The Dead Alone (Empires Lost Book 3)

by Charles S. Jackson

  “Do you believe they will bend to our will?”

  “The Americans…?” Yamamoto asked with a wan smile. “Captain, it is my opinion that the attacks we are about to unleash upon the United States will fill them with so great a desire for vengeance that they may not stop until we are wiped from the face of the earth entirely. I have given this opinion many times to anyone who would listen,” he added bitterly, “however neither the prime minister nor the rest of the Imperial General Headquarters were willing to take any notice.”

  “Then…” Genda began, horrified that a man with greatest strategic mind in the entire Japanese Navy could be so certain of defeat. “Why have you planned this attack?”

  “These are the orders of the War Council and – by default – the Emperor,” Yamamoto shrugged in resignation. “These are our orders and we must obey. As such, it is my duty to devise the best plan possible to strike a killing blow right to the heart of the US Navy and buy us as much time as we can. I expect failure, Genda-san, but as is my way, I plan for success… throughout history, many impossible victories have been won in just this fashion. Would you not sacrifice your life for the nation, should the Emperor demand it?”

  “Of course, sir… gladly…” Genda answered without hesitation, ready to do so without a second thought.

  “All our lives exist only to serve the nation, and mine is no exception,” Yamamoto explained with a nod and a smile. “To die for Emperor and Nation is the highest hope of a military man. One man's life or death is a matter of no importance but in death, the fighting man will go to eternity for Emperor and country. Come, Genda…” he added, shivering as a particularly cold blast of wind howled past in that moment. “Let us go inside and partake of that tea you have ordered… we’ll go over our reports and our plans and see if we can find some change that might improve our chances…”

  Indian Ocean

  South of the Cocos Islands

  November 22, 1942

  Sunday

  The Kriegsmarine’s Type-X U-boats were among the most advanced in the world. Three years earlier, their introduction had in one fell swoop made every other submarine class obsolete overnight, and the rest of the world’s navies – the Allied navies in particular – had been struggling to catch up ever since. Build from the ground up as an underwater craft rather than a surface vessel that was able to submerge – as was the case with all preceding submarine designs – the Type-X was silent and deadly; able to run at high speed under water and armed with a potent array of six forward torpedo tubes, complemented by the most advanced fire control and sonar equipment currently in existence.

  One of the first ever built of this class, U-1004 was now an old veteran and although wear and tear had started to show through after three hard years of war in just about every theatre in which the Kriegsmarine had fought, she was still an extremely competent boat with a highly-trained and equally-competent crew.

  Her commander, Fregattenkapitän Gunter Kohl, had taken a commission in 1934 and had been posted to U-boats two years later, rising quickly to his own command just before the outbreak of war in 1939. Well-liked by the men who served under him due to the efforts he displayed in taking care of them, his men accorded him a great deal of loyalty and respect, earning him the reputation at the OKW of being an efficient commander who achieved excellent results.

  Sailing out of Diego-Suárez in northern Madagascar, they’d just completed a short but quite fruitful sortie interdicting Allied merchantmen in the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, expending all but their last two torpedoes. Their mission now was to make their way around the Dutch East Indies via the Timor Sea – easily the most dangerous part of the trip –then turn north through the Banda Sea for safer, Japanese home waters and a new base of operations at Cam Ranh Ban in French Indochina. The South-East Asian posting was a distant and at times arduous one in which the transit periods to and from were often more dangerous than actual operations, yet these missions were only given to the best crews and captains as a result, and every man aboard U-1004 considered it an honour that they’d been chosen for that posting.

  “Underwater transients, Mein Herr…!” His sonar officer called suddenly, bringing the whole control room to immediate attention after several hours of uneventful travel at snorkel depth. North-east… medium range…” he continued, tilting the fine-tuning controls of his hydrophones backward and forward to zero in on the sound. “Two torpedoes, I think…”

  “Coming our way, chief…?” Kohl demanded sharply, crossing the floor of the control room in a bound and bringing up the main search scope, suddenly tense and sweating bullets over a sudden, potential danger.

  “No, sir… away, it sounds like… hard to tell, but it...” he paused again, this time lifting the headset away from his ears and wincing faintly. “Two solid hits, Mein Herr… must have been close to the shooter… almost no run time at all…”

  “Well…” Kohl said slowly, almost to himself as he rotated the scope around toward the correct bearing and sound far more relaxed now he knew the ship was not in danger, “…let’s see what’s going on up there, shall we? Picking up anything by way of surface traffic?”

  “Plenty, sir… five passing ships within range during the last three hours, but your orders were to make note and move on unless they posed a direct threat…”

  “It’s alright, Helmut… I understand,” Kohl assured, grinning as he flipped his cap around into the stereotypical image of a U-boat captain and placed his eye against the scope’s lens, scanning the sea for any sign of what was going on.

  “Distant… bearing three-three-six…” he observed, squinting and rising the magnification to full power. “I see smoke…” he added as his XO quickly jotted down information at the nearby plotting table. “Eight… ten thousand metres perhaps…. a lot of smoke… definitely a battle of some kind…” He glanced across at his sonar operator. “Can we get in closer?”

  “They’re making a lot of noise, Mein Herr,” the operator assured with a nod. “Even if they have ASDIC fitted, they’ll never hear us over all that racket.”

  “Take us in, XO,” Kohl decided after a moment’s pause, still staring through the periscope. “Depth one hundred metres… make revolutions for fifteen knots, heading zero-four-two.” He stepped away from the periscope and flipped then handles up even as it began to descend once more into its fairing. “Let’s see what all the fuss is about…”

  The Straat Malakka was burning furiously now, yet even after two torpedoes, she’d taken more than twenty minutes to finally settle in the water and slowly sink stern-first below the waves. The Dutch freighter had left Fremantle earlier that week, headed for Ceylon with a load of food, coal and other strategic supplies intended to bolster the huge garrison of Commonwealth forces there. Evening was drawing near, and the inferno created by what was left of her fuel oil took on an almost eerie glow.

  It was a terrifying image from a distance of half a mile, and every man standing on the deck of the Kormoran could feel the terrible heat of that blaze on their faces as black smoke poured into the sky.

  “We must not linger here!” Standartenführer Gerhard Fuchs declared angrily. “We’re too close to enemy aircraft here!”

  Stick thin and wearing thick, dark-rimmed spectacles, the man was nominally a colonel in the SS, although the rank was mostly honorary in recognition of his position as a high-ranking scientist with the Reichsforschungsrat (the Reich Research Council). Generally a man with an open and disarmingly friendly disposition, they were seeing none of that now as he fretted about their current lack of progress.

  “We are still picking up survivors…!” Detmers snarled back, standing right beside him on the upper deck outside the entrance to the bridge and watching the proceedings through binoculars.

  “This mission is far too important to waste time on such niceties!” Fuchs hissed, showing a dark side rarely seen. “I gave permission for us to stop long enough to capture this vessel and replenish our fuel bunkers, but
this misplaced compassion is unnecessary! The Cocos Islands are just a two hundred kilometres to the north: the Abwehr believes that the RAF operate bombers and maritime patrols from airfields and the lagoon there.” He threw an accusing hand up at the pyre of smoke curling high into the darkening sky above. “How long do you think it will be before someone comes looking to see what all that is about?”

  “We will take those men onboard and that is the end of it!” Detmers barked, openly defying Fuchs for the first time since the man had boarded the ship ten weeks earlier. “Make whatever report you care to once we arrive at Palau, but I will not leave defenceless sailors to fend for themselves! The prevailing currents around here take anything westward, away from land and safety,” he added with venom, defending his honour as an officer and a sailor. “Any man we leave behind will be dead a week before he reaches any landfall!”

  “The Führer will hear of this!” Fuchs threatened, only making Detmers more determined than ever.

  “Do as you will,” he shot back with cold disinterest. “Have me arrested when we arrive in port – if you can – but on this ship, I am captain and you will follow orders from now on!”

  He lifted the field glasses once more and turned his gaze back toward the sinking freighter as its bow finally slipped beneath the surface of the ocean amid a spreading stain of flaming fuel oil, while a speechless Fuchs silently seethed beside him, fists clenched.

  “It’s a surface raider…” Kohl observed, this time watching through the far smaller attack periscope from a range of just 2,000 metres, also watching as Straat Malakka’s bow disappeared. “They’re collecting survivors even now…”

  “One of ours, then…?” His XO mused softly beside him.

  “Natürlich, Werner” Kohl agreed with a smile. “Why would the British have need of a surface raider?”

  “A Q-ship, perhaps…?” Werner countered, defending his earlier statement. It was known that the Allies sometimes armed otherwise innocent-looking merchantmen with the aim of catching unsuspecting German raiders unawares.

  “I can see four… five… six large guns… ten or fifteen centimetre at least… and we already know they also have torpedo tubes,” Kohl pointed out drily. “That’s substantially more than any Q-ship I ever heard of.” He shook his head faintly, as if to himself. “Definitely an auxiliary cruiser… but which one…? Big bastard…” he added, thinking out loud, “but then, they usually are… This one seems familiar, though…” He paused for a moment, something else occurring to him.

  “Markus…!” He called sharply, turning away from the scope for a moment and addressing his communications officer. “That classified despatch we received last month: the one about that raider the OKW wanted captured or sunk… what was its name?”

  “Jawohl, Mein Herr…!” Markus barked immediately, opening a folder his station and instantly rifling through a stack of typed reports held within. “Here it is! The Kormoran, sir: Hilfskreuzer Kormoran…!”

  “Kormoran, yes…!” Kohl snapped his fingers as his memory returned and he lowered his eyes to the scope once more. “She was tied up at the docks in Kiel when we were there, four months ago…” he continued, thinking out loud and becoming more certain with every passing second. “Theodor Detmers commanding… I served under him for a while before transferring to U-boats…”

  “Our orders are clear, Mein Herr,” he XO pointed out softly, having examined the sheet of paper Markus had produced from the manila folder. “We have two torpedoes remaining…”

  “Yes… we do…” Kohl agreed grimly, turning away from the scope once more, “and those orders are unusual to say the least. Why would the OKW ask us to sink one of our own? I know… I know, Werner… we will carry out our orders if need be…” he added quickly as he saw protest rising on the younger man’s face. “But Detmers was an honourable man and a fine commander and I, for one, would like to find out a little more about what’s going on before I condemn four hundred fellow Deutsche sailors to death based on the orders of a Berlin bureaucrat. I would instead like to shadow this fellow for a while and see where it leads us. We can keep up well enough, and I’d rather report back to headquarters requesting confirmation before killing our own countrymen. Is that acceptable…?” He asked his XO, one eyebrow raised. There was no actual reason to request the man’s permission – being captain and all – but he liked to have the man’s opinion, and inclusion tended to make for better officers with greater initiative.

  “Of course, Mein Herr…” Werner agreed, snapping to attention and nodding in a faint attempt at a bow.

  It was ten more minutes before Kormoran finally got underway once more, steaming off to the east at a steady ten knots. There was no need for anyone to guess their route. Dangerous as navigating the Timor Sea was, just 250 nautical miles separating Timor and the Australian mainland at its closest point, there was a far better chance of a raider disguised as a merchantman slipping through there undetected or at least unchallenged than there would be trying to push through the extremely narrow straights separating the main islands of the Dutch East Indies, teaming as they were with Allied warships and patrol aircraft flying out of Surabaya, Batavia or Singapore.

  Secure in their certainty of where Kormoran was likely to be heading in the next few days, Kohl took U-1004 north at high speed for several hours, putting enough distance between the two vessels that it was unlikely the other would detect their coded transmissions. Beneath the brilliant star fields of the southern night skies, the U-boat sent a contact report back to base at Diego-Suárez and waited for a reply, cruising on the surface and enjoying the cool night breeze as it wafted down through the open hatches.

  They had their orders two hours later, and like it or not, Kohl this time had to accept that those orders must be obeyed. Turning east, they submerged to snorkel depth once more and went to full speed, slicing through the water at close to eighteen knots. The OKW had advised that three more U-boats were being sent from Cam Ranh Bay, heading due south at full speed to intercept Kormoran, but the fact remained that they would be days in transit and the vessel would almost certainly have slipped away within that time.

  The reality was that U-1004 was the only German warship close enough to be of any use, and notwithstanding the fact that the ship held just two torpedoes left in its tubes, the task therefore fell to them to do their duty. They’d lost precious time heading north in order to make their transmissions, but there were shortcuts a submarine could take that would not be safe for a surface vessel, and Kohl intended to do whatever it took to prevent Kormoran from reaching its destination.

  Chopawamsic Recreational Demonstration Area

  Prince William County, Virginia, USA

  November 23, 1942

  Monday

  It was still bitterly cold as Samuel Lowenstein was woken at eight that morning by the scraping sound of a food tray being slid through the long, wide slot cut into the bottom of his cell door. They called it his ‘room’ and told him he was a ‘guest’, but after a decade held captive by the Nazis, he knew a prison well enough when he was in one. The door was locked every night, and in the unlikely event he felt the need to leave his room during daylight hours, he was escorted by two armed guards at all times.

  Not that he felt any particular desire to get out and see the sights or commune with nature or anything else that involved any kind of social interaction with the rest of the planet. Thirty miles south-west of Washington DC, Chopawamsic Recreational Demonstration Area was the largest protected natural area in the region at almost 19,000 acres. With most of the park area left completely undeveloped, it served as a unique window into American woodland of a time well before European settlement of the Continental United States.

  Early into November, it was also absolutely freezing most mornings, with temperatures dipping as low as one or two degrees Centigrade overnight and barely rising into the mid-teens during the day. There was no snow about as far as Lowenstein could see, at times when he bothered to stare th
rough his barred widows at the forest outside, but he couldn’t have imagined it was too far away as temperatures continued to drop every day.

  Sam Lowenstein couldn’t have cared less. He read nothing of the newspapers they brought in for him daily, and had never once turned on the small transistor radio that had come with the room. Food trays were left unnoticed for hours or days on occasion, with him only taking sustenance when his own body was so desperate that gulping down whatever was available became a necessity of instinct rather than any conscious decision. Some meals had been left lying in the open air for so long by the time that he got to them, that he’d been violently ill three times in three weeks, so sick with food poisoning that he’d feared for his life… or at least, the small, insignificant part of his psyche that still cared had.

  He hated himself; of that he was certain. What the Nazis couldn’t do to him through ten years of torture and imprisonment had been accomplished by one psychopathic SS officer, in just a few seconds that had lasted an aeon in his mind, dragging out forever in the nightmares that visited upon him every night. The vile self-loathing that possessed him however was the realisation of the fact that no matter how shattered of mind and spirit he’d become, he still couldn’t bring himself to make that last, final step of taking his own life as he knew he should.

  I held the blade in trembling hands, prepared to make it but… He remembered that dark words from Pink Floyd’s The Final Cut… the narrator’s terrible baring of the soul that seemed to encompass all the pain and anguish of the world in that one, mournful line. …just then the phone rang… I never had the never to make the final cut…