The Saboteurs

by W. E. B Griffin

  They could hit the beach, strap the stainless steel containers on their backs, and move inland without having to take time to deflate and then bury the boats. Only their footprints would be evidence of their having been there, and in an hour’s time, with the rain, those would be gone, too.

  And if no rubber rafts were found, then there would be no reason for anyone to look for whatever vessel had launched them.

  Koch lightly clicked his heels, nodded once in deference, and left the tower for the deck.

  Brosin turned to Wachoffizier Detrick.

  “If there is no signal within fifteen minutes to retrieve the boats, Willi, personally see that the line is cut.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Richard Koch dipped the wooden oar blades into the sea, pressed for leverage the toes of his boots into the crease formed where the floor of the rubber boat met the transom, and slowly leaned back, pulling on the oars as he did.

  The whole boat seemed to contort and simply move in place at first. It felt as if the rubber ring that formed the sides of the raft just flexed around the weight of the cargo—Koch and the stainless steel container—and that the boat made no forward motion across the water.

  Koch raised the blades out of the water, leaned forward, dipped the blades, and again leaned back and pulled. More flexing of the raft, but not as much as the first time. And when he made another cycle, he could sense that he was making progress, that the rubber boat was moving forward.

  Between his raft and the U-boat, Koch could hear the dipping of the others’ oar blades and similar sounds of progress.

  Getting the men and the containers from the U-boat into the rafts had gone almost as they had practiced it at the sub pens in France. They first had tied off each boat—as an act of safety in the event one went in the drink before anyone wanted it there—to a short line that was secured to the ironwork that protected that deck gun mounted just fore of the conning tower. Then, after the boats were inflated with a foot-operated bellows, they were slipped over the side. One had gone in upside down and had to be recovered, drained of seawater, and re-launched.

  Next, a rope ladder was produced and deployed, and the first agent, Bayer, made his way down it, along the port side of the sub, and into a raft being steadied by a sailor holding as best he could to the short length of line tied to the bow. Once the agent was in the boat, seated on the center bladder of inflated rubber that served as his rowing position, one of the stainless steel containers, tied to another line and with its web shoulder straps placed against the hull to muffle any metal-on-metal clanking, was slowly slid down the port side. The container was secured on the deck of the raft by a strap affixed to the floorboard, and the sailor then cast off the short bowline and the next raft was pulled forward and positioned at the foot of the rope ladder.

  With each agent, the process had been repeated almost flawlessly. The exception was Rolf Grossman.

  When Grossman’s container was lowered over the side, the sailor, his fingers tired and cramping, accidentally let the rope slip and in the quiet of the night the container hit the water with a remarkable sound. The resulting splash nearly soaked Grossman with cold seawater, and it took some effort for the quick-tempered agent not to spring from the raft and up the ladder to let loose a string of expletives—if not a fistful of knuckles—at the sailor.

  In addition to the short length of line on his boat, Koch had another. It was tied to a hard point on his bow and, at the other end of the line, to another coil of line on the U-boat deck that in turn was tied to yet another coil of line that was secured to the ironwork that protected the U-boat’s deck gun. A sailor played out the coiled lines as Koch rowed away.

  Koch now led the tiny flotilla to just shy of shore. He kept a steady rhythm as he cycled the oars. And after some time, he felt the raft suddenly rise higher on a swell than it had on any swell since he had left the sub and he knew that meant the water was getting shallower, that he was almost ashore.

  He dipped the blades and pulled hard on the oars, once, twice, then, on the third pull, he at once felt the blades strike the sand bottom and the raft slide to a stop to the sound of rubber scraping on the beach.

  Koch quickly shipped his oars and practically leaped out of the boat and onto the shore. He scanned the area, saw nothing in the darkness, then reached in the boat and, with a good deal of effort, pulled out the stainless container and set it on the sand. He turned and tugged hard at the raft to pull it up and out of the water.

  Next, he carried the container higher on the beach, up past some driftwood and old logs, then ran back to meet the other rafts.

  One by one, as they repeated the pulling ashore of the boats, Koch used hand signals to indicate that the agents should move the containers to the collection point on higher ground.

  As Cremer and Bayer and Grossman did so, Koch took the loose end of the short line of the nearest raft and tied it to his boat, then tied the next raft to that one, creating a train of rubber rafts ultimately tethered to the U-boat.

  He was tying the last raft when Cremer returned.

  “Herr Hauptmann, shall I make the retrieval signal?” Cremer whispered in German.

  “Not ‘Herr Hauptmann,’” Koch hissed in English. “From now on, we use our American names.”

  “Yes, sir—” Cremer began in English, then corrected himself. “Okay, Richard.”

  Cremer stepped to the water’s edge, removed a black tin flashlight from his pocket, held it to the highest point he could reach over his head, then pushed its switch six times to make the agreed-upon signal of two series of three flashes each. When there was no immediate response from the U-boat, he quickly repeated the two series of three flashes.

  He heard a sound of something rushing through the water just offshore and realized it was getting closer. It sounded like a small school of fish rushing across the surface. Then he noticed a line tied to the first raft was drawing taut—fast. The line stiffened and the raft practically shot off of the shore. It took him a moment to understand that someone on the U-boat had seen his first signal and the sailors had begun to pull on the line. The delay, he guessed, had to have been due to the length of the line and the taking up of its slack.

  Cremer put the flashlight in his pocket, then hurried over to the next raft in line. He positioned it in the water, toward the U-boat. Koch was about to do the same with the third raft when he heard footfalls squeaking in the sand as someone was fast approaching.

  “Sir!” Bayer whispered excitedly.

  “It’s Rich—” Koch began to correct Bayer as he turned away from the raft to face him.

  Koch stopped when he saw Bayer standing there with Grossman. He couldn’t believe his eyes, but when Cremer ran up with his flashlight and turned it on there was no disputing it.

  Between Bayer and Grossman stood a young man—really, only a kid; his huge eyes showed stark terror—wearing the uniform of an American coastguardsman.

  Bayer had the young man’s hands bound together with rope cut from one of the containers, and Grossman had his Walther 9mm pistol pointed at the kid’s head. They had used a length of material cut from the poncho to gag his mouth.

  “Turn off the goddamned light!” Koch whispered, in German, and when it went dark he leaned closer to Bayer’s ear and snapped, “What is this?”

  Bayer replied in German: “I was having no luck finding the placement of the containers. I went up to the dunes, by some logs, and heard moaning.”

  “Moaning?” Koch repeated.

  “Ja,” Bayer said, a hint of laughter in his voice. “And when I finally saw where it was coming from—a poncho—I saw it was shaking. A happy shaking, if you get my meaning, Herr Hauptmann.”

  Koch looked at him incredulously. “Scheist!” he said.

  “He has no weapons,” Grossman said. “What do you want to do? I can kill him, but then we have a body.”

  Koch considered that quickly. Grossman would have no trouble strangling him—cutting his throat or shoo
ting him was out of the question; too messy and noisy—but they couldn’t leave the body on the beach or toss it in the sea.

  The kid clearly constituted some sort of beach patrol. And if he didn’t check in with someone, that someone would come looking for him, and if they found his body there would be problems that the Germans did not need. Same if they tried to bury him. Someone would eventually find the grave site. Worse, it would require the teams to burn valuable time digging a grave, burying the body, then covering their tracks.

  There was the sound of laughter coming from a short distance inland, and a woman’s cackle caused Koch to be distracted for a moment. Then, behind him, there came the sound of the third raft beginning to crunch across the sand as it headed for the sea.

  Koch turned and looked at it a long moment as it slid away.

  “This way!” he said, running for the last raft in the line. “Schnell!”

  With more than a little effort, Bayer and Grossman lifted and dragged the young American in the soft sand behind Koch.

  “In here!” Koch said, pointing to the raft.

  The American squirmed and made angry grunts as they placed him on the floor of the raft. Grossman smacked him hard on the top of his head with the Walther and the protests stopped for a moment. When the kid stirred, Grossman hit him again with the pistol, this time behind the right ear, and he went limp.

  “Take those oars and put them in the other boat!” Koch ordered as he rushed to wrap the kid’s ankle with the strap that had secured the container to the raft. He then took the end of the line that bound his hands and ran it down to the ankles, trussing him to keep him from jumping overboard in the event there came such an opportunity.

  The line that tied the fourth boat to the third boat now began to tighten, then became quite taut. Koch suddenly realized that with the added weight of the kid, the fourth boat was stuck high and dry. He signaled for each man to move to a corner of the boat and they lifted and carried the raft into the water.

  Slowly, the train began moving smoothly out to sea again.

  “That should make a nice surprise for the commander,” Koch said as the last raft and its cargo floated from view.

  The men chuckled.

  “Enough of this,” Koch said. “Let us go before he is discovered off his post—and then we are.”

  U-134 had been moving slowly in reverse under the quiet power of batteries for about five minutes—Kapitänleutnant Hans-Günther Brosin having given the order to be under way immediately after seeing through his binoculars the first blink of light from the agent’s six-pulse signal.

  After the first two sets of three flashes, there quickly had followed another two sets, and Brosin wondered if there was any particular reason for that—were the agents simply more anxious than necessary or did they need to get the rafts off the beach right away because they were in immediate danger of being discovered?

  There was a flash code for that contingency, of course, as well as for others, but Brosin knew that invariably there were gray areas when something happened that was not addressed by some specific signal. So instead of having the U-boat sit in the shallow sea while the deck crew of five hand over hand pulled in the line in order to retrieve the rafts, he ordered another five sailors to go down and help them pull against the extra strain of the U-boat backing away from shore.

  The sooner they were in deeper water, the sooner he would feel better.

  Moments after he had given the order to get under way, as the sailors were hauling in the line, there came another odd occurrence.

  The line tethering the rafts suddenly became very taut. It pulled forward the seamen who were retrieving it due to the fact that the ship was of course motoring in the opposite direction. This created the real danger of pulling them overboard, and Brosin was just about to bark the order that they let loose of the line and that the engine power be cut when whatever obstruction there had been was overcome, and the sailors were again recovering line hand over hand.

  Now, with his binoculars, Brosin could see the first of the four rafts coming into view through the drizzle.

  “What is our depth, Willi?” Brosin asked.

  The executive officer relayed the question down below and a moment later replied, “Thirty meters, sir.”

  Brosin watched the first raft reach the submarine. The sailors cleated the line, ran to the raft, and manhandled it aboard. Two seamen began deflating the recovered raft while the others returned to pulling in the line that tethered it to the following rafts.

  Satisfied that the recovery process was progressing well and nearly completed, the captain let the binoculars hang from the strap around his neck and turned to his executive officer.

  “Bring her around, Willi,” he ordered, “and set a course of one-two-five degrees. Go to diesel power, five knots to start, then double that once all boats are aboard and stowed.”

  “Yes, sir,” Wachoffizier Detrick said, and called the orders down below.

  Brosin looked again at the men on deck, saw that they had the third boat out of the water, then he removed the strap from around his neck, handed the binocs to the XO, and went to the hatch to go below.

  Brosin had just stepped from the foot of the conning tower ladder when he heard from above Willi Detrick’s excited voice call down through the hatch, “Sir! I think you should see this!”

  [ FOUR ]

  Gander Airport

  Gander, Newfoundland

  0840 4 March 1943

  Dick Canidy had sensed in his gut the very early sign that the Douglas C-54, one so new that it seemed right off the assembly line, was going to have problems with one of its four Twin Wasp radial engines.

  The Air Transport Command flight had been eight hours, ten minutes, and fifteen seconds out of Prestwick, Scotland—Canidy had immediately checked his chronometer, which he had reset to zero and activated as the bird had gone wheels up—when he detected an odd faint vibration that his aeronautic training had immediately told him was more than a mere aberration.

  Not a minute later, it manifested itself again, louder this time, and one of the engines on the left wing of the Douglas C-54 began to shake the plane violently. Then a great cloud of black smoke erupted out of the outboard Twin Wasp, and the pilot rushed to shut it down, feather its props, and adjust throttles and trim to rebalance the aircraft.

  This took a few minutes, what to many passengers seemed like hours, but soon afterward they were informed that everything was fine, that the cause of the engine failure was a common oil pressure problem, that the pilots had absolutely no doubt that the aircraft could make this leg’s intended destination—the refueling stop of Gander—and that the only inconvenience was that they would just be a bit delayed.

  Canidy knew that “a bit delayed” was a huge understatement. Down one engine, they were going to be flying slower than the 250 miles per hour or so that the aircraft had been making.

  But he of course knew the rest to be true. The excuse of an oil pressure problem was plausible. And the aircraft was more than capable of cruising along at an altitude of seven thousand feet on the power of the remaining three 1,450-horsepower Pratt & Whitney engines.

  That had been the view of Canidy the Professional Aviator.

  Canidy the Bus Passenger, however, became miserable after hours of looking at the dead engine with the Atlantic Ocean in the background and was grateful to finally see the coastline of Newfoundland on the horizon, and then the snow-covered airfield itself, a welcome way-point carved out of the wilderness on what not five years earlier had been an uninhabited plateau of Gander Lake’s north shore.

  As the Air Transport Command C-54 pilot turned on final, the only sounds in the cabin were the hum of the Twin Wasps and the rush of air over the flaps extended from the wings. The next sounds heard—the chirp-chirp of the aircraft wheels gently touching down on the runway—were followed by the raucous applause of the nervous passengers now greatly relieved to have cheated death again.

  Canidy loo
ked out the window, trying to avoid getting drawn into the mindless jabbering of the other passengers.

  Just before touching down, his field of view allowed him to see hundreds of warbirds parked in neat lines—Douglas Boston light bombers with Canadian Air Force markings, U.S. Army Air Forces B-25 Mitchells and B-24 Liberators, and more—all apparently waiting to be ferried eastward to battle.

  They came through here, Canidy knew, because the shortest route between North America and Europe was Gander to Prestwick. He remembered being told that the population of this godforsaken frozen outpost had swollen to some fifteen thousand—a mix of Royal Air Force, Canadian Army, and U.S. Army Air Forces, heavy on the Canucks.

  Canidy could not see the warbirds now. All that was visible was a wall of snow that had been plowed off of the runway. He looked across the airplane and saw that there was a wall on either side of them and it appeared as if the plane was traveling along in some kind of winter canyon.

  The aircraft came to a gap in the canyon wall—a ramp to the taxiway—and as the C-54 turned into it, Canidy could see that a yellow truck with a FOLLOW ME sign had been waiting there, and now was leading the way.

  A moment later, Canidy began to see a row, then two and three rows, of bombers. The C-54 rolled past them, then past two hangars that looked full of aircraft in for repair, then up to the Base Operations building.

  Ramp personnel wearing remarkably heavy winter outfits and carrying wands waved the C-54 to a parking pad next to two other C-54s, and the pilot shut down the three good engines.

  After a long visit to the gentlemen’s facilities, Canidy attempted to get a status report on the aircraft and—though appreciative of having made it alive and well to Beautiful Downtown Gander—an idea of when the hell he could expect to be airborne out of this icebox of an outpost, en route to Elizabeth City, New Jersey, and connections from there to anywhere else but here.

  He tried at first to go through channels.