He moved along the side of the shed. The windows were high up near the sloping edge of the roof, for ventilation more than light. Pricks of light came from most of them. The ladder was at the seaward end of the shed.
He climbed quickly and silently, up into the wind that had changed its mind and sprung back. The handholds were icily wet. He paused at the top, surveyed the area around him. Guards tended to huddle round fires in huts, but he wanted to be certain. Nothing moving. He eased himself onto the roof, and moved in a waddling crouch along its edge. It took him whole minutes to reach the window he had selected, but he did not slip once, holding his feet as he moved them against the bolts that fixed the roof to the walls, resting his heels in the corrugations. His thighs and the backs of his legs ached when he reached his goal. Here, he tested the roofs edge, and the guttering, took firm hold with his now unmittened hands, the cold of the iron a shock that ran in a shudder through his system — then lowered his body over the edge of the roof so that he hung against the window, the weight of clothing and boots sudden and painful in his shoulders and arms.
The tear in the black-out cloth was thin, and long. He shuffled his handhold until he could lean in against the dirty glass, and see—
The submarine being worked on almost directly below him was a bloody mess, there was no doubt about that; only amazement that it had limped back for repairs. Most of the crewmen in the forward section of the hull must have died, or been badly torn up. The bow bulged open like a crusted sore, and the deck-plates had been shuffled like untidy cards. McBride estimated that the sub had lost ten or twelve feet of its bow. Internal explosion? Torpedo? Mine? Depth charge?
A big U-boat, and another beyond it, being checked over for plate-wear, hull-strain. Two of the biggest class of German U-boat, men hurrying about them. If each shed contained even one, then there was a pack of ten here — on Guernsey? These were submarine pens, but not like La Rochelle, Brest and St Nazaire and the rest of the Normandy and Brittany pens — no concrete, no massive servicing back-up, no — permanence — ? It had taken the Germans no more than a couple of days to throw up the corrugated sheds — which could only be for concealment, then.
These boats were either 'milchcow" refuelling subs, or they were long-trip, ocean-going boats, designed to bite the jugular where it was exposed, far out in the Atlantic — not around the North Channel where the convoys turned for the Mersey and the Clyde. Why here? For God's sake, he told himself sternly, as if lecturing the general staff of the Kriegsmarine, it's like keeping old silver in a pillow-case under the bed. He smiled, shifted to test the weariness of his arms, then continued his surveillance. His hands were beginning to go dead.
The damaged submarine in front of him carried no deck-gun. He could not see a single torpedo-trolley, not even the necessary hoists to lower the torpedoes on board. They were going out unarmed? His arms weakened with the shock, he felt as if struck. The mysteriousness of what he had found assailed him like a punch that simply went on happening, almost for a minute. He could find no answer, and his ignorance was like an impotence. What else, what else? he prompted himself. Concentrate.
At the stern of the submarine — and the one beyond it — he saw the strange, out-of-place pillars, curved and jointed like insect mandibles. The men working at the bow of the undamaged boat were erecting stanchions, and he assumed that the missing bow-section of the other sub had borne a similar, inexplicable mounting.
There was nothing else, nothing he could take in as clearly as before. Fact had been deadened by speculation. He was wasting his time now, it might come back later, just as if he had caught it on film, when he was debriefed. Once the resolve had gone, it was hard to hang on for sufficient time to take in the scene once more, repressing the selectivity of speculation. He wondered whether he could haul himself up with the frozen hands and aching arms.
One thing more — his angle of vision had precluded sight of them before, but now they moved nearer the stern of the damaged sub, as if to inspect the mountings. Two senior officers — one wearing a Wehrmacht greatcoat, the other in naval uniform. His weariness, the aching muscles in his arms, seemed to go away to a great distance. He was a spectator of some adult drama he could not comprehend. There was a familiarity, a common cause between the two senior officers, so unlike the Intelligence proclamations of intense and unceasing rivalry between the Wehrmacht and the Kriegsmarine; all the way up to the General Staff and the Führer. What in hell were they doing?
Their conversation went on for minutes, then the two men shook hands, there was much self-congratulation, and, as they walked out of his view, he groaned with the return of awareness to his arms and shoulders. He didn't think he could pull himself back up—
The voice from below him settled the matter. "You — drop to the ground, at once!" McBride did not look down, nor did he pretend not to understand German.
Thomas Sean McBride parked the mud-stained Audi in the hotel car park, collected his room key and mail from the stiffly-polite clerk, whose words he brushed off as if they came between him and the indulgence of his weary disappointment, then took the lift to his third-floor room with its view across the Moselstrasse to the river and the suburb of Lutzel on the opposite bank.
When he had closed the door behind him, draped his raincoat over a chair, and slipped off his shoes, he poured whisky from an almost empty bottle into a toothmug, and stood at the window looking across the darkening river, occasionally shifting his half-seeing gaze to his right, where the Deutsches Eck promontory marked the confluence of the Moselle and the Rhine. His eyes were gritty with a bad night's sleep in the gasthaus in Norden, after the evening ferry journey back from the island, and aching from the whole day's driving back to Koblenz. His mind creaked through the grooves of disappointment and frustrated rage the blind Menschler's words had worn.
A barge passed slowly across his vision towards the confluence of the rivers, from his vantage hardly seeming to move. It possessed an apt, facile symbolism. A woman collected washing at its stern — that didn't fit the symbolism, and he smiled, sipped again at the whisky, almost shrugged off his mood. The first street lamps were coming on along the Moselstrasse, and the brake lights of the cars sprang out as red globes as the cars pulled up at traffic signals. Behind him in the unlit room his scattered — now useless, fatuous — papers, which he had enjoined the maid not to dust or tidy, and the leaning heaps of reference books subsided into gloom. Even so, his mind could not ignore them; an inward eye focused on them more clearly than his retinae registered the passage of the barge.
He had had it in the palm of his hand—
He'd blown it, crapped out on a blind man. The Woodstein of World War Two had gone down without throwing a punch!
He knew he was easing himself into a better mood — the bitterness was gone from the self-mockery, which might have been an effect of the whisky. Still, a blind man! His innate self-confidence, the blooming ego under the sun of his best-selling status, his greater potential, combined to prevent him from long periods of self-condemnation, self-awareness. He no longer had anything to fear from the less-clever men who eased past him into the grandly titled chairs of study or into the plush administrative grades. Menschler, therefore, was not an interview board of one, turning him down; without enemies, real or presumed, McBride was unable to categorize Menschler with them, and thereby retain an anger towards him. He was the dead, keeping the grave's secrets.