But…The Kriegsmarine had its ways of showing it was unhappy with an officer, all right. Loading down his boat with experimental equipment was one of them. You didn't want a skipper you really cared about to play the guinea pig. Oh, no. In that case, you'd lose somebody you wanted to keep if the-the goddamn snort, that's what it was-didn't work as advertised. But if that happened in U-30…
Poor old Lemp, people in the know would say. First the liner and now this. He wasn't lucky, was he?
Poor old Lemp, poor old Lemp thought. He was stuck with it, all right. "I don't need to talk to the admiral," he mumbled after a long silence.
"No? Good." The engineering officer paused in the middle of lighting a cigarette. A chilly breeze blew off the Baltic, but it didn't faze him. He was one of those people who could keep a match alive in any weather with no more than his cupped hands. It was a useful knack for submariners, who had to come up onto the conning tower to smoke. Some guys had it and some didn't; that was all there was to it. Happily puffing away, the engineering officer went on, "You'll take two engineers to sea with you this cruise."
"Wunderbar," Lemp said. A U-boat needed a second engineer the way a fighter plane needed an extra prop in its tail. The only reason you took one was to train him so he could become the engineer on a new boat his next time out.
Or so Lemp thought, till the engineering officer told him, "Leutnant Beilharz is an expert on using the snorkel." Lemp would have liked that better if he hadn't tempered it with, "If anybody is, of course." Still, maybe it meant the powers that be didn't actively hope he'd sink. Maybe.
Gerhart Beilharz proved improbably young and improbably enthusiastic. He also proved improbably talclass="underline" within a centimeter either way of two meters. Type VII boats-hell, all submarines-were cramped enough if you were short. With all the pipes and conduits running along just above the level of most people's heads…"You're asking to get your skull split," Lemp said.
"I know," Beilharz said. He pulled an infantryman's Stahlhelm out of his duffel bag. "I got this from my cousin. He's somewhere in France right now. I'm pretty good at remembering to duck, but maybe the helmet'll keep me from knocking my brains out when I forget."
"That'd be nice," Lemp agreed dryly. "Try not to smash up the valves and such when you go blundering through the boat, if you don't mind."
"Jawohl!" Gerhart Beilharz said-he really was an eager puppy.
And he knew things worth knowing. Or he was supposed to, anyhow. "Tell me about the snort," Lemp urged.
"You've heard that, sir, have you? Good," the young engineer said. "It's a wonderful gizmo, honest to God it is. You can charge your batteries without surfacing. That's what the Dutch were mostly using it for. But you can cruise along submerged, too, and you're much harder to spot than you would be on the surface."
"But how am I supposed to spot targets if I do that?" Lemp asked. "If I'm puttering along at three or four knots-"
"You can do eight easily, sir," Beilharz broke in. "You can get up to thirteen, but that sets up vibrations you'd rather not have."
"Can I get the periscope up high enough to look out with it while I'm running with the snorkel on?" Lemp asked.
"Aber naturlich!" Beilharz sounded offended that he could doubt.
True believers always sounded offended when you doubted. They sounded that way because they were. That was what made them true believers. Lemp was also a true believer, in his way. He believed in going out and sinking as many ships bound for England as he could. Anything that could help him sink those ships, he approved of. Anything that didn't…He eyed the ungainly snorkel one more time.
"Well, we'll give it a try," he said. "The North Sea is rough. Will the snort suck all the air out of the boat if the nozzle goes under water?"
"That's not supposed to happen," Leutnant Beilharz said stiffly.
Lemp concluded that it could, whether it was supposed to or not. What happened then? Did it vent exhaust back into the boat? That might not be much fun. He wished he'd never set eyes on the miserable Athenia. Then they'd have fitted the goddamn experimental whatsit onto somebody else's U-boat.
Well, he was stuck with it. He tried it out before the U-30 left the calm waters of Kiel Bay. It worked as advertised. The diesels chugged along with the whole boat-but for the tip of the snorkel tube-submerged. Gerhart Beilharz seemed as proud as a new papa showing off his firstborn son.
What happens when the little bugger pisses in your eye after you take his diaper off to change him? Lemp wondered sourly. He stayed surfaced through the Kiel Canal and out into the North Sea. Away from the sheltered bay, the ocean showed some of what it could do. Several sailors went a delicate green. Puke in the bilges would remind the crew it was there all through the cruise.
"Ride's smoother down below," Beilharz suggested.
"Nein." Lemp shook his head. "I'll use the snort when I have to, but not for this. I want to get out there and go hunting, dammit. Even eight knots is only half what I can make on the surface, so we'll stay up here." The second engineer looked aggrieved, but that was all he could do. Lemp had the power to bind and to loose, to rise and to sink.
He cruised along at fifteen knots, heading up toward the gap between Scotland and Norway. The Royal Navy patrolled the gap, of course-they didn't want subs getting loose in the Atlantic. They laid minefields in the North Sea, too. A lot of U-boat skippers stuck close to the Norwegian coast. Some even-most unofficially-ducked into Norwegian territorial waters to stay away from the Royal Navy. Sometimes-also most unofficially-the limeys steamed into Norwegian waters after them.
Lemp steered straight for the narrower gap between the Orkneys and the Shetlands. As far as he was concerned, the Norwegian dogleg only wasted fuel. He prided himself on being a hard-charging skipper. (Sometimes, these days, he wondered how proud he should be. Would he have torpedoed the Athenia if he'd waited longer to make sure of what she was? But he couldn't dwell on that, not if he wanted to do his job.) And the North Sea was plenty wide. Chances were he wouldn't hit a mine or get spotted by a destroyer. And if he did get spotted, he told himself, it was at least as much the destroyer's worry as his.
He kept four men up on the conning tower all the time during the day. Their Zeiss binoculars scanned from side to side and went higher up into the sky to make sure the watchmen spotted a plane before it saw the U-boat. Leutnant Beilharz took his turn up there. Why not? It was the only time when he could stand up straight.
His disapproval of the way Lemp used-or rather, didn't use-the snorkel stuck out like a hedgehog's spines. Finally, Lemp pulled him into his own tiny cabin. Only a sheet of canvas separated it from the main passageway, but it gave him more privacy than anyone else on the sub enjoyed.
Quietly, he said, "We have the gadget. If we need it, we know what to do with it. Till then, I don't intend to break routine. Have you got that?"
"Yes, sir," Gerhart Beilharz answered sourly. U-boat discipline was on the easygoing side-enough to threaten to give officers from the surface navy a stroke. That formal response felt like, and was, a reproach.
Where the conversation would have gone from there was anybody's guess. Downhill was Lemp's. But somebody yelled, "Smoke on the horizon!"
"It'll keep," Lemp said as he jumped to his feet.
"Ja." Beilharz sprang up, too. He wore his cousin's helmet all the time inside the U-boat-and needed it, too. It scraped on something overhead as he trotted along behind Lemp. He might make a submariner yet, even if he was oversized. Lemp would have thought hard about chucking him overboard had he tried to waste time.