White Shark

Part One

1945

1

The water in the estuary had been still
for hours, as still as a sheet of black glass, for there was no wind to stir
it.

Then suddenly, as if violated by a great
beast rising from the depths, the water bulged, heaved up, threatening to
explode.

At first, the man watching from the
hillside dismissed the sight as yet another illusion caused by his fatigue and
the flickering light from the cloud-shrouded moon.

But as he stared, the bulge grew and grew
and finally burst, pierced by a monstrous head, barely visible, black on black,
distinguishable from the water around it only by the gleaming droplets shed
from its sleek skin.

More of the leviathan broke through — a
pointed snout, a smooth cylindrical body — and then silently it settled back
and floated motionless on the silky surface, waiting, waiting for the man.

From the darkness a light flashed three
times:
 
short, long, long; dot, dash,
dash — the international Morse signal for
W
.
 
The man replied by lighting three matches in
the same sequence.
 
Then he picked up his
satchel and started down the hill.

He stank, he itched,
he
chafed.
 
The clothing he had taken days
ago from a roadside corpse — burying his own tailored uniform and handmade
boots in a muddy shell crater — was filthy, ill fitting and vermin-infested.

At least he was no longer hungry:
 
earlier in the evening he had ambushed a
refugee couple, crushed their skulls with a brick and gorged himself on tins of
the vile processed meat they had begged from the invading Americans.

He had found it interesting, killing the
two people.
 
He had ordered many deaths,
and caused countless more, but he had never done the actual killing.
 
It had been surprisingly easy.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

He had been traveling — fleeing — for
days.
 
Five?
 
Seven?
 
He had no idea, for stolen moments of sleep
in sodden haystacks had blended seamlessly with hours of slogging along
shattered roads, in company with the wretched refuse of weak-willed nations.

Exhaustion had become his companion and
his plague.
 
Dozens of times he had
collapsed in ditches or flopped in patches of tall grass and lain, panting,
till he felt himself revive.
 
There was
no mystery to his fatigue:
 
he was fifty
years old, and fat, and the only exercise he had in the past ten years was
bending his elbow to sip from a glass.

Still, it was infuriating, a
betrayal.
 
He shouldn't
have
to be in good shape; he wasn't
supposed
to be running.
 
He wasn't an athlete or a
warrior,
he was a genius who had accomplished something unprecedented in the history of
mankind.
 
His destiny had always been to
lead, to teach, to inspire, not to run like a frightened rat.

Once or twice he had nearly been seduced
by exhaustion into succumbing, surrendering, but he had resisted, for he was
determined to fulfill his destiny.
 
He
had a mission, assigned to him on direct orders from the Fuehrer the day before
he had shot himself, and he would complete that mission, whatever it cost,
however long it took.

For though he was not a
man of politics or world vision, though he was a scientist, he knew that his
mission had significance far beyond science.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

Now exhaustion, fear and hunger had all
vanished, and as he made his way carefully down the steep hillside, Ernst
Kruger smiled to himself.
 
His years of
work would bear fruit; his faith had been rewarded.

He had never really doubted that they
would come, not once in the endless days of flight
nor
in the endless hours of waiting.
 
He had
known they would not fail him.
 
They
might not be clever like the Jews, but Germans were dependable.
 
They did what they were told.

2

A small rubber boat was waiting when
Kruger reached the pebble beach.
 
One man
sat at the oars, another stood on shore.
 
Both were dressed entirely in black — shoes, trousers, sweaters, woolen
caps — and their hands and faces had been blackened with charcoal.
 
Neither spoke.

The man on shore extended a hand, offering
to relieve Kruger of his satchel.
 
Kruger
refused.
 
Securing the satchel to his
chest, he stepped aboard the boat and, steadying himself with a hand on the
oarsman's shoulder, made his way forward to the bow.

There was a sound of rubber scraping
against pebbles, then only the soft lap of oars pulling against calm water.

Two more men stood on the deck of the
U-boat, and when the rubber boat glided up to its side, they helped Kruger
aboard, took him to the forward hatch and held it open for him as he climbed
down a ladder into the belly of the boat.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

Kruger stood behind a ladder in the
control room and listened to a blizzard of curt orders and immediate
responses.
 
The air inside the submarine
was a fog.
 
Every lightbulb had a halo of
mist around
it,
every metal surface was wet to the
touch.
 
And the air was not only humid, it
stank.
 
He parsed the stench, and
recognized salt, sweat, diesel oil, potatoes and something sickly sweet, like
cologne.

Kruger felt as if her were a prisoner in
an infernal swamp.

He heard a muted sound of electric motors,
and there was a faint sensation of movement, forward and down.

An officer wearing a white-covered cap
stepped away from the periscope, gestured to Kruger and disappeared into a
passageway.
 
Kruger bent his head to pass
through an open hatch, and followed.

They squeezed into a tiny cubicle — a
bunk, a chair and a folding desk — and the commander introduced himself.
 
Kapitänleutnant Hoffmann was young, no more
than thirty, bearded, with the gaunt pallor of U-boat veterans.
 
Around his neck he wore a Knight's Cross, and
when it snagged in the collar of his shirt, he flicked it aside.

Kruger liked the insouciance of the
gesture.
 
It meant that Hoffmann had had
his
Ritterkreuz
for some time, was
probably entitled to wear oak leaves with it but didn't bother.
 
He was good at his job, but that was already
obvious from the simple fact that he had survived.
 
Nearly 90 percent of all the U-boats launched
during the war had been lost; of thirty-nine thousand men who had sailed in
them, thirty-three thousand had been killed or captured.
 
Kruger remembered hearing of the Fuehrer's
rage as he had read those figures.

Kruger gave Hoffmann the news:
 
of chaos in the country, of the retreat to
the bunker, of the Fuehrer's death.

"Who is the new leader of the Reich?
"
Hoffmann asked.

"Donitz," said Kruger.
 
"But in fact, Bormann."
 
He paused, debating whether to tell Hoffmann
the truth:
 
there
was
no more Reich, not in
Germany
.
 
If the Reich was to survive, the seeds of its
survival were here, in this submarine.
 
He decided that Hoffmann didn't need to know the truth.
 
"Your crew?" he said.

"Fifty men, including you and me, all
volunteers, all party members, all single."

"How much do they know?"

"Nothing," Hoffmann said,
"except that they're not likely to see home again."

"And the trip will take how
long?"

"Normally, thirty to forty days, but
these days aren't normal.
 
We can't get out
the shortest way.
 
The
Bay
of Biscay
is a death trap, crawling with Allied ships.
 
We'll have to go up around
Scotland
, get into the
Atlantic
and head south.
 
I can make eighteen
knots on the surface, but I don't know how much we'll be able to travel on the
surface.
 
I'll have to maintain economy
speed, about twelve knots, so as to keep our range at about eighty-seven
hundred miles.
 
If we're harassed, we'll
spend more time submerged.
 
We only make
seven knots submerged, and our E motors give out after sixty-four miles and
need seven hours of surface running to recharge.
 
So the best I can give you is a guess:
 
about fifty days."

Kruger felt sweat bead on his forehead and
under his arms.
 
Fifty days!
 
He'd been in this iron tomb for less than an
hour, and already he felt as if a mailed fist were crushing his lungs.

"You'll get used to it," Hoffman
said.
 
"And when we get south,
you'll be able to spend time on deck.
 
If
we get south, that is.
 
We're at a disadvantage.
 
If we have to fight, we'll be like a
one-armed man.
 
We have no forward
torpedoes."

"Why not?"

"We took them out, to make room for
your... cargo.
 
It was too big to go down
the hatch, so we removed the deck plates.
 
Then we found it wouldn't fit between the torpedoes, so they had to
go."

Kruger stood up.
 
"I want to see it," he said.

They moved forward, past space after tiny
space — the radio room, officers' quarters, the galley.
 
When they reached the bow of the ship, Hoffmann
swung open the hatch leading to the forward torpedo room, and Kruger stepped
through.

It was there, secured in an enormous
bronze box, and for a moment Kruger simply stood and looked, remembering the
years of work, the countless failures, the derision, the first tiny successes
and, at last, his triumph:
 
a weapon
unlike anything ever created.

He saw that the bronze had begun to
tarnish, and he stepped forward and checked swiftly for any signs of
damage.
 
He saw none.

He put a hand on the side of the box.
 
What he felt was beyond pride.
 
Here was the most revolutionary weapon not
only of the Third Reich but of science itself.
 
Very few men in history could claim what he could:
 
Ernst Kruger had changed the world.