Тим Пауэрс - Bugs and Known Problems

The sun was blinding on the bright water. It was worth the risk that his periscope would escape observation, and the hydrophone operator didn’t hear more than one strong almost overwhelming noise of the single ship. The watch officer saw no escort ships as they ran closer in: just row upon row of what seemed to be windows rising in ranks into the heavens.

Troop ship. A repurposed pleasure craft, of monumental proportions. Dietsch climbed into his conning tower and gave the order to raise the attack periscope. He was the eyes of U-797. He was its Ahab. He had a full load of torpedoes for harpoons.

The target was so large there was no fear of misdirection; no need to finesse his course and speed, and the ship showed no signs of even the most basic of defensive maneuvers, but sailed in a straight line. He brought the boat into perfect position—nose on to broadside—and issued his command, three torpedoes to launch, in a fan; there , he said to himself, with satisfaction. That will serve you out for those depth charges .

Then he—and everybody else—waited, counting out the seconds either under their breath or, like Englhardt standing on the ladder half-way between Zentral and the conning tower where Dietsch sat at the attack periscope, on his stop-watch.

They were late. The size of the ship had confused him, Dietsch realized: it was farther away than he’d realized, the figures of the passengers he’d seen on one upper deck too indistinct to judge the distance by their height.

Late, but on target, and Dietsch rejoiced in the sweet sound from the hydrophones of the eels sinking their teeth into the hull of a juicy Allied transport. Once. Twice. Three times. Eye pressed to eyepiece of his periscope he scanned the ship to see what it would make of the gift that he had brought to their first meeting.

It didn’t seem to have made much of an impact. The ship had not slowed down. It didn’t seem to be taking on water. He knew his torpedoes had hit. All three of them. He knew a ship in ballast could eat up two, three torpedoes and still float, but that was a troop ship, it would logically be carrying people rather than ballast, why wasn’t it showing him that it was wounded? Hadn’t it noticed that it had been attacked?

He’d heard of that happening. When Prien had torpedoed the Royal Oak none of its crew had realized what had happened until it was far too late. This ship showed no sign of turning turtle. He needed more information than he could acquire from the conning tower. “Surface,” he told the watch officer. “Get a little nearer. And join me on the bridge.”

But it didn’t get any better when he climbed into the daylight to train his binoculars on the scene. Nobody was manning the ship’s boats, if that was what they were, those peculiar yellow objects like a cannoli or a tube-balloon. He could see some wisps of black smoke rising from the hull at the water-line, but when he looked up to the top of the boat he saw no signs of panic, or even alertness. And he was closer to the target than he’d been before. He could see things better.

What he saw made his heart sink. Those weren’t soldiers. There were men, yes, but there were at least as many women, and there were children there as well. This was a mistake. He’d made an error. He had to get away as quickly as possible, before he was seen, before he was identified, before the news of a U-boat attacking a defenseless passenger ship—a refugee ship, perhaps—could become a weapon in the propaganda war. He didn’t hesitate. He stooped over the hatch and yelled at the top of his lungs. “Alarm!”

Emergency dive. U-797 was a VII-F, they were the heaviest VII series made, they could dive like a cormorant. Hatch secured. Decking, already awash, now underwater. Conning tower slipping fast beneath the waves. Bridge flooded. Boat—disappeared. Had they been seen?

Should he go back and try again?

It was too late for that now. The word would spread throughout U-797 too quickly. No wise commander risked an order that would raise too many questions in men’s minds. Slumping against the chart table—his hands braced to either side of his rump to keep himself steady as the boat drove down into the deep—Dietsch listened to his engineer count off the meters. Twenty. Forty. Sixty. One hundred. He straightened up.

“That will do,” he said. Now he had to take control of his larger situation, define for his crew what their reality was going to be going forward. “I was misled by the unfamiliarity of the ship.” That was true. It cost him nothing in the eyes of the crew to admit to his mistake right away, and take any potential guilt on himself. “However, they do not appear to have been damaged very badly. We have avoided a grave error.”

Was there anything he could have done differently? Would any rational man have looked upon so large a target and risked an open hail, not knowing whether or not the ship was armed? That would have endangered the boat and its crew. No. No man would have gotten close enough to see women and children on so high an upper deck before launching his torpedoes, and by then it was too late.

They had been sent into the Indian Ocean with their load of torpedoes to replace ones whose batteries had degraded to uselessness in the damp heat of the tropics. Those of U-797 had clearly been affected as well. That would explain their failure to do significant damage, with three clearly heard detonations.

“We resume our course. We surface when we have some distance between us. Next stop Mar del Plata, gentlemen. That is all for now.”

A ship so much bigger than the Bismarck, one torpedoes did not sink, sailing blithely along on holiday as though there was no war on at all. Where was the shipyards in which such a monster could be built? Who was the national genius behind such an innovation? What nation in all the world was not at war?

And when, when would they find a true target against which to unleash their fury, and burn away the embarrassment and shame of having almost murdered a cruise ship full of women and children?

It was a beautiful day. Verricht Lachs stood on the low veranda of the command cabin—the one he shared with his senior officers, First Officer Goond Hols, Second Officer Theodor Sclarvie, Engineering Officer Joachim Vilsohn—facing the crew leaders, who stood on the lawn facing him. Out beyond his men Lachs could see the lake, glittering in the light of the Sun in a cloudless sky.

“We have considered the situation, Herr Kahloin.” Their navigator, Harald Rathke. “As you have asked. We can derive no explanation for how we got here. And in the absence of any other information our only suggestion is that we go out the same way we came in.”

They had to escape from the trap they were in if they were to hope to survive in the long term. Lake Superior was a very large body of water, and deep, four hundred meters in places; but it was less than half the extent of the Bay of Biscay, and it had been proven that a U-boat had to have luck on its side to traverse Biscay safely now that Allied air carried the new radar. The newer radar , Lachs reminded himself.

It had been difficult to hide in 1945. In 2005 it would be that much harder, if anybody started looking for them, which meant that Lake Superior offered no long-term sanctuary that could be safely relied upon, not even here at the Salmon Shore resort.

Sooner or later someone would happen upon their boat. They had to get out of here. A U-boat did not belong in Lake Superior, and there was a route from the lake out to the Atlantic Ocean, but to get there one had to traverse the complex system of locks that was called the Saint Lawrence seaway and there was no way to sneak a U-boat through those.

“I risk the lives of everybody in our crew,” Lachs pointed out. It was his decision, absolutely; any hint of collective action was entirely out of the question. Nobody wanted to invoke the shameful shadow of the Kiel mutiny. Nobody hated Communists more than a U-boat crew. “I risk the boat. Have we really no alternatives, in your view?”