Rogue Angel 55: Beneath Still Waters (20 page)

Annja mentally reviewed what she knew about U-boats as they drew closer. The average boat was roughly 220 feet long and displaced about 700 tons of water. It carried a crew of 35 men, was loaded with 12 torpedoes, and could remain beneath the surface for a little more than two hours on fully charged batteries.

This boat had docked with its bow pointed toward the entrance to the cove, most likely so that it could put to sea quickly if it was discovered. That told Annja that the lagoon was probably much deeper than she expected, given how much room it took to maneuver a boat of this size.

She wondered what had happened to it and why it was still here so many years after the war. Surely the captain and crew would have wanted to go home at some point, if they were still capable? Perhaps the boat had run out of fuel. Or was no longer seaworthy due to battle damage that they couldn’t be seen from the surface.

Just looking at the thing she had a hundred more questions, and she hoped that they’d find some answers once they got aboard.

Garin brought the dinghy alongside the dock on the side opposite the U-boat. Paul hopped out, testing the strength of the pier. When it seemed that the wood was solid enough to bear their weight, Paul grabbed
the mooring line from Annja and tied the boat to one of the pier’s support poles. Once it was secure, Garin helped Annja onto the dock, passed the duffel bag full of tools up to her, then jumped out himself.

They crossed the dock and stepped up onto the wooden deck of the U-boat. It had rotted through in a few places, but for the most part was still intact. “The hatch is this way,” Annja said, leading the two men toward the conning tower. She skirted the deck gun and mounted the steps on the other side of the conning tower to enter the central section. A hatch lay in the middle of the floor, leading down into the ship.

Unsurprisingly, not only was the hatch closed but it looked as though it had been rusted shut for a long time.

Still, one has to try
, Annja thought.

She bent, grabbed the wheel that opened the hatch and did her best to turn it.

It didn’t move.

“Give it a try, guys,” Annja said.

She stepped back, letting Garin and Paul take her place. They grabbed hold of the wheel on opposite sides and leaned their weight into it. Annja could see the muscles in their arms bulging, but the wheel didn’t move.

“All right, don’t give yourselves hernias,” Annja said. “Step back.”

When they had complied, she took an aerosol can of nut and bolt loosener out of the duffel bag at her feet and sprayed it liberally over the point on the underside of the wheel where it met the crank shaft. She waited a few minutes, then took an oversized
wrench from the bag. Lifting the tool over her head, she brought it smashing down against the wheel of the hatch. She did that half a dozen times, alternating spraying it and hitting it with the wrench.

Satisfied, she stepped back and inclined her head at the hatch again.

The men got the message. Situating themselves on either side of the hatch, they tried again.

Nothing.

Annja stepped in and went through the whole routine a second time, then signaled Garin and Paul to give it their best shot.

The wheel still didn’t turn.

“Come on, you son-of-a-gun,” she said, stepping forward once more.

The spray had to have finally had enough time to work some of the rust loose, for when the men tried, the wheel moved an inch to the left before getting stuck.

“Yes!” Annja cried.

Now they knew that it would open if they just kept working at it. Ten minutes later they were able to turn the wheel fully and unlock the hatch.

“Ready?” Paul asked, and at his companions’ nods he pulled back on the hatch, opening it.

Foul air rushed out of the opening, causing them to turn their heads for a moment, but it dissipated quickly. Annja traded her spray can and her wrench for a high-powered flashlight and shone it into the interior of the boat.

At the bottom of the ladder, a human skull stared back at them through the light.

“Hello, what have we here?” Annja said, upon seeing the skull. It wasn’t the first time she’d encountered human remains during her work and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. She moved the beam of the light around slowly, noting there were quite a few more bones at the bottom of the ladder. The ladder itself looked stable; they should be able to get to the bottom without a problem.

What was waiting for them down there might be another story, though.

Stop the nonsense
, she scolded herself.
This sub’s been locked up as tight as a drum for decades. If anything was waiting down there for you, it’s long dead
.

She ignored the little voice that chimed,
“That’s what I’m afraid of!”
back at her.

They tied the hatch in the open position, so that it couldn’t fall and accidentally seal them in. When they had finished, Annja turned to the others. “I’ll go down first and have—”

“No,” Garin interrupted. “I’ll go.”

Annja rounded on him, annoyed. “Are you suggesting
that there’s something down there that I won’t be able handle?”

Garin looked at her with so little expression that Annja was sure that he was holding back laughter. That suspicion only grew when it took him several seconds to get his response out.

At last he said, “Nothing of the sort, actually. I outweigh both of you. If the ladder is going to break, it is most likely going to do so under my weight and not yours. If you go down first and the ladder breaks when I follow you, that means there will be at least two of us stuck down there. If I go down first and the ladder breaks, only one of us gets stuck, leaving the two of you to find a way to get me out.”

Annja felt her cheeks heating up at Garin’s perfectly reasonable explanation, and she did her best to ignore the sensation.

“Right. I knew that,” she said, turning away so she didn’t see the smirk trying to break free on Garin’s face.

Garin took hold of the rails on either side of the ladder and stepped down onto the second crossbar, testing to see if it would hold his weight.

When it did, he began his descent. He eased down, one crossbar at a time, until he reached the bottom, then stepped onto the interior deck of the submarine, doing his best not to step on the bones of the skeleton that were lying at his feet.

“I’m good,” he called up the others. “Send Paul down next.”

Once Paul reached the bottom, Annja started her
descent, and soon the three of them were standing in the central control room taking a look around.

The first thing that Annja noticed was that the compartment was cramped. She’d expected it to be, it was a submarine after all, but it was even smaller than she expected. There was a heavy bulkhead at each end of the compartment, with a hatch in the center leading to either end of the boat. In the center were large cylindrical tubes that no doubt housed the optics for the periscope. Around them were crammed multiple work stations for the command crew. The port side held the main helm controls, the main vent controls, what looked to Annja like a bilge pump and a large tank of some kind, possibly for drinking water. On the starboard side was an exposed motor, most likely for the periscope, the compass and attack computer, and the ladder up to the conning tower.

She and her companions nearly filled the space; Annja couldn’t imagine what it would have been like with six to eight men working in here at the same time. She was very glad that she wasn’t claustrophobic, for if she had been, she doubted that she could have gone any farther.

The skeleton lying at the base of the ladder wasn’t the only one; Annja counted two more. There was also a fair amount of evidence that a fight of some kind had taken place. There were broken gauges, what looked like bullet holes in the bulkheads, and even a soot-blackened area where the navigator’s table should have stood.

She supposed a fire could have caused the damage
she was seeing, but that didn’t explain the bullet holes. Had the soldiers fought among themselves and accidentally caused a fire? Had the three dead men been trapped by the flames or were they dead, possibly from the smoke, before the fire broke out?

* * *

W
ITHOUT A PROPER
lab in which to analyze the remains, she would never know.

That made the archaeologist in her twitch in discomfort.

She bent next to the nearest skeleton and looked closely. She could see small bits and pieces of cloth between and under several of the bones and realized that it was all that was left of the man’s uniform. It looked as if he’d died in his chair, doing his duty.

Paul interrupted her thoughts.

“Why did they leave the bodies here?”

She turned and frowned at Paul, not sure if she’d heard him correctly. “What was that?”

“Why weren’t the bodies given a proper burial?” he asked. “Wasn’t that the custom back then?”

It was. Honoring the dead was one of the customs that transcended cultural and physical boundaries.

Which made Paul’s question all the more curious.

So why not now? Why not here? What had happened to the crew that was so bad that it kept them from tending to their own? she wondered.

That was the question of the day, it seemed.

“I don’t know,” she told Paul. “Maybe they were the last survivors and there was no one left to take care of them when it was their time to go.”

It was as good an explanation as any, she supposed, but it made the presence of the skeletons even more upsetting than before.

What was so deadly that it killed all three men at the same time, right where they were?

Plague was the first thought that popped into her head.

It wasn’t a very comforting one.

Paul had to have been thinking something similar because he stepped away from the skeleton he’d been examining, and said, “You know, this might not be such a good idea. Maybe we should go.”

But Annja shook her head. “We can’t leave. We don’t know what we are looking for, and this is a pretty big island to search blindly. If we’re going to meet the deadline, we need to find a clue as to where to begin looking for Hitler’s hideaway. The best place to find something like that is on this boat.”

She couldn’t help but add, “Besides, if they did have something like bubonic plague, you can rest assured that you’ve contracted it already.”

The stricken look that crossed Paul’s face in response to her comment told her it probably wasn’t as funny as she thought it was.

She considered what she knew about U-boats, trying to remember where the captain’s cabin, if it could even be called that, was on the boat.

Forward of the control room? Aft?

She couldn’t recall.

In the absence of clear direction, she mentally flipped a coin and when it came up tails, chose aft.
Walking to the hatch in the bulkhead at the rear of the room, Annja examined the flywheel in the center. Unlike the wheel on the hatch above, this one was free of rust and in good shape. She dug her trusty can of bolt loosener out of the duffel hanging over her shoulder and gave the flywheel a few sprays before giving it an experimental turn.

It didn’t budge.

She peered at the flywheel, using her light and getting in close, but it looked just fine. There was no rust that she could see, nothing gumming up the works.

It should open.

Unless it was locked or jammed from the other side.

Oddly unsettled by the notion but not sure why, Annja turned and moved to the other end of the compartment. Garin was trying to open the opposite hatch, with about as much success as she’d had with hers.

This one, too, seemed to be locked or jammed from the opposite side.

“Are there any other hatches topside that we can use?” Paul asked.

Annja shook her head. “The conning tower hatch is the only real entrance to the submarine.”

“What do you mean ‘real entrance’?” Garin asked.

“I mean an entrance that the crew normally uses. That doesn’t mean that it’s the only way into the ship, just that it’s the one that sane people use. For instance, technically speaking, if you were small enough and the doors on both ends were open, I suppose you
could climb through either the forward or aft torpedo tubes and get in that way, but even I’m not crazy enough to try that.”

“So we’re dead in the water?”

“I didn’t say that.” Garin’s question had gotten her thinking about the other ways into the boat and one big one stuck out in her mind.

“We could try the escape hatch.”

“What’s that?” Paul asked.

“It’s an emergency hatch built into the floor of the forward torpedo room. It was designed to allow the men in that compartment to escape the boat in the event of an emergency.”

“Did it work?”

Annja shrugged. “Not really. The difference in pressurization between the air inside the boat and the water outside meant that the hatch couldn’t be opened until the hatch compartment was flooded. The guys trying to escape would have to climb inside, calmly wait for the chamber to flood, and then open the hatch before swimming for the surface. When your boat is headed for the ocean floor, it’s awfully hard to stay calm enough to do something like that. Never mind the fact that if you do pull it off and get the hatch open, it might already be too deep for it to make any difference and you drown on the way up.”

“And you think we can use this to get inside that part of the boat?” Garin asked.

“Possibly. If I can get the outer hatch open and if
the hatch mechanism still works well enough to flood the interior chamber, then yes, we might be able to.”

She thought about it for a few seconds and then said, “Yeah, I think it’s worth a try.”

Annja knew that the number of successful escapes from a sinking submarine using the hatch she’d just described were few and far between. Normally that might have given her pause, but in this instance she didn’t think it really mattered. After all, she wasn’t trying to get out of a sinking sub, she was trying to get inside one. One that was still tied to a dock, no less. That should make all the difference in the world.