Alex Scarrow - A thousand suns

‘Excellent. You’re a natural, Pieter,’ Max said generously. ‘Much better than my first attempt.’

Pieter sighed with relief. ‘I think I’d rather fly an H-111 than this huge bastard. She feels bloody heavy, like a Tiger tank wearing butterfly wings.’

11 a.m. 18 April 1945, the port of Bergen, Norway

He watched the submarine as it gently came to rest, parallel to the concrete side of the pen and about thirty feet out. On her narrow foredeck half a dozen men waited for a rope to be tossed over to them, and aft beyond the conning tower another six men waited. Their eyes were screwed up against the brightness of the day, and the crisp morning air had them rubbing their hands and stamping their feet to keep warm.

Koch watched as the ropes were tossed across and the men grabbed hold of them and began pulling. The U-boat gently began to drift towards the concrete wall of the pen.

The crew looked unpleasantly like so many tramps, many of them sporting scruffy beards, all of them wearing uniforms that were smeared with oil and sweat stains. Koch wrinkled his nose, even from twenty feet away the faint stench of their body odour reached him; it reminded him of a stale meat pie.

‘Strange little mole-men, aren’t they, sir?’ said Feldwebel Buller, one of Captain Koch’s men.

Koch nodded silently; he was reminded of the Morlocks in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine — pallid man-like creatures that lived below ground amidst a cavernous world of arcane Victorian technology. Actually the comparison wasn’t a bad one. The Morlocks always stayed below ground, but every now and again they would surface to kill and cannibalise one of the beautiful, peaceful surface-dwellers. In the early years of the Atlantic war, these men had most definitely been the Morlocks, striking ships with impunity, dragging them down to the ocean floor. But now? Now they were being hunted like rabbits.

‘Go easy, Buller, we’ve got to spend a week or two with these men. Let’s remember to be polite,’ said Koch.

Koch curled his lip in disgust, as the meat pie smell grew stronger. He’d endured a lot of things for his country, many hardships, discomforts and hazards. He certainly wasn’t relishing the prospect of being jammed into this U-boat with fifty of these submariners and thirty more of his own men. It was going to be an extremely unhygienic and claustrophobic few days. The misery that lay ahead of them could be best conceived by considering one simple logistical fact. Eighty men… one toilet.

‘Yes, sir, polite, sir.’

Koch found himself wondering if this was it… The Mission.

The Mission… the one that would make a difference, the one he’d been waiting for since signing up three years ago. He had been on perhaps a dozen important undertakings, all of them pretty dangerous. The worst had been in Greece, fighting in the hills and taking a heavily defended base camp of General Mavros’ communist guerrillas. But that, and the others, were merely skirmishes in a campaign, one of many small-scale engagements that would have no real impact on events beyond it. This one… this felt different.

The war was at an end, and yet he had received these orders out of the blue.

Nobody now was being sent out to attack anything. Every command decision was about retreat and entrenchment. It had been that way for months, possibly that way for over a year. Koch and his men had, of course, been out on patrols since being pulled back into Norway, and, on several occasions, there had been a few minor brushes with Norwegian partisans. But essentially since returning to Norway, they had all been watching the war slip away from the comfort of their barracks.

And now these orders.

It had to be the one. The one he’d been waiting for.

He had only been informed that he and a platoon of handpicked men would be boarding a U-boat; that he was to present himself to the vessel’s commander, and then both he and the captain would be allowed to open their sealed orders. Even then, he had been told, the U-boat captain would not be allowed to know the objective, only the location he had been ordered to take these men to.

Such secrecy.

Koch smiled proudly. Perhaps this would be another Gran Sasso? He wondered if this wasn’t going to be the rescue of an important member of the Reich high command from Allied hands. He remembered reading about Skorzeny’s rescue of Mussolini from the Campo Imperatore hotel, his daring arrival by glider on the slope in front of the building, and how, with a handful of paratroops, he quickly overpowered the Duce’s guards and hustled him off the mountain in a Storch without a single shot being fired.

Koch found his young face creasing into a smile. He and his company had waited out the war for something like this. It was about time the Gebirgsjager, the Alpine troops, had an opportunity to show what they could do, that they were an elite regiment, that they were every bit as good as the Fallschirmjager.

The thirty men he’d selected from his company were as eager as he was to get on and do this thing, whatever it was, but he realised they were going to have one hell of a hard time coping with being boxed up inside this boat. These were lads who had spent their childhood in wide-open, natural environments, sleepy villages nestled on the side of glorious snow-capped mountains. Most of them were drawn from around Tyrol in Austria, some from Finland, even a couple of Norwegians. Two weeks in a submerged iron coffin was going to be tough on them.

The U-boat bumped against the pen wall with a dull clang and the ratings on the sub’s decks secured the lines. One of the pen workers wheeled up a gantry and pushed it out so that it rested on the deck.

Out of the foredeck hatch climbed the submarine’s captain. Koch watched him as he chatted to his men and exchanged a joke, clearly relieved to be stepping out of the cramped confines of the vessel. The men exchanged banter for a few moments before he turned away to step briskly up the gantry and onto terra firma. Koch let the man have a minute to adjust to the light, the air, the solid ground, the space, before approaching him.

‘Captain Lundstrom?’

Lundstrom turned round to face him. ‘Yes, who wants to know?’

‘Captain Koch, 3rd Company, Gebirgsjager regiment 141. I have some orders here for you.’

Lundstrom studied the young man. He wore the Eidelweiss badge on his cap, the elite Alpine troops, the Gebirgsjager, a respected infantry regiment. The young man had a tanned face chiselled out of muscle and bone, and a sprinkling of freckles that crossed the bridge of his nose from one cheek to another.

So young for the rank of captain.

That was something Lundstrom had noticed becoming more and more commonplace these last two years, battlefield promotions. Officers were getting younger and younger. Soon it would just be boys leading boys into the meat grinder.

The young officer was patiently holding out a sealed envelope.

Lundstrom reached out for it and noticed Koch was standing awkwardly to attention.

‘At ease, we’re both captains,’ said Lundstrom. Koch softened his stance and looked relieved.

‘Recent promotion I’m guessing, Hauptmann?’

Koch nodded. ‘Three weeks, sir.’

‘You’ll get used to not saluting other captains soon enough.’ He looked down at the envelope in his hand; it bore the stamp of the Reich Chancellor’s office.

‘This has come directly from Berlin to me?’

‘Via Kriegsmarine HQ, Bergen, yes.’ Koch produced a similar envelope. ‘I have one also. These orders came with the instruction that we’re to open them together.’

Lundstrom closed his eyes and breathed deeply. With a heavy heart he realised the envelopes could only mean one thing… another trip out.