y later. For now, the key point is that the Crypt is all
important. I can take all of my ideas and put them into a single pod of
information, but almost every government in the world would prevent
distribution to its citizens. It is essential to build the Crypt so that the
HEAP can be freely distributed throughout the world."
"HEAP?"
"Holocaust Education and Avoidance Pod."
"Oh, Jesus Christ!"
"This is the true meaning of what you are working on," Avi says, "and
so I urge you not to lose heart. Whenever you are about to get bored
stamping out those license plates in the Philippines, think of the HEAP.
Think of what those Nahuatl villagers could have done to those fucking
Aztecs if they'd had a holocaust prevention manual a handbook on guerilla
warfare tactics."
Randy sits and ponders for a while. "We have to go and buy some water,"
he finally says. "I've sweated away a few liters just sitting here."
"We can just go back to the hotel," Avi says, "I'm basically finished."
"You're finished. I haven't even started," Randy says.
"Started what?"
"Telling you why there's no chance I'm going to be bored in the
Philippines."
Avi blinks. "You met a girl?"
"No!" Randy says testily, meaning Yes, of course. "Come on, let's go."
They go to a nearby 24 Jam and purchase bluish plastic bottles of water
the size of cinderblocks. Then they wander around through streets crowded
with unbearably savory smelling food carts, guzzling the water.
"I got e mail from Doug Shaftoe a few days ago," Randy says. "From his
boat, via satellite phone."
"In the clear?"
"Yeah. I keep bothering him to get Ordo and encrypt his e mail, but he
won't."
"That is really unprofessional," Avi grumbles. "He needs to be more
paranoid."
"He's so paranoid that he doesn't even trust Ordo." Avi's scowl eases.
"Oh. That's okay then."
"His e mail contained a stupid joke about Imelda Marcos."
"You took me on this walk to tell me a joke?"
"No, no, no," Randy says. "The joke was a prearranged signal. Doug told
me that he would send me e mail containing an Imelda joke if a certain thing
happened."
"What certain thing?"
Randy takes a big swig of water, draws a deep breath, and composes
himself. "More than a year ago, I had a conversation with Doug Shaftoe
during that big party that the Dentist threw on board the Rui Faleiro. He
wanted us to hire his company, Semper Marine Services, to do the survey work
on all future cable lays. In return he offered to cut us in on any sunken
treasure he found while performing the survey."
Avi skids to a stop and clutches his water bottle in both hands as if
he's afraid he might drop it. "Sunken treasure, like, yo ho ho and a bottle
of rum? Pieces of six? That kind of thing?"
"Pieces of eight. Same basic idea," Randy says. "The Shaftoes are
treasure hunters. Doug is obsessed with the idea that there are vast hoards
of treasure in and around the Philippines."
"From where? Those Spanish galleons?"
"No. Well, yes, actually. But that's not what Doug's after." He and Avi
have begun walking again. "Most of it is either much older than that pottery
from sunken Chinese junks or much more recent Japanese war gold."
As Randy had expected, the mention of Japanese war gold makes a huge
impact on Avi. Randy keeps talking. "Rumor has it that the Nipponese left a
lot of gold in the area. Supposedly, Marcos recovered a big stash buried in
a tunnel somewhere that's where he got all his money. Most people think
Marcos was worth something like five, six billion dollars, but a lot of
people in the Philippines think he recovered more like sixty billion."
"Sixty billion!" Avi's spine stiffens. "Impossible."
"Look, you can believe the rumors or not, I don't care," Randy says.
"But since it looks like one of Marcos's bag men is going to be a founding
depositor in the Crypt, it is the kind of thing you should know."
"Keep talking," Avi says, suddenly ravenous for data.
"Okay. So people have been running all over the Philippines ever since
the war, digging holes and dredging the seafloor, trying to find the
legendary Nipponese war gold. Doug Shaftoe is one of those people. Problem
is, making a thorough sidescan sonar survey of the whole area is quite
expensive you can't just go out and do it on spec. He saw an opportunity
when we came along."
"I see. Very smart," Avi says approvingly. "He would do the survey work
that we needed anyway, in order to lay the cables."
"Perhaps a bit more than was strictly necessary, as long as he was out
there."
"Right. Now I remember some angry mail from the Dentist's due diligence
harpies because the survey was costing too much and taking too long. They
felt we could have hired a different company and gotten the same results
quicker and cheaper."
"They were probably right," Randy admits. "Anyway, Doug wanted to cut a
deal that gave us ten percent of whatever he found. More, if we wanted to
underwrite recovery operations."
All of a sudden Avi's eyes go wide and he swallows a big gulp of air.
"Oh, shit," he says. "He wanted to keep the whole thing a secret from the
Dentist."
"Exactly. Because the Dentist would end up taking all of it. And
because of the Dentist's peculiar domestic situation, that means that the
Bolobolos would know everything about it too. These guys would happily kill
to get their hands on gold."
"Wow!" Avi says, shaking his head. "Y'know, I don't want to seem like
one of those hackneyed Jews that you see in heartwarming movies. But at
times like this, all I can say is 'Oy, gevalt!' "
"I never told you about this deal, Avi, for two reasons. One of them is
just our general policy of not blabbing about things. The other reason is
that we decided to hire Semper Marine Services anyway just on their own
merits so Doug Shaftoe's proposition was irrelevant."
Avi thinks this one over. "Correction. It was irrelevant, as long as
Doug Shaftoe didn't find any sunken treasure."
"Right. And I assumed that he wouldn't."
"You assumed wrong."
"I assumed wrong," Randy admits. "Shaftoe has found the remains of an
old Nipponese submarine."
"How do you know that?"
"If he found a Chinese junk he was going to send me a joke about
Ferdinand Marcos. If he found World War II stuff, it was going to be Imelda.
If it was a surface ship, it was going to be about Imelda's shoes. If it was
a submarine, her sexual habits. He sent me a joke about Imelda's sexual
habits."
"Now, did you ever formally respond to Doug Shaftoe's proposition?" Avi
says.
"No. Like I said, it wasn't relevant, we were going to hire him any
way. But then, after the contracts were all signed and we were drawing up
the survey schedule, he told me about this code involving the Marcos jokes.
I realized then he believed that by hiring him, we had implicitly said yes
to his proposition."
"It's a funny way to do business," Avi says, wrinkling his nose. "You'd
think he would have been more explicit."
"He is the kind of guy who does deals on a handshake. On personal
honor," Randy says. "Once he had made the proposition, he would never
withdraw it."
"The problem with those honorable men," Avi says, "is that they expect
everyone else to be honorable in the same way."
"It is true."
"So he believes, now, that we are accomplices in this plan to hide the
existence of this sunken treasure from the Dentist and the Bolobolos," Avi
says.
"Unless we come clean to them right away."
"In which case we are betraying Doug Shaftoe," Avi says.
"Cravenly backstabbing the ex SEAL who served six years of combat duty
in Vietnam, and who has scary and well connected friends all over the
world," Randy adds.
"Damn, Randy! I thought I was going to freak you out by telling you
about the HEAP."
"You did."
"And then you spring this on me!"
"Life's rich pageant. And all that," Randy says.
Avi thinks for a minute. "Well, I guess it comes down to whom would we
rather have on our side in a bar fight."
"The answer can only be Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe," Randy says. "But
that doesn't mean we'll make it out of the bar alive."
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 any thing,
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
else where 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 some thing 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