“Quite right, Mr. Schiffer,” Hardy said warmly, his eyes falling on Beatrice. “It was my pleasure.”
Chapter 10
Dora Pen, 11th S-Boat Flotilla, Cherbourg, France
Even under the low light of the arc lamps, the S-boats of Flotilla 11 looked dangerous to Kommodore Walters. The armored skullcap bridge and the wheelhouse roof painted a dark gray, contrasting with the pale gray of the vertical surfaces, sat low on the deck; its black windows soulless eyes that stared into the dim interior. The clean hull swept back from the bow’s knife-edge to the sculpted cutouts for the enclosed torpedo tubes. Just aft of the bridge was a twin-mount 2cm gun with its armored shield surrounded by ammunition lockers, racks for extra barrels, and helmet boxes. Next was a large rubber dinghy and a 4cm Bofor’s cannon, its long, thin barrel secured so that it pointed aft.
It was the deepened and enlarged well in the bow that held Walters’s interest, or rather what sat in the well. The Trinity guns, he had been told, recoilless cannon with stubby barrels, were an aberration on a vessel whose sleek lines denoted speed. The guns and their mount, rising from within the deck, were a hideous growth, begging to be cut out and tossed overboard. That, in fact, was going to happen. The monstrosity would be removed and a 4-barrelled 2cm Flakvierling, or 3.7cm flak gun, would be inserted in the well.
Walters moved to the edge of the quay and peered into the dark water that surrounded the boat’s pale hull. The hull below the waterline was covered in a black, anti-fouling paint so that any light that penetrated the water was immediately sucked up by the dark surface.
“You can’t see them,” Reubold said behind Walters.
The kommodore turned as Reubold joined him at the edge. The Raven, he was called for his dark moods and fast boats. He looks ill, Walters thought, noting the man’s sunken eyes.
“There,” Reubold said, pointing into the dingy water. “If you lean over, you might see the leading edges of the struts and supports. Be careful not to fall in.”
Walters made a show of not being interested. He studied the roof of the pen. The large work lights glared back at him. Electric cables ran along the pitted concrete ceiling, clinging to the dull surface like thick vines, dropped down the wall, and disappeared into the rusting, gray metal cabinets. The large derrick that served the boats rumbled down its glistening rails suspended from the ceiling and stopped near the head of the pen.
Walters glanced around. “Busy place,” he commented.
“It’s the war,” Reubold said. “It continually interferes with day-to-day activities.”
“Are they as fast as they say?’ Walters asked, restraining himself from looking into the water. He knew that Reubold thought him a fool and Rommel’s stooge, and the act of peering into a greasy, stagnant pool of water simply reinforced that idea. There was a mutual distrust of staff and line: staff certain that the men who did the fighting were egotistical and erratic, with line firmly convinced that staff was nothing more than a brotherhood of fat, soft idiots who knew nothing of the sea or boat handling. The tension arose continually, when each thought that the other intruded in its domain, and lessened their efficiency. No matter, Walters knew; it was a common state of affairs that had to be dealt with. The kommodore viewed himself as a diplomat, and his mission was to investigate the resources of the Kriegsmarines in defense of the Atlantic Wall. Even if they were volatile men such as Reubold.
“ ‘They’ say so much. It’s very difficult to keep up with what is actually said.”
“Forty knots,” Walters said, baiting Reubold.
“Forty knots,” the fregattenkapitan scoffed. “You people … sixty knots and more if the sea is right. We can keep that speed for thirty minutes at a time.”
“Why just thirty?”
“Her wings won’t take any more than that.”
“Wings?”
“Hydrofoils,” Reubold said. “Waldvogel’s wings, we call them. The fellow that invented them and that mighty weapon on the bow.”
Walters watched as several men worked around the triple-gun mount, inserting chains and strapped through the supports. There was nothing threatening about the guns. They did not look deadly—they were just machines, awkwardly industrial. They were not graceful. They were functional and ugly.
“Off they come,” Reubold said, following the kommodore’s gaze. “Orders, you know. Perhaps your orders.”
“No, not mine,” Walters said, unfazed by the accusation. “What is their range?”
“Just over seventy-nine hundred meters, maximum load. Standard load, half that.” Reubold lit a cigarette and regarded Walters. “Why are you here, Kommodore? Why travel all the way from Paris with Allied fighters snapping at your heels, just to ask a few questions? Dresser has already issued orders to dismantle the boats.”
“He was a bit premature,” Walters said, walking away from Reubold. He needed a moment to think and the fregattenkapitan’s negativity interfered with his thinking. But Reubold followed, apparently unwilling to let go.
“You mean that you’ve come to give us a reprieve?” Reubold asked, the question nearly a statement, wreathed in sarcasm. “How kind of you. You must be very close to the fieldmarschal. Tell me, does he know that we exist down here? Does he have confidence in us? We are such a little force—nothing to be reckoned with. It is so difficult for we who fight to understand the complexities of command.” Reubold examined the silent vessels. “No matter. They aren’t ready for war yet—not real war. Not yet.”
They stopped at the bow, Walters studying the strange guns. Reubold was a defeatist but the kommodore laid that thought aside. One day he would say too much and the SS would come and take him away. The guns caught his attention again. “Can they be fired at top speed?” He turned, wanting to be more precise with the question. “They can’t be very accurate if you are moving through the water at that speed. Have you overcome that?”
“You mean can we actually hit anything?” Reubold said, “Hit, yes. Aim, no. Still if one puts enough rounds in the air, one is bound to hit what one is aiming at. Eventually. Kommodore? Why won’t you answer my question? Why are you here?”
“To learn,” Walters said, lost in thought.
“Yes,” Reubold said, “but why are you here?”
“The fieldmarschal has determined that the most effective use of these boats is in laying mines across potential invasion corridors,” Walters said. “I agree. From what you’ve told me, and from what I already know, it is highly unlikely that these S-boats, as intriguing as they are, have any likelihood of inflicting significant damage on the invasion fleet.”
“We have certainly raised hell with enemy convoys in the Channel.”
Walters continued to study the guns. “Everything is the invasion, Reubold,” he announced. “Preparation is all. The fieldmarschal has decreed that the enemy must be stopped at the beaches. Sea mines are a very important part of that strategy. They can potentially disrupt an invasion fleet, influence the enemy’s tactics …”
“We’re lucky,” Reubold mused, “if the enemy possesses no minesweepers.”
“What?” Walters asked, the connection lost.
“Nothing,” Reubold answered.
Overhead the gantry burst into life, the diesels driving the crossbeam along the tracks toward the boat. Thick steel cables with hooks, pulleys, and straps swung rhythmically with the movement. An oberbootsmann shouted instructions, sending half a dozen matrose onto the S-boat’s deck to secure the straps around the gun.
“After they pull her stinger,” Reubold commented, “we’ll take her out of the water, remove the foils and mounts, replace the shafts, and she’ll be a good little girl again.”
The gantry stopped with a loud clank, the sound echoing off the concrete walls and ceiling.
“Time-consuming, no doubt,” Walters said. “Removing the guns.”
The steel cables played out, dropping the hooks and straps toward the gun.
“Something that requires particular care,
I should imagine,” Walters said. Reubold cocked his head in question.
“A very complex task,” the kommodore said, looking at Reubold. There was a message behind the words.
Reubold cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted: “Hold.” He turned back to Walters. “You’re playing a dangerous game, Kommodore,” he said coldly. “I’m not sure that I care to play.”
“Games are for children, Fregattenkapitan. Perhaps,” he added, “your strange vessels are destined to play another role. My only interest is defending the Fatherland from her enemies.”
Reubold considered the kommodore’s reply. He answered with a smile. “I might be one of those enemies.”
“Are you, Fregattenkapitan?” Walters said.
Reubold’s smile grew broader, but he did not answer.
“Well,” Walters said as the straps swung back and forth. “I must return to Paris and select the fieldmarschal’s wine. I’m very pleased to see that the work is progressing at a very deliberate pace so that there is no danger of damage to the boats.”
“Admiral Dresser may find the lack of progress confusing,” Reubold said.
“Yes,” Walters said, “so might the fieldmarschal should he learn of it. But they are both busy men. I’m sure such details would go unnoticed for a time.” His eyes swept the long, low, ominous shape of the S-boat. “Before I entered the Kriegsmarine, my father held out the hope that I would choose the ministry. Are you familiar with the works of Charles Fletcher Leckie?”
“No. Who is he?”
“He was an American clergyman and teacher. He died in 1927. I actually attended one of his lectures in England. He said: ‘It is a world of startling possibilities.’ Don’t you agree, Fregattenkapitan?”
Reubold eyed the kommodore with a new appreciation. “It is a world of surprises.”
“Yes,” Walters said. “Truly. Shall we combine the two then, and say that it would be to our benefit to investigate any possibility to surprise our enemies? Good day, Fregattenkapitan Reubold.”
The fregattenkapitan pulled a cigarette from his case, lit it, and gave the strange visit by Walters a great deal of thought. What he had learned while immersed in the hierarchy of Nazi high command was that everyone wanted something. Certainly they all wanted to win the war, but success was decided by personal gain, not victory for the Fatherland. He kept that observation to himself, of course. The heady talk that floated around glittering receptions and opulent dinners as counterpoint to Brahms or Wagner was guaranteed to advance one’s position. In a world where so little was certain—this was.
Walters had come to set a plan in motion, but Reubold had no idea what the plan entailed. Was it necessary that I know? he asked himself. Is it so important at this late date in the war that I suddenly become privy to what others have in store for me? Reubold’s answer was blunt: You’ve never cared before—why now?
They had run most of the night, relying on radar to see into the blackness, in unspoken relief that dark clouds covered the moon and stars so that their broad wakes were nearly hidden.
DeLong took the wheel of 155 almost immediately as Cole moved to the farthest reaches of the tiny bridge, melting into the structure, a man finding sanctuary in solitude. It was as if, DeLong thought after glancing at the silent form, Cole had willed himself far away from the living, that he had built a prison and quietly closed the cell door.
DeLong switched on the hooded light over the pioneer compass to get his bearings, then quickly turned it off. Even the tiniest of lights on the flat plain of the English Channel was enough to alert a vigilant enemy.
Edland, as silent as Cole, stood behind DeLong, his arm wrapped casually in the intricate framework of the radar mast. He’s a cool one, DeLong thought long after they had cleared the harbor and full night wrapped itself around the tiny vessels. All business. But he was the one who had told Cole, over a year ago—a century before—that the target was escorted by only a few MAS boats. No E-boats, he had said confidently in the steamy confines of the operations shack at Bastia.
“No E-boats,” Edland had said in response to Moose’s question.
“Good,” Moose had said, voicing everyone’s opinions. “I hate those guys.”
“We’ll go in on the step,” Cole had said, rubbing the end of a pencil over his bottom lip in thought. His eyes traveled over the chart, lingered on the enemy convoy’s supposed path, and narrowed in concentration. DeLong watched the Skipper and saw the questions forming in the man’s brain. On the step—flank speed, hard-chinned hull out of the water, bow up, hungrily looking for the enemy—the only way that Cole operated.
“You guys are sure about this, huh?” Cole had finally said.
“We’re sure,” Edland returned quickly. His confidence eased their concerns.
“Sure as shootin’,” Tommy Turner had confirmed to himself. Harry Lowe laughed and smiled broadly at Turner. It was fun to make Harry laugh, to drop a curse in the middle of a perfectly innocent sentence and catch Harry off guard. Harry didn’t smoke or drink, and the only curse words he knew were mild—hell or damn—and even then, when he said them they really didn’t sound like cussing. “Hell, man,” DeLong had said after they’d known each other for a while, “you’re not for real.” He was good-natured, and the pictures of his wife showed an exquisite blonde flanked by a couple of kids. Harry and Cole were close—Harry the leavening to Cole’s sometimes harsh moods—Harry there to bring reason to Cole’s occasional outbursts. Harry the guy Cole went to when his own unidentified emotions had him wrapped so tightly that anything, everything, anyone did was wrong.
Harry Lowe, the guy who turned to Cole when the E-boats that weren’t supposed to be there slid out from behind the enemy transports with a strange, stricken smile that said: I’m going to die.
Harry Lowe’s matinee-idol good looks and his Clark Gable mustache disappeared in a flash of red as a 20mm shell blew his skull into a thousand pieces, covering the bridge, Cole, and DeLong with an obscene spray of flesh, blood, and brains.
“How far out, Barney?” Cole said into the microphone. DeLong was no longer in Bastia.
“Just about ten miles, Skip.” Barney was navigating from the auxiliary compass and had the advantage of the radar set tucked into the starboard corner of the chart room. He also had a light when he needed it to consult the charts that led them to Edland’s inlet.
“Can you make out Bill and Dean?” Cole asked DeLong.
“One sixty-eight is just abeam of us, to port,” Edland said from the darkness. “Dean is off our starboard quarter. Both about eight hundred yards out.”
“Good eyes,” DeLong whistled softly in appreciation.
“I’ve been watching them for some time,” Edland said, moving closer. “I’m sure that your radar man will confirm their position.”
“Throttle back to twenty,” Cole said, ignoring Edland. “Bill and Dean should pick up the speed change on radar. When we’re five miles out, drop to ten and we’ll ease her in. I’ll put Rich in the bow with a lead line.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Edland said. “It’s deep water all the way to the cliff face.”
“Keep an eye on everything, will you, Randy?” Cole said. “Commander, let’s take a walk.”
Edland followed Cole aft to a midway point of the Day Room canopy.
“This is about as private as we get on a PT boat,” Cole said, his voice low and his features obscured in the darkness. “I’ll forget all the niceties that come with rank and tell you if you ever again interfere in me running this boat, I’ll give you another scar to add to that one.”
“All I said …”
“I don’t give a fuck what your reason is and I sure don’t give a fuck about any of your opinions.”
“I thought we agreed …”
“We agreed that you may run the show but I run the fucking boats. That’s what we agreed on. You want an E-boat. I want to get out of this mess without getting my ass shot off, or piling the boats on some uncharted
shoal, because when we’re high and dry fifty feet from a bunch of Krauts, a simple ‘Gee, I’m sorry as hell’ won’t mean a fucking thing.”
The figure facing Cole in the darkness was silent for a moment. The PT boat pitched gently in the calm sea, the deep rumble of the engines vibrating throughout the deck planking. The passing water hissed playfully against the hull.
“Okay, Lieutenant,” Edland said in a measured tone. “You’ve made your point. You’re the captain.”
“Yeah,” Cole said, turning.
“It wasn’t my fault,” Edland said.
Cole stopped.
“It wasn’t my fault. Your boats and your men.”
Cole didn’t bother to face Edland when he said: “No, it wasn’t. It was mine for believing you.”
Chapter 11
The English Channel, four kilometers from
Cap de la Hague
Matrose Willy Hellwig had been aboard S-204 for nearly a year. He was the youngest member of the crew of twenty-eight, a loader on the forward MG C/38 2cm Oerlikon gun, and not well liked by the other members of the crew. Especially Leutnant Meurer. No, Bootsmannmaat Janzen despised him even more than Meurer. Meurer simply held Hellwig in disdain.
It wasn’t Hellwig’s fault. He was only nineteen and he was not very comfortable around the doorknocker, and when it went off, the loud, constant bang startled him so that he nearly forgot to feed the shells into the hopper atop the gun. Then Janzen would curse Hellwig’s stupidity, his mother’s idiocy for giving birth to such a dolt, his village—he was from Cloppenburg, and the rest of the crew found that somehow very amusing—and finally the Kriegsmarine for allowing itself to come to such a sorry state that it had to settle for imbeciles like Matrose Willy Hellwig.
So the end of each patrol brought a sense of tense relief to Hellwig as well as the first sliver of dawn that announced that it was time to seek the shelter of the S-boat pens in Cherbourg, where S-204 was safe from the Allied bees and Hellwig was safe from the boxing that Janzen gave his ears.
What a war.
Armada Page 9
