The Last Eagle (2011)

by Michael Wenberg

  Stefan followed Eryk slowly up to the bridge, climbing the rungs like an old man, and then gasping with pain as he climbed over the edge.

  “You all right?” Kate asked, her face etched with concern.

  “I’ll live,” Stefan said. It was more than he could say for Albert. “Would you see about the boy? Make sure he’s comfortable?”

  Kate nodded, and disappeared below.

  Stefan leaned into the speaker tube. “Set course one-nine-five,” he ordered hoarsely. “Flank speed.”

  “I’m worried about mine fields, Stef,” Eryk said. “In the dark, we’re not going to be able to spot them until it is too late.”

  Stefan shrugged. “That’s why we’ll hug Swedish waters. Can’t imagine the Germans mining their waters. I mean, those bastards are arrogant, but not that arrogant.”

  Eryk mumbled something into the top of his coat.

  “What was that?”

  “Just said, I hope not. How long, do you think it’ll be before we get there?”

  Stefan thought for a moment. Hard to think. But he couldn’t stop now. “We’ve got 620 kilometers, give or take. We’ll do maybe 170 kilometers tonight, another 30 or more tomorrow. … We’ll be close in three nights. Maybe wait until the fourth night to give The Øresund a go. Of course, could be longer if we run into any trouble.”

  “Of course,” Eryk repeated under his breath. “And to think I chose this instead of becoming an artillery officer.”

  “If you’d chosen artillery, Stefan said quietly, “you’d probably be a prisoner now ... or dead.”

  “There is that,” Eryk said.

  The weather began to worsen about midnight. By early morning, the Eagle was corkscrewing through heavy seas, and the foredeck was constantly awash. Long before that time Stefan had sent the deck gun crew below. The last thing he needed was a man, or woman, washed overboard.

  The monotony of the night was interrupted about 3 a.m. by an appearance from Reggie, who needed a smoke. He stood the entire time, legs apart, back to the bullet- hard rain, hands cupped over his cigarette to keep it from fizzling out completely. As soon as it was done, he lit another. He smoked and talked nonstop for a half an hour about his family and friends in America, his job, his car, his wife’s sexual preferences. At one point, Eryk interrupted him to ask innocently enough about Kate.

  “She’s busy working on her story,” Reggie said, staring suspiciously at him. “Something about finishing it before we get to England. When did you start falling for her?”

  Eryk stumbled for a response.

  Reggie cut him off. “Yeah, right. Don’t bother. Just get in line, bub. You don’t think there aren’t a dozen lugs just like you. She’ll break your heart, she will.”

  “You sound like someone who knows,” Stefan interjected.

  “Nope. Not me,” Reggie said bitterly. “I’m happily married.”

  When Reggie finally left, hands shaking, teeth chattering from the soaking, both Eryk and Stefan were glad to see him go.

  The Eagle submerged at dawn, though no ship or plane was in sight. Stefan didn’t want to chance discovery, and no one complained about his decision. The storm continued to increase in force, and they were all happy when the Eagle settled into calmer waters 60 meters below the surface. Anyone who wasn’t on duty fell immediately into his bunk, a few not making it even that far, simply curling up in an out-of-the-way nook or cranny, lulled into an exhausted sleep by the hum of the electric motors.

  The second night, the Eagle resumed her race to the south on the surface of a still restless sea, but with the storm’s passing, she was without the protection offered by bad weather. As a result, the night was punctuated by crash dives and one heart-stopping moment as the Eagle rounded past the lighthouse on the southern tip of Öland and came upon a Swedish patrol boat, its spotlight sniffing the surface of the dark water. For an agonizing moment, the light caught Eagle in its beam. Like the angel of death gazing at us, Stefan thought to himself, as he held his breath, waiting for the patrol boat to erupt in activity, his eyes dazzled by the beam. And then it moved on.

  “Jesus Christ,” Squeaky croaked, crossing himself quickly. “They had us. …”

  Stefan didn’t have time to think about why they had been missed. The night was dark, overcast, the seas unsettled. After a few hours on watch, it was easy to make a mistake. He leaned into the speaker tube, dictated a new course that would veer them away from the ships, and then following it with “Emergency dive!”

  By morning, Stefan was so tired he felt numb. He turned over control of the vessel to Eryk, who didn’t look any better than he felt, and stumbled back to his cabin to try and get some rest. But sleep was elusive. He couldn’t ignore the tension that had been slowly building ever since they escaped Tallinn. His nerves felt stretched like steel cables on a bridge burdened to the breaking point. And yet, he couldn’t break. It just wasn’t an option.

  He finally gave up on sleep, and turned to the captain’s log. He was nearly finished with entries from the previous night, when he paused, pen hovering above the paper. Something wasn’t right. He was already up from his desk when the shriek of metal against metal began to echo throughout Eagle. “All stop,” he bellowed, racing down the passageway toward the Control room in his bare feet. “Reverse engines, now.”

  “Reversing engines,” Eryk repeated, his young face transformed by fear into that of an old man. “What the hell is that?”

  The metallic howl slowly came to a halt as the Eagle’s forward motion stopped and then started up again, like an insane laugh, as the boat reversed direction.

  “Course change?” Eryk asked.

  “Steady,” Stefan said.

  At the instant the sound ceased, Stefan yelled, “All stop. Blow tanks. Take us up.”

  “Blowing,” Eryk repeated. “Aren’t you going to look around first?” He gestured at the periscope.

  Stefan shook his head, watching the depth gauge spin toward single digits, hands on the ladder to keep them from shaking. He hadn’t answered Eryk’s first question, but he had a pretty good idea what caused the sound. The image of it filled him with dread. If he was right, they were lucky they weren’t already dead.

  He was first up the ladder, spinning the hatch open, and vaulting out onto the bridge deck, still barefoot, followed close behind by Eryk, two lookouts and the conning tower gun crew.

  “What have I done,” Eryk moaned, pointing at the round metal ball, studded with spikes and packed with enough explosives to blow off Eagle’s bow, bobbed on the surface like a rust-streaked prehistoric menace twenty meters from Eagle. Stefan did a quick scan. In the murky light of midday, at least a dozen more mines were visible, a web of death waiting for some unsuspecting prey to stumble into their midst and be destroyed.

  “What do we do now?” Eryk said, his hands flapping helplessly at his side. Three mines blocked their escape. There were at least that many in any direction in front of them.

  Stefan scratched his beard, looked up at the sky as if they would provide an answer to their dilemma. They could submerge, try their luck, but the chance of snagging a cable mooring a mine to the bottom was fairly high. They could try and detonate the mines ahead with the deck gun, but the explosion of the closest mine would probably kill or incapacitate anyone on Eagle’s deck.

  Stefan didn’t like the answer he kept coming back to, but it was the best he could do.

  “Get me a long pole,” he said to Eryk, stripping off his shirt. And then he explained what he wanted to do.

  “You’re joking,” Eryk said.

  Stefan shook his head, patted Eryk on the cheek. “Don’t worry. I trust you,” he said. “You have the helm.” He climbed over the edge of the conning tower, slid down the outside ladder and padded out onto the Eagle’s foredeck. The Eagle moved restlessly beneath his feet. Stefan windmilled his arms in the chill, hopping nervously back and forth on the balls of his feet like a prizefighter about to enter the ring.

  “What’s
going on?” Kate asked. She pushed up next to Eryk, leaning into him for comfort.

  “We’re stuck in a mine field,” Eryk said, watching as one of the crew popped out of the foredeck hatch, leaned down to pull up a long pole. Stefan was right there to take it from him. He grasped the end of the pole, the muscles in his arms and back suddenly flexing like a bodybuilder’s. Stefan glanced up at Eryk, and smiled. He looked like he was enjoying himself.

  “We’re going to try and get out,” Eryk said softly. “Stefan will use that pole to push off any mines that get close.”

  Kate’s mouth opened, and then closed. There was nothing benign about the look of the mines, Kate thought, staring at the nearest one, lurking near the surface like a crocodile. They looked evil, craggy with barnacles, and shaggy with black algae. “Are those spikes what I think they are?”

  “Yes,” Eryk said simply. “It’s a contact mine. The simplest type. Those are the detonators. He touches any one of them with the pole, and he’s vaporized, followed an instant later by us. You know, you may want to get below.”

  “I don’t think so,” Kate said with a sharp shake of her head. “If I’m going to go, I’d just as soon do it up here and below.”

  Eryk leaned into speaker tube. “All ahead slow, hard starboard rudder.”

  As the Eagle moved ahead, her bow swinging to starboard, Stefan hefted the pole in his hands and began stalking the approaching mine like a hunting Neanderthal.

  Eryk spoke again into the speaker tube. “Port rudder, hard. Reverse port screw. Dead slow.” The Eagle’s bow began to come about, while her stern continued to slide away from the approaching mine. “All ahead both screws; ease off the rudder,” Eryk said.

  Stefan padded along the side, matching speed with the mine as it slid by the Eagle’s flank, ready to push it away if it came too close. He wasn’t needed. When it was passed, he almost skipped back to the bow, shouting up to Eryk: “Well done!” And there he waited for the next two mines, one more to follow after that, and then they were out.

  On the bridge, Eryk was mute, his brain racing as he calculated course, speed, current, even the wind and then considered the fixed positions of the three mines anchored up ahead. His forehead was furrowed with strain, sweat gathering along his hairline. Some devil laid out this trap, he thought for just a moment. He glanced to the starboard and port at the band of mines curving off like a gill net in either direction. No, straight ahead was the way to go. In his mind, he could the see the path they needed to take. It was their only chance. He could avoid two of the mines, the first and last, but the middle one was the problem. Stefan would have to hold it off with his pole. He murmured instructions into the speaker tube.

  Kate pulled out a cigarette. As she lit it, she noticed her hands remained steady. She wasn’t sure that was a good sign. Any sane person should be howling in terror right at the moment. Instead, she drew in the smoke, smiled as she watched Stefan began to bounce up and down with anticipation. Like a big kid, she thought. And then she turned his back on him, unable to watch anymore. She leaned into Eryk, finding comfort in the weight of his body against hers. He was so absorbed in the problem at hand, he didn’t even notice her. She glanced up the sky, marveling in the clouds’ delicate shapes, the wonderful hints at color, the smell of the sea air in her nose, even the tobacco’s rich taste in her mouth. There could be worse moments to die, she thought. She wasn’t done with her story of the Eagle and her crew. That was her one regret. It was a great tale. If that mine went off, no one would ever get the chance to read it.

  As soon as they were past the first mine, Stefan could see what Eryk had in mind. It was like they were connected in some strange way. He could almost overhear his thoughts. The middle mine, the second one of the pair, was the problem. Once past that, they would be out of danger.

  Stefan was enjoying himself. It was insane. And part of him knew it was the cumulative effects of stress and lack of sleep. But he couldn’t help himself. Prowling the deck half-naked, armed with a long pole, had ignited some long-buried memory instilled in the genes of every human male on the planet by 100,000 years of living. His ship, his home, his family, was about to be attacked by a creature of fierce power. And he had a fucking wooden pole to fight it off.

  The Eagle nosed ahead, curved slowly around the first mine, closer than Eryk would have liked. He peered anxiously over his shoulder—one swell stronger than the rest was enough to push the Eagle into side—but the waves remained steady as a heartbeat. Stefan was ready as they came at the next mine; he speared it deftly with the pole, avoiding the detonators on the spikes, taking up the impact with his shoulders and then leaning into the mine’s bulky weight, every muscle on his torso quivering with strain, as he pushed it past the bow and then began to shuffle down the side, keeping the mine away from the Eagle’s unprotected flank.

  Eryk wasn’t watching. Couldn’t. He knew that one stumble, one slip of the pole, and the mine would swing into the Eagle and explode with catastrophic consequences.

  For Stefan, everything had slowed and then disappeared. Only the pole and the mine were left. He had an eon to consider the placement of each foot, the stress on the pole, and the angle of his body. He noticed every slight move of the pole’s tip on the mine, as they remained delicately balanced in a strange embrace, the mine’s single-minded purpose against Stefan’s will. He marched passed the conning tower, onto the aft deck, his bare feet beginning to slide ever so slightly.

  Kate drew in another lungful of cigarette smoke, then exhaled as Stefan appeared below her, balanced on the deck’s edge like a tightrope walker. It was hard to imagine that he could hold off that massive steel ball floating just next to the submarine all by himself, but he was. An ox, indeed, she thought, remembering the nickname he had once been give by his men. Even from her perch on the bridge, she could see the strain in his arms and back. He must be getting tired. Not much more. Ten more steps. Then five. Just a few meters.

  She watched Stefan gather himself, and then push with all his might. The mine swung away from Eagle’s iron side as she slipped past, and then began to come back as soon as Stefan released it, the suction of the submarine’s wake threatening to pull the mine into her stern like a tornado sucking up a house. At the last moment, it was pulled up short by its steel tether. And then they were free. Stefan flung the pole over the side in one last act of defiance, and then slumped to his knees, accompanied by slowly growing cheers from the crew, who began pouring out of the forward and rear hatch.

  They still weren’t out of danger. Eryk ignored the celebration, intent on the last mine, quietly ordering a minor course change. He watched the mine pass by on the starboard and then sagged visibly.

  “Nicely done, Commander,” Kate said, offering him a cigarette.

  “I don’t smoke,” he said, slipping the cigarette into the corner of his mouth, and then leaning forward as Kate offered him a light.

  “You do now,” she said.

  Eryk was right in the middle of a hoarse cough when the lookout interrupted the celebrations on the deck: “Ships at nine o’clock.”

  “Clear the deck,” Stefan shouted, struggling to his feet. The men began scrambling for the open hatches, their mob changing from jubilation to fear as quickly as if someone had flipped a light switch. Along the horizon, two shapes were quickly gaining definition. Stefan stared at them for a moment, as the dive klaxon began to sound below decks. Destroyers, by the look of them. German. Racing like greyhounds directly toward the Eagle. So much for sneaking into The Øresund. They’d been spotted.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  “Eagle. . .we’ve got her!” The radioman trotted up to the captain, handed him a slip of paper.

  Ritter glanced up from a book he had found in the ship’s library. It was a copy of Hamlet. In German. He had already decided it was a poor substitute for Shakespeare’s original in English. Not something Hitler and his sycophants would ever like to hear, he was sure, but their zeal for all things Teutonic sometim
es bordered on the ridiculous. He slipped off his perch on the far side of the bridge, crossed to the navigation table, set the book on the edge. “Where?” he said.

  The captain looked up from the message. “West of Bornholm. Looks like you were right.” He sounded disappointed. “She was heading this way. We got her.”

  Ritter glanced at the chart, tracing along with his index finger until he found the position on the map. He noted the sea depth in the area and frowned. More than enough room for the Eagle to dive and hide. “Is there a minefield anywhere near here?”

  “Yes. Since last year. According to this message, it appears that the Polish submarine was caught by it. Somehow those lucky bastards were able to make it through. When our ships were spotted, she dove. She won’t get away.”

  Ritter rubbed at the scab on his check. Itching already. That was a good sign. He restrained an impulse to pick at it.

  “Shall we join them?” The captain glanced up at the helm, ready to issue the order.

  Ritter stared out the bridge window at the gunmetal-gray sea glinting dully in the midday light and the dark band of Danish coastline beyond. They had been prowling the narrow stretch of the Sund, between the Danish port of Helsingør, and the Swedish counterpart across the channel, Helsingborg, back and forth like a relentless sentry, for the past two days. He was restless to move on, too. Do something. But it would be wrong. His father had always complained that he was too impatient. But no longer.

  Ritter sucked air in through his teeth. “We stay here,” he decided. “This is where they will come. They will have no choice.” He snagged his copy of Hamlet from the edge of the chart table as he strode across the room, turned slightly in the direction of the captain and touched his forehead in a salute, and then disappeared through the doorway.

  “As you wish,” the captain said tightly. This Ritter had better be right, he thought to himself, or Grossadmiral Raeder himself would hear of it.