Codes of Courage, page 21
Billy shimmied down the rope and reached the bottom. Karl went next, hoping the captain, Sparks, and anyone else still alive and on board could make it to one of the other lifeboats before the ship disappeared. He landed hard and cut the painter, severing the lifeboat from the Hillingdon. Billy grabbed two oars and handed one to Karl.
Karl rowed them away from the wreck of the Hillingdon, then back toward the men the lifeboat had dumped into the ocean. “At least the sun’s coming up. Last time I was torpedoed, it was at the beginning of the night, not the end. Took a long time for anyone to find us in the dark.”
“And the water’s as warm as a swimmin’ pool. No one’ll freeze to death.” Billy grunted as he worked his oar.
No. Death from exposure to the cold wasn’t likely. Karl was more worried about heat exhaustion once the sun came up, but maybe they’d be picked up before the hottest part of the day. The sound of an airplane drew Karl’s attention. In the dim lighting, he could make out the shadow of the plane but couldn’t tell if it was friendly or hostile.
“Ecker?” Billy’s voice held a note of alarm.
“What is it?”
“Look to the starboard.”
Karl obeyed. His view had been blocked before by the Hillingdon, but now she was almost completely submersed. A U-boat cruised on the surface, perhaps five hundred yards away. A painted raven decorated the conning tower, clutching what looked like a torpedo in its claws.
“It’s all right. Once we’re off our ship, they’re more likely to offer us cigarettes than to hurt us.”
“Then why are so many of ’em rushin’ to their gun?”
Karl glanced at the U-boat again. Sure enough, they were preparing the deck gun. “Because that airplane must be on our side, and they’re going to try to blow it from the sky.” With any luck, the airplane had already signaled the coordinates of the wreck, and then it would avenge the Hillingdon by destroying the U-boat that had torpedoed her. But when Karl thought of what that battle might entail, a chill that reminded him of the North Atlantic ran along his backbone.
“Row, Billy. Harder than you’ve ever rowed before.”
“But you just said the U-boat won’t shoot at us.”
“They won’t, but the airplane that’s fighting them might drop depth charges. Those things can batter in the hull of a U-boat. What do you think they’ll do to men floating in the water?”
Billy swore. They rowed as if the lives of their shipmates depended on them, because they did, but the lifeboat fought them with each maneuver. It was designed for a dozen people—it needed more crew on the oars, plus someone to steer it. Karl kept looking over his shoulder to measure the bearing to the nearest man, and sometimes, he had to temper his row so he wouldn’t pull the boat the wrong direction. Billy did his best on the other oar, but he wasn’t as strong, making their progress lopsided.
They reached the first man, Peaky Hammond, as the U-boat’s gun let loose a long, loud burst from the deck cannon. Karl reached a hand overboard to haul Peaky in. Peaky gave Karl his left hand, rather than his right, even though his right hand was closer. Karl tried to tug him in, but with Karl and Peaky on one side and only Billy on the other, the lifeboat tipped precipitously.
“You’ll have to do it, Billy, or we’ll capsize.” Karl traded places with Billy and tried to throw his weight in the right spot to keep the lifeboat level.
Billy strained as he tried to help his shipmate. There wasn’t any way a featherweight like Billy could balance the ship if Karl tried to pull Peaky in, but Billy might not be strong enough to fish men from the water either. Karl said a silent prayer, Billy groaned, and Peaky whimpered.
Peaky slid into the bottom of the boat, holding his right hand against his chest.
“Can you row?” Karl asked. His muscles burned from their previous work, and he suspected Billy’s were even more exhausted.
Peaky shook his head. “I think my arm’s broken. Gashed too.”
“Can you steer?”
Peaky nodded.
“Good, because if that aircraft drops depth charges . . .” Karl didn’t finish. He sat and took the oar, and the moment Billy was in position, they started again.
Karl grabbed the next man from the water. Peaky and Billy helped keep the lifeboat balanced. Jake came aboard, coughing and sputtering, but he took Billy’s place, and they rowed toward the next man as the Short Sunderland Mark V roared overhead. Smoke leaked from one engine. Karl instinctively ducked his head and shoulders as shells from the U-boat’s deck gun fired overhead, even though the trajectory of the projectiles was far too high to hit the lifeboat.
They were almost to the next man when the Sunderland made a tight turn and lined up for another run on the U-boat. It whooshed overhead, then burst into a ball of fire as the U-boat’s shells intersected the aircraft’s path.
Karl ducked again, and so did Jake. Probably Billy and Peaky, too, but Karl couldn’t see them. The explosion didn’t come even close to reaching them, but intuitive fear kicked in. Then horror, as a pair of dark objects arching away from the blast fell into the water and turned it into a white, bubbling mass of churning liquid. The U-boat rocked. Then the lifeboat rocked.
Jake began rowing again, and Karl joined him. The cook had been only ten meters from the safety of the lifeboat, but when Jake reached for him; he didn’t reach in return. Momentum from the lifeboat moved the body, and a wash of red swirled with the waves. No one said anything, but Billy retched into the water over the side of the lifeboat. They left the corpse and went to the next, then the next, then back to where the ship had sunk, hoping the men there had been far enough away to escape the hydraulic shock.
They found the skipper. Captain Blake had made it off the Hillingdon. So had Sparks. But they hadn’t made it onto a lifeboat, and neither of them had survived the underwater explosion. It didn’t seem to matter that Karl had seen scores of other men killed in action—each new death still hit him with brutal force. Captain Blake had worked harder than anyone Karl knew to reach the position of ship’s master. He’d gone out of his way to mentor those who were new or those who were lonely. He might have survived if he hadn’t gone back for Sparks, but abandoning a crewmember had never been in Captain Blake’s nature.
The men on the U-boat examined their craft for damage, then maneuvered closer to the lifeboat. “Only four of you?” one of them called down from the conning tower in accented English.
Jake glanced at Karl, but Jake was the officer, so the decision on whether to talk to the enemy or not was his. He looked at Peaky next, with his broken and bleeding arm, and maybe that was what convinced Jake to speak. “She went down too fast for the lifeboats to properly launch. This one tipped. We were trying to pick up everyone else when . . .” Jake didn’t finish. He just gestured to a small piece of the plane’s still-burning wreckage.
“And the Hillingdon’s cargo?”
More hesitation. Jake could ignore the question or lie. The U-boat man might demand an answer by pointing a firearm at them. But the ship was gone now, and the enemy already knew its name. Maintaining silence over its cargo no longer served the Allied cause. The U-boat men just wanted to know how much tonnage they could claim. In the end, Jake spoke. “Ammunition and aircraft parts.”
“How big was your ship?”
“8,000 tons.”
“Do you need food or medicine?” the German officer asked.
Karl assumed the lifeboat was adequately stocked. With only four of them, the supplies would be ample. But Peaky’s arm could turn septic.
Jake hesitated but only for a moment. “One of our men has a broken arm.”
The German officer motioned them toward the sub. “Come, I have a man who can look at it.”
Jake nodded at Karl, and they rowed closer.
“We ain’t actually goin’ on a U-boat, are we?” Billy’s face looked green.
“Just the deck, maybe,” Jake said. “They don’t want us in their space any more than we want to be there. But if anyone asks, Karl was born in Scotland, eh?”
Karl grabbed the line when one of the U-boat men threw it. He would keep his mouth shut until the U-boat disappeared, either over the horizon or beneath the waves. He had thought Jake was still upset with him because he wanted to join the Royal Navy, and maybe he was. Yet he was also looking out for him. Differences of opinion aside, they were friends and shipmates, and that meant protecting each other when danger came.
Extra sailors clambered onto the U-boat’s deck to keep a lookout. They wore a variety of clothing. Some wore no shirts, and most looked as if they hadn’t shaved in weeks.
A short man with glasses and a thick brown beard left the conning tower dressed in the same green-gray material many of his crewmates wore. “No, the plane didn’t send any transmissions before we destroyed her. The ship sent an SSS and her name, but not her position.” He spoke to the officer in German, not to the enemy sailors in the lifeboat, probably assuring the kommandant that it was safe to linger at the place of their victory. Rather than waving Peaky up onto the U-boat, the man joined them in the lifeboat. Considerate and practical, given Peaky’s injury. The seas were fairly calm, but the deck was significantly above the edge of the lifeboat.
“You a doc?” Peaky asked as the man gently took his arm and examined it.
The man didn’t answer. Perhaps he didn’t understand. Karl had been planning to stay silent so that no one on the U-boat would suspect he was technically a traitor to the Reich. But if he was the only one in the lifeboat who spoke both German and English, he owed it to Peaky to translate.
“Do you speak English?” Karl asked the German petty officer in English.
The man didn’t reply.
“You are doctor?” Karl tried to make his German sound sloppy.
The man shook his head as he disinfected the gash running along Peaky’s forearm. “We don’t have room for a doctor, but I qualified in a first-aid course.”
Karl decided not to translate that for Peaky, as he didn’t think it would inspire much confidence. The man seemed sure of his abilities, so maybe he really knew what he was doing. Plenty of people had false confidence, but the sea had a knack for teaching a man what he could and couldn’t do, and the man had to have been at sea at least long enough to grow a beard.
Peaky gritted his teeth and hissed when the man began a line of small sutures in his arm.
“Help me hold his arm, will you?” The German petty officer glanced at Karl, and Karl complied. The man then pulled a bottle of cognac from his medical bag and handed it to Peaky.
Peaky imbibed, and the German petty officer stitched. After the stitches came a splint and a wrap.
“You’ll want to keep that as dry as possible. And clean.” The U-boat man glanced about the lifeboat. “I imagine you’ll be picked up before the stitches need to be removed or the bone is healed. A real doctor can take it from there. Good luck.” The man packed up his bag but left the cognac.
“See if he can give us a heading to the nearest land,” Jake said.
Karl asked as the man swung his bag to one of his shipmates on the U-boat’s deck.
“I’ll ask one of the officers. I don’t often see the charts from the radio shack.” The man climbed from the lifeboat and chatted with someone Karl assumed was an officer. It was hard to tell because the man wore only shorts and shirtsleeves.
“Head east, but you’ll never make it rowing. You’ll have to hope that one of your friends finds you or the Guinea Current catches you.”
Karl and Jake began rowing again, not with the intention of making it to the African coast but with the intention of getting away from the U-boat before it left. If it moved too fast, it might overturn their little craft.
“Save the rest of the cognac for when you really need it, Peaky.” Jake looked over his shoulder.
“I just had my arm stitched up and splinted. Believe me, I need it now.”
“You might need it later too.” Jake kept his strokes long and powerful. “And it might have to double as a disinfectant.”
The cork popped into the bottle’s top. “Rather fine French cognac to be used as a disinfectant. I hope we get picked up before we come to that.”
Jake grunted. When they’d put sufficient distance between their lifeboat and the U-boat, he stopped rowing, and Karl did the same.
“Billy, see what we have in our first-aid kit in the way of disinfectants,” Jake said.
While Billy was focused on the first-aid kit and Peaky was closing his eyes, probably waiting for the pain to deaden, Karl leaned toward Jake and dropped his voice to a whisper. “Before he came on board, that man told his skipper that the plane sent no transmission, and the Hillingdon sent an SSS but no coordinates. He mentioned being in the radio room, so I assume he was listening for signals.”
“So even if they heard the SSS, they won’t know where to look.” Jake looked eastward. Then he flinched and swore under his breath. “Grab the oar again. Sharks. I don’t want to be close enough to see them feasting on the bodies.”
Chapter 30
“Why bother helping them?” Wolfram scowled when Rolf squeezed into the radio shack. “They’re the enemy, and they’re going to die anyway.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. With a little luck, they’ll be picked up by another ship.”
“They’re still the enemy.”
“The moment their ship sinks, they become survivors rather than enemies.” Rolf hadn’t grown up at sea the way some of the men on board had, but he knew the unwritten laws and traditions. “All seamen have a duty to help the shipwrecked. You think God will help you when you’re shipwrecked if you turned your back on someone in the same position?”
Wolfram huffed. Rolf wished he wouldn’t because the man’s breath was atrocious. U-boats didn’t carry enough water to spare for bathing, but the men were allotted enough to properly clean their teeth. “I have no god. Just my führer.”
“You don’t have to believe in God if you don’t want to, Wolfram, but you had best learn to respect Neptune while you sail in his ocean.”
“So you’re religious and superstitious?”
Rolf didn’t answer. It wasn’t superstition so much as naval tradition, and faith was . . . well, it was hard to explain. He picked up a paper from the desk and stared at the coded letters. “What’s this?”
“A message detailing our victories this morning.”
“You were supposed to wait until I could supervise you.” If Wolfram didn’t change his attitude, Rolf was going to have a chat with Kapitänleutnant Baumann. A U-boat wasn’t large enough for crewmembers who didn’t follow instructions from their superiors, especially about something as sensitive as encoding procedures.
“Apologies, Funkmaat Denhart. I am eager to learn, and the medical procedure was prolonged.”
The man’s tone didn’t match his words, but what did Frieda always say? Some quote about soft answers turning away wrath. “Show me the settings you used.”
Rolf double-checked all of Wolfram’s work, pausing at the indicator group. “Where did you get this indicator group? It’s not on the table.”
Wolfram huffed again, and his fetid breath filled the radio shack. “Making one up saves time and increases efficiency. No one without an Enigma machine and all the correct settings is ever going to read our messages. All this protocol. Ridiculous.”
“No, they will not read our messages because we are so careful to always follow every protocol. Obey the rules, Wolfram. They were made for a reason.” Wolfram’s confidence had outpaced his competence, and if Rolf didn’t correct him, the man would endanger communications security for the entire Kriegsmarine.
“The British aren’t clever enough to break our codes. And the Americans weren’t even clever enough to black out their shoreline—not that I’m complaining about the 50,000 tons we sank that voyage along their coast. I could send a message with no more enciphering than adding five to every letter, and I still doubt they’d figure it out.”
Rolf could have figured out a code like that when he was in primary school, and he didn’t doubt the enemy could too. “Don’t underestimate them. They won the last war, remember?”
Wolfram rolled his eyes. “Only because the Jews stabbed us in the back. That won’t happen again. We’re taking care of that problem.”
The way Wolfram spoke . . . like the Jews were another enemy to be crushed in the same way the British Navy or the Soviet Army were. “What do you mean?”
“Those who do not voluntarily serve the Reich must be made to serve it. Or be eliminated. My uncle assures me that Jews, Communists, and other troublemakers are being concentrated in camps where they can be watched and kept from harming our war effort.”
Memory of Frieda’s words pricked at Rolf’s conscience. He couldn’t assume an entire group was disloyal just because they were Jewish or Communist. But he couldn’t worry about that now. They had a message to transmit, as soon as that message was properly encoded.
After the message was sent in Wolfram’s clumsy, lumbering fist, the U-115 gave the site of the attack a wide berth and dived below the surface to avoid being spotted by aircraft. Rolf stood his watch in the radio shack, left alone to his thoughts. Mercy for the shipwrecked enemy they fought against. Preemptive punishment for groups of people who might not be loyal in their homeland. Mercy, he understood. It went along with his faith and his hope in redemption. He also understood the harsh realities of war. If someone committed treason, they had to be punished, especially during times of war. But what if they only might commit treason because they were part of a group that couldn’t be trusted? By that same logic, U-boats ought to slaughter all the enemy sailors who made it to lifeboats because those sailors might be rescued and could again man ships bringing weapons and other supplies to their enemies. Same with civilian children who might grow up to fight against the Reich.
