We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [300]
Knud Erik remembered the nights on the Nimbus when they'd tuned in to the RAF frequency. Every one of them had longed to come face to face with a German he could empty his revolver into. At last the enemy was standing before them, not in the form of a war machine, but as a living, vulnerable human being they could hurt and take revenge on. Finally they had a chance to redress the massive imbalance of their lives. In those days, he'd desperately wanted to be on the receiving end of an enemy bullet. Now he felt the same blood lust as the others. It was urgent and strong. The imbalance in him was greater than in any of his crew.
He saw the two men kneeling on the wing of the aircraft that had been shot down, and the sailors in their hundreds, teeming along the rails of the surrounding ships, some with rifles in their hands, and the gunners in their positions behind the machine cannons. They fired lightheartedly, as if at the shooting gallery of a summer fairground. They probably felt that they were men again, because men aren't cut out to take a pounding and not fight back. They were fighting back.
The bullets whipped at the water around the aircraft. One of the two remaining airmen shot backward from the wing, as if a mighty hand had come to sweep him off and in doing so, prove just how pointless his life was, how futile his prayers to preserve it. The shot must have come from one of the heavy-caliber machine cannons. He landed in the water and vanished instantly.
The survivor slumped. He unclasped his hands and settled them on his thighs, leaning forward and baring his neck as if awaiting the mercy shot.
The rattle of bullets stopped: the men lowered their rifles, and the moment became a solemn one, as if they were all holding their breath before completing the execution. Slowly it began to dawn on them what they'd just done. Even before the enemy had been annihilated, their thirst for blood was quenched.
Knud Erik pushed the Nimbus's gunner aside. He was an untrained shot. At first the machine cannon spat its bullets straight into the sea, drawing a long stripe of foam across the water, before starting to strike the aircraft wing. Then they hit their target.
Now he'd killed another human being, and everything inside him collapsed. He fell on the machine cannon, sobbing, oblivious to the hot metal burning the skin of his palms.
THEY'D SAILED NORTH around Bear Island, on the seventy-fourth parallel, when a new order came from the British Admiralty: spread out. From the briefing Knud Erik had received in Hvalfjörður on Iceland, where the convoy had set out, and from his experience of every other convoy he'd been with, he knew the order was a death sentence. Many rules applied to convoy sailing, but one overrode them all: Stick together. You'll only get through if you're united. On your own, you're lost, and an easy prey for the U-boats, with no protection and no one to pick you up if you're sunk.
How often had his crew heard that message over the megaphone from a passing destroyer, when, despite Anton's efforts in the engine room, the Nimbus lagged behind: "Stragglers will be sunk." This wasn't so much a warning as a sentence, a farewell unaccompanied by the usual encouraging assurance: we'll meet again.
They knew one thing for certain: the cargo had to arrive. The tanks, vehicles, and ammunition in their hull would continue via some complex route and end up on a distant front, where the fighting between the Germans and the Russians would determine the outcome of the war—and ultimately their own fate. They knew it because that's what they'd been told, but they'd never been sure about the actual mechanics of it. The only part