Carter peered through the periscope at the approaching ship. A freighter, but what nationality? He couldn’t make out her name and her flag was hanging limp. He couldn’t just go and sink anything he saw. After all, there were still a number of U.S. ships on the ocean, many of whose skippers didn’t know that Los Angeles and San Diego had fallen or, for that matter, were blissfully unaware that the U.S. was at war with Germany. Hell, many merchantmen still didn’t have radios.
Thus, he would surface, then hail and halt the big fat slow-moving freighter. He hoped and prayed it would be a German, although an Austrian would do just as well. Austria-Hungary had declared war on the U.S. in knee-jerk support of Germany, but there had been no attacks from that strange and polyglot empire. It didn’t have much of a navy or merchant fleet to begin with. Despite that, Commander Nimitz ordered his men to consider them the enemy as well. Carter and his crew didn’t need much convincing. They had all lost friends during the German sneak attack on Mare Island.
A quarter of a mile away from the freighter, he ordered the sub to surface. Carter figured seeing the sub so close would be worth some shock value. It was. As his men scrambled to man the three-inch deck gun, he could see crewmen on the freighter running like chickens with their heads cut off. Carter grinned as he identified her. She flew the German flag, and her name was the Gudrun out of Bremen. He watched in disbelief as a couple of the ship’s crewmen waved at the sub. Did they think she was one of their U-boats?
“Gunner, take out her radio and her antenna.”
The gunner smiled and fired immediately. He’d been aiming since he took up position behind the deck gun. The shell hit the structure below the antenna, sending pieces of wood and metal into the air. A second shell completed the job. The freighter struck her flag.
I will not be a butcher, Carter thought. I will not be like the Germans and slaughter the crew. He positioned the sub close to the freighter and was about to hail her when a fusillade of bullets struck the sub, sending men into the sea.
“Open fire,” he ordered and both the deck gun and the machine guns opened up, raking the Gudrun. Carter pulled the sub back a couple of hundred yards and the deck gun began pumping shells into her, just below the freighter’s water line.
More white flags flew and somebody tried to yell something. Too bad he couldn’t hear it. The German crew began to abandon ship as smoke and flames billowed up through a hatch. Something exploded and the ship shuddered, starting to settle. The explosion must have blown out her guts.
Another ship was approaching. What the hell? Carter thought. Had this part of the ocean suddenly become a damn highway? At any rate, the first ship they’d hit was beyond help.
“We gonna submerge, sir?” asked Chief Ryan, a man with nearly twenty years experience.
“Is it a warship?”
“No sir. Looks like another big ass freighter.”
Carter grunted. He wondered if the first ship had gotten off any kind of message. If it had, the message would likely have been a simple SOS, and nothing saying she was under attack. The new ship doubtless thought the O-7 was on an errand of mercy to save the Gudrun. If the new ship was also a German, he could also sink her without wasting a precious torpedo.
“All the men back on board?” He was told that the men who’d jumped when the bullets started to fly were wet but safe. A few bruises, but no real injuries, except to their pride.
He positioned the O-7 so that the dying German hid him from the new target. At a mile out he showed himself. The new ship also flew a German flag and her hull proudly announced that she was from Hamburg.
Burned once by the surprise of small-arms fire, Carter ordered the guns to fire immediately. Although smaller than the Gudrun, the new ship was more stubborn. It took a dozen solid hits before her crew began to abandon her and flames started eating at her.
Carter smiled. It was a good day. “Any more customers, Chief?”
“I see a couple, but they’ve turned and are running. We could chase them, but it’d take forever and we’d be out of fuel if we didn’t run into the German Navy first.”
Ah yes, Carter thought, the German Navy. The twin plumes of smoke from the sinking ships billowed high into an otherwise clear sky. Four lifeboats clustered on the water, the German crews wondering if they were going to be machine gunned or left to the mercies of a sometimes merciless sea. He would not gun them down. The Germans did that, not Americans. Let God provide.
But there was a problem and he could see it clearly. The sub base at Catalina had only five submarines. The plan was for two subs to be on patrol at all times, while the others either refueled or made it back and forth to their assigned areas. The O-7 had sunk two ships but missed the opportunity to sink at least two more. There had to be a better, more effective way of sinking enemy ships, he thought. Also, these had sailed without escort. Carter had the sinking feeling, pun intended, that German destroyers and light cruisers would soon be convoying the freighters and transports. As he thought this, the second ship exploded, sending shock waves over the O-7. Thankfully, the debris fell short of his sub.
The chief grinned. “I think she was carrying at least some ammunition.”
Carter checked his fuel supply. It was time to head for the little port near Avalon, on Catalina Island. Carter’s commanding officer at Catalina, Chester Nimitz, had a first-rate mind if there ever was one. Maybe Commander Nimitz would have a thought on how to catch the whole covey and not just a quail or two.
Tim Randall recovered, but with agonizing slowness. He didn’t know why he’d been chosen to survive the influenza when so many others had died. He was weak as a baby and nobody wanted to be near him even though the doctors said he was no longer contagious. Fair enough. He wouldn’t want to be near him either. The doctors said the epidemic had almost run its course and the young soldiers were all safe.
Nobody believed them.
No training was taking place at Camp Dix. Nobody came in and nobody left, except maybe in a box. If the doctors were right and the flu was over, that situation would change and new recruits would soon arrive.
When he felt strong enough, Tim managed to get himself to the mound of earth under which Wally’s body lay. He had died while Tim was unconscious. His last memory was of laying his brother’s frail body on the now empty cot, hoping that a miracle would cure him. Wally had died moments later, but Tim had been unconscious and near death himself.
Wally’d been buried in a mass grave with fifty others. Crosses lined the mound and Wally’s name was duly inscribed on one, but Tim wondered if his brother’s body actually lay anywhere near the spot.
He wanted to cry but it hurt too much. He and Wally had joined to fight the Germans. If that meant being killed or wounded in battle, so be it. War was tragic but heroic, and that was what they’d signed on for. Maybe they didn’t totally understand the implications of warfare, but to be felled by an invisible little Goddamned germ was too much.
Nor did it help a whole lot when a deeply sympathetic Sergeant Smith told him that this was the way of war. Since time immemorial, Smith said, more warriors had been killed by disease than by the enemy. Tim found it hard to believe and checked it out with the medics. Smith had exaggerated only slightly. Modern medicine had reduced the numbers killed by illness, but not eliminated it. Even a conflict as recent as the Spanish-American War saw many more American soldiers killed by Yellow Fever than by Spanish bullets.