Of course there’s always France, which is friendly territory, but it is a siren whose allure must be sternly resisted. It’s not enough for Bischoff just to run the U-boat aground on a godforsaken beach somewhere; he wants to get the thing back to a proper base. But the skies above the proper bases are infested with Catalinas, illuminating the sea with the satanic light of their radars. It is much cleverer to make them think that he’s headed for France, and then head for a German port instead.
Or at least it seemed that way two days ago. Now the complexities of the plan are weighing on him.
The shadow of the ship above them suddenly seems much longer and deeper. This means either that the earth’s rotation has just sped up tremendously, moving the sun around to a different angle, or that the ship has veered towards them. “Hard to starboard,” Bischoff says quietly. His voice travels down a pipe to the man who controls the rudder. “Anything on the radio?”
“Nothing,” says the Funkmaat. That’s weird; usually when the ships are zigzagging, they coordinate it on the radio. Bischoff spins the periscope around and gets a load of the transport, still trying to shoulder its way into them. He checks his course; the bitch has veered a full ninety degrees!
“They’ve seen us,” Bischoff says. “We’ll dive in just a moment.” But before he loses his ability to use the periscope, he does one more three-sixty, just to verify that his mental map of the convoy is accurate. It is, more or less; why, there’s a destroyer, right there where he thought it was. He steadies the ‘scope, calls out target bearings. The Torpedomaat echoes the digits while dialing them into the targeting computer: the very latest fully analog technology. The computer grinds through some calculations and sets the gyroscopes on a couple of torpedoes. Bischoff says: fire, fire, dive. It happens, almost that fast. The diesels’ anvil chorus, which has been subtly driving them all insane for a couple of days, is replaced by a startling silence. They are running on batteries now.
As has always been the case, and as will continue to be the case for at least another half century, batteries suck. The convoy seems to bolt forward as U-691’s speed drops to a pathetic wallow. The destroyers can go about five times as fast as they can now. Bischoff hates this part.
“The destroyer is taking evasive action,” says the sound man.
“Did we have time to get the weather forecast?” he asks.
“Storm front moving in this evening. Foul weather tomorrow.”
“Let’s see if we can stay alive until the storm hits,” Bischoff says. “Then we’ll run this bucket of shit straight up the middle of the English Channel, right up Winston Churchill’s fat ass, and if we die, we’ll die like men.”
A terrible clamor radiates through the water and pierces the hull. The men cheer sullenly; they have just sunk another ship. Whoopdy-doo!
“I think it was the destroyer,” says the sound man, as if he can hardly believe their luck.
“Those homing torpedoes are bastards,” Bischoff says, “when they don’t turn round and home in on you.”
One destroyer down, three to go. If they can sink another one, they have a chance of escaping the remaining two. But it’s nearly impossible to escape from three destroyers.
“There’s no time like the present,” he says. “Periscope depth! Let’s see what the fuck is going on, while we’ve got them rattled.”
It is like this: one of the destroyers is sinking and another is heading towards it to render assistance. The other two are converging on where U-691 was about thirty seconds ago, but they are hindered by having to make their way through the middle of the convoy. Almost immediately, they begin to fire their guns. Bischoff looses a spread of torpedoes towards the assisting destroyer. Water is spouting up all around them now as they are straddled by shells from the other two. He does another three-sixty, fixing the image of the convoy in his mind’s eye.
“Dive!” he says.
Then he has a better idea. “Belay that! Surface and go to flank speed.”
Any other U-boat crew would cut his throat at this moment, then surrender. But these guys don’t even hesitate; either they really do love him, or they’ve all decided they’re going to die anyway.
Twenty seconds of raw terror ensue. U-691 is screaming across the surface, banking like a Messerschmidt as shells pound into the water all around her. Crewmen are spilling out of her hatches, looking like prison camp inmates in the bright sun, trying not to slide off the deck as it tilts this way and that, diving to snap the carabiners of their safety lines onto cables before they are blown out of their shoes by the waterspouts from the exploding shells. They are manning the guns.
Then there’s a big transport ship between them and the two destroyers. They’re safe now, for a minute. Bischoff’s up on the conning tower. He turns aft and gets a load of the other destroyer, spiraling crazily in an effort to shake off those homing torpedoes.
When they come out from behind the shelter of the big transport, Bischoff sees that his mental map of the convoy was more or less accurate. He speaks more orders to the rudder and the engines. Before the two attacking destroyers have a chance to open up with their guns again, Bischoff has got himself positioned between them and a troop transport: a decrepit ocean liner covered with a hasty coat of wartime camo. They can’t shoot at him now without blowing hundreds of their own troops to shreds. But he can shoot at them. When Bischoff’s men see the liner above them, and gaze across the water at the impotent destroyers, they actually break out into song: a congratulatory beer hall ditty.
U-691 is topheavy with weaponry, armed to the teeth because of the aircraft threat. Bischoff’s crew opens fire on the destroyers with all of the small and medium-sized stuff, to give the deck gun crew a chance to line up its shot. At this range, the danger is that the shell will pass all the way through the destroyer’s hull, and out the other side, without detonating. You have to be patient, take your time, aim for the engines. Bischoff’s crew knows this.
A skull-cracking explosion sounds from the barrel of the deck gun; the shell skims the water, hits the closest destroyer right in the boilers. The destroyer doesn’t blow up, but it does go dead in the water. They take a few more shots at the other destroyer and manage to knock out one of its guns and one of its depth charge launchers. Then the lookouts see airplanes headed their way, and it’s time to dive. Bischoff does one final periscope scan before they go under, and is surprised to see that the destroyer that was trying to evade the torpedoes managed to do so; apparently two of them curved back and hit transport ships instead.
They go straight down to a hundred and sixty meters. Destroyers drop depth charges on them for eight hours. Bischoff takes a nap. When he wakes up, depth charges are booming all over the place and everything is fine. It should be dark and stormy up there now: bad weather for Catalinas. He evades the destroyers by (in a nutshell) doing clever things he has learned the hard way. The U-boat is as thin as a knitting needle, and when you turn it directly toward or away from the source of a ping, it makes almost no reflection. All that’s required is a clear mental map of where you are with respect to the destroyers.
After another hour, the destroyers give up and leave. Bischoff takes U-691 up to schnorkel depth and points her straight up the middle of the English Channel, as advertised. He also uses the periscope to verify that the weather is, also as advertised, awful.
Those bastards have a big fat red pin on the map marking his position as last reported by those destroyers. Around that pin, as the hours go by, they will draw circles of steadily increasing radius, widening gyres enclosing the set of all points in the ocean where U-691 could possibly be at the moment, based on their assumptions about her speed. The square mileage that must be searched will increase as the square of that radius.
Going up the Channel, while submerged, just isn’t going to work—they’ll run into one of the block ships that the Brits sank there to prevent U-boats from doing just that. The surface is the only way, and it’s a hell of a lot faster too. This rais
es the airplane issue. Airplanes search not for the boat itself, which is tiny and dark, but for its wake, which is white and spreads for miles on calm water. There will be no wake behind U-691 tonight—or rather, there will be, but it will be lost in random noise of much higher amplitude. Bischoff decides that covering distance is more important than being subtle at the moment, and so he brings her up to the surface and then pins the throttle. This will burn fuel insanely, but U-691 has a range of eleven thousand miles.
Sometime around noon the next day, U-691, battering its way through a murderous storm, lances the Straits of Dover and breaks through into the North Sea. She must be lighting up every radar screen in Europe, but airplanes can’t do much in this weather.
“The prisoner Shaftoe wishes to speak to you,” says Beck, who has gone back to being his second-in-command, as if nothing had ever been different. War gives men good ignoring skills. Bischoff nods.
Shaftoe enters the control room, accompanied by Root, who will apparently serve as translator, spiritual guide, and/or wry observer. “I know a place where we can go,” Shaftoe says.
Bischoff is floored. He hasn’t thought about where they were actually going in days. The concept of having a coherent goal is almost beyond his comprehension.
“It is—” Bischoff gropes “—touching that you have taken an interest.”
Shaftoe shrugs. “I heard you were in deep shit with Dönitz.”
“Not as bad as I was,” Bischoff says, immediately perceiving the folksy wisdom of this American barnyard metaphor. “The depth is the same, but now I am head up instead of head down.”
Shaftoe chuckles delightedly. They are all buddies now. “You have any charts of Sweden?”
This strikes Bischoff as a good but half-witted idea. Seeking temporary refuge in a neutral country: fine. But much more likely is that they run the boat aground on a rock.
“There’s a bay there, by this little town,” Shaftoe says. “We know the depths.”
“How could that be?”
“Because we charted the fucking thing ourselves, a couple of months ago, with a rock on a string.”
“Was this before or after you boarded the mysterious U-boat full of gold?” Bischoff asks.
“Just before.”
“Would it be out of line for me to inquire what an American Marine Raider and an ANZAC chaplain were doing in Sweden, a neutral country, performing bathymetric surveys?”
Shaftoe doesn’t seem to think it’s out of line at all. He’s in such a good mood from the morphine. He tells another yarn. This one begins on the coast of Norway (he is deliberately vague about how he got there) and is all about how Shaftoe led Enoch Root and a dozen or so men, including one who had a serious ax wound to the leg (Bischoff raises his eyebrows) all the way across Norway on skis, slaying pursuing Germans right and left, and into Sweden. The story then bogs down for a while because there are no more Germans to kill, and Shaftoe, sensing that Bischoff’s attention is beginning to wander, tries to inject some lurid thrills into the narrative by describing the progress of the gangrene up the leg of the officer who ran afoul of the ax (who, as far as Bischoff can make out, was under suspicion as a possible German spy). Shaftoe keeps encouraging Root to jump in and tell the story of how Root performed several consecutive amputations of the officer’s leg, all the way up to the pelvis. Just as Bischoff is finally starting to actually care about this poor bastard with the gangrenous leg, the story takes another zigzag: they reach a little fishing town on the Gulf of Bothnia. The gangrenous officer is delivered into the hands of the town doctor. Shaftoe and his comrades hole up in the woods and strike up what sounds like an edgy relationship with a Finnish smuggler and his lissome daughter. And now it’s clear that Shaftoe has reached his favorite part of the story, which is this Finnish girl. And indeed, up to this point his story-telling style has been as rude and blunt and functional as the inside of a U-boat. But now he relaxes, begins to smile, and becomes damn near poetic—to the point where a few members of Bischoff’s crew, who speak a little bit of English, start to loiter within earshot. Essentially the story goes totally off the rails at this point, and while it’s entertaining material, it appears to be headed exactly nowhere. Bischoff finally interrupts with “What about the guy with the bad leg?” Shaftoe frowns and bites his lip. “Oh, yeah,” he finally says, “he died.”
“The rock on the string,” prompts Enoch Root. “Remember? That’s why you were telling the story.”
“Oh, yeah,” Shaftoe says, “they came and picked us up with a little submarine. That’s how we got to Qwghlm and saw the U-boat with the gold. But before they could enter the harbor, they had to have a chart. So Lieutenant Root and I went out on a fucking rowboat with a rock on a string and charted it.”
“And you still have a copy of this chart with you?” Bischoff asks skeptically.
“Nah,” Shaftoe says, with a flip coolness that in a less charismatic man would be infuriating. “But the lieutenant remembers it. He’s really good at remembering numbers. Aren’t you, sir?”
Enoch shrugs modestly. “Where I grew up, memorizing the digits of pi was the closest thing we had to entertainment.”
CANNIBALS
* * *
GOTO DENGO FLEES THROUGH THE SWAMP. HE IS fairly certain that he is being chased by the cannibals who just cooked up the friend with whom he had washed ashore. He climbs up a tangle of vines and hides himself several meters above the ground; men with spears search the general area, but they do not find him.
He passes out. When he wakes up, it’s dark, and some small animal is moving in the branches nearby. He is so desperate for food that he grabs at it blindly. The creature has a body the size of a house cat, but long leathery arms: some kind of huge bat. It bites him several times on the hands before he crushes it to death. Then he eats it raw.
The next day he goes forth into the swamp, trying to put more distance between himself and the cannibals. Around midday he finds a stream—the first one he’s seen. For the most part the water just seeps out of New Guinea through marshes, but here is an actual river of cold, fresh water, just narrow enough to jump across.
A few hours later he finds another village that is similar to the first one, but only about half as big. The number of dangling heads is much smaller; maybe these headhunters are not quite as fearsome as the first group. Again there is a central fire where white stuff is being cooked in a pot: in this case, it appears to be a wok, which they must have gotten through trade. The people of this village don’t know a starving Nipponese soldier is lurking in the vicinity, so they are not very vigilant. Around twilight, when the mosquitoes come out of the swamps in a humming fog, they all retire into their longhouses. Goto Dengo runs out into the middle of the compound, grabs the wok, and makes off with it. He forces himself not to take any of the food until he is far away, hidden in a tree again, and then he gorges himself. The food is a rubbery gel of what would appear to be pure starch. Even to a ravenous man, it has no flavor at all. Nevertheless he licks the wok clean. While he is doing so, an idea comes to him.
The next morning, when the sun’s bubble bursts out of the sea, Goto Dengo is kneeling in the bed of the river, scooping sand up into the wok and swirling it around, hypnotized by the maelstrom of dirt and foam, which slowly develops a glittering center.
The next morning Dengo is standing on the edge of the village bright and early, shouting: “Ulab! Ulab! Ulab!” which is what the people in the first village called gold.
The villagers wriggle out of their tiny front doors, bewildered at first, but when they see his face and the wok dangling from one hand, rage flashes over them like the sun burning out from behind a cloud. A man charges with a spear, sprinting straight across the clearing. Goto Dengo dances back and takes half-shelter behind a coconut tree, holding the wok up over his chest like a shield. “Ulab! Ulab!” he cries again. The warrior falters. Goto Dengo holds out his fist, swings it to and fro until it finds a warm shaft of sunlight, and then loosens it sli
ghtly. A tiny cascade of glittering flakes trickles out, catching the sun, then plunges into shadow, hissing as it strikes the leaves below.
It gets their attention. The man with the spear stops. Someone behind him says something about patah.
Goto Dengo levels the wok, resting it on his forearm, and sprinkles the entire handful of gold dust into it. The village watches, transfixed. There is a great deal more whispering about patah. He steps forward into the clearing, holding the wok out before him as an offering to the warrior, letting them see his nakedness and his pitiful condition. Finally he collapses to his knees, bows his head very low, and sets the wok on the ground at the warrior’s feet. He remains there, head bowed, letting them know that they can kill him now if they want to.
If they want to choke off their newly discovered gold supply, that is.
The matter will require some discussion. They tie his elbows together behind his back with vines, put a noose around his neck, and tie that to a tree. All of the kids in the village stand around him and stare. They have purple skin and frizzy hair. Flies swarm around their heads.
The wok is taken into a hut that is decorated with more human heads than any of the other huts. All of the men go in there. Furious discussion ensues.
A mud-daubed woman with long skinny breasts brings Goto Dengo half a shell of coconut milk and a handful of white, knuckle-sized grubs wrapped up in leaves. Her skin is a tangle of overlapping ringworm scars and she is wearing a necklace that consists of a single human finger strung on a piece of twine. The grubs squirt when Goto Dengo bites down on them.