We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [301]
Their contribution to the war effort was important. They needed to keep faith in that. But the moment they received the order to give up their place in the convoy and fight their way to Molotovsk on their own, they realized such faith had been pointless and supplanted it with speculation about the reason for the fatal order. And as always, in a shaky situation involving immense pressure, their guesses hardened to suspicion, and they recalled the rumor that had dogged every single convoy they'd ever sailed with to Russia, a rumor that clung with the persistence of smoke to a funnel, the wake to a propeller, and a torpedo to your precious cargo: they were bait.
In one of the Norwegian fjords a forty-five-thousand-ton German battleship, the Tirpitz, lay in ambush. She was the biggest battleship in the world, a threat to everything that moved in the North Atlantic and a symbol of the Nazi dream of world domination. Probably the battleship's greatest value lay in simply being that symbol: certainly she rarely ventured out of her hiding place in the fjord, with its protective mountainsides. Instead she lay chained there like the great wolf of myth, threatening a Ragnarök that never came. But now that Ragnarök was imminent: the wolf at the end of the world was going to snap its chain at last and grab the bait.
Hard experience convinced them of this, the same experience that had lined their faces and tortured their bodies with frostbite. When the thirty-six ships of the convoy abandoned sailing in formation and tried limping on their own to Murmansk, to Molotovsk, or to Archangel on the White Sea, the Germans wouldn't require the overwhelming firepower of the Tirpitz's fifteen-inch guns to sink them: the U-boats could manage it with ease. Now that the British destroyers and the corvettes that had escorted them had been called off to go chasing after the Tirpitz, the convoy's thirty-six ships were left defenseless. No, they were doomed. Their own protectors had tricked them into an ambush.
They realized their insignificance with bitterness. They were expendable.
But what about their cargo? In Hvalfjörður they'd been told that in total they were carrying 297 aircraft, 594 tanks, 4,246 military vehicles, and 150,000 tons of ammunition and explosives to Russia. Were the British navy's officers prepared to sacrifice all that, simply to boast that they'd sent the Tirpitz to the bottom of the ocean?
They didn't get it. The only thing they understood about this whole business was that they couldn't trust anyone but themselves if they wanted to stay alive. If they didn't survive, they'd die without a soldier's sense of duty fulfilled or the comfort of knowing that their sacrifice made sense. If they were sunk, they'd disappear not just without honor, but without any acknowledgment that they'd so much as existed.
The defiance that flooded them wasn't directed solely at the enemy, but at friend and foe alike. As if they'd lost all notion of the difference.
The order came as a relief to Knud Erik. It meant that he could stop worrying about the drowning men. From now on, it was all about him and his crew. He could finally allow himself to surrender to the cynicism that comes when a crisis of conscience has exhausted itself. His sole priority was survival. They'd be alone in the middle of the ocean, and that was where he wanted to be. Alone, with no little red lights.
He changed course and headed north for Hope Island, sailing as close as he dared to the rim of the ice. Dense freezing fog covered the entire area. He ordered the crew to paint the whole ship white. They lay still for a couple of days, with the boilers switched off so the funnel smoke wouldn't give them away. The pack ice grated against the sides of the ship, and her steel plates protested in an ominous bass growl that from time to time shrilled to a treble scream. The message