Michael Wenberg - The Last Eagle

“She’s got you there, sir,” Stefan heard the hydrophone operator comment drift out through the door in the sound room.

Stefan’s face turned a brilliant shade of red. “Bullshit she does,” he barked. He spent the remainder of the afternoon ignoring them all, intently poring over Eryk’s handmade charts like they were Michelangelo’s recently discovered works.

Twenty-two hours after leaving the waters north of Gotland, the Eagle was lurking at periscope depth in the Gulf of Gdansk, back again at the beginning.

Stefan’s arms were draped over the periscope grips, face pressed against the rubber eye mounts. Seawater dripped down from above, drenching his already soggy hat. He didn’t notice. In fact, he looked close to happy.

“Skipper, contacts closing,” sang out the hydrophone operator.

Stefan’s shoulders tightened. He twirled the periscope around. And then he saw them. Three thousand meters off to the port. Two good-sized freighters. At least 10,000 tons each. Their distant shadows outlined with deck lights and lined up like a couple of railroad cars heading to market. Obviously, they had not been warned that a Polish submarine was still loose in the Baltic. Or they had been warned, and didn’t care. Just like Germans. Arrogant. Stefan watched them pass by the unseen submarine. “We’ll take them on top,” he said into the intercom mike. “Full rise on the bow planes. Prepare tube one.” He peered through the periscope again and chanted: “Rudder, port 15, steer eight-five.”

Kate had remained in the control room throughout the day, leaving occasionally to do another interview, then returning to write it up. No one seemed to mind her presence. At first glance, she was nothing to look at. Her hair was pulled back and gathered at her neck, no makeup, broken nose, and men’s pants beneath the skirt she had worn into the ballroom just a day earlier. And yet, in some strange and mysterious way, she had never looked better to the men, more alive and dangerous and something else, as well. It was something that had never happened before in any submarine in the world. Because of her actions, they had come to see her as an extension of themselves. The world’s first female submariner in fact, if not in name.

She gazed around the control room. Remember this, she told herself. Remember it all. Some of the boys were staring intently at the gauges and dials as if they could glean from them something even more profound than the state of the ship. Others, faces pale and haggard were turned toward Stefan, their eyes bright with emotion: fear, despair, excitement, hope, hatred. Almost every human feeling imaginable flickered in their eyes. And yes, love, too. She could see that, as well. They loved their big, burly captain in the love reserved by men for their true fathers. She didn’t doubt that if she could magically leap 100,000 years back in time and do inventory of the faces of a hunting party, she would see the same emotions playing across their faces. This was just another hunt in a long line of hunts.

“Would somebody get me a cup of coffee?” Stefan said suddenly, a goofy grin splitting his beard.

Blank stares all around. Did they hear him right? But Kate could feel the tension ease. A few of the boys laughed, admiring the courage of their skipper in the face of what was to come. Kate admired it, too. It was the kind of intuitive act that could never be taught. Her father had had the same touch with men. It was what made him such a good reporter. He would have relished being part of this. Of that Kate was sure. No doubt he would have written up the Eagle’s story like an epic baseball game, good versus evil, the fate of the free world at stake.

No one had moved. Kate moved to get the man a cup herself.

Eryk shook his head. “Stachofski,” he bellowed.

The radio operator stuck his head out the door.

“Get the skipper some coffee.”

“Sir?”

“You heard me.”

Stachofski pulled off his headphones, tried to pat down his hair, which was a nervous tangle of curls. “Cream and sugar, sir?”

“Black,” Stefan said, “and hot enough to curl my dick.” He saw Kate’s mouth contort into a grin at those words, the look of shock on the faces of those around him. “Oh,uh, sorry,” Stefan stuttered with mock embarrassment. “Not used to having a woman on board.”

Stachofski was back a moment later, handing the cup to Stefan. As Eagle’s bow began to tilt upward, he drank the cup quickly. It was black and hot, but that was where any resemblance to coffee ended. Having simmered for hours, it was the consistency of thick cream and tasted like diesel fuel. But, of course, everything aboard a submarine quickly took on the stench of diesel. There was no way to get away from it, and nothing anyone could do about it.

As the conning tower broke the surface, Stefan gulped down the last of his coffee, pulled on a rain slicker, and then scrambled up the ladder. He opened the hatch, ducked beneath a curtain of water, and then stepped up onto the bridge deck, breathing heavily through his nose.

It was raining, a steady wind from the northeast, unsettled waves chopping the surface. The storm from earlier in the day had moved on. Along the horizon, the underbelly of the clouds glowed faintly, indicating the location of Gdansk and the coastline more precisely than any compass.

Stefan raised the Zeiss binoculars, scanned the black lengths of both freighters, grunted when he found what he was looking for: German flags, lit by spotlights on a pole above their bridges.

“Closer,” Stefan said. “We can’t afford a miss.”

As the Eagle surged ahead, Stefan made another course correction, angling the Eagle’s bow slightly ahead of the lead freighter. If they missed it, there was still a chance they would hit the second one.

He watched through his binoculars as the distance narrowed, confident that the Eagle’s low-slung shape would be impossible to pick out in the dark. And if by some miracle they were spotted? It was already too late to do to run from them. . He could feel the lookouts behind him nervously shifting their weight back and forth. They were close enough now to make out detail on the ship, see faint figures in the bridge, high above the water.

Stefan waited until they were 1,000 meters from the target, watching the freighter closely for any change in direction, singing quietly under his breath: “Hold, hold, hold.” And then he dropped the binoculars. “Fire one!” he yelled into the voice tube.

There was a slight shudder, as a pulse of compressed air propelled the 7-meter long French-made torpedo stuffed with 148 kilograms of high explosives from the tube. Like a bloodhound hightailing after a fox, the torpedo didn’t hesitate; it raced away from the Eagle at better than 40 knots.

Stefan didn’t wait to see the impact. He already knew it wouldn’t miss. “Bring us about,” he shouted. “Rudder hard port. New course two-two-five. Let’s get out of here.”

The Eagle’s conning tower leaned toward starboard as her bow ported, away from the freighters. Spray broke over the bow as her twin diesels accelerated to maximum.

Even though Stefan had no doubt what would happen, he was still startled by the explosion. It lit up the sky like sunshine on a summer day. He felt a wave of heat on the back of his head, and then a thump in his chest as the pressure wave went past the Eagle .

“Holy Christ, what was she carrying?” a lookout exclaimed.

A second explosion peppered the night. “Probably not frozen pork,” Stefan said. He glanced over his shoulder, the fires from the ship dazzling his eyes, momentarily ruining his night vision. It was clear from the bow’s 45-degree angle that the Eagle’s torpedo had broken the freighter in half. She was already sagging in the middle, circles of burning fuel spreading out over the water like molasses from a broken bottle. He could see men jumping from her stern, disappearing into the dark water.