Taylor Zajonc
Red Sun Rogue
To Mom & Dad,
For all adventures past
And all adventures yet to come
Publisher’s Note:
This book is a work of the imagination. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. While some of the characters and incidents portrayed here can be found in historical or contemporary accounts, they have been altered and rearranged by the author to suit the strict purposes of storytelling. The book should be read solely as a work of fiction.
PART 1
May 6, 1945
CHAPTER 1
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, 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 the 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, 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 remove appendixes, probe infections, treat sexual diseases, 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. Although the role of ship’s surgeon was a specialized job for a trained medical mind, the only skill truly necessary aboard the Führer’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, rather 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 of 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 was also 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.”