© Timov M., 2022

© Aegitas publishing house, 2022

Introduction

April 16, 1945

20:36 local time

Bay of Genoa, 7 miles south of the Genoese port

Giovanni Renzi again used the Lord’s name in vain and lifted his greasy palms to the low night sky oozing with a dull, heavy rain.

“Pepo, you bastard!” he barked, trying to out-scream the roar of the downpour on the roof of the stubby superstructure of the schooner. “Where the fuck are you?”

His son, a twenty-year-old fool who volunteered to go with him on this voyage, responded from the bowels of the small engine compartment.

“Yes, Father?”

“What the devil are you messing around with? If we don't start this damn clunker in the next half hour, the oncoming storm will throw this tub onto the rocks south of Genoa Bay!”

“But, Father…”

The rain's cacophony made Pepo's voice hollow like he was speaking in a barrel. Old man Renzi just waved his hand. He raised his wet beard to the sky as if calling on all the saints to witness how useless an heir they had sent him.

He did not want to go to sea. Hunger, that unavoidable companion of these recent years, had forced him to push away from the mooring wall and try his luck on this rainy April day.

In the morning, while the weather was still relatively mild, they went out. They had thrown their nets out a few times; already some fish were splashing in the hold when the old 'Marconi' gurgled as if it had swallowed with a huge gulp of seawater. It sneezed twice and stalled.

All attempts to breathe at least some life into the engine got them nowhere; the schooner dangled lagged to the wave, taking the blows of foamy crests that came at it steeply. Both of them, father and son, were soaked to the skin. From somewhere on the Atlantic side, a sudden gust of wind drove in a vast bank of rain clouds, and all hell broke loose.

Water from above, water splashing at the bottom of the engine room, water wherever you look. And with no prospect of reaching the port, at least not till morning. The old man, of course, realized he was being unfair to his son: under the circumstances, no one could revive this tired old waterfowl. Most likely water was clogging the air filters, but it was almost impossible to make out anything in this pitch-black darkness and with such pitching and rolling.

On the bright side, these clouds made it impossible for those damn Americans to fly out here. Otherwise, he could expect some 'Mustang' or 'Brewster' pilot to get bored with his routine patrol and decide to harass the defenseless schooner. It was impossible to predict what these Yankees might get into their heads next. They were so drunk with the prospect of their imminent victory. Their regiments were already on their way to Genoa! Taken as a whole, Giovanni thought, the situation was not that unbearable. Sink? That has happened so rarely during his life at sea! They will get out somehow, just as they did before.

Pepo, a lanky fellow, scrambled out of the engine compartment’s pit. He stretched himself until his joints squeaked, and froze, looking somewhere to the side.

The old fisherman looked in the same direction and shuddered: a grey shroud of rain, some half a cable from the side of the schooner, thickened suddenly, grew cloudy, and became tangible.

The damned rain drowned out all other sounds. Something huge seemed to approach the small boat with all the inevitability of fate. Another boat?

The old man was already reaching for the time-darkened bell to signal a warning. Something made him pull his hand away at the last moment.

Like a ghost from children's fairy tales, the long body of a submarine, sailing on the surface, glided past the side. There was no rumble of diesel engines; the sub must have switched to its electric motors.

The boat crept forward and, at some point, came to a stop near the fishing schooner. Old man Giovanni stepped out of the wheelhouse to his son and covered his mouth with a broad palm, stifling his surprised cry just in time. Renzi knew that a German submarine would not just appear on the shores of an Italy that had become hostile overnight. The old man did not doubt this was one of Dönitz's boats. He had seen enough of these silhouettes during the last war. But what was she doing here, instead of looking for enemy convoys in the vast Atlantic?

He heard the creak of a cranked rack, somewhere above the waterline, around the wheelhouse. A hatch opened, and he heard the guttural sounds of German speech. Renzi listened intently: there were two talking. The old man was quiet, trying to make out every word.

Oberleutnant zur See Otto Wermuth, commander of submarine U-530, climbed onto the ring bridge of the wheelhouse and immediately threw the hood of his rubberized cape over his head. Yet this did not save him from the nosy sheets of icy April rain. He shivered in the chilly air and took a step to the side, making way for his first mate, Rudolf Schlitsch. Leutnant zur See Schlitsch served with the first commander of U-530 Kurt Lange. He was written off to shore in January because of his advanced age, for a submariner, despite him being only forty-two. Schlitsch knew everyone on board. From the start, he was an excellent first mate for the young and ambitious Wermuth.

They sent Otto himself to the boat as only a watch officer. Still, the deputy of Admiral Dönitz, Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg, considered it appropriate to appoint a young twenty-four-year-old chief lieutenant as commander of the submarine.

“Well, where are they?” muttered Schlitsch with displeasure, looking around. It was almost impossible to make out anything in this grey haze; turning on a searchlight near a hostile shore would be complete madness. Otto shrugged.

“We are at the rendezvous point; the rest is no longer our concern.”

“Doesn’t it bother you that, right when the whole Reich is ready to put its head on the altar of victory, they’ve forced us to act as some kind of water taxi?” asked the first mate, raising the collar of his raincoat higher and wiping an icy drop from his nose.

“Do we have a choice?”

“I guess not.” Lieutenant Schlitsch was about to take a cigarette from under his cloak, but, wincing from the rain streams, he gave up this venture. And at that moment, from somewhere to the side, they heard the cautious clatter of the engine of a small boat.

“Signalman!” barked the chief lieutenant, waving a gloved hand at the invisible sailor. Above the deckhouse, from the antenna pin disappearing into the darkness of the night, a dazzling white searchlight beam descended. It smeared across the water’s surface, dotted with the crests of evil waves. In its spot, a cable from the narrow body of the submarine, a boat appeared of those on which the Genoese smugglers had fled to Corsica and Sardinia.

“Deck crew, get ready for mooring,” the first mate shouted, leaning over the ring-fence of the platform, and the distinct clatter of the sailors’ boot heels rolled across the deck.

Old Renzi was afraid to even sigh, although he knew well in his mind that they could not hear his breathing over the noise of the rain and the splashing waves. He watched with fascination as the boat approached the steep side of the submarine, from where the sailors threw a wooden gangway with rails onto its deck.

In the searchlight’s beam, several figures, shapeless in their rubber capes, moved from the side of the boat onto the submarine. The old fisherman fancied he could make out a female silhouette beneath one of them.

Practiced hands removed the gangway with ease. The boat’s engine rattled even more insistently, and, rolling away from the side of the sub, disappeared into the night. Darkness enveloped the sub again as the searchlight went out. The sub got underway and, picking up speed, dissolved into the muslin sheets of rain. The fisherman fervently crossed himself and, having uttered praise to the Virgin Mary, pushed his still-unsettled son towards the hatch of the engine compartment.

As soon as the boat departed, the chief lieutenant went down to the deck to escort the guests to their cabins, which they had prepared for them in advance. He saw several figures wrapped in raincoats in front of him, and stretched out and raised his hand in salute.

“Heil!”

In front of him stood a short man with a civilian bearing, despite the uniform under his raincoat. Otto Wermuth took a silent step back and leaned on the conning tower with his hand.

“Welcome aboard, gentlemen!”

His mother would not have recognized his voice now. On this wet and icy April night, Oberleutnant zur See Otto Wermuth realized this was the last voyage of his life.

Interlude

Tuesday, March 14, 1950

22:27

Stalin's dacha

Lavrenty Beria was sitting, immersed in the leather of the large sofa of the Great Living Room, and pondered. No, the purpose for which the almighty Master summoned him to his country residence today was, in principle, known to him. Not to say that he was not worried about the current situation after all. The status of the almost all-powerful Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, who oversaw the USSR Ministry of State Security, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of State Control, was in a quite buoyant mood. And to sink it now would be a challenge, especially after the successful completion of the Soviet nuclear ‘deterrence’ program, as the cunning newspapermen characterized it.

But with some kind of scent unknown even to him, the former head of the NKVD felt clouds were gathering over him, and the danger came from Koba himself. He became too suspicious. Lately, his suspiciousness turned into some kind of persecution mania, and even the people closest to him feared this. Those who were not lucky have already disappeared from the political horizon, and some of them have disappeared altogether in the wilds of many camps. The rest became quiet, especially after the death of Zhdanov and the 'case of the poisoning doctors' that followed.

Beria buried his nose in the invariable dark kashne scarf. He did not throw off his coat, demonstrating to the Leader that he had arrived here only under the influence of circumstances and was striving again to take up his immediate duties as soon as possible.

The lock clicked almost inaudibly, the high door to the bedroom opened, and Stalin entered the living room with an inaudible step. He knew how to walk like a cat. He had learned on the rocky paths near his native mountains. Yuft boots almost silently crossed on the carpet, a jacket without shoulder straps and insignia, soft breeches. Nothing from the image of the Generalissimo, replicated by newsreels and many ceremonial photos.

Stalin walked to a long table, on which a helpful assistant had laid out some documents. He nodded to Beria as if he had only recently seen him.

“Hello, Lavrenty. Thank you for coming so quickly.”

Beria chuckled:

“When was it ever different, Koba?”

Stalin moved his moustache as if about to say something but then waved his hand, grabbed a piece of paper from the table and pushed it across the green tabletop towards Beria. The latter got up heavily from the plaintively groaning sofa, stepped up to the table, and took the sheet. It was a transcript of the report of one of the illegal agents. During his tenure as Commissioner General of State Security, he had seen enough such documents, and now he recognized them at a glance. He raised his eyes to Stalin as if asking permission.

Stalin chuckled, squinting slyly:

“Since when did you become so timid, Lavrenty? Read, we want to hear your opinion on this issue. The comrade reports exciting things.”

Stalin, meanwhile, went to the window at the far end of the hall and examined the riot of snow whirlwinds behind the tall windows. The storm refused to let Moscow and the Moscow region leave its embrace. The tall pines that surrounded the dacha were covered with shaggy caps of snow. Nothing outside the windows showed that this was not a January blizzard, but quite an ordinary spring day in March.

While Beria was reading the report of the head of the American station, Koba thoughtfully twirled the old, darkened pipe in his fingers. These days he smoked rarely. Even the once-beloved 'Herzegovina-Flor' no longer brought its former joy. The taste of tobacco seemed to dissolve his lungs, and no longer spun his head like before.

A slight rustle of paper at the table informed Stalin that his old friend and assistant had finished reading. The Father of the Nations slowly turned to him, jabbing in his direction with the shank of his pipe:

“Tell me, Lavrenty. Why, when you were the State Security Commissioner, if I may say so, such news was more or less predictable, but today it falls like snow on one’s head?”

Beria leaned back in his chair and chewed his lips, carefully choosing the words for an answer. Once upon a time, Koba lapped up the solutions he offered, but that was then.

When the pause exceeded critical limits, the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, weighing every word, said: