Watchmen shot white incendiary flares off the sides, which flew up and glowed on the placid water. The reflection pierced the darkness and I breathed in the light. For a moment I was calm inside the hull of the Negro. But the glass top of my fuselage reflected the flash and the ping of a watchman’s gunfire pierced the bow of the Negro.
My boat was shot at once more before the whole aft of the British ship exploded into flame, and the top decks became brilliantly illuminated by a deep orange glow. Fire rose up into the air in a giant column. The starboard-leaning burning section of the aft tilted toward the waterline at an impossible angle. The middle and bow of the ship cruised forward, both sections intact but no longer connected. In the eerie light of the flares and orange glow of the flame, the ship’s conning tower leaned down to the sea, which pushed its bow into the sky. Water around the tower bubbled up, drinking the ship down, gulping up its side until it vanished, pushed under by the upright and sinking bow. There was a large white churning of water after the bow sank.
The aft of the ship was still a billowing tower of black smoke and flame and in the distance, the crew who made it up to the deck leapt off the sides into the burning water below them. One of the jumpers was on fire. His arms and legs kicked at the air to shake the flames loose as he plummeted toward the waterline.
The shadows of burning men jumping from what I had convinced myself was only machinery, tonnage, and supplies seared hot and terrible into my mind.
When the aft tilted forward into the sea, the last of the white flares dropped to the water. Deck by deck the flaming ship’s aft half-sank, leaving the wide gas spill burning on the surface.
My mind took in every detail like a camera taking hundreds of shots per second, all of which settled at the stem of my head, deep in my snake brain. I imagined being onboard, iron sheets squealing as they unhinged. Rivets wrenched loose. Overheads in the passageways sucked down by the blast of heat, and the mêlée of movement of all the sailors running into the smoke filling the holds with clotted air. Charred armament. The sibilant wheeze of air pumping from the bilges. The gunmetal gray world buckling in around them. All those men billeted there. The bunk room now a bellows. Warping. The dizzying truth of what was to come. The vitals of the ship gutted by fire. Paint boiling off the bulkheads.
These flecks of images sliced beneath my skin. There was no returning to who I was before. There was no being someone who did not take that shot again. I was now something different. Those images would never be dislodged.
I steered the Negro to pass through the wake of the troop carrier to avoid any of the wreckage. That’s when a yellow dog swam by me. It barked, and barked, and barked, and the sound of it filled the capsule of my submarine. The dog swam away from the burning surface of this ship, farther from any direction where there could possibly be land. It swam and barked, moving deeper into the ocean. This was something I had not prepared for. The cold language of class, of ship, and of tonnage made it all sound like a game, and removed any talk of people and their lives. I’d been trained to sink floating sections of warehouses and had done so. But the sound of the dog barking, barking like Fergus, barking until the cold pulled it under, coupled in my brain with the images of the burning man jumping into the sea.
A garbled swishing rose in my stomach, then a familiar stabbing pain. Wet heaving noises croaked up from between my ribs. Yellow bile splattered against my lap and ran off in runnels of spew down my thighs. After recovering, I turned the Negro around and set my course for the German battleship’s rendezvous point. I used my neckerchief to clean vomit from my lap, and where it soaked into my jumpsuit down my leg. All the thoughts in my head dissolved into something dark and grainy, and my bowels felt like they were on the verge of collapse.
I lit a cork with a match to mask the smell of the sour bilge.
Heading back to the meeting point with the German battleship, I retraced my exact movements so as not to make the slightest calculation error that might send me off course into the middle of the ocean. It took me six hours to get back, working against the current. By then it was well past sunup, when the sky opened and I hoped that any plane that saw me would mistake me for an algae patch, driftwood, a naiad, the back of a rippling wave. At 0800 hours, I was at the correct meeting point at the meeting time, but the battleship still had not appeared. By 0900 hours my sub was almost out of fuel. I cut the engines and let myself drift, then restarted and worked my way back to the meeting point. With each passing minute came the terror of being in the wrong spot. I checked and rechecked my calculations. As I waited, a profound regret for sinking the ship built up in me, and I realized that it would have been a worthy punishment to be abandoned for such a sin.
Now, I think, perhaps I was cast off.
Then at 1000 hours, with aprons of bright white clouds bordering the sky, the battleship steamed over the horizon toward me with the white waterline pulsing where the bow turned up the swells. It was broad daylight now, a poor time for any motion in these waters, but the ship gave me such a lift of hope. I’d managed to stay alive. A man on the bow used signal flags to communicate with me, but I did not understand what he was trying to say.
When the ship was alongside, they lowered a sailor on a cargo line by crane. When the sailor stood on the bow of my submarine, he raised his hand and saluted me. His body looked like a statue riding on the swells. Then he tied a line off to the bow that the crane pulled into the open cargo bay door, where it was hooked up to more lines and winched aboard. In the cargo bay there were only three other Negro subs. I’d been the nineteenth to launch, so there should have been eighteen boats. The three Negros in the hold had their torpedoes still adhered to the bottom. Crew members unlatched my cockpit cover and pushed it up.
“Ensign Koopman,” Major Oldif said. “Where is your torpedo?”
“I fired it, sir.”
“Did you make contact?”
“Yes, sir.”
“With what?”
“A Class 8 armed troop carrier, sir.”
“Yes. Yes. Yes. You’re the one then. We had radio transmission from the ship that went down. That was you. God damn it, good job, Dutchman.” Major Oldif reached into the sub and squeezed my shoulder and gave it a shake. I wanted to hug him for touching me, for bringing me away from the endless drift. Then he looked at me and noticed the vomit on my clothes. He pulled his hand off my shoulder and wiped it on the leg of his trousers. “Sailors, get this man out of here. He’s a goddamn hero, help him up and take him to the medics.” They lifted me out of the submarine. A heavy-caliber bullet had punctured the forward planking. My legs were so stiff they locked up on me and the men had to drag me to the medic.
“Why are there only three boats?”
“We’ll find more,” the sailor said.
In the medic’s office, Pauwel was lying on a cot and mumbling to himself, thrashing around under a sheet.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“CO poisoning,” the medic said.