RED SUN ROGUE
a WRECKING CREW novel
TAYLOR ZAJONC
Blank Slate Press
Saint Louis, MO 63116
a WRECKING CREW novel - Book 2
Copyright © 2017 Taylor Zajonc
All rights reserved.
Publisher’s Note: This book is a work of the imagination. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. While some of the characters and incidents portrayed here can be found in historical or contemporary accounts, they have been altered and rearranged by the author to suit the strict purposes of storytelling. The book should be read solely as a work of fiction.
For information, contact:
Blank Slate Press at 4168 Hartford Street, Saint Louis, MO 63116
www.blankslatepress.com
Blank Slate Press is an imprint of Amphorae Publishing Group, LLC
www.amphoraepublishing.com
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cover Design by Kristina Blank Makansi Cover photography: USS_Annapolis_ICEX - By US Department of Defense photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Tiffini M. Jones, U.S. Navy
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.jpg
Flag of the Imperial Japanese Army by Thommy [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons Set in Adobe Caslon Pro and Aachen BT
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017931227
ISBN: 9781943075263
To Mom & Dad,
For all adventures past
And all adventures yet to come
PART 1
May 6, 1945
CHAPTER 1
2315 Hours
Kriegsmarine Type XXI Underseeboot U-3531
Grid Position KR86,
Approximately 450 Miles SW of Madagascar
Silent Running at 30 Meters Depth
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.
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