Someone gabbled excitedly in his ear. Lemp was astonished to see his jaw drop. Donitz was for the most part an imperturbable man. Not today.
"What?" he barked. "Are you sure?… What is the situation in Berlin?… Are you sure of that?… Well, you'd better be. Call me the minute you have more information." He slammed the handset into its cradle.
"What's up, sir?" Lemp asked. "Anything I need to know about?"
Donitz took a deep breath. He's going to tell me to get lost, Lemp thought. What the devil was going on? But the admiral didn't do that-not quite. "Maybe you and your men should stick close to barracks for the next couple of days," he said.
"Sir, we just got in after a cruise," Lemp protested. "The boys deserve the chance to blow off some steam. It's not as if-" He broke off.
"As if you'd sunk the Athenia again?" Donitz finished for him. Lemp gave back a miserable nod. That was what had been in his mind, all right. Admiral Donitz went on, "No, this isn't your fault. But they should do it anyhow, for their own safety. Things may get… ugly." He seemed to pick the word with malice aforethought.
"Can you tell me what's going on?" Lemp asked.
"Only that it's political," Donitz replied. "Listen to the radio. You'll probably piece things together-as well as anyone can right now. Oh, and don't be surprised if you find the barracks under guard."
That raised more questions than it answered. Lemp chose the one that looked most important: "Political, sir? What do you mean, political?"
"What I said." Donitz seemed to lose patience with him all at once. "You are dismissed." Lemp saluted and got out. He hadn't closed the door before the admiral grabbed for the telephone again.
The commander was waiting in Donitz's anteroom. "What's up?" he asked when he got a look at Lemp's face.
"Ask your boss… sir," Lemp said. The commander looked impatient. As best he could, Lemp recounted what had gone on after the phone rang.
"Der Herr Jesus!" the other officer said after he'd finished. "Something's gone into the shitter, all right. You'd better do what the admiral suggested. Things are liable to get nasty in a hurry."
If he didn't know what was going on, he had his suspicions. "What do you mean?" Lemp inquired.
"Just sit tight. I hope I'm wrong," the commander said, which only frustrated Lemp more. Instead of giving him any answers he could actually use, the other officer hurried into Donitz's sanctum.
"Why don't you do what Commander Tannenwald says, sir?" one of the armed ratings said. Now Lemp had a name to go with the face. The fellow with the Stahlhelm and the Mauser should have had no business giving him orders. His muscle, and his friend's, and their weapons, were very persuasive. The two of them escorted Lemp back to his crew.
A few minutes after he got to the barracks, rifle shots and a short burst from a machine gun rang out not nearly far enough away. "What the hell is going on?" Peter demanded. No one answered. No one could-no one else knew, either. The helmsman turned on the radio in the barracks hall. Syrupy music poured out of it. That was no help.
When the tune ended, the announcer said, "Remain obedient to duly constituted authority." Then he played another record.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Lemp asked. He got no more answer than Peter had.
More gunfire came from the edge of the naval base. The lights outside the barracks hall suddenly went out. One of the guards stuck in his head and said, "The watchword is 'Heil Hitler!' Remember it." He shut the door before anybody could ask him any questions. Lemp wasn't sure what to ask anyway. And if people were running around with guns, the wrong question was liable to have a permanent answer.
Lieutenant Beilharz took him aside and spoke in a low voice: "Skipper, I think some kind of coup is going on. What do we do?"
The same unwelcome thought had crossed Lemp's mind. "What can we do? Go back to the U-30 and start shooting things up with the deck gun? We don't even know which side is which. Best thing is to sit tight and wait to see what happens. Or have you got a better idea?"
"Well…" What wasn't Beilharz saying? What were his politics? What did he think Lemp's were? Terrible for a fighting man to need to worry about things like that. The engineering officer sighed and nodded. "Ja, that's probably best. What else is there?"
"Nothing that won't put us in worse hot water," Lemp answered, and they were in plenty. A bullet shattered a window and buried itself in the opposite wall.
"Douse the lights! Get down!" Peter sang out. Somebody hit the switch. The hall plunged into blackness. Thumps and shuffling noises said quite a few men were hitting the deck anyhow. Lemp only wished he knew who was shooting at whom, and why. Wish for the moon while you're at it, he thought as he flattened out himself. WHEREVER PEGGY DRUCE WENT in Stockholm, she kept looking over her shoulder. Would Nazi soldiers suddenly come out of the woodwork like field-gray cockroaches, the way they had in Copenhagen? Germany loudly insisted she had no aggressive designs on Sweden. Of course, she'd said the same thing about Denmark and Norway. If she did end up invading, she would swear on a stack of Bibles that she'd been provoked. An oath like that was worth its weight in gold.
If you listened to the magazines and radio reports coming out of occupied Denmark, all the Danes were happy as could be with their Aryan brothers from Deutschland. If you listened to the people who'd got out of Denmark just ahead of the Gestapo, you heard a different story.
You could hear both sides in Sweden. You could pick up both Radio Berlin and the BBC. Papers printed reports from the Nazis and from the Western Allies (mostly in Swedish translation, which did Peggy no good, but even so…). You could buy the International Herald-Tribune and Signal, the Germans' slick new propaganda magazine. The Swedes took such liberty for granted. Well, so had the Danes. Sweden didn't know how well off it was, or so it seemed to Peggy.
Still, Stockholm wasn't too bad. London or Paris (or Brest or Bordeaux) would have been even better. Peggy soon discovered, though, that the German major in Copenhagen had been right: she couldn't get there from here. Planes weren't flying. Ships weren't sailing. The Germans were driving English, French, and Norwegian forces up the long, skinny nation to the west, but Scandinavia and the North Sea did indeed remain a war zone.
She was so desperate to get out of Europe, she even visited the Soviet embassy to see if she could reverse Columbus and get to the west by heading east. None of the Russians at the embassy would admit to following English, but several spoke French or German. Peggy preferred French for all kinds of reasons. Once they saw she understood it, so did the Russians.
"Yes, Mrs. Druce, we can arrange an entry visa for you," one of their diplomatic secretaries said. "We can arrange passage to Moscow. There should be no difficulty in that. Once in Moscow, you may travel on the Trans-Siberian Railway as far east as, I believe, Lake Baikal. We would gladly ticket you through to Vladivostok, you understand, but the Japanese have a different view of the situation."
"Aw, shit," Peggy said in English. Just so the Russian official wouldn't feel left out, she added, "Merde alors!" Sure as hell, Columbus had got it right: the world was round. And a skirmish on the far side of the immense Eurasian land mass could screw up her travel hopes just as thoroughly as the one right next door. It not only could-it had.
"You have my sympathy, for whatever it may be worth to you," the Russian said.
"Thanks," Peggy answered, and left. His sympathy was worth just as much as the Germans' nonaggression pledge… and not a nickel more.
If you had to get stuck somewhere, plenty of places were worse than Stockholm. The weather was getting chilly, but Peggy didn't worry about any winter this side of Moscow's. There was plenty of food, as there had been in Copenhagen till the Nazis marched in. Plenty to drink, too-she needed that. The town was extraordinarily clean, and more than pretty enough. A lot of the buildings were centuries older than any she could have seen in America. For contrast, the town hall was an amazing modern building; the locals couldn't have been prouder of it. The south tower leaped 450 feet into the sky, and was topped by the three crowns the Swedes also used as the emblem on their warplanes.