Plague Ship (2 page)

“With the sea this calm we’ll spot them even if they’ve stopped to ask for directions.”

“Do we even know if anyone’s out here?” The question came from the crew’s youngest member, Ernst Kessler. Kessler was the
Kondor
’s rear gunner and sat scrunched at the aft of the ventral gondola that ran the partial length of the aircraft’s fuselage. From behind his Plexiglas shield and over the barrel of a single MG-15 machine gun, he could see nothing other than what the
Kondor
had already flown over.

“The squadron commander assured me that a U-boat returning from patrol spotted at least a hundred ships two days ago above the Faeroe Islands,” Lichtermann told his crew. “The ships were heading north, so they’ve got to be out here somewhere.”

“More likely, the U-boat commander just wanted to report something after missing with all his torpedoes,” Ebelhardt groused, and made a face after a sip of tepid ersatz coffee.

“I’d rather just spot them, then sink them,” Ernst Kessler said. The gentle lad was barely eighteen, and had harbored ambitions of being a doctor before he had been drafted. Because he came from a poor rural family in Bavaria, his chances of an advanced education were nil, but that didn’t prevent him from spending his off-hours with his nose buried in medical journals and texts.

“That isn’t the proper attitude of a German warrior,” Lichtermann admonished gently. He was thankful that they had never come under enemy attack. He doubted Kessler would have the stomach to open fire with his machine gun, but the boy was the only member of his crew who could sit facing aft for hour after hour without becoming incapacitated by nausea.

He thought grimly about all the men dying on the Eastern Front, and about how the tanks and planes shipped to the Russians prolonged the inevitable fall of Moscow. Lichtermann would be more than happy to sink a few ships himself.

Another tedious hour dragged by, the men peering into the night in hopes of spotting the convoy. Ebelhardt tapped Lichtermann on the shoulder and pointed to his log. Although the fore gunner kneeling at the front of the ventral gondola was the official navigator, Ebelhardt actually calculated their flight time and direction, and he was indicating that it was time for them to turn and search another swath of open sea.

Lichtermann applied rudder and eased over the yoke in an easy turn to port, never taking his eyes off the horizon, as the moon seemed to swing across the sky.

Ernst Kessler prided himself at having the sharpest eyes aboard the aircraft. When he was a boy, he would dissect dead animals he found around the family farm to learn their anatomy, comparing what he saw to books on the subject. He knew his keen vision and steady hands would make him an excellent doctor. His senses, however, were just as adept at finding an enemy convoy.

By rights of his aft-facing station, he shouldn’t have been the one to spot it, but he did. As the plane canted over, an unnatural glint caught his attention, a flash of white far from the moon’s reflection.

“Captain!” Kessler cried over the intercom. “Starboard side, bearing about three hundred.”

“What did you see?” The primeval thrill of the hunt edged Lichtermann’s voice.

“I’m not sure, sir. Something. A glimmer of some kind.”

Lichtermann and Ebelhardt strained to see in the darkness where young Kessler had indicated, but there was nothing apparent.

“Are you sure?” the pilot asked.

“Yes, sir,” Kessler replied, forcing confidence into his reply. “It was when we turned. The angle changed, and I’m sure I saw something.”

“The convoy?” Ebelhardt asked gruffly.

“I can’t say,” Ernst admitted.

“Josef, get the radio powered up,” Lichtermann said, ordering the fore gunner to his ancillary position. The pilot added more power to the BMW radial engines, and banked the aircraft once again. Their drone became a bit sharper, as the props tore through the air.

Ebelhardt had a pair of binoculars pressed to his eyes as he searched the blackened sea. Rushing toward a possible contact at two hundred miles per hour, he should spot the convoy any moment, but, as seconds grew into a minute and nothing revealed itself, he lowered the binoculars again. “Must have been a wave,” he said without keying the intercom microphone, so only Lichtermann heard.

“Give it a chance,” Lichtermann replied. “Kessler can see in the dark like a damned cat.”

The Allied powers had done a remarkable job of applying dizzying camouflage patterns to their freighters and tankers, to prevent observers from seeing the ships from the surface, but nothing could hide a convoy at night, since the wakes that formed behind the vessels burned white against the ocean.

I’ll be damned, Ebelhardt mouthed, and then pointed through the windscreen.

At first, it was just a large patch of gray on the otherwise-dark water, yet, as they flew closer, the gray sharpened to become dozens of parallel white lines, as distinct as chalk marks on a blackboard. They were the wakes of an armada of ships, driving eastward as fast as it could. From the
Kondor
’s altitude, the ships looked as plodding as elephants traveling in a herd.

The
Kondor
flew closer still, until the moon’s sharp glare allowed the crew to distinguish between the slower freighters and tankers and the slim wakes of destroyers set like pickets along each flank of the convoy. As they watched, one of the destroyers was making a fast run up the starboard side of the convoy, smoke pouring from her two stacks. When the destroyer reached the head of the convoy, it would slow again, and let the freighters pass it by, in what the Allies called an “Indian run.” At the tail of the mile-long convoy, the destroyer would accelerate once again, in a never-ending cycle. In this way, it took fewer combat vessels to provide cover for the convoys.

“There must be two hundred ships out there,” Ebelhardt estimated.

“Enough to keep the Reds fighting for months,” the pilot agreed. “Josef, how’s it coming with the radio?”

“I have nothing but static.”

Static was a common enough problem, working this far above the Arctic Circle. Charged particles striking the earth’s magnetic field were driven to ground at the poles and played havoc with the radios’ vacuum tubes.

“We’ll mark our position,” Lichtermann said, “and radio in our report when we get closer to base. Hey, Ernst, well done. We would have turned away and missed the convoy, if it weren’t for you.”

“Thank you, sir.” Pride was evident in the boy’s response.

“I want a better count of the convoy’s size, and a rough approximation of their speed.”

“Let’s not get so close that those destroyers open up,” Ebelhardt cautioned. He had seen combat firsthand and was flying second stick now because of a piece of shrapnel buried in his thigh, thanks to antiaircraft fire over London. He recognized the look in Lichtermann’s eye and the excitement in his voice. “And don’t forget the CAMs.”

“Trust me,” the pilot said with cocky bravado, and wheeled the big plane closer to the slow-moving fleet ten thousand feet below them. “I’m not going to get too close, and we’re too far from land for them to launch a plane at us.”

CAMs, or Catapult Aircraft Merchantmen, were the Allies’ answer to German aerial reconnaissance. A long rail was mounted over the bows of a freighter, and, with a rocket assist, they could launch a Hawker Sea Hurricane fighter aircraft to shoot down the lumbering
Kondor
s or even attack surfaced U-boats. The drawback to the CAMs was that the planes couldn’t land back aboard their mother ship. The Hurricanes either had to be close enough to Great Britain or some other friendly area for the pilots to land normally. Otherwise, the plane had to be ditched in the sea and the pilot rescued from the water.

The convoy steaming below the Fw 200 was more than a thousand miles from any Allied territory, and even with the bright moon a downed pilot would be impossible to rescue in the dark. There would be no Hurricanes launched tonight. The
Kondor
had nothing to fear from the mass of Allied shipping unless it strayed within range of the destroyers and the curtain of antiaircraft fire they could throw into the sky.

Ernst Kessler was counting rows of ships when winking lights suddenly appeared on the decks of two of the destroyers. “Captain!” he cried. “Fire from the convoy!”

Lichtermann could just make out the destroyers beneath his wing. “Easy, lad,” he said. “Those are signal lamps. The ships are sailing under strict radio silence, so that’s how they communicate.”

“Oh. Sorry, sir.”

“Don’t worry about it. Just get as accurate a count as you can.”

The
Kondor
had been flying a lazy circle around the flotilla and was passing along its northern flank when Dietz, who manned the upper gun platform, shouted, “Incoming!”

Lichtermann had no idea what the man was talking about and was a beat slow in reacting. A perfectly aimed string of 7.7mm machine-gun rounds raked the
Kondor
’s upper surface, starting at the base of the vertical stabilizer and walking up the entire length of the plane. Dietz was killed before he could get a shot off. Bullets penetrated the cockpit, and, amid the harsh patter of them ricocheting off metallic surfaces and the whistle of wind through rents in the fuselage, Lichtermann heard his copilot grunt in pain. He looked over to see the front of Ebelhardt’s flight jacket covered in blood.

Lichtermann mashed the rudder and pressed hard on the yoke to dive away from the Allied aircraft that had come out of nowhere.

It was the wrong maneuver.

Launched just weeks earlier, the MV
Empire MacAlpine
was a late addition to the convoy. Originally built as a grain carrier, the eight-thousand-ton vessel had spent five months in the Burntisland Shipyard having her superstructure replaced by a small control island, four hundred and sixty feet of run-way, and a hangar for four Fairley Swordfish torpedo bombers. She could still haul nearly as much grain as she could before her conversion. The Admiralty had always considered the CAMs a stopgap measure until a safer alternative could be found. As it was, the Merchant Aircraft Carriers, or MACs, like the
MacAlpine
, were to be used only until England secured a number of Essex Class escort carriers from the United States.

While the
Kondor
loitered over the convoy, two of the Swordfish had been launched from the
MacAlpine
and flown far enough out from the fleet that, when they climbed into the inky sky to ambush the much larger and faster German aircraft, Lichtermann and his men never knew they were coming. The Fairleys were biplanes, with top speeds barely half that of the
Kondor.
They each carried a Vickers machine gun, mounted above the radial engine’s cowling, and a gimballed Lewis gun in a rear-facing cockpit.

The second Swordfish lay in wait three thousand feet below the Focke-Wulf and was nearly invisible in the darkness. As the
Kondor
dove away from the first attacker, the second torpedo bomber, stripped of anything that could slow it, was in position.

A stream of fire poured into the front of the
Kondor
from the Vickers, while the second gunner leaned far over the rear cockpit coaming to train his Lewis gun on the pair of BMW engines attached to the port wing.

Coin-sized holes appeared all around Ernst Kessler, the aluminum glowing cherry red for an instant before fading. There had been only a few seconds between Dietz’s scream and the barrage that swept the underside of the
Kondor
, not nearly long enough for fear to cripple the teen. He knew his duty. Swallowing hard because his stomach had yet to catch up with the plummeting aircraft, he squeezed his MG-15’s trigger, as the Fw continued to dive past the slower Swordfish. Tracers began to fill the sky, and he aimed the 7.92mm weapon like a fireman directing a stream of water. He could see a circle of little jets of fire glowing in the darkness. It was the exhaust popping around the Fairley’s radial engine, and it was there that he targeted the withering fire, even as his own plane was continuously hammered by the British craft.

The arcing line of tracers converged on the glowing circle, and, suddenly, it appeared as if the Allied plane’s nose was engulfed in fireworks. Sparks and tongues of fire enveloped the Swordfish, metal and fabric shredded by the assault. The propeller was torn apart, and the radial engine exploded as if it was a fragmentary grenade. Burning fuel and hot oil rolled over the exposed pilot and gunner. The Swordfish’s controlled dive, which matched the
Kondor
’s, became an out-of-control plummet.

The Fairley winged over, spiraling ever faster, as it burned like a meteor. Lichtermann began to level the
Kondor.
Kessler could see the flaming wreckage continue to drop away. It suddenly changed shape. The wings had torn loose from the Swordfish’s fuselage. Any aerodynamics the mortally wounded aircraft had possessed were gone. The Swordfish dropped like a stone, the flames winking out when the wreckage plowed into the uncaring sea.

When Ernst looked up and across the fifty-foot trailing edge of the port wing, the fear he had been too distracted to acknowledge hit him full force. Smoke trailed from both nine-cylinder engines, and he could plainly hear the power plants were misfiring badly.

“Captain,” he shouted into the microphone.

“Shut up, Kessler,” Lichtermann snapped. “Radioman, get up here and give me a hand. Ebelhardt’s dead.”

“Captain, the port engines,” Kessler insisted.

“I know, damnit, I know. Shut up.”

The first Swordfish that had attacked was well astern, and most likely had already turned to rejoin the convoy, so there was nothing Kessler could do but stare in horror at the smoke rushing by in the slipstream. Lichtermann shut down the inboard engine in hopes of extinguishing the flames. He let the propeller windmill for a moment before reengaging the starter. The engine coughed and caught, and fire appeared around the cowling, flames quickly blackening the aluminum skin of the nacelle.

With the inboard engine producing a little thrust, Lichtermann chanced shutting off the outside motor. When he kicked on the starter again, the engine fired immediately, producing only an occasional wisp of smoke. He immediately killed the still-burning inboard engine, fearing the fire could spread to the
Kondor
’s fuel lines, and throttled back the damaged outside motor to save it for as long as he could. With two engines functioning properly and a third running at half power, they could make it back to base.