“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.
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.
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.
PART 2
Present Day
CHAPTER 3
Radioactive Exclusion Zone,
Fukushima, Japan
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant glinted in January moonlight, gentle waves lapping against the snow-dusted rock jetty below the crippled cooling towers. Dull yellow halogen lamps dotted the facility’s buildings and fences, leaving the abandoned coastal villages surrounding the area all the darker by comparison. Tall transmission lines and cranes pierced the horizon, and thick electrical cables disappeared into the darkness. Behind the three main buildings, endless rows of white temporary storage tanks lapped up leaking irradiated groundwater as it seeped from the crumbling stacks.
The Scorpion drifted towards the power plant at dead-slow, her matte-black hull submerged, a single narrow periscope slicing through the dark ocean. The underwater craft mirrored the aesthetic of Fukushima—both stark and utilitarian. Both, relics of another era.
Dr. Hassan Nassiri stood in a corner of the submarine’s cramped command compartment with arms crossed, trying to swallow his butterflies as the tactical lighting bathed him in thick crimson. It still surprised him that a group of just five could run the entire 250-foot diesel/electric submarine. He supposed they were lucky the vessel’s previous crew of mercenaries had automated and computerized the bulk of the antiquated systems.
Before him, his captain—his friend, though it still felt a strange notion—clasped the periscope handles with both hands as he deftly navigated the submarine into the shallow foreign harbor.
Yes, his friend . . . he’d discovered Jonah Blackwell— salvage diver, criminal, man without a country—in a secret Saharan prison. Caught on an illegal underwater mission in Moroccan waters, Jonah had been rendered by the secret police and forced to carve out a tense, often violent life among gangsters and terrorists. But this desert anvil had also forged the only man willing to accompany Hassan into the heart of Somali pirate territory, a man audacious enough to rescue the doctor’s captured mother and recruit a crew of hardy survivors and outlaws. Jonah and the doctor created the core of an unexpectedly effective team, their very own wrecking crew, as Jonah liked to call them— Hassan with his intelligence and medical training, Jonah with his capacity for quick thinking, cunning, and combat.
But the voyage from Washington’s Puget Sound had been long, long enough for the ghosts that haunted the corridors of their stolen vessel to make themselves known. Whenever he closed his eyes, he felt as though some unseen force spun a wheel until it clicked to a stop upon a terrible or profound recent memory.
Blink.
A proud island metropolis perched upon the foundation of massive oil platforms, its tall skyscrapers toppling into the sea under the impact of a hijacked super container ship.
Blink.
His body wedged within the twisted metal of the Scorpion as the last of his air drained from his lungs, his narcotic mind reeling with panic.
Blink.
Seeing Alexis for the first time, the young Texan sitting on the floor of a superyacht engine room bobbing her head to unheard music, eyes closed, and her long legs, blonde hair, and freckles—
Blink.
His mother, wrapped in white cloth as their pirate allies solemnly ferried away her pale, electrocuted body for an honored burial in a distant land.
But the one memory he forbade himself was his life as an army surgeon in Morocco, the life he’d abandoned to find his biologist mother after her plane disappeared over the Arabian Sea. Absent without leave from his military service, he’d been instrumental in multiple savage clashes, hijackings, and the obliteration of an entire island nation; too many lines crossed to ever return home.
Hassan shook his head and ran his fingers through the tousled black hair that framed his dark eyes. He returned his attention to the data-stream steadily marching across his communications console. The butterflies again—but such was life amongst the barbarians. Always some measure of danger, however great or small.
Jonah looked up from his periscope and grimaced, scanning the red-illuminated command compartment with piercing eyes. Hassan wondered if the American would ever lose a prisoner’s affectations or physicality, his intense, almost paranoid attention to detail made manifest in his gaunt, muscled form.
Over the course of the voyage, Jonah had kept his blonde hair close-cropped and his beard tightly trimmed. Seeing the scarred-up knuckles and the residual hardening around the American’s eye socket and jaw, the doctor had to wonder if the beard covered further scarring.
“Vitaly—check the readings,” Jonah commanded, pointing at the Russian helmsman as he returned his eyes to the periscope. “How bad is our radiation exposure?”
“About twenty mili-sievert per minute,” Vitaly said glancing at a Geiger counter nestled approximately atop his testicles, his answer only somewhat discernible through a thick accent. “We in radioactive containment chamber drainage outflow for sure now. Maybe equivalent of one chest x-ray every two-three minutes. I am detecting Iodine-131, Caesium-134 and . . . da, Caesium-137. Like Chernobyl, nyet?”
“How bad is that?” asked Jonah. “Am I going to grow a third eye here?”
“For Russian, is no problem,” answered Vitaly. “For you, I think maybe not so good news.”
“Doc?”
“He’s right,” said Hassan, trying to dig through the cobwebs of his mind to a short rotation in radiology during his medical residency. “In two hours, we’ll be exposed to more radiation than we would in a typical year. I advise we not linger any longer than absolutely necessary.”
“Agreed,” said Jonah, looking up from his periscope and patting the doctor on the shoulder as he turned to face the main corridor that ran the entire length of the submarine. Yes, friend . . . Perhaps it wasn’t so strange a notion after all.
Jonah pressed the intercom that lead to the engine room. “Alexis!” he shouted, loud enough to get the engineer’s attention over the constant thrumming of the recently overhauled diesel-electric engines.
A static-filled response came back, not clear enough to make the words out.
“How are my engines?” asked Jonah, again speaking into the intercom.
“Good!” said a young female voice from the engine compartment, background noise echoing through the transmission. “We’re five-by-five back here.”
“You want to come up here for a few, take a look at the harbor through the periscope?” asked Jonah.
“Nope!” said Alexis. “I’m going to stay right here— surrounded by the thickest section of hull. Y’all can go ahead and get as irradiated as much as you want up in command.”
RED SUN ROGUE Page 3
