The Death of an Irish Sea Wolf (26 page)

When we got back to the harbor an hour or so later, we discovered that Rehm had taken control of the area around the new Walter boat. Fire teams of SS storm troopers armed with Schmeisser machine guns were positioned at both sides of the pier, with another clutch at the gate to keep out the crowd of submariners who had gathered to tour the boat
.

Seeing that, my anger surged. I had just enough alcohol in me and just enough sorrow over our defeat and all those who had died needlessly to make me fearless. Without thinking, my hand leapt over the shoulders of the submariners in front of me and seized the throat of the SS officer who had been facing them down. I slapped my Walther against his temple and forced him to his knees
.

“Shoot me!” I roared at the SS guards. “And I shoot him! They shoot you!” My cohorts had now also drawn their sidearms. “You want to die?” I asked the officer, who was gagging and trying desperately to pry my hand
from his throat. But he was soft, a desk warrior who had no strength, and I began dragging him toward the Walter boat, where Rehm now appeared on the conning tower
.

“What’s this all about, Klimt?” he asked in a mild voice
.

“It’s about your Gestapo! These men only want to inspect the new boat, which is their right. Since when has the SS declared a German Navy vessel off limits to German sailors? And what’s this here?” Sweeping my hand that held the gagging officer, I sent him tumbling down a gangplank toward another group of SS who were trying to hoist a torpedo in the yoke of a crane
.

“This boat is my command,” I went on. “Up until the moment that I’m issued a direct order by a superior
naval
officer to stand down. Nothing occurs aboard her, nobody comes on board without my expressed permission.” Now I had the gun pointing directly at Rehm and the four men who had appeared behind him. “Is that understood?”

Rehm smiled. “Then you’ve decided to accept my offer? Something else has just come in. I think you should see it.” He raised a sheet of paper
.

I stepped up onto the boat, then helped the smaller Geis aboard. He said to me, “Maybe it’s time we covered our own asses. It’s a long way to Germany.” He meant either in a U-boat running on the surface with a white flag flying from the mast, if there was fuel enough even for that. Or by road and ferry, with more than a few angry partisans along the way
.

Up in the conning tower, Rehm handed me another transmission from Berlin to the flotilla commander, ordering him to keep all boats in port and all personnel in place until “an Allied naval presence” arrived to take charge of “all men and materiel.” Since they were just offshore—I knew from my own recent experience there—they would be here within a day
.

“Do you want to be around for that, Klimt? I most certainly don’t.”

I straightened up and surveyed the men standing be
hind Rehm; one of them looked vaguely familiar. While dressed similarly and nautically—blue caps, pea jackets, dark trousers—they were not in uniform, and looked more like merchant seamen (and British at that) than military officers
.

I certainly did not wish to witness our defeat, much less give myself up if I did not have to. As a dual citizen who had voluntarily fought for the other side, I would without a doubt be singled out for some special attention. My concern was not so much for me, since I had made the choice and now would have to live with the outcome, but for my mother’s relatives in Harwich, a city that had been bombed during the Blitz
.

“What about Geis?”

“What about him?”

“He gets the same as you offered me.”

Rehm shook his head. “Half.”

“The same, or you get somebody else. There’s not a man out there who’s so much as made landfall in South America.” I waved a hand at the other submariners, who had still not dispersed
.

“Three hundred thousand U.S. dollars or its equivalent.”

“No, the same.”

“Then, we’ll find somebody else.”

“Good. You men down there!” I bellowed at the boaters below me on the dock. “Stop what you’re doing and come up here. Take these bastards off this boat.”

“Wait,” said one of the men behind Rehm. “Commodore Dorfmann should not be expected to sail without his chief engineer. And Lieutenant Geis should be compensated for his extraordinary service and talents.”

Rehm said nothing. Obviously the man—the same one whom I thought I recognized—was in command
.

“What will my other crewmen be paid?”

Said Rehm, “One hundred thousand U.S. dollars or the equivalent in the currency of the country of our destination.”

“Which is?”

The other man pointed to the ladder. “We’ll decide
that when and
if
we can get out of here, and already we’ve wasted too much time. Now that Commodore Dorfmann is aboard, gentlemen, we should leave him to the loading of the torpedoes. It will go more quickly.”

“Do you think that’s wise, sir?” Rehm asked
.

“Wisdom is a commodity we can no longer afford, Helmut. It takes too long to acquire.”

The other men laughed, and they left the conning tower, retiring into a forward area of the boat
.

I waved to the submariners, bidding them to come aboard; one by one I planned to take the crew we would need aside and make them the offer. I would show them the order of surrender, tell them what Berlin had said about their wanting us to die for them
.

But Geis was not at work five minutes before he decided that there was something strange and wrong about the ten Luts that Rehm had flown in. Unlike the old acoustic torpedoes that could be fired at an angle of no more than ninety degrees, the new torpedoes could set their own course, zigging and lagging toward a target. Also as many as six Luts could be fired in one salvo from as deep as 160 feet to swarm up and annihilate an enemy ship
.

But the torpedoes that Rehm had brought seemed too heavy, inordinately so, and balanced wrong with all the weight forward of the midline. Fourteen years of submarine-engineering experience told Geis that once those eels were shot out of the tubes by compressed air, they would promptly sink to the bottom of the ocean
.

“I don’t care what they’ve used for a propulsion system,” he confided to me, as we surveyed where the strap of the winch had to be placed to balance the thing. “Not even a rocket could keep that nose up.” Even after he added a four-thousand-pound addition to the counterweight, the crane only just managed to raise it
.

A thought occurred to me. I could not imagine Rehm and the four others with him leaving Europe empty-handed, not with the opportunities they must have had for plunder. It was, surely, the difference between a
soldier and sailor at war. The sailor had only the company of his mates and his boat with the pitiless sea beneath him and sometimes months of patient hunting before quarry was even sighted. A soldier, on the other hand, had land under him, and women and wine. Preferred soldiers
—political
soldiers—had the best of that, on principle
.

“Let’s get them aboard,” I told Geis quietly in the cabin of the crane, “then we’ll see what they are.”

In the early years of the war, a crew of dockworkers called “torpedo boys” was responsible for the loading of eels aboard submarines. By 1945 those crews had either been killed or had become submariners themselves. Therefore, we armed our own boats, and now, as I added men to the crew, they gathered round to help Geis
.

The process was difficult, time-consuming, and dangerous under the best of circumstances. A conventional three-thousand-pound torpedo had to be greased, fitted with a protective harness, and then hoisted by crane over the submarine. Slowly it was then lowered onto a loading trough and slid through the torpedo hatch into the sub
.

There the harness was removed and by means of a system of pulleys, the torpedo was maneuvered into the bow or stern torpedo stowage bays. The torpedo mechanic then armed it with a warhead and recorded its number in his munitions log
.

Looped with other bands of steel and chain, it was again hoisted aloft by six men and dragged into its tube or stowage cradle. Fourteen acoustic torpedoes—a total of some forty-two thousand pounds—was the usual complement aboard a Type VII sub. This boat had ten twenty-one-inch-diameter eels that were fourteen feet long; there were six in the bow and four more broadside forward, two to port, two to starboard. It was 3:00 in the morning by the time we got them all aboard, and I sent all the submariners but Geis to retrieve their belongings from their berths or billets and to report on deck no later than sunup
.

Geis and I immediately repaired forward, second tier, where the torpedo bay was situated, and we were surprised to find an SS storm trooper positioned there. “Who are you?” he demanded
.

My first impulse was to disarm and perhaps even kill him; I had told Rehm the conditions under which I would join them, and here, only hours later, one had been violated. But we had other literal fish to fry. And I realized he was just another young boy dressed in a man’s costume, like my own aboard my last several commands
.

Pushing the barrel of his Schmeisser aside, I said, “Why, son, I’m the captain of this scow. This is my engineer, and we’ve come to arm the torpedoes. Surely you wouldn’t want us to sail out of here unarmed. Are you coming with us?”

His eyes said, I hope not. “I was ordered not to let anybody in here.”

“I just told you”—I raised my arm, forcing him back so Geis could duck in—“we’re not anybody, I command this boat. Standartenführer Rehm wants this to happen.” I had to perform my special contortion to get myself through the hatch of the bulkhead, and when I straightened up as much as I was able, I saw the young man’s eyes widen; he had not expected a submariner to be so large. “You sit yourself down and watch. You might learn something. What’s your name?”

“Hans.” Who was not a day over fifteen. In his hands the Schmeisser looked like an abomination
.

“My name is Klimt, that’s Connie. Has anybody told you the war is over? We surrendered today.” Obviously nobody had; his eyes were wide as saucers. We advanced on the eels
.

At the first sling, Geis removed the firing pin/plunger cap and bent his head to peer into the detonator cavity. He turned to me and smiled. With the blade of his long-shaft screwdriver he tapped the back of the cavity. “Just like I thought, it’s solid. These aren’t torpedoes, they’re—” He shook his head; he didn’t know what they were. “Shine the light in there.” I complied
.

The black paint was easily scratched off, exposing a bright, soft metal below. Geis smiled more completely and kept working the screwdriver until it had produced a small pile of shavings. Scooping them out, he handed them to me, saying, “Why don’t you see if there’s any ersatz coffee in the mess, Commodore. I can take it from here.” And to the boy, “I like the war being over—now I can give that big bag of wind orders.”

But the boy scarcely smiled. It was past his bedtime, and his eyes were closing. By the time I returned with three cups, our storm trooper was sprawled against the bulkhead, fast asleep, and Geis turned to me triumphantly. “It’s gold, isn’t it?”

I nodded
.

“Well, take a look at this.” Glancing down at the boy to make sure he was asleep, Geis led me over to one of the torpedoes and quickly and expertly removed the propeller and tail section housing. But instead of finding a propeller shaft and the aft end of some propulsion device, I saw a long, brown tube that was rumpled and soft
.

“It’s like a big waterproof bag. I think it extends the length of the eel. Feel it.”

There was something in it or—rather—many things, some bigger than others
.

“Let me show you.” Stepping around the thing, Geis squeezed open a slit that he had made on the hull side of the “bag” and shone the beam of the torch in. “All that glitters is not gold,” he said. “It’s gold and silver and diamonds and rubies and anything else that they could get their hands on.”

It was obvious it was just that—pillage, plunder, booty; most of it was spectacular jewelry
.

“All ten are the same, I’ve checked. They must have mocked up a Lut torpedo, leaving it an inch shy of the twenty-one-inch diameter. Then they made a mold and cast these things in gold, leaving the interior ten inches of the twenty-inch-diameter hollow. These inserts came next, stuffed with diamonds and jewelry, the whole thing then being encased in the shell of a Lut with a cast
iron warhead, cowlings, propeller, and all. Real enough to fool anybody on first sight
.

“The one thing they hadn’t counted on is the weight. But with the war over”—Geis shrugged—“there’s no need for them, right? And all they have to do when we get to wherever we’re going is to pop them out of the tubes with compressed air into some shallows near a beach, then put themselves off in a raft, and scuttle the boat
.

With us in it, I thought
.

As had Geis. “With all this”—his hand swept the torpedo bay—“they can’t let us live. How did they get this stuff? Who’d they steal it from? And who
are
they—the others with Rehm? There must be a reason they’re bailing out of Europe.”

I shook my head. I did not know. I’d been at sea for most of nine years and knew only what I’d been told in communiqués. I don’t think I had read even so much as a single newspaper in the last six months
.

“And even if the boat is found with us shot or poisoned or suffocated, so what? It’ll be passed off as just another wartime accident or mutiny. Something that happened to some Krauts off the coast of South America.”