Crucified by Michael Slade

Author:Michael Slade
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Thrillers, Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780143167877
Publisher: Penguin Group Canada
Published: 2009-06-02T22:00:00+00:00

"Thank you for telling me."

"If Karl had been killed in England, I would have wanted to know. Not far from here is a magnificent tree. The pilot was secretly buried beneath its canopy. If you'd like to go for a walk in the country, I'll accompany you to his grave."

U-BOAT

GERMANY, 1944

Entering the U-boat was like crawling through the neck of a bottle. With the hatch closed, you said farewell to the sun, the moon, the stars, the earth, and everyday life. Suddenly, your world shrank down to this oppressive, claustrophobic, constricted steel tube. The Elektro boat—a new weapon in the arsenal of the Reich—was half the size of the submarines that had begun the war. Less than ten feet wide, it wasn't designed for the comfort of its crew. The sub was a battle engine stuffed with machinery and torpedoes. It gave the men just enough room to vegetate and perform the chores essential to their mission. For weeks on end, the fourteen-member crew would stoop, step up, slip sideways, and bang their heads on pipes and hand-wheels as they moved along the central aisle. The Judas agent felt like Jonah inside the whale as this mechanical predator slipped silently beneath the sea toward its target.

His codename was Sturmer.

Daredevil, in English.

And daring indeed was this plan to smuggle Hitler's atomic secrets to Churchill in the Black Devil.

The tide had turned in the Battle of the Atlantic. In the early years of the war, wolf packs of U-boats had attacked convoys on the surface, then submerged to escape from destroyers. But by the end of 1943, sub losses were greater than the number of ships torpedoed. What tipped the scales against Germany were aircraft equipped with radar. Forced underwater, the wolf packs were deprived of surface mobility, and solitary hunters had little chance against an escorted convoy. Clearly, Germany required a new type of sub.

The Judas agent had been sequestered in a hideaway on the Baltic Sea for a crash course on the revolutionary Type XXIII Elektroboot. Diesel power, Sturmer learned, was obsolete. By replacing it with electric motors juiced by high-capacity batteries, the Germans had built a machine that could stay submerged for 194 nautical miles, so it couldn't be "starved out" by surface pursuers. The electric boat could maintain a lightning attack for over an hour, and it was almost immune to echo-detection by sonar-probing destroyers. With double the attack speed of other submarines, the Type XXIII had the option of silence over swiftness by switching to an auxiliary electric "creep" motor.

Run silent, run deep.

That was the Black Devil.

Sneaking Sturmer aboard the sub had not been difficult.

By 1944, the mauling of the wolf packs had bled experienced crews dry. The Kriegsmarine had to take whatever manpower it could get. From the hideaway on the Baltic Sea, Sturmer was sent to the main torpedo-training school for officers at Miirwick.

By then, his German was up to snuff and his papers were real.

He was just an ex-Luftwaffe marksman going to sea. His studies focused on torpedoes and how to launch them.

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