Cryptonomicon

Chapter 47 SEEKY

They have stuffed him into the narrow gap between the U-boat's slotted outer hull and the pressure hull within, so that bitterly cold, black water streams through with the bludgeoning force of a firehose and wracks him with malarial chills: bones cracking, joints freezing, muscles knotting. He is wedged in tightly between uneven surfaces of hard rough steel, bending him in ways he's not supposed to bend, and punishing him when he tries to move. Barnacles are beginning to grow on him: sort of like lice but bigger and capable of burrowing deeper into the flesh. Somehow he is able to fight for breath anyway, just enough to stay alive and really savor just how unpleasant the situation is. He's been breathing cold seawater for a long time, it has made his windpipe raw, and he suspects that plankton or something are eating his lungs from the inside out. He pounds on the pressure hull but the impact makes no noise. He can sense the warmth and heat inside, and he would like to get in and enjoy both of them. Finally some kind of dream-logic thing happens and he finds a hatch. The current sweeps Shaftoe out, leaving him suspended alone in the watery cosmos, and the U-boat hisses away and abandons him. Shaftoe is lost now. He cannot tell up from down. Something bashes him on the head. He sees a few black drumlike things moving inexorably through the water with parallel comet-trails of bubbles behind them. Depth charges.

Then Shaftoe comes awake and knows that this was all just his body desiring morphine. He is certain for a moment that he is back in Oakland and that Lieutenant Reagan is looming over him, preparing for Phase 2 of the interview.

“Good afternoon, Sergeant Shaftoe,” Reagan says. He has adopted a heavy German accent for some reason. A joke. These actors! Shaftoe smells meat, and other things not so inviting. Something heavy, but not especially hard, thuds into his face. Then it draws back. Then it hits him again.

“Your companion is morphium-seeky?” says Beck.

Enoch Root is a bit taken aback; they've only been on the boat for eight hours. “Is he already making a nuisance of himself?”

“He is semiconscious,” Beck says, “and has a great deal to say about giant lizards—among other subjects.”

“Oh, that's normal for him,” Root says, relieved. “What makes you think he is morphium-seeky?”

“The morphium bottle and hypodermic syringe that were in his pocket,” Beck says with that deadpan Teutonic irony, “and the needle marks in his arms.”

Root observes that the U-boat is like a tunnel bored out of the sea and lined with hardware. This cabin (if that's not too grand a word for it) is by far the largest open space Root has seen, meaning that he can almost stretch his arms out without hitting someone or inadvertently tripping a switch or a valve. It even sports some wooden cabinetry, and has been sealed off from the corridor by a leather curtain. When they first brought Root in here, he thought it was a storage closet. But as he looks around the place, he begins to realize that it's the nicest place on the whole boat: the captain's private cabin. This is confirmed when Beck unlocks a desk drawer and produces a bottle of Armagnac.

“Conquering France hath its privileges,” Beck says.

“Yeah,” Root says, “you blokes really know how to sack a place.”

Lieutenant Reagan is back again, molesting Bobby Shaftoe with a stethoscope that appears to have been kept in a bath of liquid nitrogen until ready for use. “Cough, cough, cough!” he keeps saying. Finally he takes the instrument away.

Something is fucking with Shaftoe's ankles. He tries to get up on his elbows to look, and smashes his face into a blistering hot pipe. When he's recovered from that, he peeks carefully down the length of his body and sees a goddamn hardware store down there. The bastards have put him in leg irons!

He lies back down and gets slugged in the face by a dangling ham. Above him is a firmament of pipes and cables. Where has he seen this before? On the Dutch-Hammer, that's where. Except the lights are on in this U-boat, and it doesn't appear to be sinking, and it's full of Germans. The Germans are calm and relaxed. None of them is bleeding or screaming. Damn! The boat rocks sideways, and a giant Blutwurst socks him in the belly.

He begins looking around, trying to get his bearings. There's not much else to see except hanging meat. This cabin is a six-foot-long slice of U-boat, with a narrow gangway down the center, hemmed in by bunks. Or maybe they are bunks. The one directly across from him is occupied by a dirty canvas sack.

Fuck that. Where is the box with the purple bottles?

“It is amusing to read my communications from Charlottenburg,” Beck says to Root, changing the subject to the message decrypts on his table. “They were perhaps written by that Jew Kafka.”

“How so?”

“It seems that they do not expect that we will ever make it home alive.”

“What makes you say that?” Root says, trying not to savor the Armagnac too much. When he brings it up to his nose and inhales, its perfume nearly obliterates the reek of urine, vomit, rotten food, and diesel that suffuses everything on the U-boat down to the atomic level.

“They are pressing us for information about our prisoners. They are very interested in you guys,” Beck says.

“In other words,” Root says carefully, “they want you to question us now.”

“Precisely.”

“And send the results in by radio?”

“Yes,” Beck says. “But I really should be concentrating on how to keep us alive—the sun will be up soon, and then we are in for some very bad trouble. You'll remember that your ship radioed our coordinates before I sunk it. Every allied plane and ship is now out looking for us.”

“So, if I cooperate,” Root says, “you can get back to the business of keeping us all alive.”

Beck tries to control a smile. His little tactic was crude and obvious to begin with, and Root has already seen through it. Beck is, if anything, more uncomfortable than Root with this whole interrogation business.

“Suppose I tell you everything I know,” Root says. “If you send it all back to Charlottenburg, you'll be running your radio, on the surface, for hours. Huffduff will pick you out in a few seconds and then every destroyer and bomber within a thousand miles will jump on you.”

“On us,” Beck corrects him.

“Yes. So if I really want to stay alive, it's best if I shut up,” Root says.

“Are you looking for this?” says the German with the stethoscope, who (Shaftoe has learned) is not a real doctor—just the guy who happens to be in charge of the box of medical stuff. Anyway, he is holding up just the thing. The very thing.

“Gimme that!” Shaftoe says, making a weak grab for it. “That's mine!”

“Actually, it's mine,” the medic says. “Yours is with the captain. I might share some of mine with you, if you are cooperative.”

“Fuck you,” Shaftoe says.

“Very well then,” the medic says, “I will by-leave it.” He puts the syringe full of morphine on the bunk opposite and one level below Shaftoe's, so that Shaftoe, by peering between a couple of Knockwursts, can see it. But he can't reach it. Then the medic leaves.

“Why was Sergeant Shaftoe carrying a German morphine bottle and a German syringe?” says Beck quizzically, doing his best to make it sound conversational and not interrogational. But the effort is too much for him and that smile tries to seize control of his lips again. It is the smile of a whipped dog. Root finds this somewhat alarming, since Beck's the guy in charge of keeping everyone on the boat alive.

“That's news to me,” Root says.

“Morphine is closely regulated,” Beck says. “Each bottle has a number. We have already radioed the number on Sergeant Shaftoe's bottle to Charlottenburg, and soon they'll know where it came from. Even though they may not tell us.”

“Good work. That should keep them busy for a while. Why don't you go back to running the ship?” Root suggests.

“We are in the calm before the storm,” Beck says, “and I have not so much to do. So I try to satisfy my own curiosity about you.”

“We're fucked, aren't we!?” says a German voice.

“Huh?” Shaftoe says.

“I said, we're fucked! You guys broke the Enigma!”

“What's the Enigma?”

“Don't play stupid,” says the German.

Shaftoe feels prickly on the back of his neck. That sounds exactly like the kind of thing a German would say before commencing torture.

Shaftoe composes his face into the cool, heavy-lidded, dopey expression that he always uses when he's trying to irritate an officer. As best he can when his legs are bolted down, he rolls over on his side, towards the sound of the voice. He is expecting to see an aquiline SS officer in a black uniform, jackboots, death's-head insignia, and riding crop, perhaps twiddling a pair of thumbscrews in his black leather gloves.

Instead he sees no one at all. Shit! Hallucinations again!

Then the dirty canvas sail bag in the bunk opposite him begins to move around. Shaftoe blinks and resolves a head sticking out of one end: straw-blond but prematurely half bald, contrasting black beard, catlike pale green eyes. The man's canvas garment is not exactly a bag, but a voluminous overcoat. He has his arms crossed over his body.

“Oh, well,” the German mutters, “I was just trying to make conversation.” He turns his head and scratches his nose by nuzzling his pillow for a while. “You can tell me any secret you want,” he says. “See, I've already notified Dönitz that the Enigma is shit. And it made no difference. Except he ordered me a new overcoat.” The man rolls over, exposing his back to Shaftoe. The sleeves of the garment are sewn shut at the ends and tied together behind his back. “It is more comfortable than you would think, for the first day or two.”

A mate pulls the leather curtain aside, nods apologetically, and hands Beck a fresh message decrypt. Beck reads it, raises his eyebrows, and blinks tiredly. He sets it down on the table and stares at the wall for fifteen seconds. Then he picks it up and reads it again, carefully.

“It says that I am not to ask you any more questions.”

“What!?”

“Under no circumstances,” Beck says, “am I to extract any more information from you.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Probably that you know something I am not authorized to know,” Beck says.

It has been about two hundred years, now, since Bobby Shaftoe had a trace of morphine in his system. Without it, he cannot know pleasure or even comfort.

The syringe gleams like a cold star on the shelf underneath the crazy German in the straitjacket. He'd rather that they just tore his fingernails out or something.

He knows he's going to crack. He tries to think of a way to crack that won't kill any Marines.

“I could bring you the syringe in my teeth,” suggests the man, who has introduced himself as Bischoff.

Shaftoe mulls it over. “In exchange for?”

“You tell me whether the Enigma has been decrypted.”

“Oh.” Shaftoe's relieved; he was afraid maybe Bischoff was going to demand a blow job. “That's the code machine thingamajig you were telling me about?” He and Bischoff have had a lot of time to shoot the breeze.

“Yeah.”

Shaftoe's desperate. But he's also highly irritable, which serves him well now. “You expect me to believe that you are just a crazy guy who is curious about Enigma, and not a German naval officer who's dressed up in a straitjacket to trick me?”

Bischoff is exasperated. “I already said that I've told Dönitz that Enigma is crap! So if you tell me it's crap, that doesn't make any difference!”

“Let me ask you a question, then,” Root says.

“Yes?” Beck says, making a visible effort to raise his eyebrows and look like he cares.

“What have you told Charlottenburg about us?”

“Names, ranks, serial numbers, circumstances of capture.”

“But you told them that yesterday.”

“Correct.”

“What have you told them recently?”

“Nothing. Except for the serial number on the morphium bottle.”

“And how long after you told them that did they send you the message to stop extracting information from us?”

“About forty-five minutes,” Beck says. “So, yes, I would very much like to ask you where that bottle came from. But it is against orders.”

“I might consider answering your question about Enigma,” Shaftoe says, “if you tell me whether this pipe bomb is carrying any gold.”

Bischoff's brow furrows; he's having translation problems. “You mean money? Geld?”

“No. Gold. The expensive yellow metal.”

“A little, maybe,” Bischoff says.

“Not petty cash,” Shaftoe says. “Tons and tons.”

“No. U-boats don't carry tons of gold,” Bischoff says flatly.

“I'm sorry you said that, Bischoff. Because I thought you and I were starting a good relationship. Then you went and lied to me—you fuck!”

To Shaftoe's surprise and mounting irritation, Bischoff thinks that it's absolutely hilarious to be called a fuck. “Why the hell should I lie to you? For god's sake, Shaftoe! Since you bastards broke Enigma and put radar on everything that moves, virtually every U-boat that's put to sea has been sunk! Why would the Kriegsmarine load tons of gold onto a ship that they know is doomed!?”

“Why don't you ask the guys who loaded it on board U-553?”

“Ha! This only proves you are full of shit!” Bischoff says. “U-553 was sunk a year ago, during a convoy attack.”

“Not so. I was on board it just a couple of months ago,” Shaftoe says, “off Qwghlm. It was full of gold.”

“Bullshit,” Bischoff says. “What was painted on its conning tower?”

“A polar bear holding a beer stein.”

Long silence.

“You want to know more? I went into the captain's cabin,” Shaftoe said, “and there was a photo of him with some other guys, and now that I think of it, one of them looked like you.”

“What were we doing?”

“You were all in swimming trunks. You all had whores on your laps!” Shaftoe shouts. “Unless those were your wives—in which case I'm sorry your wife is a whore!”

“Oh, ho ho ho ho ho!” Bischoff says. He rolls onto his back and stares up into the plumbing for a while, considering this, and then continues. “Ho ho ho ho ho ho ho!”

“What, did I just say something secret? Fuck you and your mother if I did,” Shaftoe says.

“Beck!” Bischoff screams. “Achtung!”

“What're you doing?” Shaftoe asks.

“Getting you your morphine.”

“Oh. Thank you.”

Half an hour later, the skipper's there. Pretty punctual by officer standards. He and Bischoff talk for a while in German. Shaftoe hears the word morphium several times. Finally, the skipper summons the medic, who pokes the needle into Shaftoe's arm and injects about half of it.

“You have something to say?” the skipper asks Shaftoe. Seems like a nice enough guy. They all seem like pretty nice guys, now.

First, Shaftoe addresses Bischoff. “Sir! I'm sorry I used harsh language on you, sir!”

“It's okay,” Bischoff replied, “she was a whore, like you said.”

The skipper clears his throat impatiently.

“Yeah. I was just wondering,” Shaftoe says turning to the skipper, “you have any gold on this U-boat?”

“The yellow metal?”

“Yeah. Bars of it.”

The captain is still nonplussed. Shaftoe is beginning to feel a certain mischievous satisfaction. Playing with officers' minds isn't as good as having a brain saturated with highly refined opiates, but it will do in a pinch. “I thought all these U-boats carried it,” he says.

Beck dismisses the medic. Then he and Bischoff talk about Shaftoe for a while in German. In the middle of this conversation, Beck drops some kind of a bomb on Bischoff. Bischoff is stunned, and refuses to believe it for a while, and Beck keeps telling him it's true. Then Bischoff goes back into that strange ho-ho-ho thing.

“He can't ask you questions,” Bischoff says. “Orders from Berlin. Ho, ho! But I can.”

“Shoot,” Shaftoe says.

“Tell us more about gold.”

“Give me more morphine.”

Beck summons the medic again, and the medic gives him the rest of the syringe. Shaftoe's never felt better. What a fucking deal! He's getting morphine out of the Germans in exchange for telling them German military secrets.

Bischoff starts interrogating Shaftoe in depth, while Beck watches. Shaftoe tells the whole story of U-553 about three times over. Bischoff is fascinated, Beck looks sad and scared.

When Shaftoe mentions that the gold bars had Chinese characters stamped on them, both Beck and Bischoff are floored. Their faces come aglow, as if lit up by the scanning beam of a Leigh light on a moonless night. Beck begins to sniffle, as if he's caught a cold, and Shaftoe's startled to realize that he's actually crying. He is crying tears of shame. But Bischoff is still fascinated and focused.

Then a mate bursts in and hands Beck a message. The mate is clearly shocked and scared out of his wits. He keeps looking, not at Beck, but at Bischoff.

Beck gets a grip on himself and reads the message. Bischoff lunges out of his bunk, hooks his chin over Beck's shoulder, and reads it at the same time. They look like a two-headed circus geek who hasn't bathed since the Hoover Administration. Neither speaks for at least a minute. Bischoff is silent because his mental wheels are spinning like the gyroscope of a torpedo. Beck is silent because he's on the verge of blacking out. Outside the cabin, Shaftoe can hear the news, whatever it is, traveling up and down the length of the U-boat with the speed of sound.

Some of the men are shouting in rage, some sobbing, some laughing hysterically. Shaftoe figures a big battle must have been won, or lost. Maybe Hitler's been assassinated. Maybe Berlin's been sacked.

Beck is now visibly terrified.

The medic enters. He has adopted an erect military posture—the first time Shaftoe's seen such formality on the U-boat. He addresses Beck briefly in German. Beck nods continuously while the medic is talking. Then he helps the doctor get Bischoff out of his straitjacket.

Bischoff's a bit stiff, a bit unsteady, but he limbers up fast. He's shorter than average, with a strong frame and a trim waist, and as he pounces from bunk to deck, he reminds Shaftoe of a jaguar deploying itself from a tree. He shakes hands heartily with the medic, and with the miserable Beck. Then he opens the hatch that leads towards the control room. Half the crew is jammed into the gangway, watching that door, and when they see Bischoff, ecstasy floods over their faces and they erupt into wild cheering. Bischoff accepts handshakes from all of them, making his way towards his duty station like a politician through an adoring crowd. Beck slinks out the other hatch and loses himself among the hammering diesels.

Shaftoe has no idea what the fuck's going on until Root shows up a quarter of an hour later. Root picks the message up off the deck and reads it. His perpetually bemused affect, normally so annoying, serves him well at times like this. “This is a broadcast to all ships at sea from German supreme naval command, Tirpitzufer, Berlin. It says that U-691—which is this boat we're on, Bobby—has been boarded and captured by Allied commandos, and has already attacked and sunk a milchcow in the Atlantic. Now it appears to be on its way towards continental Europe where it will presumably try to infiltrate German naval bases and sink more ships. All German naval and air forces are ordered to be on the lookout for U-691 and to destroy it on sight.”

“Shit,” Shaftoe says.

“We are on the wrong boat at the wrong time,” Root says.

“What's the deal with that Bischoff character?”

“He was relieved of command earlier. Now he's back.”

“That maniac's running the boat?”

“He is the captain,” Root says.

“Well, where's he going to take us?”

“I'm not sure if even he knows that.”

Bischoff goes to his cabin and pours himself a slug of that Armagnac. Then he goes to the chart room, which he's always preferred to his cabin. The chart room is the only civilized place on the whole boat. It's got a beautiful sextant in a polished wooden box, for example. Speaking tubes converge here from all over the boat, and even though no one is speaking into them directly, he can hear snatches of conversation from them, the distant clamor of the diesels, the zap of a deck of cards being shuffled, the hiss of fresh eggs hitting the griddle. Fresh eggs! Thank god they managed to rendezvous with the milchcow before she was sunk.

He unrolls a small-scale chart that encompasses the whole Northeast Atlantic, divided into numbered and lettered grid-squares for convoy-hunting. He should be looking at the southern part of the chart, which is where they are now. But eyes are drawn, again and again, northwards—to the Qwghlm Archipelago.

Put it at the center of a clock. Then Great Britain is at five and six o'clock, and Ireland is at seven o'clock. Norway is due east, at three o'clock. Denmark is just south of Norway, at four o'clock, and at the base of Denmark, where it plugs into Germany, is Wilhelmshaven. France, home to so many U-boats, is far, far to the south—completely out of the picture.

A U-boat that was headed from the open sea towards a safe port on Fortress Europe would just go to the French ports on the Bay of Biscay—Lorient, most likely. Getting to Germany's North Sea and Baltic ports would be a far longer and more complicated and dangerous trip. The U-boat would have to get around Great Britain somehow. To the south, it would have to make a dash up the Channel, which (setting aside that it's a bottleneck, crackling with British radar) has been turned into a maze of sunken block-ships and minefields by those Royal Navy spoil-sports. There is a lot more room up north.

Assuming Shaftoe's story is true—and there must be some truth in it, or elsewhere would he have gotten the morphine bottle—then it should have been a reasonably simple matter for U-553 to get around Great Britain via the northern route. But U-boats almost always had mechanical problems to some degree, especially after they had been at sea for a while. This might cause a skipper to hug the coast rather than taking to the open seas, where there would be no hope of survival if the engines shut down entirely. During the last couple of years, stricken U-boats had been abandoned on the coasts of Ireland and Iceland.

But supposing that an ailing, coast-hugging U-boat happened to pass near the Royal Navy base at Qwghlm at just the time some other U-boat was staging a raid there, as Shaftoe claimed. Then the dragnet of destroyers and airplanes that was sent out to capture the raiders could quite easily capture U-553, especially if her ability to maneuver were impaired to begin with.

There are two implausibilities in Shaftoe's story. One, that a U-boat would be carrying a trove of solid gold. Two, that a U-boat would be headed for German ports instead of one of the French ports.

But these two together are more plausible than either one of them by itself. A U-boat carrying that much gold might have very good reasons for going straight to the Fatherland. Some highly placed person wanted to keep this gold secret. Not just secret from the enemy, but secret from other Germans as well.

Why are the Japanese giving gold to Germans? The Germans must be giving them something they need in return: strategic materials, plans for new weapons, advisors, something like that.

He writes out a message:

Dönitz!

It is Bischoff. I am back in command. Thank you for the pleasant vacation. Now I am refreshed.

How uncivilized for you to order that we should be sunk. There must be a misunderstanding. Can we not discuss it face to face?

A drunken polar bear told me some fascinating things. Perhaps I will broadcast this information in an hour or so. Since I do not trust the Enigma anyway, I will not bother to encrypt it.

Yours respectfully,

Bischoff

A flock of white Vs migrates north from Gibraltar across a sunlit sea. At the apex of each V is a nitlike mote. The motes are ships, hauling megatons of war crap, and thousands of soldiers from North Africa (where their services are no longer needed) to Great Britain. That's how it looks to the pilots of the airplanes over the Bay of Biscay. All of those pilots and all of those planes are English or American—the Allies own Biscay now and have turned it into a crucible for U-boat crews.

Most of the Vs track straight parallel courses northwards, but a few of them curl and twist incessantly: these are destroyers, literally running circles around the plodding transports, pinging. Those tin cans will protect the convoys; the pilots of the airplanes who are trying to find U-691 can therefore search elsewhere.

The powerful sun casts a deep shadow in front of each ship; the eyes of the lookouts, irised down to pinpoints and squinting against the maritime glare, can no more penetrate that shade than they could see through plywood. If they could, they might notice that one of the big transports in the front rank has got some kind of unusual attachment: a pipe sticking vertically out of the water just in front and to one side of its bow.

Actually it is a cluster of pipes, one sucking in air, another spewing diesel exhaust, another carrying a stream of information in the form of prismatically reflected light. Follow that data stream a few yards down into the water and you will enter the optic nerve of one Kapitänleutnant Günter Bischoff. This in turn leads to his brain, which is highly active.

In the age of sonar, Bischoffs U-boat was a rat in a dark, cluttered, infinite cellar, hiding from a man who had neither torch nor lantern: only two rocks that would spark when banged together. Bischoff sank a lot of ships in those days.

One day, while he was on the surface, trying to make some time across the Caribbean, a Catalina appeared out of nowhere. It came from a clear blue sky and so Bischoff had plenty of time to dive. The Catalina dropped a few depth charges and then went away; it must have been at the end of its range.

Two days later, a front moved in, the sky became mostly cloudy, and Bischoff made the mistake of relaxing. Another Catalina found them: this one used the clouds to conceal his approach, waited until U-691 was crossing a patch of sunlit water, and then dove, centering his own shadow on the U-boat's bridge. Fortunately, Bischoff had double sun sector air lookouts. This was a jargonic way of saying that at any given moment, two shirtless, stinking, unshaven, sunburned men were standing on the deck, casting shadows over their eyes with their outstretched hands. One of these men said something in a quizzical tone of voice, which alerted Bischoff. Then both lookouts were torn apart by a rocket. Five more of Bischoffs men were wounded by cannon fire and rockets before Bischoff could get the boat under the surface.

The next day, the front had covered the sky with low blue-grey clouds from horizon to horizon. U-691 was far out of sight of land. Even so, Bischoff had Holz, his chief engineer, take her up to periscope depth first. Bischoff scanned the horizon meticulously. Satisfied that they were perfectly alone, he had Holz bring her to the surface. They fired up the diesels and pointed the boat east. Their mission was finished, their boat was damaged, it was time to go home.

Two hours later a flying boat bellied down through the cloud layer and dropped a skinny black egg on them. Bischoff was up on the bridge, enjoying some fresh air, and had the presence of mind to scream something about evasive action into the speaking tube. Metzger, the helms man, instantly took it hard to starboard. The bomb plunged into the water exactly where the deck of U-691 would have been.

It continued in that vein until they got far away from land. When they finally limped back to their base at Lorient, Bischoff told this story to his superiors in tones of superstitious awe, when they finally broke the news to him that the enemy had this new thing called radar.

Bischoff studied it and read the intelligence reports: the Allies were even putting the shit on airplanes now! It could see your periscope!

His U-boat is no longer a rat in a dark cellar. Now it is a wingless horsefly dragging itself across an immaculate tablecloth in the streaming light of the afternoon sun.

Dönitz, bless him, is trying to build new U-boats that can stay submerged all the time. But he has to beg for every ton of steel and for the services of every engineer. In the meantime there is this stopgap measure, the Schnorkel, which is just plumbing: a pipe that sticks up out of the water and enables you to run on diesel power, just beneath the surface. Even the Schnorkel will show up on radar, but less brilliantly. Every time U-691 surfaces for more than an hour, Holz is up there working on the Schnorkel, welding new bits on, grinding old bits off, wrapping it in rubber or some other stuff that he hopes will absorb the radar. The engineers who installed the Schnorkel in Lorient six months ago wouldn't recognize it now because it has evolved, like shrews evolving into tigers. If Bischoff can just get U-691 back to a safe port, others can learn from Holz's innovations, and the few U-boats that haven't been sunk can derive some benefit from the experiment.

He snaps out of it. This must be how officers die, and get their men killed: they spend more time reviewing the past than planning for the future. It is nothing short of masturbation for Bischoff to be thinking about all of this. He must concentrate.

He doesn't have to worry so much about being sunk by Germans. As soon as he sent Dönitz the message threatening to broadcast the information about the gold, Dönitz retracted his general order to sink U-691. But there is the possibility that some ship might have received the first order but missed the second one, so he still has to watch himself.

Big deal. There is hardly any German Navy left to sink him anyway. He can worry about being sunk by the Allies instead. They will be intently irritated when they figure out that he has been shadowing this convoy for two whole days. Bischoff is pretty irritated himself, it is a fast convoy that protects itself by zigzagging, and if U-691 does not zigzag in perfect unison with the ship above it, it will either be crushed by her, or blunder out of her shadow and be noticed. This has put quite a strain on skipper and crew, and quite a drain on the boat's supply of benzedrine. But they've covered five hundred miles! Soon, fatal Biscay will be behind them, Brittany will be off to starboard, and Bischoff will have a choice: hang a right into the English Channel, which would be suicidal; head north between Britain and Ireland, which would be suicidal; or veer to the west around Ireland, which would be suicidal.

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. Bischoffs 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 raises 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 yam. 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 Bischoffs 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.”