Titanic 2012 (inspector alastair ransom) Page 51

  “Think of it, Hulsing,” Mullenheim-Rechberg had said to Erwin at breakfast just that morning, “the leader of the Third Reich, Hitler himself, here to inspect our ship, to grace our ship with his presence.”

  “Yes… yes,” Hulsing had replied, nodding. “To grace Bismarck yes.” Shrugging, Erwin had added, “To inspect her, but what’s to inspect? The ship itself is perfect, and all of Germany and Great Britain knows this and fears it.”

  “You mean England fears it; Germany hails it as the final blow to those cowards and fools. It’s sure to keep the Americans out of the war now, ha!”

  Erwin took a deep breath and held his tongue.

  “Go ahead, my friend, speak your mind; we can trust one another,” Rechberg had said, reading Erwin’s blue eyes and chiseled features like an expert interrogator.

  “I think there are many Germans who are not so sure of the path Adolf Hitler has forged for us, my brother.”

  “You’d best not say that too loud or too often; you’ll find yourself being escorted to the onboard SS officer’s guard.”

  As with any military venue in the Third Reich, the ship had its own SS officer headquartered within earshot. Everyone was encouraged to inform on anything or anyone seeming suspicious. Such encouragement gave men a sense of power no one should be given—a single word against another, and that man could be made to ‘disappear’. No judge, no jury beyond the SS officer aboard Bismarck, a man named Commandant Herrmann Bonekemper. Of course, he had the last word, and no one questioned it—not even the captain or the admiral, although some playful pretense to their standing might be entertained. An SS officer’s decisions could be revoked by no one. It had slowly become a fact of life in Germany since the Nazi Party had taken over the German government under this dictatorial little man in 1933. This man, Hitler, started WWII by ordering his troops to invade and occupy Poland.

  After Poland had fallen to Hitler’s war machine, the other European countries fell like a series of dominoes: East Prussia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece, Italy, Belgium, then Luxembourg along with Finland and Norway. Only Russia, Turkey, France, Spain, and Portugal remained separate, with a plan of taking over North Africa in order to control the Mediterranean Sea. Now Bismarck was set about the business of taking control of the North Atlantic.

  Meanwhile, if Hulsing could believe his contacts in Great Britain, Der Fuhrer had also begun internment camps fore Jews and other undesirables, but worse than merely housing people in stalags across Germany and much of Europe now, there were fearsome rumors first couched in the more melodic term endlosung but now being called endziel—the Final Solution to the problem of the embedded Jewish Peoples of not only Germany but Poland and the rest of Europe as well. In other words genocide planned against the inferior races of the planet.

  In the meantime, good men in both civilian and military life, soldiers, mariners, pilots kept their eyes on their individual tasks to work assigned duties, concentrate on deployment and responsibilities. Everyone going along with the status quo, happy to have located their collective hive, set their feet on the mark upon which to stand in rows upon rows. Safety in numbers so long as you’re on the right side, he thought. Solidarity worked for a bad cause as well as a good one.

  How Hitler loves seeing all the thousands of pressed naval shirts and buttons in rows here now on board his ship of fools. The men were followers in desperate love with the ideas this leader had cooked up for them.

  Hard to fault their blindness; all they hoped for was enough bread and a brighter future in the new order of things. A way out of the morbid, crushing economic crisis.

  Just concentrate on your own ass and einstatz, Hulsing had so often heard over the years now from the bullying officers he’d had to work under. The idea had certainly taken hold, duty above all else. The thought privately sickened him as he’d seen Nazi soldiers in occupied Poland set one old man on fire in the street. All it took was a little petro and a cigarette.

  Now that’s suffering, he told himself, and begged for release as he stood at attention, pretending to be one with the ranks in perfect lock-step. Like the sheep we are, he privately muttered, his jaw set so hard as to chip a tooth.

  Nearly finished with his inspection of the single section of seamen that he had chosen to get friendly with, Adolf Hitler’s eyes fell on each officer in turn. To these men, Erwin Hulsing included, he gave a stern, even fatherly stare as if to say, “I am placing my trust in you officers to return to Germany victorious.” Saying nothing, just casting what seemed to be the quintessence of the proverbial ‘evil eye’, he continued on his way to complete his cursory inspection of the seamen. Then in a flash, he returned to the admiral’s bridge where he stood before the microphone which covered more than half his face. Next his cutting voice, shrill and demanding, broke into Erwin’s thoughts of how the man could not even grow a proper mustache.

  Hitler, with the Bismarck sailors still at attention, was now shouting into a microphone like a minister in the pulpit. His words condemned Gypsies first, then Jews, followed by other inferior races that must be exterminated from the globe.

  “First it was get them all out of Germany, then it was get them all out of Europe,” Erwin whispered in Heinze Zucknat’s ear. “Now its get them off the planet.”

  Zucknat, his next in command in the rear gun control room below decks merely shrugged and said, “We just need to be patient, sir, and when we see the Hood, it will be entschiedender sieg, eh?”

  It was party rhetoric in the brainwashed heads of these men, Erwin knew. He repeated Heinze’s words,”Entschiedender sieg,” although he wanted just the opposite: an indecisive victory, one in which the Bismarck would be overtaken by the hood, boarded, her admiral surrendering his sword, and the ship towed to England where all aboard could wait out the war in a prisoner of war camp in Nova Scotia or perhaps even the United States if the US ever got off its collective ass and jumped into the war with both feet.

  The inspection was taking an interminable amount of time, and Erwin felt more suspicious the longer Hitler tarried over his seemingly mock inspection of the ship and crew. Why had Der Fuhrer personally come aboard Bismarck? Were they here to make another propaganda film? The cameras were, after all, rolling, while his photographers chronicled every move, every word, every grimace, but where had they been when the immortal one and his guard had first boarded Bismarck with that unusual, custom-made crate? Sure, he was here to inspect Bismarck from stem to stern, but was this truly his only purpose? What might his ulterior motive be, other than to bless the ship before she set sail in the hunt for the British battleship, The Hood, which untill now had controlled the English Channel and the North Atlantic?

  Hitler had begun a long and loud war prayer, ending with, “I pray not for you men of Bismarck!” This remark brought on more hidden sneers than cheers while Hitler paused, even lighting up a cigarette and puffing for effect, allowing time for his caustic words to sink in before adding, “I pray not for you, for you are men of the Aryan race, willingly here, willing to die for right and justice, and so many of you will die to achieve our ends! This is glory. This is magnificence! I pray not for the Bismarck herself either—a mass of steel. She is beautiful, yes, like you—you are all beautiful, but also like you, she is a missile to be used, to fire and be fired upon, and she could be mortally wounded, like any warrior… like all of you.” Hitler’s voice had gone to an uncharacteristic whisper behind the microphone that still hid his blunt features. Erwin wondered how the man could say such things without hearing a single grumble from the men aboard ship, when Hitler ended with, “I pray for der Reich, der Vaterland!”

  Cheers drowned out Hitler’s last words, but Erwin, an expert in communications, read lips, so he heard Hitler say: “And so should you, my lovely seamen! Pray not for yourselves or Bismarck—all a means to an end. Pray for der Third Reich!”

  This winding down of the speech sent a cheer up among the men so loud that it must have frig
htened seagulls a mile away.

  Bismarck had been named for the dead Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, a man whose memory had been extraordinarily twisted to fit Hitler’s war propaganda ends. Bismarck the man had somehow become a mythological symbol of moral correctness, flag-waving patriotism, religious righteousness, race purity, along with pure power in the Third Reich. Did it make sense? Not as far as Hulsing could see but then again, what did made sense anymore? After all, they’d already gone down the ‘rabbit hole’ so whether this use of Bismarck’s name—originally christened and launched amid a crowd of thousands of patriots—was right or proper, who but the fanatics cared? The fanatics and the Nazi Party had swarmed into the Hamburg shipyards February 14, 1939 and among the crowds stood huge numbers of boys and girls of the Hitler Youth Camps who had been bused in to celebrate the launch of Germany’s grandest battleship—the new power of the seas. Back in ’39 when Bismarck was first launched, cheers had filled the air, and Erwin had been on hand, in his uniform, under orders to be among the onlookers, giving the Nazi salute as the ceremony came to a close, while the giant warship groaned and moaned on her slow slide from her gantry, down the ramp, and into the water for her launching. At the time, Erwin Hulsing, an armaments and communications man, hadn’t a clue that he would be enlisted to be among Bismarck’s crew as a Lieutenant in charge of engineering and munitions—hardly a perfect choice some felt. Erwin had been a police detective in Berlin before the call for all able-bodied men to join the Party and now the military.

  Still why now, two years later, with almost the entire continent of Europe save Russia, France, and Spain under Nazi control, was Hitler here, aboard, carting oranges to Admiral Lutjens’ quarters?

  Erwin had been born curious and was raised on the cynicism, and he respected the cynical nature of his father, grandfather, and uncles, all of whom held a healthy distrust of any form of government; they were all in agreement and especially distrusted the new government formed by Herr Hitler.

  As for Hitler, A-dolt as Erwin’s deceased grandfather had privately called him, Erwin could hardly believe the events that had led a failed soldier, a failed artist, a failed family man to become this—the leader of the Third Reich. It must have been destined, fated, or be the result of a higher power, one that allowed this little man so much influence. It must be a power to which, one day, Adolf Hitler himself might well be bowing his head and providing burnt offerings to. Erwin could only hope this would come to pass, but it wouldn’t be today that Hitler would supplicate himself, not with an ego so inflated as his had become. As for the battleship Bismarck, her guns the most enormous ever devised, had Hitler smiling even wider now, no doubt at the thought of the power beneath his feet; Erwin imagined the man, rumored to have some Jewish blood in his veins, preening at the adoration of the mariners, and at Admiral Gunther Lutjens’ previous introduction. The Fuhrer didn’t need any introduction for his war-prayer rhetoric; after all, every card shop and cigar store in Germany sold postcards depicting the man feeding and petting animals at a petting zoo, meeting with children at their schoolyards, kissing infants, rallying famous athletic heroes to his side, shaking hands with the Chancellor of England and in parades with the British leader.

  Proceeds from the Hitler postcards went into the ‘general fund’ to support the Nazi Party government which had taken hold of the land like a choking weed.

  With these thoughts going through his mind alongside the thought that he could be executed for his thoughts, Hulsing remained at attention as Hitler watched the kind of distress he kept Lutjens’and Lindemann’s mariners in—no doubt a test.

  The speech went on at length, followed by a thank you from the admiral, and a belated welcome aboard from Captain Johan Lindemann, who kept it mercifully short. In fact, Erwin thought he detected a smirk disappearing even as it was appearing on Lindemann’s face. It made Erwin curious, leaving him to wonder if the captain, unlike the admiral, was not so enthralled by this man Hitler after all, or maybe the smirk was a result of something else, perhaps something the admiral had said. By now, exhausted from standing at attention for so long, Erwin, a man of action, could not be sure of anything beyond his own pure hatred of Hitler.

  Still with Hitler basking in the long-winded speech-making, filled as it was with praise for his leadership and vision for the Fatherland, finally closed, Adolf, no doubt feeling a twinge of his childhood fantasies bubbling up, raised his hand to the two thousand men aboard Bismarck and again shouted, “Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil.” To which the men responded in one voice: “Sieg Heil,”—to Victory—and “Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler!”

  And so it went on. Every proud young seaman in der Deutschen Krietgsmarine stood on the decks, arms raised in the now well-known Nazi salute, and when the two thousand plus men raised their voices, shouting Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil, the Bismarck shook with the reverberation.

  Chapter One

  May 5, 2012 at Bismarck’s wreck site in the Denmark Straits

  The black undersea cosmos at these depths—three miles down—could not be calculated for its sheer impact on the human psyche. Ryne Mannheim slid into the seat behind Horst Fellhauer as they closed in on the wreck of the sunken Bismarck and the treasures that lay within her. They felt safe, secure in fact, encased as they were in the underwater marvel of a mini-sub, the Blitzmariner, of modern German design.

  Both Mannheim and Fellhauer could trace their ancestry back to the men on the shipwreck they were racing toward—the infamous German destroyer, The Bismarck.

  The mini-submarine moved through the deep like an underwater wave, hardly noticeable even on the radar screens manned by people who expected to see them, the captain and crew of Victory, the seagoing scientific and salvage vessel above. The expedition meant to take what it could from the bowels of the sunken WWII battleship. They had little interest in anything else such as precisely how or why she sank as history had thoroughly taken note of her demise, although some scholars questioned the odds of a direct hit on her rudder by a single torpedo fired from a Swordfish plane. Such an occurrence had seemed like a gift from the gods handed to the British fleet. Ample vengeance for the sinking of The Hood, the Lusitania, and the Titanic’s sister ship, the Britannic—each and all having been sent to the bottom by German engineering in the form of U-boats and battleships like the Bismarck.

  Ryne and Horst watched out the portals, marveling at the silence, the abyss, and the sheer blackness outside their small circle of light whenever the exterior lights began to flicker off and on. The little sub itself left no wake, no bubbles, nothing to mark its path in the water. They traveled much as a lone shark or dolphin might, with absolute silence in what amounted to a high-tech titanium shark. The sub was a sleek, space-age-design, an undersea craft created specifically for this job, the most ambitious salvage of a ghost ship at such depths in all of history. Their dive was even deeper than the ill-fated dive to the infamous Titanic a year before, an expedition put together by the Americans out of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute—one named Titanic 2012. While all the young men and women involved with Titanic 2012 met a terrible end, the expedition Ryne and Horst spearheaded meant to make their reputations, fortunes, and history all in one fell swoop.

  The Bismarck sat on the ocean bed hundreds of nautical miles from Ireland near where the Straits of Denmark open onto the North Atlantic. The ship sat on a deep valley floor surrounded by mountains and more than one underwater volcano. It would be 4,570 meters or 15,000 feet to the surface should they encounter any problem. In other words, three miles to the surface once they exited the sub and dared enter Bismarck. Definitely, there was no room for error, and the risks were enormous. All the same, both divers and the man at the controls loved the thrill of adventure and the rush of adrenaline pumping through their veins.

  The two divers had seen graphs depicting the depth, putting New York’s Empire State building on the bottom for comparison alongside Paris’ Eiffel Tower and Toronto’s CN Tower—all dwarfed to the size of a needle. It was a
miracle that Robert Ballard had ever found Titanic, and even more of a marvel that he’d managed to locate the Bismarck in 1989 at such depths. All thanks to the advanced underwater sonar developed by the US Navy.

  The exterior lights flickered, came back on and held, causing the men to gasp as a swarm of krill suddenly engulfed the sub. The swarm had to number in the trillions, the cloud a thick mask blotting out all else.

  “Damn, it’s like a white out in the Ukraine!” shouted Ryne, who’d spent some time there.

  Horst nodded. “Like a million diamonds blinking down on—” Caught in mid-sentence, the implosion of Blitzmariner instantly killed the three men aboard, the two German divers and George Fleet, the Netherlands-born salvage operator who was at the controls. It happened so fast, they did not have time to see or even feel their own deaths.

  Above on radar the men of Victory realized that the submarine had slammed into Bismarck’s hull like an airplane hitting a mountainside. The krill had blinded Fleet long enough for the Bismarck to kill them all.

  At the surface, everyone aboard the Victory—an oceangoing scientific and salvage ship monitoring the sub’s progress sat in stunned silence, aghast, knowing the expedition was now over, doomed to failure before it had truly gotten underway. One man had noted the sudden cloud on the radar screen that had engulfed the submarine with the three men inside her. The incident occurred with the suddenness of a storm at sea. At the last possible moment, Fleet, steering the sub, had shouted out a single word into his headset, something heard above: “Whale!”

  Where there was krill, there were whales gorging themselves.

  Fleet, ironically the same name as the man who’d first spotted the iceberg that Titanic had hit, had most likely—though no one would ever know for certain—cut away from the whale or whales to avoid a catastrophic collision only to crash instead into the Bismarck—the only whale-sized object below made of metal. Hardly the soft landing planned by the team, and a sure end to the entire expedition.