LRAB Chapter 84 German Instructors and the Prototype of the Underwater Wolf Pack
Chapter 84 German Instructors and the Prototype of the Underwater Wolf Pack
A week later.
Mawei, Fujian. A secret shipyard of the Fujian Shipbuilding Bureau.
At four in the morning, the sea fog, like a thick gray cloth, tightly covered the entire harbor.
A Dutch-flagged ocean liner silently sailed into the deepest, most secluded berth of the port.
There were no lights. No ship horns. Even the sound of anchor chains hitting the water was swallowed up by the sea fog.
Chen Zijun stood on the dock, with Shen Li and twelve heavily armed guards behind him.
The cargo ship lowered its gangway.
Felix was the first to disembark, still showing signs of fatigue from his long sea voyage. But his eyes shone with an alarming light.
"Young Marshal!" He strode over, lowering his voice. "The men are all here. Fifty, not one missing!"
Chen Zijun nodded, his gaze passing over Felix's shoulder and looking toward the gangway.
A group of German men in casual clothes were filing down the stairs.
Their steps were light, but their rhythm was as precise as a military march. Each person's shoulders were ramrod straight, their gazes were icy, and even in their wrinkled civilian clothes, they could not conceal the military bearing that emanated from their very bones.
The leader was a man in his early fifties.
His short, grey hair was shaved extremely short, his chin was shaved black, and his light blue eyes gleamed coldly in the sea fog. On his left breast pocket was a slightly yellowed Iron Cross medal.
Heinrich.
Captain of the German Royal Navy submarine U-47 during World War I. During the war, the submarine sank a total of over 100,000 tons of Allied ships, including two troop transports fully loaded with soldiers.
A ghost in the deep sea. A grim reaper beneath the water.
The last glory of the German Empire.
Heinrich stepped down the gangway, stood on the dock, and glanced around.
A dilapidated shipyard. A rusty gantry crane. A few old-fashioned slipways faintly visible in the distance.
His brow furrowed.
"Felix." His voice was deep, with a heavy Bavarian accent. "That Chinese warlord you mentioned... he builds submarines in a place like this?"
Felix smiled but did not answer.
He stepped aside and reached out his hand towards Chen Zijun.
"Captain Heinrich, please allow me to introduce you. This is Marshal Chen Zijun."
Chen Zijun stepped forward and extended his hand.
"Your Excellency, Captain, welcome to China."
Heinrich glanced at him.
too young.
That was his first reaction. He looked to be no more than twenty-five or twenty-six years old, wearing a gray military overcoat without any rank insignia.
But his eyes...
Heinrich spent countless nights lying in wait at the bottom of the sea, honing his ability to distinguish friend from foe in the dark.
There was no restlessness or fanaticism in the young man's eyes, only a chilling calmness.
Like a shark waiting for its prey in deep water.
Heinrich shook hands with him. The grip was light, but steady.
"General Chen," he said, his Chinese halting. "My brothers have walked for twenty-one days from Germany. They are exhausted. But what they want to know even more is what they came here to do."
"Come with me."
Chen Zijun turned around and walked deeper into the dock.
……
The deepest part of the dock.
A heavy steel sluice gate slowly rose.
The salty smell of seawater hit us.
The moment Heinrich stepped inside, he seemed to be nailed to the ground.
A U-93-class ocean-going submarine is quietly moored in the dock.
It was completely black. The conning tower was intact. The hull number had been painted off, but every weld and every rivet on the hull was as clean as if it had just been rolled out of the Kiel shipyard.
Almost brand new.
"This..." Heinrich's voice caught in his throat.
His legs involuntarily took two steps forward, reaching the edge of the dock, where he stared intently at the familiar silhouette.
The U-93 type. He had seen the prototype of this type of boat in Kiel Harbor. That was in 1917.
At that time, he was still on U-47, preparing to depart for his thirteenth patrol mission.
eight years.
He thought he would never see such a thing again in his life.
"MeinGott..." he murmured in German. "How did you get that?"
Chen Zijun walked up to him, put his hands in his coat pockets, and spoke casually.
"A gift from an Italian friend."
No sooner had the words left his mouth than a woman's voice rang out from the shadows.
"To be precise, it was the Kurlag family's investment in Chen Shaoshuai."
Lily Kurrag emerged from the side door of the dock.
Wearing a black trench coat, her emerald green eyes appeared particularly alluring in the dim light.
Heinrich recognized her.
Or rather, he recognized the chilling aura emanating from her. In Europe, everyone who has traversed the black market knows perfectly well what the surname Kurrag represents.
"The Kurlag family?" Heinrich's eyes narrowed.
“Yes.” Lily walked to Chen Zijun’s side and glanced at Heinrich indifferently. “The purchase, transportation, and customs clearance of this submarine were all handled by my family. Neither the Dutch, the British, nor the French knew its final destination.”
She paused.
"Captain Heinrich, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, what makes a Chinese warlord think he can get his hands on a U-boat? What makes it worth it for you and fifty brothers to sail across the ocean?"
She pointed at Chen Zijun.
"The answer is simple. Because he can afford to buy it, maintain it, and dare to use it."
Heinrich remained silent.
He looked at the U-93 again.
There was a long silence.
Then he turned around and looked at Chen Zijun.
"Where are the blueprints?"
Chen Zijun took out a brown paper envelope from the inside pocket of his coat and handed it over.
"Thirty-one yuan. From the keel structure to the torpedo tubes, the whole set."
Heinrich pulled out the drawings, and after only reading two pages, his hands began to tremble.
This is not an ordinary engineering drawing. Every parameter is accurate to three decimal places. Material specifications, stress calculations, and welding processes are all clearly marked.
This was even more detailed than the original blueprints he had seen while serving in the German Royal Navy.
"General Chen." Heinrich took a deep breath, carefully put away the blueprints, and stuffed them into the inner pocket of his coat.
"I've decided to stay."
Chen Zijun smiled.
Welcome to the team.
"But I have one condition." Heinrich's blue eyes were fixed on Chen Zijun.
"explain."
"I have full authority to decide on the training methods. No matter how hard your soldiers can endure, on a submarine, I only recognize one standard: the German Navy's standard. Those who don't meet it are eliminated. Those who die, no compensation."
"Deal." Chen Zijun held out his hand.
Heinrich shook hands with him three times harder than before.
……
The next morning.
Mawei Training Base. Dock Training Ground.
Heinrich stood on the deck of U-93, holding an iron pointer in his hand.
Standing before him were fifty soldiers, handpicked from various units of the Chen family army.
These men were all elite soldiers. Some were veterans who had survived the battle on the Taihu Plain, while others were gunners who had withstood Japanese artillery fire at the Wusongkou Fortress. Each and every one of them had crawled out of piles of corpses.
But they all had one thing in common: they had never been in the water.
Heinrich tapped his pointer three times on the deck.
Listen up!
His Chinese is terrible, but he has an extremely loud voice.
"From today onward, forget everything you learned on land! On a submarine, your enemies are not just the warships overhead. They are also the sea beneath your feet, the steel walls beside you, and your own fears!"
"There are only two outcomes for submariners: either they come back alive, or they sink to the bottom of the sea with their submarine. There is no third option!"
He pointed to the distant sea.
"Your commander told me that there is a Japanese fleet in the East China Sea. That idiot named Sato is using warships to intercept your merchant ships, thinking he is the master of the sea."
The pointer swung forcefully.
"He's wrong! The warships on the surface are merely prey! The real hunters are underwater!"
The soldiers' eyes lit up.
Chen Zijun stood on the command tower in the distance, gazing at everything on the training field.
Shen Li walked up behind him.
"Young Marshal, Heinrich is indeed quite capable. It's only the first day, and he's already got those veterans' blood pumping."
Chen Zijun hummed in response, without turning his head.
"Any news from Yang Yanzhao?"
"A telegram just arrived." Shen Li opened the telegram. "The Japanese Third Fleet seized three more merchant ships yesterday, one of which was a German-flagged cargo ship carrying ten tons of steel. Satoda has become increasingly arrogant lately, intercepting any ship he sees on the high seas."
Chen Zijun's lips twitched.
"Let him stop it. The more he stops it, the more dissatisfied the great powers will be with Japan, and the more support they will give us."
He turned around and walked to the nautical chart.
A red circle was drawn around the location of the horse's tail. A defensive line was marked in blue at the Wusongkou. In the East China Sea between the two, several dotted lines marked the patrol routes of the Japanese Third Fleet.
"Shen Li."
"arrive!"
"Tell Heinrich that I want him to take the U-93 out for a combat test within a month."
Shen Li was taken aback. "A month? Young Marshal, isn't that too tight a timeframe? Those new recruits can't even distinguish the hatches of a submarine..."
"No new recruits." Chen Zijun picked up a red pen and drew an X on the patrol route of the Japanese Third Fleet on the nautical chart. "For the first trial voyage, Heinrich will personally lead his German veterans."
"The goal is not war. It's to let him see with his own eyes what the enemy his future students will face looks like."
Shen Li gasped.
"Young Marshal, this is real combat..."
"This is the best training." Chen Zijun threw down his pen. "The Germans fight wars based on real combat experience."
"Then come back and tell those fifty Chinese soldiers: What you are hunting is right above your head."
Shen Li felt a tingling sensation down his back.
……
At the same time.
East China Sea. International waters. Forty nautical miles away.
The light cruiser Tama. (Bridge)
Sato stood in front of the chart stand, a smug, cold smile playing on his lips.
"Three more ships were seized today." He patted the seizure record on the table. "One of them was even a German ship. It seems the whole world now knows that the rules of the East China Sea are set by the Imperial Japanese Navy."
The staff officer whispered a reminder from the side.
"Colonel, the Germans might protest..."
"Protest?" Sato scoffed. "Weimar, that dirt-poor, dilapidated republic? They can't even afford to maintain their own warships, what else can they do?"
He walked to the outside of the bridge, leaned on the railing, and looked out at the sea in the distance.
From the direction of Wusongkou, the sea and sky meet at the horizon, and you can't see anything.
"Chen Zijun, oh Chen Zijun," he muttered to himself. "No matter how powerful your cannons are, they can't reach the high seas. As long as the shipping lanes are controlled, not a single needle of your supplies will get through. Let's see how long you can hold out."
He took a deep breath of the sea breeze.
He nodded in satisfaction.
However, what he didn't know was...
Right now, in a secret shipyard in Mawei, Fujian.
Heinrich was personally climbing into the command compartment of the U-93, inspecting each instrument panel, each control stick, and each torpedo tube's launching device.
His eyes burned with a fire that hadn't been seen in eight years.
That was the light when the hunter picked up his weapon again.
Unbeknownst to Sato on the surface, the ghost in the deep sea had already opened its eyes.
Meanwhile, the young man named Chen Zijun is using pounds sterling and steel to build an underwater wolf pack by hand.
Target: Japan's Third Fleet.
Method: One-hit kill.
Time: Countdown begins.