Last Orders: The War That Came Early Read Online Free

nothing … yet.
    He couldn’t write, for instance, that the U-30 wasn’t such a happy boat as it had been. He didn’t like the way the sailors eyed one another. He didn’t like the way they didn’t come out with what was on their minds. The U-boat service tossed surface-Navy formality over the side. Living in one another’s pockets, the men had no time to waste on such foolishness. They were brothers, brothers in arms.
    Or they should have been. But there was at least one informer on board. And Lemp didn’t know who the polecat was. That worried him worse than anything. Anything this side of the Royal Navy, anyhow.
    The thought had hardly crossed his mind before a rating spoke from the other side of the curtain: “Skipper, they’ve spotted smoke up on the conning tower.”
    “Oh, they have, have they?” Lemp said. “All right. I’ll come.” He stuck his cap back on his head. Like every other U-boat officer in the
Kriegsmarine
, he’d taken out the stiffening wire so the crown didn’t stick up above his head but flopped onto the patent-leather bill. That crown was white, not navy blue: the sole mark of command he wore.
    His shoes clanked dully on the patterned steel of the ladder rungs leading up out of the submarine. The first whiff of fresh air made him involuntarily breathe deeper. You forgot how foul the inside of a U-boat really was till you escaped the steel tube.
    As he emerged, Gerhart Beilharz pointed north. “Over there, skipper,” he said. “Not a lot of smoke, but some.” He offered his binoculars.
    Lemp scanned with them. “You’re right,” he said as he gave them back. He called down the hatch to the helmsman, who stood near the bottom of the ladder. “Change course to 020. All ahead full.”
    “Course 020. All ahead full. Aye, aye.”
    They swung toward the smudge of smoke in the northern sky. Lemp wanted to get the U-boat out ahead of it if he could. That would let him submerge and give it a closer inspection through the periscope without the other ship’s being likely to spot them in return.
    Meanwhile, he kept his eye on the smudge. Things often happened slowly on the ocean. Ships weren’t airplanes. They needed time to cross the kilometers that separated one from another.
    Actually, he hoped he would spy the unknown ship before he had to submerge. It put out a lot more smoke than the U-30’s diesels did. It rode higher in the water than the U-boat did, too. And he got what he hoped for. Through the powerful, column-mounted binoculars on the conning tower, he got a glimpse of a small, chunky steamboat—not a warship at all.
    Not an obvious warship, anyhow. In the last war, English Q-ships—freighters with hidden heavy guns and gun crews—had surprised and sunk a couple of the Kaiser’s submarines. Their captains made the fatal mistake of thinking anything that looked harmless was bound to be harmless. They’d come close to use a deck gun instead of launching an eel from a distance—and they’d paid for their folly.
    Lemp took no such chances. Maybe the steamer was as harmless as it looked. But if it was, what was it doing out here in the middle of the North Sea? Its course would take it from Scotland to Norway. It might be bringing help for the Norwegian bandits who still did their best to make trouble for the German forces occupying the country.
    He ordered the boat down to
Schnorkel
depth. It was faster underwater on diesels than with battery power. As the unknown ship approached, he had plenty of time to work up a firing solution. He launched two torpedoes from less than a kilometer away.
    The explosive in one of the eels would have been plenty to blow up the steamer. But the blast that followed a midships hit from one of the eels was far bigger than a torpedo warhead alone could have caused. The U-30 staggered in the water; it felt and sounded as if someone were pounding on the boat with iron rods the size of telegraph poles.
    “Der Herr Gott im Himmel!”
Lieutenant