‘How many men on a submarine, Captain?’

‘Like this? Around fifty.’

‘Times three. A hundred and fifty men. To bring me back home.’ He nodded towards the crew waiting on the U-boat deck. ‘Do they know …’

‘That’s why they’re all there. To see you. To honour you. To know what they might be dying for. That’s all a soldier ever wants, isn’t it, to know what he’s dying for? I thought it only fair.’

‘And I have become their Angel of Death …’

They were bumping alongside the hull, the dark waters of the Atlantic slapping its side, throwing the tiny rowing boat around and making it impossible for him to keep his balance, but there were hungry hands stretching down to grab him and haul him on board. As he found his feet on the slippery wooden deck casing he glanced around the men who were facing towards him, still saluting. He tried to look everyone directly in the eye, relieved in the near-darkness that he couldn’t. He stood to attention but did not return the salute; he saw no point in saluting death, there had already been too much dying.

‘Straight below, please. We’re already taking more risk than we ought to, sitting here. I think we’ve outstayed our welcome in Irish waters.’

It was only as they led him away that he turned for one final look at the shore and Sinead, but she was already lost in the descending night. He hoped she had already dried the tears and had gone.

EIGHT

It was around first light on what looked like being a filthy day when the asdic operator aboard the frigate HMS Juno picked up the fleeting echo. It was just as likely to be a shoal of cod as a 1,000-tonne U-boat, he thought, but his was not to reason why. He informed the officer of the watch, a punctilious if unimaginative youth from Yeovil, a former stores clerk made lieutenant who did everything by the book. The young officer had no hesitation in deciding to wake the captain; it was his first tour of duty as officer of the watch, and he was already mightily frustrated that the war would almost certainly be over before he had a chance to lob a depth charge in anger and play his own role in the annihilation of Hitler. He had no desire to add to that frustration by getting caught out, so he pulled his naval cap more firmly over his head and blew down the voice pipe.

The captain didn’t complain, he was too professional for that, but the croak in his voice betrayed the fatigue. They had just finished a particularly rough passage from the Arctic and were about to finish a far longer war, and somehow the adrenalin wasn’t pumping in the way it used to. He hadn’t been in home port for more than three months, none of them had, and to be ordered to turn round just a day out and take up position counting whitecaps off Rockall tested the patience of everyone. Yet even the suggestion of a submarine still caused the turbines to turn and the blood to surge. Through tactics and technology the Royal Navy had largely won the confrontation with the U-boat packs yet no commander underestimated the potential and the toughness of any U-boat crew, particularly one which had survived this long. The captain was on the bridge in less than a minute.

‘Report, Mr Ansell.’

‘Fleeting echo, sir! Indicating northerly heading. Trace very faint – asdic’s trying to pick it up again,’ the excited duty officer spluttered.

‘Steady on, Mr Ansell, you’ve got time to take a breath,’ the captain counselled. ‘Now, no chance of it being one of ours, heading back home to Scapa? Don’t want us snapping after our own tails, you know.’

‘Definitely not, sir,’ came the reply with a tone of hurt pride. ‘No reports of ours in the area, I’ve double-checked. I’ve also alerted the other ships in our group.’

‘Very well. We’d better try and pick them up again. Yeoman, form on a line bearing 270 degrees – course 030 degrees – ships 2,000 yards apart.’

‘Further instructions, sir?’

‘“Tally Ho!”, Mr Ansell. “Tally Ho!”’

In the monochrome light that flooded U-494, the crewmen seemed already to be wearing death masks. There was a weariness about them even the tension couldn’t disperse. Hencke discovered the crew had returned to Kiel after a gruelling tour of duty in the waters of the Bay of Biscay, torpedo tubes empty, one victim claimed, nerves shattered and duty done, the crew desperately hoping that this was the end of their war, when they’d received orders to sail immediately for Ireland. They hadn’t even finished handing over their craft to the maintenance crew before they were instructed to refuel and were turned around; many of the crew hadn’t had chance to set foot on shore. The days without sunlight, breathing air contaminated by diesel fumes and rotting food, listening to the monotonous, maddening drip of condensation, having had no bath in fresh water for weeks, not even being able to take a relaxed crap, all left their marks on the faces of the submariners. They were haggard, bearded, dirty and scared. They had been ordered back to sea on a Friday, the thirteenth of April, and that was as bad a sign as an albatross building its nest in the conning tower.

Early on the first day out from Ireland they had been brushed by the tentacles of enemy asdic, but a sharp change of course seemed to have thrown that off. Perhaps they hadn’t been noticed at all. On a normal patrol they would have taken a wide sweep round the Faeroes to avoid their notorious minefields before heading into the North Sea, but nothing was normal on this patrol. They had orders to take the short cut and risk the mines. It would save time. It might make them crab meat. But it also seemed to have fooled their pursuers. When finally they broke away from British coastal waters and into the North Sea the crew were allowed in pairs onto the conning tower bridge for a taste of night air to recover from the putrid atmosphere created by the tension.

Eling had wanted to head for one of the U-boat bases in German-occupied Norway, or even one of the isolated fjords along the Scandinavian coast, but his suggestion had been rejected. The High Command didn’t want Hencke in some distant outpost of the Reich where their control was all but shot to hell and with local resistance fighters crawling out from behind every rock. They wanted Hencke home, in Germany. Eling’s orders were specific about that. So once in the North Sea they proceeded south, risking the surface by night, submerged by day and hugging the deep trench off the coast of Norway where the darkest, safest waters of the North Sea were to be found. But they couldn’t stay in the depths forever. Sometime, sometime soon, they would have to make a break for it.

‘Then we’re really going to find out how good a sailor our captain is,’ one veteran spat. ‘No torpedoes, no aircover, that stupid Scheisskerl Goebbels having told the entire fucking world what we’re up to … Going to be a ride to remember, this one.’

‘To where?’ Hencke had asked.

‘Kiel. Wilhelmshaven. Bremen. Probably to Hell. Wherever’s open. And if not … as close as we can get.’

‘He’ll get us home? The Captain’ll get us home?’ The voice belonged to a young sailor, on his first patrol, whose features had already been aged by the experience and the pale light as he sat in the shadows of empty torpedo racks.

The veteran offered no reply, preferring to study the dirt in his finger nails.

‘I don’t want to die,’ the youth continued. His words lacked sentimentality; he was making a statement of fact rather than a plea of self-pity.

‘No one wants to die, you bloody idiot. We don’t get any choice in the matter,’ the veteran responded. His words were sharp, but his tone understanding.

‘But not yet. Please God, not yet. I … I haven’t even had a woman,’ he said. He was struggling hard to control the tremor in his voice, wanting to share. ‘I had it all planned for when we got back to port. A shower. A beer. Then a woman. I had it all arranged …’