Krauser nodded. “Surface.”
The bells and klaxons and shouts of the crew heralded the surfacing of the U-616 like a hallelujah chorus. As soon as they were surfaced, Krauser rushed up to the deck. Accompanied by Kleiner and the newly arrived Hertz, he felt his breath knocked from his chest as he saw the shark surface.
It swam up from the water in a lazy rolling action. At first all he saw was an explosion of white foam and spray, but then he saw the cavernous mouth, full of teeth like a foul warren made of bayonets. At a distance of three hundred metres he couldn’t quite make out the one, glossy black eye, but he knew it was there, searching for them. Searching for the U-616.
As if running in slow motion, the fin emerged next, and Krauser saw that it was indeed fully three metres tall. It flexed slightly with the motion of the shark, and he could see places where it had been tattered and gouged over the years, in countless battles.
It occurred to him that he’d never really thought about how old the shark could be. It was no baby, for sure, but could it be twenty, thirty years old? Older? Had it been picking off merchant ships since the 1500s, the source for all sorts of legends of killer sea monsters for millennia?
Could it be older than that? Could it have feasted on dinosaur flesh?
Could it… could it be a dinosaur itself? Some relic from the cretaceous era that had somehow survived the apocalypse of all its kind?
Then, time seemed to rush to catch up with its momentary delay as, for the first time,the muscular, ghost grey length of its body rolled up from the depths. Krauser gasped as it soared through the surf; it had to be twenty five, even thirty metres in length, dwarfing that of the largest Great Whites he had ever heard tell of. Dinosaur, sea monster, mutation… that did not seem to matter. What mattered was that this thing was alive, hungry, and coming for them.
“The goddamn thing is heading straight for us!” shouted Hertz. “Captain, we have to move!”
Krauser was frozen as the shark barrelled straight for their submarine, travelling at an ungodly speed.
Hertz grabbed him by the arm and pulled him, almost threw him, towards the hatch to the command room. “Captain! We have to move!”
Krauser nodded, as if in a dream and had slid down the ladder into the command room before he realised what he was doing. “Turn this boat around, one hundred and eighty degrees, and get us out of here at once. Full speed!”
A chorus of ayes and acknowledgments answered him, and he felt the diesel engines kick into life, as if the ship had been holding steady, like a car in gear, waiting for his command to drop the handbrake. Kleiner and Hertz slid down the ladder quickly after him, grabbing hold of rungs or pipes to stop themselves from falling as the U-616 began a rapid turn from a dead stop.
“Did you see what it was doing?” demanded Krauser. “Is it still heading straight for us?”
“It dove!” Kleiner shouted over the roar of the engines. The command room seemed impossibly noisy after the silent running of the previous half an hour or so. “It dropped out of sight about a hundred and fifty metres out from us, and then Hertz and I followed you down here. Captain… what are we going to do?”
“We’re getting the hell out of here, Mr Kleiner. I’m not going to end up as fish food, and neither are you. And that’s an order.”
“Aye aye, Captain.”
The engineer turned to continue his work, and Krauser addressed his second in command. “Mr Hertz?”
“Captain.”
“Thank you for your assistance up on deck.”
“Don’t mention it, Captain.”
“You’re a good man, Mr Hertz. I’ll be putting in a letter of commendation and recommendation for your promotion when we return to shore.”
Suddenly, they were thrown violently around as a grating shudder heralded the shark passing directly beneath them. Only their grip on struts, rungs and pipes prevented them from being thrown to the floor. “I think you mean if we return to shore, sir.”
“Maintain full speed. We can outpace this thing.” He looked down at his sleeve, turned crimson from the reopened bullet wound. “Take charge, Mr Hertz. I need to report to Dr Arnold.”
Krauser was having his wound stitched when Arnild Dahlen approached them. “Captain. I would like to apologise for what happened on the bridge earlier. I let my emotions get the better of me. I understand why you are doing what you are doing. I am sorry.”
Krauser smiled, then hissed in pain as the doctor re-stitched his wound. “Apology accepted, Mr Dahlen.”
They both froze as another rumble, like an underground train passing on the next platform heralded another sweeping pass of the shark. They all looked up, despite it clearly being on the starboard side, and Krauser remembered the depth charges. A few seconds passed before conversation continued.
“I don’t know how we could hunt a shark anyway,” said the doctor. “We have torpedoes and the deck gun and anti-aircraft, for sure, but those are all best suited to static or slow moving targets at range. I dare say there wouldn’t be time for us to aim or calibrate the weapons. The shark would be on us before we knew it.”
“I’ve arranged for some men to stand watch up top, and given them what weapons we could find,” said Krauser.
“What do they have?” asked Dahlen, his stoic tone returned.
“Not much.”
Ensigns Sessler and Gerstner stood up on the deck, keeping watch for the monster that followed them. They had been kitted out with the finest weapons the captain could find them – Sessler held a revolver, and Gerstner the largest meat cleaver from the kitchen, neither of which filled them with any degree of security or confidence. Sessler watched the fore and starboard of the boat, Gerstner the aft and port. If they spotted anything, they were to shout down into the command room where they had seen it, so that the control room crew could decide which way to steer and what to do.
“You see anything?” asked Sessler, lighting a cigarette. He was in his mid-twenties, dark and tall.
Gertner was a much younger man, fair haired and small. Many suspected he was fifteen or sixteen, and had lied about his age to join up with the Kriegsmarine. “Nothing. How the hell are we supposed to see anything up here anyway?”
“It’s just a shark. I don’t even know why we’re running.”
“The Captain says it’s big.”
“Oh, please. How big can it be?”
-THIRTEEN-
The boat rocked sharply, tilting on its axis, throwing the entire crew almost forty-five degrees to starboard. Instantly, all aboard knew what had attacked them.
Krauser heard Sessler and Gerstner’s screams from the control room and kicked into action straight away. Grabbing his Mauser, he darted for the ladder up to the deck, climbing it in seconds. The sunlight and salt spray momentarily dazzled him when he emerged on deck, but he noticed the ungodly stench instantly. The smell of fish guts and the iron tinged stench of blood hit him like a brick wall. When at last his eyes adjusted to the brightness and he took in his surroundings, he saw Sessler – certainly dead – torn in half on the deck. Below the rib cage he was no more than a mess of strands of viscera and shards of bone. The screaming came from Gerstner, who was kneeling by the dead man, chewing his fist and rocking back and forth. Sessler’s blood, thinned by the sea water, was spreading around them both.
Krauser ran to Gerstner and squatted beside him, gripping his shoulders. “Which side did it come from? Did you see it?”
“It… it just… it rose up. I couldn’t do anything. There was a noise… I thought it was an explosion… then it was just… there. He fell… he slid to it… and it…”