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“Can you tell if this fishing boat is one of yours?” he asked quietly.
Nola placed his face up to the periscope. It took him some moments to get his bearings, then to dial in the scope. When he finally did, he did not like what he saw.
It was a mostly moonless night but clear, and the sky full of brilliant stars cast a soft light on the water, putting the two boats on the surface in silhouette.
Nola had a reasonably unobstructed view of both vessels, their bows pointed more or less in the direction of the sub. He could see that the fishing boat, at about fifty feet in length, was not unlike the Stefania. The German patrol boat, sitting a couple meters off her port side, was about twice its length.
On the fishing boat, there were ten men standing on the port gunnel—most likely, the entire crew—looking up to face the sailors on the S-boat.
“I cannot tell,” Nola said, his voice quavering. “But it very easily could be mine, or one of someone I know.”
Suddenly, he saw the night erupt in flames. It was the muzzle flash from the S-boat’s light machine guns laying a line of fire from bow to stern.
The fisherman were cut down where they stood, some falling into the boat, others into the sea. Dead.
“Great Holy Mother of God!” Frank Nola exclaimed, then turned away from the periscope.
L’Herminier grabbed the scope handles, stuck his eyes to the viewing glass—then immediately retracted the periscope.
“Dive! Dive!” the sub commander called. “Flood all tanks!”
“Dive!” the sad-eyed XO repeated to the helmsman. “All tanks flooded!”
“No!” Francisco Nola shouted to L’Herminier. “You must torpedo those bastards!”
L’Herminier turned to Canidy.
“Get him the hell out of here, Major!”
Canidy had never heard L’Herminier use that tone of voice.
But he recognized that L’Herminier was, in fact, right.
Canidy took Nola by the sleeve of his jacket and attempted to gently push him toward the compartment hatch.
“Let’s go, Frank.”
Nola tried to hold his ground.
“Now, goddammit!” Canidy said, and much more forcefully used his body to push Nola.
Nola stared shuffling toward the hatch.
“They just gunned them down in cold blood.” He began crying. “We must do something.”
They reached the hatch as the angle of the deck began to change.
“We can’t, Frank,” Canidy said, looking back over his shoulder at L’Herminier. “If we do, then our mission is compromised.”
L’Herminier, still with a stern face, returned the look with a nod.
“Give me a depth of one hundred meters,” L’Herminier then ordered his XO. “Then steer a course of zero-one-zero degrees. Full speed, if we can get it.”
“Depth of one hundred meters,” the executive officer repeated, “course of one-zero. Full speed.”
The bow of the boat dropped dramatically. As the angle grew greater, mugs and papers and anything else not secured slid from tables.
Not ten minutes later, with the Casabianca passing through a depth of fifty meters, there came a thunderous boom from far above. It reverberated through the sub.
