The Passenger (33 page)

‘They didn't tell us it was going to be an armada,' said Juhl. Lorenz counted the destroyers. There were three of them zigzagging ahead of the convoy. Juhl's voice shook with frustration. ‘The message from U-boat command said they were lightly defended.'

‘Yes,' Lorenz replied, ‘excellent intelligence.'

‘Perhaps we were given the wrong coordinates?'

‘Ah!' Lorenz extended the exclamation enough to communicate not only surprise but also apprehension. ‘To starboard, thirty-three degrees relative. If I'm not mistaken that's a fourth destroyer.'

‘What? Over there?' Juhl raised his binoculars and made a whistling sound through his teeth. ‘Yes, that
is
a fourth destroyer.' After a thoughtful pause he added, ‘And we're on our own?'

‘Indeed.'

‘No more messages from headquarters?'

‘No more messages.' Lorenz called down the hatch. ‘Half speed.'

U-330 was low in the water and approaching from the east. The rising sun would hide the conning tower in its glare. Lorenz considered the situation to be relatively safe and judged that he had sufficient time to establish positions and identify targets before diving. The sun duly appeared and was obligingly bright. He was keeping a judicious eye trained on the fourth destroyer when Juhl
said, ‘God, they're fast.' The other three warships were considerably closer and producing high bow waves.

‘Yes,' Lorenz answered, revising his plan and deciding to err on the side of caution. ‘Perhaps we'd better get out of their way.'

‘Shit!' The voice belonged to Voigt, and its tone was incredulous.

Lorenz wheeled around and saw a thick black cloud rising from the back of the boat. Below, men were coughing and shouting: more smoke started to rise out of the hatch. Lorenz drew back and watched a swirling cyclone of smuts twist high above his head.

‘They'll see us,' said Juhl, looking anxiously over the bulwark.

More smoke welled up from the hatch, almost liquid in its consistency. Lorenz watched it flowing through the rails and cascading onto the deck. It ran over the sides of the boat and dispersed over the water. The air became inky and opaque. Lorenz could hardly see Juhl, Voigt, and the other two lookouts, and within seconds his eyes were blind and stinging. The boat was still traveling toward the convoy and the shouts from below were beginning to explore new registers of desperation. Lorenz snatched the communications pipe, removed the stopper, and hollered, ‘Chief? Chief? What's happening?' There was no reply, the hull juddered and the engines fell silent. Lorenz waved his hand impotently from side to side, trying to create an opening in the obfuscation through which he might see the destroyers. ‘They'll fire at us soon as we're in range.' Only one course of action would prevent them from being utterly obliterated by heavy shelling. He leaned over the hatch and cried ‘Alarm!'

Voigt was just about to jump into the tower when Graf's head appeared at his feet like a ghoulish creature emerging from a cauldron. The engineer's face was coated with filth. ‘Kaleun, the boat's unfit to dive!'

‘Unfit to dive?'

‘Yes. There's a fire.'

‘Where?'

‘Somewhere aft—the engine room, I think. I was trying to get there when you called.'

‘We've got to dive!'

‘But we're on fire.'

‘Listen: there are four destroyers heading our way. We can't just sit here sending up smoke signals. We'll just have to put the fire out when we're submerged.'

‘But we need to keep the hatch open, Kaleun. The men will suffocate.'

‘Then distribute the emergency breathing apparatus!'

When Lorenz landed in the control room he could see very little. The lights were glimmering weakly, emitting a dull brownish glow. Men were holding handkerchiefs or hats over their mouths. Everyone was coughing or retching. Contorted faces, eyes streaming, came forward out of the darkness and vanished again. The atmosphere became even more impenetrable now that the bridge hatch was closed. Lorenz grabbed Sauer. ‘Where's the breathing apparatus?' For a moment Sauer appeared to have lost the ability to comprehend German. Lorenz shook him and said firmly, ‘Number One! Distribute the breathing apparatus. Do you understand me?' Sauer nodded and as he stumbled away the smoke closed behind him like two stage curtains. Lorenz's mouth tasted of oil and his lungs felt as if they had been filled with concrete. A fit of coughing seemed to dislodge an obstruction from his throat and he was finally able to shout ‘Flood!' He hoped that the crew had returned to their posts.

Graf's disembodied voice initiated the dive protocol. ‘Clear air-release vents.' Lorenz felt a wave of relief when the reports followed.

‘One.'

‘Two clear.'

‘Three—both sides.'

‘Four.'

‘Five clear.'

‘All vents clear.'

Lorenz couldn't see anything. He felt disoriented and then strangely isolated. The status reports and general commotion were growing fainter. His convulsive breathing swamped the other sounds, and the blackness became absolute.

A figure stepped out of the pitchy void; an apparition bathed in the flickering illumination of its own dim aurora. Its long open coat was garlanded with thick rubbery straps of sea weed and a squidlike creature had made a home in its exposed ribcage. A thin tentacle slithered out from beneath its sternum, which was encrusted with conical limpet shells. Its skull retained remnants of loose, swollen flesh around manically grinning teeth, but the orbital ridges and frontal bone were covered in barnacles. This massy, bulging extrusion suggested deformity or the projecting forehead of a Neanderthal. There were no eyes, only holes through which it was possible to see the interior of a blasted, incomplete cranium. Lorenz's mouth opened involuntarily, and he expected his giddy terror to become a scream; however, as in a nightmare during which all cries for help are stifled, he produced only a long, wheezy exhalation. The horror that he experienced was extraordinarily physical and resembled a sustained electric shock. It passed through his body and welded his feet to the deck. The present moment, usually so fluid and motile, became fixed and obdurate. He feared that he might become trapped in this dark limbo, doomed to keep Sutherland's rotting, skeletal remnant company for all eternity.

An instant later the noises of the submarine rushed into his ears, and it was Sauer who was standing in front of him, saying, ‘Kaleun, Kaleun—the breathing apparatus.'

‘Thank you,' said Lorenz.

The boat tilted, and Graf called out, ‘Bow planes down fifteen, stern up ten.'

‘Keep going,' said Lorenz. He couldn't see the manometer, so he had to estimate the boat's depth by listening to its creaks
and groans. ‘Hard a-port.' When they reached what he guessed was fifty or sixty meters, he added, ‘Level the boat, chief.'

‘Planes at zero,' said Graf.

Lorenz bit on the mouthpiece of the breathing apparatus. The vision of Sutherland had left him feeling stunned and vacant. He felt as if he had just received a hard blow to the head. The smoke seemed to be clearing and the lights were like yellow orbs suspended in the gloom. There was a sense of a crisis having passed, but this was very short-lived. Within a few minutes Thomas had called out—‘Propellers, getting louder'—and soon they could all hear the thrashing of the destroyer's approach.

After removing his mouthpiece Lorenz responded: ‘Ahead slow.'

Men were still spluttering, heaving, and retching. The more distant coughs were sharp and clear like the repetitive chipping of a stonemason's chisel. Percussive sounds such as these would carry. Lorenz hissed, ‘Shut up! Control yourselves.' Others repeated his command in hushed, anxious tones and the hacking was replaced by muffled grunts and whimpers. A desperate, childlike sob floated through one of the hatchways, but everyone was too focused on inner visions of detonations and surging water to be concerned about its source.

The thrashing was right above them and they tensed when the first icy pulse of the ship's underwater detection system chilled their blood and invited them to contemplate oblivion. It sounded like a wetted finger moving around the rim of a wine glass and pausing after each revolution. The crew awaited the inevitable: splashes, the ticking descent of depth charges, bowel-loosening thunder. But the inevitable never came. Instead, both the thrashing propellers and the Asdic pulses faded. The smoke had cleared sufficiently for Lorenz to see across the control room. He climbed through the forward bulkhead, knelt beside Thomas, and looked up at him quizzically. Thomas shrugged and whispered, ‘They've gone right over us. And they're not turning
around.' Stepping back into the control room Lorenz caught Graf's attention, ‘Carry on, Chief. Steady on course.'

‘What happened?' said Graf softly. ‘Why didn't they hammer us?'

‘They must have been following the smoke we left behind. Perhaps the wind blew it away and they're still chasing it.'

‘But the Asdic? They knew we were right beneath them!'

A depth charge exploded—then another—and another. The boat rolled a little; however, they were no longer in any danger. Charges continued to explode but the roaring diminished as they pulled away at two knots.

After forty-five minutes the air was hazy and foul-tasting but breathable. Every pipe and dial and valve wheel was covered in black soot. After consulting Thomas, Lorenz looked through the observation periscope and called out, ‘Prepare to surface.' They ventilated the boat for twenty minutes and then, because the convoy was still in view, submerged again for another hour, during which cleaning materials were distributed, and the crew set about making the boat habitable once more.

An investigation followed and Neumann, one of the mechanics, offered an explanation for what had caused the fire. ‘I'd left some oily rags on the ledge over where the exhaust pipe bends. I do it all the time. Well, we all do—it's not just me, Herr Kaleun.' A note of defiant indignation hardened his voice. Lorenz gestured for him to proceed. ‘I can remember the exhaust was really hot,' Neumann continued, ‘because we'd been going so fast for so long. In fact the bend in the exhaust pipe was glowing. Red hot, it was. I think the rags must have fallen onto the pipe, caught fire, and dropped into the bilges. There's a lot of oil swilling around in the diesel room.' He made a silent, wide-eyed appeal to Lorenz and Graf. ‘It can't be helped.'

‘When we opened the outside ventilation valve,' said Fischer, the chief mechanic, ‘and we flooded the bilges, the blaze went out immediately. In fact, the fire only lasted a few seconds but it produced a huge quantity of smoke.'

‘So why did the engines cut out?' asked Lorenz.

‘They didn't,' said Fischer. ‘It was chaos back there,' he jabbed his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the diesel room, ‘so I switched everything off. It was unsafe to leave the engines running when we couldn't see anything. Someone could have got trapped in the machinery—lost a limb—or worse, sir.'

‘And what Neumann just said,' Lorenz frowned. ‘Is that true? Your men always leave dirty rags on the ledge above the exhaust pipe?'

‘Not always,' said Fischer. ‘But it happens.'

‘Have
you
left rags there?'

‘Yes,' said Fischer. ‘It was bad luck, Kaleun. The rags fell at just the wrong moment, just when the pipe was hot enough to cause a fire.'

‘It's never happened before, Herr Kaleun,' said Neumann.

The men looked at each other and something passed between them, an uneasy acknowledgement of the fact that Fischer had employed the words ‘bad' and ‘luck.' The uniqueness of the event suggested agency, intervention, forces at work that might possibly create ‘bad luck.'

‘It's never happened before,' Graf repeated, largely to end the tense, protracted silence. ‘And it probably won't happen again, Kaleun.'

‘Even so,' said Lorenz, addressing the two mechanics. ‘You'd better stop leaving rags on that shelf in future. Just in case.' Fischer and Neumann nodded their heads in vigorous agreement.

‘Kaleun?' Schmidt asked. ‘With respect, are you going to recommend any disciplinary action?' The Master-at-Arms was holding a pencil over the page of an open notebook. His pained expression showed that it was his reluctant duty to raise such issues.

‘No,' said Lorenz, shaking his head. ‘I don't think that will be necessary.'

‘The Admiral might take a different view,' said Pullman.

Lorenz hadn't realized he was there. He turned slowly to face the photographer. ‘I beg your pardon?'

‘The rags
did
cause the fire. And Neumann
did
leave them there.'

‘I don't recall asking for your opinion on this matter, Pullman. Did I ask for your opinion?'

‘No, Herr Kaleun.'

‘Then would you kindly keep your mouth shut?'

‘I was only seeking to be of service, Kaleun. Others may see things differently.'

‘Pullman, I'm not interested in what you think.'

‘What I think is of no consequence, sir; however, I was merely pointing out that Admiral—'

Lorenz hit the hull with the side of his fist. ‘Enough!' Those gathered around him all flinched at once. ‘God in heaven, Pullman, you test my patience!'

The photographer bowed his head and apologized.

Lorenz looked at each man in turn before speaking. ‘It wasn't Neumann's fault. It wasn't anybody's fault.' Would Sutherland's spirit ever give up? Or would it carry on troublemaking, denied rest, until it finally succeeded in sinking U-330?

Neumann sighed and wiped the perspiration from his brow with his cuff. ‘Thank you, Herr Kaleun.'