David Gibbins - The Gods of Atlantis

Parker reached over to the top of the instrument panel between them and tapped the compass housing. ‘The gyro’s gone on the blink.’

White remembered what the briefing officer had told them, and then tapped the housing himself. ‘It must be the magnetic disturbance near the fault line north of San Salvador that they talked about. At least it shows we’re in the right place.’ He squinted at the sun, noting its position between the metal frames of the cockpit window. ‘We’re going to have to fly by dead reckoning. Everyone, eyes peeled for the target now. It should be coming up in a few minutes. Bomb-aimer, take position. Gunners, cock weapons. After we’ve dropped our charges, I’m going to come round so you can have some target practice on whatever’s left of that minesweeper.’

‘Have some fun, you mean, sir,’ Brown’s voice crackled in.

‘Whatever you say, Charles.’ White smiled wryly to himself, then took a deep breath. Without the compass, he felt like an ancient mariner on an unknown ocean, as if the beast he was riding were on some unseen current in the air that would take them inexorably to their destination. Instinctively he looked for the only talisman he had ever carried, a little metal butterfly pendant he had been given by his eight-year-old daughter on leave after his first tour. He had told her how on a daylight raid his aircraft had risen above the clouds into the brilliant sunshine, and how the clouds had seemed as white as angels’ wings, as if he were being conveyed directly to heaven without death. What he did not tell her was how the clouds were peppered with the burst of flak, how other aircraft were falling burning all round him, and how the Tallboys they dropped through the orange and red skymarkers to the unseen target below had shaken and rippled those white clouds with their blast, sending up black clouds that curled and billowed through the white as if the fires of hell had broken through to heaven itself. His wife had said they would pray every night for those angels to cleave a path ahead of him through the bullets and the shrapnel so that he would return safely to them. After that last mission, he had gone back to his aircraft to retrieve the butterfly, but on the way he had seen the new pilot, a fresh-faced boy who could not have been more than nineteen, who would be flying into the reach of death even in those final days and would need all the luck he could get. As he passed him, the boy had smiled, saying nothing but waving him a breezy salute, and in that moment, White felt as if he had transferred all that was within him to the future. He had left the butterfly pinned to the instrument panel of his Lancaster, the only place that seemed right for it. Now he looked below the gyro compass to where he was so used to seeing it, and remembered his final night of leave two weeks ago, when he had left his wife and daughter asleep in their cottage before the long flight to Nassau. The butterfly had kept him safe. But soon he would need a new talisman, for a new war.

Another voice crackled on the intercom. It was the forward gunner, crouched behind the twin fifty-calibre Browning machine guns in the nose turret above the bomb-aimer. ‘Skipper, you’re not going to like this. There’s a submarine dead ahead, just surfaced. It’s about a mile away, just before that lighter patch of sea that must be the edge of the reef. It seems to be heading west, directly into the reef. There must be a passage through.’

White groaned. Christ. There were supposed to be no vessels in the live-fire zone. The last thing they wanted was a sub commander reporting them for rattling his boat. He straightened up for a better view over the protuberant nose turret, and then pressed the rudder pedal so that that aircraft yawed slightly to port. He squinted hard at the horizon, seeing only the whitecaps, remembering the forward gunner’s exceptional eyesight. Then he saw the sub, about five degrees to starboard, a dark sliver on the water below the horizon. Their target vessel was still not visible, presumably just out of sight beyond. What was a sub doing here? The zone designation had only been put in place two weeks ago, and it was just possible that a sub returning from a long patrol might have failed to pick up the warning. But it didn’t make sense. The war in the Atlantic had been over for weeks, and there had been no need for subs to remain submerged and out of radio contact. He would be over it in less than a minute. He had to make a snap decision. They would abort until the sub was well away, and come round again. Rather than let the sub commander report him first, he would radio the sighting back to Nassau now. He pressed the intercom against his face to try to exclude the throbbing of the engines. ‘Can anyone make out the type?’

Parker loosened his harness and raised himself up from the co-pilot’s seat, gazing through a pair of binoculars. ‘Well, it’s not a Type VII U-boat. The conning tower’s too big.’

‘We’re not going to be seeing U-boats, Bill. The war’s over,’ White said.

‘Sorry, skip. I did my first ops in Coastal Command; that’s what the word submarine means to me. I think this one must be American.’

‘All right. Navigator and wireless operator, I want a position fix and I want it radioed through to Nassau now. We’ll send a follow-up message when we see the sub’s recognition code as we fly over it. There’ll be hell to pay, but we’ll let the station commander sort that out with the US Navy.’

The wireless operator came on. ‘I can’t get through, sir. Electromagnetic interference. Must be the same problem that’s affecting the compass.’

White groaned again. ‘All right. Navigator, what’s your estimate for the position of the sub?’

The navigator rattled off the co-ordinates, and White repeated them under his breath, keeping them running through his head. He could see the conning tower of the submarine clearly now, and the wake where it had surfaced from deep water and was now slowing over a shallow section of reef.

‘It’s one of those blue holes, skipper,’ the forward gunner said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean the sub’s heading towards one of those blue holes in the reef, about two sub’s lengths ahead of it. You can see the dark patch in the water now. It’s a really big one, about twice the distance across of the sub.’

White stared at the scene. What the hell was going on?

The co-pilot still had his binoculars trained ahead. ‘There’s something not right here. That’s not an American sub. My last bombing op was over the U-boat pens at Valentin on the Baltic, so I think I know what I’m looking at. Now that I can see the conning tower, there’s no question about it. That’s a German Type XXI U-boat.’

A U-boat. White’s mind raced. He knew that much of the surviving U-boat fleet had been destroyed in the bombing, or scuttled by their crews after the surrender. But the Type XXI was more advanced than any Allied submarine, and there would have been a scramble by the Allies to capture intact vessels. It could be one of those, recommissioned as an American or British boat. If only they could make radio contact. But there were other possibilities. There had been rumours of U-boats in the final days of the war sneaking away from Baltic and Norwegian ports carrying high-ranking Nazis and their loot to secret destinations in Latin America. Or this could be a maverick captain, a fanatical Nazi who had refused to accept the surrender and was still fighting the war on his own terms. White felt a chill down his spine. It was too late to pull away, to keep out of range. They were committed now.

‘Sir!’ the forward gunner yelled. ‘They’re manning guns!’

White froze. He stared at the sub, now less than a thousand metres ahead. He tried to remember the Type XXI specs. There would be two turrets on the conning tower with twin 2cm flak guns. This sub also had a forward deck mounting, probably the standard 10.5cm gun. A single hit from that could blow the Liberator apart. And there would by machine guns, MG-42s, mounted on the conning tower railing. He squinted against the sun. The barrels of the deck gun and the turrets on the conning tower should have been clearly visible, but were not. In an instant he realized why. They were aimed directly at them. He saw flashes like a Morse code signalling lamp, and then red streaks of tracer that zipped past the cockpit.