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Page 33.

Work and war and responsibility kept Tim too busy to spend much time thinking. Many ships had the new RADARs on them, but they were limited in range and often inaccurate. Huff Duff, or High Frequency/Direction Finding (HD/HF), was an entirely different tool with over 600 miles (1000 km) range. Using an unusual cage-shaped sender/receiver mounted on a mast, Huff Duff could intercept German radio traffic and triangulate the approximate location of U-boot packs. A round picture tube similar to a RADAR screen revealed the location of the signal being sent. Already, as these units were being refined in crash R&D projects on both sides of the Atlantic, the effect on the northern convoy routes was measurable—U-boots were beginning to run for their lives. A ship with Huff Duff could use shore-based as well as ship-based Huff Duff units, some located as far away as in the Bahamas, others in newly liberated North Africa, to zero in on wolf packs and then send aerial bombers or antisubmarine ships to kill the killers. Now the latest American version was being tested in the South Atlantic as the Allies gained their balance and started hunting the enemy who had been sinking hundreds of Lend-Lease ships.

Tim felt like one of the pack as he joined his hosts on the bridge, wearing his own sandy loden coat and flat helmet. The warrants were in complete technical control of their operation. Tim’s job was to compile technical statistics on the unit’s performance, and to write a detailed journal over 100 pages long, with appendices. To this end, he had the relative privacy of a small cabin, and a typewriter with a supply of paper and ribbons. After a four-week cruise, they were due in the Bahamas for a well-earned and anticipated R&R, during which Tim would debrief U.S. and Commonwealth officers on the strong and weak points of the new technology.

Already, they had a possible kill a hundred miles away, off Cape Verde, and they steamed south at top speed. The warrants triangulated, using a sender at Tobruk and another at the Gambia, and a flight of Lancaster bombers had been sent to investigate a possible U-boot nest.

Then disaster struck.

On the first day of the second week of Tim’s cruise aboard Sturmer, just as the ship’s bell rang and the smell of tea and cakes wafted up to the bridge, a tremendous explosion rocked the tail section of the ship. Another followed immediately after, tearing off the bow.

Tim had been standing at the rail amidships, enjoying a chat with two young sailors who were telling stories of the pubs and of their families and girlfriends in Leeds, and a brisk sea breeze blew. It was a sunny day, and Tim felt as if he were on a luxury cruise, if only one could order a good cup of American coffee and maybe a handful of chocolates from home.

The next moment, Tim smashed against a bulkhead. Everything went black. He heard the truncated scream of one of the young sailors as both men disappeared in a gout of flying glass and blood and bits of flesh. By a miracle, Tim found himself intact—he’d been blown into a cavity that had once housed small collapsible life rafts but now contained only rolled-up deck canvas. Jammed awkwardly between two rolls of this sun shield, he had survived when the other two boys clearly hadn’t made it. At first Tim thought he was blind, but he realized his vision was being obscured by a mix of oil and blood smeared like porridge on his face. Stunned, he at first thought he must be missing his arms, but he found them firmly attached and was able to raise his hands to wipe the gore off his face. Already, Sturmer was listing badly, and it looked as if the sea would swallow Tim when she rolled over.

The U-boot they were hunting had found them first. Two or three torpedoes, and the dirty work was done.

Now he heard men screaming as he untangled himself and got on his feet. The steel deck was listing badly, and he pulled himself up a ladder to the upper decks, straddling an upended and shattered lifeboat that would be of no use.

Events unfolded with blinding speed now, all wrapped in a white froth of thrown waves as the ship started sinking and the sea surface bubbled up closer by the minute. He caught glimpses of faces in the water, drowning men, arms reaching for ropes and hawsers and anything else to grab, mouths spitting water but taking in more water instead of the air they hoped to breathe. Wounded men, helpless, were drowning in six inches of water on the inundated decks, pinned under floating debris, and they looked up with huge imploring eyes as if it were just a shop window between themselves and the air they needed to breathe. He thought he recognized Jerry Harris’s dour bearded face staring in black accusation up at Tim, at the world he was about to lose, before the sea closed over the man.

Tim slipped on the blood-smeared deck as the ship shifted, and banged his ribs on a steel mooring-winch. Doubled over, he slipped down into the boiling cold water. His breath was knocked out of him. Not a sound could escape his mouth, though he tried to scream. Then his mouth filled with harsh, salty water. He felt hands grasping at him with rubbery dying terror, cold fingers like little fish gnawing at him, trying to get under his shirt or grasp his belt.

For a minute or so, he was underwater. This was it. He was done for. He’d hold on as long as he could, in this moment between life and death, but when the pressure got too much he’d open his mouth to gasp for air and instead take in a lungful of water and black out. He heard the clanking of the ship’s engines, still firing away on at least one boiler. He heard the grinding of her worm gear as it crunched away in a shaft full of abrasive seawater cutting through her packing grease. He heard the screams of trapped men who faced certain death from drowning just minutes away. He heard the tortured groan of tons of steel realigning itself now that the ship’s structural integrity had been destroyed. How deep was the sea here? What would it be like to sink down as the darkness quickly took him?

Then she rolled the other way, settling by what was left of the bow, so that the stern rose momentarily.

He felt the weight of water crashing away, and got several great lungs full of cold air, all in a blur.

As the stern rose up, he spread-eagled against the aft gun turret. In that instant, he caught sight of the U-boot. She surfaced about a quarter mile away, a fish rising from the sea, streaming foam and water, with rich twirls of magnificent bottle-green sea flying around her sail. The commander might put out some rubber rafts if he had them. The Germans sometimes stayed to rescue, but nowadays the Krauts were on the run, and it was dubious the Kraut would risk his boat and complement to save enemy sailors, particularly in sight of land.

Sky and sea whirled blender-like. Tim lost consciousness again as he fell.

The way he figured it afterward, the stern had risen up, then briefly hung in the sky with him straddling a gun mount. Then she’d rocked once in a swell, throwing him clear, before sliding without another sideways motion straight down, bow-first, on the long descent a mile down to whatever slimy plain would become her eternal cemetery.

Tim had on his life vest, and that saved him. He came to, minutes after falling into the water, and found himself bobbing up and down in an oil slick among debris—a large tin of tea, some wooden crates of linen and bread, waterlogged mattresses, and motionless bodies.

Then he heard shouts. A few men had gathered around a rubber life raft from the Sturmer. Tim scissor-kicked toward them. His ribs ached, and the sea was cold, but he was alive. He was intact.