Submerged

by Thomas F Monteleone

  A horror thriller in the tradition of Ken Follett and H.P. Lovecraft.

  The submarine U-5001 was a Nazi secret weapon that could have changed the course of World War II. Kapitaenleutnant Erich Heinz Bruckner commanded the U-boat on its only mission—a voyage that transported him and his crew to a place of wonder…and horror.

  Dexter McCauley is a present-day ex-Navy diver who finds the only evidence of the U-5001’s existence, which drives him to discover its original, terrifying mission.

  Submerged follows both men in a narrative that spans generations, echoing the tales of Lovecraft at their most strange. As the paths of these men’s lives converge, a third element surfaces to influence their decisions—decisions that will shape the future of civilization in ways never imagined.

  Submerged

  Thomas F. Monteleone

  Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;

  And in the lowest depth a lower deep

  Still threat’ning to devour me opens wide,

  To which the hell I suffer seems a Heav’n.

  John Milton, Paradise Lost

  I could not help feeling that they were evil things—mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss.

  H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Kapitaenleutnant Erich Heinz Bruckner

  U-5001, Somewhere at sea

  Late April, 1945

  His boat was going to die.

  And all his men? Yes, they were going to die as well.

  He sat in his quarters trying to argue with his terrible conclusions. The death of his crew as well as his boat. The two interconnected facts had been threading through Captain Bruckner’s thoughts for weeks. He railed against such fatalism because it challenged his natural tendency to be an optimist.

  His colleagues had always branded him an arrogant, prideful bastard, but they respected him because of his record of successes. Victory came more easily to those who believe they cannot be beaten, and Erich Heinz Bruckner had always been a huge believer in himself and his abilities.

  But this war and its maniac-leaders had proved to be larger than anything Captain Bruckner had ever encountered in his twenty-five years—so young to be a U-boat captain, but Admiral Doenitz was quite simply running out of men, especially qualified officers. Sworn to defend the Fatherland, Erich had not wavered when the European campaign called him. He’d been raised in a military family—father and older brother had both been German Navy men. His father had distinguished himself at Jutland; and his brother, Gunther, had gone down with his crew in the U-201 east of Newfoundland almost two years ago to the day.

  The Bruckners had always been “regular” Navy officers, which meant their first allegiance had been to their Armed Service rather than to any political party or faction. Military families in Germany had been part of a kind of centuries-old aristocracy, but the National Socialists had changed the nature of that tradition. With the creation of the schutzstaffel, the SS, the face of the German military had been twisted into something more grotesque, less honorable.

  But the U-boat Service had managed to escape the direct corruption of any purely political constructs. Erich believed this with all his being. He had to believe it. The young sailors who had served in the submarine war had been the bravest and the most unselfish of any German warriors caught in the web of madness they called the Second World War.

  If Erich had not been privy to personal dispatches from the office of Admiral Doenitz himself, he would not believe the hideous statistics which described the obituary of the Submarine Service. At this late hour of the war, more than 700 U-boats had been sunk; of almost 39,000 seamen in the Service, more than 32,000 had been killed. Captains were getting younger and younger—like himself—absurdly so. He purposely didn’t cipher the exact percentage of the dead; it would be such a gut-wrenchingly high number.

  Better not to think about it…

  But he could not ignore the almost certain odds of not returning from a voyage. The allies had become so proficient at detecting the movements of the U-boats, it was absolutely impossible to not undergo depth charge or air attacks while at sea. Erich and some of his more astute colleagues were convinced the Brits or the Yanks had somehow decrypted the Enigma messages which relayed all critical data on the positions and missions of the remaining underwater flotillas. And although to say this publicly, or in any official communiqué, would be tantamount to heresy, or signing a decree to have one’s own throat cut, Captain Bruckner firmly believed it had happened.

  Somehow, the allies had done it. They knew far too much.

  That is why Erich had insisted on radio silence and no Enigma messaging during this initial cruise of the U-5001. If Germany’s newest, and possibly last, best, secret weapon would survive the odds, and fulfill its outlandish mission, Erich would do nothing foolish to jeopardize a chance for success.

  He had fallen in love with this boat from the first moment he’d seen her on the drawing boards in Koenigsberg. The submarine was a prototype vessel which incorporated the latest technologies and the most visionary functions imaginable. Almost twice the length and tonnage of the workhorse Type VII-C, the U-5001 carried the designation of Type XXX-A. Although it bristled with 8 tubes fore and aft, and carried a standard compliment of 40 torpedoes, its armament was secondary to its real mission—as an underwater aircraft carrier.

  The boat looked more like a humpbacked whale than the standard barracuda-silhouette. The reason—a bulbous, second-deck air-tight hangar, located aft of the conning tower and housing an ingeniously compact plane. Built by Messerschmitt, with an official designation of ME-5X, the two-man, pontoon bomber was known under its code name as the Little New Yorker because of its size and intended target.

  Erich had heard of the original “New Yorker” bomber, which—in the spring of 1945—still remained in the design-stage. Where it would most likely die. He knew the possibility of the Reich actually launching a squadron of super-bombers capable of making round-trip, transatlantic bombing sorties to America’s East Coast cities was remote indeed. The concept of an undersea armada of boats like the U-5001 was a far more likely scenario for striking deathblows to the cities of the United States.

  And this was to be the first.

  Inside the U-5001’s hangar-deck, in the bomb bay of the experimental plane, lay a new kind of weapon. He had been told the exact nature of the bomber’s payload and mission, but had been ordered not to share this with his crew—none of them. When the U-5001 secretly launched, rumors throughout High Command circulated wildly. Having been treated to some of the Fuhrer’s more ludicrous pipe-dreams in the past, Erich wondered if he might be the victim of another madman’s scheme.

  As far as his crew of 52 was concerned, Erich’s present mission was to ascertain the capabilities and performance limits of the boat. With the help of an outer hull sheathing of black rubber designed to make her less visible to Asdic and other types of sonar scans, Erich should be able to slip out of the waters north of the North Sea, angling past the Shetland and Faero Islands. If his luck and skill held, he could drop below Iceland and the convoy lanes to enter the nominally safer waters of the open Atlantic.

  Then on to the Eastern seaboard of the United States.

  But the recent history of such great numbers of U-boat sinkings—many before they could escape their homewaters west of Hamburg—had stirred a dark current of pessimism in him. Despite the technological wonders of his new boat, the allies could still stumble upon him and his crew, raining down enough hell to send them to the bottom. The sense of dread, an almost palpable expec
tation of failure, like the stink of sweat, simply would not leave him.

  And so, Erich Bruckner had been reduced to thinking of his life and that of his crew in terms of “ifs.”

  If they escaped detection; if they withstood any attacks; if they reached the open seas… If the boat had no fatal flaws…if the equipment was as good as the Admirals claimed, then they would perform a series of test-dives, and execute a complex program of maneuvers and battle tactics with the intention of pushing the new boat to her design limits. With a submerged speed of 25 knots, she was fast, but her increased size might present problems of evasiveness and reaction to aggression. One of the points of this maiden voyage would be to challenge the boat’s handling limits. Under less stressful conditions, Erich would have looked forward to the challenge of proving the U-5001 seaworthy with his usual élan.

  If…

  The biggest word in the mission. If all the above was successful, he was to bring the boat to a rendezvous point with the cruiser, the Sturm, where they would take on a pilot and bombardier. But that was Phase Two of the mission. And he could not concern himself with—

  There was a knock at the door to his quarters, jarring him from his thoughts.

  “Yes? Come in.”

  The door opened slowly to reveal a young man with sandy-red hair, blue eyes and a lantern jaw. He was tall and broad-shouldered, almost completely filling the threshold. His rank and name were Oberleutnant Manfred Fassbaden, and he served as Erich’s Executive Officer.

  “Excuse me, Captain, but you wanted to know when we cleared the pens.”

  “Yes, thank you, Manny. Let’s go topside.”

  Fassbaden nodded and turned to lead the way down a narrow corridor, made to look even more confining because of his imposing size. The interior of a submarine is by nature claustrophobic and it is no accident that most U-boat seaman are not big men. Fassbaden was an obvious exception.

  As they walked toward the center of the boat, Erich noted how fresh and clean everything still smelled. From the new paint to the lubricating oils to the recently-showered crew. He smiled to himself. All that would soon change with the endless confinement and the only new air coming through the “snort.” It was hard to describe what it was like to spend months at a time in a world defined by a narrow tube where everything was eternally damp and dim. The longer U-boatmen were at sea, the more pervasive their use of cheap cologne to mask all the foul odors.

  As they worked their way to the control room, Erich took note of how every available space had been used for supplies and foodstores. Despite the U-5001’s larger size, it was actually no more comfortable than its smaller sisters because there was never enough extra storage room. It was a long-accepted part of a U-boat’s routine, and even the greenest recruits never questioned or complained about it. Besides, as stocks were consumed, more space would be freed up.

  His crew snapped to attention as he entered the heart of the boat, and Erich wanted it that way. Even though everyone would be seeing so much of one another, he never saw that as a reason to lighten formal military protocols. Some captains believed that in a submarine, everyone became everyone’s brother in a short amount of time, and snappy salutes were out of place.

  Erich believed in respect for the traditions of his service.

  After shrugging into a parka, he climbed the ladder to the open nest atop the conning tower and Fassbaden followed. When Erich emerged in the open air, he was immediately stricken by the clarity of the night. The air was crisp and cold, the stars piercing the dome of dark sky like the points of lances. The Warrant Officer, Gunther Ostermann, was positioned at the van of the tower, piloting the boat by speaking into a non-electric intercom tube linked to the control room. He saluted, nodded to his Captain and returned to his duty. There was another sailor standing next to him with binoculars masking his face. Pausing to salute his captain, he returned to the watch—ever vigilant for a smokestack on the horizon or a hunter-killer from the skies.

  Looking back, Erich could see the dim lights of marker buoys of Trondheim’s harbor and its concrete-hooded sub-pens within. The departure of the U-5001 had been effected at night with none of the old fanfare and ceremony. It had been decided by the High Command the less notice paid to this mission, the better, so the hulking underwater beast of a boat slinked out of its yard like an unwanted pest.

  “Beautiful night,” said Fassbaden.

  “Yes,” said Erich. “I think we should take a mental picture, store it away for the times ahead, when we might not see the sky for days at a time.”

  Neither man spoke for a minute or two, then his Exec exhaled, letting it become a nervous clearing of the throat. “Captain, I know my question may sound unprofessional, but I was wondering—how do you see our chances of success?”

  Erich looked at Fassbaden. They’d been friends since their earliest days at the Academy in Flensburg, through their first assignments in Kiel at the Wik Navy Yards. Over the past three years, though, they’d served on different boats, and beaten the odds by surviving the deaths of all of them. When Erich was given the helm of the U-5001, and told to hand-pick his officers, Manfred Fassbaden was the first name he penciled onto his list. Manfred had been on the U-387 when it returned from a mission in the Baltic Sea in late November.

  Because of his selection to Captain Bruckner’s crew, Fassbaden did not go out with U-387 when she had her fatal rendezvous with the destroyer, H.M.S. Bamborough Castle. Manfred had tried to make it sound like Erich had saved his life, but Bruckner would not hear of it. Wars were rampant with stories such as theirs—so many as to become meaningless.

  Fassbaden was staring at him blankly, and Erich suddenly realized he had not responded to his question. Lost in thought, he’d simply gone away for a moment too long.

  “Sorry, Manny,” he said. “I was thinking about something…but to answer you—which part of the mission do you mean? The shakedown phase? Or the one this boat’s been designed for?”

  “You mean ‘Phase Two’?”

  “Yes,” said Erich.

  “Well, since I know nothing of the second phase, I guess I meant the first part. But I will say both.”

  Erich shrugged. “Oh, I do not know. If we are smart and a little lucky, I like our odds. We are being told to keep our noses very clean, do not forget. We are to initiate no action with the enemy—even if he hands us a convoy or a flagship on a golden dish.”

  “Getting sunk would be bad enough, but to allow the prototype to be captured would be unthinkable,” said Fassbaden.

  “And impossible.”

  “We scuttle,” said Fassbaden.

  “Of course.”

  “Comforting thought.”

  “The crew knows nothing of that, of course,” said Erich.

  “Of course.”

  There was brief silence as both of them looked up at the fantastic vault of the night sky. Then Erich spoke: “You know, I cannot help thinking how futile this is…”

  Fassbaden sent a careful glance at the other men topside with them, as if ensuring they were not eavesdropping on his conversation. Then he spoke in a guarded voice. “Yes, I have had similar thoughts. But I keep them to myself.”

  Erich chuckled as he glanced toward the watch and the pilot. “Do not worry too much about them. If I thought there was any chance of either of them turning on us, they would have never been selected for this cruise.”

  Fassbaden nodded as he was reminded of that simple truth.

  Erich knew the Exec understood—such treachery was unheard of among the men of a U-boat. Every man depended on every other man to stay alive. Nothing could get in the way of that—not military protocol, not the mandates of the SS, certainly not the twisted philosophies of a strutting martinet.

  “Open sea dead ahead, Captain,” said the Warrant Officer.

  “Steady as she goes. Maintain current course,” said Erich. “K
eep a careful eye, now. We are a big target.”

  “Jawol, Captain,” said the seaman of the watch.

  Erich tuned back to his Exec: “We stay on the surface as long as possible. When we go down, it may be for a long time.”

  Manfred shook his head, wracked his shoulders with a chill. “I do not like the sound of that,” he said.

  Chapter Two

  Dexter McCauley

  Chesapeake Bay, May 8, The Present

  “Hey Dex, you down there?” The headset of his Divelink crackled with Don Jordan’s voice.

  “Well, I’m sure as hell not still up there with you…” said Dex McCauley as he inched his way down the safeline.

  “Hey, c’mon, man, I’m just checking the radio,” said Don.

  Dex smiled behind his full-face mask. He liked Don, the Captain and owner of the Sea Dog, which had been the base vessel of the dive club since they started their wreck-diving adventures several years ago. They called themselves “The Deep Six” because that’s how many of them were in the group—and nobody cared if it was a cliché or not (and it certainly was that). They’d been through a lot, and they were a tight bunch of guys. Six of ’em.

  Although not an official member of the “Six,” Don was a real nice guy who wouldn’t be caught dead diving himself. He believed he should have fun on the water, never under it. He’d been running a charter boat business out of Annapolis for almost ten years, and still loved it.

  “You hear me?” said Don.

  “Affirmative…I just can’t help being my terribly sarcastic self.” Dex said into his mask-mic.

  “What’s it like down there?”

  “Not too cold. We’ll see what it’s like at 60 feet or so…” Dex was currently hanging around 30 feet as he waved his torchlight upward toward the surface, looking for his dive-mate. “Mike, you in yet?”

  “Just hit the water, Chief. I’m working my way down the line,” said Mike Bielski, his voice edged by the clipped accent of a true New Jersey native.