Elizabeth watched Feynman as he ran back toward the Tech Area fence. She didn’t know whether to feel like a savior or a traitor.
16
German U-Boat 415
May 1944
“It is the sad, terribly ironic truth… that toward the end most of them knew that their cause was lost. The heroism of the warrior, who is generally naive, young, honorable and incorruptible, can never make up for a bad cause.”
—Captain Edward L. Beach, U.S. Navy
“It is an awful responsibility which has come to us, and we thank God that it has come to us instead of to our enemies. We pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.”
—President Harry S. Truman
Captain Hans Werner gripped the iron rail on the edge of the deck, steadying himself though the sea remained calm. Wrapped in an old sheet, the corpse of First Watch Officer Tellmark looked like a shapeless blob of bread dough.
Two of the remaining men coughed; they appeared to be waiting for something. Werner realized he had said no eulogy yet, and he tried to concentrate, pulling his mind away from the agony in his body. In the past handful of days, he had exhausted all of the eulogies he could imagine.
“May the sea take this man and keep him. Let the currents carry him to a grand reunion with all the other brave submariners who have died in this miserable war. And may God have mercy on the rest of us.”
The other two men rolled the sheet-covered body off the edge of the deck. Tellmark made a deep, soft splash as he struck the water, then bobbed on the surface, slowly sinking. The knocking diesel engines carried the U-boat away from where the corpse disappeared.
Captain Werner had delivered sixteen similar eulogies in the past week. Another twenty of the crew lay deathly ill, retching and crapping blood into the bilges. The U-boat did not have enough bunks for them all—the men were supposed to alternate shifts, some sleeping while others worked. But out of his crew of fifty, only fourteen remained functional enough to perform their duties.
They were all dying, trapped in a metal drum the size of two railroad cars. Below, the air smelled with a fantastic stench of sickness and death.
By the time they had begun to chart their return journey across the Atlantic, away from New York harbor, the crew members all looked alike, smelled alike, acted alike. Being imprisoned in such close quarters for so long, many mannerisms, curses, and facial expressions had become identical. Each man’s individual habits became known intimately among the entire crew—how they snored, how they laughed, how they ate. They were a close team; only two had felt sick with what seemed to be a severe flu.
On previous voyages, Werner had enjoyed that supernatural rapport, that sharing of secrets no other human beings could understand. But now it worked against them, because the entire crew knew, to a man, that they were doomed. The sickness ran rampant in the great iron coffin of U-415.
Werner descended into the submarine, using each rung of the aluminum ladder. His trembling legs would not let him slide down to the deck plates as he had always done before. Inside the conning tower, three men shared a cigarette, keeping it protected from the breakers and spray that too often extinguished a smoke. The acrid smell of burning tobacco struck Werner as refreshing compared to the fetid air inside the boat.
He removed his white cap and found that clumps of his beautiful dark hair had stuck to the sweat inside. Werner had given his mother a lock of hair before departing on this voyage; she had pasted it in her keepsake book…. Most of the crew had patchy baldness, skin sores, nausea, and terrible dysentery.
His executive officer, Gormann, had been one of the first. Days before, Captain Werner had knelt beside Gormann’s bunk, whispering to him. Gray and clammy, the exec was surrounded by an awful smell. He looked as if he had been boiled alive in some caustic substance.
Gormann spoke, saying what Captain Werner himself feared. “It’s the Americans—one of their secret weapons. It is some kind of plague. They must have immunized all their own people, and now we have been infected. All of us breathed the air. How many have been struck down already? How many of the crew are as bad as me?”
Werner pressed his lips together. “Don’t worry. Rest now.”
“How many!”
“Eleven, so far. Many of the others are feeling sick. I myself seem to be feverish and ill.”
“As I thought.” Gormann let the silence hang for a long moment. Werner heard only the incessant banging of the engines, groans from sick men, and subdued conversation from the other crew members. The exec reached out a hand that clenched with spasms. “You cannot bring the boat back to Germany, Captain. You cannot bring the plague with you.”
Werner straightened. “What are you saying?”
“Do you want to do this to all of Europe? This way the Allies can wipe us out without spilling any of their own blood. It will make the Black Death look like a minor unpleasantness.”
Werner brushed Gormann’s remaining hair away from his sweat-glistening forehead. “Don’t think about that now. Just close your eyes.” The exec complied.
Werner tried to speak of something more pleasant to occupy Gormann’s thoughts. “Think about your Academy days—do you remember them? I went to the Naval Academy in Flensburg, had about six hundred in my class. After basic schooling, I went off for half a year on a small minesweeper, then rejoined my classmates by Christmas.” Werner sighed. “Already by that time four of my classmates had been killed in action. We were all nineteen. The rest of us were promoted to ensigns. Double-breasted blue uniforms—can you remember how it felt to wear one for the first time?”
Looking down, the captain saw a smile on Gormann’s face.
“When we finally got sent out on our first assignment, they packed us off in crowded train cars and made us ride through the night up to Kiel. Crammed in such a small space… I guess it was training for life aboard a U-boat, eh? We thought it would be just as Jules Verne described in his book, not like this.
“Remember all the silly things you were afraid of on your first voyage: Would your life preserver save you? How long would it take the boat to fill up with water if a depth charge cracked the hull? If you escaped from the boat at a depth of three hundred meters, could you make it to the surface before you drowned? The admiral spoke to us before we went to our boats. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘this day Germany expects every man to do his duty.’ We’ve done that, haven’t we?”
Gormann had fallen asleep, but his peaceful expression had lapsed into a half grimace.
Werner stood up, blinking fuzziness from his eyes. He held his stomach. He wished they could receive some word about what had happened to New York, if they had been successful with the rockets, or if they had sacrificed themselves for nothing.
The exec never woke again. By the next morning five other crewmembers had been incapacitated by the plague, including the radioman.
Werner himself tried to contact any nearby U-boat in the western Atlantic, but could get no response. As another day passed, he sensed the rest of the crew verging on panic. And he could do nothing to console them.
As U-415 worked its way back toward the home port, day and night, the crewmembers grew more lax in their observation. Much of the German submarine fleet had already been destroyed by Allied defenses, but the sea was still filled with enemy destroyers. Werner felt it was only a matter of time before someone spotted U-415.
He didn’t know anymore if that would be such a bad thing.
In his bunk, Werner woke from a feverish dream of his second season of vigorous training. Ice covered Pillau harbor with a layer a third of a meter thick; ice-breakers chugged back and forth to keep the channel clear for small boat traffic, for U-boats to come and go, for the exercise to take place. The training submarines went to sea and back, day and night, letting the cadets assume roles as captain or engineer. The seasoned instructors ordered crash dives, signaled emergency drills, caused accidents that the cadets would have to fix. Werner had perfor
med well, doing everything right, but no matter how perfect his actions, in his dream the U-boat kept sinking, and he couldn’t save his crew….
Dark hair clung to his comb when he tried to make himself presentable before pushing aside the green curtain that gave the captain’s space a little privacy.
He learned that two more men had died in the night.
The boat swayed in the uneasy sea, making the men groan. Some vomited into the bilges. Werner stood under the periscope, holding on, trying to determine his best course of action. He could barely take three steps without stumbling.
It made him smile for a moment. When submariners got into port, they always had a great deal of trouble walking—not just because of the drinking binges, but because they were not accustomed to walking on solid ground that didn’t sway beneath their feet. Now the whole world seemed to be swaying.
At the navigator’s table the captain tried to write a full entry in his log, but he could no longer remember how many of his men had succumbed to the plague. He wanted to document everything, tell each symptom, tell how long it had taken them to feel the effects.
Condensing moisture dripped from the overhead pipes, splashing on the table, making everything damp. His pencil would not write well in the logbook.
Werner couldn’t understand how the Americans had developed such a terrible weapon, and how they knew that the plague would not backfire on them.
It had to be the Americans, didn’t it? U-415 had brought nothing with it, only their three experimental rocket weapons from Peenemunde. He remembered touching the warhead end of the rockets, how warm and feverish it had felt. Surely the developers would have provided protection for the U-boat crew.
It had to be the Americans.
His unsteady hand made his handwriting illegible in the log, and he soon gave up, letting himself drift off into bleary reminiscing. How long had it been since he had fun, since he had been a carefree man who enjoyed life?
He recalled coming back to Brest, or Kiel, thinking fondly of the women ready to greet them—Suzette? Maryanne? No, Suzanne! That was her name. Making love with a desperation and a sense of abandon, focusing on ignoring everything but the next second. He tried not to let any feelings of romance intrude, because all the while he was on top of her, feeling her skin against his, listening to her whispers of passion—he knew that a different man had been inside her the night before, and she would not remember his name as she whispered the same noises in the ear of someone else tomorrow.
He would be death to Suzanne now. He could never go back. Only the ocean remained for him, and its cleansing depths.
Werner wanted to die in peace and silence. Another few days had passed, and he could take it no longer. He shut off the diesel engines himself. Together with the four still-functional men, he secured the hatches of U-415 and prepared to dive, tilting the submarine at an angle that would take her all the way to the bottom. He nudged the electric motors to their full speed of nineteen knots.
The boat held only an eerie silence of impending death. Werner turned to the men who had joined him. “Gentlemen, you are relieved of duty. Your service has been exemplary. “
One man slumped into a cross-legged position on the floor plates, as if duty had been the only thing that had kept him on his feet. Two others shuffled to their bunks to die with their eyes closed. One stocky man—Werner could no longer remember anyone’s name—chose to remain at the bridge.
“This day Germany expects every man to do his duty,” the admiral had said before Werner’s first voyage four infinite years before. He closed his eyes, trying to think of women, of birthdays, of his family. He wanted bright memories.
His fondest recollection was of the Hotel Beausejour after fifty days of patrol, and the ecstasy of shaving, of standing long under the pounding spray of a hot shower, breathing deep of the steamy, clean air, and then sprawling out on the shamelessly spacious bed with its crisp white sheets. He would miss that.
Blinking, he stumbled his way toward the rear of the boat, his boat. The floor tilted from the submarine’s descent, and the effort of climbing uphill exhausted him. But Werner hauled himself through the last hatch to the engine room, where the three torpedoes waited.
The engine compartment reeked of fuel oil and grease and smoke, but now the electric engines hummed, sucking power from the batteries, turning the screw that drove the boat downward. Werner stopped, reeling as the black gulf of unconsciousness swelled around him. Intentionally, he smashed his knuckles against a bulkhead, and the stinging pain snapped him back to awareness. Nausea threatened to cripple him, but he managed to force it down.
The three aft torpedoes waited in their tubes, and it took all his strength to open their hatches. Steel-gray arrows, they looked small and familiar compared to the red-and-black rockets he had fired at New York City. These gray weapons had been his companions. They had helped him sink dozens and dozens of enemy ships. He called on them to perform one more service.
“We must all do our duty for Germany, gentlemen,” Werner whispered to the first torpedo casing. “I know you are hungry for the hull of a British ship. I’m sorry I must keep you here. It is a difficult thing to ask.”
He set the timer for the scuttling charges on all three torpedoes, then made his way downhill back to the control room.
Werner wanted someone to shout the alarm one last time, to spot an oncoming destroyer after U-415 had sunk another supply ship. They would make a crash dive and slip to safety under the waves. All his crew would be back alive and working together.
The U-boat always slid into the invisible depths while they could hear the whir of approaching ships above. They would brace themselves, knowing a spread of eight or sixteen depth charges would come floating down, racing the descent of the boat. Asdic pulses would ping on the hull like hammers trying to break in. The shock waves of exploding depth charges would send the men reeling along the floor plates, searching the hull seams for any fresh leaks. Werner would order drastic course changes, trying to fool the enemy above with a meandering course.
Sometimes it took hours or even a full day before the destroyer above gave up looking for the great raft of air bubbles gushing to the surface that would signify the destruction of a submarine. But they always gave up, and Captain Werner and his U-415 always survived.
Those had been years of glory.
The boat continued to descend, deeper than it had ever gone. At a depth of four hundred meters the hull groaned and squeaked as the underwater pressure worked to crumple the steel shell. The bottom of the Atlantic remained a long way below.
The creaking sounds made Werner think of all the good men who had died at sea. Their ghosts swam in the depths too dark for any sunlight. Did his own fallen companions wait for him even now? He thought of them swimming outside the U-boat, shadowy and formless, with tattered uniforms, accompanying his submarine, escorting it to its final resting place.
The hull plates shrieked from the strain. Somewhere in the aft compartment a rivet popped free with the force of a bullet, pinging and ricocheting three times before it clattered into the bilges.
Werner could hardly breathe. The sounds of the outside depths and the humming of the electric motors seemed to be the whispers of dead men.
He didn’t know how long it would take for the pressure to destroy the boat—five hundred meters deep now, he saw—or if the scuttling charges would detonate first.
He would know in a moment.
17
Los Alamos
July 1944
“Hitler had sometimes spoken to me about the possibility of an atom bomb, but the idea quite obviously strained his intellectual capacity. He was unable to grasp the revolutionary nature of nuclear physics.”
—Albert Speer, Nazi Minister of Armaments
“It will not be a calamity if, when we get the answers to the uranium problem, they turn out negative from the military point of view, but if the answers are fantastically positive and we fail to get them fi
rst, the results for our country may well be tragic disaster. I feel strongly, therefore, that anyone who hesitates on a vigorous, all-out effort on uranium assumes a grave responsibility.”
—Ernest O. Lawrence
Elizabeth rolled over and tried not to disturb Graham Fox. He made no sound as she moved away from him. She patted her clothes in a pile on the wooden floor beside the bed, searching for the clunky watch she had bought at the PX. Holding it up in the moonlight, she squinted to see the time.
Two a.m. Sleep had escaped her for the last three hours, but it seemed later than that. Then she noticed the second hand had stopped. She had forgotten to wind the damned thing again. Elizabeth really missed her LCD digital watch. No telling what time it really was. At this rate she’d be dragging by morning, and probably wouldn’t be able to slip back into the women’s dormitory in time to get past Mrs. Canapelli.
She had had the nightmare again, recalling the film General Groves had shown about the New York disaster. As she had expected, another twenty thousand people had died from radiation exposure in the following month and a half, but the Germans had failed to strike again, sending everyone into panicked speculation.
She still saw the low-altitude footage of deserted streets, the little girl crying beside her dead mother. It seemed so unreal. She couldn’t believe what the Nazis had done. It was inhumane, something that she had never confronted on such a scale. These people played with radioactivity, but had no fear of its dangers.
At times like this she could understand why she had told Feynman about the implosion scheme. She still had not been able to admit that to Graham Fox. She didn’t know what he would think of her hypocrisy. He grew more resistant toward the Project work day by day.
Elizabeth tried to convince herself. Would the method really have been overlooked if she hadn’t brought it up? Somehow she doubted it—the theoreticians kept dabbling with new and exotic ideas, and sooner or later they would have had the inspiration.
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