The Wrecking Crew

by Taylor Zajonc

  Sweaty and still buttoning their shirts, Dalmar and Vitaly emerged from the conning tower, waving at the rest of the party.

  “That reminds me,” added Marissa, pulling half a dozen folded-up loose leaf pages of printer paper from her back jeans pocket. “Jonah told me to run your names, see what the authorities have on you.”

  “I’ve been kinda dreading this moment,” said Alexis.

  “It will be fine,” said Hassan, giving Alexis’s hand a reassuring squeeze. “You’ve not done anything wrong.”

  “Jonah—we’ll start with you,” said Marissa. “Looks like INTERPOL wants you for questioning over what happened at Anconia Island. I’d also keep away from any US cities for … well, forever. And most major western countries as well.”

  “No surprises there,” said Jonah.

  “Dr. Hassan Nassiri,” continued Marissa, reading off the page. “You’ve been formally charged with desertion and facilitating the escape of a prisoner. You’re also wanted in Malta in connection with a stolen yacht—wait, you guys were the ones that stole the Conqueror?”

  “Yeah, and kidnapped me while they were at it,” said Alexis.

  “Good,” said Marissa. “Well, the kidnapping part isn’t good. But the owner of the Conqueror was a real asshole.”

  “And then they sank it,” added Alexis. “Can you believe that?”

  “Seriously?” Marissa shook her head. “Jonah, this is why you can’t have nice things.”

  Dalmar and Vitaly stepped up to the group at the dock, a ruddy flush on both their faces.

  “I assume you’re Dalmar Abdi?” asked Marissa, pointing at the massive pirate.

  “I am Dread Pirate Dalmar Abdi,” he answered in his booming voice. “And you are very beautiful woman.”

  “My computer almost crashed when I Googled your name because you, my friend, are an internationally wanted terrorist. I could probably go to Gitmo just for talking to you.”

  “I am finally famous!” shouted Dalmar, waving his fists at the heavens.

  “Congratulations. And you are … Vitaly Kuznetsov?” asked Marissa, nodding towards the Russian pilot.

  “That is me,” said Vitaly.

  “Vitaly, I can’t find anything about you anywhere. Frankly, I’m not convinced you even exist.”

  “Even so,” said Vitaly, “Russia not so safe for me right now. Some people not so happy with Vitaly. I stay with submarine.”

  “Alexis Andrews,” said Marissa with an apologetic tone. “I hate to say this, but you may want to lay low for a while. There are no warrants out, but there are a lot of angry people who want to ask you some really serious questions.”

  Alexis nodded and looked at the ground. “I have letters,” she finally said. “Can you get them to my family?”

  “Of course,” said Marissa. “Which brings me to Charles Bettencourt. You guys catch the news?”

  “We put up a satellite dish, but it keeps getting washed off,” complained Jonah.

  “Well, then you’ll like this. Bettencorps CEO Charles Bettencourt is officially missing and presumed dead. His helicopter was found abandoned near a small fishing village on the coast of Somali. His helicopter pilot was found nearby.”

  “Alive?” asked Vitaly quizzically.

  “Not so much,” said Marissa. “Body was mutilated. And he’d been forced to drink so much toxic waste that authorities had to take his body to a chemical weapons disposal furnace in Belarus for cremation.”

  “Ouch,” said Jonah.

  “Yeah,” said Marissa with a wry smile. “Ouch is right. The Anconia data dump wasn’t complete, but Jesus, what a mess. Environmental groups and NGOs from around the world jumped on it. The red tide off Somalia is still bad, but there are early indications that it’s starting to fade. An American carrier group is in the area, their deep-dive program already pulling up barrels. Nobody knows what to call the stuff, much less what to do with it. Inside sources say it’s going to be a full-scale cleanup effort, especially for anything that washed up onshore.”

  “Fatima would be pleased,” whispered Hassan. Beside him, Alexis nodded.

  “So … you’ve got yourself a goddamn submarine. What the hell are you going to do with it?” Marissa surveyed them.

  “Seek adventure!” Dalmar spread his arms wide.

  “Probably more crime,” admitted Vitaly.

  “Babysit these guys.” Alexis rolled her eyes.

  “I’m of the hope that they will need my services as little as possible,” said Hassan.

  “It’s a big ocean,” mused Jonah. “We’ll just have to see what comes our way.”

  “I’ve got a job for you and your crew in Japan if you’re looking for work. Yours if you want it,” said Marissa, hoisting up the suitcase and preparing to leave. “I’ll give you the details in a couple of days. Jonah, I hope you’re a better captain than you were a boyfriend.”

  “Same here,” admitted Jonah. “And thanks for everything. I know you’re risking a lot to help us.”

  “Not done yet,” said Marissa. “You know that certain someone you asked me to keep an eye out for?”

  “Yeah?” said Jonah, just barely daring to hope.

  “Klea,” shouted Marissa as she waved back to her car. “You can make your dramatic entrance now. We’re all good—everybody is cool and no helicopters swooping in. Yet.”

  A slight, pale, dark-haired young woman exited the car, cautiously at first. But when she caught sight of Jonah, she broke out into a full run. Jonah caught her in his arms as she embraced him and buried her face in his chest. For the briefest of moments, Jonah’s mind flashed back to their long journey in the inflatable life raft.

  “I—I thought—” began Klea.

  “It’s okay.” Jonah held her close, running his hands up and down her back. “We made it. What happened?”

  “Burhaan’s family hid me,” said Klea. “Took me south, just like they said they would. I showed up at an American embassy and told them to take me home. I thought you were dead until Marissa called me.”

  “I’m so happy to see you,” admitted Jonah. “I can’t even find the words—”

  “I can come with you,” said Klea. “I can help, I know things—engines, electronics, navigation—”

  “We’ll manage,” said Jonah, holding her tightly. “Klea, I’m just happy at least one of us is allowed back in the world. It should be you.”

  Klea threw her arms around Jonah’s neck. And for one perfect moment, he felt her smile as she kissed him.

  “Everybody, this is Klea,” said Jonah, introducing her to his wrecking crew. She smiled and waved.

  “Nicely done, Captain,” said Vitaly. “She very pretty.”

  “You want a tour?” Jonah offered Marissa and Klea.

  “Pass,” Marissa said.

  “Maybe starting with the captain’s cabin?” Klea cocked her head and raised an eyebrow.

  Jonah grinned and took her under his arm.

  “Oh, and one last thing,” Jonah said, digging into his pocket. “I got a present for you, Marissa.”

  “More gold I can’t unload? Or did you save some black market human skin just for me?”

  “Better.” He tossed her a small silver voice recorder. Marissa caught it one-handed, frowned, and held it to her ear as she pressed the play button.

  “I was over-extended financially, risking not just Anconia Island, but the whole of the Bettencorps empire,” began the recording of Charles Bettencourt, arrogance dripping from his voice. “And then the Conglomerate came to me with a proposal that could save everything, a problem for which they required the utmost discretion.”

  The tape dropped out for a moment, returning when Hassan’s cool aristocratic voice broke in. “And you took these weapons,” said the doctor over the recording. “And you buried them in the deep waters of the Indian Ocean.”

  “Of course I did!” the CEO shouted, his voice tinny over the recording. “I was forced, forced to agree that the best place to hide weapons
that shouldn’t exist was among people who didn’t matter. It was such an easy choice to make, what they wanted was so simple—their interests protected, a blind eye turned, and for that I got my bottom line secured.”

  Marissa clicked the recorder off and smiled.

  “Dead or alive, the world is going to know the truth about Charles Bettencourt,” said Jonah, turning back toward the Scorpion, his fingers entwined with Klea’s.

  “Is the world going to find out the truth about Jonah Blackwell, too?” shouted Marissa after him.

  “We’ll see, won’t we?” said Jonah.

  ~ THE END ~

  COMING NEXT

  Red Sun Rogue

  CHAPTER 1

  May 6, 1945, 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 storm, 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 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 and 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 take appendixes, probe infections, treat sexual disease 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. Though the role of ship’s surgeon was a specialized job for a trained medical mind, the only skill truly necessary aboard the Fuhrer’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 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 to 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 doubled as 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.
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  “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 sabotage. 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,” said Doctor Goering, “do not be a horse’s ass.”

  “I bunk in the aft torpedo room,” said the young man, 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.