“I’ve had this illness for years,” grumbled the doctor. “It makes one fat and bald and easily annoyed.”
The captain’s hardened face twitched once, then broke into an open smile — and yet the smile carried with it such sadness.
“Do you know what we’re carrying to Japan?” asked the doctor, steering the inquiry to his concern. “In the aft torpedo room — or in any compartment for that matter?”
“I do not,” declared the captain with a hint of righteous annoyance. “The eierkopf scientists believe that knowledge above my station.”
It went unspoken that the declaration would never leave the cabin. To the crew, the captain must remain God, all seeing, all-knowing, an ordained instrument of deliverance. But his hand still unconsciously tapped upon the letter.
“Any insight would assist,” pressed the doctor. “If the source is some type of toxic exposure, I would recommend we rotate the men’s bunks. On the other hand, if it is infectious—”
“Then you do not want to risk further infection,” said the captain, completing the physician’s thought. “I regret I know nothing more than you. In any case, I cannot order a man to sleep in a sick man’s bunk; he’d sooner sleep tied to the keel. I authorize you to distribute rations of brandy to the ill.”
“Generous,” harrumphed Doctor Goering. “We’ll soon have an entire company of afflicted.”
A smile flickered across the captain’s tired face, but then died. The doctor stepped back for a moment at the uncharacteristic demeanor. Something troubled the young man, and the sense of discomfort compelled the doctor into retreat.
“We’ll speak another time,” said the doctor, bowing slightly in deference as he backed towards the cabin door.
“Do not leave,” said the captain, apologetically gesturing for the doctor to return as he himself stood up and gently pressed the communique into the interior pocket of his wool uniform jacket. “Accompany me to the command compartment. My learned friend, I will need you at my side, today above all days.”
Confused and troubled, Doctor Oskar Goering nodded and followed his captain into the main corridor. For the first time, he noticed that the grey-eyed commander had donned a clean uniform typically reserved for return to port, wore his dress pistol sidearm, and had even made an attempt to slick his hair and trim away the more unkempt patches of his scraggly beard.
Today above all days, thought the doctor to himself. What could this possibly mean?
The captain forced a smile and nodded to Diesel Obermashinist Baek as he and the doctor squeezed past in the narrow walkway. Short — and quite fat, despite meager rations — the chief engineer had the ruddy-faced complexion of a gift-laden, bearded der Weihnachtsmann. Easily the most popular crewman on the ship, he consistently found no situation above merriment, no comrade undeserving of friendly affection.
“Which sailors are sick?” asked the captain as the doctor followed him towards the command compartment.
“Seaman Lichtenberg,” said Doctor Goering. “And his bunkmate, the one whose name I can never remember. The one from Czechoslovakia.”
“Damnable wunderwaffen,” muttered the captain. “Secret weapons, secret plans. Secrets upon secrets. So secret that even a captain knows not what he carries upon his own vessel. They tell me we carry the weapons that will save the war — but why simply trade them to the Nipponese?”
“We have what they need, I suppose,” said the doctor. “I doubt their science or manufacturing is within a decade of ours. Their medicine certainly isn’t.”
“We are selling our future,” declared the captain. “God has seen fit to bless their Asiatic empire with natural riches. But on my last porting in Ushant, I saw our planes without tires, our trucks without diesel. Soon our soldiers will be without shoes.”
To say nothing of women and children without bread, thought the doctor, thinking back to the last letter he’d received from his grown daughter before departing port. Even through her brave, stalwart insistence that all was well, he could see past the thin veneer of state-enforced optimism.
“We need raw materials from the East,” said the captain. “And for this, we must give our technology. I have the U-3531 with a submerged fast-attack speed of more than 17 knots; I can carry 23 torpedoes and sixty men across oceans. And yet we are little more than a glorified oxcart. My friend, there was a time when we were wolves.”
The captain wasn’t wrong. For a moment, the doctor felt himself wondering if the Japanese had designs on the U-boat once it arrived. It’d be easy enough, wouldn’t it? Greet their German guests at the docks, lure them in, butcher the crew, and take their mighty submarine.
Striding past the radio compartment, the conversation came to an abrupt end as the captain spotted the glance of Oberleutnant Boer, the submarine’s twenty-three-year-old political officer, an inevitable consequence of the Valkyrie assassination bombing attempt on Hitler’s life. The ferret-faced sailor was committedly friendless, content in his divine mission. Every casual attempt to engage him in conversation would result in some lecture about sovereign living space, superiority of the German man, the right of Fatherland to assert its will over Europe, or the dazzling brilliance of the Führer. The few who tried rarely bothered a second time.
Boer behaved like a man who’d never invited nor experienced a moment of doubt in his life, a trait that passed the point of admirable conviction and situated itself contentedly in the realm of outright parody. With his immaculate uniforms unspoiled by labor, and his tendency to breathlessly repeat schoolboy slogans and propaganda, even the sympathetic found his devotion to the Reich laughable. But the only truly unforgivable sin committed by Boer was his confiscation of a full third of the ship’s razors, allowing the political officer to remain the only consistently shaved man aboard.
The captain briefly paused at the last door before the command compartment. Originally designated as the captain’s cabin, the quarters now held two Japanese military attachés. Doctor Goering had seen little of the two diminutive men. They rarely left the small room, and preferred to eat their strange rice meals in solitude. He’d only seen them in the moments before embarkation, two gymnast-like, muscled Japanese officers with short beards, in crisply-pressed khaki uniforms, and sheathed samurai-styled blades at their hips. The doctor had watched as the two men eyed the German sailors with a mix of disinterest and contempt, not even bothering with the implied respect of one supposed master race to another.
Captain Duckwitz checked both directions of the corridor, and slid a folding ox-bone penknife from his pocket. As the confused doctor looked on, the captain reached up to the low ceiling and allowed his fingers to find the small wire that went to the intercom speaker inside the Japanese cabin. The young captain slid his penknife through the wire, slicing it in two. With the thick metal cabin door shut, the interior would be as silent as a bank vault. The doctor did not know what the captain intended to say over the intercom — but whatever was to be said, their Japanese guests were not meant to hear it.
Stepping into the command compartment, the captain and his doctor were greeted by a muffled Captain-on-deck and were saluted by the assembled officers. Captain Duckwitz ordered them at ease and turned to his radio operator, leaning low over his station and addressing him with a conspiratorial whisper, the doctor joining the huddle.
“Loss reports?” asked the captain.
“Not good, Captain,” said the young man, dropping a single earphone from his head. “Have just received April 30th through May the 3rd. Eight losses at minimum.”