We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [299]
At last all went quiet. They crawled out from under the beds, closed the curtains, and lay down next to one another on the untouched beds.
They'd won.
KNUD ERIK WAS there when the Mary Luckenbach was blown up.
The Nimbus was sailing in a convoy north of the Arctic Circle, on its way to Russia, with supplies for the Red Army. The weather was fine and visibility good. They were half a nautical mile behind the Mary Luckenbach.
The men on the bridge of the Nimbus watched in total silence. They'd seen tankers take a direct hit before; they'd seen two-hundred-meter flames. But they'd never seen anything like this. Neither had Knud Erik. It wasn't terror that silenced him. It was relief.
The German Junkers flew in so low over the water that it seemed to skim the waves. Just three hundred meters from the Luckenbach, it dropped its torpedoes, then roared across the ship's deck and got caught in the machine-cannon fire. Small flames darted from one of its engines.
Then the torpedoes reached their target.
One moment the Mary Luckenbach was there. The next, nothing but a stillness as terrifying as the explosion itself. There was no sign of fire, no wreckage floating on the sea: just a black cloud of smoke that rose with majestic slowness, as if it had the power to lift up thousands of tons of steel and carry them off.
The smoke rose unbroken to the clouds, several kilometers up, where it slowly spread out until it covered half the sky. Black soot fell silently as snow over the sea, as if the explosion had come from a volcano, rather than the war they were in the middle of.
There would be no little red lights: that was Knud Erik's only thought. Fifty people had just been wiped out, right in front of his eyes. A minute ago, through his binoculars, he'd seen gunners crouched behind the machine cannons and a black mess boy calmly crossing the deck with a tray. Now they were gone and all he felt was relief: he'd been spared. Not his miserable life, which he no longer valued, but his wrecked conscience.
They attacked in waves of thirty to forty aircraft, flying only six or seven meters above the water, swarming blackly over the gray sea. The sirens mounted on their wings let off a terrifying howl designed to drive the enemy mad and short-circuit his ability to react. Their twenty-millimeter machine cannons pounded the ships, and white and red tracer bullets sprayed the deck as the planes dropped their torpedoes one by one. The inexperienced gunners on the decks panicked and aimed wildly, their bullets hitting lifeboats and the wheelhouses of surrounding ships.
It made them shudder with reluctance, but they were forced to admire the German pilots' courage. With suicidal determination, they flew into a wall of fire intensified by the four-inch cannons aimed at them from the escorting destroyers.
The Wacosta and the Empire Stevenson were hit next, then the Macbeth and the Oregonian.
It was all over in five minutes. A Heinkel made an emergency landing on the water at the center of the convoy. The aircraft stayed afloat, and the crew crawled out onto one of the wings and held up their hands in surrender. They were no longer enemies. Without their machines they were just defenseless human beings. They kept looking around as if they wanted to catch the eye of every single one of the sailors crowding the rails of the surrounding ships. Then they meekly lowered their heads, awaiting sentence.
A shot rang out. One of the men clasped his shoulder and turned halfway around before sinking to his knees. A second shot finished him off. He slumped forward into the water, but his lower body stayed on the wing. The three remaining crew started running around him in a panic, looking for cover. One of them tried to crawl back into the cockpit. He was shot in the back. He fell and rolled into the water. The two survivors threw themselves to their knees and clasped their hands beseechingly.
They'd realized what was happening. They hadn't been transformed: they hadn't become human beings. They were still the enemy, and the proof hung