Dominik waved urgently. Vaclav dove behind the closest bush. He didn't know what was up ahead, and he didn't want to find out the hard way. Sergeant Halevy twiddled fingers at him. Ever so cautiously, Vaclav slithered forward. He swore under his breath every time a knee or an elbow broke a twig.

Then he froze-German voices up ahead. The breeze swung, and he got a whiff of cigarette smoke. "God in heaven, I'm tired," one of the Fritzes said. "I could sleep for a month."

"Just a little going on, Klaus." If those dry tones didn't come from a sergeant, Vaclav would eat his boots.

"Ja," Klaus said, and then, "What the hell was that?"

That was Vaclav's antitank rifle scraping through some dry bushes. The goddamn thing was more than a meter and a half long-almost as long as he was tall. It wasn't just heavy; it was also unwieldy as all get-out. Jezek froze.

"I didn't hear anything," the noncom said.

"I sure thought I did," Klaus replied.

"Want to check it out?"

"Nah. I just want to sit here and grab a smoke."

"Sounds good to me. Let me bum one off you," the sergeant said.

Even more warily than before, Vaclav crawled forward. He spotted an armored car between a couple of chestnuts. Hoping the noise wouldn't give him away, he chambered a round. The Germans didn't have kittens, so he got away with it. A couple of those long, fat rounds through the engine compartment and that armored car wouldn't go anywhere for a while.

He waggled the fingers on his left hand to let Sergeant Halevy know he was in position. The rest of the Czechs opened up on the Germans. His noise covered by theirs, he punched one through the armored car's thin steel side and into the engine.

He was about to shoot at it again when a German with a submachine gun popped up out of nowhere. Vaclav shot him instead. A round designed to pierce armor did horrible things to flesh. It seemed to blow out half the German's insides. The poor bastard fell over with a grunt and never stirred after that. It was over fast for him, anyhow.

Shoulder aching-even with muzzle brake and padded stock, the antitank rifle kicked harder than a kangaroo-Vaclav reloaded. Here came the other armored car. He fired at where the driver would sit, once, twice. The car slid to the left and slammed into a tree.

That seemed to take the vinegar out of these Germans. They either ran off or gave up. "Good job!" Sergeant Halevy called to Vaclav. "Don't you wish it was this easy all the goddamn time?"

"Jesus!" Vaclav exclaimed. "I'm just glad it was this easy once." Halevy laughed, for all the world as if he were joking. LIEUTENANT JULIUS LEMP STOOD AT stiff attention. When a rear admiral reamed you out, you had to stand there and take it and pretend it didn't hurt. The process was a lot like picking up dueling scars, except you had no sword of your own.

"You thick-skinned idiot!" Karl Donitz didn't raise his voice, which only made things worse. "Did you want to drag the United States into this war?"

"No, sir," Lemp replied woodenly He stared straight at a spot three centimeters in front of Donitz's nose.

The round-faced chief of U-boat operations was not a man who stood out in a crowd. Donitz was supposed to be a pretty good guy, too. He had a reputation for sticking up for his captains. But nobody would stick up for you when you screwed up the way Lemp had.

"U-boats brought the Americans in the last time," Donitz said. "We try not to make the same mistakes twice, you know." He waited.

"Yes, sir." Again, something mechanical might have spoken through Lemp.

"I've had to calm down Goebbels and von Ribbentrop and the Fuhrer," Donitz said. "They all wanted your scalp." He waited.

What am I supposed to say now? Lemp wondered. He tried, "I'm honored, sir." In a way, he was. If the Propaganda Minister and the Foreign Minister and Hitler himself noticed you, you'd done something out of the ordinary, no doubt about it.

Rear Admiral Donitz's pale eyes grew cold as the seas off Greenland. "I wouldn't be, if I were you," he said, and his voice was as icy as his face. "Dr. Goebbels had to put together a whole propaganda campaign to shift the blame away from us. Now there's some doubt about who sank the Athenia-but not among us, eh?"

"No, sir. I did it, all right." Lemp still didn't change expression. Yeah, sometimes you had to stand there and take it. This was one of those times.

"I'd run you out of my office if you told me anything else," Donitz said. "If you screw up like this again, I won't be able to help you. Do you understand that?"

"Yes, sir." Men who served on U-boats weren't normally long on military discipline. This was one of those occasions where formality was mandatory, though. You took your abuse by the numbers.

"A notation about your error will go into your service jacket," Donitz said, which meant Lemp would be a long time seeing another promotion.

"Yes, sir," Lemp said one more time. He couldn't get into more trouble as long as he kept saying that, and he was in plenty already.

"Next time we send you out, for God's sake try not to sink anything flying the Stars and Stripes," Donitz said.

"I will, sir," Lemp replied. But he couldn't help adding, "You are going to send me out again?"

"Yes, yes." The commander of the Kriegsmarine's U-boat forces sounded impatient. "You've proved you can hit what you aim at. We need that in our skippers. I have to dress you down, because you aimed at the wrong ship. I have my orders, too, you understand."

Did that mean he'd been going through the motions before? It sure sounded that way to Lemp. If he had, he could take his act on stage. He'd make more money with it than he ever could in a naval career. "I see," the U-boat skipper said cautiously-one more phrase that stayed pretty safe.

Donitz looked altogether different when he smiled. "All right, then," he said. "Dismissed. And you can tell your crew we won't send them to a camp."

Lemp saluted. "Yes, sir. I'll do that. Some of them have been worried about it." Some of them had been scared shitless. You didn't want to say that to a rear admiral, though. Lemp didn't like the idea of living in a place where making an honest mistake could land you in this much trouble. But, no matter what else the Vaterland was, it was the Vaterland.

"Go on, go on." Donitz had spent all the time with him he was going to. Stacks of papers smothered the admiral's desk. It wasn't as if he had nothing else going on.

After one more salute, Lemp made his escape. He was glad he'd worn his greatcoat. Germany had enough coal to keep furnaces going and heat buildings, but Wilhelmshaven was bloody cold outside. Screeching gulls wheeled overhead. The air smelled of the sea and, more faintly, of fuel oil-familiar odors to a U-boat skipper.

Donitz's office wasn't far from the harbor, and from the seaside barracks that housed U-boat crewmen when they came in to port. Lemp made for the two-story red-brick building with dormer windows where the sailors from the U-30 were staying. A sailor wearing a Stahlhelm and carrying a rifle stood guard outside. He saluted Lemp. The skipper and his crew weren't quite under arrest-but they weren't quite not under arrest, either.

Returning the salute, Lemp said, "You can relax, Jochen. I think they'll give you some other duty soon."

"I wouldn't mind," Jochen said.

Lemp walked on in. The sailors crowded the wardroom, smoking and playing cards and reading newspapers. It wasn't nearly so crowded as the long steel tube of the U-30 would have been, though. Everything stopped when the men saw Lemp. They searched his face as anxiously as they would have searched the horizon when Royal Navy destroyers were in the neighborhood.

"It's over," Lemp said. "The admiral read me the riot act, but they'll let us put to sea again."