Armada

by Steven Wilson

  Chapter 8

  11th S-Boat Flotilla headquarters, Cherbourg, France

  Peter Waldvogel knocked and heard the muffled command to enter. He had been summoned to Fregattenkapitan Reubold’s office and he was nervous about the meeting. He had been working diligently on the sighting mechanism and gyro stabilizing platforms of the S-boat’s forward cannons—the Trinity it was called—but the delicate instruments failed to perform the moment that the boats hit rough water. There was simply no way to aim the 110-millimeter guns effectively. S-boats were poor gun platforms for anything larger than rapid-firing 4cm guns, which spewed a steady stream of rounds at the target. Effective enough against small ships and aircraft, the 4cm, and the even less effective MG C/38 2cm “doorknocker,” did not have the force to pierce enemy steel.

  The Trinity guns with their hollow-shaped charges had the power to hole the hulls of enemy vessels, the shells burning their way into the interior of the ship before they exploded. Waldvogel had proved it. He had proved it during static tests before excited cadets and officers at the Marineschule in Murwick. He had proved it to a second tier of Kriegsmarine officers at Le Havre, but there the response had been nothing more than mild interest. He had proved it at Le Havre after a frustrating seven months lost to scheduling, canceling, and rescheduling trials because the senior officers who needed to be present found themselves far too busy to commit to a time and place.

  These officers saw the same three short-barreled guns arranged in a triangular formation on a stationary mount. There was nothing graceful about the guns. They were stubby with outsized breech mechanisms, and projecting from the rear of each was a long cone. Everyone had examined the curious weapons—the cadets with wonder, the officers with interest, and the senior officers with disdain. Especially after the gun was fired, filling the air with a blue haze of gaseous discharge.

  “It does not recoil,” Waldvogel explained patiently. “There is no shock to the gun, or mount.” He saw that he was losing his audience of high-ranking officers as they signaled for staff cars to carry them away.

  Finally one kommodore glanced at him with a look of pity reserved for an idiot and said: “They have torpedoes, Waldvogel. What do they need with stovepipes?”

  Waldvogel closed the door behind him to find Reubold lounging on his cot. All of the S-boat officers and men had quarters in the Cherbourg suburbs, at Urville, and in a museum that had once been a villa, at Tour La Ville. But not Reubold. Generally outgoing and open with his crews, the fregattenkapitan insisted on staying in his single room that served as living quarters and office, in an ancient building on the naval base.

  “A self-imposed exile,” he once told Waldvogel.

  Fregattenkapitan Richard Reubold, back propped against the wall, rested on one elbow with the other draped across an upraised knee. There was a decadent air about his languid pose.

  “In England,” Reubold said in welcome, “you would be called a boffin.”

  “Boffin?”

  “It is their pet name for scientist. Fellows whose minds work on a higher plane.”

  Waldvogel noticed a slight smile etched across the officer’s face.

  “ ‘Chaps,’” Reubold continued, “who never quite fit in the real world.”

  Waldvogel noticed a half-empty bottle of calvados, a local apple brandy, on the desk. That would explain Reubold’s odd behavior. Perhaps he had drunken himself….

  “No,” Reubold said, sliding into a sitting position. Both feet were planted firmly on the floor, but his body had fallen back against the wall. “It’s not the brandy if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  Waldvogel shook his head. “No. I …”

  “I received a directive from Dresser this morning,” Reubold said. “The army wants to turn us all into minelayers. Yes, that’s right,” he said in response to the stricken look on Waldvogel’s face. “Minelayers. Nothing official yet. No lightning bolt from the high command. Just a note preparing us for the fall of the axe.”

  “But they can’t.”

  Now it was Reubold’s turn to look shocked. “You are a boffin, aren’t you? Gods can do as they wish, my naive friend. It is a shame,” he said, unfolding his body from the bed to stand, “that we never got to experience the true potential of your remarkable boats and wonderful guns. Although it is quite evident that your hydrofoils make the boats go very fast. A little clumsy up on those long legs. Not agile, if you understand.” He said those things as if they were acceptable traits, but his manner changed as he continued. “Your guns”—he emphasized the words with arched eyebrows—“are erratic. Perhaps dangerous to the enemy one day, but particularly dangerous to our men now. Our gunners especially.”

  Waldvogel’s words poured out in explanation. “The guns expel poisonous gases through the breechblock. The funnels are meant to direct the blast away. I told them …” He stopped, trying to arrange his thoughts. “Many times. I told them… .”

  “Yes, yes,” Reubold ended the explanation. “I attended the classes and read the manuals. You were careful to explain everything.” He changed the subject. “You know that we will have to remove the boat’s sea legs—the foils. If she couldn’t fire torpedoes from that height, she can’t drop mines with her hull that far out of the water, either. So all six boats will be held in port, returned to their original configuration. The Trinities will be removed and the original twenty millimeters installed in the gun wells.” A humorous thought struck him. “We are moving backward.”

  “Fregattenkapitan Reubold, can’t you talk to Admiral Dresser? Perhaps if you explain that we have very nearly resolved the problems.” He began to tick off a list of difficulties they had overcome. “The steering. The rudders and struts. The mounts and traverse mechanism for the guns.” His mind worked rapidly to build a case for the defense while Reubold listened without comment. “The men’s training. The gun well. Oh, yes.” He suddenly remembered. “Overheating. The engines no longer overheat the way that they used to. We’ve corrected that. I’ve worked so hard to perfect these boats. They are very fine weapons. Every day I think; ‘How can I make them better?’ I think: ‘If I do this or do that, we can solve the problems.’ Perhaps if you go and tell them, they will listen to you. You are highly decorated. A hero of the Fatherland. A Knight’s Cross! There, you see. They will listen to you. They must listen to you.”

  Reubold looked into the pleading eyes and shook his head slowly. “Not me,” he said, walking to the desk. “They won’t listen to me. Goering has made sure of that. I am not welcome in Berlin. Nor are my opinions. And what would I tell them? That the bow rides too high out of the water because of the foils so that we can’t shoot your lovely guns forward. We must shoot them to port or starboard and sometimes we actually hit what we aim at. Should I tell them that we must constantly inspect the hull around the foil struts because, although they make the boats as fleet as stags, they have a tendency to snap off.”

  “That was in the beginning,” Waldvogel reminded him. “The hull and struts have been reinforced. They haven’t been given a chance. I thought that you supported them? That your interest was genuine?”

  “Don’t you understand?” Reubold said. “The Reich applauds failure. They embrace it like a long-lost relative. Success breeds suspicion and foments enemies. To fail is to be shunned, to fall off the stage, and exit the absurd play with its cast of remarkable idiots and madmen. Be joyous, Waldvogel. Don’t despair, we have been granted the special privilege of invisibility. We exist, and yet do not exist.”

  “But don’t you see …” The korvettenkapitan struggled to find an argument that would reverse this terrible injustice. “You must find a way,” Waldvogel said. “They will not listen to me. You must be the one that carries this message. You’re a brave man. I am nothing of the sort. But you are brave. Honored. Everyone has said this of you.”

  “Yes,” Reubold said quickly. After a moment of silence when his shoulders appeared to sag and dullness swept over his eyes, he added: “Yes, i
t is well known that I am a brave man,” and this time the words were edged in humiliation but carried inevitability. “Were I brave, I would kill myself outright. As it is,” he moved to the desk and opened the top drawer, “I have chosen to kill myself one needle at a time.

  Waldvogel looked into the drawer. In one corner, lying on a blue velvet cloth, was a syringe and several small vials.

  “Morphine,” Reubold answered Waldvogel’s questioning glance. “At first for the pain of a broken body. Later, because it helped me to escape the world of excess that I created. Now, because life has gone mad and I have a covenant with the devil. My life in exchange for eternal peace. After the life that I’ve lived, I deserve that much.”

  When Waldvogel spoke his voice was steady, confident, as if the truth of what he said was undeniable. “Your life is not yours to take, only to give.”

  Reubold slid the drawer shut. “I have given so much of me, Waldvogel, that there is nothing left. I am as you see me now, a man who once was. Dresser appears anxious to appease the great General Rommel. Who am I to defy the gods? I follow orders without hesitation because …” He let the sentence hang. “Make preparations for dismantling the hydrofoils and removing the cannon. Your wonderful boats will soon become trawlers.”

  “I thought that they meant as much to you, Fregattenkapitan, as they do me,” Waldvogel said.

  “But of course they do, Korvettenkapitan Waldvogel,” Reubold said. There was no compassion in his words. “But as with all things in the Reich, only so long as is expedient.”

  The two Mosquito PR Mk XVI, painted the standard PR blue, flew side by side, sweeping the area 35,000 feet below. In their bellies, where bombs would have been carried had they been B models, were two F24 Split Vertical cameras peering from two separate ports. Farther along the fuselage, just aft of the wings, were two F52 Split Vertical cameras and an F24 Oblique camera.

  Accompanying these two photographic reconnaissance planes was another Mosquito aircraft, but of a different sort. It was an Mk FB VI, and protruding from its blunt nose were four .303 caliber machine guns, and directly beneath them, almost hidden in the round body of the aircraft, were four 20-millimeter Hispano cannons. It was the FB VI’s duty to ensure that the two unarmed Mosquitoes could go about their job, undisturbed by enemy aircraft.

  The PRs were stationed at Benson and had been since early in the war, but the FB came from a Pathfinder base at Walker and was flown by a Polish crew: Pilot-Sergeant Casimir Gierek and Navigator/ Radar Operator Jozef Jagello of the No. 105 Squadron. They had escaped to England soon after the fall of Poland and had two things in common. First, they hated the Germans with every once of their strength and lived for the day when they could return to their homeland. Second, they hated the Russians with every ounce of their strength and lived for the day that they could return to their homeland. Other than that, they were complete opposites.

  Gierek squirmed, trying to get comfortable atop the parachute that fit into the hollow box that was his seat, below his buttocks. He stretched his left leg along the thigh rest just underneath the compass attached to the instrument panel and glanced from the oil and fuel pressure gauges to the left and right manifold pressure gauge. He had yet to master the art of becoming comfortable in the tiny cockpit of the two-man aircraft.

  Jagello, on the other hand, seemed entirely at home in the confines of the Mosquito. He seldom spoke, hardly moved, and, once settled into his seat situated to the right and slightly behind Gierek’s, was content to consult his charts, read the compass, make navigational computations, and watch the soft green face of the radar screen in front of him.

  They had, before they flew off to rendezvous with the two photographic reconnaissance unit Mosquitoes, gone over the details of the mission with their squadron commander. After he was satisfied that they knew exactly where and when they were to accomplish their mission, they walked to the aerodrome and talked with the Welsh RAF sergeant who led their ground crew. “Erks,” the British called them, Gierek discovered one night at a squadron get-together, but no one was sure why. The sergeant’s name was Williams, and Gierek was convinced that his booming voice and slow delivery were somehow based on the misconception that the language difficulties that sometimes arose between the two nationalities could be overcome with words delivered patiently, and at a great volume.

  Both Poles finally accepted Williams and his eccentricities, especially after they saw the great care that he lavished on their aircraft. They were not entirely sure about Williams’s eternal companion, the Black Prince.

  “Mascot,” Williams shouted at them in explanation, and then began some ridiculous sign language that was apparently intended to clarify the presence of a large black dog, whose fur was coated with oil from the hangar floor.

  “He looks like a bear,” Gierek commented, eyeing the beast with some suspicion but to Williams’s untutored ears it sounded like: “Eee luks lik ah beer.” Gierek’s English was substantially less refined than Jagello’s.

  “Yes,” Williams agreed loudly, as if the two were thirty yards away, and then bent down and roughly stroked the solemn dog whose eyes were hidden behind a thick mass of greasy fur. “Good dog. Bloody good luck.” The Black Prince responded by ponderously shaking his large head in slow awkward motions, his wide ears flopping ludicrously in the air.

  What Jagello and Gierek came to understand is that the English mechanics viewed the Black Prince as a good-luck token and so, too, eventually, did the Polish members of No. 105 Squadron. To catch sight of the Prince before you took off on a sortie was necessary for a successful return. It worked nearly all of the time, enough so that the consensus was that the Black Prince was indeed, lucky.

  The one member of the squadron who felt otherwise was Gierek, who thought the animal nothing more than a pest. There existed a silent conflict between the two, Gierek unwilling to give credence to either the dog’s ability to bring luck, or comment on the fact that he alone despised the animal.

  The Black Prince seemingly ignored the pilot’s distaste for him and chose, on a regular basis, to collapse in a heap of filthy black fur in front of the plane’s left wheel. Gierek had named the aircraft Kele after his hometown in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, and Williams and the others were used to the Polish pilot storming into the hangar immediately before each mission, pointing in anger at Kele and sputtering a single word: “dawk.” Williams would then dispatch one of the men in a lorry out to the hardstand, carefully lift the apparently unconscious dog, and place him in the bed of the truck.

  This, to Gierek, was a far too common occurrence. To Jagello it was just one more item to be checked off the preflight list.

  “Cherbourg,” Jagello said, nodding below them. The reconnaissance aircraft would drop down to 30,000 feet and begin mapping the area with their cameras while the Fighter-Bomber stayed well above them, searching the skies for German fighters. Flak was almost incidental, the enemy having learned that it was better to save their ammunition for large bomber raids than to reveal their positions trying to shoot down aircraft that were virtually out of range anyway.

  “E-boat pens,” Gierek said, scanning the sky. “Our German friends are going to have many visitors, soon.” Kele had led bombing raids on harbor facilities, U-boat pens, rail yards, and enemy fortifications. They were Pathfinders, leading the bombers into the target—marking the way. But always it was the same, the satisfaction that they were helping to kill Germans with each mission, and each mission brought them closer to the day when they could return home. “Anything?”

  “Clear,” Jagello said watching the radar. “Everything is clear.”

  “I wonder if they’ll let us lead the raid. We’ve flown over Cherbourg enough to be able to walk the streets with our eyes closed. Will they, do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” Jagello said.

  “I shall speak with Papa,” Gierek said, referring to their squadron commander. “Papa is very influential with the Wing Commander.”
r />   “Perhaps.”

  “Will it take place just before the invasion?”

  “What?” Jagello said.

  “The raid? On the E-boat pens? It’s getting so that they bombed the same targets a dozen times over. There will be nothing left when they land. They’re running out of targets. Don’t you think?”

  “No.”

  “‘No?’” Gierek said in surprise. “What do you mean ‘no’?”

  “The E-boat pens,” Jagello said. “They haven’t been bombed. When they are, it will be a very big raid. I think that it will stir a bees’ nest when we return.”

  “Oh,” Gierek said, satisfied with the answer. “Then we shall accompany them. More dead Germans.”

  “Anymore,” Jagello said in one of the rare times that he ventured an opinion, “it is not so much the dead Germans that I am concerned with. It is the safe return of two Polish airmen.”

  “That is nothing to worry about,” Gierek said grimly. “Don’t you remember that we are blessed with the lucky dog?”

  Chapter 9

  Portsmouth Naval Base, wayside dock

  “Edland?” DeLong said to Cole, puzzled.

  “Lieutenant Commander,” Cole said as he followed DeLong to the cockpit of the 155 boat. “ONI. We’ll take the one sixty-eight and Dean’s boat with us. Make sure everybody’s topped off, and for God’s sake have them check the torpedoes.”

  The PT boat’s torpedoes ran on 180-proof ethyl alcohol. Enterprising crewmen often mixed a potent cocktail of half a cup of grapefruit juice with half a cup of alcohol to create kick-a-poo joy juice. The navy countered by adding pink coloring to the alcohol and passing the word that it was poison. The sailors countered by passing the alcohol through a chammy cloth or a loaf of bread with both ends cut off to filter the supposedly poisonous torpedo fuel. It was a standoff between the navy and the thirsty sailors. Now Cole ordered the alcohol levels in the torpedoes checked before each mission so he wasn’t embarrassed by the torpedoes running out of fuel short of their intended target and dropping impotently to the seabed.