Agent of Death by John Drake

Author:John Drake [Drake, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2016-02-07T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 25

The Führerboat,

The North Atlantic.

Saturday 3 June, 07.00 hours.

The galley was a type XXI unit and highly advanced by U-boat standards. It was right aft of the control room in the same watertight compartment. It gleamed in stainless steel and aluminium; it had a fridge, a cooking range with four hot plates and a soup kettle, and twin sinks with running hot and cold fresh water. It was as crammed with pipes and tubes, valves and levers as everywhere else in the boat, and, in addition, every cubic centimetre that wasn’t full of pipes was stuffed with food in packets and tins and jars. It had all that, plus two white-clad cooks busy preparing breakfast, with an extractor hood humming over them, and a slave worker sitting in one corner where he was chained by his wrists to one of the pipes of the fresh water supply unit. He sat directly under a light fitting so it was easy to see him. But the cooks didn’t bother. They ignored him until Oberleutnant Kuhnke squeezed into their sizzling-hot, onion-stinking compartment followed by a man in Tommy clothes.

‘Sir,’ they said, and straightened their backs.

‘Carry on,’ said Kuhnke, and jabbed a thumb at the man behind him. ‘This is Herr Feldman. He needs to talk to the slavie.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said the cooks.

‘And he’s Herr Feldman, right?’

‘Yes, sir!’ The cooks knew that already. Gossip ran round a U-boat like a rat with its tail on fire, just as it did on every other naval vessel that ever sailed. So Feldman squeezed past Kuhnke, who went out, and he knelt by the man crouched on the hard steel deck.

‘Landau,’ said Feldman, in Polish. ‘They can’t understand us. Talk to me, Landau.’ He shook Landau’s shoulder, but Landau just shuddered and wrapped his arms around his knees and looked away. ‘The captain’s a decent man,’ said Feldman. ‘He spoke to me. He says the war’s over and he won’t let the blackshirts touch us. He knows what we did with the torpedoes. He guessed. But he wants our help because we know the boat so well. Do you understand, Landau?’

But Landau just closed his eyes. Feldman sat down beside him and put an arm round him. The legs of the two cooks were within touching distance. The two Germans chattered and joked as they fried sausages and beans, and their pans rattled and banged. Feldman hugged Landau’s thin shoulders. It was like this sometimes with men who’d nearly died. Feldman had seen it before. A man was sent for execution, sent for some arbitrary reason, or for no reason at all, and then he came back, reprieved for some other reason, but he came back broken because he’d looked at death and could never be the same again. Landau had been like this ever since they brought him back from the boat’s casing, when the SSA had tried to kill him.

‘Look,’ said Feldman, fumbling for cheerful words, ‘they gave me proper clothes. Even a shirt and underclothes, and shoes and socks.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.