Andrew Williams - The Interrogator

‘The sinking of our boat. The humiliation. And prison drives men to terrible things.’

‘Spare me the lies. You pushed him very hard, didn’t you?’

‘Pushed him?’

‘You interrogated him. You interrogated a number of the prisoners. The evening with the PK man at the jazz café — remember?’

Mohr smiled: ‘Leutnant Lange is fond of the story, he tells it to everyone.’

Lindsay lifted his hand and rested it on the thick file in front of him: ‘I’ve spoken to the other U-boat officers and I know the Ältestenrat wanted to know what they’d said to us. You were looking for someone who gave away just a little too much and you thought you’d found him — Heine. But this…’

He pushed the picture back across the table: ‘You authorised this senseless killing, this murder.’

‘Is this going to go on much longer? Perhaps I can have a chair?’ There was an impatient, contemptuous note in Mohr’s voice and he turned to look at the guard who was standing stiffly to attention at the far wall.

‘A chair, please,’ he shouted in English. The soldier did not move a muscle.

‘Well?’

The guard just stared back at him belligerently.

‘You’re a prisoner, Mohr,’ said Lindsay coolly. ‘Remember?’

Mohr flinched as if the words had stung him between the shoulders and he turned quickly to face Lindsay, his boots squeaking sharply on the stone floor. Was it the affront to his dignity? Something inside him seemed to snap. ‘You’re the murderer, Lieutenant. You drove him to it.’

Mohr didn’t shout or thump the table, his voice was only a little louder but his face was livid and blotchy red and there were anxious scratch marks on his throat, a sort of wildness in his eyes. The quiet military veneer had cracked for the first time.

‘You interrogated Heine, you threatened him. He told me you were going to tell me he was a traitor. He was a vulnerable prisoner. His mind was clouded — he was sure he’d betrayed his U-boat comrades and his country. He could not live with the guilt and he took his own life. So you put the rope around his neck, Lieutenant, you did — not me.’

Mohr looked down at the photograph still lying in the middle of the table between them and his shoulders seemed to drop a little as if the anger was draining from him. When he spoke again his voice was cool and reflective: ‘Heine was a casualty of your war.’

And he lifted his head to make firm eye contact with Lindsay: ‘Our war. The dirty little war we’re fighting.’

Their dirty war. The thought beat long after Mohr had been led away. It was beating in the mess over lunch and in the camp commandant’s office as Lindsay said goodbye to smug, self-satisfied Benson. It was beating in his head now as the jeep swung him backwards and forwards along country lanes to the station. Was it dirtier than the one being fought in the Atlantic? Perhaps Mohr had become the demon he was fighting inside himself. But it was the same war, it was cold, it was ruthless, and to the victor the spoils — there were always casualties.

The last of the sun was settling into the ocean behind the ship, painting her high funnel and masts an eerie tropical orange. She was an old liner of more than twelve thousand tons, perhaps a troopship, zigzagging defensively in 40-degree turns. Hartmann adjusted the focus on the bridge’s firing binoculars: ‘Careless.’

Her deadlights were not pulled down over the ports and she was twinkling provocatively at the 115 .

‘Have the crew eaten?’

‘Yes, Herr Kaleu.’

‘Good. She’ll turn south-westerly and cross our course within the hour.’

The sea was building, a summer gale forecast. He would attack from the surface, the dark grey hull of the U-boat lost in the restless night.

The U-115 had found her at a little before ten that morning. Her smoke was drifting in a long tail across the ragged tops of the ocean at the very edge of the horizon. A large ship, and where Kapitänleutnant Paul Hartmann expected to find her.

‘Full ahead both engines. Course two-one-zero.’

The deck beneath Hartmann’s feet had trembled, the diesels hammering their battle song as the U-boat plunged forwards at attack speed, its bow rising in fine clouds of spray that swept across the foredeck and into the faces of the men atop the tower. Urgent, incessant, beating the length of the boat, from the crew quarters aft to the forward torpedo room, and every man’s heart beat with the engines, faster and faster and faster, an end to the poor hunting, an end to idle days of African sunshine. And the excitement had been plain in the faces of the watch and of the men squinting at the horizon from the rail of the gun platform, older than their years, weathered and lined by the sea and the tropical sun, their beards flecked white with salt. It was Hartmann’s first patrol as their commander but they knew of his record, that he had served with one of the great U-boat heroes — with Kapitän Mohr.

He had followed the wisp of grey smoke through the bridge’s firing binoculars until his eyes began to water and late in the afternoon he sent a signal to U-boat Headquarters:

TARGET LOCATED GRID SQUARE FF 71. IN PURSUIT. NO ESCORT. COURSE SOUTH WEST. FOURTEEN KNOTS.

And headquarters had replied:

AT THEM. ATTACK THEM. SINK THEM.

He had smiled quietly to himself because he knew it must have been written by the Admiral. It was pure Dönitz.

‘Tubes one and three ready?’

‘Tubes one and three ready, Herr Kaleu.’

‘She’s turned. Steering 200 degrees, approximately twelve knots.’

Yes, she was a big ship, close to 20,000 tons, roughly camouflaged in grey, deck guns fore and aft and a watch searching the dark surface of the sea for an enemy bow wave.

‘Take her hull down.’

The order was repeated to the control room below and as the waist tanks of the submarine flooded the sea swept up the foredeck until only the tower was breaking the waves. They would catch the ship just before she turned again, broadside on, in — he glanced at his watch — perhaps six minutes.

‘Half engines.’

He could sense the intense excitement of the men about him, as they turned stiffly through the points of the compass, their glasses hunting the darkness for escort ships. He bent to the voice tube:

‘Stand by tubes one and three.’

In the ‘cave’ for’ard, the torpedo men would be clutching their stopwatches, ready to count out the seconds from release to impact. Anything between a thousand and three hundred metres would do. She was edging into the spider lines of Hartmann’s firing sight now, rising and falling gracefully in the swell, her bow cutting a crisp white wave. And as he followed her stately progress the heavy night cloud parted, catching her in silhouette against a bright sickle moon.

‘Twelve hundred metres.’