Submerged

by Thomas F Monteleone

  They fought against the tide for several hours before finally reaching a muddy embankment. With no moon, the land was dark as a coalmine, and the lights they had seen from a distance had become lost in a thick tree line. Insects thrummed and Erich thought he heard the occasional rattle of a vehicle on some distant, unknown road.

  “Hide the raft,” he told his small crew, and they punctured the dinghy and did a poor job of hiding it beneath some underbrush. However, it only needed to stay undiscovered until they were far enough away to never be connected to it.

  Hausser had said they must work their way north, toward Baltimore, but slowly with great caution. Once in the city, they could find his uncle’s restaurant, and the hope of sanctuary. Erich felt this was a simple plan, but he was concerned about his poor English skills. Like Manny, he barely recalled any of his grammar school drills. Hausser claimed to have a decent vocabulary from his letters to his American cousins, but Erich believed in no guarantees at that point.

  There were other concerns as well—they had no American money, no real sense of direction nor distance, and were very afraid people might not yet know the war had ended. What would happen, Erich mused, if they were caught and discovered to be Germans by an uninformed populace?

  Manny felt it wise to head toward the sound of vehicles, which promised a road and a means of orienting themselves. They reached a paved two-lane highway just as dawn arrived, giving them a compass heading. Manny figured the road headed in a general northwest direction, which suited their purpose. However, they decided to remain in the woods and brush bordering the road, moving as best they could, but undetected during the day. The landscape was mostly peppered by farms and the occasional intersection.

  When darkness fell, they were fighting exhaustion and had used up the small amount of rations they’d brought along. Although risking capture was almost unthinkable, Erich knew they would not get very far without food or water. And so, when they stumbled on a small rural gas station and grocery which had closed for the evening, they had no choice but to break inside and gather provisions.

  For almost a week, they moved only in darkness, abetted by one additional burglary. It was slow and they had no idea when they would reach the city. However, as the farms became more plentiful, so did available supplies and well water, which kept them alive. Manny seemed particularly terrified by the idea of capture. Erich was getting to the point of no longer caring what happened to him, while the young Hausser seemed to be genuinely excited at the prospect of seeing his relatives.

  On the evening of the sixth day of their wandering, they saw a glow beyond the horizon, signaling a large city. The outskirts of Baltimore. Crowded. Dirty. Industrial.

  They entered the area through the southeast where steel mills still blazed around the clock and shipyards swelled with dry-docked vessels in for repairs. The war with Japan was very much in doubt, and America still labored to earn victory. Everyone working so hard. So much activity that Erich felt safe walking in the streets. Wearing non-descript khaki and denim, they looked like other workers. No one gave them a second glance.

  They became more comfortable, and Hausser became downright bold. “We need money,” he said. “I will get it for us.”

  Erich and Manny waited in an alley, while their young cook begged for coins on a street corner.

  Within the hour, he had a handful of nickels. “Watch this, Captain,” he said.

  Erich and Manny followed him into a tiny corner store selling cigarettes, newspapers, and American soft drinks. Hausser smiled as he spotted what he was looking for in the rear corner of the establishment. But first he moved to a refrigerated chest, lifted its lid and pulled out three bottles of Coca-Cola. The glass felt cool in Erich’s hand, and he realized they had no way to open them. A small boy squeezed past him, retrieved his own bottle, and snapped it open on a small lip attached to the side of the cooler.

  Smiling, Manny nodded and they all opened their first bottles of Coke in America. It was a moment Erich never forgot.

  As they edged to the back of the store, Hausser directed them to the original object of his quest—a wooden phone booth with a split hinged folding door and a large book attached to a shelf beneath a telephone.

  Hausser spent considerable time searching through the listings…until he found what he needed. “It is the Continental House,” he whispered in German. “I found it!”

  A phone number. Using one of his begged coins, he successfully telephoned his Uncle Herman at the restaurant. Hausser was so proud of his ability to do this, his smile looked as if it would explode off his face.

  After hanging up, Hausser guided them outside into the noisy street, then told them how shocked his uncle had been to receive a call from young Freddie, as they all called him. But the elder Hausser did not hesitate to act.

  One half hour later, Herman and his son, Dickie, arrived in a 1938 Plymouth, a beat-up black sedan, covered in road dust. He drove up Hanover Street through a neighborhood he called ‘Sobo’. The uncle was tall with thin blond hair and small, round spectacles. He had been clearly overjoyed to see his young nephew, and if he was suspicious of Manny and Erich, he did not show it. As he drove slowly up the crowded streets, he told Erich with evident honesty he could not have helped them if the war in Europe had not been ended.

  Erich nodded, tried to relay in half-English-half-German, his appreciation and understanding. He tried to tell Herman he would have done the same. At that moment, Erich had acknowledged the day would come when they would face questions from the Americans and their answers would have to be good ones.

  When they reached the Continental House, Erich was impressed with the size and popularity of the restaurant. Herman ran it with his wife, their two daughters and their husbands as the wait-staff. They had a German chef named Kimmel, a few kitchen helpers, and that was all. Herman had come to America as a small boy with his family, who had been in the meat business as butchers and packers. He started his restaurant after the Depression, originally calling it the German Haus, but he had changed the name after Hitler invaded Poland and occupied France.

  Erich and Manny were taken in by Hausser’s family with a promise they would be safe until they could get established. Back then, Baltimore was very much a patch-quilt of tight little neighborhoods demarcated by nationalities. The Haussers lived in Morrell Park—an area which had been heavily German for a hundred years, and because of that, no one paid much attention to the poor English language skills of Erich and Manny.

  Nephew Freddie went to work in the family restaurant’s kitchen, where he learned the secrets of the great chefs and how to speak passable English quite quickly. Herman found Manny work as a neighborhood handy-man with older residents who needed odd-jobs and who still spoke a fair amount of German. Finally, he was able to arrange employment for Erich as a helper on an ice-truck. It was backbreaking work, dragging blocks of ice into stores and taverns. And, because he spoke so little English, the pay was very low.

  As the months passed, slouching into a humid Baltimore August, Manny and Erich learned to speak the language of the locals. At first, it was difficult, and peppered with colloquial aberrations, but Erich persevered because of the utter necessity of it. He, Manny, and Freddie were becoming a familiar part of the neighborhood, and no one questioned their presence there. As Erich learned more English, he was able to comprehend more of what was happening in his home country. And, as he and Manny had suspected, Europe and Russia were planning to punish Germany in a very large way. Both were grateful to not be there—either to witness or suffer it.

  Japan surrendered when it felt the punishing force of an American atomic device. When Erich saw the notices later that month of a terrible weapon that had leveled two Japanese cities, he thought immediately of the device he’d left behind…and only then had any true sense of what kind of weapon it might have been.

  Erich would have never imagined ever spending a
Christmas in America, and his first was a memorable one. He and Manny had been making friends throughout the neighborhood and the city itself. There was a lot to like about their new country, and they had both decided to become permanent citizens—if they ever wanted better jobs, better housing.

  Like so many of his friends, Erich wanted a family. But there was only one way to do this—he would need to rise up from hiding. Herman Hausser suggested waiting at least a year after the end of the war before placing himself at the mercy of the American authorities. Time has a way of smoothing out rough spots, and Erich hoped the American Navy would be tired of the war and have little interest in him or his Executive Officer.

  While keeping a low profile until the proper time, he and Manny, along with Freddie Hausser, concocted a history for themselves. A history that would allow them to keep the truth buried—hopefully forever.

  By the next summer, they were ready. Thankfully, Erich recalled the story of the U-1020, under the command of a very young captain named Eberlein. In January, 1945, it had disappeared during its mission to scout aerial defenses of major harbor cities along the East Coast of America—part of the preparation for the 5001’s secret mission. When Erich and the others officially turned themselves in, Erich told the federal agents they had been part of an adjunct training crew on that submarine, which had been sunk in the Atlantic, south of the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay. They had been the only three survivors—washing ashore south of Norfolk.

  Erich had been confident the Americans would believe him—for several reasons. One, he gave them real names, and the feds were able to verify all three of them had been members of the German Navy. Two, there was no record of Manny, Hausser, or Erich sailing on any other boats—the 5001 never officially existed and adjunct crew were routinely omitted from regular boat crew-lists. Three, the Navy did have records of attacking and sinking U-boats sighted off the Virginia and Carolina coasts in January of ’45. which made it more than likely they sank the boat carrying Erich and the others. And four, Erich had no reason to be lying.

  They did believe them, and eventually, after passing through the bureaucracy, Erich, along with Manny and Freddie Hausser, went about the business of becoming Americans.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Dex

  As Jason maneuvered along the not-crowded streets of downtown Lancaster, Dex listened to Erich Bruckner, who had proved himself a decent narrator.

  “Opa, you never told me any of that before,” said Jason.

  “I hedged my bets, as they say.” Bruckner looked out the window wistfully. “I was hoping I would never need to.”

  “It must have been hard to keep all that in, all this time,” said Augie, who’d been listening with rapt attention.

  “For a long time, I had Manny who shared our secret—who believed in staying silent as much as me. Of course, often, that can be a problem.” Bruckner turned to look at Dex, smiled. “Ben Franklin said something about such a situation, Mr. McCauley. Did you ever hear it?”

  Dex smiled. He knew the quote well. “Two men can easily keep a secret…as long as one of them is dead.”

  Bruckner nodded. “And that has been the case for seven years now.”

  “But what about before then?” said Jason. “How did you keep it so quiet?”

  Erich regarded his grandson, pausing to find the right words. Then he said, “Manny and I were…what is the word…haunted by the ruins we’d found. And the suggestion that something had been awakened in the base after the explosion. We agreed the place was best left alone. Forgotten. Like a tomb with a curse. And the curse turned out to be the Project Norway bomb.”

  “Yeah, I can understand that,” said Jason.

  “Besides,” said Erich. “The odds of anyone ever finding a passage under the Greenland Shelf seemed almost impossible.”

  “Yeah, but what about the science stuff? That beacon thing?” Jason spoke softly, with a very respectful tone. “I mean, whoever built that, they sounded so much more advanced than us. Maybe we should try to—”

  “No,” said Erich, holding up a hand. “Better left alone. Maybe we should not know what became of them.”

  “Hmm, yeah,” said Tommy. “I never thought of it like that, but you’re right, you know.”

  Bruckner continued: “I had one other overriding concern. Remember, I had left my logbook in my quarters on the U-5001. For many years, I worried about that. I wondered if anyone might ever find the remains of our boat. If they did, I wondered if they would be able to discover facts regarding our true mission.”

  “But the years went by, and Manny and I carried on our lives. We married American girls, saved our money. We opened our first bar near the Cross Street Market in Baltimore. We did well. When we discovered the old world ways and the German influences up here in Pennsylvania, we decided to sell the bar and move our families, and open a new place. It was a fine idea.”

  “Yeah, Opa, you did great, you really did.”

  Bruckner smiled as he patted his grandson’s shoulder. Then he turned to Dex: “All that time going by, and no word on our U-boat. Manny was convinced it was gone forever, but my instincts told me to never be certain of anything—that’s why, after Manny died, I told Jason his ‘uncle’ had been in the German submarine service, that his boat was called the U-5001, and I stressed to him if he ever saw any mention of the boat—any at all—I would be interested in knowing about it.”

  “Okay,” said the grandson. “It’s all making sense now.”

  “All that time,” said Dex. “And then along comes me and my divers.”

  “Yes,” said Bruckner. “In all these years I have learned many things—one is to not be surprised by the workings of fate.”

  While the old man had been talking, Dex had been partitioning his thoughts, wondering how much he should tell Captain Bruckner about the people who were after them. He was an officer, and deserved to know, but it would probably be best to wait until the Admiral’s people reached them.

  As much as Dex hated to even think about it, not only Bruckner might be in danger, but the rest of his family as well.

  So what did he say? And when and to whom?

  He remained silent as Jason pulled onto the Bruckner’s street. As the SUV drifted into a lazy turn into the driveway, Dex tapped Jason on the shoulder.

  “Can you stop here for a sec? I need to get something from my truck.”

  Tommy looked at him initially with surprise, then understanding. He didn’t want to alarm the others, but he didn’t want to go walking into a trap.

  Reaching his hand into the pocket of his windbreaker, Tommy nodded. “You go on,” he said. “I’ll go in with Captain Bruckner and see if he needs any help.”

  “I’m right behind you.” Dex turned and walked out to his F-150 on the sidewalk. Just as he reached it, he heard the first whump-whump sounds of a helicopter somewhere above them. Why hadn’t Whitehurst called back to confirm it?

  Jason and his grandfather had reached the front door, followed by Augie and Tommy. Dex couldn’t move, seized by indecision. He had the Mossberg in the truck, but that was a desperation weapon. Useless in a crowd when not everybody in the crowd was a bad guy. Quickly opening the passenger door, he grabbed his backpack from the rear cab and rummaged an extra magazine for the Sig. With his hand in his jacket, he clicked off the handgun’s safety, and headed for the Bruckner house, where the group had entered and closed the door behind them.

  Now that was weird…

  The night sky resonated with the distant beat of rotor blades—were they getting louder, closer?

  Jesus, he wasn’t trained for this kind of situation, and besides that, he was feeling too old to pull it off. He knew they’d been dumb-lucky the first time they’d locked horns with the enemy, but Dex had a very bad feeling they wouldn’t let themselves be that stupid twice.

  Rotor blades whumping in the
darkness. Definitely drawing closer. The Lancaster airport was dead north of his position, and only by a few miles.

  What now?

  Pulling out his Trac Fone, he hit the re-dial. If the connection locked him into the infinite carousel of the Pentagon routing system because it was after hours, he was fucked. If it—

  “Whitehurst,” said a voice.

  “Admiral, it’s McCauley—what’s going on? I never heard from you and the chopper’s on its way.” His gaze moved skyward as he spoke; now the running lights of the Sea Ranger, as well as its engine, had become a faint signal of its approach.

  “That’s a negative,” said Whitehurst. “That’s why I haven’t confirmed yet. Philadelphia can’t get their bird airborne. Trouble with the fuel line…”

  His hand tightened on the Sig’s grip. “What’re you talking about? I got one homing in on me right now.”

  There was a pause on the other end. “No good, McCauley. Get everybody outta there! That’s not us!”

  A little late for that, thought Dex. His pulse jumped so quickly, he felt an instant of pain behind his ears, a blur of vision. “I’m gonna need some help here!” he said, then punched off the call, knowing he should be doing something.

  He moved away from his pick-up, leapt over the hedge and ran along the left perimeter of the front lawn. Interior lights blazed from most of the windows on that side of the house, like beacons to guide him in for a closer look.

  Rotors were slashing and beating the air above him. Looking up, he saw a dark fuselage silhouetted briefly against the low cloud cover then it vanished. The aircraft had cut its running lights and only the increasing baffle of it blades belied its proximity. Dex wondered if it carried heat-sig scanners which would reveal his position instantly.

  Can’t worry about it now.

  Moving to a window under a flower bed, he wedged himself in between two large manicured shrubs. Thin, designer blinds shuttered the light from inside, but remained slanted just enough for him to squint into the thin horizontal opening.