The Last Eagle (2011) (36 page)

At mid-morning, the clouds suddenly lowered and the weather worsened, winds climbing until the reached near-gale forces. As the
Eagle
bucked and swayed over a never-ending picket line of three meter rollers, the evil stew that was the submarine’s air became even fouler, filled with the stench of vomit. Those who didn’t know better complained. In between dry heaves, the rest thanked whatever god was watching over them, knowing that the weather would ground any aircraft and make it almost impossible for the low-slung submarine to be spotted by any vessel.

Stefan slept until noon, right through two crash dives, stumbling into the control room red-eyed and mad after being rolled out of his bunk by a particular nasty wave. He was all ready to blister Eryk for ignoring his orders. But Kate’s presence at the navigation table, as she was working on her story, gave him pause.

He rubbed his face, stifled a yawn. “I said one hour,” he grumped, glancing at Kate, and then back to Eryk.

“I know,” Eryk replied.

“Well?”

“Well what? I thought you could use the sleep. You’re no good to us dead on your feet. You should know that. And you won’t get any shuteye tonight, so …”

“So you should thank him for knowing when to ignore your orders,” Kate chimed in.

“Jesus,” Stefan exclaimed, scratching his beard. “What a way to run a ship! My officers choose to ignore direct orders whenever they feel like it. Sorry, sir, I don’t feel like firing on that ship right at the moment. Or: Sorry, sir, I don’t think we should take that heading right now. Maybe later. What’s next is chaos, pure and simple.” He wagged a finger in Eryk’s direction. “Do it again and I’ll have your ass. Got it?”

Eryk snapped to attention and saluted. “Sorry, sir.” Of course, he felt anything but sorry. Stefan would get over his pique soon enough.

“I think somebody got up on the wrong side of the bed,” Kate commented. “And it occurs to me that a little more chaos among military leaders might lead to fewer wars against us civilian types.”

“She’s got you there, sir,” Stefan heard the hydrophone operator comment drift out through the door in the sound room.

Stefan’s face turned a brilliant shade of red. “Bullshit she does,” he barked. He spent the remainder of the afternoon ignoring them all, intently poring over Eryk’s handmade charts like they were Michelangelo’s recently discovered works.

Twenty-two hours after leaving the waters north of Gotland, the
Eagle
was lurking at periscope depth in the Gulf of Gdansk, back again at the beginning.

Stefan’s arms were draped over the periscope grips, face pressed against the rubber eye mounts. Seawater dripped down from above, drenching his already soggy hat. He didn’t notice. In fact, he looked close to happy.

“Skipper, contacts closing,” sang out the hydrophone operator.

Stefan’s shoulders tightened. He twirled the periscope around. And then he saw them. Three thousand meters off to the port. Two good-sized freighters. At least 10,000 tons each. Their distant shadows outlined with deck lights and lined up like a couple of railroad cars heading to market. Obviously, they had not been warned that a Polish submarine was still loose in the Baltic. Or they had been warned, and didn’t care. Just like Germans. Arrogant. Stefan watched them pass by the unseen submarine. “We’ll take them on top,” he said into the intercom mike. “Full rise on the bow planes. Prepare tube one.” He peered through the periscope again and chanted: “Rudder, port 15, steer eight-five.”

Kate had remained in the control room throughout the day, leaving occasionally to do another interview, then returning to write it up. No one seemed to mind her presence. At first glance, she was nothing to look at. Her hair was pulled back and gathered at her neck, no makeup, broken nose, and men’s pants beneath the skirt she had worn into the ballroom just a day earlier. And yet, in some strange and mysterious way, she had never looked better to the men, more alive and dangerous and something else, as well. It was something that had never happened before in any submarine in the world. Because of her actions, they had come to see her as an extension of themselves. The world’s first female submariner in fact, if not in name.

She gazed around the control room. Remember this, she told herself. Remember it all. Some of the boys were staring intently at the gauges and dials as if they could glean from them something even more profound than the state of the ship. Others, faces pale and haggard were turned toward Stefan, their eyes bright with emotion: fear, despair, excitement, hope, hatred. Almost every human feeling imaginable flickered in their eyes. And yes, love, too. She could see that, as well. They loved their big, burly captain in the love reserved by men for their true fathers. She didn’t doubt that if she could magically leap 100,000 years back in time and do inventory of the faces of a hunting party, she would see the same emotions playing across their faces. This was just another hunt in a long line of hunts.

 “Would somebody get me a cup of coffee?” Stefan said suddenly, a goofy grin splitting his beard.

Blank stares all around. Did they hear him right? But Kate could feel the tension ease. A few of the boys laughed, admiring the courage of their skipper in the face of what was to come. Kate admired it, too. It was the kind of intuitive act that could never be taught. Her father had had the same touch with men. It was what made him such a good reporter. He would have relished being part of this. Of that Kate was sure. No doubt he would have written up the
Eagle’s
story like an epic baseball game, good versus evil, the fate of the free world at stake.

No one had moved. Kate moved to get the man a cup herself.

Eryk shook his head. “Stachofski,” he bellowed.

The radio operator stuck his head out the door.

“Get the skipper some coffee.”

“Sir?”

“You heard me.”

Stachofski pulled off his headphones, tried to pat down his hair, which was a nervous tangle of curls. “Cream and sugar, sir?”

“Black,” Stefan said, “and hot enough to curl my dick.” He saw Kate’s mouth contort into a grin at those words, the look of shock on the faces of those around him. “Oh,uh, sorry,” Stefan stuttered with mock embarrassment. “Not used to having a woman on board.”

Stachofski was back a moment later, handing the cup to Stefan. As
Eagle’s
bow began to tilt upward, he drank the cup quickly. It was black and hot, but that was where any resemblance to coffee ended. Having simmered for hours, it was the consistency of thick cream and tasted like diesel fuel. But, of course, everything aboard a submarine quickly took on the stench of diesel. There was no way to get away from it, and nothing anyone could do about it.

As the conning tower broke the surface, Stefan gulped down the last of his coffee, pulled on a rain slicker, and then scrambled up the ladder. He opened the hatch, ducked beneath a curtain of water, and then stepped up onto the bridge deck, breathing heavily through his nose.

It was raining, a steady wind from the northeast, unsettled waves chopping the surface. The storm from earlier in the day had moved on. Along the horizon, the underbelly of the clouds glowed faintly, indicating the location of Gdansk and the coastline more precisely than any compass.

Stefan raised the Zeiss binoculars, scanned the black lengths of both freighters, grunted when he found what he was looking for: German flags, lit by spotlights on a pole above their bridges.

“Closer,” Stefan said. “We can’t afford a miss.”

As the
Eagle
surged ahead, Stefan made another course correction, angling the
Eagle’s
bow slightly ahead of the lead freighter. If they missed it, there was still a chance they would hit the second one.

He watched through his binoculars as the distance narrowed, confident that the
Eagle’s
low-slung shape would be impossible to pick out in the dark. And if by some miracle they were spotted? It was already too late to do to run from them. . He could feel the lookouts behind him nervously shifting their weight back and forth. They were close enough now to make out detail on the ship, see faint figures in the bridge, high above the water.

Stefan waited until they were 1,000 meters from the target, watching the freighter closely for any change in direction, singing quietly under his breath: “Hold, hold, hold.” And then he dropped the binoculars. “Fire one!” he yelled into the voice tube.

There was a slight shudder, as a pulse of compressed air propelled the 7-meter long French-made torpedo stuffed with 148 kilograms of high explosives from the tube. Like a bloodhound hightailing after a fox, the torpedo didn’t hesitate; it raced away from the
Eagle
at better than 40 knots. 

Stefan didn’t wait to see the impact. He already knew it wouldn’t miss. “Bring us about,” he shouted. “Rudder hard port. New course two-two-five. Let’s get out of here.”

The
Eagle’s
conning tower leaned toward starboard as her bow ported, away from the freighters. Spray broke over the bow as her twin diesels accelerated to maximum.

Even though Stefan had no doubt what would happen, he was still startled by the explosion. It lit up the sky like sunshine on a summer day. He felt a wave of heat on the back of his head, and then a thump in his chest as the pressure wave went past the
Eagle
. 

“Holy Christ, what was she carrying?” a lookout exclaimed.

A second explosion peppered the night. “Probably not frozen pork,” Stefan said. He glanced over his shoulder, the fires from the ship dazzling his eyes, momentarily ruining his night vision. It was clear from the bow’s 45-degree angle that the
Eagle’s
torpedo had broken the freighter in half. She was already sagging in the middle, circles of burning fuel spreading out over the water like molasses from a broken bottle. He could see men jumping from her stern, disappearing into the dark water.

The following freighter fired off distress flares, but instead of slowing to look for survivors, began taking evasive action, veering away from the doomed ship, her captain no doubt concerned that he was going to be the next one victim.

In his mind, Stefan could almost see what was happening in Gdansk. Rescue ships already scrambling to get out of port, along with sub chasers. They couldn’t be certain it was the
Eagle
. Perhaps there was another Polish submarine loose in the Baltic, or maybe the freighter had hit a mine that had become untethered? But they couldn’t take that chance. If the dying freighter’s captain had managed to send a message, he would tell them what had happened. Torpedo. To the north, German and Soviet warships would be veering south, their captains’ sleep interrupted by news of the attack on the freighter.

Stefan turned his back on the burning vessel, already thinking about the next target, a Soviet vessel. No sense letting the Germans get all the fun.  Helsinki, Finland, a day and a half’s cruise north, was a destination port for Soviet materials. It shouldn’t be too hard to find a Soviet freighter or two. Another explosion underscored his decision.

“Just in, sir.” The junior officer saluted and then disappeared off the bridge.

Ritter scanned the message quickly. “Sonofabitch,” he said with a shake of his head.

“Pardon me?” sniffed the
Leberecht Maass’s
captain , Albert Funkt.

Ritter waved the message in his hand. “Report of a freighter sunk off Gdansk a few hours ago.”

“Hit a mine?”

Ritter shook his head. “Lookout recovered from the water reports seeing a submarine fleeing north. Wasn’t close enough to identify her.”

“The
Eagle
?”

Ritter shrugged. “You count ’em. Three in Sweden. One sunk. Another in England. She’s the only one left.”

“But what is she doing there? I thought you said …”

“That she would try to escape,” Ritter finished for him. “Yes, I remember. And that’s what I still think.”

“Heading in the wrong direction, then.” After breakfast, the captain had reclaimed his chair on the bridge. He leaned back in his seat, uniform immaculate, and glanced knowingly at Ritter. “They are Poles. Now they will run for safety. Sweden, I think.”

Ritter shrugged. “You may be right, captain, but our orders stand.” He glanced again at the note. It also had news from Sweden. Two Estonians picked up on Gotland. The message indicated that they were the ones taken by the
Eagle
.

It had been Ritter’s idea to say that the men had been executed. Of course, it was just wishful thinking on his part. He hoped news of their murder would prevent the international press from hailing the
Eagle’s
crew as heroes. It had worked in Germany, but no where else. And now he wondered if anyone would remember that these Estonians were supposed too be dead. Too bad they had turned up in Sweden. If they had been picked up by the Germans, they wouldn’t have survived the night.

“Where can they go?” Funkt said. “No charts, is that right?”

Ritter nodded.

“It would be foolhardy to continue. Yes, if the captain is a reasonable man, they will turn themselves over to the Swedes.”

“And that’s where you’re wrong, Herr Captain.”