Peter Benchley's Creature

by Peter Benchley

  CREATURE

  PETER BENCHLEY

  Peter Benchley's Creature was previously published under the title White Shark.

  Copyright © 1994 by Peter Benchley.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 93-26883

  ISBN: 0-312-96573-7

  For Jeff Brown

  and

  in memory of Michael W. Cogan

  and

  Paul D. Zimmerman — missed men

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For their counsel and corrections on matters cetological, ichthyological, chondrichthian, ornithological, hyperbaric and cryptomedical, I am in debt to Richard Ellis and Stanton Waterman. Any inaccuracies or speculations that may remain are mine, not theirs.

  And for her patience, perseverance, wisdom, encouragement and friendship, I am, as I have been for nearly two decades, grateful beyond words to the incomparable Kate Medina.

  —P.B.

  PART ONE

  1945

  1

  THE water in the estuary had been still for hours, as still as a sheet of black glass, for there was no wind to stir it.

  Then suddenly, as if violated by a great beast rising from the depths, the water bulged, heaved up, threatening to explode.

  At first, the man watching from the hillside dismissed the sight as yet another illusion caused by his fatigue and the flickering light from the cloud-shrouded moon.

  But as he stared, the bulge grew and grew and finally burst, pierced by a monstrous head, barely visible, black on black, distinguishable from the water around it only by the gleaming droplets shed from its sleek skin.

  More of the leviathan broke through—a pointed snout, a smooth cylindrical body—and then silently it settled back and floated motionless on the silky surface, waiting, waiting for the man.

  From the darkness a light flashed three times: short, long, long; dot, dash, dash—the international Morse signal for W. The man replied by lighting three matches in the same sequence. Then he picked up his satchel and started down the hill.

  He stank, he itched, he chafed. The clothing he had taken days ago from a roadside corpse—burying his own tailored uniform and handmade boots in a muddy shell crater—was filthy, ill fitting and vermin-infested.

  At least he was no longer hungry: earlier in the evening he had ambushed a refugee couple, crushed their skulls with a brick and gorged himself on tins of the vile processed meat they had begged from the invading Americans.

  He had found it interesting, killing the two people. He had ordered many deaths, and caused countless more, but he had never done the actual killing. It had been surprisingly easy.

  He had been traveling—fleeing—for days. Five? Seven? He had no idea, for stolen moments of sleep in sodden haystacks had blended seamlessly with hours of slogging along shattered roads, in company with the wretched refuse of weak-willed nations.

  Exhaustion had become his companion and his plague. Dozens of times he had collapsed in ditches or flopped in patches of tall grass and lain, panting, till he felt himself revive. There was no mystery to his fatigue: he was fifty years old, and fat, and the only exercise he had had in the past ten years was bending his elbow to sip from a glass.

  Still, it was infuriating, a betrayal. He shouldn't have to be in good shape; he wasn't supposed to be running. He wasn't an athlete or a warrior, he was a genius who had accomplished something unprecedented in the history of mankind. His destiny had always been to lead, to teach, to inspire, not to run like a frightened rat.

  Once or twice he had nearly been seduced by exhaustion into succumbing, surrendering, but he had resisted, for he was determined to fulfill his destiny. He had a mission, assigned to him on direct orders from the Fuehrer the day before he had shot himself, and he would complete that mission, whatever it cost, however long it took.

  For though he was not a man of politics or world vision, though he was a scientist, he knew that his mission had significance far beyond science.

  Now exhaustion, fear and hunger had all vanished, and as he made his way carefully down the steep hillside, Ernst Kruger smiled to himself. His years of work would bear fruit; his faith had been rewarded. He had never really doubted that they would come, not once in the endless days of flight nor in the endless hours of waiting. He had known they would not fail him. They might not be clever like the Jews, but Germans were dependable. They did what they were told.

  2

  A small rubber boat was waiting when Kruger reached the pebble beach. One man sat at the oars, another stood on shore. Both were dressed entirely in black— shoes, trousers, sweaters, woolen caps—and their hands and faces had been blackened with charcoal. Neither spoke.

  The man on shore extended a hand, offering to relieve Kruger of his satchel. Kruger refused. Securing the satchel to his chest, he stepped aboard the boat and, steadying himself with a hand on the oarsman's shoulder, made his way forward to the bow.

  There was a sound of rubber scraping against pebbles, then only the soft lap of oars pulling against calm water.

  Two more men stood on the deck of the U-boat, and when the rubber boat glided up to its side, they helped Kruger aboard, took him to the forward hatch and held it open for him as he climbed down a ladder into the belly of the boat.

  * * *

  Kruger stood behind a ladder in the control room and listened to a blizzard of curt orders and immediate responses. The air inside the submarine was a fog. Every lightbulb had a halo of mist around it, every metal surface was wet to the touch. And the air was not only humid, it stank. He parsed the stench, and recognized salt, sweat, diesel oil, potatoes and something sickly sweet, like cologne.

  Kruger felt as if he were a prisoner in an infernal swamp.

  He heard a muted sound of electric motors, and there was a faint sensation of movement, forward and down.

  An officer wearing a white-covered cap stepped away from the periscope, gestured to Kruger and disappeared into a passageway. Kruger bent his head to pass through an open hatch, and followed.

  They squeezed into a tiny cubicle—a bunk, a chair and a folding desk—and the commander introduced himself. Kapitanleutnant Hoffmann was young, no more than thirty, bearded, with the gaunt pallor of U-boat veterans. Around his neck he wore a Knight's Cross, and when it snagged in the collar of his shirt, he flicked it aside.

  Kruger liked the insouciance of the gesture. It meant that Hoffmann had had his Ritterkreuz for some time, was probably entitled to wear oak leaves with it but didn't bother. He was good at his job, but that was already obvious from the simple fact that he had survived. Nearly 90 percent of all the U-boats launched during the war had been lost; of the thirty-nine thousand men who had sailed in them, thirty-three thousand had been killed or captured. Kruger remembered hearing of the Fuehrer's rage as he had read those figures.

  Kruger gave Hoffmann the news: of chaos in the country, of the retreat to the bunker, of the Fuehrer's death.

  "Who is the new leader of the Reich?" Hoffmann asked.

  "Donitz," said Kruger. "But in fact, Bormann." He paused, debating whether to tell Hoffmann the truth: there was no more Reich, not in Germany. If the Reich was to survive, the seeds of its survival were here, in this submarine. He decided that Hoffmann didn't need to know the truth. "Your crew?" he said.

  "Fifty men, including you and me, all volunteers, all party members, all single."

  "How much do they know?"

  "Nothing," Hoffmann said, "except that they're not likely to see home again."

  "And the trip will take how long?"

  "Normally, thirty or forty days, but these days aren't normal. We can't get out the shortest way. The Bay of Biscay is a death trap, crawling with Allied ships. We'll have to go up
around Scotland, get into the Atlantic and head south. I can make eighteen knots on the surface, but I don't know how much we'll be able to travel on the surface. I'll have to maintain economy speed, about twelve knots, so as to keep our range at about eighty-seven hundred miles. If we're harassed, we'll spend more time submerged. We only make seven knots submerged, and our E motors give out after sixty-four miles and need seven hours of surface running to recharge. So the best I can give you is a guess: about fifty days."

  Kruger felt sweat bead on his forehead and under his arms. Fifty days! He'd been in this iron tomb for less than an hour, and already he felt as if a mailed fist were crushing his lungs.

  "You'll get used to it," Hoffmann said. "And when we get south, you'll be able to spend time on deck. If we get south, that is. We're at a disadvantage. If we have to fight, we'll be like a one-armed man. We have no forward torpedoes."

  "Why not?"

  "We took them out, to make room for your . . . cargo. It was too big to go down the hatch, so we removed the deck plates. Then we found it wouldn't fit between the torpedoes, so they had to go."

  Kruger stood up. "I want to see it," he said.

  They moved forward, past space after tiny space— the radio room, officers' quarters, the galley. When they reached the bow of the ship, Hoffmann swung open the hatch leading to the forward torpedo room, and Kruger stepped through.

  It was there, secured in an enormous bronze box, and for a moment Kruger simply stood and looked, remembering the years of work, the countless failures, the derision, the first tiny successes and, at last, his triumph: a weapon unlike anything ever created.

  He saw that the bronze had begun to tarnish, and he stepped forward and checked swiftly for any signs of damage. He saw none.

  He put a hand on the side of the box. What he felt was beyond pride. Here was the most revolutionary weapon not only of the Third Reich but of science itself. Very few men in history could claim what he could: Ernst Kruger had changed the world.

  He thought of Mengele, Josef Mengele, his personal friend and professional rival. Had Mengele, too, escaped? Was he still alive? Would they meet in Paraguay? Mengele, known as Der Engel des Todes, the Angel of Death, because of his experiments on human beings, had been contemptuous of Kruger's work, proclaiming it fanciful, impossible. But in fact, Kruger's research had a very practical, and very deadly, purpose.

  Kruger dearly hoped Mengele was still alive; he couldn't wait to show Mengele his achievement, the ultimate weapon: Der Weisse Hai.

  He turned away and left the torpedo room.

  3

  AS the U-boat rounded the tip of Scotland, it hit a savage westerly gale. Pitching and rolling like an amusement park ride, it inched south, west of Ireland, and made its way slowly into the Atlantic.

  On May 8, Hoffmann told Kruger that a bulletin had come over the radio: Germany had surrendered. The war was over.

  "Not for us," Kruger replied. "Not for us. For us, the war will never be over."

  The days fell, like autumn leaves from a linden tree, one after another, indistinguishable. Hoffmann had avoided the shipping lanes, and so encountered no Allied vessels. Three times the lookout had seen trails of smoke on the horizon; half a dozen times Hoffmann had ordered the boat to submerge, shallow practice dives rather than emergencies.

  For Kruger, time became a monotonous cycle of meals, sleep and work in the forward torpedo room. His work was crucial; it was the sole motivation for his own life now, and for enduring this interminable voyage.

  In the torpedo room, Kruger pushed a release button hidden beneath a tiny swastika etched in the bronze. The cover of the huge box opened; with a magnifying glass he examined the thick rubber O-ring seals that kept the box air- and watertight. He applied grease to any spots that appeared to be pitting or drying out.

  Kruger's superiors had immediately grasped the military applications of his experiments. What he saw as a scientific breakthrough, they saw as a magnificent weapon. And so money was lavished upon it, and Kruger had been pushed to complete it. But then, with success so close, time had run out; the empire of the Reich had shrunk to a bunker in Berlin, and Kruger had been told that the weapon would be transported, even though programming was incomplete.

  Four weeks into the voyage, Kruger was summoned to the control room. Hoffmann's arms hung over the wings of the periscope, his face was pressed to the eyepiece and he was turning in a slow circle. He didn't look up, but as soon as Kruger was in the room, Hoffmann said, "This is the moment we've been waiting for, Herr Doktor. It's calm, it's twilight and it's pouring rain. We can go topside and have a shower." Hoffmann looked away from the eyepiece and smiled. "And in deference to your station, you shall be on the first shift."

  It had been more than a month since Kruger had bathed, shaved, brushed his teeth. The boat could store only a few gallons of fresh water, and that which its desalinizers made every day was reserved exclusively for cooking and for servicing the batteries. He longed for the feeling of fresh water on his stinking skin. "Is it safe?" he asked.

  "I think so. There's not much traffic this far south— we're about two thousand kilometers east of the Bahamas." Hoffmann returned to the eyepiece and said, "How much water under the keel?"

  "No bottom here, Herr Kaleu," a sailor at a control panel replied.

  "No bottom?" Kruger said. "How can there be no bottom?"

  Hoffmann said, "It's too deep for our Fathometer to get a return. We must be over one of the midocean trenches . . . three kilometers, five kilometers . . . who knows? Plenty of water. We're not likely to hit anything."

  The rush of fresh air, as a crewman opened the conning-tower hatch, smelled to Kruger as sweet as violets. He stood at the base of the ladder, holding a bar of soap, and savored the drops of rainwater that fell on his face.

  The crewman scanned the horizon with binoculars, called out, "All clear!" and slid backward down the ladder.

  Kruger climbed up, stepped over the lip of the bridge and descended the exterior ladder to the deck. Four crewmen followed him, scaling the ladders as nimbly as spiders. They gathered on the afterdeck, naked, and passed a bar of soap among them.

  The rain was steady but soft, not wind driven, and the sea was slickly calm. The long, gentle ocean swell lifted the submarine so slowly that Kruger had no trouble keeping his footing. He walked forward to a flat stretch of deck, took off his clothes and spread them on the deck, hoping the rain would rinse the stench from them. He lathered himself and spread his arms.

  "Herr Doktor!"

  Kruger dropped his arms and looked aft; the four naked crewmen were rushing up the ladder to the bridge.

  "A plane! Hurry!" The last crewman on the ladder pointed at the sky, then kept climbing.

  "A what?" Then, over the sound of his own voice, Kruger heard the drone of an engine. He looked in the direction the crewman had pointed; for a moment, he saw nothing. Then, against the lighter gray of the western clouds, there was a black speck skimming the wave tops and heading directly at him.

  He scooped up his clothes and ran for the ladder. His foot hit something, some obstruction on the deck, and he sprawled forward onto his knees, scattering his clothes.

  The drone of the plane's engine sounded closer; it had risen to a yowl.

  Stunned by a sharp, hot pain that shot from his big toe up through his calf, Kruger abandoned his clothes and struggled to his feet. He glanced backward to see what he had hit; one of the deck plates just aft of the forward hatch looked warped, as if a weld had popped and sprung one of the plate's edges.

  He began to climb the ladder.

  The engine noise was deafening now, and Kruger ducked reflexively as the plane screamed overhead. He looked up as it began a long loop into the sky.

  One of the crewmen leaned down from the bridge, reaching his hand out to Kruger, urging him on.

  From somewhere inside the hull Kruger heard the klaxon for an emergency dive, and as he fell over the lip of the bridge and sought footing on the i
nterior ladder, he felt the thrum of engines and a sensation of motion forward and down.

  The hatch clanged shut above him, the crewman shimmied past him down the side of the ladder, and Kruger found himself standing on the bottom rung, naked, drenched, a film of soap running down his legs.

  Hoffmann was bent over the periscope. "Pull the plug, Chief," he said, "we're taking her down."

  Kruger said, "On the deck, one of the—"

  "Periscope depth," the chief called. "E motors half speed."

  Hoffmann spun the periscope ninety degrees. "Son of a bitch," he said. "The bastard's coming back."

  "He didn't fire on us," Kruger said. "I think you—"

  "He will this time; he was just making sure. He's not about to let a U-boat get across the Atlantic, war or no war. Forward down fifteen, aft down ten. Take her to a hundred meters."

  Hoffmann slammed the wings of the periscope up and pushed the retractor button, and the gleaming steel tube slid downward. He glanced at Kruger, noted the stricken look on his face and said, "Don't worry, we're a needle in a haystack. Night's coming on, and the chances of his finding us—"

  "Fifty meters!" called the chief.

  "On the deck," Kruger said. "I saw a ... one of the pieces of metal . . . have you taken this boat to a hundred meters before?"

  "Of course. Dozens of times."

  "Seventy meters, Herr Kaleu!"

  At seventy meters below the surface, there was nearly a hundred pounds of water pressure on every square inch of the submarine's hull. The boat had been designed to operate safely at more than twice that depth, and had done so many times. But when the forward deck plates had been removed to take on Kruger's cargo, one of the welders assigned to replace them had worked too hastily. A few superficial, inconsequential welds had failed during the shallow dives, but all the critical ones had held. Now, however, with thousands of tons of water squeezing the hull like a living fist, one gave way.