The Dead Alone (Empires Lost Book 3)

by Charles S. Jackson

  “You know me?” He demanded suspiciously in faltering English. “How is this so?”

  “Our intelligence is excellent…” Lloyd responded without hesitation, while Langdale leaned in to an equally-surprised Donelson and whispered “School history project…” in her ear by way of explanation, almost drawing an extremely inappropriate snort of laughter before she caught it and reminded herself of the seriousness of the situation. “We’ve been searching for your ship for some time now.”

  “You are in command?”

  “I am in command,” Eileen announced firmly, stepping forward as Detmers turned in her direction. She’d expected his initial reaction of surprise with regard to her presence and the claim that a woman was in charge, but to his credit he also recovered very quickly and let that surprise pass without comment.

  “I surrender my ship as you have demanded,” he announced proudly, wincing visibly as he came to attention and gave a salute. “I expect that you will now also honour your demands and provide assistance with our wounded and the damage to this vessel.”

  “Aye, we’ll do that, captain… how many men have you aboard?”

  “We are four hundred,” he answered after considering her question for a few seconds, “however how many are now dead or dying, I do not know… perhaps a hundred or more? We also have almost one hundred prisoners below decks, taken from vessels we have sunk over the past month. They have been cared for as best we could, however I do not know their fate during this engagement.”

  “We have the ship’s doctor being flown over now with assistants and supplies – we’ll see to anyone who needs help,” Eileen vowed seriously, receiving a single nod of thanks in return. “Now, however,” she continued, “I would very much like you to show me where the special cargo that was put aboard this vessel at Kiel before your departure has been stored: the special cargo that was intended for Tokyo.”

  “All of our cargo is for Tokyo,” Detmers replied, a little too quickly to have been entirely honest.

  “You know which one I’m talking about, captain, so let’s not play games. We’re honouring the terms of surrender and we’re going to find everything anyway… what point is there in making things difficult?”

  Detmers thought long and hard for a moment, but in the end he decided that indeed there was little point in refusing. Something in the way the woman had asked specifically about that damned crate also suggested that it was the reason they’d been so eager to capture Kormoran rather than sink her outright, and the fact that Fuchs and Hegel had intentionally placed his men in such great danger for no obvious benefit began to make him angry over the whole situation.

  “The crate of which you speak is in the main hold, toward the bow,” he answered finally. “The officer accompanying it is dead, killed during the air attack, however the briefcase he was carrying may be important.” He turned and nodded to a back corner of the bridge where the item in question lay, mostly forgotten. “It’s over there: he shan’t be needing it anymore. It is difficult for me to walk…” he added, indicating the shell dressing on his leg, “and I should prefer to stay on the bridge and watch over my men, however I will assign an officer to escort you to its location if that is agreeable?”

  “That will be fine, thank you, captain,” Eileen agreed, nodding as Lloyd wasted no time in stepping across to collect the discarded satchel, grimacing with disdain over the vague sogginess of the blood-stained leather.

  “Ensign Schultz,” Detmers called out in German, drawing the attention of the young officer who’d manned the radio as Reinhold’s replacement.

  “Mein Herr…?”

  “Escort these officers down to the hold… show them where the crate is…” No further explanation was needed; every man on board knew which crate he would be referring to. “Don’t try anything stupid…” he added, just in case the fellow got any silly ideas about being a hero, unlikely as that seemed.

  “Jawohl, Mein Herr…!” Schultz acknowledged with a snap to attention and a salute. “This way… please…” he asked carefully in broken English.

  “Thank… you…” Eileen replied clearly and carefully in return, nodding with exaggeration to emphasise the intent of her reply. With more hand signals and body language than actual speech, the ensign showed them back out the way they’d come and down into the bowels of the ship through a hatchway on the main deck below.

  “Mal,” she said, turning to Langdale. “We’re heading down to check out the hold. You hang about up here and organise the crew. See if you can get those prisoners free and up on deck: if they’re well enough, give rifles to anyone you can trust… we might need a few extra bods looking after this lot on the way back.”

  “You got it, ma’am!” He nodded instantly, saluting her retreating figure as she and Lloyd disappeared through the open hatchway. “Sergeant Thomas…!” He bellowed loudly, seeking out the leader of the marine boarding party the moment she was gone.

  Come about to three-six-zero… ahead one third…” Kohl directed softly, his eyes never leaving the lens of the attack scope as he kept careful eye on the two vessels. One was clearly Kormoran and the other was just as clearly a British warship – a Leander-class light cruiser unless he was sorely mistaken. At a range of less than three thousand metres it wasn’t difficult to identify either, and that kind of distance was a very easy torpedo shot against a stationary target.

  “Watch your depth, chief…” he warned unnecessarily, tense rather than doubtful of his crew’s abilities. “Range two thousand six hundred… targets currently dead in the water.” He considered the situation in a little more detail. “I see aircraft… a hubschrauber from the enemy cruiser. It’s landing a boarding party. Kormoran has been badly damaged… several fires burning… the warship is spraying with water, trying to put them out.”

  He backed away from the scope for a moment, blinking as the realisation struck.

  “They’re going to keep her…!” He exclaimed, much to the surprise of the crew around him. “Why not take the crew off and just sink her, unless…” he paused again “…unless there’s something on board they can’t move… something they want very badly…” another pause “…something important enough for the OKW to want her sunk by her own navy…!”

  He checked the vessels positions once more, finding them unchanged, before making the mental calculations in his own mind.

  “Weapons… high speed torpedo settings…” He ordered quickly, thinking on the fly. “Set running depth for tube four to seven metres… depth for tube six to be three metres… confirm, please…”

  “Tube four, seven metres… tube six, three metres…” the fire control officer confirmed a moment later, working his fingers across the sub’s torpedo data computer. “Speed at highest setting…”

  “Range to target two thousand, five hundred,” Kohl advised, making another check. Still stationary…”

  “Torpedoes ready, Mein Herr…”

  “Flood tubes four and six…”

  “Tubes four and six flooded, sir,” came the confirmation within seconds as a faint hissing sound echoed through the vessel’s hull.

  “Open bow doors…”

  “Bow doors open…” the ensign advised as a subtle whirring replaced the sound of rushing water, followed by a soft but solid thud.

  Kohl waited for a few seconds, staring intently at the scene beyond the periscope as he considered the finality of the orders he was about to give.

  “Fire tube four only… match bearing and shoot…!”

  There was a click as the weapons officer twisted a large handle in a bank of six on his console, and the U-boat shuddered as a 21-inch torpedo was kicked from its tube by a burst of compressed air.

  “Torpedo away, Mein Herr…!”

  “Fire tube six,” Kohl directed, having waited twenty seconds or so. “Match bearings and shoot…!”

  There was a second rumble through the hull as the boat’s last torpedo surged away, following along in the wake of its predecessor at
a speed well in excess of any warship.

  “You’re firing both at the cruiser, Mein Herr?” His XO asked with interest, having watched Kohl at work with interest.

  “The targets are overlapping, Werner: we’ve no clear shot at Kormoran and no time to mess about…” The captain replied, pausing and raising one eyebrow as if challenging his XO to think more about it.

  “The torpedo depth…!” Werner exclaimed, seeing the method behind his commander’s apparent ‘madness’.

  “I checked Kormoran’s statistics after our first sighting,” Kohl explained. “She has a draft of more than eight metres: that light cruiser wouldn’t draw much more than five at most. I’m playing long odds, but we should be able to slip the first fish straight under one and into the other…”

  Napoleon once said that no plan survives contact with the enemy. Max Thorne was fond of quoting that one on occasion himself, and this particular situation was no exception to the rule. The enemy in this case was poor quality checks by the Naval Ordnance Corps, the civilian department that handled maintenance and development of all Kriegsmarine torpedoes.

  A poor production batch of contact exploders had slipped past QC, undoubtedly – as these things are often wont to happen – after lunch on a Friday afternoon. One of those flawed modules was subsequently fitted to the G7e electric torpedo fired from U-1004’s tube number four. It was only at the end of its run, as it sliced straight beneath the keel of Sydney and on to its target beyond, that the problem became suddenly and rather frustratingly apparent.

  “Dud torpedo…!” The sonar operator called out, pressing the earpiece of his headset hard to his ear. “Clean hit at the end of run, sir; just no explosion…”

  “Scheisse…!” Kohl growled angrily, for a moment wishing the entire staff of the Naval Ordnance Corps were standing on the deck of the enemy cruiser. “That’s the sixth one in three patrols!”

  In a similar fashion to issues experienced by the US Navy with regard to execrable performance of their own Mark-14 torpedoes in the first few years of the Realtime war, the Kriegsmarine also suffered initial problems, ironically due to many of the same reasons. Malfunctioning designs for magnetic exploders combined with poorly-designed contact detonators conspired to mask each other from discovery, the issue exacerbated by a lofty pig-headedness from the Naval Ordnance Corps in its refusal to accept that any possible fault could exist with their product. It eventually took the intervention of Admiral Dönitz himself to redress the issue, again in much the same way that the Realtime involvement of American flag officers had been necessary before the US Bureau of Ordnance had finally been forced to even test, let alone fix their own torpedo problems.

  “What’s happening with number six, Helmut?” Kohl demanded, tension in his voice. “Is it running true?”

  “I believe so, sir… any moment now…”

  “There’s a lot of big bloody things down here,” Lloyd observed dubiously a few minutes later as they stood in a huge, smelly and poorly lit cargo hold surrounded by wooden crates of varying shapes and sizes.

  “Might as well take a look, then,” Donelson pointed out with a grin, hefting a pry bar she’d found lying about and proceeding to lever up the lid of the nearest one as Lloyd kept watch and kept an eye on Schultz.

  She was forced to work her way about halfway along the box before the nails gave way with an ear-rending shriek and the lid came away completely, clattering to the deck on the other side as the contents were revealed.

  “Jet engine,” she said simply, voicing the same deduction they’d all made. Wrapped in plastic and packed with straw for protection, it was long and narrow and very clearly a jet turbine engine.

  “What type…?”

  “Oh, how the bloody hell would I know?” She replied with mild exasperation. I’m not that bloody good that I can identify some random engine by sight…” She paused to think about it more. “Not big, though: possibly a bizjet model or something similar… Looks like an older design – turbojet… possibly a J85 or something similar,” she ventured finally, taking a guess regardless of her earlier remark. “Can’t know for certain, but there’s no afterburner on here – that I can tell. Probably the same unit they’re fitting to their current range of first-generation jet fighters and attack aircraft. All very interesting,” she added with a shrug, “but not what we came for…”

  “Fraulein...” Schultz ventured nervously in German, trying to get her attention as he inched his way toward her. “Please… here… the item you seek is here…”

  Following his gaze and his outstretched hand, she spotted a far larger crate sitting in corner in darkness, almost impossible to see in the poor general lighting. As she approached, Lloyd keeping a wary eye on the German sailor at all times, she was quickly able to tell that it was not at all like any of the others.

  “I do believe we have what we’re looking for,” she announced with excitement building as she stepped closer. “Steel casing, but I can see lead beneath where someone’s dented the corner. Buggers must’ve been lucky: if this was a gun-type device, a good knock like that might’ve set it off…”

  “Ahh… just on that subject…” Lloyd pointed out, lifting a finger and suddenly sounding a little nervous himself. “Should we actually be near that thing?”

  “Reasonably safe…” she replied casually, glancing at a small dosimeter she’d taken from her pocket while he shifted his position uneasily. “The lead’s keeping things shielded well enough: minor levels of radiation about, but nothing that’s likely to do us any harm.”

  Moving closer still, she ran her hands over the top of the device, making note of every detail and committing it to memory for future reference. Toward one end of the huge box, a large steel panel was sunk into the top and secured by four heavy-duty wing nuts. With a grunt of exertion and a significant amount of force, she was able to release each one and unscrew them, placing them carefully to one side of the casing.

  “Eileen…” Lloyd warned loudly, happy to deal with any threat that involved charging madmen armed with assault rifles but not so prepared for the reality of being in close proximity to an atomic bomb.

  “Its fine, Evan,” she assured, mostly believing it herself, “they’re hardly likely to booby-trap something intended for an ally…”

  She wasn’t really sure if that logic was valid, but it sounded good and made her feel better as she used a key already fitted into the main access panel to unlock it and carefully lift the entire cover away.

  “Jesus Christ…!” She breathed softly, making both her escorting Australians start with fear.

  “What…? What is it…?”

  “This thing is fully self-contained!” She explained with some admiration, earning an exasperated ‘oh for fuck’s sake’ under his breath from Lloyd in response as she pocketed the key. “Arming panel, power source…” she continued, able to read German far better than she could speak it. “There’s even dual ignition switches: direct detonation or clockwork timer.” She turned and glanced sharply at Lloyd as the logical progression of that came to her. “This isn’t a prototype meant to be studied!” She exclaimed, suddenly very concerned. “This was meant to be used…!”

  It was at that moment that an unexpected and rather loud ‘BONG’ reverberated throughout the hold, vibrating the deck and sounding as if it had come from somewhere just below Eileen’s feet.

  “What the fuck was that…?” Lloyd asked angrily, feeling embarrassed at having almost jumped out of his skin at the sound.

  “I don’t know,” Eileen admitted, fear in her own eyes as she locked them with his. “It sounded like it came from outside the hull…”

  The deck suddenly lurched upward and sideways, throwing all of them to the floor as a deafening, clanging ‘BOOM’ reverberated throughout the whole ship, stinging their ears to the point of actual pain and leaving both of them mildly dizzy.

  “What… the… fuck…?” Lloyd repeated with nervous rage, shaking his head to clear his thoughts as he r
egained his feet. “What just fuckin’ hit us?” The entire hold was now filled with the strange, muffled noises of rushing water and groaning, twisting metal, the sounds eerie and diffused as if coming from somewhere far away.

  “That wasn’t us,” Eileen breathed with a sudden, terrible certainty. “That was Sydney…” she added, fear in her eyes as she glanced across at Evan. “Those a breaking-up noises: she’s sinking!”

  “Depth sixty metres…!” Kohl ordered immediately, lowering the scope and stepping away as he fought to control his frustration. “Ahead full, bearing zero-two-seven: I want us in there fast... with the cruiser out of the way, we may be able to convince Kormoran to surrender… Theodor’s a good man: he deserves a chance to explain.”

  “Mein Herr, we fired on them…” Werner pointed out with a thin smile as the Chief of the Boat relayed orders to everyone concerned.

  “They don’t know that,” Kohl shot back just as quickly, raising his eyebrows. “Could have been an ‘accident’… and… they also don’t know we’re out of torpedoes. Time to see how good my poker face is…”

  It was all over by the time they reached the main deck, stepping out into the open air and a sight of abject horror. Sydney had broken in half, and what was left was little better than torn, twisted metal surrounded by debris, flaming fuel oil and screaming sailors, many already mortally wounded or burning to death amid the flames. Fire-fighters who’d been on deck trying to control Kormoran’s fires earlier were now lined up at the ship’s starboard side, desperately spraying their hoses all over the wreckage in a vain attempt at bringing some relief the men in the water below.

  “Mallee…!” Lloyd howled loudly, Langdale appearing as if by magic just seconds later. “Whaddya got for me…?”

  “Prisoners are okay and up on deck like the captain asked,” Mal assured, his eyes fixed on the carnage to his right. “We broke open the ship’s armoury and handed around a few goodies, so they’re locked and loaded for bear.”