“At the slow speed we’ve been going we can’t have covered much more than ten miles since we came on board. Aircraft from Kronstadt will do that in about ten minutes, so you haven’t got a dog’s chance. They’ll smash in the hull of this thing as though it were made of tissue paper and the ice-cold water will come pouring in. You’re going to die here, choking out your life like the rat you are.”
Gregory closed his eyes and swayed slightly. Grauber began to curse feebly; then, with sudden resolution, he stretched out his hand and pressed the bell.
When the steward appeared he said: “Tell the Kapitänleutnant that I wish to see him. Now! At once!”
“Have you ever experienced what it is like to be choked?” Kuporovitch enquired in a conversational tone. “One feels as if one’s head is going to burst and there is a drumming in one’s ears. It goes on for a long time, and one also suffers from most appalling cramps. All that business about drowning being a pleasant form of death is sheer nonsense.”
“Silence!” Grauber roared, bringing his fist down with a crash on the table.
The fair-bearded Kapitänleutnant came through the narrow door. “You sent for me, Herr Gruppenführer?”
“Yes.” Grauber mopped his face with his handkerchief, and a whiff of the perfume he always used came strongly to them. “What happened just now?”
“We were spotted by a Soviet aircraft, and she let go the two bombs she was carrying at us.”
“But how could she spot us through the snow?”
“The snow ceased falling shortly after you came aboard, Herr Gruppenführer.”
“But in the darkness?”
“The moon is now up. You will remember that I sent ashore to warn you that you should not delay longer, when you postponed your departure two days ago.”
“Two days can hardly make all that difference.”
“They make a lot to the time of the rising of the moon, Herr Gruppenführer; and up above it is now almost as bright as day.”
“Teufel nochmal!” Grauber exclaimed, now white with fright “Then, if they send other aircraft it is certain that we shall be spotted and bombed again.”
“The Gruppenführer does not like bombs,” announced Gregory, the sight of Grauber almost dithering with fear having temporarily restored his own nerve. “I was with him once in London when an air-raid siren went off by accident, and even that false alarm scared him out of his wits.”
The Kapitänleutnant gave him a swift sideglance, then replied to Grauber: “It will be more difficult to spot us than it was before, because we are now submerged; but there are only ten or twelve fathoms of water here so our chances of escaping detection are not very good. Also, I fear that they may send submarine chasers to co-operate with the aircraft.”
“How far are we from the shore?” asked Grauber.
“About a mile: not much more. I dare not go much further out from the coast or I may run into their minefield.”
“Get out the boat, then. I am going ashore.”
“But—but,” stammered the Kapitänleutnant, “the Herr Gruppenführer does not understand. To get out the boat I should have to surface—to lie still for ten minutes at the least. Other aircraft may arrive in the vicinity at any moment. What you ask would greatly increase the danger of our being spotted.”
Grauber shrugged. “I can’t help that. I must get ashore.”
“Nein!” cried the bearded sailor with sudden anger. “Das kann ich nicht machen! I refuse to unnecessarily endanger my ship and the lives of my crew.”
Quite slowly Grauber stood up. He was terrified of bombs but he was not afraid of any man living, and there had been times when he had even faced up to Himmler. Huge, gorilla-like and menacing, his effeminate streak lending him an added, unnatural sinisterness, he now stepped up to the U-boat commander. Shooting out a great hand he seized him by the lapel of his uniform and shook him.
“You!” he sneered, his falsetto rising to a squeak in his anger. “How dare you tell me what you will or will not do! I am of more value to the Führer than ten U-boats, and if your ship is sunk through putting me ashore it will have been lost while employed on an important duty. If you refuse to obey me and I survive I will have you flogged in front of your crew for mutiny and I will send every single member of your family to a concentration camp. Now, surface your ship and get out that boat.”
The Kapitänleutnant’s resistance collapsed like a pricked balloon. “Jawohl, Herr Gruppenführer,” he muttered. “I apologise for my outburst. I am not accustomed to having distinguished passengers, like yourself, on board. I realise now, of course, that your life is more important than the safety of the ship. But the Esthonian coast, here, is in the hands of the Russians. Will you not almost certainly be captured if you land?”
“No,” snapped Grauber. “I speak Russian fluently, and it would need much more than a lot of muzhiks playing at soldiers to capture me.”
“The prisoners? Do you wish to take them with you?”
Grauber cast a malevolent glance at Gregory and Stefan. “No,” he answered, with marked reluctance. “I couldn’t manage those two in a country infested with enemy soldiers. I must chance your being able to get them through for me. Confine them in your cells, and if you are forced to abandon ship on no account are you to release them. On the other hand, if you can bring them to a German controlled port, hand them over to the Gestapo, and I’ll see that you get a Knight’s Cross for it. Quick now; go and give your orders about that boat.”
“Jawohl, Herr Gruppenführer!”
As the Kapitänleutnant clicked his heels, Grauber added, “And send somebody to take charge of these two men.”
“Sofort!” rapped out the sailor, now endeavouring to live down his rash show of spirit by becoming once more an efficient automaton; and, turning, he hurried from the mess room.
Grauber hastily pulled on his furs, then glared again at the prisoners. “Having caught you at last, there are few things that I have ever hated to have to do so much as to leave you here.”
“Then take us with you,” urged Gregory, with a sudden wild hope that he might yet escape from these surroundings that caused such havoc to his nerves.
“Himmel! Is it likely? I have to make my way through the Russian lines, and before I could do that the two of you would find some way to murder me.”
Gregory felt prepared to agree to almost any terms if only it would enable him to get out once more into the open air.
“Let’s do a deal,” he cried. “You’re armed and we’re not. We’ll give you our parole not to harm you or attempt to escape until we sight the first German picket. With your pistol you’d still have the advantage of us and a good chance to bring us in.”
“Morte Dieu! you’ll go alone then,” said Kuporovitch gruffly. ‘I’ll be damned if I give him my parole.”
“You must, Stefan, you must! For God’s sake don’t refuse! I can’t leave you behind. You know I wouldn’t do that.”
“I wouldn’t accept it, anyhow,” Grauber said, after a second. “Once ashore you’d find a way to twist me somehow. Then I’d lose both you and the information you can give me. For me, to leave you here is a far better bet. Kapitänleutnant Bötticher is a skilful navigator. If his ship survives the next hour she will reach deep water, you will be delivered to me from a German port and I shall have lost nothing. If the submarine is sunk, well, you heard the order I gave him. You will go down with it, and at least be out of my way for good.”
As he had been speaking, the U-boat had tilted nose upwards. They heard the rush of waters cascading from her sides and knew that she had surfaced. A petty officer came hurrying in, saluted Grauber, and said:
“The Hen Kapitänleutnant says please to come at once, Herr Gruppenführer. The boat is now being got out.”
Without another glance at his prisoners, Grauber grabbed a small handbag from a rack, pushed past the P.O. and ran heavily down the passage.
“Kommen Sie mit!” said the petty officer, putting
a hand on the pistol at his waist, and signing to the others to precede him.
Gregory and Kuporovitch picked up their furs and followed Grauber down the narrow corridor. As they reached the main operations room, in the middle of the ship, they saw that the conning-tower hatch was open. The lights had been switched off, in order that no beam should strike upwards through the hatch towards the sky. Instead, a shaft of moonlight filtered down, silvering the tubes and crosspiece at the observation end of the periscope.
The P.O. hurried them along to the extreme after-part of the ship. Right in the stern he called to a rating and, at his order, the man pulled up a trapdoor in the steel flooring from which a foot wide iron ladder led down into the bowels of the vessel.
“No!” gasped Gregory, “No!” now almost overcome with terror at the thought of being shut up in that dark abyss.
As he drew back the petty officer kicked him from behind. This act of physical violence provoked his normal courage for an instant, and he swung round to strike the man.
Kuporovitch grabbed his arm, and muttered tersely: “Don’t be a fool. He’d only shoot you. While we have our lives we can always hope; and if it is ordained that we should die, what does it matter where we do so?”
“Thanks, Stefan,” Gregory breathed. The sweat was streaming down his face, but he had used that dictum so often himself that he could not now reject it. “All right, lead on then.”
At the bottom of the miniature companion-way there was another corridor even narrower than the one above, and so low that they could not stand upright in it. On one side of it stood a row of six cupboard-like steel doors, each having a row of slits for ventilation in the upper part of their panels. They were the cells in which refractory members of the U-boat’s crew were confined when necessary. The P.O. unlocked the two sternmost, pushed one of the prisoners into each, re-locked them and clattered away up the ladder.
The cells, like the passage, were too low to stand straight up in, and hardly more than upright coffins in which a man could only just turn round, but opposite the door in each there was a bench-like seat and on these the prisoners at once sat down.
Gregory sank his face into his hands and groaned. After a moment, Kuporovitch’s voice came to him, thin but clear, through the ventilators in the two doors. “Gregory, can you hear me?”
“Yes,” Gregory replied, starting up. “Let’s talk. Anything to take our minds off these ghastly surroundings.”
“They are pretty grim, aren’t they? No place to wash or lie down, and right next to the vessel’s screws. There! The engines have just started up again and these steel cells will now vibrate like this all night. Well, I suppose it’s a good deterrent for the submarine crews if insubordination means being confined in places like this.”
As the U-boat began to submerge, Gregory said: “That brute Grauber’s got off all right. I wish to God he’d taken us with him.”
“The dirty rat! Exposing the ship and crew to additional danger in order to get out himself. We wouldn’t have stood much chance if we’d gone with him, though. At least two sailors will have manned the boat that took him ashore and the Kapitänleutnant is not fool enough to have waited for them to get back. So we’d have been a party of five or more. They would have shot us for certain before they would have allowed us to fall into Soviet hands again, and when we reached the German lines we wouldn’t have been any better off than we were before.”
“I don’t agree. My brain simply refuses to function properly when I’m cooped up like this, but once I was on dry land I would have thought up some way of getting out of Grauber’s clutches. As it is, we don’t stand any chance at all.”
“I think you’re wrong there. You heard what Grauber said about the captain of this craft. He knows these waters well, and he must have had plenty of experience in evading aircraft and destroyers. I think the odds are that he’ll get us through. If he does we’ll have a much better chance of escape when we reach a port than if we’d gone ashore with Grauber and had the muzzle of his gun in our backs all the time.”
“Yes. If he gets us through. But we’re not much more than a dozen miles from Kronstadt yet, and he didn’t seem at all cheerful about his prospects himself.”
“You’re being too pessimistic,” Kuporovitch insisted. “The worst danger was when we surfaced to put Grauber off. As you say yourself, we’re still only about a dozen miles from Kronstadt, so other aircraft must have been up and searching for us by the time they got out that boat. Since they didn’t spot us then, the chances are now all in favour of our getting clean away.”
At that second, in flat contradiction of his optimism, the dull thump of another bomb shook the ship from stem to stern.
“Oh, God, they’ve found us!” gasped Gregory, springing up. “Now we’ll never get out of here alive.”
Chapter XV
Floating Coffin
“Hang on,” called Kuporovitch, “they haven’t got us yet.”
Gregory fell back on his hard seat and bit his lip.
The explosion had occurred at some distance and although the pressure waves had struck the hull a sharp blow, the U-boat was still forging full speed ahead. She now turned sharply, like a huge fish on a line feeling a hook in its jaws and dashing off in a new direction.
Kuporovitch was now sweating too, but he knew that he must try to keep Gregory’s courage up as well as his own, so he shouted:
“That’s the way! Our captain knows his stuff. I’ll bet he’s run the gauntlet a score of times before. He’s using evading tactics now. We’ll get away all right.”
There came a more distant explosion. For an instant they hoped that again the had been found only by a single aircraft, which had now let go doth its bombs; but a second later another followed, much nearer, making the vessel’s stern heave alarmingly. The prisoners were thrown sideways, hard against the walls of their cells. Thrusting out their arms as they were jerked back into their seats they sought to support themselves, while waiting breathlessly for the next shock.
It came, almost immediately. A loud boom rang right through the ship. She shuddered horribly, listed hard to port, then seemed to swing half round. Her engines stopped.
“This is it!” thought Gregory. “This is it! They’ve got her. That last one jammed her propellers or something, and she’s a sitting pigeon now. The next one will be a direct hit and the water will come rushing in. Oh, God! This is too awful!”
Two more explosions followed. After each the submarine rocked and vibrated wildly. As she regained an even keel they realised that she was still going slowly forward under her own way and that her nose was now pointed slightly downwards.
For a few moments nothing happened, then there came a very gentle bump and the U-boat stopped dead.
“We’ve grounded!” shouted Kuporovitch. “We’re on the bottom.”
“I know!” Gregory shouted back in a half-strangled voice.
A new terror had seized him now. He was convinced that the submarine had been put out of action, for although the near miss had not actually sunk them the frightful jolt from it must have damaged some vital part of her mechanism. Why, otherwise, had her engines stopped? She was stuck there on the bottom and would never rise to the surface again. Instead of the hull being burst open and his being killed instantly, crushed under a mass of compressed steel, or choking quickly as the water poured through some gaping rent in her side, he was now condemned to linger there for hours, or perhaps even days, gradually suffocating in the fume-laden air.
He knew that they were in quite shallow water, and that sunken submarines could be raised by means of camels and buoys; but the Russians were not the people to waste the time of their divers salvaging sunken German U-boats for the sake of rescuing their crews. If they bothered to salvage her at all it would be weeks hence at their own leisure; and by that time every soul in her would have long since been dead.
But no! In these days all under-sea craft were fitted with special escape hatches, through which
the crew could one by one be released, so that with their Davis apparatus they shot up to the surface. Probably they were getting out in that way now and the Russians in some torpedo-boat were hauling them up to the fresh air, life and safety. Yet, even if that were the case it could bring no hope to him. Grauber’s order had been clear enough. If the submarine was sunk the two prisoners were in no circumstances to be released, but left to drown in her.
His brain was racing with these nightmare thoughts. All that he had read of sunken submarines came back to him. He recalled the grim reports of the imprisoned sailors, tapping out messages in morse code on the hull, and of the divers outside answering. Of how the divers bored a hole through the steel plates and brought down a line to pump in air; but that sometimes the sea became so rough or the currents on the sea-bed so strong that the divers’ rescue operations were constantly checked; and that the tapping of the men inside the submarine grew fainter and more irregular, until it ceased. Yet he might tap and hammer until his strength gave out. There would never be any reply, because there would never be anyone there to hear him.
He wondered when the U-boat’s batteries would fail, and her lights go out. They had flickered wildly and gone off for a moment once or twice while the vessel was being buffeted by the underwater explosions, but for some moments now they had been steady again and a cheering glimmer coming through the ventilation slits from the electric bulbs in the passage lit the cell with a faint radiance. But long before he died the power would give out and his last hours would be passed in terrifying stygian blackness.
Darkness, cold and the reek of poison fumes would be his last sensations on earth. It was almost stifling now but when the generators ceased to function, down there on the sea bottom, the cold would be intense. His furs now lay on the floor at his feet. By putting them on he would be able to stave off the cold for a little, but that would not prevent him from dying, buried alive in that black, coffin-like pit.
Kuporovitch was very far from being happy but, not being a victim to claustrophobia, he had so far escaped the worst of these nightmare fears. He was extremely perturbed by the turn events had taken, but his mind was still clear, and ever since the engines had stopped he had been sitting almost rigid, listening with all his ears. Soon after they grounded he had heard three more distant explosions and felt the hull shudder faintly in response to each, but after that there had ensued the silence of the grave.
Come into my Parlour Page 31
