Everyone was moving before the alarm bells rang. Max holstered the Luger, dashed for the main companionway, and reached the
bridge in seconds, followed closely by the captain. Hauer stared daggers at him, then began giving crisp orders that sent
Meteor
to full speed just as the first British shells exploded in the water fifty meters off the port beam. Everyone jumped to Hauer’s
commands—no question of insubordination now; they must all work together or be killed together. The ship’s disguise had not
fooled anyone this time. Yet Max felt relief flooding his body, unwinding the muscles in his gut. He was almost glad to be
under attack. Another volley of shells exploded into the water off their starboard bow, closer this time, sending up towers
of water taller than the ship. A straddle. The British cruiser, running at speed eight kilometers off their port bow, had
their range.
“Prepare to fire,” Hauer ordered.
The hull flaps dropped, exposing the batteries.
A moment as the gun captains double-checked their range—“Fire!”
With a sharp report the batteries fired, their smoke drifted over the ship. Did the captain mean to fight? Max looked on in
astonishment but said nothing. Instead he stood impassively, hands behind him, exactly as Langsdorff had done under fire.
Meteor
had been built as a passenger liner—she wasn’t protected with heavy plates of Krupp steel like a warship. One or two hits
would turn her into an inferno. They must turn away
now
and run with every bit of speed they could muster from the engines.
Another blast from their guns sent smoke eddying into the bridge. A third set of British shells bracketed
Meteor
, spraying the ship with water and shell splinters—shattering the bridge windows. The helmsman went to his knees, blood pouring
from his face. Max stepped to the wheel and steadied them on course, the helmsman’s blood staining his hands and his uniform.
Meteor
shook violently as Dieter and the engineering crew below pushed her engines to their very limit.
“Make smoke,” Hauer ordered, “hard starboard, take us into the smokescreen.”
Max put the wheel hard over. “Rudder is hard starboard, Herr Kapitän.” Thank God the man had given up the idea of fighting
it out with the British cruiser. In moments, a cloud of oily smoke boiled from the special generators on the stern, creating
an impenetrable cloud that hovered over the water. Just as
Meteor
began to turn, a volley of British shells hit her hard.
Max felt the raider shudder beneath him and then the bridge exploded, the force wrenching the wheel from his hands and tossing
him across the deck. The navigator screamed in agony, covering his eyes. Blood seeped out between his fingers. A slick of
blood now covered the bridge deck, most of it coming from Captain Hauer’s body, shredded by the blast. Smoke poured through
the shattered windows. Men screamed from below.
Choking on the smoke, Max retched, rose to all fours, slipped on the blood, felt the ship listing beneath him. He pulled himself
up again just as another shell struck
Meteor
, and another, throwing him back down. One of his front teeth broke against the deck.
He scrambled up and saw flames covering the stern.
Meteor
’s guns stopped firing, their crews torn apart by the shell splinters. All Max could hear was the roaring fire, punctuated
by the cries of sailors—some wounded, some dying, some thrown into the water.
He lurched to the engine room voice tube. “Engine room!” he shouted. No reply. Max wiped the blood from his eyes and found
the radio room voice tube. “Radio!”
Kurtz, the radio operator, answered as if nothing were out of the ordinary. “Radio, aye.”
“Kurtz, make to Seekriegsleitung: ‘Most Immediate.
Meteor
sunk by British cruiser. Need assistance.’ Give our position. Do it now!”
“Understood, Herr Oberleutnant. And whose name do I sign the message?”
“Mine, dammit. Send it! Then get the hell off the ship.”
Habits of bureaucracy died hard.
Meteor
lurched to starboard, the funnel coming down in a shower of sparks and soot. Max crawled to the loudspeaker microphone, seized
it, but it didn’t work. Where were the bell signals? Shit! Still on his knees, he looked frantically around through the smoke.
An explosion below rocked the ship again and she listed even more to starboard—almost forty degrees now. She would turn turtle
in a moment. Get out, now! There it was, the panel for the bell signals. He slid across the deck on the slick of blood and
banged the “abandon ship” button. Pray God the emergency power circuit still worked. It did. The continuous trill of the distress
bell sounded through the ship.
He scrambled off the bridge to the starboard rail of the listing ship and made the short jump into the sea. The cold of the
water shocked him. Salt stung the little cuts on his face and hands.
Meteor
’s fuel tanks ruptured, tons of oil spilling into the sea, creating a large black slick upon which the ship appeared to float.
He turned onto his back and kicked away from the ship, swimming through a pool of oil that covered him like a foul-smelling
blanket. It soaked his hair, forced its way into his ears, trickled from his head into his mouth—Max puked and puked again.
Meteor
loomed above him. He feared that she would fall on him, and he thrashed in panic against the water. Screams filled the air—men
dying aboard or men dying in the water. He couldn’t tell. Probably both. The alarm continued to trill. The ship settled by
the bow, listing violently to starboard, spilling men over the side.
Max cleared the oil slick, turned onto his stomach, and struck out for a lifeboat maybe forty meters away. He thought for
a moment that he might not make it—his limbs seemed weighted down by the oil—but at last he felt the wooden hull and the men
leaned over and pulled him in by his gun belt, the only place they could get a grip.
Once in the lifeboat, he turned to see the ship afire. Flames engulfed most of the top deck, save for a gap amidships. Here
Dieter appeared, along with a group of the Lascars. He must have stopped to let them out on his way up from the engine room.
He limped from the companionway and stumbled onto the slanting deck. One of the Lascars helped him to the starboard rail and
they tumbled overboard together. Both were struggling hard in the oily water when the burning deckhouse fell into the sea.
“Dieter!” Max leapt to the gunwale of the boat as the oil ignited. “Dieter!” he yelled.
Dieter heard him, he thought, looked up.
Max tore open his tunic, brass buttons flying everywhere, put one foot on the gunwale and moved to dive back into the water,
but a burly sailor held him back—Harslager. He said nothing, only wrestled Max away from the side of the lifeboat and held
him in an iron grip. Max watched as flames tore across the oil-slicked water, shooting out from the deckhouse to burn a wide
circle around the ship. The blaze overtook Dieter quickly. A wall of orange fire shot up and Max lost sight of him. The screams
of the burning men were so loud, they pierced the terrible roar of the inferno. Max stared openmouthed into the spreading
flames. His body shook, then lost all sensation. Harslager let him go and Max collapsed in the bottom of the boat.
How long did he lie there? Three hours? Four? It made no difference. Darkness had fallen by the time his senses returned.
The wind had picked up and waves lapped against the wooden sides of the lifeboat in a rhythmic, staccato slap. It was cold
now and he shivered in his oil-soaked uniform.
The lifeboat itself was one of the larger ones. It could hold up to sixty men, but as Max looked around in the semidarkness
he saw no more than fifteen, perhaps twenty. He tried to speak but the oil had dried his tongue. He spat, the spittle black
and viscous.
“The Oberleutnant is awake,” one of the sailors announced, helping Max sit up. His entire body felt bruised; pain stabbed
his right side with every breath. Must be broken ribs.
“Here, sir.” The sailor offered him a cup of water. He drank some water, swished it around in his mouth and spit it out. The
rest he drank slowly, the liquid cool on the raw tissues of his mouth.
“The ship?” Max asked in a whisper.
“Sunk, just on four hours, Herr Oberleutnant.”
Max hung his head. The image of Dieter in the burning oil came back to him, and he knew that it would keep coming back. “The
British cruiser?”
“Picked up the boats and tore away, sir.”
“Not us?”
“We was on the opposite side, drifted inside the smokescreen, Herr Oberleutnant. Couldn’t see us till it blew off and by then
they was too far away.”
Max nodded. Silence came over the boat. The war had been a strange and bitter trip. First came the scuttling of
Graf Spee
, now
Meteor
had gone to the bottom, Dieter had been incinerated, and Max found himself adrift in a lifeboat, twelve hundred kilometers
from land. He hadn’t seen Mareth in two years and would never see her again; they would never be married. He would die here,
in the middle of the Indian Ocean, twenty-six years old, and no one would ever know what became of him. The telegrams Mareth
and his father received would say only that Max was “missing.” That was how Oberkommando der Wehrmacht—Armed Forces High Command—listed
you if your body was never found.
Hundreds of thousands of men from the First War were still listed this way, but these men hadn’t deserted and run off with
French girls. They were missing because they’d been blown to bits by an artillery shell, or torn to pieces by machine-gun
bullets. Some had been dragged to the ocean floor aboard a sinking ship, others had gotten a sniper’s bullet in the face and
fallen into an old shell hole filled with stagnant water and covered with algae. But the telegrams never made this explicit.
Mothers all over Germany had gone on for years after the Armistice in 1918, hoping that somehow their precious Fritz had not
been ground into the blood-soaked mud of Verdun. They went to church every morning, praying that their wonderful boy, a gentle
soul who loved his mother, a handsome boy with a smile bright as sunshine, was suffering from amnesia. Perhaps he had wandered
over the Pyrenees into Spain and had been taken in by nuns. At this very moment, he could be sitting on a hillside in Catalonia,
herding goats for the good sisters who looked after him.
Max wanted his telegram to tell the truth:
With great regret the Oberkommando der Kriegsmarine must inform you that your husband/son/father/brother/lover
—then a blank to be filled in with the appropriate name and rank, must get the rank correct—
is missing in action at sea. Though his body has not been recovered, we have reason to believe that he was incinerated/drowned/ripped
apart by a British shell/trapped in the engine room and suffocated/hit by the collapsing funnel of his ship/choked on viscous
fuel oil/starved in a lifeboat/eaten by sharks. He gave his life for Greater Germany. The Führer and the Oberkommando der
Kriegsmarine extend their deepest sympathies. Heil Hitler.
Max shut his eyes, swallowed. If he went missing, would the navy send his father and Mareth a copy of the
Consolation Book for All Who Mourn for the Fallen
, written especially for the bereaved by a navy chaplain? Or did loved ones get a copy only if you were officially dead?
He was the lone officer in a boat filled with mutinous sailors, but none of that mattered. Besides, he was the only one among
them who could navigate. Like most lifeboats, this one was equipped with a sextant and a set of charts. He supposed they could
make landfall somewhere—if the mast and sail were undamaged; if they didn’t die of hunger or thirst or sunstroke; if they
didn’t capsize in a storm or get killed in any of the other numberless ways the sea had of taking men.
It was Harslager who finally spoke up, respect in his voice. “What are your orders, Herr Oberleutnant?”
Max thought. Give them hope? Be harsh? He remembered advice from somewhere: minimize the difficulties at hand. Not so easy
in this case. “We sent off a signal to Seekriegsleitung before we sank,” he said.
“You did?”
“Yes, I ordered it from the bridge.”
“Did it go off before the antenna fell?” one of the young sailors asked.
“You will address me as Herr Oberleutnant,” Max reminded him firmly. “I will not overlook this again.”
The sailor stiffened, squaring his shoulders in a gesture of attention. “May I ask the Oberleutnant if the signal went off
before the antenna fell?”
“Yes, it did,” Max said, with a certainty he did not feel.
“Are you sure, sir?”
Harslager said, “If the Oberleutnant says it was done, then it was done. Don’t question the officer. So we should stay here,
sir?”
“Yes, I believe we should, but I don’t know for how long.”
“Do we have U-boats in the Indian Ocean, sir?”
“Yes, of course we do,” Max said, hoping they believed him.
He spent the next hour overseeing the inventory of their supplies. They didn’t have a full complement of rations because sailors
had been filching them to supplement the short rations they received on
Meteor
. Max would happily shoot the thief who had stolen provisions from the lifeboat. Stealing emergency supplies was a far more
serious crime than lifting a pair of binoculars and a few bottles of whiskey. They had enough water for six days at two pints
a man, which wouldn’t be enough to ward off dehydration after the third day. There should have been more water, too. Their
food supply—dried biscuits, powdered soup, and chocolate—would last seven days, Max calculated. Maybe eight. He put Harslager
in charge of the rations.
When the morning sun came up it baked the greasy oil into his skin, which tightened and even split in some places, but oddly,
the oil served as a kind of protective coating. Without it, the others blistered more severely. During the day they huddled
under the sail for shade, but it wasn’t big enough to cover every part of them. It barely helped anyway. The canvas was thin
and the sun burned them through it. Their skin peeled. Lips cracked. Pus oozed from burst blisters.