The
Matrosentabobergefreiter
at the other end replied: “One moment.” He would have to activate the electric motors to provide power to the pumps. After a moment he said: “Permission granted,” and then Statz heard the click of the receiver.
Cussing the superior attitude of the bridge watch, Statz made his way back to the gun controller's station for number-one gun. He slid onto the small saddle chair and began opening the electrical circuits for the hydraulic fluid pumps.
“Kuhn!” Statz shouted over the edge of the platform. “Ready?”
“Hell yes,” Kuhn called back. “Let's get this done. My ass is freezing.”
“Pumps on,” Statz said. He watched the needles climbing as the ready fluid exited the reservoirs. He switched on the reservoir release and saw the elevation indicator dial begin to rise. When the reservoirs were empty, the hydraulic fluid in the cylinders, when released, could be transferred to the reservoirs. The cylinder plunger fell, sliding into the cylinder with the weight of the breech, and the muzzle of the gun would rise. It topped out at forty-five degrees, but twenty degrees would give them an idea where the problem was.
“Five degrees,” he called out over the loud hum of the gun's breech nestling deeper into its hold.
“Nothing,” Kuhn replied.
“Ten degrees,” Statz said and adjusted the fluid flow so that the gun would fall smoothly.
“Right.”
“Fifteen.”
“Statzyâ”
There was a soft boom, like the noise of a distant firework. Nothing dangerous, nothing frightening about it. Just a sound that came to Statz from the starboard cylinder well.
“Kuhn!” Statz shouted. “Kuhn?” He quickly shut off the circuits and swung over the platform railing. He locked the insteps of his shoes to the outside ladder railings, gripped the railings with his hands, and dropped like a rock. He landed hard on the narrow deck that surrounded the cylinder.
“Kuhn?” He found the trouble light but it was out. He pulled a flashlight from the back pocket of his overalls and played it rapidly over the dark interior of the well. He saw the ruptured cylinder first. There was a two-foot slash near the bottom of the cylinderâhydraulic fluid dripped from it like blood from a wound. “Kuhn!”
Statz found Kuhn, jammed between two support flanges, cut nearly in half. Statz slumped to the deck of the cylinder well and sat in three inches of hydraulic fluid mixed with the blood of his friend, who stared back at him with sightless eyes. He must have been right next to the cylinder when it eruptedâclose enough for the pressurized hydraulic fluid to rip him apart.
When Kuhn was finally pulled from the turret and his body lay on a stretcher, there was more to be concerned about for the crew of D.K.M. Sea Lion than the fact that they had lost a friend.
Sailors are superstitious and they know that vessels are sometimes marked as lucky or unlucky. To those who never put to sea, it may seem childish and nonsensical, but life aboard frail vessels that dare the North Atlantic are governed by laws unnatural in any case, and unrelated in all cases to the land. There are complex regulations and statutes, known and unknown, put forward by the sea and enforced with absolute dispassion. Earth gives firmness and stability and seldom rises up to attack those who travel upon it. The sea is not so considerate and demands that all sailors be wary and all ships be prepared to submit to its edicts.
Now, in all of the sections and divisions aboard this remarkable vessel, old sailors shared similar stories while serious young sailors listened, about unlucky ships and unlucky crews, and they always came back to sailors dying.
Chapter 7
The garden of Number 10, Downing Street, London,
21 July 1941
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Louis Hoffman followed a butler into the bright sunshine and saw the short, stocky figure of Winston Churchill, cigar in one hand, brandy snifter in the other, comfortably enthroned on a cast-iron settee.
“Mr. Hoffman. How are you?” Churchill said, making no move to rise.
“I'm fine, Prime Minister,” Hoffman said, but he wasn't. He'd been too long in England and he wanted to go home. He couldn't get a decent meal unless he went to the embassy. Thank God Joe Kennedy wasn't there to bore him to death. Franklin had recalled the former ambassador some time before because Kennedy had a way of making it sound as if he admired Hitler and the Nazis. That admiration didn't mix well at dinner parties thrown by the English.
“Care for something to drink, Mr. Hoffman?” Churchill said, as if reading his mind.
“Scotch and water,” Hoffman said.
“Immediately,” Churchill ordered the butler with a chuckle. “Mr. Hoffman looks as if he is in need of refreshment.” He took a sip of brandy and said: “All in all, how do you think we English are faring, Mr. Hoffman?”
“All in all, Prime Minister,” Hoffman said, lighting a cigarette, “I'd say that the Germans gave you the old one-two combination and you're on the ropes.”
“That's a lovely boxing analogy.”
“Thank you. Feel free to pass that on.”
“Indeed, I shall. Louis, we English can be obstinate. We are like a bulldog; you can beat us time and again and we will come back after you. Feel free to pass that on as well, Louis.”
“Thanks, Winston, I will.”
The butler arrived with the drink and Hoffman took a healthy taste. “Ahhh, the breakfast of champions.” He eyed Churchill. “We've got the go-ahead?”
“By all means, Louis, Parliament has approved it, my lords of the Admiralty assure me that it will be a calm and relaxing voyage.” He paused and swirled the remaining brandy inside the snifter. “This may be the most important meeting undertaken in the history of these two great countries. We are the same blood, you Americans and we British. We have a common ancestry and common values, not to mention a common language. We are the last bastions of democracy and we must band together to fight this terrible evil.”
Hoffman nodded, ground the cigarette out on the heel of his shoe, and stuck it in a potted plant. “You're taking a chance, you know. I don't care what anybody says, it's a big ocean and those Kraut bastards would like to send you to the bottom. But the fact is that cables and telephone conversations don't do the trick. Franklin told me that he wanted an eyeball-to-eyeball meeting with you because that's how he does things.”
“To take the measure of the man, is that how it is?”
“Yeah, except we call it sizing a man up.”
“The same concept, Louis,” Churchill said. “I agree. The issues are far too complex and far-reaching to be relegated to cables and telephone conversations. It would hardly do them justice and may lead to confusion at a time when confusion may lead to catastrophe. We must sit and talk like civilized men.”
“Franklin knows that. You know it. So we're halfway home. He wants to make this meeting count, Winston. There are a lot of people in the United States who'd just as soon stay out of this mess. They don't see this thing in Europe as our fight.”
“This âthing in Europe' is every man's fight, Louis. It is ultimately a struggle of good versus evil.”
“Yeah. That's what I've heard.” Hoffman took a sip of his drink. “Winston, some people in America think that Hitler is the good and you're the evil. I just hope that we can convince them otherwise before it's too late.”
“So do I, Louis.”
Hoffman leaned forward, resting his elbows on his tiny legs. “You've got to be straight about everything. Brutally honest. Don't hold back and don't try to gold-plate anything. Franklin's a cagey son of a bitch and he can smell a load of horseshit a mile away. Be candid. Don't hold anything back.”
“I wasn't aware that I was doing any such thing,” Churchill said calmly, unaffected by Hoffman's language.
“Maybe not in so many words, but you've been careful to add a spoonful of sugar to the answer of every direct question that I've asked you.”
Churchill cocked an eyebrow and rolled the cigar around in his mouth. He pushed his considerable bulk out of the settee and walked to a brick wall covered in ivy. He turned and came back to Hoffman.
“One gentleman to another, Mr. Hoffman,” he said in a soft voice, “may I ask what transpired in your communications to President Roosevelt since you arrived?”
“One gentleman to another, Prime Minister, I thought you'd have the damned phone tapped.” Churchill tried to protest but Hoffman continued. “I know Franklin and he may be the president of the United States but he's also a politician. The same goes for you, so it means that both of you are going to play your cards close to your vest. I told him what I thought, which is what he wanted.”
“What are your thoughts, Mr. Hoffman?”
“You folks are in a hell of a fix over here. If things don't improve and I mean quick, you'll be throwing shit balls at the Germans when they land on the beaches. You need arms and munitions and just about everything else. Sometime soon you'll need American boys to lend a hand.”
“That's an accurate description of the situation, if a bit caustic.”
“My advice to you, Winston, when you get behind closed doors with Franklin, is to forget all of that blood, sweat, and tears hogwash and tell him the same thing I've been saying in my cables: âFranklin, it's the top of the seventh and they're behind by six runs.' Get me?”
“Baseball, Louis?” the prime minister inquired.
“Yeah, Winston. If something doesn't happen and happen soon, England will fall to Germany.”
Churchill nodded somberly. “I see why Franklin enjoys your company.”
“Nobody enjoys my company, Winston. Not even me. I'm a son of a bitch.”
The prime minister expelled a cloud of cigar smoke and then brushed it away with the back of his hand. “Two weeks. We'll leave Scapa Flow aboard H.M.S. Prince of Wales The meeting with President Roosevelt will be candid, forthright, and untarnished by rhetoric.”
“That's good.”
“You'll come with me of course, Louis?”
“Oh, hell yes,” Hoffman said bitterly. “The only thing that I like more than airplanes is boats.”
Churchill cocked his ear to one side when the butler appeared.
“I beg your pardon, sir, but the gentlemen from Germany have arrived.”
“Yes, I thought I heard antiaircraft fire. Louis, would you care to join me in the bombproof ?”
Hoffman heard the faint wail of warning sirens and saw tiny flak bursts in the distant sky. “Got anything to drink down there?”
“I wouldn't have it any other way, Louis.”
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Cole maneuvered the MG through crowded streets, darting around stopped vehicles. He stomped on his brakes and the tiny car slid to a stop as civilians rushed across the street to air raid shelters. He heard the coarse boom of antiaircraft artillery, as the shells exploded directly overhead. Barrage balloons swung complacently back and forth.
When the frightened crowd had passed he jammed the gearshift into first and stomped on the gas pedal.
An air raid warden shouted at him to pull over and find a shelter, but he had to get to the row house at Warren Square, Rebecca's home.
He looked overhead to see a Heinkle, the German bomber, trailing smoke in a long graceful arc, glide languidly across the sky, followed by an angry Hurricane. The British fighter was pumping bullets into the carcass of the enemy plane.
Bombs were hitting around him now; he heard the sharp explosions, and the screams of the people who had not reached the shelters in time. Dirty brown towers of smoke and debris cluttered the horizon as the bombers swept through London. Cole had seen it before and was always fascinated by the macabre slow-motion eruption of the blast and the unidentifiable remnants of houses and people as they fell to earth. He never spoke to anyone about it because he was ashamed to, but he saw magnificence in all of it, a monumental spectacle unfolding in a vast arena. Too much the historian, he had cautioned himselfâremoved from the reality of war by the crisp white pages and stark black letters of textbooks.
It was murder of courseâcivilians dying by the thousands, contrary to all rules of warfare. But Cole saw it with the clinical eye of a professional and did not invest the view with emotion. His ex-fiancée would have had a comment about that.
You're cold and calculating
, Ruth had told him more than once.
Analytical and careful
, he had said, but he thought, ironically, that that was a reply delivered with no real emotion; it was simply constructed as a response. Maybe he was a coldhearted bastard after all.
Cole whipped the MG back and forth, trying to avoid debris scattered in the street, racing frantically to get to Rebecca's. He'd followed the course of the bombers as he drove to his flat and suddenly realized that they were headed for Rebecca's portion of the city. She was at homeâhe knew that she was there because he had called her, wanting to talk about the other day, but she had said that there was nothing to talk about and that she would have to be going soon anyway. She was at homeâdirectly in the path of the attack.
A bomb suddenly landed in a house ahead and Cole saw a section of a wall begin to totter. He knew it was going to fall in the street. It was going to fall on him. He downshifted and steered the car up on the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street. He heard a tire blow and he was pretty sure because of the terrific jolt he felt when he hit the curb that he'd broken a spring as well.
He saw the section of wall slowly detach itself from the burning house and begin to fall. Cole tried quickly calculating how much room he had to clear the wallâwhen the wall would land, where it would land.
He watched in disbelief, as the falling section seemed to grow larger, the disintegrating brick monolith trailing a swirling veil of red dust, reaching out to crush him. The MG shuddered valiantly through the debris, bumping over bricks, timbers, and bits of people's lives scattered on the sidewalk.
Cole was under the wall, caught in its shadow. He could sense it falling on him, feel its presence grow as it pushed the air out of its way in an attempt to reach him.
He was through.
The world exploded behind him. He felt the MG shake from the concussion and he was enveloped in a cloud of dust so thick he could not see where he was driving. But worse, he could not breathe as the thickness filled his mouth and nostrils. He saw a lorry in front of him and he tried to swerve to miss it, but the MG did not respond. He slammed on the brakes and skidded into the heavy rear wheels of the vehicle. He was dazed but he managed to climb from the vehicle.
He looked around to get his bearings and heard the drone of aircraft engines. He had to get to Rebecca's house. If he was caught out in the streets he wouldn't last five minutes.
Cole was three blocks from Warren Square and sanctuary when he began to run. He could hear the demonic whistle of the bombs falling from the sky and then the blast as they crashed into the ground, spewing debris into the air. The horizon was a false sunset with a red and orange tint, flickering as fires raged throughout the city. Above it was the true sky, a natural blue perverted by columns of dirty smoke that rose as monuments to destruction.
Cole tasted the dust and the smoke stung his eyes and nostrils and he heard the frantic clanging of the fire bells. He knew that firemen dressed in long coats and archaic helmets, like those worn by ancient warriors, were out, fighting the fires. But it was no useâthe fires were too numerous and widespread and the gallant men in their quaint little helmets must have known that they could not win.
He saw Rebecca's house and ran across the square, barely avoiding a speeding fire truck. He bounded up the few stairs and tried the handle. The door was locked.
Cole looked up and saw another wave of enemy bombers headed toward him, their throbbing engines echoing off the buildings.
“Rebecca?” he shouted, pounding on the door. “Rebecca? Open the door.” He slammed against it in desperation but it wouldn't budge. “Rebecca!” He jammed his elbow into the narrow windowpane, breaking the glass. He reached through and found the lock. He flipped it and threw the door open. “Rebecca? Where are you?” He heard the rumble of the approaching planes and knew that they had only moments to reach a shelter. The flak guns began firing, sharp cracks that increased in tempo as they found the range.
“Rebecca?” he called, moving into the drawing room from the hall. He saw her, a filthy, dust-covered ball curled up in the corner, her head pressed tightly between her knees.