Pauwel turned toward me and squinted. “Thank god it’s you. Thank god.”
The medic helped me out of my jumpsuit. On the cot he started checking all my vital signs. He squeezed the black egg of the blood pressure cuff, which inhaled tighter around my arm. There were two other ensigns in the bunks next to Pauwel. One had his hands in a prayer tepee covering his face and the other was asleep on his side with a blanket over his head. After the medic checked me, he told me to go get something to eat and get back to my bunk.
“Pauwel. Are you okay?”
“I will be.”
“What happened?”
“There’ll be time for all that,” the medic said. “Go get something to eat.”
Pauwel nodded his head and waved me away. “I’m fine.”
I was starving, and I got myself a meal. I took a slice of sausage for Pauwel and brought it to the outer deck of the vessel to watch the rest of the Negros getting picked up. The sun was full and rising to the middle of the sky. The open water all around the ship was calm in that dull blue-glossed-brown color. In the distance was a glint of steel, the next Negro to be retrieved. When we got closer what I thought was the glass cockpit of the fuselage I saw to be the long cylinder of the torpedo. The Negro was upside down. When the crane hooked the boat up, I peered over the deck to see them hook enough lines to flip the boat right-side-up. When they did the slumped head of the pilot slapped against the glass. When the upturned Negro was pulled in, the ship picked up its speed to meet the next vessel, which was not there. We slowed for a moment and then moved along to the next.
“All day, like this,” a watchman standing by the 16mm guns said. “All day these subs aren’t there.” The man wore a leather jacket and a fur hat with long ear flaps cinched tight by a thin cord tied in a bow under his chin. His fur collar was pulled up high over his neck.
The rest of the afternoon the ship picked up seven more Negros. Two had dead pilots from CO poisoning. One of the Negro pilots poured yellow dye into the sea to make himself more visible. It was only to be used if we had drifted off too far, out of reach of the support vessel. The pilot must have been frightened out there waiting for the missing ship. He must have deployed the yellow dye, which in turn hailed an Allied plane out of the sky that strafed it with machine-gun fire. A stripe of fighter plane bullets ran up the length of it and had shattered the pilot’s lap, chest, and head. The next stop had a loosening slick of yellow without a sign of a sub. That made eleven survivors from the forty-nine that had set out. When the battleship spent the rest of the day doing another circle to check for lost boats, I went back to the medic’s office to sit with Pauwel.
He opened his eyes and looked at me. “If I’m dead, you’re one ugly angel.”
In the medic’s office the pilots discussed what happened to the rest of our rank. Some pilots were lucky, they decided, as they probably fell asleep through strain or lack of oxygen under their tiny glass domes. The vessels had been tested for making headway against the current so that the sub could go out on the ebb tide and return home on the flood, but in the open waters, some of the boats would have made no progress and, sooner or later, would be lost. All of us in the medic’s office who had returned had not submerged our ships. We figured some that had submerged never came up. Others may have fired their torpedoes but the clasps failed and they were carried along on the backs of their own bombs. We each sat in our own bunks and talked of the ways the lost men did not come back.
“I thought they figured out the CO problems.”
“Apparently not.”
“What about the ones that are left out there?”
“They’re smart. They’ll send a recon plane out for them.”
“Yeah, but the recon plane will probably make sure they sink so that no one else gets their hands on them.” This made everyone quiet for a while.
Then one of the pilots confessed. “I didn’t go anywhere. I circled the same spot over and over.” He gave us a nervous smile and kept rubbing the palm of his hand over his chin so his fingers squeezed into his cheek. Then he shook it off as if it were a joke.
“Didn’t they want to know what happened?” I asked.
“I told them it was a technical fault and that I had to turn back early.”
None of us questioned why he had done this as on the battleship’s third loop around, no more Negros were found.
On the final evening of the two-day trip back to Kiel, Major Oldif sent a sailor to bring me to the bridge. In the conning tower, the major paced back and forth, and looked out at the water. Low growls of static trundled from the radio console. A machine beeped every twenty seconds. Soft. Steady. I counted to twenty. To twenty. To twenty, until Major Oldif turned and waved me forward.
“Ah, Ensign Koopman. Good, good, come in. Are you feeling okay?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good, that’s good. I want to congratulate you, son. You made this mission a great success. That ship you sunk was a big victory for us. Do you know how much manpower and effort it would be to deal with those soldiers and supplies once they landed in Europe? Every ship we take down is the equivalent of a land battle won. And you won a big one for us, ensign.”
“But the lost subs, sir.”
“Yes, a shame, but you’re not seeing the big picture. We tested the Negros and they work. They will work better running along the shores. When the Allies mount an invasion force, we now know we have these weapons to use against them. Now, maybe we can get you some publicity for your success, and we can use that to round up some more fine Dutch to come captain for us.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, feeling sick all over again, knowing this meant the pilots who spent the night circling the same spot of ocean would have to go out again. This would become a tactic now. The major made to squeeze my shoulder, but maybe the memory of seeing me covered in vomit made him stop short.
17
The morning after the battleship returned and disembarked at the training center in Kiel, Major Oldif ordered me to report to his office in my full dress uniform. A film of dust coated the lamp on his desk but there was an oyster blue porcelain vase with three red tulips that looked fresh and new. A man with a camera had draped a dark sheet against the major’s office wall.
“Stand here, please, ensign,” Major Oldif said, pointing to the front of the sheet. “Take one of just him first.”