‘I wish to God you hadn’t come,’ he swore.

Then the steel door slammed shut, the wheel which secured the watertight seal was being turned, and he saw the veteran no more.

Inside the crowded control room Eling was standing by the intercom, barking instructions, eyes fixed on the dials and gauges as he listened to replies. But already he was giving instructions to sections of the boat from which no reply was forthcoming. As the chief engineer shouted in his ear that both aft torpedo hatches were flooding and water began seeping down an instrument panel, there was the unmistakable sound of the electric motors complaining, complaining again, and falling silent.

‘Engine room! Report!’ Eling shouted into the mouthpiece, but there was no response. He looked imploringly at the chief who stood soaked in a torn singlet beside the far watertight door, shaking his head.

With the dying of the engines and the closing of the hatches, a relative quiet descended over the craft. Metal was still pounding against metal in a distant forward compartment, but soon that also stopped. The craft was settling nose-down in the water, and they listened to the submarine’s death throes. A groan here, a creak there, the crying of tortured metal, the cracking of the internal wood fascias as they buckled and split, and always the slow, deadly sound of gurgling water. But from the crew there was only silence, the silence of men fallen to despair. The captain’s gaze was fixed unblinkingly on the depth gauge, watching its hypnotic fall, great beads of perspiration trickling down his forehead. Then there was a heavy bump, hands once again reached out for support, and the submarine settled on the bottom.

The captain tapped the gauge. ‘A hundred and twenty metres,’ he announced, his eyes glazing. ‘Could be worse …’ There was silence as everyone calculated the odds. ‘Chief! Damage report,’ the captain instructed.

‘Engines dead, rear compartments flooded. I can’t raise the forward torpedo compartment. The bilges are flooding so the batteries are gone and if they’ve not yet drowned they’ll be choking on chlorine gas in next to no time … Sorry, Captain,’ the chief apologized as Eling’s stare gave him silent rebuke. This was still the Kriegsmarine, and there was a proper way to die. ‘The control room is the only watertight compartment. For now.’

‘How many men do we know for sure are still alive?’

‘Just what you see, Captain.’ It made a total of fourteen. Fourteen out of fifty. No, out of a hundred and fifty.

‘Looks like we have them surrounded, eh?’ Eling said grimly. He turned to Hencke. ‘I’m sorry, Hencke. It seems we failed. I’ve got a dead craft and fourteen men left. As far as we can tell all other compartments are flooded, which means that anyone behind those doors is already dead. I am sorry.’

Hencke marvelled at this man who had been ordered to sacrifice his craft and most of his crew in order to bring one passenger home, yet who still felt the need to apologize.

‘Is there anything to be done?’ Hencke was surprised how calm his voice sounded, betraying none of the turmoil and twisted nerves within.

Before Eling could answer, from no great distance away came the echoing sound of an explosion, not a depth charge but something big. A grim smile of satisfaction flickered around the captain’s mouth. ‘So the dying’s not yet done, and maybe the surviving too … That was a mine. One of ours. Ripping the bottom out of a ship. One of theirs. I took us into a minefield,’ he explained. ‘Seems to have paid off.’

‘What will happen now?’

‘They’ll have trouble locating us on the bottom with all the junk and other wrecks around here. And now they’ve lost one of their own …?’ He shrugged. ‘They’ll probably call it a day. They won’t want to thrash around in a minefield, particularly when they know there’s a 95 per cent probability they’ve sunk us already.’

As if in confirmation, from nearby came the explosion of a clutch of depth charges, one final gesture from the Royal Navy planted along the huge oil slick which was forming on the surface and which they hoped marked the tomb of another U-boat. One for luck, and farewell. The violent rocking cast the craft into darkness yet again and when at last some source of light was restored, even the rueful smile which the captain had managed to manufacture had been wiped away.

‘Further damage report, Chief! Chief?’

But the chief did not respond. He was staring transfixed at the cabinet where the emergency breathing gear was kept. ‘They’re gone. There’s not a single one left …’ And with those words, each man knew, had disappeared their last chance of survival. The chief turned in desperation towards the captain. ‘The maintenance crew, at Kiel. They were stripping the boat down for overhaul, started here in the control room. They were unloading everything. Then we got orders to turn around, I threw them straight off board …’

No one spoke. What was there to say? In spite of the angry looks cast in his direction, it wasn’t the chief’s fault. On arrival in Kiel after weeks at sea they hadn’t even had time to break wind let alone check stores before they were ordered back out to sea. How could anyone have reckoned on some half-witted fitter forgetting to replace the breathing gear? On all the emergency supplies in other compartments being cut off behind flooded bulkheads? On being caught out playing taxi at the bottom of the North Sea?

As the silence dragged on Hencke could feel the eyes of some of the crew, particularly the younger ones, latching on to him, piercing him with accusation. The one who had brought them here. The one who had caused all this. The passenger …

‘Do we have any prospects?’ he asked the captain.

‘Staying here and slowly choking to death,’ responded Eling grimly. ‘Or trying to escape without breathing apparatus from 120 metres and probably drowning. Take your pick.’

‘It’s no fun dying slowly, Captain.’

‘I do so agree.’ He gave a small Prussian nod of respect. At least the bastard wasn’t panicking and screaming his head off; Eling couldn’t have stood that. ‘So. We make ready to abandon ship! Chief. Chief, where …?’

The chief had disappeared head-first through a service hatch in the floor. When he hauled himself back up he was coughing and his eyes were full of terror. ‘Chlorine!’ he gasped. ‘Chlorine!’

Sea water was leaking into the huge batteries which powered the electric motors, and the result was a chemical reaction which produced a gas as deadly as that found in any trench of the First War. And it was seeping uncontrollably around them.

‘For God’s sake flood the compartment and let’s get out of here,’ pleaded one of the younger ratings.

‘Can’t,’ the chief spluttered. ‘Won’t be able to open the hatch until the air pressure inside has equalled the water pressure outside. 120 metres. At that pressure the concentration of chlorine in the lungs will kill us in seconds.’

‘But it’ll kill us anyway!’ the rating responded. ‘We stay, we die. We try to leave, we die. What have you done to us, Chief?’ The edge of desperation in his voice was beginning to infect the others around him. It wouldn’t be long before there was a general outpouring of panic which would overwhelm them all.

‘There’s one chance.’ It was Eling who spoke, very quietly, to reassert his authority. ‘One chance, perhaps. Above our heads in the conning tower. There’s room for one man. We close the hatch between the control room and conning tower, he floods the conning tower like an escape chamber, he opens the exterior hatch and escapes.’

‘But what about the rest of us?’ pressed a petty officer.

The chief interjected, desperate to bear hopeful tidings for a change. ‘The first man closes the exterior hatch from the outside, we drain the conning tower, we do it all over again. Fourteen times.’ But he didn’t sound as if he had convinced even himself.