Kovacs shuddered, remembering the cold-blooded way the Russian soldier had been dispatched. The past few days had been a blur. The tall man had arrived at the lab during a snowstorm and produced a document authorizing the release of Dr. Kovacs. He had introduced himself only as Karl, and told Kovacs to gather his belongings. Then came the madcap dash across the frozen countryside and the narrow escapes from Russian patrols. Now this miserable ship.

The food had made Kovacs drowsy. His eyelids drooped, and he drifted off into a deep sleep.

WHILE THE professor slept, a squad of military police swept the Gustloff in search of deserters. The ship was cleared for departure, and a harbor pilot came aboard. At around one in the afternoon, the deckhands cast off the mooring lines. Four tugs came alongside and began to pull the ship away from the dock.

A fleet of small boats, loaded mostly with women and children, blocked the way. The ship stopped and took the refugees aboard. The Gustloff normally carried 1,465 passengers, served by a crew of four hundred. As it began this voyage, the once-elegant liner was carrying eight thousand passengers.

The ship headed into the open sea, and dropped anchor late in the afternoon to rendezvous with another liner, the Hansa, to wait for their escorts. The Hansa had developed engine trouble and never showed up. Naval Command was worried that the Gustloff would be exposed to danger in open waters and told the ship to go it alone.

The liner plowed into the whitecapped waters of the Baltic, fighting a stiff northwest wind. Hailstones rattled the windows of the bridge, where Commander Zahn seethed with anger as he looked down at the two so-called escorts that had been sent to protect the liner.

The ship was built for southern climes, but, with any luck, it could survive bad weather. What it could not survive was stupidity. Naval Command had sent the liner into harm's way with an old torpedo boat called the Lowe, or “Lion,” and the T19, a worn-out torpedo recovery vessel as escorts. Zahn was thinking that the situation could not get any worse when the T19 radioed that it had developed a leak and was returning to the base.

Zahn went to Captain Petersen and the other officers gathered in the bridge.

“In view of our escort situation, I suggest that we pursue a zigzag course at high speed,” he said.

Petersen scoffed at the suggestion. “Impossible. The Wilhelm Gustloff is a twenty-four-thousand-ton ocean liner. We cannot go from one tack to the other like a drunken sailor.”

“Then we must outrun any U-boats with our superior speed. We can take the direct, deepwater route at the full speed of sixteen knots.”

“I know this ship. Even without the bomb damage to the propeller casings, there would be no way we could reach and maintain sixteen knots without blowing out our bearings,” Petersen said.