Black Chamber

by S. M. Stirling

  “Our bearing is within the parameters set for the mission,” Denke said formally. “Deploy anchors!”

  More levers were pulled. There was a muted clang from behind them, and a whirring sound.

  “Stern anchor deployed.”

  Another, the same sound but much fainter, from the distant bows, and then again.

  “Bow anchors deployed.”

  Denke stood, grinning at his crew: “Men,” he said ceremoniously. “We’ve done it!”

  No, you haven’t, Luz thought. Not yet.

  SEVENTEEN

  Boston Harbor, Massachusetts

  United States of America

  SEPTEMBER 24TH, 1916(B)

  Luz tucked the little Browning pistol into the pocket of her leather coat. Then she put her hand into the one in her gray German naval trousers and touched the navaja, feeling the steel and brass and bone beneath her fingertips.

  When she did that she could hear old Pedro’s voice. Not speaking words of sympathy, but in cold command when he finally told her she had mastered all the technique he could teach her:

  That is an ass in the skin of a lion without this, he had said.

  He’d thumped his fist over his heart and reached out a finger to touch the air over hers.

  As a navajera you must fight with the cunning of the Moor, the passion of the flamenco, and the courage of a matador facing the bull. Should any of these be lacking, you will not be in control of the outcome. Then you should throw your sevillana away, or give it to someone who will use it properly. But if you have them, then you are like the wise in much, and like God in everything, and you will be the victor whether you live or die.

  “Gracias, Abuelo Cabo,” she whispered to a memory, in the language they had shared, feeling her body washed clean, a fire like liquid steel flowing through its veins. “You were as one of my own blood to me, and I will not dishonor your teaching or your trust. I will give you pride in your granddaughter.”

  Ciara looked at her; there were dark circles under her eyes. She was inexperienced at this work, but far too intelligent not to know that they had a better-than-even chance of dying in the next few hours. The only way they could have a better-than-even chance of survival would be to go along with the German plan; that would find them a hundred miles away or better by the launch time.

  And neither of us will do that, Luz thought. Or even consider it.

  Ciara swallowed and leaned closer. “Luz . . . I—”

  Luz smiled and laid a finger on her lips and spoke softly: “Ciara Whelan, I’m glad you’re with me.”

  “I’m so glad I met you, Luz,” Ciara said; even now, and with some distance between them and any of the U-150’s crew she remembered not to use the full real name. “Even . . . well, even now. And I’m very glad it’s you beside me.”

  They walked forward from the little galley. “And we never have to use that maloliente head again,” Luz said thankfully, as they passed it.

  That startled a giggle out of Ciara as they came back into the crew’s bunking compartment. It was far more open now; all the bunks and their frames had been disassembled and stacked elsewhere, which made it merely rather crowded with half the crew in it; the rest were back down the corridor to the control room, or in it.

  Horst looked up from the Thompson machine-carbine he was checking over and glanced between the two women, raising a brow at Ciara’s little laugh. Luz gave him a thumbs-up sign, and he nodded, thinking that she was confident of keeping Ciara up to the mark for the task the Germans had set her. Right now she was angry enough—it was a cold rage—that she didn’t regret deceiving him in the slightest. There wasn’t much of morality or indignation in her anger; she’d killed for her country too, and sometimes in cold blood, though not on anything like the scale he was attempting. What she felt was the pure animal bloodlust of a she-wolf at having a rival pack step over the scent-marked boundary, toward the den and the cubs and the game that fed them, threatening the bond of blood between the generations.

  No stranger on our tribe’s land! Kill!

  Horst nodded again and handed her the weapon and the webbing belt that went with it, with the carriers for another two of the fifty-round drums. Kapitänleutnant Denke looked at him in surprise as Luz reflectively checked the weapon over, made sure there was no cartridge in the chamber and that both safeties were engaged. The very first model of this thing had had an unfortunate tendency to fire if dropped—and sometimes to jump around like a piñata under the sticks firing all fifty rounds, if dropped.

  “Herr Kapitänleutnant, how many men have you killed? Personally and on dry land, with bullet and grenade and knife?” Horst asked.

  The sailor’s brows went up. “At least hundreds at sea, none on land,” he said promptly. “We all had that training course before this mission from those Stoßtruppen but I’m not in the infantry.”

  “Not until we get ashore; then you are. If there’s fighting, you won’t be doing it like a gentleman at several kilometers’ distance.”

  Horst grinned, not an unfriendly expression but a savage one. “And with my own eyes I have seen Elisa kill about . . . six Frenchmen, wasn’t it, Fräulein? All armed and fighting back.”

  Luz took the weapon in the crook of her left arm. It weighed about nine pounds loaded, and the feeling was very familiar indeed, along with the oily metallic-chemical smell. She didn’t know if the Germans had acquired it through back channels or made this copy in their own shops—there were Springfield Armory marks and the serial number 9772 on the receiver, but those could be copied too.

  “Six or seven, depending on whether they all died after I shot them or blew them up and they fell down,” she said indifferently. “We were too busy to check, after those first few in the hotel, as I recall.”

  “That was not your first time dancing at the ball, either, eh? It didn’t look that way to me!”

  Luz smiled in a way that made the U-boat captain blink. The expression showed her white even teeth, at least.

  “¡No, por Dios!” she said, which had the advantage of being quite true. “But I don’t keep count. You do what you must. Only bandolero idiots waste time carving notches on perfectly good revolvers.”

  Denke laughed. “I take your point, Hauptmann von Dückler. If the women of Mexico are like the Fräulein, how did the Yankees ever conquer the men?”

  And you probably think that is a compliment, Luz thought, and did not visibly roll her eyes. Though to be fair, a lot of people would take it so. Elisa Carmody might.

  “They had superior numbers and better weapons,” she said dryly. “And we were divided.”

  That too had the virtue of being true, if you threw in better organization as well. Mexicans in her experience were mostly extremely brave, often suicidally so, and sometimes very skilled, determined, clever, and tricky-dangerous fighters individually or in small groups. But organization wasn’t their strong point. By the time the Intervention started there had been somewhere between three and seven distinct armed factions fighting it out down there over the ruins of old Don Porfirio’s dictatorship, the number depending on how seriously you took their mutual alliances.

  While they were fighting the flood of invading gringos they’d gone right on killing each other, too. As Díaz himself had said: Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States.

  “Oh,” she said, raising her voice slightly. “Would everyone please, bitte schön, pretty please, check the safety on their weapon again? An accidental discharge in here would get this whole day off to a bad start.”

  There were chuckles, but they checked, and one swore and corrected a potentially fatal mistake. Like any habit, that got more secure with practice. More weapons were handed out; the three Lewis light machine guns she’d noticed on the conning tower in Wilhelmshaven, another half-dozen Thompsons, the ugly angular shapes of Browning’s self-loading rifles, and .4
5 automatics. There were also a scattering of brass knuckles and trench knives. They weren’t going to put themselves wholly in the hands of their local allies—which showed solid good sense.

  So did using American weapons. Someone who caught a glimpse would wonder what the auto rifles and Thompsons and brand-new .45 pistols were doing in the hands of civilians. If they were casual enough it might be written off as National Guardsmen or reservists on their way back from maneuvers—they kept their personal weapon at home with their uniform, their boots, and nowadays the steel helmet. But they wouldn’t be waving something that shouted Germany to anyone with eyes to see. Too many interested men knew exactly what a Mauser rifle looked like, and Boy Scouts . . . and for that matter Girl Scouts . . . got badges for weapons recognition tests.

  “I wish our men had something like this,” Horst said, clicking a twenty-round box magazine into his Colt-Browning rifle. “We’ve got something as good designed and tested and in limited production, but the factories are too busy turning out Gewehr 98s to mass-produce new models.”

  “You are a true warrior, Horst,” Luz said lightly. “Worrying about that and not whether we drown now.”

  Then he passed around something else: rolls of Indian Head ten-dollar gold pieces, along with bills and smaller change. There was laughter then, and mock-innocent questions about the cost of beer in America.

  With all the interior gear out of the way, you could see that there was another hatch in the ceiling of the compartment, one of the massive ones that cut through the pressure hull. Various pieces of complex equipment surrounded it. Luz looked at them with mixed feelings. Ciara twitched beside her as she looked in the same direction. Luz knew enough about submarines to know that every time you put a hole in the thick steel that held out the sea you added another potentially fatal point failure source. Evidently Ciara knew more—or just felt it more directly, because technicalese was a language that spoke immediately to her soul.

  “Nonsense, Fräulein,” Denke said as he watched one of his crewmen put a foot in the cupped hands of another. “In the tests, this device worked over ninety percent of the time! Of course, those tests weren’t after a real voyage and after being depth-charged.”

  “A pity we didn’t have time to refine it until it always works,” Horst agreed. “It would be a great pity to die a statistically insignificant death.”

  Some of the crew joined in the officers’ laughter—since they were standing right there to share the common fate they had a right to joke. And would even be admired for it, among a crew of the sort who volunteered to go from dangerous duty to something even more so. Others were staring silently, and some were crossing themselves or otherwise praying. The man lifted his partner as he stood upright, and the second reached up and disengaged a locking pin that secured a long lever set into the roof of the compartment. This was the section of hull below the sloped metal faring ahead of the conning tower. That should have protected the mechanisms through the battering U-150 had taken from the American depth charges.

  Operative word is should have, I think, ran through Luz’s mind.

  He put both hands on the grooved narrower end and looked down.

  “Do it, Dieter,” Denke said, his voice firm but flat.

  The man who’d been holding Dieter up stepped back, and he brought the lever down as he dropped back to the deck. For a long moment nothing happened . . .

  Bang!

  The hull rang like a gong. Hissing, rumbling, clanking sounds followed. Then they dwindled, and after a few minutes there was silence again.

  Denke spoke again: “Open it.”

  The tension built once more, but the crewman and his partner repeated their motion, until the one lifted—who was thin, but had big hands and thick wrists—was grasping the undogging wheel of the round hatch. He was whispering something; other voices took it up, and she recognized the Lutheran Bible’s version of Psalm 20:

  Now I know that the Lord saves His anointed;

  He will answer him from His holy heaven

  With the saving might of His right hand.

  Some trust in chariots and some in horses,

  Yet we trust in the name of the Lord our God.

  They collapse and fall,

  Yet we rise and stand upright.

  O Lord, save our king!

  So may He answer us when we call.

  “Amen!” Dieter said, and twisted strongly at the wheel.

  It resisted for a moment, then spun faster and faster. Then the hatchway slammed downward, and a massive slug of seawater struck him in the face. He shouted as he toppled backward under the impact, and hands caught him; there were more shouts, some that were really screams . . .

  . . . dying off suddenly and sheepishly as no more water followed the first. Instead a metal-link ladder fell out of the dark hole above them, accompanied by the sort of dribble a small garden hose would produce.

  “If you birds are through singing,” Obersteuermann Göttsch said with heavy sarcasm, “then let’s get going.”

  “I am first,” Horst said; it was his duty, since he’d be in command ashore. “Then Fräulein Whelan, Fräulein Carmody—”

  Who as far as he knew were his local liaisons and needed to be above for the plan to go forward.

  “—and then the crew. Orderly but quick now, men!”

  The two specialists stuck their heads through from the control room. “The Loki firing control mechanism is still working perfectly, skipper,” one called. “We’ll be the last through from here and dog the hatch.”

  Horst slung the rifle down his back; Luz did likewise with her Thompson.

  Denke called: “Before we go, men, say good-bye to U-150. The lady got us here alive, and now she’s ready for the Fatherland!”

  The men murmured, many of them touching a hand to their lips and then reaching to press it to part of the U-boat. Horst did the same—he had very good manners, in his way—then grasped the metal ladder and swarmed upward with a parting:

  “And douse the lights down here—we don’t want to attract attention when I pop the lid at the top!”

  Most of the lights died, leaving only a single orange bulb glowing, and a little scatter of light from the control chamber. Horst vanished, and Ciara put her hands on the rungs with Luz standing beside her.

  “Don’t worry, querida, I’m right behind you,” Luz said quietly; the Boston girl was fit, but she hadn’t trained as a runner or climber. “If you fall, I’ll catch you. Don’t try to hurry, just do it a rung at a time. Climb with your feet and legs, steady yourself with your arms.”

  “I won’t fall, but sure, thanks for the offer!” Ciara said stoutly and began to climb.

  Luz followed, and the escape tube closed about her, dark and cramped and smelling of seawater and rubber, the weapon on her back bumping against the other side with every rung. Most of it was thick rubber, a tube with a mesh of flexible steel wire in it, and a thicker steel ring every meter. It had lain tightly packed into collapsed form for the voyage. The lever had triggered mechanisms that shoved aside the fairing that had covered it and blown compressed air into it and much more into the three big inflatable rubber boats fastened to the top of the tube. Their ascent had dragged the tube upward . . .

  It was one of those brilliant ideas that didn’t necessarily take into account things like the rubber fabric working during the trip against the metal reinforcement that would keep it open against pressure when it was extended. And it was a rush job, without enough time to work out all the bugs. Little jets . . . and one or two not-very-little jets . . . of cold smelly harbor water struck her as she climbed the rungs made by loops of the steel rings protruding into the tunnel. And it was moving and flexing, rising and falling and swaying as the currents and tides in the water twisted it.

  Ciara didn’t climb nearly as fast as Luz would have, and the sound of her breath grew lou
d in the confined space. Once her booted foot slipped; Luz caught it on her shoulder and put a hand on it, guiding the sole back to the next rung.

  “Sorry,” Ciara said.

  “Steady, steady does it,” Luz replied.

  The tube sagged and twisted still more as the rest of the U-150’s crew climbed; someone was feeding them in at carefully controlled intervals, though, and subdued whispers kept them properly spaced except once or twice when someone’s head bumped her feet. As she neared the top the contrast between the gusts of clean air from above and the fetid reek from the submarine almost made her gag even then.

  And I smell no sweeter, she thought.

  More light came from above as Horst cut loose the top cover. It was bright to her dark-adapted eyes, but really nothing but stars and the reflected glow from the city’s late-night illumination. There was a cheerful “Here, Fräulein,” and a squeak as Horst grabbed Ciara by the back of her jacket and effortlessly lifted her into the nearest of the boats.

  If I had a couple of grenades . . . Luz thought.

  Then she could just pull the pins in the darkness, drop them as she got out, cut Horst down with a burst from the Thompson, and row off to greet the harbor patrol. Horst did have some grenades and had kept them to himself, which might or might not be simply because he could throw them farther and more accurately.

  She could shoot him, get them, drop them down the tunnel . . .

  No. Too risky, she thought regretfully as she rolled into the boat alongside them.

  “Up to the bow,” she said to Ciara, her voice sounding odd in her own ears now that it wasn’t confined by a metal tube. “This is going to be bumpy.”

  She absolutely could not risk a firefight here, not if there was the slightest chance of losing it or even of it going on for more than a moment. Her life didn’t mean all that much—not in the greater scheme of things—but getting the data tucked into her brassiere to the Black Chamber and the Navy meant everything in the world.