Randall showed little emotion. ‘Ask him to confirm his message.’
The cadet relayed the query. A few moments later, the reply came: ‘M-I-S-T-A-K-E. G-O A-H-E-A-D P-L-E-A-S-E. G-O-O-D-B-Y-E.’
‘Signal “Received”. Start engines.’ The deep rumble of Manhattan’s engines began to throb under their feet. ‘Ahead slow.’
The tension hadn’t left the bridge. If anything, it had increased. ‘Should we get the passengers out of the lifeboats?’ Symonds asked.
‘No hurry,’ Randall replied calmly. ‘Let’s get some distance between Mister Mistake and us first.’
‘Aye-aye, Sir.’
Commodore Randall had his binoculars trained on the U-boat. ‘I’d give a lot to overhear the conversation that’s taking place on her bridge at this moment,’ he muttered.
As the Manhattan moved forward slowly in the water, they all watched the U-boat intently. The rim of the sun emerged from the horizon, sending a shaft along the surface of the sea. The tips of the millions of waves turned translucent green. It had become a sea of jade.
A bellboy ran on to the bridge, a boy of fourteen, the brass buttons on his uniform still awry from the haste with which he had dressed that morning.
‘Sir! There’s another submarine on the port beam.’
The officers moved in a body to the port deck to look. Without doubt, several miles away, another submarine had surfaced, her shape gilded in the flat light of the rising sun. They could see her hull and the lump of her conning tower.
‘Has she seen us?’ Symonds asked.
‘I don’t care to find out,’ the Commodore retorted. ‘And I don’t want any more conversations with undersea boats. Swing us into the sun, helmsman. Full ahead all engines.’
The manoeuvre brought the second visitor to their stern. Manhattan’s one hundred and sixty-five thousand horses began to gallop, pushing her to her full speed of twenty knots and heading straight into the brilliance of the rising sun. The great liner settled her stern in the water and drove ahead. Either blinded or uninterested, the second submarine soon fell astern and vanished.
‘I believe I’ve aged ten years in the last hour,’ Commodore Randall remarked. ‘Shall we secure lifeboat stations, George?’
‘Aye-aye, Sir.’ Symonds went on rather shaky legs to let the passengers out of the boats.
U-113
None of the crew were quite sure what to do with Kapitän-leutnant Jürgen Todt. Since being relieved of his command, he had not spoken a word. He went straight to his quarters and remained there, which many of them thought was ominous; they imagined he would be writing furiously in his notorious log, preparing a report which would have them all shot on their return to Germany.
Rudi Hufnagel, however, was in need of immediate medical attention. He had been wounded twice and he was losing a lot of blood. The first of Todt’s bullets had glanced across his left shoulder, damaging bone and muscle. The other, ostensibly more superficial wound, was the one that Krupp found most hard to deal with. The bullet had torn open the veins of Hufnagel’s right forearm, and blood was pouring out as the First Watch Officer lay slumped on the floor, starting to lose consciousness.
Krupp bandaged the arm as tightly as he could, but the scarlet blossomed through the gauze instantly and spilled on to the metal deck-plates, making them slippery underfoot.
‘Tie a tourniquet above the elbow,’ someone advised. ‘That will stop it.’
‘I can’t cut off the circulation altogether,’ Krupp said helplessly. ‘By the time we get back to Kiel he’ll have lost the arm.’ With a seriously wounded man to care for now, and very little real experience, the twenty-three-year-old Krupp was overwhelmed, and on the edge of tears. There was a hubbub of conflicting advice from the men standing around him: to raise the wounded arm above Hufnagel’s head, to make Hufnagel lie down, to cauterise the wound with the electrician’s soldering-irons.
The sharp voice of the hydrophone operator cut through this babble.
‘Torpedo launched.’
They all turned to stare at the man, who was hunched over, with his hands clamped on to his headphones. ‘We haven’t launched a torpedo,’ Krupp said stupidly.
‘Enemy torpedo,’ the hydrophone operator said. ‘Starboard stern. One thousand metres. Closing at thirty knots.’
There was a moment of silence. In the confusion of the last few minutes, and with their two senior officers out of action, the inexperienced crew had neglected the primary rule of submarine warfare – to keep a watch at all times. They now had less than a minute to respond to the torpedo which had been launched at them.
‘Secure hatches!’ Krupp screamed. ‘Prepare to dive.’
Leaving Hufnagel bleeding on the floor, the men rushed to their posts, closing the watertight doors, gulping water into the ballast tanks, revving the motors. The seconds ticked by. The remainder of the crew rushed to the forward compartment to weigh U-113’s nose down. At his station, the hydrophone operator murmured, almost admiringly, ‘It’s a British submarine. They crept up behind us while we weren’t looking.’
U-113 was just starting her dive when the torpedo struck her stern. The explosion ripped through the compartments, bursting the watertight doors open, hurling men and machinery in all directions, plunging the U-boat into darkness and opening her like a sardine can to the plundering sea.
SS Manhattan
Rachel Morgenstern was reluctantly forced to admit that Thomas König had been helpful during the crisis. Without his assistance, the girls would have found the experience very difficult; and it was doubtful whether Stravinsky would have made it to the lifeboat at all.
‘Of course, you did it for Masha,’ Rachel said to Thomas. ‘You prefer Masha to me, don’t you, Adolf?’
‘I like you both the same,’ Thomas replied awkwardly. Rachel made him very nervous.
‘Liar. You think I am an ugly, spiteful Jewess.’
‘You are not ugly,’ he replied, flushing, ‘and your religion is not important to me.’
‘Liar again. Nor have you denied that I am spiteful.’
‘You are not spiteful.’
‘Liar a third time.’ She considered him with her sharp blue eyes. ‘How did you know which was our lifeboat?’
‘I found it out.’
‘When?’
‘The first day I saw you.’
‘So you could impress my cousin?’
‘So that I could be useful.’
‘How lucky we Jews are to have a little Nazi looking out for us. You were useful, I suppose.’ Grudgingly, she leaned forward and touched her lips to his cheek. ‘There. You had better go and wash that off now, before the Führer finds out about it.’
Thomas would far rather the kiss had come from Masha, but he accepted it with good grace. Masha did not kiss him, but she took Thomas’s hand in her own and walked along the deck with him. ‘You have never told me about your mother,’ she said. When he made no reply, but just looked away, she went on, ‘I would like her to know what a good, brave young man she raised.’
Well-intentioned as this remark was, it had the effect of emptying the cup of Thomas’s happiness in an instant, leaving him bereft, taking him back to the moment he had last seen his mother. ‘It was nothing,’ he mumbled.
‘It was not nothing,’ Masha replied. ‘You looked after us.’
‘The submarine didn’t even fire a torpedo.’ Thomas felt almost disappointed, as if that eventuality would have enabled him to show true heroism, rescuing Masha from the waves.
Masha smiled, perhaps reading his thoughts. ‘That’s not the point. You behaved like a grown-up. Like a man.’