Night Crossing

by Robert Ryan

  Uli had received a letter from her father. He was on the Isle of Man, one of the last ones still interned there, apart from a hard core of fanatics who had been kept behind. Judging by the message’s content, he had only received her third and fifth letters, the others having gone astray. She had instantly written a sixth, begging for more information about him rather than news of the wonderful examples of the human spirit’s resilience that he had seen and the talented young musicians whom he had met.

  She had just examined her face in the mirror—‘no longer that of a featureless young girl’ was the best interpretation she could put on the new lines that had appeared around her eyes and mouth—and put the last pin in her hair when she heard the honk on the horn from Dennis’s truck and ran out to greet him.

  Their picnic spot was on the edge of the pine forest, on a small knot overlooking a lake. Beyond that was a tapestry of wheat and tobacco farms, stretching away towards America. Once the USA had entered the war, the authorities had relaxed the regime at the camp. Now there really was nowhere for thousands of miles that wasn’t the Allies’ territory. Many of the men had already been transported back to Britain, and the rest figured that if they just bided their time, it would be their turn eventually.

  However, the women still seemed to be a mere afterthought. They had petitioned the camp governor for release, who in turn had tried the Alien Office in Ottawa, which contacted the Home Office in Britain, but the fate of a few dozen female refugees was not a priority for the moment. And in her heart, Uli had to admit that, much as she ached to see her father, the thought of crossing the Atlantic again, every nerve alert for the impact of a German torpedo, held little allure.

  When they reached their patch of rough grass, they settled down on the blanket and Uli let the sun warm her while Dennis fussed with the meat loaf, ham and fresh bread. ‘Mom would like to meet you,’ he said softly.

  ‘Well, I would welcome the opportunity to thank her for all this.’

  ‘That’s settled, then,’ Dennis said, grinning. He unscrewed the flask lid. ‘I’ll fix it. Coffee?’

  Uli accepted the plastic cup. ‘Thank you. We do have the little problem of me technically being a dangerous enemy prisoner.’

  ‘Oh, the camp governor is going to start issuing weekend passes soon.’

  ‘Well, yes, then. It would be a pleasure.’ A real home, a real family. She wondered if she still knew how to behave in such company. And what would she wear? She was fairly sure that Dennis wouldn’t mind if she put on old sacking, but she’d want to make a good impression on his mother. The flowery dress she wore each Wednesday for Dennis was the best thing in her meagre wardrobe, and that garment was faded and patched.

  ‘Oh, and I got this,’ Dennis said casually.

  She took the newspaper eagerly and looked at the date. The copy of the Daily Mail was three weeks old, but she devoured it greedily.

  Most of the news confirmed rumours that had circulated in the camp. The Allied landings on Sicily, the Russians pushing back the Germans near Kursk. Elsewhere there were pictures of the giant funfair on Hampstead Heath, items on the relaxing of restrictions on greyhound meetings, the latest rationing news, and the Mail had started a campaign to allow turn-ups on men’s trousers once more.

  Then her gaze caught the name Ross. An Inspector Ross had been awarded the KPM, the King’s Police Medal, for his bravery during what they called the Siege of St John Street. Uli scanned the story. Could it be the same Inspector Ross? A hero? Surely not. She thought back, beyond the diffident figure at the airport to the man who had plunged fearlessly into the mêlée in Tiergarten and realised that, yes, the Ross she once knew did have it in him. She also remembered the pleasure of the kiss at the Lufthansa lounge, and the effect it had had on him. She’d been a wicked little girl back then.

  She leant back against a tree. It was strange to feel a name reaching across from the past and affecting her like that. She could see him now, standing in the hall, offering that well-meaning gift, and she heard her snobbish teenage voice high-handedly turn him down. She blushed at the memory.

  ‘Can I kiss you again?’ asked Dennis, sliding his bearlike form nearer, wanting to progress from last week’s chaste peck on the cheek.

  ‘No, Dennis. Not this time,’ Uli said firmly as she tore out the cutting and slipped it into her dress pocket. ‘Shall we eat?’

  Torpedo Alley was quiet. Erich had decoded a cipher from BdU which confirmed that a convoy was gathering at Halifax to sail in three days’ time. Until then all that the crew of U-40 could do was wait, conserving their energies, wallowing on the surface in a silvery sea. Erich was up top on the wooden deck, along with a dozen others, taking advantage of a soft summer day in the ‘air gap’, the region where they knew they were outside the range of the marauding Liberators or the Sunderland flying boats of the Canadians or British Coastal Command.

  There had been a rendezvous two weeks earlier with a supply sub that was returning to St Nazaire, and most of the crew had handed over their letters to their family and loved ones. Erich hadn’t posted his to Uli. What was the point? He had no address, and even if he had, he doubted whether the Bundespost sent many mailmen across to London these days. If, indeed, that was where she was. He’d heard that the British had locked all their Germans up in KZs, concentration camps. Would Uli survive that? Yes, she would, he decided. Uli was made of harder stuff than him.

  He looked up at Prinz on the bridge. The Captain was wearing his Knight’s Cross, getting used to the feeling of its new oak leaves. This addition—a sign that the wearer had won the Cross twice—was by way of a long-service medal, an appreciation of the skill that it took to survive out here for so long. The British had improved their Hedgehog cluster charges and their sonar, and now they had airborne radar and acoustic torpedoes dropped from planes. In response, U-40 had been painted with anti-sonar coatings and fitted with an extra deck, which held an anti-aircraft gun, on the rear of the tower. She also had been given a variety of decoy buoys and new torpedoes that instead of running straight described a ladder pattern, zigzagging through convoys, which made them much more likely to strike a target. Unfortunately, on the early trials the new eels had tended to deploy in a large circle, often coming back and destroying the U-boat that had launched them. Erich was pleased that U-40 had been out on patrol when those prototypes had been deployed.

  Despite constant improvements to her defences and operational capacity, poor old U-40 was showing her age. Many of the Type VIIBs had gone. He guessed that few U-boats got to retire—BdU worked them until they broke, taking the crew with them. He had heard Prinz curse Dönitz for this, even, after a few drinks, when they’d been on shore. Prinz thought he deserved a Type VIIC/42, with its more powerful engines and better armament, not to mention its stronger steel hull and less cramped interior. The 42s even had freezers to keep food fresh. They all deserved that, the Captain felt.

  Erich heard a buzzing in his ears. As one, the dozen men on deck swivelled their heads to the west. They’d all picked up the sound of aero engines. ‘Liberator!’ shouted the Zweiter as he found it in his lenses. ‘Closing fast.’

  Surely they can’t get this far out to sea, thought Erich.

  ‘Alarm! All hands below! Clear the bridge!’

  Erich joined the stampede. The Liberator could only mean one thing. The damned British and Canadians had found a way to close the air gap.

  Twenty-Three

  IT WAS, ROSS had to admit, a beautiful view. Across from the Ruthen Peninsula where he stood he could see a string of sandy bays interspersed by rocky points. Out at sea, the black pinpricks were seals or sea lions. The houses scattered across the rolling hillsides were pristine white, freshly repainted this summer, and the gardens were neat and well-tended. He could almost be on the edge of Loch Sunart, the remote part of the west coast of Scotland where his family originally came from and where a reclusive uncle still lived, rather than the Isle of Man.

  Behind him was the row o
f boarding houses that formed one of the refugee-detention camps, its boundary delineated by a single strand of wire. How different from the imposing fences strung up around the hotels in Douglas, where the men had been kept. The women who had spent much of the war in these houses behind him had had it much easier. And a better view.

  Ross turned and faced the tweedy middle-aged woman who strode along the path towards his vantage point. She was the Home Office representative in this complex, which now held a handful of hardline pro-Nazis and a couple of women with no other place to go. She was brusque but sympathetic to a policeman who had used a KPM award to wangle a few weeks’ leave to undertake what she clearly considered a wild-goose chase.

  Ross had traced Ulrike Walter relatively easily, from Alexandra Palace in North London to Kempton Race Course and on to a housing estate near Liverpool, but he had lost her at the docks. The Isle of Man steamers now left from Fleetwood, not Liverpool. The Mersey wharfs and piers had suffered a pounding by German bombers and there were no surviving manifests of passengers boarded, no proper records of landings for those hectic months three years ago.

  Joan Ashley gave him the bad news. ‘I’m sorry, Inspector. I’ve called all the other camps—there is no trace of her.’

  ‘What if she was sent abroad?’

  She shook her head. ‘No women were sent abroad, Inspector. Men went to Canada and Australia, a few to South Africa. No women. It was not policy. Then, once the married camp was set up, all single female aliens were concentrated on one site.’ She waved at the houses behind her. ‘If she was on the island then, she’d have come through here.’

  ‘When was the married camp set up?’

  ‘Oh, 1941. The men and women were kept separate until then.’

  Ross felt a jolt. Idiot, he said to himself. He’d only been thinking about Uli. The transit camps had been mixed, even though the sexes had been segregated. He’d assumed that something similar would work at the final destinations. He’d assumed wrongly. ‘Even fathers and daughters?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Man and wife, father and daughter, brother and sister—didn’t matter.’

  ‘So Uli and her father could have ended up in separate camps.’

  ‘No “could have” about it. Would have. Without a doubt.’

  ‘Or even in a separate part of the world.’

  Joan Ashley hesitated. ‘In some cases. But as I said, it was the men who were relocated overseas.’

  ‘How many men are left on the island?’

  ‘A few hundred, I suppose. Mostly at Hutchinsons. Those whom the Aliens Advisory Committee still consider a risk. You will have seen Hutchinsons, up the hill from the landing stage at Douglas.’ Ross had: a rather bleak windswept collection of houses, cocooned in barbed wire.

  ‘Do you want me to check? I only asked about a Miss Walter at the women’s facilities. I can easily check the listings for a Herr Walter. If he has been on the island, then the Commandature should have it. The men were looked after by the military authorities, unlike the women, so it takes a bit of time to cut through the red tape.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Ross said, aware that he had been rather churlish up until this point. ‘I appreciate your help.’

  ‘Don’t mention it. You can have a cup of tea while you wait. I think we even have some scones that the inmates baked. Don’t worry. They haven’t poisoned us. Yet.’

  ‘That would be very nice. Thank you.’

  Ross allowed himself to be led back towards the houses, still wondering how he could have been so dumb.

  After the Liberator had spotted them, U-40 had turned and run. They had quickly discovered through BdU how the air gap had been closed—VLRs, very-long-range planes equipped with radar to detect them on the surface, and sonar buoys for when they dived. They had survived three attacks so far.

  Prinz had stopped to harry three merchant ships, sinking one and damaging another with a gnat, a short-range acoustic torpedo that homed in on propeller noise. It was as though the ships were saying come and get me. And come they did.

  Now U-40 had no torpedoes left, and one of the diesels had run a bearing, but she limped on towards home under water, resurfacing at night to recharge the batteries. Erich had coded and deciphered the messages between Prinz and BdU: send me air cover. Send me a support vessel. All the replies were curt and to the point: no cover or supplies available. Head for Lorient as best you can. It then warned them about Leigh Lights—a combination of radar and searchlights—that enabled bombers to patrol in the dark. Also there was a new radar, which the Metex detectors on the U-boats could no longer pinpoint. The enemy arsenal was expanding and the Germans had no new countermeasures. Erich had never felt so exposed at sea before.

  The enemy found them late one afternoon off the north-east tip of Ireland. The phonesman hardly had time to warn them of a destroyer closing fast before the explosions punched through the ship, making her buck. Glass exploded over Erich as dials burst their faces. The lights went out for a second, then came back on.

  ‘Take her down, Chief—’

  A cluster of Hedgehogs erupted all around, battering them mercilessly.

  ‘Flooding in engine room.’

  ‘Pumps on full.’

  ‘Second destroyer—damn. Where did that come from?’

  Another round of explosions. This time Prinz didn’t need to tell them to go down. U-40 began to slide into the depths of her own accord. Erich felt the steel bands of the Blechkoller close round his chest, the first time he had felt the submariner’s panic in many a month.

  ‘Depth?’

  The IWO looked at the shattered gauge and tapped it. A triangular piece of glass fell out, but the needle stayed jammed in place. ‘Broken.’

  ‘Flooding in the torpedo compartment.’

  ‘Can you seal it off?’

  ‘Trying.’

  ‘You’re going to have to blow the tanks.’ The Chief was at Prinz’s shoulder, speaking as easily as he could.

  Prinz turned on him. ‘Pumps?’

  The Chief shook his head. ‘Working as hard as they can. And the aft pump is failing.’

  A surge of water came through the control room, pouring over their boots. Erich could feel the sub starting to roll. If they didn’t blow soon, so much water would have entered that negative buoyancy would be impossible. He heard some of the panels start to creak and a rivet popped somewhere. Another pipe burst. More rivets, like gunshots this time. They must be getting deep.

  ‘Rudder full to port!’ yelled the Chief. That sometimes acted as a brake. Not this time. The lights went again, leaving only the red emergency bulbs. We’re going straight to hell, thought Erich.

  Prinz prepared himself for one of the final announcements of his captaincy. ‘Blow—’ he began. A stream of water hit his face and he stepped back, spitting. The gasket rings on the periscope housing had failed. He took off his cap and shook his head to clear the water. ‘Blow all tanks.’

  The Chief set to work, and Erich stood beside him, rotating the valve handles as quickly as he could. They heard the hiss of compressed air. The sub was still rolling. The navigation aids began to slide off the table.

  ‘All tanks!’ yelled the Chief.

  U-40 stopped for a second, then gave a little shiver and began to rise. They felt her lift slowly for a few seconds, then begin to accelerate.

  ‘Shit!’ said the Chief. ‘Too fast.’

  The submarine was bobbing up like a cork released under water, liable to break her back and in danger of smashing into one of the hunters above.

  ‘Brace!’ yelled Prinz, although everyone had already found something to cling to.

  ‘Fifty metres!’ came a distant voice. It was from the torpedo room. Its depth gauge must still be working. ‘Thirty-five.’

  The lights were restored. The control-room team didn’t speak. Several of them had their eyes closed. As the water became less dense they felt the sub rise even quicker.

  Then there was the hollow thump of waves breaking over the t
ower and the deck as U-40 smashed its way into the air, rocking back and forth so hard that it almost turned turtle, flinging its crew across the hull as it oscillated. But the old crate held together.

  ‘Hatch clear.’

  ‘Opening hatch.’

  As the Captain climbed the ladder Erich heard the tower crackle under the impact of heavy machine-gun rounds. Prinz slid down. ‘Two of them, closing fast.’ He looked at Erich. ‘Codes.’

  Erich sprinted through to the signal room, grabbed the Kurzsignalheft, the short-signal book, and the Wetterkurzschlüssel, the weather short-signal book, and dunked them into the dirty water slopping around his feet. They instantly began to bleed black clouds, as the soluble ink drifted off the pages. He took the coding machine and, following standing orders, smashed the rotors with three hammer blows before tossing it to the floor. He did the same with the spare rotors. In the mess room he used his key to open the signals locker and took out the dozen letters he had written to Uli, slid them into an oilskin pouch and shoved them into his tunic before dropping the other documents into the water.

  As he returned to the control room he saw Prinz at the periscope. ‘Schnee! Signal a surr—’ shouted the Captain.

  They heard the shrieking of metal and sailors yelling followed by the whoosh of sea water cascading its way into the pressure hull. Something had sheered part of the sub’s tail off. The boat spun round and tilted once more. Erich could smell burning and chlorine fumes. He fumbled towards the bulkhead where the rebreathers were kept. An explosion catapulted him into the metal. The ship was starting to list. Erich, Prinz and the others didn’t need a damage report to know that U-40 had been rammed and fatally wounded. She was going to the bottom.

  The Falcon Cliff Hotel sat on a clifftop above Douglas Harbour, its castellated and turreted frontage proclaiming its somewhat grander status compared with the lesser establishments that lined the seafront. Now, though, its lobbies and lounges had been stripped bare of ornament, its carpets torn up, and it smelled of astringent chemicals and the elderly. It had functioned as the main hospital for the internment camps since the first refugees had arrived and the authorities realised that they had interned a large number of people with diabetes, kidney problems, heart murmurs, dementia and even tuberculosis.