Читать книгу The Land God Made in Anger - John Davis Gordon - Страница 27

Because it is so popular with German tourists, there is a Lufthansa flight direct from Namibia to Frankfurt, but Nathan had friends in the travel business who organized him a bucket-shop deal via London. It was still more than McQuade could afford, but he resolved to enjoy the trip. He had a bottle of duty-free whisky which was half-finished in a couple of hours, but he still was not enjoying himself: all he could think of was the vile blackness of that submarine, the horror of bones crunching under his feet, the stinking taste of death and the choking retch in his throat. When the cabin lights were switched out, he could not go to sleep: when he closed his eyes the dark cocoon of the aircraft became that long terrible tomb of the submarine. Was he crazy to be spending all this money so that he could dive down on that terrible thing again? It was very late when he at last fell asleep, but he awoke with a grim, hungover determination to do what he had set out to do.

It was mid-morning when he cleared customs at Heathrow airport. He found a public telephone and looked up the number of the German Embassy. He dialled and asked to speak to the Naval Attaché.

‘Guten Tag,’ a cheerful voice intoned.

‘Good morning,’ McQuade said. ‘Can you help me, please? I’m very interested in German submarines of the World War II period. I believe you have a naval museum in Germany where I can see some?’

‘In Laboe,’ the officer said. ‘Near Kiel.’

McQuade scribbled a note. ‘Which type do they have there?’

‘Type VII C. That was the standard German submarine.’

‘And is there a naval archive open to the public, where I can find out details about individual submarines, and what they did during the war?’

‘The U-Boat Archive, in the town of Sylt. Near the Danish border. The man in charge is Horst Bredow, he was a submariner during the war. I will give you the address. Say hullo to Herr Bredow for me.’

Ten minutes later he was buying a ticket to Hamburg. The Lufthansa girl who served him was heart-achingly beautiful, and as charming as she looked. He went in search of a bar, feeling lucky. Everybody was being so nice. He was starting to enjoy himself.

It was early afternoon when he arrived in Hamburg, full of Löwenbrau beer and feeling no pain. He took a bus to the railway station. There was still plenty of time to get to Kiel before nightfall, but he thought, what the hell! He asked what times the trains ran in the morning, then he crossed the road and checked into Popp’s Hotel. Then, determined to enjoy himself, he did what tourists do in Hamburg and went to the Reeperbahn.

He sat in the Glass Elephant and drank expensive whisky while he watched some of the most beautiful girls in Germany copulating on stage. The most impressive performance was by one man with two girls, who managed to do it while they all whizzed around on rollerskates. Between acts the girls circulated amongst the audience and offered hand-jobs for fifty marks. He went back to his hotel late, jet-lagged and sex-bothered.

He hadn’t really enjoyed himself. He lay in bed wondering if he was crazy to be spending all this money on such a long shot.

It was freezing in Kiel. He left his bag in a locker, then asked how to get to Laboe. He bought a notebook from the newspaper kiosk, then he left the railway station and turned down to the waterfront, to the Bahnhofbrücke pier. A ferry was waiting. There was still ice floating in the harbour.

Half-an-hour later he disembarked at the village of Laboe at the mouth of Kiel’s long harbour, opening onto the bleak Baltic Sea. There were snowclad woods around the mouth. He asked the way to the U-boat museum.

It looked a nice little seaside holiday town, shut down for the winter. There were pleasure yachts and fishing boats wintering, closed up. He set off briskly down the seafront road, past solid Germanic suburban houses in neat little gardens. Within a few hundred yards he saw it, half a mile ahead, the long grey shape mounted on concrete blocks on the wintry shore, and the tall red-brick memorial opposite it, the shape of a submarine’s conning tower, rearing hundreds of feet up into the grey sky.

McQuade stood at the fence surrounding the submarine and stared at the long, sleek, dangerous-looking machine. All the horrors of that charnel house came flooding back to him, the dark ghostly shape materializing out of the gloom, the gaping black hatch of the conning tower, the horror of the octopus flying out at him with its suckers clawing, the stinking choke of death as he struggled upside-down in the tube, the dreadful boot lying at the bottom. He gave a tense sigh and raised his camera.

He took three photographs, of the stern, midships, and bows, then went through the gate. He paid the admission and bought the brochure on the submarine; there was a two-page drawing of the internal layout. He mounted the steps up to the doorway cut into the vessel’s stern section. He stooped through, into the aft-torpedo and electrical machine room.

It was brightly lit, and very clean. He was in a narrow passage, ten metres long, lined at eye-level with metal cabinets with dials and wheels. Below these, half under the steel footplates, were the long generators. In the very stern was a torpedo tube with a circular steel door.

McQuade’s heart sank. In this room alone there were a hundred places where a man could conceal valuables. Under the steel foot-plates, behind the labyrinth of pipes … He raised his automatic camera, and took four photographs, from different angles. Then moved on, to make a quick familiarization tour before going over everything carefully. He went through a water-tight door into the Dieselmotorenraum.

He was being grimly businesslike, but again his heart sank. Again there were a myriad of places to hide things. Big diesel engines, five feet high, lined the long narrow corridor. Overhead was a mass of twisted pipes, dials, valves.

He took more photographs, then pushed on, through another door. Into the galley, where some cook had once fed fifty-two men.

It was two metres by four. There was a black oven, some cupboards, a small toilet leading off, like a pantry, and that was it. McQuade looked around. Surely nobody would hide loot in a place like this?

He ducked through the next door. Into the Unteroffizierenraum, the Petty Officers’ Room.

There were eight bunks, four on each side. Covered in red cloth. There were two folding tables in the narrow alleyway. Above and below the bunks were wooden lockers. He tried to open one. It was locked. Then he crouched through a circular water-tight door. Into the Zentrale, the nerve-centre of the boat. He stood there, looking around. This was the part he had looked down into through the escape tube.

The periscope hung from the deckhead. To the right was a corner bench, and to the left, a stand-up table. All around, in a mind-boggling array, were dials, valves, more dials and more valves. Above his head, in the centre was the hatch leading up to the conning tower. This was where the telescopic escape tube came down from. It had been removed from this submarine and an iron grille prevented anybody going up to the conning tower.

He made his way forward, and stooped through another circular water-tight door. Into the Commander’s Room.

It was tiny. There was a narrow bunk, a locker and a folding table. A curtain was there for privacy, but the cabin was also a thoroughfare for the whole crew. On the other side was the radio room.

He tried the lockers and cupboard. All locked.

The next room was the officers’ sleeping cabin. Three bunks, lockers, a folding table. He went through it quickly, into the next part – the petty officers’ sleeping cabin: four bunks and a toilet. He passed through another water-tight door, into the main torpedo room.

This was it, the killing part of the machine.

It was fifteen paces long. In the bows lay the four big torpedo tubes. One hatch was open. Inside lay a torpedo, its propeller visible. From a rack hung a torpedo, nine metres long. There was a hatch angled into the deckhead above it, where new torpedoes were slid into the boat and onto the racks until loaded into the tubes. There were also nine bunks for the ordinary crew, and lockers. Everywhere ran pipes, valves and dials.

He closely examined the locking mechanism of the torpedo-tube hatches; they were secured by locking wheels in the centre, and locking pins, He tried to open one. The mechanism was painted over solid. He would need a crowbar to twist them open.

He looked around grimly. There were a thousand places on this boat to hide treasure.

He sighed and retraced his steps, to start going through the boat again, foot by foot, taking photographs and making notes. Until he knew every nook and cranny.

It was mid-afternoon when he finished. He had been through the U-boat four times. It felt as if he knew every corner and crevice, and he would scream if he stayed inside it a minute longer. He came out of the cold submarine into the freezing grey day.

He crossed the road towards the rest of the museum, and mounted the long path. He entered the massive memorial built in the shape of a conning tower.

He stared at the wall. It was a gigantic mural depicting thousands of ships and submarines, all in relief. Every German ship that was sunk, every submarine that went down, was represented here, to scale, in bleak grey sculpture.

McQuade stared. It was awe-inspiring. Staggering. And horrifying, that this is what men did to each other when they went to war. The horrifying waste of human life. Written in stone, in huge Gothic letters: ‘120,000. Sie Starben Für Uns.’ You died for us.

McQuade turned away from it abruptly. Trying to push the shrieking image of that black soupiness out of his mind, trying to feel tough, like a fortune-hunter. He grimly crossed the courtyard to the second building.

Here was the other half of the horrifying story. There were seven maps of the world, representing seven stages of the war on the sea. Red dots indicated where every Allied ship was sunk by U-boats. Blue crosses represented sunken German submarines. In the first three maps, representing the periods up to December 1941, red dots of sunken Allied shipping were densely packed around Britain, Portugal, Gibraltar, France, West Africa and even South West Africa, and there were very few blue crosses. In the maps representing January 1942 to May 1943 these red dots were massively concentrated around the east coast of America, the Caribbean, West Africa, South Africa and the north Atlantic – but there were many more blue crosses now. The last two maps, depicting the period June 1943 to mid-1945, showed the way the war was going for Germany, the terrible price her submarines were paying: the red dots were sparse and the blue crosses were numerous. He then took the stairs that descended into a large, circular mausoleum. And he wanted to get out of the place. It was ghostly. Dull light filtered through a glass opening to the courtyard above. Laid into the walls, and on a raised dais in the centre, were coats of arms, and flags of U-boat squadrons that went down. McQuade hurried through it, to the exit staircase on the other side, almost feeling the ghosts behind him. He found himself reentering the massive conning tower again, with its sculptured mural of sunken shipping and the inscription, ‘You died for us’.

There was an elevator leading to the very top of the memorial. McQuade had had enough; but he entered the elevator. He emerged onto a balcony at the top of the tower.

It was freezing up here. He looked down.

Hundreds of feet below him, down on the bleak beach, lay the U-boat he had just examined so carefully, long and mean and dangerous. And beyond lay the Baltic Sea, grey and icy under the leaden sky. Beneath his feet was the sculptured mural, the haunting mausoleum, the maps with all those blood-red dots and funereal-blue crosses. McQuade looked down at that grim submarine, and he saw again that ghostly shape under the freezing Atlantic off the Skeleton Coast with its pitch-black horrors. He tried to force the image from his mind, and think of the loot waiting for him. But he could not make it; all he could see and think and smell and taste and feel was that charnel house, that ocean tomb, a war grave that he was going to desecrate, the bones and soup of brave German boys he was going to wade through.

He turned abruptly, back to the elevator.

He hurried back along the freezing seafront, to catch a ferry back to Kiel. To catch a train to Sylt, where the U-boat archives are. He felt like a grave-robber all the way.