The Wrecking Crew

by Taylor Zajonc

  “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 speck-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 Doctor Oskar Goering, 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 revealed his true sentiment of the submarine’s foreign passengers—a wish to eject them from the submarine like so much garbage.

  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 couldn’t tell one from the other, the two Japanese could have been brothers or even twins. And then there was the 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. We will return to Europe for an orderly surrender to Allied forces. Gentlemen, I regret that 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 complete your mission and return us to Japan.”

  “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 new 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 Japanese cabin, pushing his face within inches of the foreign 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,” said the officer, narrowing his eyes as his twin stood motionless behind him.

  “Accepted,” said the Captain, stepping back and returning his own cap to his head. “And please understand I must involuntarily 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,” said the stony Japanese officer.

  “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 Oskar 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,” said the captain.

  “A pistol, perhaps,” said the Japanese officer. “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 took one step backwards out of the cabin, shut the door and locked it from the outside. The doctor followed him back to the captain’s cabin, where the pair of men sat down at the small table. The captain reached into his desk drawer and retrieved a cloudy glass bottle of plum schnapps, then poured the dark amber liquid into two tumblers.

  “What now?” asked the doctor, accepting his drink with a measure of relief. “You think they’ll cause trouble?”

  “Denying swords and guns will hardly stop them. 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 interned 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.” The captain raised his glass. “Then let’s drink.”

  “To what? 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 with a smirk. “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 to 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!” the captain shouted to all within earshot. “They’ve cut the power cables in their quarters!”

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

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

  Hearing no answer, the captain shoved a midshipman out of his way as he purposefully 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 and brandishing stolen MP-40 submachine guns in one hand and their samurai swords in the other, the round glass lenses of the masks flashing with the reflection of the harsh emergency lamps.

  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. Decided unworthy of a bullet, the attacker cocked 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, clattering across every rib 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 hand 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 slaughters 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 well be ants under the heel, not of a cruel schoolboy but 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 and battery acid meeting the foamy white brine of the ocean. Doctor Goering crawled towards his cabin as the influx of water swirled around the base of batteries, already beginning to flood the engine room.

  The doctor dragged his girth into his medical cabin and pushed the door closed with a foot, trying to shut 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, it 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.

  The doctor’s shaking fingers found three, and then they were in his mouth with a single shard of glass, all ground up 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 as it entered his nostrils—metallic pineapple, a fearful odor he’d never thought he’d sense again. Green, low-hanging chlorine gas gathered about the compartment, just like the trenches of the Great War. The burning sensation was the mucus membranes in his nose interacting with the chlorine molecule and becoming a powerful hydrochloric acid. In the nose it was painful, in the lungs it was soon fatal, essentially melting the tissues from the inside until the victim drowned in his own bodily fluids. But why? A long-forgotten explanation flashed through the doctor’s stimulant-addled mind, battery acid mixing with seawater producing 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, echoing from both ends of the submarine as the Japanese stalked in opposite direction, eliminating the convulsing survivors. Still crawling, the doctor dragged his frame out of the medical cabin door, holding his breath 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 coursing 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, muscles twitching as sparks and electrical arcs danced, dead men floating face-down before 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.

  The Japanese had sabotaged the mask days ago, maybe even weeks ago.

  Uncontrollably shaking, 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. The doctor 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 flowing 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 a single Japanese officer 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 single-mindedly pushed his way through heaps of dead and dying men, mouths foaming, broken bodies bleeding from piercing sword and bullet wounds.

  Wunderwaffen. Doctor Goering would seize the raygun 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, 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. The doctor wrenched open the nearest metallic box in the dim emergency lighting.

  Sickly blue light spilled out, 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 within. The cloth slipped from his face, lungs burning, tears now streaming unstaunched from his eyes and 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 eyes, experiencing his own sight from a great distance, far-away. A sense of peace washed over him, beautiful and serene. Nothing mattered, not really. He allowed his hands to slip out of the powder-filled box, his other fell 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 a childhood poem. He chanted it again and again in the silence of his own mind as he faded inexorably into nothingness.

  There are no roses on a sailor’s grave, no lilies on an ocean wave.

  The only tribute is the seagull’s sweeps, and the teardrops that a sweetheart weeps.