North Sea Hunters Page 4

  Krauser nodded. “As I said: the torpedo.”

  Dahlen shook his head. “Forget your torpedo, Captain. I am sorry to rob you of your victory and pride, but what I saw was not man made.

  “The wall of the hold just…burst open. The metal split and pushed inwards, as though some giant had fixed it with a bayonet. The walls peeled upwards and split as the shark forced its way in. Captain…the size of this thing. It looked like the devil himself had taken shark form. It was faded grey…maybe even white in places. One dead black eye stared into the room; it must have lost the other in some battles months, perhaps even decades past, as all that remained was a sod of lumpy scar tissue. The head of the shark pushed its way into the hold and we felt the entire ship shift under its weight, causing the floor to become a slope directly into the things mouth.

  “I was fortunate enough to grab a hold of a support pillar. The steel held, despite the chaos.”

  Dahlen sat for a moment, lost in his memory. Eventually Krauser grew uncomfortable in the silence and felt the need to push him along. “And Øystein?”

  Dahlen breathed in deeply, and blew it out shakily. “Øystein was…not so fortunate. He lost his footing as the sea water cascaded in. The floor turned into a slide under the salt water and the deadly angle the shark created. He went straight onto his backside, and…slid straight to the beast. The shark opened its jaw and…Captain, its mouth must have opened three metres wide. Not that that was the worst part.

  “Sharks have more than one set of teeth you know. They have rows and rows of them, like a meat grinder. Almost as soon as one is lost, the next can roll forward to fill the gap. This jaw spread open three metres, let out a gust of disgusting, rotting breath, and those teeth…

  “Øystein slid in feet first. He managed to catch hold of the thing’s bottom lip, and tried to kick and lever himself out, but it did no good. Those jaws came together with a suctioning boom, and Øystein screamed as the teeth drove into his thighs, broke his legs, ripped at his stomach. He slid in another half a metre, and they came down again, crushing his rib cage this time. He vomited a gout of blood which only seemed to ignite the beast’s hunger further. Two more chomps in rapid succession and Øystein was dead. Two more and he was gone from sight. The thing ate him whole, Captain.”

  Dr Arnold looked terrified. “My god, if what you say is true, this thing is…simply colossal. Captain, can a shark really puncture through the steel of a tanker? Can they grow to that size?”

  Krauser paused and took a deep breath before continuing. “I am not an expert on sharks, doctor, but I do not believe that Mr Dahlen is lying. I am sorry for the loss of your friend, Øystein, Mr Dahlen.”

  Dahlen waved his hand in part acknowledgement, part dismissal. “He was not exactly a friend, but he was a young man, and I was sorry to see him go. Especially in so grotesque a manner.”

  “Please continue your story.”

  “The shark retreated once it had consumed Øystein, and slid back into the dark waters. Immediately the cold sea poured in through the hole it had torn, and I was left drenched and freezing. Instantly I felt the boat lurch hard to the side, and I knew that we had to be sinking. I ran for the ladder back to the upper decks. I slowly made my way there by bouncing off and grabbing onto struts and packing crates and chains, the water making my every step laborious. When I at last reached the ladder, the hold shuddered as if in a seizure, and once again the shark came for me. It caught and scratched its skin on the shredded metal of the opening, but this did not seem to bother it in the slightest. I felt myself tremble under the gaze of that dead eye once more, before the adrenaline kicked in and I was up the ladder and on deck before I knew what was happening.

  “Captain Otness was leading the evacuation. Like yourself, he assumed that it was a torpedo that had hit us. I tried to tell him what had happened, but he could not hear me in the chaos of the men readying the lifeboats for escape. He waved me off and shoved me in the direction of the nearest lifeboat, and I followed this order.

  “Once we were in the boat, it seemed to crash down through the darkness and onto the water. Two of the men – I forget their names already – rowed us as far away from the ship as we could get. They feared a fire reaching the fuel reserves, or something of that nature, I suppose. I didn’t tell them what the real thing to fear was. Who of them would have believed me?”

  Dahlen fell silent for a moment, and sipped his coffee. When he continued, the panic that had been edging into his voice had subsided, and he was back to his normal, almost stoic, manner. “I did not see the first lifeboat go down. I don’t know that anyone did. I heard some of the men shout that the boat was missing. At first they called for their friends, hoping that they were just adrift in the darkness. Perhaps some of them feared they had capsized, or something, but in my heart, I already knew what had happened…and I knew it was only a matter of time until our boat was next.”

  “We saw what happened to the other lifeboats,” said Krauser. “We were making our way toward you to provide assistance when your boat was sunk. We feared you were lost to the shark, until we spotted you clinging to that driftwood.”

  “I have no idea how I survived, myself,” replied Dahlen. “I do not even really remember the shark hitting our lifeboat. Well, I do, but it is…sort of in a dream. Or rather a nightmare, eh? I remember our boat being…thrown up, I suppose…though it actually felt more as though the boat was pushed upwards. I did not see the shark. I just saw the foam and spray, heard the shouts of my colleagues…but I smelled that same death and rotten fish odour that I remembered from the cargo hold. Then I crashed into the water, and…to be honest, the next thing I really remember is being helped aboard your ship.”

  “Boat.”

  “Sorry?”

  “We are a boat, not a ship. A minor technicality, but a bugbear of most submarine crews.”

  Dahlen nodded in understanding. Dr Arnold turned to Krauser to offer his diagnosis. “He’s in shock, and there’s possibly a slight concussion, but nothing serious. Keep him warm and dry and rested for a day or two and he’ll be in perfect health.”

  Krauser nodded. “Mr Dahlen, we will hand you over to the Kriegsmarine when we return home at the end of this patrol in a week or so. They will arrange your safe return back to your family.”

  “Thank you, Captain. I appreciate your hospitality. And I hope that we make it ‘home’.”

  Krauser left the man with the doctor, and made his way back to the control room. He knew what Dahlen was inferring. If this shark had indeed sunk a freighter, then what chance did the U-616 stand?

  -SEVEN-

  August Krauser finally hit his bunk several hours later; it must have been about three o clock in the morning when he finally turned in. His sleep was dark and dreamless, and yet he still felt fatigued upon waking, and it took two mugs of the submarine’s glutinous coffee before he was truly feeling ready for duty. At about eleven o’clock in the morning, he was reading in his bunk when Hertz approached him with news that a new target had been sighted.

  He was surprised. It could be days between spotting viable targets; and even then it was not always feasible to launch an attack. The ship could be escorted, or travelling too fast, weather could be against them, or the target could simply be too small to be worth expending the ammunition.

  Krauser headed on deck with his second in command, suppressing a shiver, having once again left his windbreaker by his bunk. He peered through his binoculars, and could see that the freighter on the horizon would indeed make a viable target. It was certainly large – perhaps slightly larger than the Freyr had been the day before, and he gave the command to Hertz to close to torpedo range. “Dive immediately at the first sign of an escort.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  They retired to the hot and noisy control room as the U-616 sped through the waters, in pursuit of its quarry. Hertz gave him a smile. “We are lucky to have two hunts in twenty-four hours. This will keep the men better motivated than any chess
tournament.”

  Krauser nodded. He didn’t like it, but he knew he was right. The men needed to blow off steam on a patrol, and if the steam came packaged in a G7a torpedo, then so be it. After half an hour or so the submarine slowed down, and seemed to come to a near stop. They had reached torpedo range.

  Krauser looked through the periscope at the target ship. It was actually a tanker, rather than a freighter – Admiral Dönitz would be pleased if they managed to bag this particular trophy. Depriving the British of fuel for their planes and vehicles would aid Germany greatly. “Any sign of an escort?” he asked.

  “No, captain. She’s alone,” replied one of the men.

  Krauser nodded. “She’s far too large a target to risk the deck gun. Load four steam torpedoes into the forward tubes.”

  The command was shouted along the length of the submarine. The men working the torpedo tubes hurriedly swung their payload along, the room filling with clamour and organised chaos. In less than a minute the four tubes were locked and loaded, ready to deliver death and destruction to their target.

  After giving the men two minutes to organise themselves, Krauser called “Fire one!”

  The ship shuddered as the torpedo spat forth, pushed through the water by compressed steam. Krauser could see the bubble jets as it sped towards the tanker. He waited, and counted under his breath, knowing that everyone in the control room was doing the same thing. As he hit fifty, he saw a huge gout of water and flame shoot from the side of the tanker. A rewarding, percussive sound followed half a second later. “Direct hit!” he yelled, and the men in the control room cheered in victory. “Fire two and three!”

  The submarine shuddered once more, more intensely this time, as two torpedoes were fired in rapid succession. Again the Captain of the U-616 watched the jets bubble across the ocean, counting under his breath. Another blossoming of water and flame told him that at least one of the torpedoes had successfully reached its mark, and that another target was succumbing to the might of the finest war machine in the Kriegsmarine.

  “Direct hit!” he cried again. Cheers of celebration, “Kriegsmarine!” and “Heil Hitler!” filled the room once more. “Come, Mr Hertz. Let’s head up top!”

  He hurried up the ladder to the main deck, followed by the older second-in-command. He suppressed a shiver and watched through his binoculars at the burning ship. “Another victory for the U-616!” he said to Hertz.

  Hertz smiled. “Yes, sir. To the glory of the Fuhrer, and the Fatherland!”

  Krauser did not. He was not so stupid as to speak openly against the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei and his nation’s leader, but he did not particularly care for their politics himself, and neither did the majority of his crew. His job was the same regardless of who held the Reichstag, or how they managed to get in there in the first place. Hertz was obviously a devotee of Adolf Hitler, but that was his own business.

  The other reason he didn’t reply was that something seemed off to him. There was a tension or pressure in the air, that hadn’t been there before. Something had caused the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck to rise. He scanned the water, nervously, involuntarily. Dahlen’s tale of his battle with the shark must have gotten under his skin, that’s all…

  Except it wasn’t all. He could definitely hear something now; something that was not normally there. A high pitched, buzzing that seemed to be coming from somewhere…up above?

  He span just in time to see the Sunderland screaming out of the cloud cover, its machine guns sending up a spray of searing hot lead as it began a strafing run of the U-Boat. Milliseconds later the bullets rained all around him. Time seemed to slow down into a series of very short motion pictures. Two of the crew ran for the deck gun, but were cut down, blood gouting from their arms and chests as the bullets struck. Wood splinters flew as stray rounds thudded into the deck. Hertz slid down the ladder, rapidly disappearing from view. There was a beastly roar as the plane shot over head. He knew he had only seconds before it turned for a second pass.

  Three, no, four men now lay dead on the deck. No time to check identities, he would have to take a roll call when – if – they managed to escape the Sunderland. He screamed “Alarm!” as he slid down the ladder into the comparative warmth and darkness of the control room. Bells rang and whistles shrieked in the wave of this command.

  The U-616 began its crash dive.

  The men worked in unison, as much a well-oiled machine as the U-Boat itself. Cogs span, dive planes were adjusted, and the tanks began to fill with sea water, causing the ship to rapidly sink beneath the surface. In less than a minute, they were submerged, and still diving. The Type VIIB U-Boat was pressure tested to a depth of two hundred and twenty metres, and it was a brave captain indeed who would exceed this measurement in all but a life or death situation.

  The crew fell silent, as was standard practice, fearing that the slightest noise could be detected by enemy ships operating in the areas. As one, Krasuer, Kleiner, Hertz, the entire crew (including Dr Arnold and Dahlen in the rear of the boat) turned their gaze upwards. Krauser never knew why this was. The deadliest depth charges always came from the side or – worse – from below, yet every seaman he knew (himself included) involuntarily looked up when threatened by them. A depth charge was a submarine’s deadliest enemy.

  “One hundred and fifty metres deep,” whispered Kleiner.

  “Hold steady,” Krauser replied.

  Two hollow splashes told them that the Sunderland had dropped depth charges, and there was nothing that the crew of the U-616 could do now, but wait.

  The seconds dragged like hours as everyone aboard fell silent, before the first shock hit. It came from the starboard side, and the entire boat tilted on its axis, and skidded sideways. Men shouted, metal screamed, and Krauser gritted his teeth so hard he feared they might shatter in his mouth. In a deadly one-two punch, the U-616 was thrown sideways and careered into the second depth charge. This one hit so hard on the underside that Dahlen grabbed hold of the doctor and shouted that the shark had come back for them. Krauser felt himself thrown upwards by the sheer force of the depth charge, lost his footing and seemed to float momentarily before landing hard on his right arm. He screamed as a terrible, muscular pain flared white hot just above the elbow. He feared that it had been broken.

  Kleiner mistook his scream for a shout of “Dive!” and the order was hurriedly relayed as the captain staggered back to his feet. The first he knew of the mistake was when he cleared his head and Kleiner reported that U-616 was now holding steady at two hundred metres.

  Another splash heralded the dropping of another depth charge, but either U-616 had moved sufficiently far away, or the Sunderland had miscalculated their position. Krauser gave the order to travel submerged for a good couple of hours before sending the periscope up to check the coast was clear.

  “Yes, sir,” replied Kleiner, adding, “Captain, you are bleeding.”

  Krauser looked down, and saw that the right sleeve of his shirt was completely saturated with blood.

  -EIGHT-

  The damage to the U-616 was extensive, even without taking into account the four men dead from the Sunderland’s original strafing run. Krauser sat on his bunk as Dr Arnold tended to his arm. It turned out that it was not broken, but that he had in fact taken a bullet from the Sunderland. He had obviously been so distracted by the action around him (“adrenaline”, the doctor called it) that he hadn’t noticed at the time. Dr Arnold was able to remove the bullet, but the wound still hurt like crazy.

  After a couple of hours running silently beneath the waves, Krauser gave the order to surface and begin repairs. He left Hertz in charge of the control room, and lay on his bunk with a bottle of whiskey, to try and rest and blot out the pain of his new gunshot wound.

  He couldn’t deny that he felt a palpable sense of relief upon surfacing. He was never fazed by being underwater – one could hardly rise to the position of captain aboard a U-Boat if one was – but after a
tense experience like being depth charged, it felt like literally coming up for air.

  He managed to doze a little over the course of two hours while the men carried out their preliminary repairs. This time his dreams were dark and fitful, full of sudden explosions and dark teeth in the water. He was in particular haunted by the dead black eyes of the Great White Shark he had seen on shore leave, and the spinning driftwood of the Freyr’s lifeboats.

  He was eventually brought fully awake by Kleiner at his bedside. “Sir?”

  Krauser blinked away sleep and pushed himself up using his injured arm, causing him to groan between gritted teeth. “Yes, what is it?”

  “I have the damage report, sir.”

  The captain rubbed his eyes and nodded. “Tell me.”

  “We’ve lost ten men in all, sir. The four men up on the deck, two were crushed when a torpedo broke loose in the launching bay and four more suffered head or neck injuries as a result of being thrown about in the explosion, sir.”

  Krauser groaned. Of a crew of forty-two, that was a substantial loss. “Get names for me. I will write the letters to their families. And prepare them for burial.”

  A ship as tightly packed as a Type VII U-Boat didn’t have the capacity for a morgue, and all the men knew that. In the event of their death, they would be buried at sea. The phrase “fish food” leapt into Krauser’s mind, followed by the glimpses he had had of the shark that had demolished the crew of the Freyr (and the Freyr itself, if Dahlen could be believed).

  Kleiner nodded before continuing with his report. “Yes, sir. Also, the flak gun is inoperable, and two of the forward torpedo tubes are jammed. We still have two in front, two in rear and the deck gun, sir. They, at least, are all fully operational. Unfortunately, the manoeuvring planes are damaged. We can rise and dive okay, but our speed and manoeuvrability are not what they should be. In short, if we run into trouble again…I don’t know that we’ll be able to get out of it so easily. We’d struggle to get away from a destroyer, and another Sunderland would have us dead in the water, sir. Hell, if we run into that shark again I-”