Last Orders

CHAPTER 1

A French second lieutenant wore one gold bar just above each cuff on his tunic and one gold ring on his kepi. A French full lieutenant was exalted with two gold bars above each cuff and two gold rings on his tunic. A French colonel-who reveled in five gold bars on his sleeves and five gold rings on his kepi-presented Aristide Demange with the tokens of his new rank. “Congratulations on your promotion, Lieutenant!” he said.

Demange saluted with mechanical precision. “Thank you very much, sir!” he replied woodenly, in lieu of the Big fucking deal that shouted inside his head. He’d been in the Army since the last war: his whole adult life. He wished like hell he were still a noncom.

You couldn’t show those things, though. Oh, you could, but it wouldn’t do you any good. Demange kept his ferrety face as expressionless as his voice. Never let the bastards guess what you’re thinking made a good rule. They’d screw you if they did. They’d screw you anyhow, come to that-screwing you was their job-but they’d screw you harder if they did.

The colonel stepped forward for the ritual embrace. He brushed cheeks with Demange, first on one side, then on the other. Demange shifted his smoldering Gitane from one corner of the mouth to the other in turn, so he didn’t singe his superior. He smoked whenever he wasn’t sleeping or getting his ashes hauled, and he’d been known to make exceptions for the second. Hardly anybody on the front line didn’t smoke. On the other hand, hardly anybody smoked like Demange.

“Well, Lieutenant, with your experience, do you feel capable of commanding a company?” the colonel asked.

“Whatever you want, sir.” Demange wasn’t going to volunteer. He’d been in too long for that. But he wasn’t going to say no, either. With his experience, he thought he could run a brigade and do a bang-up job. He might need a captain with eyeglasses-a smart Jew, say-to give his orders the proper upper-crust tone. He sure as hell knew what needed doing, though.

“We’ll give it a try, then,” the colonel said, with the air of a man who thought he was doing Demange a favor. “We’ve had more casualties than I care for since we started pushing the Boches out of Belgium.”

“Yes, sir,” Demange said, more woodenly yet. The fighting in Belgium was just as ugly, just as brutal, and just as murderous as trench warfare in the last war had been. Both sides had tanks now. Those were supposed to smash through enemy defenses, to get the snail out of his shell so you could eat him, or at least kill him.

For a while, it had worked. At the end of 1938, German panzers smashed through the Low Countries and northeastern France, and almost-almost! — got around behind Paris. The Nazis would’ve won the war if they’d managed to bring that off. But they didn’t … quite.

Over on the far side of Europe, German and Russian tanks still had plenty of room to maneuver. Demange had been over there while France and Germany were on the same side for a while. He’d never dreamt of country so vast till he saw it himself. You couldn’t fortify all of it.

You could fortify damn near all of Belgium and Luxembourg, though, and Hitler’s chums damn well had. New tanks-especially the German Tiger-were a lot tougher to brush aside than the old ones had been, too. You didn’t, you couldn’t, storm forward here. You slogged.

You especially slogged if your Army and your government still weren’t a hundred percent sure they really wanted to be fighting the Boches. It had taken what amounted to a military coup to kick England out of the Nazis’ bed. France stayed palsy-walsy with Hitler even longer. Plenty of rich people thought he made a safer bet than Stalin.

Demange hated Germans worse than Russians. If you pointed him at Russians, though, he’d kill them, too. He knew they’d do the same to him. He also hated his own superiors, and the poor cons those superiors’ dumb orders got killed. He despised the whole human race, in fact, himself included.

While Demange brooded, the colonel, after donning a pair of bifocals, studied a map. In due course, he said, “I know of a company in front of Rance that lost its captain. What say you go there?”

“Whatever you please, sir.” Demange had only a vague notion of where Rance was: a little farther north than he had been before he stopped this promotion (and that was how he thought of it-much like stopping a bullet). Wherever it was, the Germans would do their best to kill him there. Their best hadn’t been good enough through half the last war and all of this one. Maybe he’d last a while longer.

“Bon,” the colonel said. “We’ll do that, then. Captain Alexandre, the officer you’ll replace, was a man of uncommon quality. His father is a major general-an expert in artillery, I believe.”

“I’ll do my best, sir,” Demange said. Of course he would-that was his best chance to stay alive. He didn’t much fear death. But dying in combat commonly hurt like hell. That, he feared. He lit a fresh Gitane from the stub of the old one to keep his narrow features from showing too nasty a grin. So an aristo had been running this company, had he? Well, now they’d have to deal with a gutter rat from a long line of gutter rats. And if they didn’t like it, too damn bad!

He rode toward Rance in an American truck. The beast was enormous, and tough and powerful as a tank. He thought it might even stand up to horrible, roadless Russia. French trucks went to pieces in short order when they tried to cope with Russia’s ruts and rocks and bottomless bogs (to Demange’s somber satisfaction, so did German machines). But this hulking beast might have what it took.

The countryside was the cratered moonscape he remembered too well from the last war. Here and there, he saw a shattered tree, one wall of a stone farmhouse, or a tank’s burnt-out carcass. The air stank of smoke and shit and death.

Some of the craters scarred the road. The driver went around them when he could and across them when he had to. The truck jounced and bounced, but showed no signs of falling apart no matter how roughly it was used.

“A formidable machine,” Demange said after a while.

“Sir, it sure is!” the driver agreed enthusiastically. “How come we can’t make ’em like this?” Since Demange didn’t know why that was so, he went back to keeping quiet.

When artillery started coming in only a few hundred meters in front of them, the driver hit the brakes. Demange hopped out of the cabin and went ahead on shank’s mare. Before long, a sentry challenged him without coming up out of the foxhole where he hid from fragments.

“I’m looking for what used to be Captain Alexandre’s company,” Demange answered. “For their sins, I’m their new commander.”

“For their sins, is it?” Now the sentry stuck up his head, like a rabbit wiggling halfway out of its burrow at a noise that surprised it. He pointed. “Take that communications trench up to the front and then bear left.”

“D’accord.” Demange zigzagged up the communications trench. A German machine gun started hammering as he got to the forward trenches. Keeping his head down, he made his way along them till he found the outfit he was looking for. A couple of poilus took him to a rather prissy-looking second lieutenant who was running the company for the time being.

That worthy sent him a fishy stare. “You’re in charge now?” he said. “Pardon me, but you don’t seem much like Captain Alexandre.” He crossed himself, as if the late captain were a saint.

“I’m not much like him,” Demange said, nodding. “He’s deader than dog shit, and I’m here to give you grief.”

Now the junior officer’s stare was of unabashed horror. Demange laughed and lit a fresh Gitane. He’d just made another friend.

Russian winter was colder than anything Arno Baatz had ever dreamt of when he was back in Germany. Russian summer didn’t last as long, but it got hotter than the Reich ever did. It got muggier, too; like the men in his squad, the Unteroffizier always had sweat stains under the arms of his wool Feldgrau tunic. Being sweaty all the time made him itch.

All kinds of things in Russia could make you itch. Corporal Baatz had fleas. He had lice. Whenever his outfit got pulled out of the line, the first thing they did was go to a delousing station. That helped till their uniforms cooled off from being baked, and till the men dried off after bathing in hot, medicated water.

The Wehrmacht issued powders and pump sprays that were supposed to kill off pests while you were in the field. Arno Baatz was as patriotic as the next guy. Most of the time, he made a point of being more patriotic than the next guy. But even he had to admit that all the promises on the labels to the powders and sprays were a crock of Quatsch.

And, of course, along with the fleas and the lice came swarms of mosquitoes, plus flies ranging in size from next to invisible to just smaller than a Bf-109. When they bit you-and they would, and they did-all you could do was smear grease on it if you had any grease and try not to scratch. And pretty soon your face and your neck and your hands turned into sausage meat.

One of the senior privates in Baatz’s squad dolefully surveyed himself in a polished steel shaving mirror. “Don’t see much point to getting out a razor,” Adam Pfaff said. “I’d cut me more than I’d cut my whiskers, all bitten up the way I am.”

“You’ll shave like everybody else,” Baatz growled. “It’s in the regulations.”

“A lot of things that are in the regulations sound great in Germany, but they turn out to be really stupid here in Russia.” Insubordination was Pfaff’s middle name.

Baatz glared at him and ran a hand over his own bitten-up but reasonably well-shaven face. “If I can do it, you can do it. And if I’ve got to do it, you’ve fucking well got to do it, too.”

He never could gauge ahead of time what would work on the Obergefreiter. “All right, Corporal. I guess that’s fair,” Pfaff said now, and started scraping away.

No sooner had he rinsed off his razor and stuck it back in his kit than the Ivans started shelling the German positions in the area. All the Landsers jumped for the closest foxhole, and most of them got into cover while the Russian shells were still screaming down. The ground shook from one burst after another. The Russians weren’t the most efficient soldiers God ever made, but they always seemed to have artillery falling out of their assholes.

If a 105 came down right on top of you, cowering in a foxhole wouldn’t do you a pfennig’s worth of good. Baatz knew that all too well. If a shell came down on top of you, they’d bury you in a jam tin … if they could scrape enough of you from the mud to bother with a burial at all. He knew one fellow who’d taken a direct hit and vanished from the face of the earth, teeth, belt buckle, boot-sole hobnails and all. Gone. Off the map.

You tried not to think about things like that. Sometimes, though, your mind kept coming back to them, the way your tongue kept coming back to a bit of gristle stuck between two teeth. Because there were plenty of worse things than dying from a direct hit. Then, at least, you never knew what happened. Baatz had listened to men shriek for hours, sometimes for more than a day, begging their friends and even their enemies to kill them and end their agony. He’d never had to do that himself, but he knew men who had.

Anything that can happen can happen to you. One more truth that wartime brought out, and one more Baatz did his best not to remember. He already had one wound badge, and an amazing scar on his arm. He wasn’t anxious for fate to do any more carving on him.

His anxiety or lack of same, of course, might have nothing to do with anything. “They’re coming!” someone bawled through the roar of bursting shells.

The Ivans had come up with a hideously sneaky trick. They would stop shelling a narrow corridor-sometimes only fifty meters across-and send in their infantry there while they kept plastering the rest of the front. Any defender who wasn’t in the corridor and stuck up his head to shoot at the advancing Reds was asking for a fragment to blow it off.

If you didn’t stick up your head and shoot, the Russians would get in behind you. They were like rats-they squeezed through any little hole. Then you could kiss your sorry ass good-bye. They’d shoot you or bayonet you or smash in your skull with an entrenching tool. Or they’d take you alive and see what kind of fun they could have with you. The USSR never signed the Geneva Convention. Neither side in the East played by any rules this side of the jungle’s.

Swearing and praying at the same time, Baatz popped halfway out of his hole and started shooting. The Mauser slammed against his shoulder again and again: a good, familiar ache. An Ivan in a dun-colored uniform tumbled and fell. Baatz wasn’t sure his bullet got the bastard, but he’d been firing in that direction. He’d take credit for the kill in his own mind.

A couple of foxholes farther south, Adam Pfaff was also banging away at the Russians. He’d painted his rifle’s woodwork a gray not far from Feldgrau. He claimed it improved the camouflage. Baatz thought that was a bunch of crap, but the company CO let Pfaff get by with it. What could you do?

Right this minute, trying to stay alive mattered more than the weird paint job on an Obergefreiter’s rifle. Baatz slapped a fresh five-round clip into the magazine of his own Mauser and went on firing. A tiny, half-spent shell fragment clanged off his helmet. It didn’t get through. When the last war started, they’d gone into battle with headgear made of felt or leather. Baatz remembered his old man talking about it, and about how in the days before the Stahlhelm any little head wound was likely to kill you. You couldn’t make a helmet strong enough to keep out a rifle bullet but light enough to wear. Just blocking fragments, though, saved a hell of a lot of casualties. Baatz knew that, without his helmet, he’d be lying dead now, with no more than a trickle of blood in his hair-maybe not even that.

No matter how sneaky the Russians were, they weren’t going to ram through the German lines this time. Along with the stubborn riflemen, an MG-34 and one of the new, quick-firing MG-42s hosed the Ivans’ corridor down with bullets. Russians could be recklessly, even maniacally, bold. Or they could skedaddle like so many savages. This time, they skedaddled, dragging their wounded behind them as they pulled back.

Some of their wounded: a soldier in a khaki greatcoat thrashed and screamed just a couple of hundred meters in front of Baatz’s foxhole. He took aim to finish off the sorry son of a bitch-and to shut him up. But then another Russian ran back, waving his arms to show he wasn’t carrying any weapons.

Baatz was about to pot him anyhow. Yes, he was a brave man. To Baatz, that meant he needed killing all the more. One of these days, he’d show up again, this time toting a machine pistol. But a couple of Germans yelled, “Let him live!” Reluctantly, Baatz didn’t pull the trigger.

The Russian waved toward the German foxholes-he knew he could have got his ticket punched right there. He hauled his countryman onto his back and, bent almost double, lumbered away toward the east.

Squeezing liver paste from a tinfoil tube onto a zwieback cracker later that day, Baatz was still discontented. “I should have nailed that turd,” he grumbled, and stuffed the food into his face.

“World won’t end,” Adam Pfaff said as he lit a cigarette. “Sometimes they let us pick up our guys, too. The war’s hard enough the way it is. We don’t need to make it even worse.”

“They’re Russians. Do ’em a favor and all you get for it is a kick in the balls,” Baatz said. Since he outranked Pfaff, he got the last word. He wished like hell he’d got that Ivan, too.

Vaclav Jezek hadn’t known what summer heat was like till he came to Spain. The Czech had thought he did, but now he owned he’d been just a beginner. The sun northwest of Madrid beat down on his head as if out of a blue enamel bowl that focused all its heat right there.

He lay in a shell hole in the no-man’s-land between the Republicans’ barbed wire and the stuff the Fascists strung. He had branches and bits of greenery on his helmet and here and there on his uniform. They didn’t block the heat. They weren’t supposed to. They did help break up his outline, to make it harder for Marshal Sanjurjo’s men to spot him out here.

His antitank rifle also had its long, straight barrel bedecked with leaves and twigs. The damn thing wasn’t much shorter than he was. It weighed a tonne. The French had made it to fire a slug as wide as a man’s thumb through a tank’s armor. It could do that … to any tank made in the 1930s. It was as powerful a rifle as one man could carry and fire. Even with a muzzle brake and a padded stock, it kicked harder than any mule ever born.

No matter how powerful it was, it couldn’t kill the bigger, heavier modern tanks the war had spawned. To the logical French, if it couldn’t do the job for which it was made, it was useless.

French logic, though, reached only so far. The antitank rifle fired a very heavy bullet with a very high muzzle velocity. The round flew fast and far and flat. It might not be able to cope with a Panzer IV, but it could knock over a man at a couple of kilometers. It was, in other words, a perfect sniper’s rifle.

In France, Vaclav had killed German officers who made the fatal mistake of thinking they were too far behind the line to worry about keeping their heads down. When France hopped into Hitler’s arms for a while, she generously allowed the Czechs who fought for their government-in-exile to cross the border into Spain and take service with the Republic. Vaclav brought the antitank rifle with him. By then, he would have killed anybody who tried to take it away from him.

After a couple of years here, he knew enough Spanish to get fed. He knew enough to get drunk. He knew enough to get laid. He could cuss some, too. He had the essentials, in other words. Anything past the essentials, no. He spoke pretty good German-a lot of Czechs did-which helped him with the men of the International Brigades but not with the Republicans. Most of the Spaniards who could Deutsch sprechen fought on Sanjurjo’s side.

Like the rest of the Czechs, he’d made himself useful here. He’d actually used the rifle on enemy tanks. Sanjurjo’s men tried sending some old Italian tankettes against the Internationals. They had enough armor to laugh at ordinary small-arms fire. Not at what his overmuscled elephant gun could do, though.

And he’d killed General Franco with the antitank rifle. Not as good as blowing off Sanjurjo’s jowly head, but the next best thing. He’d got a medal for that, and a wad of pesetas to go with it that gave him one hell of a spree in Madrid.

Marshal Sanjurjo had an even bigger price on his head than his late general had. If the marshal ever decided to inspect these lines and came within 2,000 meters of wherever the Czech happened to be hiding, Vaclav vowed that he was one dead bigwig.

Meanwhile … Meanwhile, he waited. He spied on the Nationalists’ lines with a pair of binoculars wrapped in burlap. He’d stuck cardboard above their objective lenses so no untimely reflections would give him away. And he’d taken the same precaution with the objective on the rifle’s telescopic sight.

Careless snipers had short careers. He wanted to go back to Czechoslovakia after the war ended … if the war ever ended, and if there was any Czechoslovakia to go back to once it did. Dying in France fighting against the Nazis, he would at least have been playing against the first team. Making a mistake that let some Spaniard in a diarrhea-yellow uniform plug him would just be embarrassing.

No, not just embarrassing. Painful, too.

Not much was going on now on either side of the line. Here and there, a rifleman would take a shot at somebody in the wrong uniform who was rash enough to put himself on display. Most of the time, the would-be assassin was a crappy shot and missed. His attempted victim would dive for cover.

Vaclav was anything but a crappy shot. He’d been good when the Czechoslovakian Army drafted him. Plenty of practice in the years since left him a hell of a lot better than good. He could have killed plenty of careless Nationalists at the front line.

But that would have been like spending a hundred English pounds for a glass of beer. Ordinary privates and noncoms weren’t worth killing with an antitank rifle. If he yielded to temptation and let the air out of one of those bastards, he’d have to find a new hiding place. Shooting twice in a row from the same spot was more dangerous than lighting three on a match. You were telling the enemy right where you were. You were telling him you were stupid enough to stay there, too.

So he ignored the jerks who stuck their brainless heads up over the parapet for a look around. He scanned farther back, to the places where most of the time you wouldn’t need to worry about getting shot. Nationalist officers wore much fancier uniforms and headgear than the men they led. Killing a colonel might do more for the Republican cause than exterminating a company’s worth of ordinary soldiers.

For the moment, though, nobody worth shooting was showing himself. So Vaclav brought down the glasses and surveyed the shattered ground ahead of where he lay. Every once in a while, Sanjurjo’s men sneaked out to hunt snipers. He’d blown big holes in a couple of those guys. He was ruthless about keeping himself in one piece.

And the Spanish Fascists sent snipers of their own out into no-man’s-land. They didn’t have anybody with a monster gun like his. But a good shot with a good rifle could kill a man a kilometer away-not every time, maybe, but often enough to be dangerous. Vaclav knew what the ground was supposed to look like from here. He knew what it was supposed to look like from almost every centimeter in front of the stretch of trench the Czechs held. Knowing such things was like a life-insurance policy. Any little change might-probably would-mark trouble.

He didn’t see any little changes, though. The heat made everybody move at half speed. Let the sun kill the bastards on the other side, the thought seemed to be. Shooting them was too much trouble for soldiers.

After a while, it got to be too much trouble for Jezek. He ate brown bread and crumbly Spanish sausage full of fennel. It could give you the runs, but it tasted good. To kill some germs, he washed it down with sharp white wine from the canteen on his belt. He would rather have drunk beer-he was a Czech, all right. But most Spanish beer tasted like piss, and smelled like it, too. Wine was also easier to come by here.

He wanted a cigarette. He didn’t light one. Smoke could give you away. He wouldn’t get too jittery before he went back inside the barbed wire among his friends and countrymen. He’d puff away once he did.

Some days went by without his firing a shot. If he didn’t see anything worth firing at, he just stayed where he was till it got dark. Let the Nationalists think they’d finally killed him while they were shelling no-man’s-land. It might make them careless. Then they’d give him better targets.

What was this? A truck coming up toward the Fascists’ lines. Canvas tied down over hoops covered the rear compartment. When the truck stopped, soldiers got out. A man hopped down from the passenger side of the front seat, too. That and his uniform told Jezek he was an officer.

Nothing much had happened yet today. So … why not? The officer gestured, getting his men ready to do whatever they were going to do. Vaclav took careful aim. Not much wind. Range about 1,100 meters. You might even do this with a Mauser, though you’d need a little luck as well as skill. Luck never hurt, of course. But with this much gun, skill alone could turn the trick.

Breathe. Let it out. Bring back the trigger, gently, gently … The antitank rifle thundered. It kicked, not even a little bit gently. The Nationalist officer grabbed his midriff and fell over.

“Earned my pay today,” Vaclav said. He took out a cigarette to celebrate. He could smoke it now. He wouldn’t be staying here more than another few minutes anyhow.

To say Lieutenant Commander Julius Lemp didn’t enjoy summer patrol in the North Sea was to beggar the power of language. He wasn’t quite up at the latitudes where the sun never set, but he was plenty far north to keep it in the sky through most of the hours.

He and several ratings stayed up on the conning tower, scanning sky and horizon for enemy ships and airplanes. You had to do it all the time. The Royal Navy was looking for the U-30, too, and for all the other boats the Kriegsmarine sent to sea.

The Royal Navy was looking hard. It had ways to look no one had dreamt of when the war broke out, almost five years ago now. Radar could spot a surfaced U-boat no matter how cunningly its paint job mimicked sea and sky. And, when it dove, English warships hounded it with their pinging hydrophones. Unlike the ones both sides had used in the last war, these really could help a surface ship track-and sink-a submarine.

Gerhart Beilharz popped out of the hatch like an elongated jack-in-the-box. The engineering officer grinned like a jack-in-the-box, too. He was two meters tall: not the ideal size for a man in a U-boat’s crew. This was the only place on the boat where he didn’t have to worry about gashing his scalp or knocking himself cold if he forgot to duck.

“You’ve done your two hours, skipper,” he said. “I relieve you.”

Lemp lowered his Zeiss field glasses and rubbed his eyes. They felt sandy under his knuckles. “I feel like a bug on a plate,” he said. “A black bug on a white plate.”

Beilharz pointed back to the Schnorkel. The breathing tube-for the diesels, not the men who served them-stuck up like an enormous stovepipe. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “As long as we’ve got that baby, we can slip under the glazing.”

He could say Don’t worry about it. The U-boat’s survival wasn’t his responsibility. Lemp had to worry about everything; that was what command entailed. And worry he did: “They can see us under the glazing, too, dammit, or rather hear us with those stinking hydrophones.”

“We’ve slithered away before,” the tall man said. “We can do it again.”

“I hope so.” Sighing, Lemp went below-out of the sunshine, out of the fresh air, into a steel cigar dimly lit with orange bulbs and stinking of everything from shit and puke and piss to diesel oil to the reeks of rotting food and dirty socks. However nasty, the odor was also infinitely familiar to him. And well it might have been, since his own fug made up a part of it.

Only a green curtain shielded his tiny cabin-cot, desk, chair, safe-from the corridor. Still, command’s privilege gave him more privacy and space than anyone else on the boat enjoyed. He logged the events on his latest watch: course, position, observations (none significant), the fact that a radio tube had burnt out and been replaced. His handwriting was tiny and as precise as if an automaton had produced it.

But as he wrote, he was conscious of all the things he wasn’t saying, all the things he couldn’t say-not unless he wanted some serious attention from the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst and the Abwehr and, no doubt, other organizations of State and Party about which he knew nothing … yet.

He couldn’t write, for instance, that the U-30 wasn’t such a happy boat as it had been. He didn’t like the way the sailors eyed one another. He didn’t like the way they didn’t come out with what was on their minds. The U-boat service tossed surface-Navy formality over the side. Living in one another’s pockets, the men had no time to waste on such foolishness. They were brothers, brothers in arms.

Or they should have been. But there was at least one informer on board. And Lemp didn’t know who the polecat was. That worried him worse than anything. Anything this side of the Royal Navy, anyhow.

The thought had hardly crossed his mind before a rating spoke from the other side of the curtain: “Skipper, they’ve spotted smoke up on the conning tower.”

“Oh, they have, have they?” Lemp said. “All right. I’ll come.” He stuck his cap back on his head. Like every other U-boat officer in the Kriegsmarine, he’d taken out the stiffening wire so the crown didn’t stick up above his head but flopped onto the patent-leather bill. That crown was white, not navy blue: the sole mark of command he wore.

His shoes clanked dully on the patterned steel of the ladder rungs leading up out of the submarine. The first whiff of fresh air made him involuntarily breathe deeper. You forgot how foul the inside of a U-boat really was till you escaped the steel tube.

As he emerged, Gerhart Beilharz pointed north. “Over there, skipper,” he said. “Not a lot of smoke, but some.” He offered his binoculars.

Lemp scanned with them. “You’re right,” he said as he gave them back. He called down the hatch to the helmsman, who stood near the bottom of the ladder. “Change course to 020. All ahead full.”

“Course 020. All ahead full. Aye, aye.”

They swung toward the smudge of smoke in the northern sky. Lemp wanted to get the U-boat out ahead of it if he could. That would let him submerge and give it a closer inspection through the periscope without the other ship’s being likely to spot them in return.

Meanwhile, he kept his eye on the smudge. Things often happened slowly on the ocean. Ships weren’t airplanes. They needed time to cross the kilometers that separated one from another.

Actually, he hoped he would spy the unknown ship before he had to submerge. It put out a lot more smoke than the U-30’s diesels did. It rode higher in the water than the U-boat did, too. And he got what he hoped for. Through the powerful, column-mounted binoculars on the conning tower, he got a glimpse of a small, chunky steamboat-not a warship at all.

Not an obvious warship, anyhow. In the last war, English Q-ships-freighters with hidden heavy guns and gun crews-had surprised and sunk a couple of the Kaiser’s submarines. Their captains made the fatal mistake of thinking anything that looked harmless was bound to be harmless. They’d come close to use a deck gun instead of launching an eel from a distance-and they’d paid for their folly.

Lemp took no such chances. Maybe the steamer was as harmless as it looked. But if it was, what was it doing out here in the middle of the North Sea? Its course would take it from Scotland to Norway. It might be bringing help for the Norwegian bandits who still did their best to make trouble for the German forces occupying the country.

He ordered the boat down to Schnorkel depth. It was faster underwater on diesels than with battery power. As the unknown ship approached, he had plenty of time to work up a firing solution. He launched two torpedoes from less than a kilometer away.

The explosive in one of the eels would have been plenty to blow up the steamer. But the blast that followed a midships hit from one of the eels was far bigger than a torpedo warhead alone could have caused. The U-30 staggered in the water; it felt and sounded as if someone were pounding on the boat with iron rods the size of telegraph poles.

“Der Herr Gott im Himmel!” Lieutenant Beilharz exclaimed. “What the devil was that?”

“I don’t exactly know,” Lemp answered. “No, not exactly. But whatever it was, I think the Reich is lucky it never got to Norway.” He peered through the periscope. Nothing was left of the steamship but small bits of flotsam and a hell of a lot of smoke. Somebody in England and Norway would be disappointed, but he wasn’t.