Cryptonomicon

Dönitz, bless him, is trying to build new U-boats that can stay submerged all the time. But he has to beg for every ton of steel and for the services of every engineer. In the meantime there is this stopgap measure, the Schnorkel, which is just plumbing: a pipe that sticks up out of the water and enables you to run on diesel power, just beneath the surface. Even the Schnorkel will show up on radar, but less brilliantly. Every time U-691 surfaces for more than an hour, Holz is up there working on the Schnorkel, welding new bits on, grinding old bits off, wrapping it in rubber or some other stuff that he hopes will absorb the radar. The engineers who installed the Schnorkel in Lorient six months ago wouldn't recognize it now because it has evolved, like shrews evolving into tigers. If Bischoff can just get U-691 back to a safe port, others can learn from Holz's innovations, and the few U-boats that haven't been sunk can derive some benefit from the experiment.

He snaps out of it. This must be how officers die, and get their men killed: they spend more time reviewing the past than planning for the future. It is nothing short of masturbation for Bischoff to be thinking about all of this. He must concentrate.

He doesn't have to worry so much about being sunk by Germans. As soon as he sent Dönitz the message threatening to broadcast the information about the gold, Dönitz retracted his general order to sink U-691. But there is the possibility that some ship might have received the first order but missed the second one, so he still has to watch himself.

Big deal. There is hardly any German Navy left to sink him anyway. He can worry about being sunk by the Allies instead. They will be intently irritated when they figure out that he has been shadowing this convoy for two whole days. Bischoff is pretty irritated himself, it is a fast convoy that protects itself by zigzagging, and if U-691 does not zigzag in perfect unison with the ship above it, it will either be crushed by her, or blunder out of her shadow and be noticed. This has put quite a strain on skipper and crew, and quite a drain on the boat's supply of benzedrine. But they've covered five hundred miles! Soon, fatal Biscay will be behind them, Brittany will be off to starboard, and Bischoff will have a choice: hang a right into the English Channel, which would be suicidal; head north between Britain and Ireland, which would be suicidal; or veer to the west around Ireland, which would be suicidal.

Of course there's always France, which is friendly territory, but it is a siren whose allure must be sternly resisted. It's not enough for Bischoff just to run the U-boat aground on a godforsaken beach somewhere; he wants to get the thing back to a proper base. But the skies above the proper bases are infested with Catalinas, illuminating the sea with the satanic light of their radars. It is much cleverer to make them think that he's headed for France, and then head for a German port instead.

Or at least it seemed that way two days ago. Now the complexities of the plan are weighing on him.

The shadow of the ship above them suddenly seems much longer and deeper. This means either that the earth's rotation has just sped up tremendously, moving the sun around to a different angle, or that the ship has veered towards them. "Hard to starboard," Bischoff says quietly. His voice travels down a pipe to the man who controls the rudder. "Anything on the radio?"

"Nothing," says the Funkmaat. That's weird; usually when the ships are zigzagging, they coordinate it on the radio. Bischoff spins the periscope around and gets a load of the transport, still trying to shoulder its way into them. He checks his course; the bitch has veered a full ninety degrees!

"They've seen us," Bischoff says. "We'll dive in just a moment." But before he loses his ability to use the periscope, he does one more three-sixty, just to verify that his mental map of the convoy is accurate. It is, more or less; why, there's a destroyer, right there where he thought it was. He steadies the 'scope, calls out target bearings. The Torpedomaat echoes the digits while dialing them into the targeting computer: the very latest fully analog technology. The computer grinds through some calculations and sets the gyroscopes on a couple of torpedoes. Bischoff says: fire, fire, dive.It happens, almost that fast. The diesels' anvil chorus, which has been subtly driving them all insane for a couple of days, is replaced by a startling silence. They are running on batteries now.

As has always been the case, and as will continue to be the case for at least another half century, batteries suck. The convoy seems to bolt forward as U-691's speed drops to a pathetic wallow. The destroyers can go about five times as fast as they can now. Bischoff hates this part.

"The destroyer is taking evasive action," says the sound man.

"Did we have time to get the weather forecast?" he asks.