Red Sun Rogue

CHAPTER 1

The German submarine U-3531 slipped invisible through the bottomless depths of the Indian Ocean, masking her acoustic signature as she skipped like a stone across pooling thermoclines. The long, steel craft stalked the waters thirty meters below a raging monsoon, beneath her, the vast, crushing emptiness of the deep abyss. A silent hunter, her cutting-edge design represented an uncommon marriage of triumph and desperation — sleek hybrid-electric engines a generation beyond her time, faster, quiet, deadlier than her enemies. Yet despite her recent christening, she already bore the jagged scars of a battle-tempered weapon.

Fifty-seven. Fifty-seven haggard, unshaven boys, fifty-seven Jonahs within the dimly-lit belly of a dank metal whale, never knowing when fate would vomit them to the surface or send them to watery internment among the serrated metal bones of their artificial cetacean. To exist in the gut of this beast was to live in a purgatorial netherworld of dim, flickering light and the sickening, omnipresent odor of sweat, diesel, and human shit.

Doctor Oskar Goering frowned as he probed a midshipman’s tongue with a warped balsa wood depressor. Mentally attempting to extinguish the maddening, pervasive hum of the engines, he glowered at the thin wooden walls of the closet-sized medical quarters that doubled as his berth. Thin trails of blood flowed from his patient’s gums, pooling in the back of the young sailor’s blotchy, swollen throat, angry and bright under the harsh, yellow glare of his dangling ceiling lamp.

The doctor frowned again, releasing the lamp to swing free, returning the room to the dim illumination of the single, yellow bulb. Despite the tomfoolery and gallows mirth of his pimple-faced shipmates, he couldn’t recall the last time he had lifted a corner of his mouth for even a tiny, rueful smile. The medical quarters were a place of pain and sorrows only, a place of crude battlefield surgery, and he, both the reigning king and reluctant torturer.

Here he was to remove appendixes, probe infections, treat sexual diseases, and nutrient deficiencies. Here recently died a man, a suicide, an officer too old for his rank and too timid for wartime service, a man who gurgled his final breath through a half jaw after misaiming a 9mm Parabellum Luger inside of his own mouth. Here Doctor Goering repaired the afflicted bodies of men and boys and returned them to the insatiable appetite of the Fatherland. Although the role of ship’s surgeon was a specialized job for a trained medical mind, the only skill truly necessary aboard the Führer’s submarine was the capacity for endurance. As not every torpedo-man can sleep beside his primed warhead, not every doctor can sleep upon his own surgical table. When his thoughts were quiet, Doctor Goering sipped a brandy blotted with three drops of morphine until his body relaxed and his vision faded to a white, dreamless sleep. When the idea of any slumber seemed as distant as his family’s pastoral home in Rostock, he retained a small stash of Temmler methamphetamine pills; and with each pill, seventy-two jittery hours without fatigue.

The open-mouthed, bleeding midshipman before him stunk. Not distinctively or overwhelmingly, but slightly more than the stink of every other unwashed sailor aboard the submarine. As the doctor bent down over his patient, he couldn’t help but breathe in particles of sweat-impregnated wool and cotton, matted hair, and dandruff. Grimacing, the doctor felt the sticky texture of his patient’s arm. It was revolting — he could scarcely stand his own touch, much less the skin of this frail and doleful boy.

More than twice the age of the second-oldest man on the submarine, the doctor felt only weariness of the damnable war, exhaust of uncertainty, annoyed at the youth of his shipmates, and the endless dreary months. Any sympathy he could muster, he reserved for his own lot, leaving nothing but irritability for his young comrades. He’d already fought his war as a young man in the trenches of western Germany. His fight wasn’t against the French, English, or Americans — as medic he battled chemical poisoning, burns, perforated limbs, shock and disease, meeting blood with scalpel and bandage in a perfect hell of flesh, steel, and sickly yellow gas. Rank mattered little on the stretcher or in his medical tent; every soldier before him was an identical hollow-eyed, useless husk. But when the Fatherland demanded, perhaps it was better to accept service and retain the illusion of choice and honor, rather than suffer the indignity of involuntary conscription. The doctor tried not to think of the desperation of a military machine that demanded the services of an old country physician, a man now more suited for delivering the infants of farmhands and milkmaids than safeguarding the health of an elite submariner crew. Perhaps this was the true problem with young men — that their numbers were not infinite. But what difference could a paunchy, cynical, old physician now make against the swelling tide of a dozen Allied nations?

The doctor hated the U-3531. To him, it was no more than a perpetually dim, humid, metal tube, the electronic shadows of hostile planes and foreign ships dogging their every heading. No sooner would the undersea craft surface to recharge the batteries or recycle stagnant air, than the radar detector would squawk in urgent warning. The very ether of the universe was thick with waves of penetrating radar, the skies black with hostile planes, the seas swirling with enemy destroyers. At least the undersea was their own — they’d survived depth charges off Ushant, twisting and rolling under the barrage of explosions. Destroyers hunted them for a thousand miles as they made their way south. A seaplane attack off Capetown forced the submarine to crash-dive as enemy retro-rockets fell from the skies and shook them to their bones. Now far off the coast of East Africa, perhaps they’d slipped their pursuers — but he doubted it.

The physician adjusted the tongue depressor and sighed, staring at the growing sheen of black mold on his wall. Claiming a larger stake of his wall with every passing day, the aggressive mold threatened to claim his only real treasure aboard the ship: a single, smudged, fading photograph of his wife and grown daughter. He could never quite kill the invader, not even after scrubbing it with bitter lye and metallic chlorine until the beds of his fingernails cracked and bled. It was as if the mold had infected the very bones of the vessel and was now so deep in the marrow that any efforts to expunge it would compromise the backbone of the submarine itself. Turning his attention back to his fidgeting patient, the doctor hunched over in the claustrophobic examination room that was also his berth. The young midshipman stretched and sat up on the surgical table that doubled as the doctor’s bed.

“You have not been ingesting your vitamins,” declared the doctor. It wasn’t a question.

“I ’ave,” protested the sailor, his swollen tongue squirming against the depressor in a futile effort to form proper consonants. “E’ery ’ay.”

“Every day?” confirmed the doctor. “Without fail?”

“E’ery ’ay,” insisted the sailor.

“I cannot cure your ailment if you lie to me.”

“E’ery ’ay, ’oc!” the sailor emphatically repeated.

The doctor issued a wheezing, skeptical harrumph through pursed lips as he further probed the bloody mouth. The wooden depressor easily bruised the irritated, spongy gums. A single hair drifted from the midshipman’s scalp and slowly pinwheeled onto the examination table.

“And your excrement?” asked the doctor, withdrawing the tongue depressor.

“Loose, I think,” said the midshipman. “But I don’t look at it after.”

“Check it,” said the doctor. “Tell me what you see. Better still, leave it in the bowl and summon me.”

“Yes, Herr Doctor,” said the midshipman, knowing full well the action would announce his difficulties to the rest of the tightly-quartered crew and invite open ridicule. Life on board a Kriegsmarine underseebooten was difficult, the misery of others often the only entertainment, anything to distract from the ever-present specter of death.

The doctor shook his head. The boy must be lying or confused. The cause: scurvy, or some other nutritional deficit. Maybe the vitamins they took on in Norway were contaminated or otherwise lacking — perhaps even sabotaged. Even the most determined propaganda couldn’t mask the havoc American and British advances wreaked with German supply chains and the increasingly inconsistent and slipshod quality of German manufacture, to say nothing about the darkening disposition of the conquered races on which the war effort relied.

“Very well,” sighed the doctor, scribbling a short note to check in on the young man in a few hours’ time. It wouldn’t do to keep him longer; the cause of the strange ailment remained elusive for now. Best to find him after his duty shift and probe further. “Where is your bunk?”

“I’m not supposed to say,” said the sailor.

The doctor gritted his teeth. More foolishness, maddeningly expected. “Midshipman,” he said, “do not be a horse’s ass.”

“I bunk in the aft torpedo room,” said the young man, and then stole a look back and forth, as though anyone larger than a footstool could have stowed away in the tiny compartment. He continued his statement with a whisper. “On top of the ray gun.”

“The what?” asked the doctor, genuinely baffled by this new nonsense.

“You know we have no torpedoes in the torpedo room,” said the sailor. “Left ’em back in Trondheim before our departure for Japan. Couldn’t take them, see? We needed space for all the… um… special crates.”

Doctor Goering nodded. He’d seen the boxes — radar detectors, prototype rifles, aviation turbine engines, technical plans, and similar marvels. The cargos were the best technologies that Reich scientists could offer, only to be born away from Fatherland soil for use by the Asiatics. It was all luftschloss to the doctor. Castles in the sky. The idea that the massing mongrel hordes of America and Australia could be turned back by a single, yellow race armed with German-made x-ray guns and jet planes.

“So?” asked the doctor.

“I’m sleeping on top of a ray gun,” said the midshipman. “It has to be the cause of everything! What else could cause my sickness? No one else is afflicted! Marvelous, no? If this happens when one merely sleeps upon the weapon, just imagine it discharged upon the Americans! We could roast entire divisions where they stand!”

Carried away by his own mirth, the midshipman made a few imbecilic zapping noises toward imagined enemy troops, until finally, he was silenced by the doctor’s profound lack of corresponding amusement.

“You’re dismissed,” said the doctor. “I will call on you in a few hours. Do you remember what I said?”

“Continue taking my vitamins,” said the sailor glumly, unhappy that his pet theory had not gained traction with the doctor.

“And?”

“Keep my scheisse in the bowl until you inspect it.”

“Dismissed,” said the doctor, shepherding the sailor out of the medical cabin. For a moment, he stood leaning out into the main corridor, the hollow spine of the submarine connecting every compartment. Diesel and grease-stained men shuffled their way through net-hung fruits and breads, passing each other in the cramped quarters with silent familiarity, moving with the eerie synchronicity of scavenging ants.

The doctor adjusted his uniform and walked the three meters to the captain’s quarters, doffing his hat as he knocked at the door to the cabin that doubled as the armory.

“Kommen,” came a familiar voice from the other side of the thin wooden door. Captain Duckwitz needed not request the identity of the knocker — only one of the top lieutenants, chief engineer, or the doctor himself would ever consider interrupting the captain in his private quarters.

Doctor Goering pressed open the door, stepped inside, and latched it behind him. The captain, with rows of Mauser pistols and rifles, signal guns, hand grenades, and several matte-black MP40 submachine guns racked behind him, looked up from a handwritten letter, his weary grey eyes meeting the gaze of the ship’s doctor. Two Japanese katana swords hung from the rack as well, conspicuous and out-of-place amongst the futuristic weapons.

Captain Duckwitz was just twenty-eight, too young for his authoritative mannerisms and steely bearing, too young for the weight of responsibility or the wrinkles around the corners of his unusual eyes. The doctor’s daughter had expressed genuine horror upon finding the captain’s tender age — how can a man not yet thirty, not yet married and with no children even contemplate the rigors of command? But in these waning days of the kreigsmarine, command was earned through survival. Survival through hard-won skill and wily intelligence, and in Duckwitz’s case, ably demonstrated over three bitterly-fought tours.

“What can I do for you, my learned friend?” asked the captain with a wry, gravelly voice as he gestured the doctor to sit on the edge of the bunk beside the desk. Doctor Oskar Goering smiled, but did not sit.

It was true, at least part of the statement — they were indeed friends. Doctor Goering found himself in the rare position as the one man in Kapitanleutnant Duckwitz’s command with near total autonomy, a position that allowed him to become the captain’s foil and confidant. Mutual trust allowed forbidden discussions on the increasingly erratic instructions from German High Command, the confusing, divergent orders, collapsing morale, and the unimaginable implications of national surrender.

“It may be the usual malingering,” grumbled the doctor. “But two of the crew have been afflicted by a strange illness originating from the aft torpedo room.”

The handsome captain nodded, his grey eyes piercing the wall of his quarters. He ran a hand through his brown hair — hair too long for regulations — as he considered the statement. The doctor noticed the captain’s hand absent-mindedly tapping a single folded letter bearing a decryption stamp from the radio officer. Another coded communication from the Fatherland — what new and futile insanity could this one demand?

“Is this a bad time?” asked the doctor, noticing the captain’s distraction.

“For Germany perhaps,” said the captain. “We live in difficult days. But you are always welcome in my quarters. I take it you have never seen this affliction previously?”

“I have not,” said the doctor. “But diseases manifest themselves differently in every man. There is no reason to assume it is new or unknown.”

“If it is new and you are the discoverer, it must bear your name,” mused the captain. “They’ll call it Oskar Goering’s disease.”

“I’ve had this illness for years,” grumbled the doctor. “It makes one fat and bald and easily annoyed.”

The captain’s hardened face twitched once, then broke into an open smile — and yet the smile carried with it such sadness.

“Do you know what we’re carrying to Japan?” asked the doctor, steering the inquiry to his concern. “In the aft torpedo room — or in any compartment for that matter?”

“I do not,” declared the captain with a hint of righteous annoyance. “The eierkopf scientists believe that knowledge above my station.”

It went unspoken that the declaration would never leave the cabin. To the crew, the captain must remain God, all seeing, all-knowing, an ordained instrument of deliverance. But his hand still unconsciously tapped upon the letter.

“Any insight would assist,” pressed the doctor. “If the source is some type of toxic exposure, I would recommend we rotate the men’s bunks. On the other hand, if it is infectious—”

“Then you do not want to risk further infection,” said the captain, completing the physician’s thought. “I regret I know nothing more than you. In any case, I cannot order a man to sleep in a sick man’s bunk; he’d sooner sleep tied to the keel. I authorize you to distribute rations of brandy to the ill.”

“Generous,” harrumphed Doctor Goering. “We’ll soon have an entire company of afflicted.”

A smile flickered across the captain’s tired face, but then died. The doctor stepped back for a moment at the uncharacteristic demeanor. Something troubled the young man, and the sense of discomfort compelled the doctor into retreat.

“We’ll speak another time,” said the doctor, bowing slightly in deference as he backed towards the cabin door.

“Do not leave,” said the captain, apologetically gesturing for the doctor to return as he himself stood up and gently pressed the communique into the interior pocket of his wool uniform jacket. “Accompany me to the command compartment. My learned friend, I will need you at my side, today above all days.”

Confused and troubled, Doctor Oskar Goering nodded and followed his captain into the main corridor. For the first time, he noticed that the grey-eyed commander had donned a clean uniform typically reserved for return to port, wore his dress pistol sidearm, and had even made an attempt to slick his hair and trim away the more unkempt patches of his scraggly beard.

Today above all days, thought the doctor to himself. What could this possibly mean?

The captain forced a smile and nodded to Diesel Obermashinist Baek as he and the doctor squeezed past in the narrow walkway. Short — and quite fat, despite meager rations — the chief engineer had the ruddy-faced complexion of a gift-laden, bearded der Weihnachtsmann. Easily the most popular crewman on the ship, he consistently found no situation above merriment, no comrade undeserving of friendly affection.

“Which sailors are sick?” asked the captain as the doctor followed him towards the command compartment.

“Seaman Lichtenberg,” said Doctor Goering. “And his bunkmate, the one whose name I can never remember. The one from Czechoslovakia.”

“Damnable wunderwaffen,” muttered the captain. “Secret weapons, secret plans. Secrets upon secrets. So secret that even a captain knows not what he carries upon his own vessel. They tell me we carry the weapons that will save the war — but why simply trade them to the Nipponese?”

“We have what they need, I suppose,” said the doctor. “I doubt their science or manufacturing is within a decade of ours. Their medicine certainly isn’t.”

“We are selling our future,” declared the captain. “God has seen fit to bless their Asiatic empire with natural riches. But on my last porting in Ushant, I saw our planes without tires, our trucks without diesel. Soon our soldiers will be without shoes.”

To say nothing of women and children without bread, thought the doctor, thinking back to the last letter he’d received from his grown daughter before departing port. Even through her brave, stalwart insistence that all was well, he could see past the thin veneer of state-enforced optimism.

“We need raw materials from the East,” said the captain. “And for this, we must give our technology. I have the U-3531 with a submerged fast-attack speed of more than 17 knots; I can carry 23 torpedoes and sixty men across oceans. And yet we are little more than a glorified oxcart. My friend, there was a time when we were wolves.”

The captain wasn’t wrong. For a moment, the doctor felt himself wondering if the Japanese had designs on the U-boat once it arrived. It’d be easy enough, wouldn’t it? Greet their German guests at the docks, lure them in, butcher the crew, and take their mighty submarine.

Striding past the radio compartment, the conversation came to an abrupt end as the captain spotted the glance of Oberleutnant Boer, the submarine’s twenty-three-year-old political officer, an inevitable consequence of the Valkyrie assassination bombing attempt on Hitler’s life. The ferret-faced sailor was committedly friendless, content in his divine mission. Every casual attempt to engage him in conversation would result in some lecture about sovereign living space, superiority of the German man, the right of Fatherland to assert its will over Europe, or the dazzling brilliance of the Führer. The few who tried rarely bothered a second time.

Boer behaved like a man who’d never invited nor experienced a moment of doubt in his life, a trait that passed the point of admirable conviction and situated itself contentedly in the realm of outright parody. With his immaculate uniforms unspoiled by labor, and his tendency to breathlessly repeat schoolboy slogans and propaganda, even the sympathetic found his devotion to the Reich laughable. But the only truly unforgivable sin committed by Boer was his confiscation of a full third of the ship’s razors, allowing the political officer to remain the only consistently shaved man aboard.

The captain briefly paused at the last door before the command compartment. Originally designated as the captain’s cabin, the quarters now held two Japanese military attachés. Doctor Goering had seen little of the two diminutive men. They rarely left the small room, and preferred to eat their strange rice meals in solitude. He’d only seen them in the moments before embarkation, two gymnast-like, muscled Japanese officers with short beards, in crisply-pressed khaki uniforms, and sheathed samurai-styled blades at their hips. The doctor had watched as the two men eyed the German sailors with a mix of disinterest and contempt, not even bothering with the implied respect of one supposed master race to another.

Captain Duckwitz checked both directions of the corridor, and slid a folding ox-bone penknife from his pocket. As the confused doctor looked on, the captain reached up to the low ceiling and allowed his fingers to find the small wire that went to the intercom speaker inside the Japanese cabin. The young captain slid his penknife through the wire, slicing it in two. With the thick metal cabin door shut, the interior would be as silent as a bank vault. The doctor did not know what the captain intended to say over the intercom — but whatever was to be said, their Japanese guests were not meant to hear it.

Stepping into the command compartment, the captain and his doctor were greeted by a muffled Captain-on-deck and were saluted by the assembled officers. Captain Duckwitz ordered them at ease and turned to his radio operator, leaning low over his station and addressing him with a conspiratorial whisper, the doctor joining the huddle.

“Loss reports?” asked the captain.

“Not good, Captain,” said the young man, dropping a single earphone from his head. “Have just received April 30th through May the 3rd. Eight losses at minimum.”

The captain shook his head. Bad, but not as bad as the air raids of early April. “Read me the designations,” he ordered. “But quietly.”

“U-325, missing with all hands. No cause known. U-879, sunk by warship patrol. U-1107, lost by aircraft in the Bay of Biscay …”

“Bay of Biscay? More like the valley of the shadow of death,” mumbled Doctor Goering to no one in particular.

“U-2359, 2521, and 3032 presumed lost to aircraft,” continued the radio operator. “And the U-3502 has been deemed un-repairable from an earlier attack.”

“The U-2521?” asked the captain. “That was Heinz Franke’s boat, no?”

“I don’t know,” admitted the radio operator.

“Was he a friend?” asked the doctor.

“Not as such,” said the captain. “But I know the family.”

“Were you able to decode the message from this morning?” the radio operator gingerly inquired. “I was unfamiliar with the cypher.”

“Stop probing,” said the captain with a wry smile. “If you were meant to know the message, you would know the message. Doctor — please join me as I address the crew.”

Doctor Oskar Goering could do little but nod and stand beside his captain. He could scarcely imagine the weight of command. His young friend was like the oak core of ever-greater nesting dolls, bearing the expectation of the surrounding men, the pressure of the ocean around their tiny submarine, the hostile airplanes and destroyers that circled like locusts, even the massing Allied armies at the Fatherland’s borders.

With one deep sigh, the captain took the intercom phone from beside the attack periscope and cleared his throat.

“Crew of the U-3531, come to attention,” he began, the intonation of his voice giving no evidence as to his forthcoming message. “This is your Kapitanleutnant speaking. We have received urgent orders from Naval High Command that I will now relay to you.”

The captain took another halting breath before continuing, steadying himself against the periscope.

“All Underseebooten,” he continued. “Attention all. Cease fire at once. Stop all hostile action against Allied shipping.”

Murmurs whispered throughout the command compartment, turning to hissed whispers. The doctor feared they’d soon turn to a roar.

“The orders continue,” said the captain. “It reads as follows: My U-Boat men. Six years of war lie behind you. You have fought like lions. An overwhelming material superiority has driven us into a tight corner from which it is no longer possible to continue the war. Unbeaten and unblemished, you lay down your arms after a heroic fight without parallel. We proudly remember our fallen comrades who gave their lives for Füehrer and Fatherland. Comrades, preserve that spirit in which you have fought so long and so gallantly for the sake of the future of the Fatherland. Long live Germany. It is signed Grand Admiral Doenitz. Orders end.”

Silence rang through the submarine like a gong, a profound, ear-ringing silence only experienced after a falling bomb has ripped through a city block — or when years of total war come to an abrupt end.

“I will add a measure of my thoughts,” said the captain into the intercom. “Men, we have fought like comrades and died like brothers. I am eternally honored to have served with every one of you. We must now steel ourselves to push through this veil, whether that veil be wet with tears or red with hatred. I intend to return us to Germany and place our fates at the feet of our conquerors. Men — brothers— we have survived the war; may we now survive the peace to come.”

The dam broke with fifty-seven simultaneous shouts of despair and joy, insistences of disbelief, shattered expectations and uncertainty.

Ferret-faced Political Officer Oberleutnant Boer pushed his way to the foremost of the captain’s congregants, shoving aside ruddy Diesel Obermaschinest Baeck and the aghast radio operator.

“Lies!” Boer shouted, waving a finger in the captain’s impassive face. “American, British lies!”

“I’ve verified the code personally,” said the captain. “The orders are from Admiral Doenitz’s hand to my mouth— and Oberleutnant Boer, be well advised that I do not owe your rank an explanation.”

“Orders?” snarled Boer as he nearly ripped open the lapel of his uniform to reach inside his interior breast pocket. “These orders of which you speak? I have orders as well — secret orders from the Führer’s inner circle! In the event of a collapsing war effort or sabotage from within, we are to sail to Argentina to regroup. Captain, this very vessel has the weapons necessary to turn the tide. We are the key to beating back the mongrel races — but instead, you tell us these lies of surrender?”

The captain’s mouth had just begun to twitch with an infuriated response when out of nowhere a fist flew into Boer’s face, snapping across the young man’s jawline with shattering force, instantly dropping the political officer in a sprawling heap on the floor. Ruddy, affable mechanic Baeck had become a human cudgel, his teeth gritted and his brow knotted as he continued the assault, throwing his body atop the political officer and raining down blow after blow. The doctor recoiled in horror — not for the act, but because of the beloved man committing it.

Shouting officers dragged the two men apart. The political officer was now dazed and bleeding as the bloody-knuckled mechanic struggled against the interventionists. In the confusion, the doctor noted a flashing metallic glint in the captain’s hand as he drew a Luger pistol and drew aim at the beloved mechanic.

“Striking a superior officer is a capital offense,” intoned the captain, cocking the hammer as Baeck’s eyes widened in surprise.

“I want him shot,” shouted Boer, yanking himself free of the two men who’d helped him to his feet. “And anyone who sympathizes with his cowardly—”

The captain’s face twisted in anger as he shifted his aim from the mechanic to the political officer, pulling the trigger in an instant, the pistol blast ringing through the tight command compartment. Blood spurted from a spec-sized hole under Boer’s unseeing left eye as the young, smoothfaced man crumpled to the metal deck.

Silence again took hold as the captain holstered his pistol.

“Release Obermachinest Baeck,” he commanded to his men. “Baeck, return to your duties at once. As for Oberleutnant Boer, perhaps peacetime will elevate fewer such men. Prepare his body for immediate burial at sea.”

No one moved.

“I will have order on my ship,” growled the captain with an icy voice, the coldest the doctor had yet heard. “We few, we lucky few, have survived all manner of wartime and loss; we have survived, unlike so many of our brothers in arms. I would prefer my men to survive the peace, uneasy as it may be. Doctor Goering, I will need you for one final task before you are dismissed.”

“Yes, Captain,” said the doctor, following as the captain turned 180 degrees on one heel and stomped from the command compartment, leaving the political officer’s body behind.

“We have a duty to inform our Japanese guests,” said the captain as he purposefully strode towards their cabin door, the two men once again finding themselves alone.

“And you require me for this notification?” asked the doctor, not wholly understanding.

“You’ll see,” said the captain, knocking three times on the door and standing at attention. “Dealing with these Japs isn’t like dealing with a proper German. Perhaps notification is too strong a word. Müllschuss might be more appropriate.”

The doctor pondered for a moment. Müllschuss, or “garbage-shot” referred to the days’ collected trash as it was blasted from an empty torpedo tube and into the abyss. Normally so deft at hiding his feelings, the young captain had just revealed his true sentiment of the submarine’s foreign passengers — a wish to eject them from the submarine, like so much garbage.

CHAPTER 2

The cabin door swung open, revealing the two Japanese officers. Standing at attention as though they’d expected the intrusion, the two short men stood primly, hats cocked, their khaki uniforms unnaturally immaculate in the dull light streaming in from the corridor, beards closely trimmed, hair neatly slicked back without a single errant strand. Try as he might, the doctor genuinely could not tell one from the other. The two officers could have been brothers, or even twins. And then there was that smell; too many unfamiliar spices mixed with the slight after-scent of sweet rice wine.

“I have news,” said the captain stiffly, wasting not a word. “Germany has withdrawn from the war effort. Our orders are to return to port for an orderly surrender to Allied forces. Gentlemen, I regret we cannot return you to your homeland.”

“Not acceptable,” said the foremost Japanese officer, speaking with a faint British-accented German, his face betraying no emotion. “You will proceed to Japan and complete your mission.”

“The war is over for Germany,” said the captain, letting a slight measure of formality slip from his intonation. “I know this puts you in a difficult position, but we would be in violation of our orders to continue.”

“You will complete your mission,” repeated the Japanese officer, cold and insistent.

The captain whipped off his wool cap and stepped into the cabin, pushing his face within inches of the closest officer, scowling with intense displeasure. The Japanese soldier didn’t so much as blink.

“I did not choose this,” whispered the captain. “So long as I have breath in my lungs, I would in no way willingly submit myself, this ship, or its crew to humiliation before our enemy. But I will say this — I shot dead the last man to question my orders. I advise that you do not make the same mistake.”

“My… apologies… for any offense,” the officer said, narrowing his eyes as his twin stood motionless behind him.

“Accepted.” The captain stepped back and returned his own cap to his head. “And please understand, I must confine you to these quarters for the remainder of the voyage.”

The foremost Japanese officer nodded, not in agreement, but in acceptance of a fact he could not change.

“I request my katana,” the stony Japanese officer said.

“Whatever for?” blurted out the doctor before the captain could respond.

The Japanese officer tilted his head a millimeter to address the doctor.

“There is no German translation for the practice,” he said. “We are honor-bound to perform the act of seppuku.”

Doctor Goering shivered, remembering the reference from an old pulp-printed adventure novel from his youth. Seppuku — the act of honor-bound suicide rather than capture, a self-inflicted stomach-cutting, followed by decapitation by an attendant.

“Denied,” the captain said.

“A pistol, perhaps. And two bullets.”

“Also denied. Any reasonable requests will be reasonably accommodated. But I will not aid you in your deaths, honorable as your intentions may be. Gentlemen — if there is nothing further, I bid you goodbye.”

Without waiting for a reply, the captain backed out of the cabin, shut the door, and locked it from the outside. The doctor followed him back to his cabin, where they sat at the small table. The doctor watched as the captain reached into his desk drawer and retrieved a cloudy glass bottle of plum schnapps and then poured the dark amber liquid into two tumblers.

“What now?” Doctor Goering said, accepting his drink with a measure of relief. “You think they’ll cause trouble?”

“Denying swords and guns will hardly stop them,” said the captain. “These Japanese always carry cyanide salts for such events. Perhaps a pill or powder. But it will be less messy, less of a distraction to the crew.”

“We must search the room,” began the doctor, his cynicism falling away for a moment to reveal a zealous young medic from another war long since passed.

The captain shook his head. “We will return in two hours’ time,” he said. “We will find our Japanese passengers unconscious or dead. You will attempt to revive them— unsuccessfully. Their bodies will be interred at sea in accordance with their customs. I’m not of a mood to argue, my learned friend. The matter is closed.”

“I suppose it is their way,” muttered the doctor.

“Good,” said the captain, raising his glass. “Then, let’s drink.”

“To what?” asked the doctor. “The end of this savage war? To our dishonorable survival?”

“Let’s drink to the ambiguity of peace.”

“I’ll let that be your toast,” said the doctor, smirking. “Mine is far less philosophical. I drink to fewer amputations… and more howling babies.”

The glasses clinked together, and for one perfect moment the doctor allowed his thoughts to return to home. The local train, chugging merrily along the Warnow River. The sagging green door of his rural farmhouse. His grown daughter smiling for the first time since the invasion of Poland, her husband now returned from the Eastern front. His wife, standing in the kitchen with her daffodil-yellow apron and—

The dim light above them flickered and died. The captain swore as he jumped to his feet, the cloudy schnapps bottle falling to the floor and shattering. He threw open the cabin door to a darkened hallway. No lights shone from the corridor, save for a handful of battery-powered emergency lamps slowly flickering to life in the hands of quick-acting crew.

“Damnable Japs!” he shouted, not caring who heard him. “They’ve cut the power cables in their quarters!”

How—? thought the doctor as he sprang to his feet.

“I’m going to flay them,” the captain shouted, stomping towards their cabin. “And if they live, they’ll spend the rest of the cruise in the torpedo tubes.”

The captain yelped when he touched the lock to the cabin door, yanking his hand back. Doctor Goering caught a glimpse of the smoking lock, still glowing with a smoldering ember red and realized it’d been melted from the inside. The captain put his hand on the butt of his pistol and kicked the metal door open, revealing the immaculately clean, empty room inside. “Where are they?” he roared.

Hearing no answer, the captain shoved a midshipman out of his way as he stomped back to his unlocked cabin, white-hot anger palpable in every step. The door cracked open before him, light spilling from within. Without warning, a glinting steel blade pierced out of the slit between door and wall, sticking the captain just below his right ear and cleanly exiting the back his neck, expertly severing his cervical vertebra. The captain stood stone-still for a heartbeat, eyes frozen open, mouth stuck in a grimace. His hands fell limp at his sides, unable to staunch his own fatal wound. The sword slid out with a gushing of blood, spraying across the walls and the deck as the captain collapsed, his neck spitting gouts of red fluid from the frayed rubbery ends of a severed jugular artery.

The two Japanese officers burst from the captain’s cabin and armory, both now clad in black rubber gas masks, the round glass lenses of the masks flashing with the reflection of the harsh emergency lamps, brandishing stolen MP-40 submachine guns in one hand and their samurai swords in the other.

The unarmed German crew scattered, channeling themselves down the main corridor as the foremost of the two Japanese opened fire with a deafening fully automatic burst of bullets. Blinding muzzle-flashes burned into the doctor’s retinas as he cowered behind the fleeing men. Three crewmen were cut down in the space of a single heartbeat, screaming as bullets plunged into their exposed backs, their chests bursting open with rents of blood and viscera, twisting and spasming as they fell to the deck.

The doctor opened his mouth, wordlessly, impotently, as the second Japanese locked his glassy gaze upon him. Deciding the man unworthy of a bullet, the attacker drew back his clenched, sword-wielding fist, then brought the blade down with a deliberate, sudden slash, instantly severing three fingers from the doctor’s right hand, then clattering through his rib cage and opening up the skin and fat from his collarbone to the crest of his pelvis. The doctor collapsed, soaked wet with his own warm blood, the slime of yellow fat dripping from his too-generous gut.

Doctor Goering jammed his wounded right hand into his armpit, trying to stop the freely flowing blood as the two Japanese officers slowly marched towards the engine compartment, deliberately popping off one deadly-aimed round after another as they massacred the retreating German crew.

The doctor had seen slaughter before, yes, but this was something different. Not animalistic, not the deeds of men trapped within the jungle mist of hatred, but mechanical, dissociative extermination without bloodlust or fury, a single-minded focus on utilitarian butchery. The crew might have been ants under a heel, not of a cruel schoolboy, but beneath an unfeeling actuary who’d precisely timed the seconds he’d need to reach his next appointment. No doubt they already had a submarine in the area, preparing to intercept the U-3531 and take her over.

From his prone vantage, the doctor could only watch as Diesel Obermaschineit Baeck jumped from behind the battery bank, heavy wrench held high above his head like a war-mallet, only to be felled by a continuous burst of 9mm bullets into his solar plexus.

Swiveling, the first Japanese took aim at the battery bank; the other, a seawater pipe, bursting both with a single salvo, electrical arcs sparking as the battery acid met the foamy, white brine of the ocean. Doctor Goering dragged himself toward his cabin as the influx of water swirled around the base of batteries already beginning to flood the engine room.

Once he’d dragged his girth into his medical cabin, he pushed the door closed with a foot, attempting to shut out the sight of his own bloody drag marks out of his mind. With his one good hand, he reached up to his medical cabinet, swiping his fingers along the wood as glass pill-bottles rained down upon him. Several hit the metal deck and shattered, slivers of broken glass the least of the splendid hell.

Morphine — where was the damnable morphine? The pain was too much. He felt as if he’d been sliced in half, only his weary bones holding his feeble, desiccated body together. And then he found it — Temmler Pharmaceutical’s methamphetamine pills, already loose on the deck amidst the broken bottles. Three pills. Then they were in his mouth, along with a single shard of glass, where he ground all between his teeth and swallowed, burning and cutting their way down his raw throat.

The ecstasy hit almost immediately, a sudden convulsing high that dwarfed the rapture found within a morphine blot. The doctor rose to his hands and knees, his ruined chest and gut spilling down his uniformed blouse and trousers.

An acidic smell burned his nostrils as he drew in a breath — metallic pineapple, a fearful odor he’d never thought he’d sense again. Green, low-hanging chlorine gas gathered about the compartment, just like in the trenches of the Great War. The burning sensation increased as the mucus membranes in his nose interacted with the chlorine molecule changing it into a powerful hydrochloric acid. In the nose, it was painful. In the lungs, it would soon be fatal, essentially melting the tissues from the inside, until finally, he would drown in his own bodily fluids. But why? A long-forgotten explanation flashed through the doctor’s stimulant-addled mind: battery acid mixing with seawater produced the deadly gas cloud. The Japanese had done this purposefully. Discontent with the labor of methodically shooting the unarmed crew, they’d simply opted to gas them all.

More gunshots echoed from both ends of the submarine as the Japanese stalked in opposite directions, eliminating the convulsing survivors. Still crawling, the doctor dragged his frame out of the medical cabin, holding his breath, taking air into his lungs with little gasps. Around him, wounded men clutched their throats and writhed, their lips flecked with pink foam, every choking breath sucking in more of the poison gas.

The doctor grasped a pipe and dragged himself to his feet, holding in his ruined guts with his two-fingered right hand. Pharmaceutical fire coursed through his veins as he stumbled through the engine room, eyes closed against the burning gas clouds, feet wet with battery acid and pooling seawater, every muscle twitching as sparks and electrical arcs danced while dead men floated face-down all around him.

Yanking an emergency gas mask from the wall, the doctor pushed it to his face and tried to breath, but found no air. He ran a finger through the mouthpiece, finding a thick wad of hardened epoxy over the filter.

Sabotaged. Days ago, maybe even weeks ago.

Shaking uncontrollably, the doctor staggered into the galley, once again collapsing. He reached up to the counter and pulled free a washcloth, spilling a pile of potatoes about his prone form. He pushed the washcloth down towards his crotch, underneath the bloody beltline of his trousers, and against his penis. With all his might, he forced himself to urinate, just drops at first, then the warm liquid flowed freely against the washcloth and into his hand. Summoning long-unused willpower, the doctor thrust the washcloth against his face, breathing through the piss-soaked rag, knowing that the water and ammonia would filter out the acidifying chlorine gas. The same trick had kept him alive through the gas-shellings of the Great War. Breathing now, he secured the filthy cloth behind his head with a single hand.

Footsteps — the doctor quickly laid his head upon the ground and closed his eyes as one of the Japanese officers passed.

And then a single, brilliant thought entered the doctor’s mind.

Wunderwaffen.

The crates in the rearmost torpedo room, the source of seaman Lichtenberg’s affliction. The ray gun.

Crawling, the doctor pushed his way through heaps of dead and dying men, mouths foaming, broken bodies bleeding from sword piercings and bullet wounds.

Wunderwaffen. Doctor Oskar Goering would seize the ray gun from its crated nest. He would turn it upon the two Japanese officers for this sudden betrayal — maybe even the whole of the Japanese nation. He would roast them, explode their bodies, turn them to blowing chimney ash.

Hope fueling his bled-out body as much as the stimulants, the doctor collapsed a final time before the wooden torpedo-room crate. He pulled seaman Lichtenberg’s bedroll from the box and pried open a corner of the box, hammered-in nails screaming as he forced open the lid with inhuman, drug-induced strength.

Inside lay four identical lead-lined steel boxes. The ray gun — the wunderwaffen—this was his prize, his Valhalla reward for survival, his single chance at vengeance. In the dim emergency lighting, the doctor wrenched open the nearest metallic box, the sickly blue light illuminating the dim compartment as the lid fell free and clanged to the deck.

Blue powder. Nothing but glowing blue powder lay within.

The doctor ran his hands through the heavy substance and felt a prickling, stabbing heat, but no other contents buried within. The cloth slipped from his face, his lungs burned, tears now streamed unstaunched down his cheeks, disappearing into the ineffectual glowing powder.

Then something strange happened. It was as if he took a slow step back from his own body, experiencing the moment from a great faraway distance. A sense of peace washed over him, beautiful and serene. Nothing mattered. Not really. He allowed his one hand to slip out of the powder-filled box, his other to fall from his ragged stomach. The Japanese, the war, the months aboard the submarine, even his wife and daughter seemed so distant, so insignificant, and he wondered why — but even that question held no real significance.

All Doctor Oskar Goering could do was remember an old poem. He chanted it again and again in the silence of his own mind as he faded inexorably into nothingness.