The Passenger (35 page)

‘I think it's a Tribal,' said Lorenz.

‘Yes,' Graf agreed. ‘Automatic mountings and substantial anti-aircraft armaments. A real beauty.'

Lorenz climbed into the conning tower and sat at the attack periscope. After switching on the motor he raised the ‘stalk' and applied pressure to the pedals with the balls of his feet. He swung around to the left, and then to the right, until the burning corvette came into view. The huge column of flame had been replaced by a roughly equivalent volume of black smoke. Leaning off the saddle he called into the control room, ‘Ten degrees starboard.' Falk was already tapping the dials and buttons of the computer, performing his preparatory rituals.

The wind changed direction and the column of smoke leaned toward U-330. It collapsed onto the water like a demolished building.

‘Damn!' Lorenz growled.

‘What?' asked Falk.

‘I can't see anything. There's too much smoke. We'll have to wait for it to clear.' After several minutes the situation had not improved. A solid black cliff was traveling across the crests and troughs, and if the wind continued to assist its progress the periscope would soon be enveloped and blinded.

Graf called up: ‘Lehmann can hear propellers, getting louder.'

Lorenz depressed the right pedal and rotated the saddle a full 360 degrees. Smoke—empty horizon—smoke. There were no enemy vessels approaching from behind.

‘Getting louder,' Graf called again.

A grey V-shaped bow cut through the cliff face and suddenly the destroyer was plowing toward them at high speed. Lorenz was momentarily stunned. Surely the British lookouts hadn't spotted
the periscope hood through the smoke. That was impossible! Yet the destroyer's course was direct. Was U-330 leaking oil? Had a passing aircraft reported their location? If they didn't get out the way quickly they would be rammed and sliced open.

Lorenz snapped out of his confused state and shouted, ‘Destroyer! Hard a-port, take her down to thirty!'

The boat began its descent, and Lorenz and Falk dropped into the control room. Almost immediately there were splashes and detonations. As the boat leveled, Lorenz climbed through the forward hatchway and stood next to Lehmann. The hydrophone operator had his eyes closed and he was not turning his wheel. Aware that Lorenz was standing next to him he said, ‘They're following us.'

‘We must be leaking, chief,' said Lorenz. Graf whispered some orders and two seamen removed their boots and went off in opposite directions. Lorenz passed through the hatchway again. ‘Hard a-port, another ten meters. A Tribal has a top speed of thirty-five knots. Losing it isn't going to be easy.'

At first, the sound of the destroyer's propellers could be heard through the hull as a soft, rhythmic patter, but a swift crescendo soon amplified this distant, fluid rattle into a brazen declaration of formidable propulsive power. Each revolution suggested the cyclonic movement of vast quantities of water. Every man on board checked the flow of his breath. The destroyer's underwater detection system filled the air with transparent, gelid pulses. Lorenz watched Falk reach out to touch the ‘lucky' flower they had cut from the ball gown at the beginning of their patrol. It was no longer bright yellow, but a repellent brown color, soiled by smuts from the fire and repeated fondling with filthy fingers. This particular talisman hadn't brought them much luck, Lorenz reflected, and Falk's pathetic, naive gesture emphasized the terrible extremity of their predicament. Men were biting their knuckles, cowed, already reduced to quivering helplessness. A faint acridity in the nostrils betrayed private terror, fear so great
that it stripped a man of his dignity and returned him to the nursery. Splashes—then ticking. Time slowed and it seemed to Lorenz that he was standing next to a prodigiously resonant clock. He gripped the valve wheel above his head with both hands and readied himself for the inevitable.

The ensuing blasts were so loud, the experience of hearing felt strange and unfamiliar. He understood, intellectually, that he was listening to detonations, but the experience did not
feel
as if it were being mediated by sense organs. Sound was no longer an ordinary, physical phenomenon, but something endowed with supernatural potency. It was demonic and took control of his mind and body.

When the roaring finally stopped Lorenz felt hollowed out, empty, as if the inside of his skull had been scoured like a saucepan. The control room was in darkness and it wasn't until the ringing in his ears had lessened that Lorenz realized the motors were no longer humming. He could smell burning, flames appeared near the matting, and a series of bangs echoed through the compartments—bottles of compressed air splitting open. Water spurted across the control room and there were cries of ‘breach!' The emergency lights came on and Danzer smothered the flames that lapped around the engine telegraph with his jacket. Lorenz looked at the manometer.

Forty meters, forty-five meters, fifty meters
. . .

A metallic keening that none of the men had ever heard before arrested all movement. Graf tilted his head to one side and said, ‘I think . . .' He swallowed and could barely bring himself to continue. ‘I think one of the ribs has been fractured.'

There was no hope of keeping the boat stable without the electric motors working. A submerged U-boat had to move forward otherwise it would sink. Long before the electricians had started to undertake repairs the overhead and hull would be bulging inward.

Another two depth charges went off, and the lights flickered. Through the haze Lorenz could see anxious eyes looking at him,
expecting orders or a plan for their salvation expressed with epigrammatic concision. When Lorenz failed to say anything, Graf coughed and said, ‘Kaleun, we've got to surface.'

Ninety-five meters, one hundred meters
. . .

The boat was creaking and groaning.

‘Herr Kaleun?' Falk prompted. ‘What do you want us to do?'

If the boat continued sinking then all of the crew would be dead in a matter of minutes; however, to surface next to a speedy destroyer was practically suicidal. Lorenz considered these two grim alternatives, and supposed there was a slim chance, with respect to the latter, that some men might survive in the water and be taken prisoner. He took a deep breath and said, ‘Blow the tanks, chief! Distribute lifesaving gear.'

There was a great commotion as the compressed air began to hiss.

Reitlinger poked his head through the aft-bulkhead hatchway. ‘The bilges in the motor room are making water fast.'

Graf uttered a string of obscenities before addressing the hydroplane operators. ‘Forward up twenty, aft down five.'

One hundred and fifty meters
. . .

Lorenz shouted through the forward hatchway: ‘Lehmann? Ziegler?' The two men jumped out of their respective rooms. ‘Smash up the code machine and destroy all manuals and documents.' Turning to address the navigator, Lorenz added, ‘Müller! Rip up all plans, diaries, and charts.' Another detonation rocked the boat, and Lorenz wondered whether the implementation of standard security procedure would, in the final instance, prove to be entirely redundant. The manometer needle was still moving in the wrong direction and it had passed from the orange arc into the red.

Two hundred meters, two hundred and ten
. . .

They were heading for the cellar again.

Nerves were as taut as piano wire. Lorenz could sense his crew struggling to retain their sanity as dark waves of fear and panic
threatened to sweep away reason. He had rehearsed this ending many times in his nightmares. The loss of his authority, men scratching at their own faces, gibbering and weeping, tearing bloody clumps of hair from their heads—the boat transformed into a lunatic asylum as the lights dimmed and the iron ribs snapped: a community of fate become a fated community.

The manometer needle slowed down and stopped at two hundred and forty meters, but Lorenz experienced no relief. Perspiration trickled into his eyes and his heart felt swollen and heavy. The tortured metal of the boat was surprisingly vocal, discovering in its vibrating internal structures the means to produce a long, drawn-out lamentation. This was accompanied by the percussive cracking of woodwork under strain. Lorenz thought of finely balanced scales, trembling indecisively, such that even a sigh might make one side heavier than the other. Were they too heavy to ascend?

Graf growled at the manometer and raised his arms, pressing his palms against an invisible lintel. ‘Now!' he commanded. ‘Up, up, up!' The sheer extremity of his emotion endowed his will with magical properties, and bizarrely, the boat obeyed, beginning an uncontrolled, vertical ascent. Slow at first, but gathering momentum, U-330 took off like an unstable barrage balloon released from its tether. It twisted and jolted through more turbulence as two more depth charges exploded.

Men were piling into the control room, wearing their escape gear—combined breathing devices and life jackets. Lorenz shouted through the aft hatchway: ‘Pump the diesels.' The order was relayed back through the boat; each repetition taken up by a different voice and attenuated with distance. He wanted the engines to start without a second's delay, as a moving target would be more difficult to shell than a stationary one. ‘Breaking surface!' Graf's declaration silenced the hubbub. U-330 had risen like a cork, and its subsequent movements were so violent many of the crew were thrown to the deck. As the engines coughed into
life, Lorenz scrambled over the bodies and climbed up the ladder. When he reached the top, he opened the hatch and leaped out onto the bridge. Over the bulwark he could see the destroyer. It was only a short distance away: two hundred meters or less. Lorenz shouted a new course direction and watched as the destroyer's deck gun started to revolve. ‘Quick, get out! Before they start firing on us.' U-330 did not turn away from the destroyer as Lorenz had instructed. The rudders were jammed and the boat had begun to describe a tight circle. Men were already erupting through the hatch. They clambered down the conning tower, ran toward the bow and jumped into the sea. Zeigler emerged and addressed Lorenz. ‘I've sent a message to headquarters and they know we're in trouble.' Lorenz gripped the radio operator's arm. ‘Good man,' he said. ‘Good man.' When Lorenz let go, Ziegler scaled the bulwark and accomplished a graceful, athletic dive that carried him comfortably clear of the ballast tanks.

Where were the shells? Why wasn't U-330 getting blown out of the water? Lorenz gazed at the looming destroyer. It was so close the forward mountings could not be sufficiently depressed. The frustrated British gun crew were shaking their fists and hollering curses and insults. One of them, however, was hoisting a stripped Lewes automatic rifle over the bridge screen. Lorenz ducked as bullets strafed the side of the boat and the conning tower. Through the rear railings he saw men tumbling and lying prostrate on the deck—clouds of red mist hanging in the air. Lorenz peeped over the bulwark and saw that the destroyer was trying to achieve an optimal ramming position.

Pullman climbed out of the hatch and Lorenz noticed that the photographer was clutching a small bag made from a green rubberized material. ‘What have you got in there?' Lorenz asked.

‘Film rolls,' Pullman replied.

‘Don't be a fool!' Lorenz shouted. ‘Worry about saving yourself—not your photographs!'

Pullman declined Lorenz's advice with his ludicrous half-smile and slid down the conning- tower ladder. He sprinted across the deck through a hail of bullets, and while those around him were participating in a deadly ballet—throwing up their arms and spinning before collapsing in lifeless heaps—he continued determinedly and leaped into the water unharmed.

U-330 had now completed a full circle, and Lorenz saw members of his crew swimming to get out of the way. Some of the bobbing heads, propped up by the inflated collars of the life preservers, were surrounded by expanding, ruddy diffusions in the water. The boat's continuously changing orientation exposed Lorenz to gunfire, and bullets ricocheted off the internal curve of the bulwark. He jumped into the hatch, grabbed the ladder rails, and slid down into the control room.

It was the chief engineer's responsibility to open the seacocks and hatches, and set the scuttling charges. Lorenz could hear water gushing into the compartments, a loud noise, like a cascade pouring over several deep tiers. Torn sheets of paper were floating on a river that seemed to be flowing out of the petty officers' quarters.

‘What are you doing here?' asked Graf. ‘The boat will go down in ten minutes. You really should leave. I'm finished.'

‘Leave then,' said Lorenz. ‘I won't be long.'

‘But Kaleun,' Graf pleaded.

‘I want to make sure that all my personal documents have been destroyed.' Graf's eyes narrowed with suspicion. ‘Go!' Lorenz barked. ‘Keep your head down and choose your moment carefully. If you can, wait until the conning tower is between you and the destroyer before attempting to get to the deck—and jump as soon as you can.'

‘Thank you, Kaleun.'

‘Now hurry!'

‘Kaleun?'

‘What is it now?'

‘You're not wearing your escape gear.'

‘Is this really a good time to start impersonating my mother?'

The engineer waded to the bottom of the ladder, placed his foot on the first rung, but hesitated before beginning his climb. He looked at Lorenz, and his expression was curiously transparent. It was obvious that he had, albeit for a fraction of second, considered saying goodbye. In the end he had thought it best to remain silent.

Lorenz watched Graf's ascent until the engineer's dripping boots disappeared into the conning tower. A sustained discharge of bullets made Lorenz cringe. He strained to hear Graf's progress but the gushing water was far too loud. Lorenz looked around the control room, registering the pipes and devices: the array of dials above the big hydroplane wheels, the Christmas tree, the vertical air compressor, the master gyrocompass—all useless now, all destined to rust on the seabed. He imagined how it would all look in a year's time, and then in fifty years, and then a hundred years. Shoals of fish entering through the fore-bulkhead hatchway, everything transformed, barnacle-encrusted surfaces, gaping holes, fronds of seaweed swaying in the deep-sea currents . . . Lorenz splashed through the rising water and went to his nook, where he unlocked the metal box in which the Mauser was stored. He made sure that it was loaded and then continued, making his way forward between the empty bunks. The sound of bullets strafing the exterior had stopped, and he hoped Graf had managed to escape from the boat unharmed.