Harry Turtledove: Last Orders

What was this? A truck coming up toward the Fascists’ lines. Canvas tied down over hoops covered the rear compartment. When the truck stopped, soldiers got out. A man hopped down from the passenger side of the front seat, too. That and his uniform told Jezek he was an officer.

Nothing much had happened yet today. So … why not? The officer gestured, getting his men ready to do whatever they were going to do. Vaclav took careful aim. Not much wind. Range about 1,100 meters. You might even do this with a Mauser, though you’d need a little luck as well as skill. Luck never hurt, of course. But with this much gun, skill alone could turn the trick.

Breathe. Let it out. Bring back the trigger, gently, gently … The antitank rifle thundered. It kicked, not even a little bit gently. The Nationalist officer grabbed his midriff and fell over.

“Earned my pay today,” Vaclav said. He took out a cigarette to celebrate. He could smoke it now. He wouldn’t be staying here more than another few minutes anyhow.

To say Lieutenant Commander Julius Lemp didn’t enjoy summer patrol in the North Sea was to beggar the power of language. He wasn’t quite up at the latitudes where the sun never set, but he was plenty far north to keep it in the sky through most of the hours.

He and several ratings stayed up on the conning tower, scanning sky and horizon for enemy ships and airplanes. You had to do it all the time. The Royal Navy was looking for the U-30, too, and for all the other boats the Kriegsmarine sent to sea.

The Royal Navy was looking hard. It had ways to look no one had dreamt of when the war broke out, almost five years ago now. Radar could spot a surfaced U-boat no matter how cunningly its paint job mimicked sea and sky. And, when it dove, English warships hounded it with their pinging hydrophones. Unlike the ones both sides had used in the last war, these really could help a surface ship track-and sink-a submarine.

Gerhart Beilharz popped out of the hatch like an elongated jack-in-the-box. The engineering officer grinned like a jack-in-the-box, too. He was two meters tall: not the ideal size for a man in a U-boat’s crew. This was the only place on the boat where he didn’t have to worry about gashing his scalp or knocking himself cold if he forgot to duck.

“You’ve done your two hours, skipper,” he said. “I relieve you.”

Lemp lowered his Zeiss field glasses and rubbed his eyes. They felt sandy under his knuckles. “I feel like a bug on a plate,” he said. “A black bug on a white plate.”

Beilharz pointed back to the Schnorkel . The breathing tube-for the diesels, not the men who served them-stuck up like an enormous stovepipe. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “As long as we’ve got that baby, we can slip under the glazing.”

He could say Don’t worry about it . The U-boat’s survival wasn’t his responsibility. Lemp had to worry about everything; that was what command entailed. And worry he did: “They can see us under the glazing, too, dammit, or rather hear us with those stinking hydrophones.”

“We’ve slithered away before,” the tall man said. “We can do it again.”

“I hope so.” Sighing, Lemp went below-out of the sunshine, out of the fresh air, into a steel cigar dimly lit with orange bulbs and stinking of everything from shit and puke and piss to diesel oil to the reeks of rotting food and dirty socks. However nasty, the odor was also infinitely familiar to him. And well it might have been, since his own fug made up a part of it.

Only a green curtain shielded his tiny cabin-cot, desk, chair, safe-from the corridor. Still, command’s privilege gave him more privacy and space than anyone else on the boat enjoyed. He logged the events on his latest watch: course, position, observations (none significant), the fact that a radio tube had burnt out and been replaced. His handwriting was tiny and as precise as if an automaton had produced it.

But as he wrote, he was conscious of all the things he wasn’t saying, all the things he couldn’t say-not unless he wanted some serious attention from the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst and the Abwehr and, no doubt, other organizations of State and Party about which he knew nothing … yet.

He couldn’t write, for instance, that the U-30 wasn’t such a happy boat as it had been. He didn’t like the way the sailors eyed one another. He didn’t like the way they didn’t come out with what was on their minds. The U-boat service tossed surface-Navy formality over the side. Living in one another’s pockets, the men had no time to waste on such foolishness. They were brothers, brothers in arms.

Or they should have been. But there was at least one informer on board. And Lemp didn’t know who the polecat was. That worried him worse than anything. Anything this side of the Royal Navy, anyhow.

The thought had hardly crossed his mind before a rating spoke from the other side of the curtain: “Skipper, they’ve spotted smoke up on the conning tower.”

“Oh, they have, have they?” Lemp said. “All right. I’ll come.” He stuck his cap back on his head. Like every other U-boat officer in the Kriegsmarine , he’d taken out the stiffening wire so the crown didn’t stick up above his head but flopped onto the patent-leather bill. That crown was white, not navy blue: the sole mark of command he wore.

His shoes clanked dully on the patterned steel of the ladder rungs leading up out of the submarine. The first whiff of fresh air made him involuntarily breathe deeper. You forgot how foul the inside of a U-boat really was till you escaped the steel tube.

As he emerged, Gerhart Beilharz pointed north. “Over there, skipper,” he said. “Not a lot of smoke, but some.” He offered his binoculars.

Lemp scanned with them. “You’re right,” he said as he gave them back. He called down the hatch to the helmsman, who stood near the bottom of the ladder. “Change course to 020. All ahead full.”

“Course 020. All ahead full. Aye, aye.”

They swung toward the smudge of smoke in the northern sky. Lemp wanted to get the U-boat out ahead of it if he could. That would let him submerge and give it a closer inspection through the periscope without the other ship’s being likely to spot them in return.

Meanwhile, he kept his eye on the smudge. Things often happened slowly on the ocean. Ships weren’t airplanes. They needed time to cross the kilometers that separated one from another.

Actually, he hoped he would spy the unknown ship before he had to submerge. It put out a lot more smoke than the U-30’s diesels did. It rode higher in the water than the U-boat did, too. And he got what he hoped for. Through the powerful, column-mounted binoculars on the conning tower, he got a glimpse of a small, chunky steamboat-not a warship at all.

Not an obvious warship, anyhow. In the last war, English Q-ships-freighters with hidden heavy guns and gun crews-had surprised and sunk a couple of the Kaiser’s submarines. Their captains made the fatal mistake of thinking anything that looked harmless was bound to be harmless. They’d come close to use a deck gun instead of launching an eel from a distance-and they’d paid for their folly.

Lemp took no such chances. Maybe the steamer was as harmless as it looked. But if it was, what was it doing out here in the middle of the North Sea? Its course would take it from Scotland to Norway. It might be bringing help for the Norwegian bandits who still did their best to make trouble for the German forces occupying the country.

He ordered the boat down to Schnorkel depth. It was faster underwater on diesels than with battery power. As the unknown ship approached, he had plenty of time to work up a firing solution. He launched two torpedoes from less than a kilometer away.