Deep danger

  This book made available by the Internet Archive.

  Cnapter 1

  U. S787767

  THE COMMANDING OFFICER OF THE SUBMARINE

  looked around at the navigator, Ensign Bill Grant. "We're in a trap here with only sixty feet of water under us, Bill,'' he said. *'And that ship looks phony tome.

  Bill Grant nodded and looked again at the ship ahead. It looked exactly like a U.S. Victory ship and yet there was something—he couldn't tell what—that seemed odd about it.

  The skipper of the sub talked to the forward torpedo room. *'We're boring straight in on a ship up here that's flying the American flag and looks like a Victory but she won't answer our challenge and doesn't show

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  any IFF. So stand by to let fish out of one and two/'

  Then he spoke into another tube to the engineer. "Crack valves. Stand by to crash dive. Not more than lo degrees; we're in sixty feet of water.''

  The sailor on the blinker light stopped yanking the lever and all hands waited for the strange ship to answer his coded message.

  Nothing showed on the ship; no blinking light, no flag hoist.

  The exec put the stadimeter down. ''She's speeding up," he said.

  Bill Grant watched the Fathometer. ''And taking us into mighty shallow water, Skipper. By the mark ten

  now."

  The skipper's voice had a tinge of anger as he said to the man on the blinker, "Cut the code. Tell that ship in plain language to identify or we'll sink her."

  The blinker light began to flicker again, the lever making a clanking noise.

  Bill Grant, on the cigaret deck aft of the conning tower, called down to the man on the radio direction finder, "Position, please. Get me a good fix on this, will you, Willy?"

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  "Aye, aye, sir/'

  Soon the RDF operator called up the position and Bill wrote it down—the twelve numbers of latitude and longitude—in his rough-log notebook.

  The light lever stopped clanking. t

  The men on the sub's forward gun stood tense, watching the speeding ship.

  The skipper waited a few more seconds, but there was no answer from the ship. Only the American flag streaming in the wind.

  In the forward torpedo room down inside the sub two men stood with their fingers on the ^i and ^2 firing buttons.

  Still the speeding ship did not answer nor slow down.

  Instead, at two places, hinged sections dropped down. She was not a Victory ship at all. Her sides were faked, her decks false.

  The black and red swastika of Nazi Germany, painted on the shields, became visible as they dropped.

  These shields also uncovered the heavy guns on the well decks and the crews around them.

  You could hear men on the submarine draw in their

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  breaths as the shields went down—a low, startled gasp.

  Then the sub's skipper spoke sharply, ''Open fire! . . r

  The guns on the Nazi ship flashed yellow spurts of flame and dark smoke.

  The sub's forward gun roared and recoiled, the men leaping back again to reload. Machine guns opened up and poured long arcs of tracers out across the water.

  The skipper leaned a little forward and said, quietly, to the men in the torpedo room, 'Tire one . . . fire

  two.

  Then, as he cried, "Crash dive! Crash dive!'' and the gongs began to sound, the first Nazi shell struck. It tore through the sub's armor plate and entered the 'tween decks under the conning tower. Most of its exploding blast drove downward into the heart of the sub but part of it slammed upward, folding the deck of the conning tower against the shield, killing all the people on the tower. This blast also ripped the cigaret deck clean off the sub and blew it up almost vertically into the air.

  Bill Grant went up with it.

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  The second shell from the disguised Nazi raider went in just abaft the forward torpedo loading hatch, and blasted down into the torpedo room where four torpedoes were being handled in the trolleys.

  These four torpedoes blew up, destroying the submarine and all of the men in her.

  She did not die alone. Almost at the same instant as the first shell struck, the two men on the firing buttons pressed down. Two torpedoes swam out of the bow tubes, the impulse bubbles swelling up green and foamy. They ran hot and true just under the water—two dark, racing fish of steel and destruction. One caught the Nazi raider in the ammunition magazine, the other in the forward boiler room. The explosions bathed the ship in flame and then sank her.

  Bill Grant saw none of this. The explosion under his feet had broken both his legs so that, as the cigaret deck went up into the air, he lay sprawled on it, clinging to a stanchion.

  It was almost a lazy, slow flight into the air. Then, slowly, the steel deck turned, slanting down, turned more, turned over, and began to fall back toward the sea.

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  Somehow Bill got away from it, out from under it. Too stunned to think, he just pushed himself away and fell free of the mass of junk which would have killed him.

  He hit the water hard and was under it for a long time. Explosions pounded against him, knocking his breath out and forcing blood from his ears and nose.

  Then everything was quiet and he was awash in the water, little waves lapping over his face and washing the blood away.

  The last thing he remembered for a while was pulling the lanyard on his Mae West life jacket. He thought he heard, but was not sure, the hiss of the CO2 bottle filling the yellow rubber vest.

  Bill Grant, the only one of the sub's crew left alive, floated motionless in the water, sometimes conscious, sometimes not. Gulls came and flew over him, hesitating in the air to peer down at him with their bright, cruel eyes.

  Some current of the sea carried Bill slowly along, turning him this way and that, until finally it bumped him gently against the ruined top of a wooden table. Feeling it, he fought back to consciousness and put

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  his arms up on the smooth wood. With that and the Mae West he could get his head well above water.

  His mind got clearer and clearer and pain from his broken legs began to pound upward.

  Idly he looked around, looked across the polished wood of the table.

  Across from him, arms also outstretched, head up just as his was, was a man. His face was so horribly burned that Bill could not have recognized him if he had been his best friend. The man's eyes stared out from raw flesh, the lids and lashes burned away.

  The eyes were wild and a wild voice babbled from the seared lips. Babbled in German.

  Hearing the stream of German, Bill fought to clear his mind of the fog of pain rolling in it. The man across from him was the enemy. A Nazi. He was the threat of death. He was danger.

  Bill made his mind stay clear. With both legs broken he would be helpless if the man came around the table to attack him. The Nazi could drive him away from the support of the table; could even tear the Mae West off him. And, if the Nazi was armed . . .

  The wild eyes apparently had not yet seen him.

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  Perhaps, Bill thought, if I keep my head down against the table, down almost under the water . . .

  But the eyes saw him. They slid past him and then came back, wild and staring, and fixed on him.

  With the Nazi's eyes now crowded with suspicion, Bill watched one of the man's hands begin to slide away, sliding to the edge of the table and disappearing under the water.

  The Nazi must have a gun. Bill thought.

  Bill thought then of his mother. She had been a frail, pretty woman who had died soon after her second son, John, was bo
rn. His mother had come from Germany and had taught Bill to speak German just as his father had taught him to speak English.

  The Nazi stared at him cold and hostile now, and the hand began to rise again to the table. The seared lips moved and the man asked, suspiciously, in German, "Are you an American?"

  ''Nein,'' Bill said.

  ''Heil Hitlerr

  *'Heil Hitlerr Bill said, raising one hand in the Nazi salute.

  They talked a little about the sinking of the sub

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  and the ship but slowly each stopped talking and just lay in deep pain, hanging to the table.

  Night crept down on them and the circling gulls left them. Sea currents carried them, tugging at them, moving them slowly away from the oil and floating pieces of the sunken ships.

  Pain grew in both of them but attacked them in different ways. Pain in Bill Grant came in giant strokes which pounded against him for a while and then slacked, leaving him whipped and panting. To the Nazi pain came in stretches of lunacy. When the pain of his burns grew unbearable he would scream and sob and tear at his face, trying to keep the salt water away from it.

  Then, as the Nazi's pain ebbed, he would babble. He talked about his home, about Hitler, about the victory of the Nazis.

  Bill sometimes listened to him, sometimes just let the voice babble on unheard.

  As the long night dragged itself into dawn, the Nazi seemed to go completely out of his mind. He yelled at Bill that they must go back and get the money. They must take it to the men on shore. The men were wait-

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  ing for it. They must have the money. Without the money the men on shore could not destroy the United States of America. They must go and get the money and take it to the men. The United States of America must he destroyed,

  ''Ja," Bill said in German, "let's go get the money.*'

  After a while—Bill did not know when—he heard another sound above the screaming of the Nazi. It was first a hum and then a hard hammering coming down from the sky.

  Then there was an airplane down on the water near them. A plane with the dark blue star on it and, in blue letters, U.S. Navy.

  The Nazi went wild when he saw it, clawing his way around the table toward Bill. 'They must not take us!'' he screamed in German. 'Tight them! Kill them!"

  *'Ja wohl, kill 'em," Bill said.

  A rubber boat was coming toward them, bright yellow and fat on the water.

  In English Bill called out, "He's a Nazi. He might have a gun. Be careful."

  A cheerful voice answered, "Okeydokey."

  Bill watched the German. The eyes grew sly and he

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  saw one hand beginning to slide off the table again.

  It took all Bill's strength to reach across the table and take the man's wrists in his hands. In German Bill said, *1 lied to you. Tm an American.''

  Hands from the boat reached down and caught the Nazi under the armpits. As they lifted him out of the water he looked down at Bill Grant with eyes so full of hatred that Bill shivered and looked away.

  Then hands were lifting him up, too, and with that the pain really came and he was swept away by it.

  A few weeks later Bill Grant sat in a wheel chair on the porch of a hospital in Miami waiting for his kid brother, John, to show up.

  According to the newspaper in his lap the war was going a little better. The Navy was beginning to march in the Pacific, hammering hard at the Japanese with hit-and-run attacks by the big carriers.

  There wasn't much in the paper about the Navy's undersea war but Bill didn't expect to find much. It was the Silent Service, striking secretly and keeping it a secret. But he was sure that, while the carriers were getting all the headlines, the subs were lurking under

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  the seas off Japan. Ships were sinking out there—a lot of them—blasted into their graves by the silent subs. It was not the glamorous part of the war, Bill thought, but it was a deadly part of it.

  Then a headline in the paper caught his eye. *'Nazi spies caught by FBI.'* He read all of it and leaned back in his chair.

  Some Nazi spies had been brought across from Germany by submarine and had succeeded in getting ashore on the coast of the United States. Their purpose was to form an underground army here, an army whose design would be to sabotage the industrial strength of the country. They would blow up factories, burn buildings, wreck dams and hydroelectric plants, poison water sources and, in general, ruin the ability of the United States to produce the weapons which were whipping the Nazis in Europe.

  Only—the spies had been caught almost as soon as they put foot on shore.

  Bill saw his brother John coming and grinned at him. John, now fifteen, was all arms and legs and— eyelashes. He had long, curled, dark eyelashes that the girls loved but he hated.

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  **Hello, crip/' John said, pulling up a chair.

  "Hi, Lana/'

  John blushed and balled up his fist.

  *'Look at this,'' Bill said, handing him the paper.

  John glanced at it. "I read that. FBFs right on its toes, isn't it?"

  '*Yeh. But do you remember what I told you about that Nazi floating around with me?"

  *What about him?"

  **He was talking money all the time. Getting money to the men on shore." Bill looked at his brother. '1 wonder if these were the men he was talking about?"

  *'Could be. And have you heard the news about him?'-

  "Croak?"

  "No. He got away."

  "Got away. How?"

  "Just got up and walked out. The docs didn't think he had strength enough to take a step, but he's gone."

  "For crying out loud! When did he do it? Have they caught him yet?"

  "This morning, and they haven't caught him. But if the FBI can pick up guys on the beach they ought

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  not to have much trouble nabbing a lanky bird like that with his face about burned off. He'll stick out like a sore thumb/'

  X Bill seemed not to be listening. "Look, go down to the phone and call up Naval Intelligence. Tell 'em I want to talk to somebody. Maybe they haven't seen the tie-in between that Nazi talking about money and those guys the FBI caught."

  ''Shall I tell em to send you up an admiral, En-sign?

  Bill laughed. "J^st somebody."

  John came back in a litde while. "They can only spare a full lieutenant but he's on his way chop chop."

  While they waited they talked about Bill's chances of going back into submarines when his legs were well again. 'Tm scared the docs will say I ought to serve in surface ships. They scare me. On a carrier or something like that you're just sitting there all the time. In a sub you can get down under the water."

  'You can go under the water all you want. When they draft me Vm going into the Army where I can walk—or maybe run."

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  A lieutenant came out on the hospital porch. **Lieu-tenant Grant?'* he asked. **Vm Lee Coveney.**

  Bill held out his hand. **Ensign, sir. This is my brother, John. He already knows what I want to talk about, so is it okay if he sits in?'*

  "Better not,** Coveney said quietly. "You see, your brother may not know what I'm going to talk about.** He touched John's shoulder. "Do you mind?**

  "Of course not,** John said. "1*11 go see if I can woo a Coke out of one of the nurses.**

  "Woo two more,** Bill said.

  When John had gone. Bill held out the newspaper. Coveney glanced at it and nodded.

  "The German with me in the water kept talking about getting money ashore to some saboteurs. I was wondering if there*s any connection?**

  "Plenty,** Coveney said. Then, his voice low, he went on. "Now that this is in the newspapers. Grant, you might as well know that we had been watching that Nazi ship from the time she sneaked out of Bremerhaven. She gave us the slip in the North Sea and got out into the
Atlantic. We had everything we could spare trying to stop her, but she slipped all the

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  way through to—where you found her. We hated to send your sub into such dangerous water but we had to get that ship. You see, she was carrying the top spies and all the plans and details of our factories, power plants, dams, and water supply, as well as the bribe money they thought they could use.

  *lt was a beautifully organized setup. First, the small fry were sent over—they came in subs and swam ashore—to get things started; line up ex-Germans and Nazi sympathizers in the country. The second wave, which I can't tell you about yet, was the goon squad-dynamiters, saboteurs, chemists, and engineers—all trained to do particular jobs. The third wave, which was aboard the ship you sank, was the top brass, the brains.

  ^'Heading up the whole outfit was Adolph Sweiner —the man we picked up with you. Just to show you how long and carefully this thing had been planned, let me tell you about Herr Sweiner. He was sent over here in 1934 right after he graduated from Hitler's spy school. He spent the next five years studying the U.S. industrial machine. And, he took out citizenship papers. He's a U.S. citizen, did you know that?"

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  *'A nice specimen/' Bill said.

  "So there's the picture. We stopped the first wave cold. I can go so far as to say weVe got the goon squad where we want them. And we had to stop that ship with Sweiner & Co. aboard.''

  Bill nodded. "How many of them survived?"

  "One, Adolph Sweiner. And you."

  Bill shut his eyes for a moment, remembering his skipper, and the exec, and the men in the submarine —all friends of his. All dead now. "Rough," he said.

  "Yes, rough. But you stopped the ship and put an end to a really serious threat to this country."

  "Hard to measure things like that," Bill said quietly. Then he changed the subject. "Did you get anything out of Sweiner?"

  Coveney nodded. "The Nazis have an odd trait. Grant. They love to brag. And when they brag they spill information all over the place. We found out almost all we wanted to know."