RED SUN ROGUE

by Taylor Zajonc

Hassan just looked at Jonah and shook his head. The doctor didn’t need to say a single word to make himself understood. Jonah couldn’t bluff, couldn’t gamble; not with Alexis’ life at stake. Jonah slowly struggled to his feet despite bruised ribs. Their captor shot Jonah a curious look and watched him carefully measured out three paces down the deck from the conning tower, turned sharply to starboard, and measured one more pace. Jonah stomped three times with one boot, waited a moment and stomped three more times before returning to slump against the tower with his crew.

  A minute passed in silence, and then another. And then Alexis’ head popped out of the hatch, gingerly eyeing the captured crew before she emerged with hands in the air. Smiling, their captor waved the two intercepting Japanese soldiers away from the young woman—he’d handle her personally. For a moment, Jonah felt certain she’d be allowed to join the rest of crew by her own volition.

  He was wrong.

  As Alexis passed their captor, the well-dressed man roughly grabbed her from behind, violently kicking out the back of her knees as he shoved her face-first towards the deck. Gasping with surprise, Alexis was barely able to catch her fall with bloodied forearms as she skidded across the metal hull, stopping just short of Hassan’s reach.

  “You bastard!” erupted Hassan. Jonah threw himself on top of Hassan, preventing the doctor from leaping to his feet and charging their captor headfirst. The rest of the crew swore and shouted with open fury, hurling invectives and abuse in four languages.

  Jonah allowed himself a tiny spark of pride at his crew’s defiance. But as bad as things looked, at least he’d formed an educated guess about their well-dressed captor. No doubt the man was Public Security Intelligence Agency, Japan’s secretive version of the CIA. It probably hadn’t been difficult for a PSIA satellite to track the Scorpion in and out of North Korean waters; they’d been actively spying on the hermit kingdom since the agency’s inception more than sixty years previous. Jonah found himself deeply thankful that they’d been carrying refugees and not narcotics, counterfeit money, or embargoed arms. More than anything, he was thankful that they hadn’t picked up too many stray radioactive particles during their transit through the Fukushima exclusion zone. The Scorpion would have probably been sunk on sight if the Japanese Geiger counters so much as clicked when they surfaced.

  “Leave my engineer alone,” demanded Jonah as he willed his crew into silence. “If you need someone to kick around, you go through me. Enough of the bullshit intimidation tactics. Time to tell us what you want.”

  Their captor nodded. Turning to Alexis, he pulled a permanent marker out of his front pocket, bit the cap off, and spat it onto the deck. He grabbed the young engineer by the face, thumb and index finger squeezing her cheeks and chin as he scribbled a series of numbers on her forehead in thick black ink. Hassan shifted, face once more twisted in rage as the remaining Japanese soldiers raised their weapons in warning. One aggressive move and the doctor would be gunned down on the spot.

  Finished writing, the intelligence officer dropped Alexis to the deck again and hurled his pen into the ocean. The engineer unconsciously reached up to touch the reddening skin around the blocky numerals on her face, but her captor violently grabbed her hands, twisting them away from the still-drying ink. Jonah squinted. He didn’t know the numbers, but recognized the format.

  They were coordinates.

  The officer snapped his fingers and the soldiers stepped forward, unsheathing knives as they advanced. Hassan recoiled and closed his eyes only to have his forearms roughly grabbed, the nearest blade easily slipping through the thick plastic of the zip ties. The rest of the crew was freed within moments, each rubbing their raw wrists as they looked at the now-retreating soldiers with utter disbelief. Only Marissa was left in her circles of silver duct tape, still facedown on the cold metal deck. One by one, the soldiers climbed back aboard their rubber boats and shoved off. Their violent captor was the last to depart, offering Jonah a mocking salute before turning his back to the Scorpion and boarding his small craft. Within moments, he was motoring back towards the destroyer at high speed without casting so much as a backwards glance over one shoulder.

  “What fuck was that?” Vitaly wheezed as he clutched his ribs and watched the withdrawing boats.

  “They can’t possibly be letting us go—can they?” asked Hassan.

  “You think they chase us more?” said Vitaly.

  “We cannot surrender again,” said Dalmar. “It would be very bad for my reputation.”

  “Can somebody turn me around?” Marissa’s voice was muffled from underneath a face full of wet, soggy hair. “I can’t see what’s happening behind me.”

  “Guys?” said Alexis, staring at the rest as she pointed at her own face. “What did he write on my forehead?”

  “It’s a location,” Jonah said as he and Dalmar sat Marissa up. He still wasn’t sure what to make of what had just happened—but he recognized the format of the numbers.

  “We can all see that they’re goddamn coordinates,” Marissa grumbled. “Coordinates to where?”

  “I think North Korea again?” Vitaly tilted his head, putting his face inches from Alexis.

  “What does he want us to do?” said Hassan. “He can’t possibly ask us to return to DPRK waters—not after stealing their citizens and leaving a burning hovercraft on the pack ice.”

  “Easy now, Doc. It wasn’t that bad of a cockup, was it?” said Jonah. “We’re still floating, aren’t we?”

  “Are you quite serious?” asked the doctor. “If our last sojourn wasn’t a cockup, I have little idea what the word means.”

  “We wouldn’t even be in this mess if Jonah hadn’t blown up a goddamn North Korean hovercraft,” complained Marissa.

  “Let me remind you that we’re out here on your milk run,” said Jonah.

  “Maybe he wants us to avoid those coordinates in the future?” suggested Alexis. “Like when you get pulled over on the highway for speeding or whatever, but they let you off with a warning?” Everyone—even Hassan—groaned.

  “I think we go back. We will take these North Koreans by surprise,” said Dalmar. “They would not expect us to return so soon.”

  “But why?” repeated the doctor. “What do the Japanese want from us?”

  “Maybe pick up cargo? Extract spy?” said Vitaly.

  “I’m all for speculation, but could someone please get me out of this fucking tape first?” Alexis began to pull the sticky duct tape off as Marissa tried in vain to blow her soggy hair out of her eyes. She moaned in protest at each painful tug.

  “Do not forget the possibility of assassination,” added Dalmar. “Perhaps he asks we kill a man . . . or many men.”

  “Or maybe just some routine observation?” Alexis looked up at Jonah hopefully as she freed Marissa’s ankles. “You know, from a safe distance and all?”

  Jonah just sighed, as though recalling a series of especially grim memories. “I think I’ve got this down in broad strokes,” he said. “These guys are not telling us a goddamn thing for a reason. They want us to stick our neck in the noose and see what happens.”

  “What will become of the refugees?” Alexis asked. “I hope we didn’t just deliver them to a DPRK concentration camp.”

  “Not much chance they’ll be worse off.” Hassan pulled Alexis to her feet and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “Japan won’t return them to North Korea; that much is certain. Perhaps the ones with living relatives in the home islands might stay. The rest will undoubtedly go into South Korea’s refugee rehabilitation program.”

  “The yakuza are going to be pissed,” Marissa said, frowning. “So much for getting paid, much less ever seeing Tokyo again. It’ll be years before I can stay at the Imperial Hotel.”

  “So what we do now?” asked Vitaly.

  “Let’s get below decks and scoot the hell out of here before the Japanese Navy changes their minds.” Jonah turned to Vitaly. “Make a course for North Korea. Let’s see what they want from us�
�no way that whatever’s out there is worse than what we’ve already been through.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Hassan felt as though he’d barely breathed in the hours since leaving the Japanese fleet behind. With his refugee patients gone, the doctor knew he should occupy himself sterilizing and cataloging his medical instruments, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave Jonah’s side at the nerve center of the submarine. The command compartment was lonely, half-empty. Alexis had made her way back to the engine room, while Marissa and Dalmar tried their best to sort through the picked-over chaos of the crew quarters and galley.

  Jonah had assigned Hassan to the communications and hydrophone console, leaving the doctor to occasionally report the whispering acoustic signature of a trailing Japanese submarine. The Scorpion was not difficult to follow; Jonah had given Vitaly the cryptic order of running ‘silent, but not too silent,’ instructions the Russian actually seemed to understand. But the Japanese submarine behind them remained no less than a spear at their back, pushing them ever forward into hostile waters.

  Vitaly enlarged a nautical map on his computer screen, roughly plotting out the approximate location of the Scorpion as she approached the rocky coastline of North Korea from far beneath the waves. Their new destination was nearly to the hermit kingdom’s southern border, far from the pack ice of the north.

  “We re-enter North Korean waters about now,” whispered Vitaly. “I clear baffles? How you say, check our six?”

  Jonah shook his head. “Let’s not piss anyone off,” he said. “If the Japanese are still following us with one of their subs, we have to let them . . . I don’t want to give anybody the idea that we’re trying to shake a tail.”

  “Clear baffles?” asked Hassan.

  “We have a blind spot behind our propellers,” said Jonah, jabbing a thumb towards the stern of the submarine. “Passive sonar won’t pick up anything in their acoustic shadow. Clearing the baffles means shaking our ass a little to see if anyone’s still back there.”

  Marissa stuck her head in the command compartment. “We inventoried the galley. It’s not looking good. We’re basically down to condiments, and even most of those are completely gone. But for some reason, they left the mayo completely untouched.”

  “We’ll just have to tighten our belts for now,” said Jonah. “Let’s assume this assignment is a short one, and then we can slip into the Philippines for a clandestine resupply once we’re done. It’s only a few days’ sail from here. And then we’ll be back at sea again, fat and happy, presumably heading for a destination far, far away from here.”

  “If we’re not in prison,” said Marissa.

  “Or a torpedoed wreck,” added Vitaly.

  “Maybe somewhere warm next time?” suggested Hassan.

  “Let’s get a definitive GPS fix before our final approach,” said Jonah, ignoring the dour predictions. Hassan felt an uncomfortable sick feeling in his stomach as he unconsciously adjusted the holstered Beretta pistol in his waistband, trying not to think of all the terrible ways their mission could go wrong.

  “Aye Captain. Surfacing for GPS fix,” said Vitaly as he adjusted the depth planes with his computer console. The submarine shifted upwards almost imperceptibly as it rose, climbing a hundred feet through the water column to kiss the surface, a single thin antennae rising above the swells. Vitaly’s maps shifted slightly as the plotted position of the submarine updated automatically. Their location confirmed, the submarine began to descend once more into the quiet depths.

  “Prepare for full silent running,” said Jonah. “Dead slow, zero cavitation. Disconnect the internal comms. We’ll pass messages between compartments in person until we’re back out of North Korean waters again. We have about an hour to prepare before things start getting dangerous again. And, I want everybody to take off their shoes. If I haven’t given you a job, stay in your bunk. I’ll need everything but the most critical systems offline. I don’t want the coffee maker to so much as burble. We’re hanging ass to the wind without pack ice to hide beneath.”

  “Speaking of which, we’re out of coffee,” said Marissa as she slipped off her shoes and kicked them into a corner.

  “This bad omen,” grumbled Vitaly. “Submarine run on diesel and coffee. Mostly coffee.”

  Jonah turned to Marissa. “Out of coffee? How?”

  “I think they ate the beans,” Marissa said with a shrug.

  Hassan chewed down a rueful chuckle as he removed his shoes, tied them together by the laces, and slung them around his neck. Their former refugee passengers might be in for quite the stomach ache, but at least they’d be full— unlike so many of their starving countrymen stuck waiting out the brutal North Korean winter.

  “Our Japanese friends still behind us?” asked Jonah as the last of the Scorpion’s gentle vibrations fell to eerie silence. Hassan closed his eyes and listened as intently as he could, but couldn’t hear the single swishing echo of a pursuing submarine. Either they were alone, or their escorts had now matched their stealth. Hassan strongly suspected the former. If the Japanese were willing to ply these dangerous waters, they wouldn’t have needed the Scorpion to begin with.

  “Nothing on the hydrophones.” Alexis entered the command compartment with steel-toed boots slung across one shoulder. “It appears we have safe passage—for now.”

  A small sigh of overdue relief circled throughout the command compartment. Vitaly reached up from the helm console and gently tugged Alexis by the hem of her tank top, awkwardly pulling her down to his eye level so he could get a better look at her forehead. He squinted as he stared at the ink-stained patch above her eyebrows, checking the coordinates against his own one final time. “You get it this time?” complained Alexis. “I’d really like to wash this gunk off my face, if you don’t mind.”

  “You hold still now!” ordered Vitaly, releasing her shirt only to reach up and pinch and hold one of her cheeks like an overbearing aunt. The Russian turned her face one way and then the other to confirm each number in turn.

  “I think you’re about done,” snapped Alexis as she swatted his hand away. “You’d better be, because this ink is coming off now.”

  “He memorized the numbers the moment they were written down. Vitaly, stop hassling my engineer,” Jonah ordered. Vitaly just chuckled as he dismissed Alexis with a waved hand, quite amused with himself.

  “Thanks,” Alexis said. She licked her thumb and scrubbed at the permanent marker, but to no avail.

  Hassan stood and took Alexis by the crook of her arm. “May I take you to quarters?”

  “Only if the captain OK’s it,” she said. She’d put on a brave face, but Jonah could see how rattled she was. It was clear to him she could use a few minutes of privacy with Hassan to process.

  “Go,” said Jonah, nodding. “It will still take the better part of a day to approach the coastline at this speed anyway. Marissa—I need you to jump on Hassan’s station and fill in for the doc. Can you do that for me?”

  “I am not part of your crew,” protested Marissa. “And I have no idea how these goddamn systems work.”

  Jonah glared at her briefly before responding. “Just put on the headphones and tell me if you hear any sudden sounds. Churning, engine rumblings, clicks, splashes, high-pitched whines, anything out of the ordinary.”

  “And if I hear, I don’t know, a big splash or something?”

  “Then you put head between knees,” grumbled Vitaly, “and kiss own ass goodbye.”

  Marissa widened her eyes in complete dismay as she took the headphones from Hassan and sat down at his console without saying another word.

  Alexis followed Hassan forward towards the crew quarters. She waited until they were out of earshot of the command compartment before speaking with him. “You think Jonah and Vitaly will ever get sick of messing with Marissa?”

  The doctor just shrugged. He’d barely spoken with Marissa, and found her hostile-yet-intimate bantering with Jonah baffling and exhausting in equal portions. “She seem
s like a woman who can take care of herself. Besides, how long was her relationship with Jonah? Three years? I would presume she is well aware of the more juvenile aspects of his personality.”

  “Three years?” repeated Alexis with a shake of her head. “He’s a decent enough skipper, but I couldn’t imagine spending three minutes dating that man.” Passing the open bunks and their tiny, shared cabin, she turned into the bathroom. It wasn’t much, just a single shower, two sinks, and a shared toilet covered with bright red warning notifications about flushing when below 200 feet in depth. Hassan didn’t know what the consequences of ignoring the signs might be, but given the amount of exclamation points and skull iconography, it couldn’t be good.

  Hassan watched as Alexis turned the sink faucet on, carefully measuring out a silent trickle of water. Alexis looked in the mirror and began to scrub away at the black ink, but it’d already set into her forehead.

  “I’ll retrieve some isopropyl alcohol from my medical kit,” said Hassan, gently squeezing her shoulders. “It will take but a moment.”

  “Wait,” said Alexis, grabbing his hand before he could leave the bathroom. She pulled him back in and wrapped her strong arms around him, running one hand up and down the small of his back as she buried her head in his chest. Hassan became suddenly aware of his own heartbeat as it quickened against her ear.

  “I’m here,” said Hassan, gently brushing a finger around the circumference of her soft jawline.

  “I thought I could get used to how crazy it is out here,” she said. “I don’t know how long I can do this, Hassan. We’re so alone. We don’t even have a flag. We can’t hide behind even the faintest shadow of law. Any passing ship can legally ram us, shoot us, capture us, sink us. We’re nothing out here; we have nothing to cling to. How long can we possibly last?”

  “I don’t know,” said Hassan as he rested his chin on the top of her head. “I simply don’t know. We’re all without a country, every one of us. Perhaps we must sail under our own flag for now. But we’re not alone—and whatever we are, it’s not nothing.”