A pale hunter’s moon hung above the horizon so that its light
threw dazzling reflections off the frigid ocean. With winter
not yet given way to spring, the sun had yet to rise this year.
Instead, it remained hidden behind the earth’s curvature, a
faint glowing promise that crept along the line where sky met
sea as the planet spun on its tilted axis. It would be another
month before it would fully show itself, and, once it did, it
would not disappear again until fall. Such was the odd cycle
of day and night above the Arctic Circle.
By rights of their extreme northern latitudes, the waters
of the Barents Sea should be frozen over and impassable
for most of the year. But the sea was blessed with warm
waters cycling up from the tropics on the Gulf Stream.
It was this powerful current that made Scotland and the
northern reaches of Norway habitable, and kept the Barents
free of ice and navigable even in the deepest winters. For
this reason, it was the primary route for war material being
convoyed from the tireless factories of America to the
embattled Soviet Union. And like so many such sea routes
– the English Channel or the Gibraltar Strait – it had become
a choke point and, thus, a killing ground for the wolfpacks
of the Kriegsmarine and shore-based Schnellboots, the fast-attack
torpedo boats.
Far from random, the placement of U-boats was planned
out with the forethought of a chess master advancing his
pieces. Every scrap of intelligence was gathered about the
strength, speed, and destination of ships plying the North
Atlantic in order to have submarines positioned to strike.
From bases in Norway and Denmark, patrol aircraft
scoured the seas, looking for the convoys of merchantmen,
radioing positions back to fleet headquarters so the U-boats
could lie in wait for their prey. For the first years of the war,
the submarines enjoyed near-total supremacy of the seas, and
untold millions of tons of shipping had been sunk without
mercy. Even under heavy escort by cruisers and destroyers,
the Allies could do little more than play the odds of having
one ship sunk for every ninety-nine that made it through. By
being gambled so coldly, the men of the merchant marine
paid as high a toll as frontline combat units.
That was about to change this night.
The four-engined Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Kondor was a
massive plane – seventy-seven feet long, with a wingspan
of nearly one hundred and ten feet. Designed before the
war for Lufthansa as a passenger airliner, the aircraft had
been quickly pressed into military duty as both a transport
and a long-range reconnaissance platform. Her twenty-five hundred-
mile range allowed the Kondor to remain aloft for
hours and hunt Allied shipping far from shore.
Used in an attack roll through 1941 by carrying four fivehundred-
pound bombs under her wings, the Kondor had
taken some heavy losses and was now strictly employed
as a reconnaissance plane, and remained well above Allied
antiaircraft fire during their patrols.
The aircraft’s pilot, Franz Lichtermann, chafed at the
monotonous hours spent searching the trackless sea. He
longed to be in a fighter squadron, fighting the real war, not
loitering thousands of feet above frigid nothingness hoping
to spot Allied shipping for someone else to sink. Back at base,
Lichtermann maintained a high level of military decorum
and expected the same from his men. However, when they
were on patrol and the minutes stretched with the elasticity
of India rubber, he allowed a certain amount of familiarity
among the five-man crew.
‘That should help,’ he commented over the intercom and
jerked his head in the direction of the dazzling moon.
‘Or its reflection will hide a convoy’s wake,’ his copilot,
Max Ebelhardt, replied in his customary pessimistic tone.
‘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.’