The Boat Runner

by Devin Murphy

  “I hate dogs,” Pauwel said.

  “Why, look at this guy, he’s friendly.” The dog had flipped on its back and clawed the air to get me to pet its stomach.

  “I never told you my dog story?” Pauwel asked.

  “No.”

  “When I was a boy, before we went to camp together, my father had this hunting dog he loved, a big rough springer mix. He wanted to have this dog forever, so he got a female for them to have puppies. When the dog gave birth, she kept sitting on the puppies like a chicken and suffocating them. We tried to keep her away from them, and had to stand guard while the puppies nursed. When it was my turn to watch in the garage, I lay down next to the little nest we made them and put my head on a big sack of fresh sawdust and fell asleep. When I woke, the mom was sitting on the last of the pups. A little paw stuck out from under her. The four other pups were all motionless on the ground. I stayed there for a long time before someone came and checked on me. They found me staring at that dog sitting on its dead pup beside the other dead ones.

  “‘Did you just keep watch?’ my father had asked, looking at me like I was ill in the head. I’ll carry that look like a disease the rest of my life. It’s a shame I’ll always feel.”

  I didn’t say anything to Pauwel then, but his story left a deep impression on me. Not the story of the dogs, exactly, but how he could speak openly about something that made him feel low and weak. His story was a gift to me, a model for release I knew I’d someday need to follow.

  During training Major Oldif kept telling my troop that they had special missions for us. We kept practicing steering a straight course under known conditions and with difficulties, overcoming trim-distribution problems, which eventually led to diving maneuvers. Once we had demonstrated the basics of those operations, we took a basic course in hands-on underwater maneuvering.

  At dinner, Pauwel and I shared what we learned and ate mush and potatoes. Pauwel had been on the same track, but with the prior recruit class. He was also told there was some special mission awaiting them.

  In the morning, general boat knowledge training began with technical motor and engine skills. We started with training diagrams, and charts, then by lunch moved on to cutaway models, and by dinner we worked in a factory on full engines, which we were tasked with diagnosing and repairing. At the far end of the factory, laborers were working with sheet metal at drill presses, engine lathes, milling machines, and grinding wheels.

  The next day we studied navigational charts, currents, and then tide charts for the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. Each map was similar to Uncle Martin’s except larger, and less creased.

  “We will make several runs in these ships, then you will all be transferred to a naval base in La Rochelle, France.”

  We had a few-hour course in ship identification, simple navigation, and the absolute basics in training for meteorology, astronomical navigation, and flag and light signaling. The information was thrown repeatedly at us as we were needed; every last body was needed for something.

  “My head is going to explode,” Pauwel told me. He didn’t often talk about details from home life, nor did we talk about our early camp days. We discussed what we had learned and tried to help each other through all the information. We rehashed the language we had been fed in the classes, speaking of enemy warships and merchant marine vessels by acronym names and based on tonnage. The language was cold. It was all the operational terms that dealt with machinery, and that is how we thought of it, as we went through a flip chart to identify the kinds of ships at sea and the flags they flew. It was all only metal—all machinery—nothing animate.

  On the morning of February 24, Pauwel’s and my entire cadet classes transferred by bus farther north of Kiel, to a small port camp along the water.

  Us ensigns marched off the buses into the port compound. The tents had mesh over them, and anything that could let out light was blacked out or had a cover over it so it could go dark in case of air raids. We marched into a small meeting tent, where we waited for further instructions. We sat in silence for several moments until Major Oldif came and stood in front of us.

  “It is because of your extra efforts and abilities that you have been selected for this assignment. We are about to launch a new weapon that you will each be in charge of. You are bestowed with the opportunity to turn the tide of the war at sea.” He held up his pointer finger and tapped it into the dent at his temple. Then he nodded to several soldiers who had come into the tent with him. Each soldier had a box and started handing out folders from the box to everyone sitting down. Inside my folder was a diagram of a miniature submarine.

  “What you have in front of you is the layout of our new model of midget submarine, the ‘Negro.’ They are one-person vessels capable of delivering one torpedo strike, and you will be our first wave of captains.”

  Major Oldif went through the folder with us. Then he walked us all across the compound to a warehouse. Inside there were several Negro subs propped up on large cast-iron sawhorses. For the rest of the day, engineers described the subs, their purpose, and their capabilities.

  The following morning we met at the pier where groups of five were assigned to work with one of the subs, which was already in the water. The Negro sub was nicknamed “Human Torpedo,” and was nine meters long, displaced five tons of water, and had both an electric motor and a gas engine that gave it a top speed of twelve knots. The entire thing was the same shape and size of the torpedo latched underneath it. The only visible difference between the two was the glass dome of the cockpit. In the cockpit of the sub, the waterline was at my shoulders, and the glass cover over my head was tinted black to decrease the reflection.

  “Grab that seat with your asshole,” one of the engineers told me, “and focus on these controls and gauges here.”

  Space onboard was limited to the basic equipment: a tiny cockpit, the life support systems, fuel, the propulsion system and the equipment needed to run it. When it was my turn to take the Negro out for my first pilot run in the harbor, it was uncomfortable being in such a confined space. My legs were too long. They were growing into my father’s legs. The iron walls adjusting to the pressure of the water let out soft groans that rose up through my bones. My knees barely slipped under the steering column, but there was enough room behind the seat for extra gear. The tube felt like a coffin that was ready to be pounded into the ground or to sink to the sea floor, holding me there until nothing of who I was remained. By the end of the first full run of test trips, many of the crew got sick from the waves and vomited in the bilges. The hatches couldn’t be conveniently opened while under way at sea so they had to steer with their own foul odor doubling their nausea. On the third day, one of the Negro subs floated out of the harbor and by the time it was towed back to shore the ensign inside was dead. It wasn’t until later that night that the engineers figured out carbon monoxide poisoning had caused the drowsiness and nausea and the death of the lone sailor.

  “I hate those things,” Pauwel whispered across the dinner table to me. “I’m claustrophobic in them, and the visibility is shit. I feel like a lab rat.”

  At the end of the first week of training with the midget subs, our forty-nine-member crew was put on a low-fiber diet and issued food tablets for twenty-four hours and then energy tablets for the duration of our time before shipping out, to prevent us from needing to use the bathroom on our deployments.

  “Due to lack of toilet facilities, a regular diet would cause you extreme discomfort,” Major Oldif told us.

  As the major gave us our first orders, Pauwel leaned over to me with the diet pills in his hand and whispered, “Do you feel like a rat now?”

  16

  In the mini-submarine at night, skirting along the black edge of the world, the thinnest cloud covering created a perfect inky darkness that rolled in and away with the waves. I forgot about my old life. Being in the submarine, it was as if I had no past. My life simply started as a sailor, and that sufficed. In the open water d
uring training exercises, I thought about throttle levers and current strengths, and never about what life was like before coming to Kiel. Being on the water was an empty slate.

  When my fuel levels and time chart told me it was time to return to the base at Kiel, I turned the Negro back to shore. At the base, the Negros sat moored side by side along the pier, like giant cast-iron water slugs.

  Major Oldif’s fierce eyes moved from the boats to me walking down the pier. His pupils seemed to grow and his brow furrowed. He put his head down and read something on his clipboard and walked toward me, moving to the dock as if feeling his way with a pair of antennae.

  “Ensign Koopman,” he said, “your training run went well?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. You keep this up and you may be a credit to the Dutch.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Another Negro was docking, and after the sailors roped it off, I saw it was Pauwel’s sub.

  “It’s hotter than a snake’s asshole in here,” Pauwel said from the seat of his boat. He was coated in sweat and his face was drained of color, but he bit off a short smile and pushed the glass dome open higher so he could get out.

  “Good god, I hate that thing,” he said to me as we walked down the pier. “Those are going to be the end of us.”

  After our training exercises, which consisted of taking our subs out for a cruise of the harbor where we stayed on the surface, and then another that included a brief submersion, the Negros were loaded onto a battleship by a flat crane mounted on a hopper barge. Major Oldif had given us our orders.

  “Our entire unit will load the ship on March fourteenth. We will sail for two days beyond the German naval blockade to the open Atlantic. There you will be released to hunt for live targets.”

  During that two-day cruise I saw what Uncle Martin had been talking about with the heavy traffic of German naval ships arching across the ocean, sealing in most of northern Europe.

  We were allowed out on deck at night while the ship was sailing with all its running lights off. No one was allowed to smoke on the decks at night. Almost every hour planes could be heard crossing overhead. Both British B-17 and Grumman P-65’s, and German Ju 88s and Dornier Do 177s lobbed bombs at one another. Then came the lone whine of long-range Messerschmitt reconnaissance planes thrumming through the dark sky. On March 16, when the battleship we were on was due south of Iceland, we were given our orders by Major Oldif. Each Negro pilot was to push off from the ship in his assigned direction and engage any Allied vessel, either navy or merchant. The battleship would do a wide circle, dropping off Negro subs at a prearranged dot on the ocean map close to shipping lanes. Each sub would sail from its drop-off point and return to that spot twenty hours later, where the battleship would collect it on its second circle.

  “Timing and precision will be the measure of success for this mission,” Major Oldif said. “This mission is part of a large-scale Atlantic attack force beginning tonight. Do your country and your Führer proud.”

  With that we were ushered to the holding bay. Pauwel drummed at his hips with his open hands, hammering out some wild beat. When he shook my hand, his eyes were wide with fear of the unknown and he said, “I hope to see you again.”

  Seven subs launched from the cargo bay door of the battleship before Pauwel went. Ten more subs deployed before it was my turn.

  “Ready, Dutchman?” Major Oldif asked.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. The sailors around my sub closed the glass cockpit case, clicked it shut, and looked down at me through the little half-bubble. One of the sailors held up his hand to me with his fingers splayed. Then he tucked in his thumb, then his pointer finger, and then the next until his pinkie wrapped into his fist, and with that they pushed my Negro down a sliding ramp out the cargo hold into the sea.

  The nose submerged and then scooped upward to right itself. The small chop of the waves rolled the Negro from side to side, until I hit the ignition and the hum of the motor growled to life. The engine rattled the whole sub and the torpedo connected beneath. A wave from the wake of the battleship rolled over the glass and the white foam rolled off.

  Panic ran through me as the ship sailed away, leaving me in my tube in the middle of the vast ocean. That night a blue haze slid from the sky. I steered my boat on its designated course and then focused on the sliver of moon to calm my nerves. I breathed in the moonlight. My father had told me and my brother to “breathe in the moonlight” when we were younger and lay scared of the dark in our beds. “Breathe the moonlight into your lungs, let it beat through your veins, fill your heart like a lightbulb, then exhale it and send it all the way back. That’s how you become one with the night and stop being afraid of it.”

  But there in the sub, breathing deep in the hold, I only tasted burning diesel and the heartburn bile that the food supplement pills had left. The silver light on the endless dark water scared the living hell out of me. It was the first real emotion I’d felt since leaving my mother on the wheelhouse deck of the Lighthouse Lady. I’d sealed up that part, the feeling part. Now, whatever cord that had run so taut between my mind and my heart tore loose. There in the hold, I focused on the chart to quell my rising fear.

  My chart had me follow a northwest track to the southern end of Iceland for several hours. In the mini-sub, my thighs itched, my legs were sore from the vibrations, and being crammed in upright made each link of my spine feel welded together. After several hours, everything in me ached to be out of that machine and a newly formed claustrophobia seized me. Where the clouds broke, a wide swath of stars above poured through. Where the cloud cover was dense and hid everything, I felt like the last living person on earth.

  I cruised on course for five hours without seeing anything. Then, in the distance, something shifted in the dark. Through my lenses, the small halos of light beneath the running light covers of a large ship slipped past. The ship had a conning tower and large guns mounted on the fore and aft decks. The flags were dark but the white paint trim along the bow told me it was an Allied troop transport vessel. A British light cruiser of the Aurora class. It was sleek and graceful, low to the water and slow as it cut through the swell. I marked my exact position on the chart and deviated my course forty-two degrees to face ahead of it. The ship didn’t have spotlights on so I stayed on the surface to close the gap faster. Within ten minutes I was five hundred meters away and could make out the transom, stern, antenna mast, funnel, and the ship’s boats.

  I wish to god I had another story to tell—but I have only this one.

  I fired.

  I led my shot ahead of the ship to hit aft of the centerline at its fuel tanks. The torpedo disengaged from the hull, its propeller roiled up the water as it dug forward and made a tunnel of white bubbles for about fifty meters before it disappeared. For a moment, just as the weapon released, I felt an overwhelming mixture of exhilaration and power.

  Fifty-six seconds later by my watch, a volcanic blast of water leapt up from the ocean. The ship flinched like a wounded creature. An explosion from the ribbed framework of the ship and the long waterline of the vessel bent off the surface and slammed back down. The concussion of the blast rippled through the water and wobbled the jelly between my bones. The echo rocked my sub in waves.

  The hit broke the ship’s back, and it heeled to starboard. A large fire billowed out of the hull even as the hole the torpedo created flooded with seawater. The shot hit right at the watertight doors separating the middle and aft sections at the fuel tanks.

  Watchmen shot white incendiary flares off the sides, which flew up and glowed on the placid water. The reflection pierced the darkness and I breathed in the light. For a moment I was calm inside the hull of the Negro. But the glass top of my fuselage reflected the flash and the ping of a watchman’s gunfire pierced the bow of the Negro.

  My boat was shot at once more before the whole aft of the British ship exploded into flame, and the top decks became brilliantly illuminated by a deep orange glow. Fire ro
se up into the air in a giant column. The starboard-leaning burning section of the aft tilted toward the waterline at an impossible angle. The middle and bow of the ship cruised forward, both sections intact but no longer connected. In the eerie light of the flares and orange glow of the flame, the ship’s conning tower leaned down to the sea, which pushed its bow into the sky. Water around the tower bubbled up, drinking the ship down, gulping up its side until it vanished, pushed under by the upright and sinking bow. There was a large white churning of water after the bow sank.

  The aft of the ship was still a billowing tower of black smoke and flame and in the distance, the crew who made it up to the deck leapt off the sides into the burning water below them. One of the jumpers was on fire. His arms and legs kicked at the air to shake the flames loose as he plummeted toward the waterline.

  The shadows of burning men jumping from what I had convinced myself was only machinery, tonnage, and supplies seared hot and terrible into my mind.

  When the aft tilted forward into the sea, the last of the white flares dropped to the water. Deck by deck the flaming ship’s aft half-sank, leaving the wide gas spill burning on the surface.

  My mind took in every detail like a camera taking hundreds of shots per second, all of which settled at the stem of my head, deep in my snake brain. I imagined being onboard, iron sheets squealing as they unhinged. Rivets wrenched loose. Overheads in the passageways sucked down by the blast of heat, and the mêlée of movement of all the sailors running into the smoke filling the holds with clotted air. Charred armament. The sibilant wheeze of air pumping from the bilges. The gunmetal gray world buckling in around them. All those men billeted there. The bunk room now a bellows. Warping. The dizzying truth of what was to come. The vitals of the ship gutted by fire. Paint boiling off the bulkheads.

  These flecks of images sliced beneath my skin. There was no returning to who I was before. There was no being someone who did not take that shot again. I was now something different. Those images would never be dislodged.