Koch turned and looked at it a long moment as it slid away.
“This way!” he said, running for the last raft in the line. “Schnell!”
With more than a little effort, Bayer and Grossman lifted and dragged the young American in the soft sand behind Koch.
“In here!” Koch said, pointing to the raft.
The American squirmed and made angry grunts as they placed him on the floor of the raft. Grossman smacked him hard on the top of his head with the Walther and the protests stopped for a moment. When the kid stirred, Grossman hit him again with the pistol, this time behind the right ear, and he went limp.
“Take those oars and put them in the other boat!” Koch ordered as he rushed to wrap the kid’s ankle with the strap that had secured the container to the raft. He then took the end of the line that bound his hands and ran it down to the ankles, trussing him to keep him from jumping overboard in the event there came such an opportunity.
The line that tied the fourth boat to the third boat now began to tighten, then became quite taut. Koch suddenly realized that with the added weight of the kid, the fourth boat was stuck high and dry. He signaled for each man to move to a corner of the boat and they lifted and carried the raft into the water.
Slowly, the train began moving smoothly out to sea again.
“That should make a nice surprise for the commander,” Koch said as the last raft and its cargo floated from view.
The men chuckled.
“Enough of this,” Koch said. “Let us go before he is discovered off his post—and then we are.”
U-134 had been moving slowly in reverse under the quiet power of batteries for about five minutes—Kapitänleutnant Hans-Günther Brosin having given the order to be under way immediately after seeing through his binoculars the first blink of light from the agent’s six-pulse signal.
After the first two sets of three flashes, there quickly had followed another two sets, and Brosin wondered if there was any particular reason for that—were the agents simply more anxious than necessary or did they need to get the rafts off the beach right away because they were in immediate danger of being discovered?
There was a flash code for that contingency, of course, as well as for others, but Brosin knew that invariably there were gray areas when something happened that was not addressed by some specific signal. So instead of having the U-boat sit in the shallow sea while the deck crew of five hand over hand pulled in the line in order to retrieve the rafts, he ordered another five sailors to go down and help them pull against the extra strain of the U-boat backing away from shore.
The sooner they were in deeper water, the sooner he would feel better.
Moments after he had given the order to get under way, as the sailors were hauling in the line, there came another odd occurrence.
The line tethering the rafts suddenly became very taut. It pulled forward the seamen who were retrieving it due to the fact that the ship was of course motoring in the opposite direction. This created the real danger of pulling them overboard, and Brosin was just about to bark the order that they let loose of the line and that the engine power be cut when whatever obstruction there had been was overcome, and the sailors were again recovering line hand over hand.
Now, with his binoculars, Brosin could see the first of the four rafts coming into view through the drizzle.
“What is our depth, Willi?” Brosin asked.
The executive officer relayed the question down below and a moment later replied, “Thirty meters, sir.”
Brosin watched the first raft reach the submarine. The sailors cleated the line, ran to the raft, and manhandled it aboard. Two seamen began deflating the recovered raft while the others returned to pulling in the line that tethered it to the following rafts.
Satisfied that the recovery process was progressing well and nearly completed, the captain let the binoculars hang from the strap around his neck and turned to his executive officer.
“Bring her around, Willi,” he ordered, “and set a course of one-two-five degrees. Go to diesel power, five knots to start, then double that once all boats are aboard and stowed.”
“Yes, sir,” Wachoffizier Detrick said, and called the orders down below.
Brosin looked again at the men on deck, saw that they had the third boat out of the water, then he removed the strap from around his neck, handed the binocs to the XO, and went to the hatch to go below.
Brosin had just stepped from the foot of the conning tower ladder when he heard from above Willi Detrick’s excited voice call down through the hatch, “Sir! I think you should see this!”
[ FOUR ]
Gander Airport
Gander, Newfoundland
0840 4 March 1943