The Keeper's Son

by Homer Hickam

  “Skipper,” Phimble said, “we got another kind of company. See that smoke? That there is a World War I, four-stack navy destroyer. Seeing her is like seeing a ghost. I didn’t know there was any still in service. If she’s here, maybe it means the fleet’s been let out of Norfolk.”

  Once read the destroyer’s light signal: “She’s the USS Piper, sir, and she’s telling us to heave to.”

  “The Piper. I know something about her,” Phimble said. “Kind of a hard-luck ship. She rammed a cruiser on her maiden voyage. Later, she ran aground. Some folks say she’s got a hoo-doo hex on her. I was sure they’d scrapped her and every last one of those old things.”

  “Those four-stackers might be old but they’re fast,” Josh said. “Thirty knots on a head of steam.”

  “She’s just a tin can,” Phimble replied, unimpressed.

  For a tin can, the four-stacker came down on them very businesslike, continuously blinking her signal. “Get those children below!” Josh barked when he saw the teenagers gawking at the destroyer. Millie coaxed them along with promises of biscuits and honey. A tarpaulin was thrown over the moth boat.

  The Piper was ugly, not a smooth line on her. Her wheelhouse was a box stuck in front of four huge vertical stacks, all blowing a foul black smoke. The greasy cloud from her oil-fired boilers streamed behind her like a black river in the sky. She was well armed, with three-inch guns, torpedoes, and multiple depth-charge racks. The designation on her sharp, gray bow was painted big, bold, and white: DD731.

  The men aboard the destroyer were lined up at the rail with few smiles amongst them. In fact, they looked positively grim. The Maudie Janes for the most part were grimly looking back at them, too, as if they were foreigners. There was a palpable tension between the crews. “Damned evil-looking thing,” Again said of the Piper. “Don’t like the look of her boys, neither.”

  “Navy sailors,” Ready said, “what the hell do they know?”

  “Hush up,” Phimble said. “I’ll tell you what they know. They know how to operate that big old ship, don’t think they don’t. You boys could take a few lessons, I’d warrant.”

  The Maudie Janes exchanged doubtful glances but chose not to argue with the bosun lest they get extra duty or a rash of drills.

  Several officers of the Piper came out of the wheelhouse and stood on the bridge. They were smartly turned out in blue winter coats. The senior amongst them turned out to be a Captain Dekalb, a stout man with piercing dark eyes and a bulldog jaw. “What boat are you?” he called, even though Ready had nearly worn out his arm signaling their designation.

  “We’re a Coast Guard eighty-three-footer, number eight three two two nine, sir,” Josh called over. “I’m Ensign Josh Thurlow. We operate out of Doakes Station on Killakeet.”

  “Where’s that?” Dekalb demanded. His officers registered surprise at his question, then pretended deafness.

  Josh pointed westward. “See that lighthouse, sir? That’s Killakeet.”

  Dekalb didn’t bother to look. “My orders are to patrol from Hatteras to Lookout. I’m also supposed to chase U-boats. Damn if that won’t be like hunting hornets all over the farm. I need a man who knows these waters. Send one across.”

  Josh and Phimble shared a glance. “For how long?” Josh asked.

  “Until I let him go,” the captain replied brusquely.

  Josh knew he had no choice, other than to make a run for it. Dekalb outranked him and didn’t look like a man who cared to debate an order. “Who do you think should go, Eureka?”

  “Maybe it should be me.” Phimble said. “If they try to shanghai me for too long, I’ll figure a way to jump ship.”

  “No, I need you,” Josh said. “Hell, I need all of you,” he said to the listening deck crew. After a few seconds of consideration, he said, “Once and Again, I’m going to send one of you because you know these waters backwards and forwards, considering all the fishing you’ve done up around Hatteras. You pick between you.”

  “I’ll do it, sir,” Again said before Once could answer. “I allus wondered what it would be like to be in the blue-water navy.”

  Josh walked Again to the stern where they could have some privacy. “Listen,” Josh said. “Don’t let them put you to work doing anything else other than piloting. They start giving you a hard time, you get word to me one way or the other and I’ll chase that old four-stacker down and get you off. In any case, I intend to tell them you can stay aboard for one week and that’s all.”

  “Sounds good to me, sir.”

  While Once prepared to paddle his brother across on the raft, Josh went back to conversing with Captain Dekalb. Josh suspected Dekalb was impatient because he yelled, “Hurry up, damn you!”

  “Captain, I’m going to send you over one of my best men,” Josh replied in a measured voice. “I would like to have him back in one week.”

  “And I told you you’ll get him back when I’m done with him,” Dekalb snapped. Then he said, “You haven’t heard about the Jacob Jones, have you?”

  “She’s another four-stacker,” Phimble advised Josh.

  “No, sir,” Josh replied. “I’m afraid we haven’t gotten much news down this way.”

  Dekalb gripped the rail of his bridge and his voice shook with outrage. “She was sunk off New Jersey, Mister Thurlow, by a U-boat. Of her crew of two hundred, only eleven men survived, which did not include her captain, a classmate of mine at Annapolis.” He clenched his bulldog jaw, then slapped his gloved hand down on the rail. “No, I wouldn’t call her sunk. She was smashed, swept aside like a paltry nuisance by some arrogant son of a bitch Nazi U-boat captain. I will take my revenge, sir, where I find it. And I will find it. Your man will help me in that cause.”

  “I’m powerfully sorry to hear about the Jacob Jones, sir,” Josh answered sympathetically. “We’ve had our losses, too. There have been eight freighters and tankers sunk not more than a few miles from this very spot. We even had a U-boat fire a torpedo at us.”

  “The Jacob Jones was a warship of the United States Navy, Ensign!” Dekalb roared. “Not a merchantman or some piss-pot Coast Guard boat!” He scowled at Josh, then barked. “Send your man over!”

  “One week,” Josh insisted. “One week or I’ll be coming after him.”

  “You’re impertinent, Mister Thurlow,” Captain Dekalb said. “We shall see what we shall see.” With that, he turned on his heel and went inside the wheelhouse.

  Josh saw Again off. “Remember what I told you. You stay on the bridge and advise the captain and the navigator. Keep them off the shoals as best you can. But don’t let them put you to any other kind of work. That’s a direct order from me to you. Got it?”

  “Got it, sir,” Again said resolutely, then climbed down into the raft and let Once paddle him across.

  “Enjoy the Big Bluewater Bum,” Phimble called after him, then said to Josh, “I don’t like this, Skipper. I see Captain Dekalb mad and scared, both at the same time. God only knows what he might do if he gets attacked.”

  Josh agreed. He stuck his head in the wheelhouse to talk to Stobs. “Stobs, make a signal to the Piper’s sparks. See if he’ll answer with something personal.”

  “Already done it,” Stobs said. “I asked him what his skipper was like. He answered in Morse. I wrote it down.”

  Josh read Stobs’s note: Vengeance is mine. I will repay.

  Josh handed the note to Phimble, who took a look, allowed a low whistle, then said, “He left off the ‘saith the Lord’ part.”

  “Saith Captain Dekalb, looks like,” Josh said. Then he thought of all the sailors who’d died aboard the Jacob Jones. “A big old bucket like that is one hell of a juicy target.”

  “You think she’s going to collect a torpedo, Skipper?” Stobs asked.

  “I don’t know, Stobs. But Mrs. Jackson will have my hide if anything happens to Again.”

  Later, when the Piper had disappeared beneath the horizon and the Maudie Jane was halfway back to Killakeet, Phimble took Josh a
side. “Skipper, about the moth boat, the way you almost passed out. You got to get over it. You and me, we don’t have time for anything but fighting this war right now.”

  Josh was taken aback by Phimble’s concern. Sure, he’d felt a bit woozy when he’d seen that little red boat right about where Jacob had been lost. But what did Phimble expect, that such a coincidence wouldn’t mean anything? Josh thought he’d handled it pretty well. “I’m doing my best,” he answered in a calm voice, though he got a little pink in the face. “Anyhow, I don’t reckon we’ll happen upon any more red moth boats out here.”

  Phimble wouldn’t let it go. “No sir, but it just ain’t right, you still getting torn apart this way. Let little Jacob rest. Go with Keeper Jack and put up that headstone and be done with it. You got to have your mind on your business, to keep all our boys safe.”

  Josh still didn’t see what the bosun was so concerned about but Phimble had rarely steered him wrong. “Maybe you’re right, Eureka,” he allowed. “You usually are.”

  Phimble was embarrassed by Josh’s response. “Now, sir,” he said to his friend and commander, “why don’t you figure out how we can catch us a submarine? If there’s anybody who could figure it out, it’d be you.”

  Josh gave Phimble’s suggestion some thought. “I’ve been kicking something around,” he said. “We might get court-martialed for it, but it might just work.”

  “Let’s hear it,” Phimble said. After Josh voiced his idea, the bosun grinned. “You are a devious man, Mister Thurlow.”

  Josh took it as a compliment.

  36

  It had been two of the most frustrating and degrading weeks of Krebs’s life. First, he’d let a woman chase him away from a small island, then he’d skulked out to deeper water to wait until Vogel or BdU made up their minds what they wanted him to do. Waiting was the only choice he had. The U-560 barely had enough fuel to get back across the Atlantic, its torpedoes were gone, and there were only enough eighty-eight shells to defend the boat in a scrape.

  During the day, Krebs kept the boat resting on the sand in about one hundred feet of water. Propeller sounds overhead never stopped as freighters and tankers continued churning back and forth without any idea that they were passing over a German U-boat and its thirty-two-man crew. Sharp, hollow thumps followed by the shriek of rending steel told of other U-boats attacking successfully in the area. Thunderclaps told of depth charges in reply. It was apparent some Americans were fighting back. But neither Pretch nor Harro on the sound-detection gear reported the huge gush of released air that would indicate a destroyed U-boat. The Unterseewaffe boys were still winning, but Krebs was no longer part of the battle. He just sat and waited.

  At night, he brought the boat up to air it out and let some of the boys get some time on the tower. The Killakeet Lighthouse flashed its signal, and moving lights marked individual ships running the gauntlet. Sometimes, there was an orange blaze marking the strike of a torpedo, followed by flames and smoke and the cries of dying men. Once, Krebs had been surprised to hear the whooping alarm of a warship. Moonlight showed a long, low ship with four stacks cutting rapidly through the water toward what appeared to be a torpedoed tanker. The Chief identified it as an old destroyer, built for duty during World War I.

  “But what’s she doing?” Krebs wondered. “Look at her. She goes south for a mile, then heads west, now she’s going back north.”

  Max had been studying the destroyer through the Zeiss glasses. “I see something like bedsprings on her mast. I think that’s radar, and unless I miss my guess, she’s running a search pattern with it. There must be something wrong with it or she’d have picked us up by now.”

  Krebs’s imagination was stirred by the sight of the old destroyer. What if he let her find him, perhaps even turn a light on to help? Most likely, based on her frantic movements, she would steam right at him, and alone as she was, Krebs could easily turn that into a fatal mistake. He would submerge at the last possible moment, let the destroyer pass overhead, too fast to drop her depth charges with any accuracy, and then he would rise and slam a torpedo in her stern. Since that was where she stored her depth charges, there wouldn’t even be a splinter of her left. It was an interesting thought but all theoretical, of course, since Krebs had no torpedoes. He had no choice but to watch the destroyer run her idiotic patterns and the tankers and freighters steam back and forth while he gritted his teeth in frustration.

  Nearly everyone aboard had managed to catch a cold. Krebs had one, too. During the day, the U-560 sat on the bottom in the tropical wash of the Gulf Stream with most of the crew coughing, wheezing, and sneezing in a miserable chorus. The temperature rose inside the submarine throughout the day. If anyone tried to nap, he had to lie in a puddle of his own sweat. At night, when Krebs brought the boat up and threw open the hatch, a cloud of fetid, human-derived steam escaped. Cold air flushed through the interior, chilling the sweaty men. Since there was no fresh water for laundry, clothing was washed in the ocean by putting it in a net bag and tossing it overboard at the end of a line. The bag was then pulled the length of the U-boat by a crewman designated the laundry officer for the day. A “two-pull” wash—that is, walking the bag from the stern to the bow and back again—was used to get the sweat and general grime out of a shirt. Pants and underwear took a “four-pull.” The clothes, still wet, were returned to their owners. Since there was no way to dry them, they remained damp. Most of the men broke out in rashes and sores. Krebs considered the misery and ordered a ration of beer for everyone.

  Pretch and Harro started tuning their radios to American broadcasts when the U-560 was surfaced at night. The Big Band sound reverberated throughout the boat when they put the music over the internal speakers. They also started listening to the short-range-radio voice communications of what was probably the patrol boat that had nearly rammed them and then dueled with them around the sinking freighter. The shore radio was being manned by someone who called himself “Glendale” and sometimes “Chief.” He always called the patrol boat Maudie Jane, the name that had been stenciled on the bow of the boat. Every night, Pretch and Harro, both of whom were better than fair with their English, wrote down what they heard and sent it to Krebs. One of the messages from Glendale seemed good news:

  TELL ENSIGN THURLOW (SPELLING?) CONGRATS FOR GETTING HIS LIEUTENANT’S BAR. JUNIOR GRADE BUT WHAT THE HELL.

  From the radio traffic, Krebs was starting to get a picture of the foe he faced, this Lieutenant Thurlow. Most likely he knew these waters as well as Krebs knew those off Nebelsee. He also was apparently a good ship-handler. Probably, he had been the big man in officer’s khakis who had shot at the U-560 with the rifle. Once again, Krebs wished he’d sunk the patrol boat when he’d had the chance.

  Sometimes, during the interminable hours waiting on the bottom of the ocean, Krebs imagined what he might do to sink a U-boat if he were Lieutenant Thurlow. To do it, he would have to conjure a way to lure one into a patch of the ocean where it was too shallow to dive and maneuver. Krebs gave it a great deal of thought, imagining how it might be done, but finally concluded the U-boats had too many cards for a small patrol boat to do much. There were so many targets, a U-boat could simply choose to hide while an American warship, including the little patrol boat, was around. Although it was an interesting mental exercise, Krebs concluded that all Thurlow could do was what he was doing, going out to the sinking ships, picking up the dead and the wounded, and carrying them to shore. He imagined how frustrated the American must be, nearly as frustrated as Krebs.

  Every other night or so, a message from BdU was received that said essentially the same thing: The U-560 should remain off the American coast and be prepared to follow Kapitän Vogel’s orders. Krebs knew the messages quickly filtered throughout the boat. He supposed his crew wondered why he didn’t try to get the orders changed so they could head back for France. After all, wasn’t he the famous commander with the sure touch? No, I’m not, Krebs thought wearily. Not anymore. He recalled a U
-boat captain who had signaled Doenitz that he was mentally ill and had handed over his command to his executive officer. Krebs astonished himself by thinking maybe he ought to do the same thing. He went to Pretch and asked for sleeping pills. He got them but could never quite bring himself to take one.

  Sometimes, he’d lift Miriam’s cross from beneath his shirt and just stare at it, trying to read in its design her mind. He had written Father Josef asking if he knew the significance of the amber pieces and the gem in its center. But mail from Germany was slow and no answer had come before the U-560 headed across the Atlantic.

  With so much time to think, Krebs began to wonder if perhaps he was getting religious. He tried a prayer and found himself asking God to provide him with more torpedoes. He could imagine Miriam laughing into her hands at the idiocy of such a prayer. I have gone insane, he concluded. Then, after he thought about it, he changed his opinion. I have been insane and now I’m sane. He preferred the former state.

  The days dragged on. Another way to pass the time was to simply talk. Everyone on board talked and talked and then talked some more, and Krebs and Max were no exception. Usually they went up in the tower control room to have lunch, the standard fare of boiled sausage, bread hard as rocks, and a short beer, and there they would have their conversations. Eventually, since there was time to do it, Krebs went ahead and told Max everything, how he’d adopted the lie of being an aristocrat for his own purposes to spite those who had made fun of him for being raised in an orphanage. He also told him of Father Josef, and sweet, lost Miriam, and how it was that Harro had come to be a member of the U-560’s crew.

  Max, for his part, was not much surprised. Krebs had never had the lack of imagination he associated with a Junker. He’d seen them strutting around his father-in-law’s shoe shop, demanding service, using High German when they talked amongst themselves, laughing up their sleeves at others. They might have money but they were generally dull.