Mark of the Devil Read Free

submarine shuddered and bounced with every shock wave.
    Almost immediately, more propeller and engine noise, coming closer, growing louder, and again the familiar hiss of depth charges on their way down. This time, however, the explosions seemed farther away, not as damaging, until suddenly, to Strobel, it felt as if the submarine was shifting beneath his body, cracking and splitting apart. And then, a great roaring sound. It slammed against the top and port side of the U-boat, pounding its way along the length of the hull.
    As the submarine rolled and lurched helplessly, emergency lights blinked on and off. Strobel wanted to scream, to mix his voice with the cries of others, but he didn’t. He tensed his body, grasped with both hands one of the cables that ran along the periscope column and held his breath until all motion stopped.
    He lay on the deck, gasping, listening. Sonar pings, prop wash, engine sounds, depth charge explosions, all gone. Only the steady spray of water from loosened pipe joints and the whimpering of men, too terrified to move or speak, reached his ears. Very slowly Strobel pushed to his feet, his hands motioning for quiet, his legs braced against the slightly more than 15-degrees starboard list. “Shhhhh,” he whispered, an index finger to his lips. “Listen.”
    “For what?” Krueger demanded, raising himself to one knee, the pistol still in his hand. With a look of utter scorn on his face he added, “I hear nothing except the blubbering and sniffling of your proud, brave U-boat men. Ha!”
    Ignoring the scorching contempt in Krueger’s words, Strobel ordered, “Plug the water leaks and let’s get her off the bottom. Let’s go, men.”
    For a moment, the U-boat was filled with a burst of excited energy and the sound of compressed air rushing into the ballast tanks, then nothing. “What’s wrong, Chief?” Strobel asked.
    “I don’t know. We can’t seem to clear the ballast tanks. It’s as though everything is blocked.”
    “Move the diving planes.”
    “I can’t, Captain,” the helmsman answered. “They’re frozen.” The seaman quickly shifted to the stern rudder controls. “The same, Captain. Everything seems to be frozen.”
    “The sides of the trench,” the Chief said. “If they’ve…”
    “If they’ve what, Chief?” Krueger demanded.
    “If they’ve caved in around us. The roaring sound we heard. If we’re covered with—”
    “All engines ahead slow,” Strobel ordered. But the only response was Krueger’s laughter, at first low and guttural, growing rapidly to a loud, braying sound. “Fools, all of you.”
    “Shut up, Colonel,” Strobel ordered, “or I’ll have you tied to your bunk for the rest of the journey.”
    Krueger’s laughter died as the words came slow and deliberate. “Do what you want, Captain, but if your chief is right, there’ll be no more journey. We could have all been free men if you’d followed your orders.
Reichsführer
Himmler’s orders. But you had to have the last shot, the last pathetic act against a pathetic little ship. And now, Captain, we are all buried alive.”

CHAPTER 1
    Thursday, 11 October 2001
Jacksonville Beach, Florida
    Wording on the side of the white Jeep Grand Cherokee read:
    NORTH AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGICAL
    RESEARCH & PRESERVATION ASSOC. (NAARPA).
    Matt Berkeley steered the Jeep around a tow truck. The crow’s feet of a frown stretched from the corner of each of his eyes, creating dark lines in what was otherwise a clean-cut, smoothly tanned face. The tow truck’s
beep-beep-beep
warning signal cut the air as it backed toward a Cadillac buried to the floorboard in sand. It had been like that all along Third Street, if you could call it a street anymore. It had become a tire-packed bed of sand, waiting to be dug out and cleared. Storm-ravaged cars littered the street, left by their owners when Hurricane Grace’s initial surge of water rushed inland from the beach. It was like so much jetsam, abandoned by