An Honorable German (15 page)

When all the remaining crewmen had taken their places in the launch, Max heaved himself in, leaving on board only Dieter,
who had to operate the crane, and Captain Langsdorff, who stood in lonely splendor on the deck in his sparkling white uniform,
sword buckled at his side. Without speaking, the captain climbed into the launch, ignoring the outstretched hands of the men
who offered to help him. He sat quietly in the rear, knuckles white on the hilt of his sword.

Max cupped his hands around his mouth. “Give way!” he shouted. Dieter put the crane in motion, gears grinding loudly in the
peaceful evening. Without a bump, the launch came out of its chocks. Dieter maneuvered it over the river and gently lowered
the boat till its bottom smacked the water. Two of the sailors started the motor but didn’t engage because they were still
hooked to
Spee
by the rope from the crane. Dieter shimmied like a monkey down the heavy manila rope and dropped into the launch.

“Unhook,” Max ordered. A flip of the release gear and they were free, drifting with the tide away from the ship. “Give way,”
Max said, and the motor was engaged. One of the sailors took the rudder, swung the boat around, and headed downstream from
Graf Spee
.

Max looked intently at his watch, then at the sun almost below the horizon. After five minutes he ordered the launch halted,
and when the motor was cut a terrible stillness came over them. Only the soft gurgling of the river could be heard. Max felt
shame as he looked back at the ship, now a half kilometer away. She had been worthy of them but they had not been worthy of
her and so she lay at lonely anchor, a defeated hulk of steel.

Langsdorff stood in the launch. Max and the others also came to their feet. Nineteen hundred and fifteen hours, Max could
see from his watch. Sunset. A huge explosion rent
Graf Spee
as the torpedo warheads detonated in the magazines. The blast literally lifted the ship from the water. A series of smaller
explosions then rippled through her hull, twisting and ripping her metal skin. The huge diesel tanks aft went up; first tongues
of flame shot over the ship, then came the compressed force of a giant explosion that tossed the aft eleven-inch turret into
the air like a child’s toy.

Max clenched his jaw. Langsdorff stood rigid beside him, hand to the visor of his cap in a naval salute. Max, too, saluted,
as did the others. Several of the youngest crewmen began to raise their right arms in the Nazi salute. Max stared daggers
at them and they quickly brought their palms to their foreheads in the navy salute.

Black smoke eddied around
Graf Spee
as the proud vessel settled into the water. The warheads in the magazines must have blown her bottom out. Fires on board
heated the steel skin of the ship until it glowed orange. As the superheated hull sank into the muddy water of the Plata,
clouds of steam rose hissing from the river. A vast tower of smoke and flame arched high over the sinking ship into the night
sky.

The reflection of the fire danced red across the faces of the men in the launch. Max dropped his salute. Enough of this charade.
Langsdorff had led them into a trap, and now the British had scared them into blowing up their own ship. Slowly
Graf Spee
listed to starboard and sank into the river. Steam and black smoke rose from the great warship until she disappeared, then
nothing but the lingering smoke remained.

THE INDIAN OCEAN

DAY 390 OF THE CRUISE OF THE AUXILIARY MERCHANT RAIDER
METEOR

FOUTTEEN MONTHS LATER

FEBRUARY 1941

M
AX SLIPPED THE WHITE COAT OVER HIS DARK BLUE NAVAL TUNIC.
The coat came to his knees. Two turns around his waist with the sash fastened it in place. Next came the round sunglasses,
and finally the conical straw hat. From a distance—a great distance—Max hoped he would look Japanese. “You certainly have
the buck teeth for it,” Dieter had told him.

The action alarm had died away by the time Max left his cabin. Unlike his spartan quarters on
Graf Spee
, officers on
Meteor
had spacious cabins with chintz curtains, large bathtubs, and deep carpet. All her passageways were carpeted, a remnant of
prewar days, when
Meteor
had carried passengers and freight to South America for Norddeutscher Lloyd. The Kriegsmarine had converted her for commerce
raiding in the shipyards at Bremen, but the work had been done on a tight schedule and many peacetime amenities—the soda fountain,
the swimming pool, the reading room—had been left in place. The reading room with its hundreds of books, including a collection
of Karl May’s western novels, Max’s favorite, became his sanctuary. Mareth had once given him a beautiful set of leather-bound
Karl May novels, which he had taken with him on
Graf Spee
but had been forced to sell in Argentina because he needed money. He spent many of his off-duty hours alone in a club chair
in the corner of the reading room, lost in the American frontier adventures of Old Shatterhand and his faithful Indian pal,
Winnetou.

When Max reached the bridge, Captain Hauer looked him over but said nothing. Hauer was all navy—a regular like Max, but a
man who adhered strictly to the conventions of the Imperial Navy, where captains did not speak to Oberleutnants and certainly
not to Oberleutnants dressed in Japanese costume. In retrospect, Captain Langsdorff seemed a kindly uncle compared to Hauer,
who suffered from both migraines and a nervous stomach, conditions that reflected themselves in his disposition.

Fregattenkapitän Breslau, the second in command, smiled when he saw Max. “Ah, the Mikado,” he said, making a slight bow.

Max grinned.

“We are gentlemen from Japan,” Breslau sang, quoting Gilbert and Sullivan.

“Well, I hope that through a pair of British binoculars I’ll look that way, sir.”

“I’m quite sure you will, Oberleutnant. Now be a good fellow and stroll around the deck with Felix.”

Breslau, a reservist, had been captain of a small passenger liner before the war and treated all his sailors like guests aboard
his ship. “Be a good fellow,” he would say, or, “If you please,” or, “Would you be so kind.” When he spoke, however, he spoke
with authority because his voice was as strong and deep as a foghorn. He could hail the masthead from the quarterdeck and
be heard in a Force Ten gale, several of which he’d been through while commanding a sailing ship carrying wool from Australia
in the twenties.

Breslau and Hauer made an odd pair, but there were many odd things about
Meteor
—grumbling, cliques, harsh looks, slack petty officers. Worse, she’d been more than a year at sea, her crew never setting
foot on land in all that time. Small grievances became major conflicts among three hundred men, crowded together for more
than a year in a ship half the size of
Graf Spee
, always alert for the enemy, always on short rations, with a captain whose severity would make a Prussian general proud.
All the films aboard had been screened and rescreened till the men could parrot every line; the books that mentioned sex read
till they fell apart; the swimming pool used until no one could bear the thought of swimming. Max had tried to organize a
shuffleboard tournament like the one they’d had aboard
Graf Spee
, but the men, despite their boredom, had shown little interest. In the end, only he and Dieter had played. Max won.

“You cheated.”

“You need glasses.”

Perhaps Max and Dieter should not have been so excited when the chance to go aboard
Meteor
presented itself, but they weren’t about to sit out the entire war interned in Buenos Aires. Not that Dieter had been crushed
by the months of idleness—he seemed to be on good terms with the madam of every private gentlemen’s club in the city and passed
long nights in the finest of their establishments, cavorting with the girls, drinking champagne, and winning money from British
expatriates at the card table. Because Argentina was a neutral country, the British and the Germans often encountered one
another, interacting with icy politeness. Dieter found poker his best means of revenge against the Tommies; his mathematical
mind made him a menace at cards. True to his nature, he spent the money as he won it: champagne and a generous tip for the
tango band, champagne and gifts for the young ladies of the establishment, champagne and cigars for any German gentlemen who
happened to be in the club that evening. He must have bought a thousand bottles of champagne for his friends and compatriots
during their stay in Buenos Aires.

Max was less adventurous, but he enjoyed his freedom in the city as well. The Argentines made little effort to control the
movements of the crew of
Graf Spee
, so Max spent long mornings wandering through Buenos Aires followed by long afternoons of reading on the Plaza de Mayo. But
no amount of wandering could set his mind at ease; and for all his debauched exploits, Max knew that Dieter felt the same.
It maddened them both to sit on their backsides in Argentina with their painful memories of
Graf Spee
’s scuttling while other Germans won the war. News of their victories never let up; everyone but Max and Dieter was off winning
medals. France had fallen in June of 1940, after just six weeks of blitzkrieg—no surprise, Max’s father wrote, since the French
preferred to eat cheese rather than wage war. The Wehrmacht defeated the Netherlands in a matter of days, then stopped off
in Belgium long enough to accept surrender from the King, then on to Paris; the only bad news—the British army had gotten
clean away from France, evacuated from the beaches at Dunkirk by the damned Royal Navy, the Kriegsmarine too weak to interfere.
But while the surface navy wrung its hands, the U-boat men were off sinking ships, receiving medals, getting promoted. Max
felt ill with frustration when he heard that Wolfgang Lüth, one of his crewkameraden, had received command of a U-boat and
had already won the Knight’s Cross for all the tonnage he had sent to the bottom. Fortunately, Seekriegsleitung needed its
officers. They hadn’t enough to begin with, and as the fighting grew more intense, casualties worsened the problem. Well-trained
regular officers were a precious asset, so the Naval War Staff and the German embassy began making the complex arrangements
necessary to smuggle
Graf Spee
’s officers out of South America. Wattenberg, the senior navigation officer, went first, three months after their internment
began, smuggled out on a fishing boat. Ascher went next. Carrying perfectly forged papers that identified him as a Portuguese
businessman, he simply boarded a plane to Rio, took a ship to Lisbon, and then bought a seat on the regular Swedish Air flight
to Berlin.

Six weeks after Ascher went, Diggins had his turn. The embassy procured false papers identifying him as an Argentine language
professor scheduled to visit Japan to learn more about their language. Unfortunately, the Argentines caught him and he had
to try three more times before he finally got away, smuggled aboard a Japanese freighter. Others had to do it the hard way:
cross the Andes into Chile and dodge the Chilean police, who apparently had much better eyesight than the Argentine police.
With so many officers spirited away, Max and Dieter were desperate to escape, so they jumped at the chance to go, even if
the assignment was to an auxiliary surface raider skulking about in the Indian Ocean. At the end of September they left Buenos
Aires in the trunk of the naval attaché’s automobile, spent a comfortable weekend at his country home memorizing the names
of their contacts, then slipped away. They spent the next three months stealing from one German community to another across
the pampas and over the border into Brazil, dodging local officials, sleeping in barns, straining to comprehend the dialect
of the second-generation German immigrants who sheltered them. By the time the two friends reached Porto Alegre in late December
and boarded
Dresden
, a freighter from the Secret Naval Supply Service, which would transport them to
Meteor
, they strained at the bit to get back into the war. But now they found themselves alone in a vast sea on a ship marked by
tedium and discontent, Max dressed up like a vacationer from Osaka.

Exiting to the deck, he saw that Felix, one of the young deckhands, stood ready for his part in the play. A slight lad, he
wore a kimono and a black wig, as well as the standard conical hat. His delicate hands steered a pink baby carriage, and in
the carriage lay a doll from Karstadt’s in Berlin. Max wondered who on the Naval War Staff had been ordered down to the department
store to purchase the doll. “Expect the unexpected in war,” Admiral Tirpitz had said, although he hardly could have imagined
that assignment.

“Ready, Felix?”

“Ja, Herr Oberleutnant.” His deep voice brought a smile to Max’s face.

“Off we go, then.”

They began to stroll around the deck, which had been scrubbed to a dazzling whiteness that morning as every morning. Captain
Hauer insisted on it. The importance of proper appearances was a rule upon which he and Langsdorff would certainly have agreed.
Max had come to understand their preoccupation. Scrubbed decks and polished buttons, caps worn per regulations, and hammocks
lashed up and stowed each morning in the proper manner reminded the men that they were members of a proud service, and that
discipline was the hallmark of that service. But today Max and Felix had left the navy behind: they were just an innocent
couple giving their infant some sea air. Other sailors, also in costume—white headbands and shirts worn outside their trousers
in the Japanese fashion—worked topside, swabbing the decks, chipping paint, doing the kind of routine maintenance performed
on any merchantman, especially one as efficiently run as
Osaka Maru
, the Japanese freighter
Meteor
had been disguised to resemble. Unfortunately, Breslau had told Max, the characters on the stern had been copied from a Kodak
advertisement in a Japanese magazine; for all he knew the characters might spell out: “Want better pictures? Buy Kodak film!”