“The sea is running faster, Sir,” his other officer said to him. “We can’t hold the boat here much longer.”
Randall was too numb to speak. He looked down at the black rubber raft bobbing up and down in the rough water next to the submarine, at the dark shoreline, at the canvas bag the Kapitan was holding out to him, and finally at Bruckner’s smiling face. As Michael reached for the bag, the steel map compass fell out of his sleeve and clattered on the deck. He looked down, terrified, but the captain merely smiled. “You appear to be a resourceful fellow, don’t you, Randall? But tonight, I suspect I shall need my map compass more than you will.” He bent down and picked it up, rubbing his finger across the sharp points as he looked at the young American. “Yes, I believe you will make it. I believe you will make it just fine, but the hour is late and you must go now. Please. And so must we.”
As Bruckner turned and motioned toward the ladder, for some reason Randall could never explain, he reached out and touched the Kapitan’s shoulder. He turned and looked back, and Randall found himself staring straight into the German officer’s eyes. He’d been so intent on finding a way to escape, so convinced the Germans were going to kill him, that it never occurred to him he had found a decent and honorable man who would actually set him free. Their eyes were no more than a foot or two apart that cold, windswept night, but it was a face Mike Randall would never forget. “What is your name?” he asked in a hoarse whisper. “At least tell me that much.”
“I am Bruckner, Kapitanleutnant Eric Bruckner.”
“Thank you” was all Randall could think of in return for everything this man was doing for him. “I… I owe you.” More words would not come.
“You owe me nothing, Sergeant. Now, please, go.” The German smiled as he pointed to the raft, obviously embarrassed. “The sea is rough tonight, but the headland will shelter you from the worst of it. We must hurry, please.”
Unseen hands guided Randall down the ladder, across the rolling deck, and into a small, black-rubber raft bobbing alongside the submarine. He sat in the bottom as they pushed it away. In that instant he found himself alone, floating on the cold, dark sea, and free for the first time in six long, pain-filled months. It was too much. He looked up at the bridge, at the man in the white hat, and he felt the long-forgotten sensation of tears running down his cheeks.
“Kapitan, are you really going to let him go like this?” Karl dared ask as he watched the rubber raft floating away.
“What would you have done?”
“Well…”
“No, Karl," Bruckner answered with a soft smile. “You wouldn’t. If we kill that man to hide our own secrets, we would be no better than Koch or that bastard Kruger.”
“But what if he talks about us, about the boat, about all that gold?”
Bruckner smiled. “It will be a long, hard peace, Karl, and I won’t have that man’s blood on my conscience.”
Reluctantly, the younger officer nodded in agreement.
“Besides, after everything he’s been through — alone, cold, and scared like that — he will do exactly what I told him to do. He’ll run, he’ll hide, and he’ll keep his mouth shut, especially to anyone with a uniform or a badge, because who would ever believe a story like that? Would you?”
As the U-boat continued to turn and pick up speed, making its way back to the open sea, Bruckner looked back over his shoulder and saw the rubber raft disappearing in the dark swells behind them. “Whatever, it is done,” he said. “Now let’s get the hell out of here. Shallow water makes an old submariner like me very nervous.”
CHAPTER NINE
Mike Randall sat upright in the bottom of the rubber raft. Over the roar of the wind and the waves, he heard the throaty rumble of the submarine’s big diesel engines as it began to arc away from him. There was only a quarter moon, but even in its thin light Michael could clearly see the white numerals “582” painted on the side of the conning tower. Soon waves broke over the U-boat’s bow and it began to submerge. One by one, the deck hands disappeared through the hatch, until the only one left on the bridge was the tall man in the white hat. As the Kapitan turned and looked back at the small rubber raft, Michael swore he saw him raise his arm and wave farewell. He rose to his knees and waved back with both arms, but he couldn’t tell if Bruckner saw him before he too disappeared down the hatch. In seconds, the U-boat’s nose slipped beneath the surface and waves broke against the base of the conning tower. But as it picked up speed, the submarine left a bright, trailing wake behind it, like a gently curving white “V” in the black water. Even in the pale moonlight, it was like a neon arrow pointing directly at the U-boat’s stern.
That was when Michael first heard the sound. It began as a faint whine, much higher in pitch than the bass rumble of the U-boat’s big diesels; but it was there, and it was coming in fast and straight at him. He cocked his head, straining to hear and praying he was wrong; but if Mike Randall knew anything, he knew the sound of an airplane engine. No, he suddenly realized, there were two of them — a pair of turbo-charged Merlins — and when they dive straight at you with their throttles wide-open, they make a terrifying sound a man hears in his gut, not in his ears.
Michael looked up and saw the outline of a twin-engine light bomber silhouetted against the dark gray sky as it dove down on him. In that split second, an image was seared into his brain of flames shooting around its engine cowlings and an intense young face lit by the glow of the bomber’s instrument panel. From the red, white, and blue circles on the fuselage, it was a British bomber, one of their long-range anti-submarine hunter-killers, like the ones he’d seen flying from the air base they shared in Italy. It roared right over him and the powerful downdraft from its engines slammed him to the bottom of the raft. He lay there, wanting to reach up and pluck it out of the sky, but he couldn’t. And he couldn’t stop the awful tragedy now unfolding in front of him.
The U-boat continued to submerge, unaware of its impending doom. Its foredeck was completely under water now. Waves broke halfway up the side of the conning tower, and the aft deck was awash as the bomber came in directly over its stern. Michael watched in horror as two black objects separated from the bottom of the bomber’s wings. They hung in the air for a long, cruel second before they began their slow, downward arcs toward the submarine. The range was point blank and he had no doubt of the outcome.
“No!” Michael screamed in agony, as he watched the first bomb punch through the steel plates at the base of the conning tower where it met the rear deck and exploded inside the boat’s hull. His voice died in his throat as a muffled explosion ripped the dark night at the very spot in the control room where he had been standing only minutes before. In his mind’s eye, Randall pictured the bomb exploding and ripping the small compartment apart, instantly killing everyone inside.
The second bomb struck further aft on the rear deck, dead center on the long rack of fuel oil drums, sending them flying like tenpins before it punched through the thick steel and exploded. The force drove the stern down and lifted the submarine’s bow out of the water like a breaching whale. It rose and then crashed back down with a huge splash. The blast had cracked the hull and ignited the diesel fuel spewing from the tumbling oil drums, turning the water around the U-boat into a blazing orange and black inferno. It settled down into the flames like a large, wounded animal, but water and burning oil were already pouring in through the two gaping holes in the hull. It went down fast, stern first as the sleek hull slid backward, faster and faster. As it did, the bow rose higher until the boat was nearly vertical. The bow hung high above the water for an impossibly long moment, fighting the inevitable; it slid backward and completely disappeared in the roiling orange flames and thick oily smoke. When it was gone, large pockets of air broke the surface from the ruptured hull, as if they were the U-boat’s last gasps. Then, it was gone forever.
The British bomber made a quick turn and came around for a second pass, but there was no need. Her victory had been swift and com
plete. Victory? More like an assassination, Randall thought. It flashed overhead again, and then slowly banked and headed out to sea, the drone of its engines fading as it vanished into the Baltic night to find another target. Fortunately, the pilot’s eyes had been entirely fixed on the U-boat; he never saw the small, black raft bobbing up and down closer to shore. Michael tried to stand in the small rubber raft and look into the roiling flames and black smoke for any sign of life, but it was hopeless. There were no survivors. With that brutal realization, Michael dropped to his knees and collapsed in the bottom of the raft.
Kapitanleutnant Eric Bruckner was the first decent German Mike Randall had ever met. Now, Bruckner and his entire crew were dead because they tried to do the honorable thing and give him his freedom. It was all his fault. First, the crew of the B-17, then Eddie Hodge, and now, Bruckner and his U-boat, all because he stowed away and presented a good man with an impossible choice. Bruckner could have had Randall shot or tossed overboard that very first night but he didn’t do that. Instead, he did the decent thing; and by doing that, fate took his life and forty others. Slowly the dead weight of that fact crashed down on Mike Randall and began squeezing the life out of him. Like an old boxer who had taken one too many hard shots to the head, he went numb. He slumped to the bottom of the raft and lay there as his mind went blank and stayed that way for a long, long time.
It was Jan Lundquist, the neighbor’s boy, who saw him first. Fortunately, the sixteen-year-old deckhand had good eyesight or they would have missed the raft entirely, because it was barely visible in the large, gray swells. The Brunnhilde had left port long before dawn. Daylight was more rumor than fact at that time of year, but there were fish to catch nonetheless. Einar Person was the Captain of the small Swedish fishing trawler. If he hoped to return to port with even a half-decent catch, they had to be well out to sea and halfway to the fishing grounds long before first light. The Brunnhilde was an old converted whaler built before the last war. Short and stout with a steel hull and solid oak deck, she was built to handle anything the winter could throw at a ship. Unfortunately, this was one of those winters. A fierce gale had been lashing the southeast coast of Sweden and it had been four days since any of the town’s small fishing fleet dared put out from the small harbor of Trelleborg. But rough seas or not, Person knew the cod and the skate wouldn’t wait. There were simply too many bills to be paid and too much easy money to be made to keep a boat anchored in the harbor for long.
Like Switzerland, the economy of neutral Sweden had been booming ever since the shooting war down south began six years before. The German, Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, and Russian fishing fleets, which the Swedes normally competed with, had been destroyed. Their boats were now on the bottom or rotting in port, leaving the Swedes with a monopoly on the entire catch in the western and central Baltic. Almost any old scow that could lay a net would put out to sea on the good days but it was cold, dangerous work. There were thousands of warm, dry, better-paying industrial jobs in the steel industry, metal fabricating, and armaments industries around Stockholm, Göteborg, and even nearby Malmö. Now, the only way a fishing boat could fill out its crew was to call on grandfathers, young boys, and even wives and daughters to lend a hand.
But when you’re an old salt descended from Viking raiders like Einar Person, fishing is in the blood. He was at the wheel, fighting the eight-foot swells as they ran south and east, heading to an area where the cod had been running thick the week before. Jan hoisted a big net onto the portside boom so it would be ready when Person told him to drop it in the water. As Jan told it later, he was slowly untangling a particularly bad snarl in one of the lines when he glanced out to sea and thought he saw something. He cocked his head and stared harder. There! He knew his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him. Something small and black was riding the crest of a steep, choppy wave to his right. Jan lost it again, so he dropped the rope and climbed a half-dozen rungs up the mast for a better look, then a half-dozen more.
“Captain Person!” He waved and shouted to the wheelhouse.
“Jan! What on earth are you doing up there, boy? Your mama will brain me with a pot if you fall. Now get down from there.”
“But, Captain, I see something. Look! Off to port. It’s a life raft!”
PART TWO
TRELLEBORG
SWEDEN
JUNE 1948
CHAPTER TEN
Trelleborg is a small fishing port on the far southeast coast of Sweden. It’s where Einar Person lived and where the small fleet of fishing boats he built was based. From Stockholm, you got there by heading straight south past Norrkoping, Kalmar, Ahus, Ystad, and Malmö. The harbor was small, with a concrete quay and three piers that jutted out into the water and the same number of cargo cranes standing tall against the bright-blue summer sky. The main business here was fishing and behind the quay sat two rows of fish processing plants and warehouses. Person’s was one of perhaps a dozen.
Early summer in Sweden was always a delight after a long, cold winter and 1948 was more lovely than most. The wildflowers and sugar beet fields were a vivid yellow, red, and green under the bright sun. In the dark corners of Mike Randall’s mind, however, it would always be February 1945, a terrifying time of ice and snow, a fog-shrouded coast, crashing waves, bone-chilling water, brooding evergreen forests, and an endless palette of gray upon darker gray upon black. He remembered very little of the first desperate year that followed. He was still trapped in a head full of bad memories that kept repeating themselves over and over again, of Königsberg, shell holes, rubble, bombed-out buildings, Eddie Hodge, the truck, Stolz’s old Czech revolver, black-shirted SS storm troopers, and Kapitan Eric Bruckner and his U-boat going down in a sea of orange and black flames. People say memories fade, but they’re wrong. The worst ones stay as fresh and sharp as a razor blade.
In the first weeks after they hauled him aboard the trawler, no one was sure if he would live or die. They put him in a spare bedroom in Einar Person’s house in Trelleborg, where he was constantly tended by the gentle hands of Person’s wife, Emma. They summoned doctors from Stockholm who poked, prodded, and examined him. They said the fellow was suffering from a deep depression from a brain that had been overloaded with more shock and pain than one person can process. Until his mind finally came to grips with his past and his new reality, it would continue to turn inward, held prisoner by too many painful memories.
Still pale and thin, in April he forced himself out of bed and began walking around the house. After that, he took long walks outside, where the townspeople would see him around the harbor, walking back and forth along the quay, down the beach, and up along the coastal road, with hollow eyes and a vacant stare. In August, he moved out of the house and took up residence in a small, second-floor storeroom in Person’s warehouse. He slept on a burlap mat on the floor. He rarely spoke that first year or the second, and then only to Emma and Einar Person. The people of the small town knew pain and suffering when they saw it, and they gave this quiet stranger the room he needed to heal. No one asked him to do anything, certainly not Einar Person or any of his crew. By autumn, he was getting his physical strength back, and he began to put weight back on his emaciated body. One afternoon in late autumn he appeared at Person’s warehouse and helped the men load a truck. As the days passed, he returned and began straightening fishing nets, carrying sacks, shoveling salt and ice, sorting and packing fish, and cleaning the trawler’s holds. In early spring, Einar Person smiled when Michael joined the crew of a trawler as it headed out to sea. It was obvious the fellow knew little about boats, but he learned fast. Soon, he was putting in a full day, but he still spoke very little and he never discussed what had happened to him, not to Person or to any of the crew.
By the end of that first year, he put back half of the weight he had lost. By the end of the second, he put back the rest. The muscles and strength came naturally, as he worked in the warehouse or on one of the boats, hauling and lifting. Tanned and chiseled after
two years, he developed strong forearms and powerful, callused hands. While he soon worked on each of Einar’s boats, his sentimental favorite would always be the Brunnhilde. A solid, steel-hulled whaler, she had been converted to an in-shore fishing trawler in the mid-1930s. She was eighty feet long and almost twenty-five feet wide, with a high prow and wide beam. One look at her scarred decks and the battered walls of her holds and it was obvious she had seen more than her share of hard use. But she held a lot of fish, and it would take one hell of a blow to capsize that old washtub.
That early summer morning, he stepped out of the warehouse’s front door and took a deep breath as he looked out to sea. The flowers were in full bloom, and the morning air was full of the pungent aroma of the town’s small fish processing plants. As the old salts say, the fish don’t smell when the price of haddock is up. As he looked along the bright quay, his mind suddenly flashed back again to a heavy, gray sky; to dirty snow and cracked sheets of ice piled up against other piers; to shell holes, smashed buildings, and hob-nailed boots. That war was long ago and far away now, and memories are never rational. One kept surfacing, particularly at night, when he was on that fragile edge of sleep. It even had a face and a name. It was Eddie Hodge, and it kept looking at him, reminding him he’d made a solemn promise.
He promised Eddie he’d go see his father and kid sister, Leslie, talk to them, and try to explain everything. But how? How could anyone possibly comprehend what happened back there; much less explain it to someone who hadn’t been there? The mere thought of trying made Michael physically ill, but he’d promised Eddie he would go. For the first two years, he knew he wasn’t ready. He was still mending, and as fragile as fine crystal. Dredging it all up would only rip open those old wounds, but it was a solemn promise. If he didn’t go, he knew he’d never finish healing. So, painfully and reluctantly, he wrote them. He spent months thinking and drafting each word before he put it on paper; but he did, and he sent it. Three weeks later, he got Earl Hodge’s reply. Of course, Earl knew who Michael was. He insisted he come, and now Michael was really trapped.
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