Last Orders: The War That Came Early Read Free Page B

officer.
    Nothing much had happened yet today. So … why not? The officer gestured, getting his men ready to do whatever they were going to do. Vaclav took careful aim. Not much wind. Range about 1,100 meters. You might even do this with a Mauser, though you’d need a little luck as well as skill. Luck never hurt, of course. But with this much gun, skill alone could turn the trick.
    Breathe. Let it out. Bring back the trigger, gently, gently … The antitank rifle thundered. It kicked, not even a little bit gently. The Nationalist officer grabbed his midriff and fell over.
    “Earned my pay today,” Vaclav said. He took out a cigarette to celebrate. He could smoke it now. He wouldn’t be staying here more than another few minutes anyhow.
    To say Lieutenant Commander Julius Lemp didn’t enjoy summer patrol in the North Sea was to beggar the power of language. He wasn’t quite up at the latitudes where the sun never set, but he was plenty far north to keep it in the sky through most of the hours.
    He and several ratings stayed up on the conning tower, scanning sky and horizon for enemy ships and airplanes. You had to do it all the time. The Royal Navy was looking for the U-30, too, and for all the other boats the
Kriegsmarine
sent to sea.
    The Royal Navy was looking hard. It had ways to look no one had dreamt of when the war broke out, almost five years ago now. Radar could spot a surfaced U-boat no matter how cunningly its paint job mimicked sea and sky. And, when it dove, English warships houndedit with their pinging hydrophones. Unlike the ones both sides had used in the last war, these really could help a surface ship track—and sink—a submarine.
    Gerhart Beilharz popped out of the hatch like an elongated jack-in-the-box. The engineering officer grinned like a jack-in-the-box, too. He was two meters tall: not the ideal size for a man in a U-boat’s crew. This was the only place on the boat where he didn’t have to worry about gashing his scalp or knocking himself cold if he forgot to duck.
    “You’ve done your two hours, skipper,” he said. “I relieve you.”
    Lemp lowered his Zeiss field glasses and rubbed his eyes. They felt sandy under his knuckles. “I feel like a bug on a plate,” he said. “A black bug on a white plate.”
    Beilharz pointed back to the
Schnorkel
. The breathing tube—for the diesels, not the men who served them—stuck up like an enormous stovepipe. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “As long as we’ve got that baby, we can slip under the glazing.”
    He could say
Don’t worry about it
. The U-boat’s survival wasn’t his responsibility. Lemp had to worry about everything; that was what command entailed. And worry he did: “They can see us under the glazing, too, dammit, or rather hear us with those stinking hydrophones.”
    “We’ve slithered away before,” the tall man said. “We can do it again.”
    “I hope so.” Sighing, Lemp went below—out of the sunshine, out of the fresh air, into a steel cigar dimly lit with orange bulbs and stinking of everything from shit and puke and piss to diesel oil to the reeks of rotting food and dirty socks. However nasty, the odor was also infinitely familiar to him. And well it might have been, since his own fug made up a part of it.
    Only a green curtain shielded his tiny cabin—cot, desk, chair, safe—from the corridor. Still, command’s privilege gave him more privacy and space than anyone else on the boat enjoyed. He logged the events on his latest watch: course, position, observations (none significant), the fact that a radio tube had burnt out and been replaced. His handwriting was tiny and as precise as if an automaton had produced it.
    But as he wrote, he was conscious of all the things he wasn’t saying, all the things he couldn’t say—not unless he wanted some serious attention from the
Gestapo
and the
Sicherheitsdienst
and the
Abwehr
and, no doubt, other organizations of State and Party about which he knew