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 could not tell one from the other. The two officers could have been brothers, or even twins. And then there was that 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 “Germany has withdrawn from the war effort. Our orders are to return to port for an orderly surrender to Allied forces. Gentlemen, I regret 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 proceed to Japan and complete your mission.”
“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 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 cabin, pushing his face within inches of the closest 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,” the officer said, narrowing his eyes as his twin stood motionless behind him.
“Accepted.” The captain stepped back and returned his own cap to his head. “And please understand, I must 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,” the stony Japanese officer said.
“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 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,” the captain said.
“A pistol, perhaps. 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 backed out of the cabin, shut the door, and locked it from the outside. The doctor followed him back to his cabin, where they sat at the small table. The doctor watched as the captain reached into his desk drawer and retrieved a cloudy glass bottle of plum schnapps and then poured the dark amber liquid into two tumblers.
“What now?” Doctor Goering said, accepting his drink with a measure of relief. “You think they’ll cause trouble?”
“Denying swords and guns will hardly stop them,” said the captain. “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 interred 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,” said the captain, raising his glass. “Then, let’s drink.”
“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.
Shaking uncontrollably, 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. He 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 flowed 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 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.