The Heart Mender: A Story of Second Chances

  Schneider turned quickly and pointed his finger at Kuhlmann, who was about to protest. “Do not say a word, Commander. You know I have the authority. This man has been caught without proper papers and possessing a publication banned by Adolf Hitler himself.”

  Schneider turned back to Josef, who glowered at him, watching his sub pack still in Schneider’s hands. After all, it contained the only picture he owned of Tatiana and Rosa. He stood poised, waiting to fight if it came to that or to dive in after the picture should this maniac toss it overboard.

  “And here is another photograph, Landermann. This one also for you to carry at all times . . . a small reminder of the men to whom your life belongs. See here . . .” Josef stared at the snapshot in Schneider’s hand. It was a broad display of Hitler’s inspection of the U-166 crew several weeks earlier.

  “Do you see, Landermann?” The Nazi pushed the photo directly into Josef’s face and spoke to him as if he were a child. “There is you on the front row . . . looking so angry with your unloaded rifle. There is the admiral . . .” Schneider pointed to the men as he identified them. “There is your Führer . . . and look, Landermann, look . . . there I am! Do you see me? Not a perfect picture, to be sure. The photographer only captured the image of my striking face as I look over the heads of the other officers, but I am there.

  “And do you see who is not in the picture?” Josef could not imagine where the man was going with all this and continued to stand unmoving. “Commander Kuhlmann is not in the picture! So place this photograph in your sub pack. Consider it a gift. Don’t worry. I was given several. But if I ask to see it, the photograph had better be there. And look at it occasionally, Landermann. It will remind you that Commander Kuhlmann, your protector, is not in the picture. But who is in the picture? I am in the picture. You belong to me.”

  Schneider leaned directly into Josef’s face and snarled, “When we return home, if I can arrange to be there when it happens . . . to watch . . . I do believe I am going to have you shot.”

  Schneider moved to exit the conning tower, but remembering a slight he had not addressed, he wheeled around to Kuhlmann. With a serpent’s smile, he said, “As for having me in chains? You will be fortunate if I do not arrange for your execution as well. So, Commander, do not threaten me.”

  THE RAIN WAS BEGINNING TO EASE, BUT THE WIND WAS PICKING up. Wan was driving the beach road when the call came over the radio. “Go, Doris.”

  “What’s your twenty, Wan?” the dispatcher asked.

  “Beach road. Mile marker four.”

  “Okay, you’re it. Some summer folks just came in. They’re staying down at the Ramsey house on the peninsula. That’s mile marker . . . ahhh . . .”

  “Marker nine,” Wan interrupted. “I know where it is. What’s up?”

  “They said cargo boxes and vegetables and stuff started washing up about eight this morning. The house is way back in the dunes, but from the porch, they could see everything coming in. It was raining really hard, you know?”

  Wan rolled his eyes. “Yeah, Doris. I know. What else?”

  “Well, they went out to the beach—said the surf was real bad—anyway, there’s bodies mixed in with the stuff.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Yeah, they didn’t know how many, but there was a lot of bananas too.”

  “A lot of what?”

  “Bananas. Tons of bananas all over the place. That’s how the people saw the stuff washing ashore from way back in the dunes in the first place. Bananas are yellow, you know?”

  “Yeah, Doris. I know. Anything else? I’m headed that way now.”

  “No, nothing else. I’ll call the med crews—bodies and all—so they’ll be right behind you. Hey, Wan, did you know bananas would float? I didn’t.”

  Wan pulled into the Ramsey driveway, which was really just another sandy road—almost a half mile long. The Ramseys, he knew, lived in Birmingham and rarely used the place. It was loaned occasionally to friends and was one of eleven cottages in the dunes along a twenty-one-mile stretch of beach that Wan kept an eye on. At least once a month, Wan drove down each of the long driveways. At every location, he dutifully got out, walked around, and went up onto the decks of the small houses built on pilings, checking windows and doors.

  Only four of the eleven cottages were permanently occupied— one of which was the place Helen now owned—and none of them was directly on the beach. People who had built close to the beach in the past found out pretty quickly that there was no such thing as “hurricane proof” or “hurricane resistant” or “storm certified” or anything of the kind. When 140-mile-per-hour winds blew a fifteen-foot wall of water over your house . . . well, you could only hope for dry matches and enough wood to build a campfire with what was left.

  Parking beside the cottage, the deputy could indeed see the bananas on the beach as he stepped from the vehicle. Walking the three hundred or so yards to the water’s edge, Wan saw dark shapes dotted here and there amid the sea of yellow. Crates, most of them were, but as he got closer, he saw bodies too.

  There weren’t many. Wan could count seven dead men from the beach, but it was a horrifying sight. They had been in the water for a while—fish and crabs had taken their share. Wan waited for the med crew to arrive from Foley and moved upwind, seeking to avoid the foul odor of rotten bananas and decomposing flesh. The rain had stopped, but the southeast wind had built the waves along the shore into big rollers that fluttered the bodies in the water like a housewife shook out a rug.

  It took the med crew over an hour to make it from Foley, but the five men immediately waded into the surf after what they referred to as “the floaters.” Wan sat and watched as they performed their gruesome task, and soon, the bodies they recovered—there turned out to be eight—were lined up on the beach. The med crew boss, a large man everyone called “Pal,” came over to talk with Wan while the others went to the truck for canvas body bags and stretchers.

  “Eight.”

  “I see,” Wan responded simply. What more was there to say? The two stood for a moment, uncomfortable in the presence of what used to be living, breathing people—men who appeared to have been their own age.

  Pal cursed and mentioned an invasive procedure he’d like to try on any German he could get his hands on. Wan smiled grimly, then nodding his head to the southwest, said, “Look at this.”

  Pal cupped his hands over his eyes to shield the glare. As he spotted the object Wan had indicated, the big man’s face reddened. He scowled and ran a string of curses out of his mouth in as full a voice as he could muster. “This ain’t right, Wan! You know something’s up. That dang old man is always showing up at these places.” Wan agreed, but both men simply stood on the beach with their hands on their hips and watched. Aside from the occasional curse words— nouns mostly—that Pal threw out over the water, it was all they could really do.

  Harris Kramer, his thick gray beard blowing in the wind, steered his boat right into the floating wreckage and began pulling cargo boxes aboard. Kramer ran an oyster house on the south side of Mobile Bay, but by boat, it was a quick trip into the Gulf anytime he desired. A fast run west, then due south around the tip of the peninsula at Fort Morgan took less than thirty minutes. And here he was again at the site of another U-boat attack.

  The attacks had taken everyone along the coast by surprise. The submarines had even begun sinking fishing boats, and from Galveston to Tampa Bay, most people were in stunned disbelief. Was this really happening? After all, there was nothing in the newspapers. Or on the radio. But it was real enough. The bodies and wreckage washing up somewhere every day or so were proof of that. Wan and Pal had worked four such sites already this summer, and every time, old Harris Kramer was the first man salvaging the scene.

  Salvaging wasn’t illegal, so there was truly nothing anyone could do to stop Kramer, but the man was without conscience— Wan thought he was a ghoul. In most towns along the coast, folks would get together to clear the beach and give the food and suppli
es to the needy. In many cases, they found a way to return the goods to the war effort. But not here. Most of the stuff was snatched up by Harris Kramer and his nasty boat before anyone else got to it.

  Most folks heard the boat before they saw it. Named the Melany, it was an ugly, fat boat—a converted oyster barge— with a wide back end and a painted red top. Its sound was distinctive, a throbbing gurgle that coughed, spewing raw fuel out its exhaust and into the water.

  Pal waded along in the surf, trying to keep pace with the boat, shouting and throwing pieces of wood at the man, but Kramer ignored him and continued to pull in any of the nonperishable items he found with a gaff and stack them on deck. Wan sat and watched this circus as Pal’s men arrived and joined their boss, yelling and cursing in the water. They’re wet anyway, Wan thought, and everybody hates the old man, so why not?

  There was more reason to hate Harris Kramer than they knew. He had been given a dishonorable discharge from the army during World War I. Caught stealing from the men in his platoon, Kramer wasn’t just kicked out—those were different times—he was beaten and humiliated.

  Kramer had it in for everyone after that and vowed he would get even with all of them . . . the government especially. Through a friend of a friend, Harris Kramer met an influential German sympathizer and was recruited to sell food and fuel to German U-boats in the Gulf.

  It was easy enough, he reasoned—easier than fishing anyway—and the money was good. He had a fuel ration exemption because his seafood business was designated a “necessary provider of food.” The Germans usually paid with gold, though once he was compensated in U.S. currency.

  There was no chance of getting caught that he could determine. The transactions were handled at night, but even if they had taken place in the light of day, who was going to see anything? Everyone was so scared of the U-boats, most times Kramer was out on the water alone. And the kicker? Harris Kramer knew the areas being patrolled by the U-boats—after all, he fueled them—so it was a simple matter of cruising the beaches every day till he found a cargo to salvage. Then he sold to the Germans the food he had gathered from the torpedoed ships. It was beautiful!

  Finally Pal and his men wandered back to where Wan was still sitting. Kramer, they decided, couldn’t hear them anyway. He was cruising deeper water, searching for anything that he’d missed, and was headed back to the west from whence he’d come.

  Pal plopped down in the sand next to Wan just as the sun came out for the first time that day. “Better hustle them dead fellers over the dunes pretty quick. Gonna be hot soon. Don’t want to deal with that.” Wan grunted in agreement.

  “What do you think about this U-boat mess, Wan? What’re they gonna do?”

  “By ‘they,’” Wan asked, “you mean the navy?”

  Pal shrugged. “Navy . . . Coast Guard . . . Women’s Auxiliary at the Baptist church . . . hey, man, somebody better do something!”

  The men got to their feet. “I don’t know that anybody knows what to do, Pal. You can’t see ’em . . . can’t hear ’em . . . it’s a whole new style of fighting a war.”

  “It is that,” the big man agreed. “It sure is that.”

  But it wasn’t, really. At least the submarine itself wasn’t a new weapon. In fact, the idea of undersea stealth was almost as old as recorded history. In 413 BC, warriors trained in the art of “breath holding” were employed at the siege of Syracuse. They swam undetected for long distances in order to disable ships of war. During the Middle Ages, while the Crusaders surrounded Acre, written accounts confirm an “underwater device” used by the Arabs to gain entry.

  Even Leonardo da Vinci drew blueprints for some sort of underwater transport. His design was not seen until after his death, however, and his sketch notes revealed his apprehension that such a device might be used to sink ships.

  During the next several centuries, inventors created increasingly sophisticated submersibles. No less a wartime expert than George Washington personally witnessed the launch of a one-man, pedal-powered submarine into New York harbor on September 6, 1776. Despite its ultimate failure as an attack vessel, Washington called it “an effort of genius.”

  It wasn’t until 1864, during America’s Civil War, that the CSS Hunley became the first submarine effectively used as an offensive weapon. On a chilly February night, the Confederate sub eased out of Charleston harbor and sank the USS Housatonic—a brand-new twelve-hundred-ton Union frigate. The explosives had been attached to a long pole protruding from the submarine’s bow, and they were detonated by ramming its target. The obvious success of the Hunley’s mission was tempered by the fact that the subsequent explosion also sank her, killing all eight men aboard.

  The evolution of underwater warfare had been achingly slow, but in July 1942, along the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico, the German U-boat had reached an unimaginable level of effectiveness. And as Deputy Wan Cooper watched the med crew load the last of the bodies into their truck, he wiped his forehead with a white handkerchief, blithely unaware that, in his wildest dreams, he couldn’t have conjured up a story as unlikely as the one in which he was about to become involved.

  CHAPTER 7

  WHEN ERNST SCHNEIDER DEPARTED THE CONNING TOWER, Kuhlmann rolled his eyes dramatically for the benefit of his men, who were already muttering ominously among themselves. Josef was a popular man aboard, as was their commander, and to say the officers did not appreciate the manner in which the sinister Nazi observer had just threatened their friends would be to understate their anger.

  Particularly incensed was Chief Quartermaster Friedrich Wille, who, at thirty, was the only man on board the U-166 older than Kuhlmann. Wille was also terribly embarrassed that he had not arrested Schneider immediately when he had been ordered to do so. As Fischer assumed the forward lookout and the other officers, their watch concluded, descended the tower ladder into the boat, Wille approached Kuhlmann and Josef.

  The two men still stood at the back of the conning tower’s Wintergarten, the widely railed open area surrounding the twenty-millimeter antiaircraft gun. They made room for the quartermaster to join them. “Chief?” Kuhlmann said as he came near.

  Wille stopped and looked at his feet. “Commander . . . I should be disciplined . . . There is no excuse for what I . . .”

  Kuhlmann waved off the apology. “Wille, you are a good man. Good men are often at a loss for the proper way to handle an evil snake when it slithers into their midst.”

  Emboldened, the chief glanced over his shoulder to assure himself of Fischer’s location, then spoke quietly. “Sir . . . there are many forms an accident can take on a boat of this type. We are far from home and . . .”

  Kuhlmann held up a hand to stop the man from saying any more. “Chief, don’t consider it. I appreciate the sentiment, certainly, but in the middle of all this craziness, we cannot become like them.” He clapped the man on the back. “Take your watch, Wille. Go forward with Fischer for the time being. Landermann and I will remain on this station for a bit.”

  Josef watched the quartermaster move away. He was aware of the freshening breeze in his face as he looked to the south, his eyes drawn to the schools of yellowfin tuna blasting baitfish as they tumbled in the submarine’s violent wake. In truth, he had thought about killing Schneider as well. Wille is correct, Josef mused, there are many ways for a man to die at sea. A loose shirt jerked into the revolving pistons . . . a gentle push at night from the tower deck . . . even a pillow over a man’s face could accomplish the deed. After all, who would know? Who would care?

  As Schneider had humiliated him in front of the other men moments ago, Josef had actually thought that he might grab the man and simply go overboard, taking him down and drowning them both. After all, Schneider would be no great loss to anyone, and as for himself . . . well, wasn’t he intending to commit suicide anyway? Wasn’t that why he had torn up his documents on his last watch, tossing the pieces one at a time into the dark waters below? Why hadn’t he done it? Wasn’t that what they ca
lled “killing two birds with one stone”?

  “Josef?” Alone for the moment, Hans intruded on his friend’s dark fantasy. “Are you all right?” Josef didn’t answer. “Do not worry, Josef. I will take care of Schneider when we return. He will not have anyone shot.”

  Josef managed an unconvincing nod. “He has done it before,” he said. “And he was a psychopath long before he had any authority from the other psychopaths. Remember, I knew him in England.”

  “I remember. He was like this even then?”

  Josef ignored the question. “I am concerned only for you. Maybe Wille has the right idea. You called Schneider a snake slithering into our midst. What do you do with a snake? You cut his head off so that he may never bite again.” Hans made no reply, and for a time, the men stood quietly, scanning the horizon with their eyes, but searching their hearts with their thoughts.

  The U-166 moved at a brisk pace. Capable of speeds in excess of eighteen knots, her beam of 22 feet combined with a length of 252 feet created a draft greater than if a house had been towed through the water. The Type IXC was a long-range workhorse, but she was complex and, in order to function properly, required the efforts of every one of her fifty-two crew members.

  As the sun grew higher in the sky, Josef noticed that his friend, the commander of the boat, had not departed the conning tower. A silent show of support, he realized. And much appreciated. “Hans?” Josef spoke aloud. “What is our location?”

  “When I ran the figures at dawn, we were approximately 260 nautical miles from the Mississippi Sound . . . south of New Orleans. We are to be part of an array of five U-boats shutting the port down and sinking anything in or out. Our last message ordered us in line, nearest the coast, on the eastern edge of the channel.”