While he kept his focus on the dive and the platform, Michael also kept a wary eye on Balck. From the way the man swam and handled himself in the water, it was obvious he might be a novice diver, but he was very athletic. He moved effortlessly through the water, not fighting it like the rest of them had on their first few times down.
As they neared the platform, Michael began to make out the dim outline of a large black object on the ocean floor directly beneath it, every bit as dim and unrecognizable as it had been on the television screen. Still, being there and seeing it with his own eyes added a scale and perspective that the small TV screen could never provide. It was big. The circle of light was maybe twenty to thirty feet wide, and the object began out there in the darkness to his left, passed through the circle of light beneath the platform, and disappeared into the darkness to the right. Swimming down through his own shadow, Michael reached the surface of the object and saw it was surprisingly smooth. He touched it with his gloved hand and watched a puff of silt rise in the water around him. He knew the others up in the wheelhouse were watching his every move on the monitor. Anxious to learn more, he pulled his knife from its sheath. Tapping its handle on the surface, he heard a dull, hollow “Thunk!” Whatever this thing was, it was definitely man-made. But made by whom and for what? Michael turned and swam off to the right, his flashlight beam playing along the humped-back surface as it disappeared into the darkness. There was an end to it out there somewhere, and knowing that made his heart beat even faster.
After swimming another twenty feet, he saw the dim outline of a vertical shape rising up ahead of them in the darkness. It was tall and thin, standing at an awkward angle. The conning tower? He tried to contain his excitement, realizing there was something about it that just didn’t look quite right. The top looked too thin, too stubby, and too jagged, as if it had been sheared off; but by what? The two bombs? His heart raced as he realized he could be looking at his own tomb if the Kapitan had not set him free that night. Michael closed his eyes. No matter how hard he tried to fend them off, those horrible memories crowded in on him again: the U-boat’s wake, a rubber raft on a choppy sea, roaring engines, two shattering explosions, and those choking orange-black flames. Could this really be the U-582? Then the truth hit him in the gut. No, this was not a submarine. It was far too small for that. It was an airplane; and the vertical section wasn’t a conning tower, but the airplane’s broken wing standing upright in the water.
Michael swam closer, probed with his flashlight beam, and found dim, red, white, and blue concentric rings on the wing, the shattered cockpit windows, and the broken Plexiglas of a nose bubble. It was a British bomber that must have had been shot down and come to rest here on the bottom, like his old B-17 that had been shot down all those years ago. The right wing probably snapped off when it hit the water. Half of the left wing was gone, and only the last twenty feet remained, standing up like a tombstone in some long-neglected cemetery.
The bomber was a big one, maybe a Wellington or Lancaster, and not much different from his own B-17. From the holes in her side, she must have crashed after running the gauntlet of heavy fire on a bombing run over Hamburg or Wilhelmshaven. He shuddered, knowing the full measure of hell its crew had gone through, just like the hell he and his B-17 crew had gone through on their last mission. After they turned toward the target on their final run, the pilot had to hold his course. The Germans knew that, and the sky around them would erupt with dozens of puffy, black clouds. Unfortunately, these clouds didn’t have silver linings; they were filled with sharp steel as the flak guns began ripping big chunks out of the fragile airplane. Shot up bad, England was now out of the question. The bomber could only turn, and hope to reach the coast. The German night fighters knew that too. They would be waiting to catch the homeward-bound planes and the cripples, to make certain the wounded ones never returned to bomb their cities again. The bomber might have come once, but it was not going to come back. Too bad, Michael thought, the crash site was only a few miles from the Swedish coast; they almost made it.
He swam to the window of the cockpit and poked his flashlight inside. The window was small and the space very tight, but he managed to get his head and arm inside. The cockpit had been torn apart. The narrow beam illuminated the tattered insulation on the ceiling. Wires hung loose and it had collapsed in places. The control panel was smashed. It felt cold and eerie, he thought, as if he was peering into his own long-dead past. Leaning further in, he swung the narrow beam of light through the cockpit until it illuminated something only a foot beyond his face mask to his right. It was a human skeleton, the co-pilot, still in his rotting flight suit, strapped upright in his seat. He recoiled in fright and cracked his head against the window frame.
Michael was not prepared for this. He should have expected to find skeletons down here sooner or later, but the shock of stumbling upon the first one close up like this hit him without any warning. Easy, he thought. Take a few deep breaths. Easy! He tried again to back out of the window, but his elbow struck the window frame and he dropped the flashlight. It slipped out of his grip and it dropped inside the cockpit, but he did not stop, and he did not even think about reaching back inside for it. He had seen enough and quickly turned and swam away.
Finding the skeleton left him inexplicably numb. He knew he would see some sooner or later, so why was it having this effect on him, he wondered. One more dead body shouldn’t bother a man who had seen and done all the things he had seen and done, but this was different. Maybe it was the way he came upon it, the suddenness; but much more than that, he knew that airplane was a tomb and there was something terribly wrong about disturbing it after all these years. A tomb? Imagine how much worse it will be when they find the U-boat. It had thirty-five or forty men on board when it went down; every one of them was still locked inside, and some of them were not strangers.
Slowly, that old feeling crept up his spine again. He was trapped in his own dead past; and it didn’t begin when he read that newspaper story; when he picked up the silver cigarette case; when Heinz Kruger, Martin Bormann or even Eric Bruckner and his U-boat crossed his path; or with the death of Eddie Hodge. They were only the mile markers on a long road that began almost two decades before, when the German people sold their souls to a suicidal maniac with a Charlie Chaplin moustache and a blueprint for mass murder. As improbable as it may seem, an old B-17 waist gunner named Michael Randall knew he was a vengeful angel sent to even the score and find the truth. That was what really brought him to New York, brought him up here to Sweden. It was the truth; and he would find it inside that old German U-boat. They could keep the gold bars, the diamonds and jewels, the art, and all the rest. Michael wanted the truth; and through it, he would get his revenge.
As he swam back to the platform, he turned his head and realized Balck was swimming next to him. The German had hung back, watching him as he stuck his head inside the cockpit. The water was murky and Balck wore a mask, so Michael could not see the expression on the man’s face. He knew Balck was laughing at him, but all he could do was raise his arm and point up toward the surface. Let Balck lead the way. That way he could keep him in sight as they swam back up to the whaler.
As they began to climb the cable, Mike Randall took a last look back down. At the edge of the circle of light below the platform, he saw the dim glow of his flashlight as it illuminated the inside of the cockpit. Funny; it reminded him of a child’s night-light at the end of a hallway in an old farmhouse back in Wisconsin. In an hour or so, the batteries would die and the light would go out. Darkness would return and fill the cockpit, leaving the co-pilot to resume his vigil in an everlasting night.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
After the experience with the British bomber, each succeeding day passed with agonizing slowness. The emotional peaks and valleys of those first days were now bulldozed flat by a dull routine, decreasing expectation, and the fear of what they’d find when they did locate the U-boat. It became easy to assume that the next str
ange shape on the bottom was merely a bed of rocks; or that the next sonar reading was another lost anchor, a rusting turn-of-the-century barge, a boiler, or a small sailboat that had been caught out in a storm. For the next five days, that was exactly what each new reading turned out to be. Five days, almost six, and that was all they found.
It was early evening, barely past 7:00 PM, and they were uniformly exhausted. The crew had been at it all day, but this was summer in the far north and the sun was still a long way from the horizon, “When people get tired, they make mistakes, Michael,” Einar said. “Someone will get hurt, so I suggest we quit for the day.” Reluctantly, Michael agreed. He waved to Schiff, who was on the winch to bring the diving platform up, but Yuri Chorev stuck his head out the wheelhouse window.
“I agree with quitting, Einar,” Chorev said. “But we only need one more pass to complete the square we’ve been working on all afternoon, and then we can make a fresh start on a new square in the morning.”
Person looked up at the sky and at the horizon. “The light is holding, so I suppose thirty minutes more would not hurt. Just tell everyone to be careful.”
Michael stayed at the helm fighting with the currents to keep the slow moving ship on the proper heading, dividing his attention between the compass and the water, while Schiff split his attention between the magnetometer and sonar displays. It was hard to believe that the once-crisp map on the chart table had become tattered and dirty so quickly. It was stained and smudged with handprints and coffee, split along a seam, re-taped, and covered now with row after row of bright red “X’s” marking the squares that they had already searched. Was that progress? Depends on how you count it, he thought. They still had not found the elusive U-boat. None of them would dare suggest it did not exist, or that it was not up here in Swedish waters to begin with, but he could read their faces. Unfortunately, their hopes and his now lay with a pitifully small number of squares around the outer periphery of the navigation chart. That was all they had left, and they put a finite end to it.
Michael stared at the chart. Could they have missed it? He wondered. With the shifting currents and wind, it was very easy for the Brunnhilde to drift off course, even by a few degrees. Or, had the temperamental magnetometer simply not registered? Did a thermal layer throw them a curve? Could the U-boat have ended up in one of the Baltic’s infamous trenches or a deep hole? Or, had it been anywhere around here to begin with? That was what was going through Michael’s mind, over and over again, until he realized there was a loud buzzing coming from the equipment console to his left that Schiff was monitoring. It was that damned magnetometer again! God, he was learning to hate that sound. All that the loud buzzing did was to deepen his frustration, so he ignored it and forced his full attention back on the wheel. No doubt, this was another false reading, he thought, one more on the heels of so many others before it. But the damned thing kept right on buzzing!
Michael turned angrily toward the young warrant officer. Usually, whoever was at the console had the decency to turn the thing off before the noise drove everyone else nuts. David knew that; but as Michael turned and glared at him, he did a quick double take.
“Stop the engines,” Schiff said in a soft whisper as he leaned forward. His face was close to the scope, and he motioned to Michael with a crooked finger. “Take a look,” he added, not daring to take his eyes off the dials and gauges for fear he’d break the magical spell. “There is something down there, and it is big, very big.”
Michael cut the engines back to neutral. As soon as the diesel noise dropped, Einar stepped into the wheelhouse. His eyes met Michael’s, and the captain immediately knew why. He stepped over and took the helm. With his far more talented hands, he eased the engines into a lower gear and began working the boat backward over the spot Schiff had identified. Michael stepped to the console and turned on the lights and the television camera.
Schiff’s voice was barely above a whisper as he told Person, “Go nice and slow now, Captain — nice and slow.”
One by one, the rest of the crew gathered in the wheelhouse. No one needed to be called. It was as if everyone knew something was different this time. As the long minutes passed, Schiff took four sets of readings, each from a different starting point and each on a different vector; but the images they provided were unmistakable. Whatever was down there was made of steel; and there was a lot of it, lying in a long, narrow hump on the ocean floor. What was it? The TV pictures were the most frustrating yet exciting ones Michael had seen so far. This was no rock pile or scrap heap, and it was far too big to be another airplane. Dark and grainy, the pictures showed a smooth surface, black on murky black, with tantalizingly little relief or details.
“We must check this one out,” Schiff insisted. “I know it has been a long day for everyone, but we have no choice.”
“I remind you, you are all exhausted,” Person warned. “That can make diving a very dangerous business.”
“You are absolutely right, Einar,” Michael answered for the others. “But we’ll all sleep a whole lot better if we know. Besides, it shouldn’t take more than an hour to check it out and maybe a lot less. Schiff and I will go. We’ve been cooped up here in the wheelhouse all day, and we need a little exercise.”
“Oh, no you don’t!” Leslie stepped forward and asserted herself. “We’ve got a regular rotation set up, and fair is fair. Yuri and I are next on the list.”
Michael didn’t like the idea, but he knew she was right. With eight hands helping to dress two bodies, she and Doctor Chorev were soon in the water and gone with only a small pool of bubbles to mark the spot. Michael hurried back to the wheelhouse with the others, where Person continued to finesse the rudder and the engine to keep the boat steady. As they gathered around the closed circuit TV monitor and waited, Michael realized that it was a lot more difficult to stay up here with nothing to do than it ever was to make that cold, lonely dive to the bottom. Down there you could feel it, taste it, see its subtle shades, and become part of it. Up here on deck, you were little more than excess baggage.
For too many long minutes, nothing changed on the small black-and-white screen. Finally, he saw a dim blur cut across the screen from left to right. Was it a diver’s fin? A moment later, the remainder of a black-suited figure swam into view. From the soft curves, under that thick layer of black rubber he knew it was Leslie. Yuri followed close behind as their white flashlights beams criss-crossed through the murky water. Lower and lower they swam until they reached the surface of the dark, smooth object below. Leslie paused, turned her head, and looked up at the camera. She waved her arm and pointed to the left as she and Yuri Chorev swam out of the camera’s field of view, leaving their audience up in the wheelhouse staring at an empty screen again, wishing they could stick their heads inside the TV monitor and peer around the corner. Surely, Leslie and Yuri will be back in a minute or two, Michael thought; but they were not. The minute or two slowly stretched into four and five as his eyes alternated between the television screen and his wristwatch. Ten minutes. Where were they, he wondered, as he began to sweat.
Suddenly, a black-garbed swimmer reentered the camera’s view followed by a second one. The first one quickly swam up to the camera lens and stopped a few feet away. It was Leslie. She reached for the slate board and grease pencil dangling from her thigh and bent over. She wrote something in quick, bold strokes and then raised her slate up to the camera lens. The numerals “582” were all she had written. That was all she needed to write.
Leslie could not see the broad grins on the faces up in the wheelhouse, but Michael could see the one on hers as her mouth curved upward around the edge of her regulator. As casually as he could, he looked away from the TV screen to catch the reactions of the others. Schiff had grabbed old Person by the arms and the two of them danced around the deck, the Captain’s face split from ear to ear with a broad grin. Person’s was not the kind of face that lied that easily. Michael knew the old man never expected them to find the U-boat, but
he seemed legitimately pleased now that they had.
That brought Michael around to Balck. The Mate was the only one who continued to stare at the television screen. Slowly, he began to nod, his eyes firmly focused on the smooth, black hull of the old German submarine; but his expression remained as passive as ever, hidden behind that thin, cynical smile. Still, the Mate seemed pleased that they had found the U-boat. Why? Beyond the pay and special bonuses Person had promised the two crewmen, Michael did not have a clue.
To Michael’s surprise, it was the wiry little Swede, Lindstromm, who had the most interesting reaction. He backed away from the television set, his eyes riveted on the screen; and did not appear pleased at all. He tried to celebrate and laugh along with the others, but his joy looked forced and artificial. He would smile, but the edges kept coming up like cheap linoleum. Clearly, the little Swede was afraid of something.
They rushed out of the wheelhouse and hurried to the ladder. It would take another ten minutes for the two divers to decompress and reach the surface, but no one cared. This was a very happy wait, not a tense one, as they listened to Person and David Schiff quickly outline their plans for the next day. They would go back down in the morning to bring back some proof, but they would all get more than enough chances to dive on the U-boat.
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