An Honorable German (32 page)

Carls had covered the faces of the dead men with towels, but their bodies lay twisted at unnatural angles. The injured lad
sat rigid in pain against the bulkhead, holding his broken arm, the white bone sticking out. Heinz, the torpedo chief petty
officer, tended to the youngster since Bekker had to stay on the hydrophones. The medical kit lay open, Heinz rummaging through
it while the young sailor, desperate not to moan in front of Max, compressed his lips till they went white.

“Heinz will fix you up, lad. He doctored the pigs on his grandfather’s farm, didn’t you, Heinz?”

“I certainly done plenty of that and there ain’t a lot of difference between a pig and a man, Herr Kaleu. Only pigs is smarter.
They doesn’t go to war with each other.”

Max couldn’t help but smile and even the youngster seemed to calm down.

He turned to Carls. “Damage?”

“Close on everything, Herr Kaleu.”

Max looked around. Bunks had been torn from the bulkheads, lubricating oil had sprayed over part of the compartment, spattering
the letters that were strewn about. The winch that hoisted the torpedoes had been pulled loose from the overhead; tins of
food, most of them dented, were everywhere. “Clean it up,” Max ordered. Best to keep the men busy.

Once back in the control room, he asked Bekker if he’d picked up anything from the escorts on the hydrophones.

“Nein, Herr Kaleu. Nothing moving toward us.”

Strange. Very strange. Maybe the ships had hove to while they brought up more depth charges from their magazines—not an easy
job under any circumstance, Max knew. But an escort would never stop dead in the water to do that—she would present a perfect
target to a U-boat. “Herr Kaleu,” Lehmann called.

“Ja?”

“The fuel gauge on the starboard diesel tank, the saddle tank—it’s showing empty.”

Max shook his head very slowly from side to side, then broke into a smile. Maybe the British ships weren’t hove to. Maybe
they were gone. The chief had finally woken up and was sitting on the deck by the hydroplane controls, blood matted in his
thick beard, but he was smiling, too, when Max looked over at him. “You know what that means?” Max asked him.

The chief nodded. Half his face was swollen, his cheek already turning a deep purple. He said, “It means the bloody Tommies
think we’re already sunk.”

Max laughed out loud. The destroyer had torn open the starboard diesel tank, which left an oil slick on the surface when the
boat submerged. That was usually the sign that a U-boat had sunk and its oil tanks had ruptured. Seeing that, the Tommies
would have slapped one another on the back and steamed happily away. Looking around at the littered deck, at injured men waiting
for medical care, the scene illuminated by the pale emergency lights, Max couldn’t stop smiling. He turned his grin back to
the chief. “Exactly.”

The chief dabbed at an oozing gash on his forehead. “Well, bugger you, Mr. Tommy.”

Max surfaced three hours later to an empty sea and the faint smell of petroleum. Maybe the Brits had picked his men up. He
hoped so, prayed so. Better a POW camp than drowning in the North Atlantic. The lookouts were wrong to have jumped, but the
gun crew had been right—the deck gun was gone, sheared off by the bow of the destroyer. All the wooden deckboards that covered
the steel upper deck were splintered or torn away, the starboard diesel tank gouged open, metal plating ripped and bent. Max
crossed himself. Had they been just a bit higher in the water, they would have been sunk. Thank you, Holy Mary.

Yet now they faced a new, perhaps more arduous task, one both difficult and not without great danger: their return to Lorient,
a voyage of a thousand kilometers. He had lost eight men from a crew of forty-six but was lucky not to have lost them all.
He was lucky to be alive himself. Maybe all the good-luck charms the men brought on every patrol had worked: Lehmann’s diminutive
porcelain gnome, the chief’s green sweater, the five-mark coin Wittelbach had taken from a fountain in Paris, and the aluminum
canteen token from
Graf Spee
that Max was never without.

He bent to the voicepipe. “Engage starboard diesel. Blow through.” Below, the e-motor chief cut the electric motors, then
the Dieselobermaschinist gently started his engine and blew the exhaust through the ballast tanks to expel the remaining sea
water. This saved compressed air and helped preserve the tanks from corrosion.

“Control,” Max said into the voicepipe.

“Control room, aye.”

“Have radio make following message to U-Boat Command: ‘Rammed by British destroyer. Eight casualties. Port diesel out. Extensive
damage. Two ships sunk. Estimate tonnage 15,000 grt. Returning to base. U-Max.’”

Let the staff figure it out. Ferret had the watch. “Keep on the lookout for aeroplanes,” Max told him. “Can you do that? Are
these men alert?”

“Jawohl, Herr Kaleu.”

Max looked at the men, their faces fish-belly white, sporting whatever kind of beards they could grow. Shaving was forbidden
on the boat because freshwater was always in short supply. The eyes of the men were sunken and red. Their condition hardly
inspired confidence, but none of the crewmen below looked any better. Besides, Ferret was a good officer and a captain had
to trust his officers. He said, “As soon as the batteries are fifty percent recharged I want you to submerge for six hours
so the men can rest and take some food. Once you submerge, stay on this heading with the starboard e-motor slow ahead. Understood?”

Ferret nodded and Max patted him on the shoulder, instead of cursing him for not saluting. “The bridge is yours,” he said.

Max dropped below, repeated his orders to Lehmann, then withdrew to his cabin, closed the green curtain, and stripped off
his clothes. He soaked a towel in the lemon-scented cologne issued to U-boats and wiped the dirt and sweat from his body.
Also the dried urine from his legs. That had been shameful but he wasn’t going to berate himself about it now. He lay on his
bunk after cleaning himself and shook uncontrollably. The spraying water, the screaming men, wanting to scream yourself as
your mouth filled with the freezing black sea—they had been no more than a few centimeters away from all of it, and the depth
charges would still be raining down if not for the happenstance of the ruptured fuel tank. Eventually, he grew weak from trembling
and slept.

A few minutes before dusk they surfaced and Max returned to the bridge. He swept the area with his binoculars and saw nothing
at first. Then his eye caught a small white flash in the dying sun—maybe one kilometer off the starboard beam, bobbing on
the swell. “Right standard rudder to course one five zero,” he ordered.

Lehmann had the watch. Max pointed out the object. “Can you tell what it is?”

Lehmann peered through his heavy binoculars for a long moment. “I believe it is a lifeboat, Herr Kaleu.”

Max raised his own binoculars again, but still could hardly make it out. His eyesight was always poor at dusk, while Lehmann
had excellent vision at any time. “Is there anyone in it?”

“I believe so, Herr Kaleu.”

“Control room.”

“Control room, aye.”

“Tell Carls to come up with a magazine for the machine gun.”

“Jawohl, Herr Kaleu.”

The U-boat had a twenty-millimeter anti-aircraft gun mounted on a small platform aft of the bridge—the Wintergarten, the men
called it. Max motioned toward the platform when Carls came up and the big man attached the magazine to the gun and swiveled
it to point at the lifeboat as they drew closer.

“Stay alert,” Max cautioned the bridge watch. “Look to your sectors.” Lookouts had a tendency to turn away from their quadrants
when something more interesting was happening out of their field of vision. That was an easy way to miss an approaching enemy
ship or aeroplane. “Stop engine,” Max ordered, and the throb of the diesel died away to a quiet idle, momentum carrying them
to within a few meters of the lifeboat.

There were nine men inside—no, ten. One was lying in the bilge, probably wounded. Maybe dead. It was a big lifeboat, too,
built for forty or fifty people, the name of its ship sanded off as the Royal Navy had ordered at the start of the war. One
of the men stood. He wore no cap, but gold rings looped around the sleeves of his blue jacket. An officer. Max cupped his
hands around his mouth. “What ship?” he shouted.

No reply. The officer looked around at the men huddled at his feet against the cold. He was young, no older than Lehmann.

“What ship?” Max said again.

“
D-D-Duchess of Berwick
.”

“Bound for?”

“L-Liverpool.”

The officer shook. Carls had the machine gun pointed right at him. No doubt the Brits thought they were about to be shot by
the bloodthirsty Huns. Turning to Carls, Max ordered him to point the gun aft of the lifeboat and stay ready, but it was just
a precaution.

“When were you sunk?”

“Early last evening, sir. Right as we were sitting down to tea.”

Tea. At sea during wartime and they were sitting down to tea. But Max had sunk this ship and they weren’t so arrogant now.
Many times during his training at U-boat school, he’d wondered what he would feel after he sank a ship, and now he could say
he was so exhausted he really didn’t feel anything. Every motion had been rehearsed and practiced so often that it felt automatic
when the time came, and the distance of warfare at sea kept him from having to think too much about the men he might be killing.
Besides, he had seen what the British did to
Meteor
, and what they were doing now to Berlin, and he didn’t mind the idea of killing Englishmen. But these men in the lifeboat
looked bedraggled, cold, defeated. Their boat was almost the same size as the one in which Max had floated around the Indian
Ocean. “Do you need any provisions?” he asked.

The young officer looked at him in confusion, trying to decide whether Max was making a joke. Finally he said, “Water and
food, sir. We need both. Provisions locker was almost empty when we launched and some of the water tanks had been stove in.”
Max knew all about that problem—he supposed it was no surprise that British sailors stole lifeboat provisions, too.

“Stand by then.”

Max called down the hatchway. “Tell the cook to come to the conning tower.”

“Herr Kaleu,” Lehmann said, “I must protest. It is expressly forbidden to give aid to shipwrecked men—expressly forbidden
in Admiral Dönitz’s standing orders.”

Lehmann was right. Max hesitated. What would happen to him if he did this? Lehmann would surely report him. But to the navy
or the Gestapo?

“Herr Kaleu,” the cook called from below. “Herr Kaleu, you wished to see me?”

“A moment, Cook.”

Could he really afford another altercation with the Gestapo? Max looked at the ten British sailors shivering in the evening
cold of the North Atlantic, cold that would grow worse before dawn. Much worse. Lehmann stared at him. Beneath his feet, the
U-boat rocked in the swell, wavelets lapping rhythmically against the hull. Max had spent many harsh nights shivering in the
bilge of a lifeboat, cold, hungry, throat burning with thirst.

“Cook.”

“Herr Kaleu?”

“I need ten of the big five-liter cans filled with freshwater. And what do you have extra tins of down there?”

“Ham, sir. And tinned beans. Plenty of tinned beans.”

“Good. Get me all of that and be quick about it.”

“Jawohl, Herr Kaleu.”

Cook was a good man. Before the war he had run a stall selling coffee and buns in the Munich rail station—a busy place in
these last years, since the Nazi Party had its headquarters in Munich. “I saw Hitler quite often,” he had once told Max, and
Max had said something polite about how thrilling that must have been. “No, not really, Herr Kaleu,” the cook replied. A true
believer.

Now Lehmann said, “I must ask permission to note my protest in the logbook, Herr Kaleu.”

“Of course that is your right, Leutnant, but after you go off watch.” They both knew that Admiral Dönitz reviewed the logbook
of every U-boat after its war patrol, so he would see that Lehmann had not agreed with what Max was doing.

Cook collected the provisions in ten minutes and sent them up to the deck. A number of sailors threw in packs of cigarettes
and matches. A good smoke could take a man’s mind off his troubles. Max maneuvered the U-boat as close as he could and Carls
leaned over to pass the provisions to the Englishmen.

“Do you have a sail in there?” he asked the young British officer. It would be the standard drill. Most of the big lifeboats
had sails already attached to masts with the assemblage secured in the bottom of the boat.

“Yes, sir. I believe we do, sir.”

“And can you sail?”

“Well, I don’t know, sir. I’m an engineering officer myself, Captain.”

“You step the mast and raise the sail up, then put the tiller over and—” Max stopped himself. Here he was giving sailing lessons
to a jug-eared British engineering officer in the middle of the war. “I’m sure some of your men can help you. You have a sextant
and some charts as well, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And a compass?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Can you navigate?”

“I—I believe so, sir.”

“Very well. Then you want to steer zero twenty-two degrees, north-northeast; that will take you to England. You’ll be drinking
beer in a pub in less than a fortnight.” He had to try to cheer them up, give them some hope to boost morale. Without good
morale they would never make it—not in an open boat, in the North Atlantic, a thousand kilometers from England. “I would broadcast
your position on the six-hundred-meter band, but then your escorts would be on me in a lightning flash.”

“I understand, sir.”

“Good luck, then.”

The young officer hesitated, then saluted Max. “And good luck to you, too, sir.”

Max returned the salute, then set course for Lorient.