Hating her again?
But it was for the best.Goodbye, my love.
After the last sailor climbed down the hatch, Kraus turned to her, his eyes glowing in the moonlight. “Are you glad to return to Germany, Fräulein?”
“I am. These English honestly believe they can win the war. I feel—trapped.”
“Trapped?”
She was trapped indeed. Trapped with her enemy on an enemy submarine, about to die.
Yet a great smile unfurled. She was loved by God, forgiven, and she’d never be alone again. “Now I am free.”
A stillness in the air.
An absence of air.
Her ears pummeled. Her body—slammed, sliced, tossed into air and water and oblivion.
44
A burst of yellow and orange flame to the south. A boom shuddered over the waters.
“No! Cilla!” Lachlan cranked the wheel to port. “Lord, no!”
He couldn’t operate the radiotelephone and the boat simultaneously. “Lord, let Yardley see. Let him call out rescue ships.”
No aircraft or vessels in sight. Only Cilla’s mine could have caused such an explosion. “Cilla! Lord, let her live. Please.”
All of them. He didn’t want the German sailors to die either. If they were captured, they could never report on Cilla’s actions, never trouble Allied shipping again—they didn’t need to die.
Where were the ships Yardley had promised to send? He glanced behind him over the boat’s cabin. Were those destroyers on the northern horizon coming from Hoy Sound? Or an illusion in the night sky?
He couldn’t wait for them. He had to get to the wreck if there was even a chance Cilla had survived.
The light of the explosion flickered and faded, and Lachlan forced his addled brain to keep his course true.
Cilla had done it. She’d planted the mine and sunk the U-boat. She’d saved her family and friends and the Double Cross program.
A great welling inside, ebbing, building, crushing his heart and lungs. He was too late. Too late to protect the woman he loved.
****
Cilla spat out seawater. She was alive?
The back of her head throbbed, and her left arm and leg stung and resisted her efforts to tread water.
Men’s voices—screaming, calling. In the orange dome of light, the bow of the U-boat slanted out of the water like a giant shark’s fin, surrounded by jagged chunks of wreckage and half a dozen men. A dozen?
The water—so cold. She dipped below, and she kicked to the surface. Pain wrenched through her left leg, and she cried out.
“Cilla? Is that you?”
Hauptmann Kraus? He’d survived too? He’d been topside with her, blown free.
“Cilla! Your boat! Swim to your boat.”
About twenty feet to her left,Mar na Creagfloated, bearing holes in her hull.
