The Death of an Irish Sea Wolf

by Bartholomew Gill

  Geis and I immediately repaired forward, second tier, where the torpedo bay was situated, and we were surprised to find an SS storm trooper positioned there. “Who are you?” he demanded.

  My first impulse was to disarm and perhaps even kill him; I had told Rehm the conditions under which I would join them, and here, only hours later, one had been violated. But we had other literal fish to fry. And I realized he was just another young boy dressed in a man’s costume, like my own aboard my last several commands.

  Pushing the barrel of his Schmeisser aside, I said, “Why, son, I’m the captain of this scow. This is my engineer, and we’ve come to arm the torpedoes. Surely you wouldn’t want us to sail out of here unarmed. Are you coming with us?”

  His eyes said, I hope not. “I was ordered not to let anybody in here.”

  “I just told you”—I raised my arm, forcing him back so Geis could duck in—“we’re not anybody, I command this boat. Standartenführer Rehm wants this to happen.” I had to perform my special contortion to get myself through the hatch of the bulkhead, and when I straightened up as much as I was able, I saw the young man’s eyes widen; he had not expected a submariner to be so large. “You sit yourself down and watch. You might learn something. What’s your name?”

  “Hans.” Who was not a day over fifteen. In his hands the Schmeisser looked like an abomination.

  “My name is Klimt, that’s Connie. Has anybody told you the war is over? We surrendered today.” Obviously nobody had; his eyes were wide as saucers. We advanced on the eels.

  At the first sling, Geis removed the firing pin/plunger cap and bent his head to peer into the detonator cavity. He turned to me and smiled. With the blade of his long-shaft screwdriver he tapped the back of the cavity. “Just like I thought, it’s solid. These aren’t torpedoes, they’re—” He shook his head; he didn’t know what they were. “Shine the light in there.” I complied.

  The black paint was easily scratched off, exposing a bright, soft metal below. Geis smiled more completely and kept working the screwdriver until it had produced a small pile of shavings. Scooping them out, he handed them to me, saying, “Why don’t you see if there’s any ersatz coffee in the mess, Commodore. I can take it from here.” And to the boy, “I like the war being over—now I can give that big bag of wind orders.”

  But the boy scarcely smiled. It was past his bedtime, and his eyes were closing. By the time I returned with three cups, our storm trooper was sprawled against the bulkhead, fast asleep, and Geis turned to me triumphantly. “It’s gold, isn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, take a look at this.” Glancing down at the boy to make sure he was asleep, Geis led me over to one of the torpedoes and quickly and expertly removed the propeller and tail section housing. But instead of finding a propeller shaft and the aft end of some propulsion device, I saw a long, brown tube that was rumpled and soft.

  “It’s like a big waterproof bag. I think it extends the length of the eel. Feel it.”

  There was something in it or—rather—many things, some bigger than others.

  “Let me show you.” Stepping around the thing, Geis squeezed open a slit that he had made on the hull side of the “bag” and shone the beam of the torch in. “All that glitters is not gold,” he said. “It’s gold and silver and diamonds and rubies and anything else that they could get their hands on.”

  It was obvious it was just that—pillage, plunder, booty; most of it was spectacular jewelry.

  “All ten are the same, I’ve checked. They must have mocked up a Lut torpedo, leaving it an inch shy of the twenty-one-inch diameter. Then they made a mold and cast these things in gold, leaving the interior ten inches of the twenty-inch-diameter hollow. These inserts came next, stuffed with diamonds and jewelry, the whole thing then being encased in the shell of a Lut with a castiron warhead, cowlings, propeller, and all. Real enough to fool anybody on first sight.

  “The one thing they hadn’t counted on is the weight. But with the war over”—Geis shrugged—“there’s no need for them, right? And all they have to do when we get to wherever we’re going is to pop them out of the tubes with compressed air into some shallows near a beach, then put themselves off in a raft, and scuttle the boat.

  With us in it, I thought.

  As had Geis. “With all this”—his hand swept the torpedo bay—“they can’t let us live. How did they get this stuff? Who’d they steal it from? And who are they—the others with Rehm? There must be a reason they’re bailing out of Europe.”

  I shook my head. I did not know. I’d been at sea for most of nine years and knew only what I’d been told in communiqués. I don’t think I had read even so much as a single newspaper in the last six months.

  “And even if the boat is found with us shot or poisoned or suffocated, so what? It’ll be passed off as just another wartime accident or mutiny. Something that happened to some Krauts off the coast of South America.”

  In retrospect, I know it was selfish, but I can remember feeling the outrage welling up inside of me. Helmut Rehm, who had tried to murder me once before, had traveled all this way with his Nazi masters at the end of the war and for what? To get me to transport their doubtlessly criminal plunder to some sanctuary where he would complete the crime he had botched in Cambridge and do me in.

  “I have a plan,” I said to Geis. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”

  Noreen sat down on the blanket beside McGarr. “What are you reading?”

  He showed her the handwriting.

  “Clem Ford’s memoir? Is there a chance I can see it next? What about these pages that you’ve already read?” She picked them up.

  McGarr’s eyes slid over to Maddie and her playmates, then refocused on the page he had been reading.

  CHAPTER 30

  REHM AND THE others with him awoke around dawn and found us in the control room with the turbine engine purring, charging the batteries. Geis and I and my crew were busied reading gauges and making notes on clipboards. It was all a charade.

  “Well, Commodore, are we ready to cast off?”

  I knew he was not, if he intended to depart with fifteen in his company. So far he had only five.

  “I’d say in an hour’s time. We’d like to run some tests. Did you arrive here on this boat?”

  Rehm shook his head. “We flew in.”

  “Then, who—” Geis asked.

  “Schmelling and a crew from the Todt Organization.”

  “Well—they’re here by sheer luck. The inertial guidance system that controls underwater navigation is off by at least three degrees. We’ll have to submerge to correct it.”

  Rehm’s eye narrowed in suspicion.

  “Here at dockside, of course.”

  “Also, there’s the tanks,” said Geis. “Metal fragments—flashing bits from the welding process, dropped rivets, metal shavings. It’s typical of a new boat, but can be fatal, if a dive can’t be accomplished under fire or we can’t dive fast enough to avoid being seen and marked.”

  Rehm’s brow revealed that he did not want that.

  “All minor problems.” I smiled down at him, for your experienced crew. “And I have some advice—you should have yourself a good shore breakfast with real food and stretch your legs one last time for the next month.”

  “A month? I thought it would take only twenty days.”

  “How did you figure that—running at twenty knots?”

  Rehm glanced at Geis. “I thought this boat could do twenty-four knots.”

  “Snorkeling,” he said. “But snorkeling can be seen from the air. If you’re not concerned about that—” Geis hunched his shoulders.

  “Three points,” I put in. “One, we don’t know that this boat can make that speed for any sustained period of time. It was probably built round the clock by at least some inexperienced boat builders who were probably being bombed and forced to scrimp on materials. I hope she can make twenty-four knots, but we’ll have to see. Gradually. Increasing speed a l
ittle at a time. We don’t want a breakdown.

  “Two, there are ocean currents that we will have to buck. And, finally, there’s the unknown. In my experience, the unknown always occurs. It’s inescapable.” I smiled more completely; it was the point I hoped he would understand best. “You tell us how it’s to be—breakfast here, breakfast there. You stay here, you stay there.”

  It was breakfast there, with the ten missing complements of Rehm’s group, who now arrived, remaining on the boat while we completed our “tests.” Even at first glance it was easy to see what the new additions were—Rehm’s killers.

  Although they all wore some item of Waffen SS gray, not one had on the entire uniform. Nor did they carry similar weapons, but rather whatever they had fancied and removed from fallen foes—Kalashnikovs, M1s, Colts, Enfields, Webleys.

  Most noticeable, however, was the way they peered round the control room as they descended the ladder—like the pipes, tubes, and gauges were an alien, hostile world, and all their boots, knives, guns, and bullets would not avail them much here. In a word, I could smell their fear, which had probably kept them alive on the ground wherever they had been, but could now be exploited. And would.

  “Commodore Dorfmann—I’d like you to meet Sturmbannfürer Beust. He has served me well and will now be my eyes and ears while I’m having breakfast. He’s told me he’s enamored of submarines and should have been with you and not me. Now he has his chance. Please inform him what you are doing, step by step. And don’t let his looks fool you. Beust is a quick study. Who knows, he might change careers in the Argentines and become an admiral.”

  I smiled down at the man who was not much smaller than I and much more fit, I could see. His muscles strained at the cloth of a Russian Army general’s uniform shirt, if I was not mistaken. His face was as square as those shoulders, and he had been told about me, I could tell. His dark eyes had that dead look that said it was only a matter of time. I was his target.

  Rehm left the boat with his four similarly blue-clad friends, and I turned to Beust, explaining to him what we were seeing on the dials and meters. “The deck lines have been loosed, and we shall dive in place, operate the inertial guidance system, then surface and check its accuracy against the bridge navigation instruments.” It was all a charade, of course.

  Beust, however, tried to understand none of it. It was clear he was nearly out on his feet. His eyes were glassy and kept closing in the heat of the control room. Yet he remained on my heels, like the guard dog he was.

  Perhaps forty minutes later after repeated dives, Geis handed me his clipboard. “Here’s the present variation. Can we live with that? The note on the board said, “9 billeted in forward bay, sleeping. Hatch closed, locked. Descend, flood?”

  I nodded. “We can live with that, but I don’t think Standartenführer Rehm would like it, arriving in Tierra del Fuego and not the mouth of Rio de la Plata.”

  Beust remained wooden.

  We dived again and remained submerged for only a minute or two, before I ordered the boat to the surface again. Immediately thereafter, I climbed the ladder and moved out on the dripping, frigid bridge to take the wheel and maneuver the boat in closer to the dock.

  The torpedo hatch suddenly popped open, Geis appeared, and the storm troopers scrambled out, soaking wet. Most were dressed only in their underwear, and there was not a weapon in sight.

  Geis jumped onto the dock and skidded a boarding plank down onto the deck. The storm troopers scrambled off.

  “Halt! Stop!” Beust shouted. “Where are you going?” When he turned round to me, as for help, he found the barrel of my pistol pointing at his head.

  “You’re next. Climb down the ladder and get off.”

  Now he smiled, then shook his head. “You’ll have to shoot me. I bet you’ve never killed anybody up close. It’s all been—what?—two hundred yards, five hundred, a mile. It’s easy, like that, isn’t it. Impersonal. Push a button, wait. Poof—up goes the ship,” He gestured with his hands, and I nearly shot him then.

  “Down goes the periscope, and it’s all forgotten. Well, this is different, isn’t it? If you want me off this boat, you’ll have to shoot me. Go on.” He took a step toward me. And another. Now we were very close. When his hands jumped for the gun, I put a bullet through his brain, then shoved his body down the ladder onto the deck.

  Rehm now arrived, having run down the dock. His partners were not far behind.

  Hitting the sticks and spinning the bridge wheel, I edged the sub away and the boarding plank fell into the water. Geis now joined me on the bridge and swung the aft pair of 30 mm antiaircraft guns around on Rehm and his mates.

  “You won’t get far. I ordered the sub nets closed last night. They can be opened only at my orders. Rehm meant the steel-cable nets that were strung across the narrowest part of the Bjørnafjord. Also positioned there was a battery of powerful guns.

  “‘Dour Rump Führer’ that you are,” I said, nudging the props up a peg so that the boat would slip out into the harbor.

  “We should kill them,” Geis said from the gun he had trained on them. “If he’s not bluffing, we’ll never get through submerged.”

  But Rehm would also have to convince or coerce the gun crews to fire on a German boat. Even if he did, I doubted they could hit us at the Walter boat’s top surface speed, which was nearly thirty knots. Also, Beust had been right—I had never killed like that before, and my judgment was still clouded by the experience. But Geis was right too, and my decision not to take them out there and then ultimately cost him his life.

  For even though I punched up the turbines to full power from the moment we left the sub pens in Bergen, they were waiting at the batteries and firing when we first rounded the bend leading to the net. Was the net drawn? I suspect I’ll never know, and in retrospect I believe that we should have submerged and probed it; the water there is deep and, if we had found it closed, we could always have gone back up round the bend to surface and gain momentum before making our run on top.

  But tide was running out and the current, which was strong there, was pushing our speed in excess of thirty-five knots. Added to that, I could tell from the initial shelling, which fell far short and then far long, that Rehm and his storm troopers must be manning the batteries, not the trained crew.

  “We’re flying!” Geis roared at me from the 30 mm guns that he was still manning, and in a trice we were over the position of the net, passed the batteries, and surging out into the Atlantic. But I no sooner ordered a white flag hoisted in case any Allied warships were in the vicinity before we could submerge, when a volley from the batteries—late and long—tore down from the sky and smashed into the conning tower, killing Geis instantly and the two other submariners who were with us on the bridge. It riddled my back and legs with shrapnel.

  I went down and out, and the boat, still coursing with nobody at the helm, skidded over one of the many rocks that dot the mouth of the Bjørnafjord before others of the crew could take the wheel. Gone was the lower stabilizing fin of our rudder, and the shaft was damaged in a way that made the prop spin eccentrically. Like that, it was only a matter of time before the vibration tore the boat apart. Gone as well were our snorkel, our radars, and our main radios.

  Using a sextant and traveling on the surface only at night, we managed to limp the roughly thousand miles to Clew Bay, where often, during the war, I had lain in the rocky depths or charged my batteries in a narrow inlet at night. I knew the bottom and the currents. And in the teeth of a wild spring storm I sent my final radio message using the auxiliary radio that I and the three remaining members of my crew hauled out on deck. I sent only the coordinates of our position, in case any of the others whom I had told as insurance about our mission might be listening. If we did not live, I wanted them to have the fortune.

  We maneuvered the boat as close to the Great Cliff of Clare Island as we dared go, before expelling the cargo into a hole I knew of. The torpedoes would be virtually invisible but still r
elatively easy to retrieve. By then the boat had rattled itself so loose the pumps were barely able to keep the leaking water from submerging the turbine, which occurred just after we had released the final “torpedo.”

  But mercifully the turbine (truly a miracle of German technology) carried us away from the rocks so that at least one of us (I, the lucky one) managed to survive. I tried to get us to a trench that I knew of where we could scuttle the boat. I was still on deck at what was left of the bridge, not wanting any of the others to risk being washed from the twisted wreckage by a wave. It was what saved me, being washed overboard and not sinking in the confines of the Walter boat. I was beat and tumbled and smashed into the cliffs. Yet I lived.

  I was saved by a woman, who I learned was Peig O’Malley. Her solitary cottage sat in a cleft of the cliffs. Having heard us maneuvering there during the night, she had come down to the beach with her blind niece at low tide to discover what we had been about. At first she thought me “a Brit,” as she told me when I recovered, dressed as I was in the blue togs of a British merchant mariner and carrying a Webley automatic.

  I had discovered the clothes in the lockers of Rehm and his “friends,” after we had gotten clear of the Norwegian coast. They had evidently intended to pass themselves off as English, wherever it was that they had intended to land. I thought it an expedient ruse, given my own command of the language. But the first words out of my mouth were “Wie heissen Sie?” as I looked up into the star-burst blue eyes of her niece. And from that moment I was safe. Peig O’Malley was an ardent Irish Republican who despised the British.

  It took me over a year to winch the torpedoes, one by one at night, up into the cave that Peig showed me, and almost another to establish the Clare Island Trust and find a quiet way to fund it. Now it belongs to you who are reading this. I write only so that you know the probable source of the wealth. I hold you to nothing that I have begun or is being done with the funds while I live. Its disposition is up to you.