Heroes, David Hagberg [me reader .txt] 📗

watch. It was a couple of minutes after eleven. He looked out into the bay, and an almost overpowering feeling came to him that the submarine was there. He strained to listen, but he couldn’t hear a thing except for the wind in the trees and rocks behind him and the waves washing up on the beach at his feet. But the boat was out there. He could almost smell the diesel fuel.

He pulled a large flashlight out of one of the pockets in his dark pea coat, pointed it directly south, and sent four flashes. He waited thirty seconds, then sent four more flashes, and followed them one minute later with a final four.

The answering sequence came almost immediately. Perhaps no more than a couple of hundred yards offshore. It was possible they had come that close. The water was very deep here. He had heard the local fisherman talking about it this afternoon, when he had gone into the country store for some food.

From the charts he had seen back at the cabin (he supposed they had been left there by the previous tenant, a fisherman), the sub would probably have come up the east side of the bay, well away from Bar Harbor itself, before angling back to the west to Peck’s Point.

There was a very brief flash of red light, as if someone had opened the wrong hatch or something, and then, over the wind, Schey was certain he could hear the sounds of oars dipping in the water, and someone grunted.

He looked both ways along the beach. There were coastal watchers here. Or at least along a lot of coastline there were old men with nothing better to do than snoop around at night. He wasn’t really afraid of them; he just didn’t want the nuisance.

The sounds of someone rowing a boat came much clearer now, and Schey flashed his light a couple of times for them to home in on as he waited impatiently. Every minute he was here like this, he risked exposure. There was too much work yet to be done for him to have to run. There was another reason he did not want his life turned upside down at this moment, but he pushed that thought to the back of his head.

He had not had enough time to find out for sure if beach patrols were maintained on a regular basis in these parts. A mistake on his part, he thought with recrimination, but it was too late now to do anything about it.

The rubber raft, with four men all dressed in black, their faces corked, materialized from the darkness, and Schey helped pull the boat up on the beach. All four of the men jumped ashore.

They had huge grins on their faces.

“Die Vereinigten Staaten. Wir sind hier!”

“Welkommen,” Schey replied.

“Heil Hitler,” one of the men said, raising his right arm in salute.

Schey returned it, a sudden surge of pride coming over him. It had been a long time since he had been among friends and had been able to use that greeting. Power. The destiny of Germany.

Brotherhood. Authority. It bespoke a rich patina of all those feelings and more for him.

“Hamburg sent us. You must be Captain Schey,” the naval officer said. He was young, probably twenty-five, and wore a short, well-trimmed beard.

Schey nodded. “U293?”

“Right. Lieutenant Kurt Voster, communications and security officer. You have something for me, sir?”

Schey pulled the tightly wrapped package from his pocket.

“This is very important, Lieutenant.”

“You don’t have to tell me, sir,” Voster said, taking the package and pocketing it. “We came all the way across the Atlantic to pick it up. Do you realize what that means these days?”

“Sorry,” Schey said, and he meant it. “How are things at home?” He did not trust the news he was getting here from the radio and the newspapers. There was too much propaganda.

“Not good, let me tell you.”

The three crewmen had wandered up the beach. When they returned home, they’d be able to brag to their friends that they had actually invaded the U.S. “They talk about bombing. Is it true?”

“Unfortunately,” Voster said. “The bastard Americans come over by day, and then at night the British come. We have the Norden bombsight—or at least that’s the rumor going around— but that doesn’t do us any good.”

Schey was sick at heart. “Berlin, too?”

Voster nodded. “Dresden. Koln. Munich. No place is safe.”

He looked over toward the diminishing figures of his men.

“There’s a gag going around. I heard it when I was home on leave for Christmas.”

It hurt hearing this, but Schey said nothing, letting the man go on.

“They’re asking what’s the shortest joke. When you say you don’t know, they answer: ‘We’re winning the war.’ “

“That bad?”

“I’m afraid so, sir. What about you here? How much longer will you be able to hold out?”

“That depends upon the photographs and drawings. It’s up to the Admiral.”

An odd expression came over Voster’s face. “Perhaps not,” he said enigmatically.

Schey was about to ask him what he meant by that, when the crewmen raced back, waving their arms frantically, but making absolutely no noise.

Voster spun around and pulled out his pistol. Schey held him back.

“No!” he whispered urgently.

“There’s someone up there,” one of the crewmen gasped, out of breath.

The other two were pushing the rubber raft off the beach.

“Probably the coastal watcher,” Schey said. “Get the hell out of here; I’ll take care of this.” He looked into Voster’s eyes.

“The photographs and the drawings are important, Lieutenant!

Very important! Verstehen She?”

“Ja, und Gott She dank,” Voster said. He jumped in the raft with the others, and as Schey hurried back up the beach, they disappeared into the darkness.

Almost immediately he could hear someone above in the rocks, on the west side of the creek. He froze in his tracks as a powerful beam of light flashed on the beach behind him. When it swung out to sea, he raced across to a long, low outcropping of rock.

“Here, what’s this?” someone shouted from just a