t know what the official figures are, but in my experience around half of the rounds we carry are duds, or they fail to make the range of their target, or something drifts them off course. They have their strengths, Mr Dahlen, but they have many weaknesses, also.”

  Dahlen considered this for a moment. “Fourteen torpedoes…say four a target…so you could only really sink three or four ships a patrol?”

  Krauser had never really considered it like that. “Yes, I suppose so. Sometimes we are able to use the Deck Gun, or sometimes we bag more on a good patrol, but yes, three or four would be satisfactory to me.”

  “So, it wouldn’t be unusual for you to return home with all of your torpedoes spent?”

  “Uncommon, but not unusual. It certainly wouldn’t raise eyebrows, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “And the deck gun?”

  “They’d be surprised if we’d burned through over two hundred rounds of the thing, but it wouldn’t be uncommon to have fired off more than a few.”

  “And the radio is out, you say?”

  Krauser flicked his cigarette butt into the sea, momentarily getting a vision of a toothed maw leaping from it to claim him, and suppressed a shiver. “Yes. No contact in or out.”

  “Then why don’t we go fishing? We can spend a few days here…we could drop anchor, or whatever the submarine equivalent is. Whether or not we kill this thing, your commanders will think nothing of you burning through some rounds of ammunition. Time it right, and you’ll be back home when you should be. Who would be to know that you didn’t complete your patrol as planned? The men are hardly going to report that you ordered they spend several days in pursuit of a sea monster, are they?”

  Krauser had to admit that Dahlen made a very strong argument. It was hardly within his mission parameters to eliminate marine life, no matter how much of a grievance he or the Norwegian may have against it. Hertz would be a problem, too. He may go along with it at the time, but as soon as they got back to dry land he knew Hertz would be filling in all kinds of reports and pushing for a court martial, just to be a pain in the backside and further his own career. He needed work – his wife and unborn child depended on that. Could he really stop and take a break just to hunt sea monsters?

  “I’m sorry, Mr Dahlen, but we cannot do that. People at home are depending on these men making it back home alive, and these men are depending on me to get them there. The U-616 is critically damaged, and we need to go home.”

  The usually laid back Norwegian man stiffened and his eyes widened a little. “Captain, this shark is hunting us. You know that. If we do not kill it, it will destroy the U-616 just as it destroyed the Freyr and God alone knows how many vessels before that. We are here, and we have the weapons to destroy it. You can save the lives of your men, and countless hundreds of others. Do you not see that this thing, this shark, this monster will continue to strike again and again?”

  Krauser straightened and fixed Dahlen with a steely gaze. “Mr Dahlen. I like you. I like you, and I’m sorry for what happened to your ship, but the fact remains that you are a prisoner of war and you are aboard my boat, and I am the Captain. I have listened to your suggestions, and I have considered them…but we are going home. We are badly damaged, and if we do ‘hunt’ this shark…then people are going to die.”

  “And people will die if we do not!”

  “That is not my concern, Mr Dahlen! The men below are my only concern right now and I say we’re heading home.”

  Dahlen stopped and composed himself. “I’m sorry, Captain. You’re right. We will do as you command.”

  ***

  Krauser headed to the command room and issued his orders to Hertz, who was barely able to suppress a smile at getting his own way for once. Unable to be around the man’s smugness, and not especially wanting to be in Dahlen’s company after their tiff on deck, he headed to his bunk, and dozed fitfully for a few hours. Once again, he dreamed dark, terrifying dreams. Dreams of the white ghost of ocean’s past that followed them through the water, unseen.

  -ELEVEN-

  The next day, Krauser was working the command room with Kleiner and three of the men – numbers were naturally stretched thin, following the casualties that they had suffered – when they sighted the convoy. Convoys were a double edged sword for U-Boat crews. They were a target rich environment, full of large freighters and tankers, but they were almost always escorted by destroyers armed with deck guns and depth charges, capable of sending even the bravest submarine crew to the bottom of the ocean. Krauser was constantly aware that the submarine was in far from the best condition, and that a single run in with a destroyer could crush them with ease.

  “As tempting as the targets may be, we cannot risk contact with the escort. Dive to periscope depth, and run silent. We shall wait until they have moved from visual range and then commence our journey home.”

  The men nodded and ran off to carry out his orders. Shouts and klaxons and bells rattled up and down the length of the boat as the U-616 submerged. After a while, the submarine finally fell silent, and Krauser felt the humidity and closeness all around him. He felt sweat crawl down his back, itching and tickling. He whispered to Kleiner “I say we give them twenty minutes, and then see what we can see.”

  Kleiner nodded, and stood silently, leaning back against the interior hull of the submarine, and closed his eyes. Even the purring of the electric engines faded and stopped. They were in silent running. The men were all quiet, either laying down, or standing still to conserve oxygen. So it remained for the next twenty minutes.

  Krauser tried to keep his attention focused on the convoy, but twenty minutes was a long time to remain focused on one thing, and his mind naturally wandered. His thoughts turned to his arguments with Hertz, to his wife and family at home, to what would happen to Arild Dahlen when they finally reached home port. When he next checked his watch, he saw that it had actually been nearer to half an hour since they had submerged. He stepped up to the periscope, and span it up around the surface of the water, searching for the convoy. “There’s no sign of the convoy…but…there’s another ship.”

  “Close, Captain?” asked Kleiner.

  “Six hundred metres, maybe. Small Freighter. No sign of an escort.”

  Kleiner hesitated before asking, “Should I p
repare an attack, sir?”

  Krauser knew that the ship would be easy pickings. It was a small vessel, only two thousand tonnes, if that. A direct hit from a torpedo – or perhaps even the deck gun - would smash it to pieces…but was that something that they could chance? “Negative, Mr Kleiner. We’re still too close to that convoy. If this ship is able to radio through to their escort, we’ll be dead in the wat-”

  He hesitated as a faint rumble ran through the ship on the starboard side. Had one of the engines kicked back into life? No. There was no sound, or motion. Had they run aground? Against a rock, or something? Surely not.

  “Did you feel that?” whispered one of the men in the reddened darkness of the silent control room. “Felt like a torpedo shot past us…”

  Krauser felt a chill run through him.

  “Could there be a Wolf Pack in the area we don’t know about? Perhaps they’ve engaged this freighter?” asked another.

  Wolf Packs were teams of three or more U-Boats that operated in unison, rather than the lone patrols carried out by the U-616. They were able to co-ordinate their attacks to knock out larger or grouped targets, and their numbers made it harder for destroyers or aircraft to locate them for a counter attack. With the U-616’s radio being destroyed, they’d have no way of knowing if one was in the area or not.

  “Captain, could there be a Wolf Pack?”

  “That was no torpedo,” replied Krauser in a hollow whisper.

  The rumbling passed again, this time from the front of the U-Boat to the stern, and on the port side.

  “Not unless we’re caught in a crossfire…” whispered Kleiner, only half in reply.

  The ship fell silent again. Krauser felt cold adrenaline flood his veins, and he suddenly felt sick to his stomach. “Maybe it hasn’t noticed we’re here. Maybe it can’t find us when we’re running silent,” said Krauser.

  Kleiner physically paled. “It? You mean…?”

  Krauser nodded as the rumble once again came from stern to prow, and on the starboard side. “It’s circling us. Trying to find us.”

  “What do we do?”

  Krauser felt saturated with cold sweat. The adrenaline was making his entire body tingle with cold electricity. His brain kicked into overdrive, trying to think what to do. His mouth moved soundlessly before he eventually replied. “I don’t know.”

  Sweat dripped off his forehead and down his back, but it felt like an ice flow this time. He had seen how fast the shark could lunge when it found food, not to mention Dahlen’s description of the sheer force behind its bite. If it attacked while they were submerged, not a man would make it out alive. Yet, if silent running was the only camouflage they had against the foul sea monster, then an attempt to surface would be suicide.

  Could they drive it off, somehow? Again, how could they do that without breaking silent running? Part of him wished that he had taken Dahlen’s advice when he had the chance to. They could be up there on the surface, weapons prepared, and ready to carry out the fishing trip to end all fishing trips.

  Instead, he had led them to a dark, cold silence, as good as any grave.

  Again the shark passed down the port side and he could hear the gasps and whispers, curses and prayers from the men of the U-616. Krauser remained silent himself, desperate to do all he could to hide from the beast.

  He counted the seconds in his head, and finally reached three hundred. “It’s gone,” he whispered.

  “Are you sure?”

  Krauser used the periscope once again. The freighter was now a mere four hundred metres away from them, and showed no sign of having noticed them. He spun the periscope a full circle, desperate to catch any sight of the shark, yet also hoping that it was long gone.

  He turned back from the periscope and was surprised to see Dahlen standing behind him in the control room. There was something in the Norwegian man’s eyes that indicated he was rattled, but the rest of his face was as stoic as ever. “I say we have no more doubts that this shark is hunting your boat.”

  Krauser looked around the control room, and saw that Kleiner and the other crew were watching him. He considered dismissing Dahlen’s concerns with a show of bravado; but he knew that the time for that was long past. All the men had seen or felt or at least heard the stories of the colossal shark that haunted these waters, and to dismiss it out of hand would only serve to make him seem stupid, out of touch, or foolhardy. Instead he took in a breath, let it out steadily, and nodded. “Yes. This thing is hunting us, which is another reason why I am turning us back for home and safety before any more lives are lost.”

  “Captain, the Freyr could easily manage more than twice the speed of your boat, and this monster managed to catch it and tear it to pieces. You think that you can outrun it?”

  “No, but I think we can outpace it. We can make seventeen knots on the surface, admittedly slower underwater, but still a good, constant speed. Even assuming that our fishy friend out there can swim faster than that, it will still have to stop to sleep. We can rotate crews and move constantly. The shark will tire, Mr Dahlen. The U-616 will not.”

  Dahlen nodded assent. “I hope you are right. However, I must warn you, Captain…you continue to underestimate this sh-”

  The rumbling that heralded the approach of the shark returned suddenly, harder and faster than before. It practically howled up from the rear, up the starboard side, and barrelled past the command room. The submarine rattled and shuddered as the monster passed by so close and so fast, causing several men – including Krauser – to lose their footing and fall. Equipment and supplies tumbled from cabinets and storage units as the boat rocked calamitously on its axis. It took only two or three seconds for the shark to pass them, but its wake left them rocking and shouting.

  When the U-616 eventually stabilised and the crew dusted themselves down and got to their feet, Kleiner rushed to the periscope to see if he could spot the monster. Krauser was still sat on the floor, gripping his right bicep – the ruckus had caused his gunshot wound to open up again, turning his shirt sleeve a deep red. Dahlen helped him to his feet and raised an eyebrow. “You are okay?”

  “I will survive.”

  “You are still sure your boat can out pace this shark?”

  Krauser shook his head and muttered. “I am not sure of anything anymore.”

  “Captain!” called Kleiner, from the periscope. “The shark has attacked the freighter! They are sinking!”

  -TWELVE-

  Krauser shakily made his way over to the periscope, gripping his bleeding arm. He peered through the viewfinder and saw that the freighter was indeed listing dangerously to one side. He muttered a curse under his breath. He knew that Dahlen would take this as some sort of twisted moral victory, claiming that the freighter had been sunk because of his refusal to stay and destroy the shark earlier. He was about to once again raise the notion that it could be a fellow U-Boat, or even a Wolf Pack operating in the area, when he saw the three metre high fin of the shark pass across his view, roughly halfway between them and the freighter. He jumped backwards and swore.

  “What is it?” asked Kleiner. “Captain?”

  “It’s the shark,” whispered Krauser. “It’s attacked the freighter. Maintain silent running. Maybe it’ll leave us alone and fill itself up on those sailors.”

  “What?” shouted Dahlen. “You cannot leave those men as a distraction, as bait, as chum! Are you Nazis really so divorced from your humanity that this is acceptable to you? Those are men, not some terrain to be taken advantage of.”

  Krauser nodded to an ensign. “Mr Letzer, please escort Mr Dahlen back to his bunk.”

  Dahlen shook off the ensign’s hand as soon as it touched his arm. “I can find my own way back. Krauser, I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  Krauser kept his face blank as the Norwegian was shown from the command room; though the truth be told, he was deeply shaken inside. He knew the effect of his actions – or rather, his inactions - but the fact was that his responsibility
lay with his boat and his crew. Surely Dahlen had to understand that?

  The command room seemed doubly silent following the outburst of a moment before, and it made the atmosphere turn even tenser, if such a thing were believable. Occasionally a shudder would run the length of the submarine as the shark swam by them; sometimes to port, sometimes to starboard and once, terrifyingly, directly underneath them. Kleiner maintained a watch on the periscope, and at least a quarter of an hour passed before he spoke. “I just saw its fin, sir. It’s circling the freighter.”

  “Distance?”

  “Six hundred…maybe seven hundred metres, sir.”

  “Any sign of lifeboats?”

  Kleiner squinted and panned around a little. “No, sir. Do you think he…?”

  Krauser nodded. “Surface.”

  The bells and klaxons and shouts of the crew heralded the surfacing of the U-616 like a hallelujah chorus. As soon as they were surfaced, Krauser rushed up to the deck. Accompanied by Kleiner and the newly arrived Hertz, he felt his breath knocked from his chest as he saw the shark surface.

  It swam up from the water in a lazy rolling action. At first all he saw was an explosion of white foam and spray, but then he saw the cavernous mouth, full of teeth like a foul warren made of bayonets. At a distance of three hundred metres he couldn’t quite make out the one, glossy black eye, but he knew it was there, searching for them. Searching for the U-616.

  As if running in slow motion, the fin emerged next, and Krauser saw that it was indeed fully three metres tall. It flexed slightly with the motion of the shark, and he could see places where it had been tattered and gouged over the years, in countless battles.

  It occurred to him that he’d never really thought about how old the shark could be. It was no baby, for sure, but could it be twenty, thirty years old? Older? Had it been picking off merchant ships since the 1500s, the source for all sorts of legends of killer sea monsters for millennia?

  Could it be older than that? Could it have feasted on dinosaur flesh?