An Honorable German by Charles L. McCain Page A

another wave, her sides streaming water like a hunting dog coming
     out of a pond.
    Sun hit the waves, and the sea laid bare the insignificance of the ship. In the months since he had come aboard, Max had always
     thought of her as a fortress—stout and strong, armored against her enemies by the finest Krupp steel—so large that young sailors
     often lost their way when first aboard. But one could hardly maintain that illusion now—a fortress wasn’t thrown about like
     a woodchip in a stream. So
Graf Spee
labored through the storm, the marching waves pounding her to starboard in a relentless parade, at one point rolling her
     so violently to port that even Captain Langsdorff lost his footing and went sprawling across the bridge.
    Still,
Spee
could not turn bows on into the wind and ride out the storm, for even now the British would be plowing into the gale, drinking
     endless cups of tea, cursing the weather and the Germans.
Graf Spee
was the most wanted ship in the South Atlantic, and they would not be able to outfox the British forever. The Royal Navy
     knew every ocean and every sea, every wind and every current. They had charted every coastline, every harbor. They knew every
     merchant shipping lane. And they knew how to chase down and destroy a commerce raider. They had been doing it for three hundred
     years.
    Around 0700, Max fastened his oilskin and left the enclosed bridge for one of the exposed wings. Wind knocked the breath from
     his chest. He clung to the handrail and inched his way around to the signal post, a small platform directly behind the enclosed
     bridge from which the signalmen ran their flags up and down the signal mast. The wind dropped off as
Spee
’s superstructure formed a sort of lee.
    Max pulled his binoculars from under his coat and scanned the sea astern of the ship. A clean ozone smell, the smell of storm
     air, filled his nostrils. Windblown rain quickly splotched the binoculars. He licked water off the lenses, took another look,
     then put away the binoculars. Looking down to button the coat, he paused. Three sailors struggled with the floatplane. The
     plane threatened to break loose from its moorings; young, inexperienced men tried to add restraining wires to hold it fast
     to the catapult. Exposed to these waves, they worked without lifelines. They had not yet learned that the sea was a hard master,
     deadly and remorseless, unforgiving of mistakes. One of the rules drilled into every Seekadett—never go on deck in a storm
     without a lifeline. In a tropical storm off Florida, while on the training cruiser
Emden
, two cadets had ignored that advice. They were the first of Max’s crewkameraden to die.
    Max yelled at the men to get below. The wind snatched his words and they didn’t hear.
    Max shouted again. Then his eyes widened. A giant wave bore down on them. Cupping his hands against his mouth, he bellowed
     with everything he had. The men, only ten meters away, did not hear.
    The wave arced. One of the sailors looked up and screamed at his shipmates. Too late. A wall of angry water hit the ship,
     heeled her over thirty degrees, and broke over the floatplane in a shower of spray and foam. Water ran from the deck as
Spee
righted herself. Two men were gone. The third hit a stanchion of the deck railing on his way overboard. He clung to it in
     desperation.
    “Hold on! Hold on!” Max yelled. The man did not move—no doubt injured. The next wave would take him. Max spun around, jerked
     open the flag locker, seized a length of manila rope. He dropped his binoculars into the locker and slammed it shut.
    Coil of rope in hand, he grasped the outer rails of the metal stairs, slid to the next landing, then vaulted the railing and
     dropped three meters to the teak deck. He heard the rush of water, the freight train sound of the big waves racing toward
     them, and dashed to the sailor—Keppler, a deckhand, all of eighteen.
    Graf Spee
began to heel.
    Three times around the stanchion