Cryptonomicon

After another hour, the destroyers give up and leave. Bischoff takes U-691 up to schnorkel depth and points her straight up the middle of the English Channel, as advertised. He also uses the periscope to verify that the weather is, also as advertised, awful.

Those bastards have a big fat red pin on the map marking his position as last reported by those destroyers. Around that pin, as the hours go by, they will draw circles of steadily increasing radius, widening gyres enclosing the set of all points in the ocean where U-691 could possibly be at the moment, based on their assumptions about her speed. The square mileage that must be searched will increase as the square of that radius.

Going up the Channel, while submerged,just isn't going to work--they'll run into one of the block ships that the Brits sank there to prevent U-boats from doing just that. The surface is the only way, and it's a hell of a lot faster too. This raises the airplane issue. Airplanes search not for the boat itself, which is tiny and dark, but for its wake, which is white and spreads for miles on calm water. There will be no wake behind U-691 tonight--or rather, there will be, but it will be lost in random noise of much higher amplitude. Bischoff decides that covering distance is more important than being subtle at the moment, and so he brings her up to the surface and then pins the throttle. This will burn fuel insanely, but U-691 has a range of eleven thousand miles.

Sometime around noon the next day, U-691, battering its way through a murderous storm, lances the Straits of Dover and breaks through into the North Sea. She must be lighting up every radar screen in Europe, but airplanes can't do much in this weather.

"The prisoner Shaftoe wishes to speak to you," says Beck, who has gone back to being his second-in-command, as if nothing had ever been different. War gives men good ignoring skills. Bischoff nods.

Shaftoe enters the control room, accompanied by Root, who will apparently serve as translator, spiritual guide, and/or wry observer. "I know a place where we can go," Shaftoe says.

Bischoff is floored. He hasn't thought about where they were actually goingin days. The concept of having a coherent goal is almost beyond his comprehension.

"It is--" Bischoff gropes "--touchingthat you have taken an interest."

Shaftoe shrugs. "I heard you were in deep shit with Dönitz."

"Not as bad as I was," Bischoff says, immediately perceiving the folksy wisdom of this American barnyard metaphor. "The depth is the same, but now I am head up instead of head down."

Shaftoe chuckles delightedly. They are all buddies now. "You have any charts of Sweden?"

This strikes Bischoff as a good but half-witted idea. Seeking temporary refuge in a neutral country: fine. But much more likely is that they run the boat aground on a rock.

"There's a bay there, by this little town," Shaftoe says. "We know the depths."

"How could that be?"

"Because we charted the fucking thing ourselves, a couple of months ago, with a rock on a string."

"Was this before or after you boarded the mysterious U-boat full of gold?" Bischoff asks.

"Just before."

"Would it be out of line for me to inquire what an American Marine Raider and an ANZAC chaplain were doing in Sweden, a neutral country, performing bathymetric surveys?"