"Much obliged," Peggy said. The phrase was a polite commonplace. Suddenly, though, she felt the words' true meaning. "I am much obliged to you-everybody who's finally helping me get home."

"I am here to assist travelers, ma'am," the official said, a trifle stiffly.

"Yes. I know. That's why I'm obliged to you," Peggy replied. He didn't get it. He was an Englishman, but maybe the war and all the accompanying madness seemed no more real to him than they did to the Danes. How long had he worked here?

Well, it didn't matter. All that mattered was that she had the documents she needed. Nothing would keep her off that airplane. Nothing!

She sent a wire to Herb: EVERYTHING SET. FIRST ENGLAND, THEN USA. WHOOPEE! LOVE, PEGGY. The clerk at the telegraph office had to ask her how to spell Whoopee. She was happy to tell him.

Herb's answer was waiting at the hotel when she finished spending money for the day: WHOOPEE IS RIGHT, BABE. SEE YOU SOON! LOVE, ME. She smiled. He always signed telegrams to her like that. And, like her, he'd stayed under the ten-word minimum-rate limit. They were nowhere near poor. When you'd been through the Depression, though, you watched every penny from habit. When you weren't shopping, of course. Well, sometimes even then, but not always.

She ate another splendid Danish breakfast the next morning. One day to go. She was all packed. The only thing she'd have to do tomorrow would be to put the clothes she had on now into her suitcase. What she'd wear then was already draped over a chair in her room. She intended to go to the airport very, very early. She didn't care how bored she'd get waiting for the plane. As with the train out of Germany, she wasn't going to miss it. She wasn't, she wasn't, she WASN'T!

She had lunch at the Yacht Pavilion. A guidebook called it delightful, and she agreed. She could see the statue of the Little Mermaid staring out into the sound. The smorrebrod was good, the aquavit even better.

Men started getting off a couple of freighters in the harbor and forming up in long columns on the piers. Peggy's eye passed over them, then snapped back. "No," she whispered. But yes. She'd never mistake the color those men were wearing. She grabbed a passing waiter by the arm and pointed across the almost waveless water. "Those are German soldiers! You're being invaded!"

He looked at her, at the troops in Feldgrau and beetling Stahlhelms, back to her again. Laughing, he shook his head. "No. It cannot be. Someone is making a film, that's all."

Briskly, the German soldiers marched off the piers and into Copenhagen. They looked as if they were heading straight for the royal palace. Well, where else would they be going?

A few rifle shots rang out, then a sharp burst of machine-gun fire. Faint in the distance, Peggy heard screams. Blood drained from the waiter's face, leaving him pale as vanilla ice cream. All over the Yacht Pavilion, people started exclaiming. "But it cahn't be!" someone said in clear British English.

More gunfire. More screams. It could be, all right. And it damn well was. That plane wouldn't fly to England tomorrow, or anywhere else. Peggy burst into tears.

Chapter 16

Julius Lemp felt happier about the world, or at least about how his little part of it worked. Now the U-boat skipper understood his orders. And he was pleased with himself, because he'd had a pretty good notion of what they were about even before the balloon went up.

If the Reich had decided to forestall the Western democracies by occupying Denmark and Norway before they could, of course France and especially England would try to do something about it. And one of the things they would try to do would be to rush as many warships as they could to Scandinavian waters. If they did that, they'd likely storm right through Lemp's patrol zone.

No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than one of the ratings on watch sang out: "Smoke to the southwest, Skipper!"

"Ha!" Lemp swung his own binoculars in that direction. "Now the game starts!" He peered and studied. "Looks like… three plumes."

"I think so, too," the sailor said, and then, after a moment, "They've got wings on their feet, don't they?"

"Ja." Lemp nodded. "Destroyers. They have to be. Nothing else will go that fast." By now, England had to know Germany was using her warships to move troops into southern Norway and fight the coastal forts. Destroyers could get to the battle in a hurry, and their crews were practiced with both guns and torpedoes. They were also quick and cheap to build, which made them more readily expendable than bigger, slower ships.

"Can we get to them?" another rating asked.

"We're going to try," Lemp answered. They couldn't make a surface approach, not unless they wanted to get blown out of the water long before their could loose their own eels. "Go below," he added. "We'll see how much help the Schnorkel can give us." He followed the men off the conning tower. As he slammed the hatch behind him and dogged it, he called, "Dive! Schnorkel depth! Change course to"-he calculated in his head-"to 195."

"Diving to Schnorkel depth. Changing course to 195," the helmsman said. Nothing flustered Peter. That was one of the reasons he was at the helm.

Lieutenant Beilharz appeared. The matte-black paint on his helmet had a fresh, shiny scratch. He really needed the protection to keep his skull from being gashed. Lemp pointed at him. "Just the man I'm looking for, by God! If we go all-out with your infernal device, how fast can we manage underwater?"

"They say thirteen knots, Skipper," the Schnorkel expert answered. "Everything shakes and rattles like it's coming to pieces, though."

"We'll try it anyway," Lemp declared. "Three destroyers are heading east as fast as they can go. Without the snort, we don't have a prayer of getting into firing range before they're past us. With it… Well, we've got a prayer. I think. We'll give it our best shot, any which way. You keep the damned gadget working the way it's supposed to, you hear?"

"Jawohl!" Beilharz said. Lemp had to hope he could deliver. The device was still experimental. And experimental devices had a way of going haywire just when you needed them most.

All he could do was try. He spoke into the voice tube to the engine room: "Give me thirteen knots."

"Thirteen, Skipper?" The brassy response didn't come right out and ask Are you out of your bloody mind?, but it might as well have.

"Thirteen," Lemp repeated firmly. "If that's more than we can take, we'll back it down. But our targets are making better than twice that. If we want to meet them, we have to give it everything we've got. Thirteen." He said it one more time.

"Aye aye, Skipper." The men who minded the diesels would do what you told them to. What happened afterwards wasn't their worry… unless, of course, it turned out to be everybody's worry.

They'd done eight knots submerged plenty of times, ten or eleven often enough. Above that, Beilharz had been reluctant to go. War sometimes forced you to do what you'd be reluctant to try in peacetime, though. If the U-30 could knock out one of those destroyers, how many soldiers' lives might that save? Hundreds? Thousands? No telling for sure.

The diesels surged. They had to work hard to push the U-boat through the resisting water. Lemp felt the power through the soles of his feet as he looked through the periscope. Without taking his eyes off the destroyers the optics displayed, he said, "You there, Klaus?"

"Sure am, Skipper," Klaus Hammerstein answered. Lemp hadn't expected anything else. Hammerstein might be a pup, but he was a well-trained pup. The exec's place in an attack run was at the captain's elbow. He'd have to do most of the calculating… if they could get close enough to the destroyers for it to matter.