“Don’t be cross with me, Jordan. I was only trying to explain. It’s like you’re looking for something, that’s all I meant,” Rebecca said. “It just seems so apparent to me.”
“Okay,” he said, feeling the anger subside. “Maybe I am looking for something.” He regretted that he had called her, and he realized that no, that wasn’t it. She was prying, he thought, like Ruth used to do. “You make it seem like I’m trying to get you into bed or something.” It was a harsh thing to say but he felt the need to shock her as payment for how she made him feel. “It’s a picnic and it was a kiss. What’s the harm in that?”
“You don’t know anything about people’s emotions, do you? Do you think that you live in a vacuum and that whatever you do has no impact?” She would not let go. “Perhaps it never did before.”
She looked at him with tenderness but pity as well, and he wanted to say something to hurt her for it, but the words did not come.
“The harm, Jordan, is how I feel about you,” she said. “It’s so very odd, isn’t it? A chance meeting and then suddenly I find myself thinking constantly about you. Not of my husband, Jordan, but of you. The war does that. It causes everything to race ahead. Everything becomes unnatural, out of balance, forever tumbling. The covenants of life evaporate and leave only the urgency of living. It distresses me, Jordan, but I cannot turn away.” Then she stood and said, “Please take me home.”
Chapter 6
Admiral Karl Doenitz stood uncertainly in the stern of Grand Admiral Erich Raeder’s barge as it slipped under the huge complex of camouflage netting suspended far about the surface of the Kattegatt, and neared the reason for his visit: the H-class D.K.M. Sea Lion, the most powerful battleship afloat. According to some.
“Think of it, Karl,” Raeder had boasted to him on their miserable journey to this barren island. “We have built and hidden it from the English. Larger even than my Bismarck. Everything is bigger and better. And more deadly, Karl. She will charge into the English fleet and deal death with impunity. The Fuehrer cannot wait to see it in action.”
“Yes,” Doenitz had said, wanting to get back to Berlin and his U-boats. When he heard about the project and saw the plans four years before, he had remarked to his chief of staff Ernst Godt: “Such an expensive coffin.” To Doenitz, nothing was as important or as effective as his U-boats. Large surface ships such as Scharnhorst, Tirpitz, Gneisenau, and Bismarck were wastes of Germany’s limited resources. They were obsolete giants, ponderous, clumsy vessels that floundered about the North Atlantic until they blundered into battle. And now, once more, the same mistake, except on a much grander scale — the H-class Sea Lion.
But as the barge sailed deeper into the vast cavern created by the camouflage, Doenitz began to have doubts about his own first impressions. God, she was huge! Her hull was a vast, gray, solid fortress that dwarfed the barge as it maneuvered to the ship’s side. Dazzle camouflage, wild patterns of gray, black, and white, slashed across her hull in jagged bands — a simple device to confuse enemy gunners and spotters. Perhaps she might one day lose her exotic look and be painted all-over outboard gray, a practical but uninspired acknowledgment of her primary role as a warship.
Sea Lion’s complex superstructure towered over him and could only be compared to a mountain range. He had seen the four main turrets and their twelve guns from a distance and he thought how menacing they looked in repose, sleeping along the centerline of the vessel.
When the barge nestled against the duty platform, Doenitz stepped aside to allow the handful of reporters and a dozen or more party officials, resplendent in their pseudo-military uniforms, to clamber aboard. When that pack of rats had cleared the ladder he mounted the steps with dignity, his fragile hands clad in soft leather gloves falling lightly on the rail with each step. His staff followed him at a discreet distance.
When Doenitz reached the deck he saw what must have been the entire ship’s compliment drawn up at attention, vast ranks of deep blue, double-breasted peacoats and caps, impervious to the stiff winds of the Kattegatt. It thrilled him to see Kriegsmarine sailors, rigid as steel, their ranks formed directly along the joints of the deck beams, and their silent lines shadowing those of the Sea Lion. Here was the pomp and ceremony of the Kriegsmarine that he so often eschewed publicly, preferring quiet meetings with his U-boatmen. But, deep within, as the band played “Deutchland Uber Alles,” and he saluted the ensign astern, the officer of the deck, and then Grand Admiral Raeder — he felt like a cadet fresh from Flensburg. He stepped aside to allow his staff to pay their respects. As they did he admired the long graceful lines of the freshly scrubbed oak main deck. Well, she was beautiful in design and execution, but was she a warship?
He remembered the sixteen-inch guns of the main armament and decided wryly that they were certainly in her favor. From where he stood he took an inventory of the weapons dotting the superstructure. He counted five heavy antiaircraft batteries, each with a pair of 10.5cm/L65 C33 guns. He knew that there were five on the port side as well. He calculated the medium antiaircraft batteries as well and came up with thirty-two 3.7cm guns. Doenitz gave up trying to count the light antiaircraft guns; there were far too many, and they were too widely dispersed.
Despite his own reluctance to admit it, Raeder’s Sea Lion was a formidable vessel and he had taken Bismarck’s inadequacies into consideration in arming Sea Lion with a forest of antiaircraft guns. Bismarck had been destroyed, regardless of who claimed credit, by British Swordfish torpedo bombers — obsolete wood-framed, and fabric-covered biplanes that flew no more than a hundred miles an hour. An elephant brought to its knees by a gnat.
“Ladies and Gentlemen,” Kapitan zur See Wilhelm Mahlberg, Kommandant K. of Sea Lion, said. “If you will please follow these officers, they will lead you to the wardroom. There you will be briefed and plied with mugs of hot chocolate. Nothing stronger, I’m afraid.” The half dozen civilians laughed and trailed after the officers, talking excitedly.
Raeder made his way to Doenitz.
“Well?” he said excitedly.
“When I saw her in the ways,” Doenitz said, choosing his words carefully, “I had no idea that she would grow this large.”
“She was fed on good German steel, Admiral.” Raeder laughed. “Isn’t she something? And her Kommandant and officers are handpicked. You know Frey?”
“Otto?”
“Yes. He is Erster Artillerie Offizier, I.A.O.”
Doenitz looked over the vessel again. She seemed to grow even larger.
“Yes,” Raeder said. “She does take your breath away, doesn’t she? Twenty-eight watertight compartments, a top speed of thirty-seven knots—”
“Good Lord! Bismarck could do only—”
“Yes. Thirty-one knots,” Raeder said, but then he hesitated, as if there were much more to what he had to say. He guided Doenitz in a friendly manner and walked the admiral along the deck, toward the bow. Raeder looked overhead at the vast field of camouflage netting that stretched from pylons driven deeply into the shallow ocean floor, suspended at a dozen points on the superstructure of the Sea Lion.
“We shall go to the briefing in a moment,” Raeder said. “I want to spend as little time with those hyenas as I have to. Tell me, Admiral Doenitz, haven’t you wondered what Sea Lion’s first mission is to be?”