Specimen & Other Stories Read online

  Krause heard something and sat up. He saw Schmidt gone and assumed he’d relieved Henckel. Probably sharing a smoke now. Krause rubbed his hands together. It was cold. He tossed a few more sticks onto the dying fire.

  Hoffman opened his eyes. “What’s up?” he said.

  “I’m going to relieve Voormann. Poor bastard must be half-frozen.” Krause took his machinegun and field radio and descended the trail to the beach.

  Hoffmann got up to check the weather unit and its radio. The anemometer cups turned slowly in a light breeze, the weather vane pointed like an arrow into the northeast. Everything in order. He returned to the fire and stretched his hands to the meager flames.

  He lit a cigarette and savored the warmth of the smoke in his lungs, thinking it would taste so much better with a strong coffee. He looked at his watch. A galley breakfast had never seemed so appealing.

  Out in the dark, he heard a sound. Although unsure of where it’d come from, he looked toward the trail where Sergeant Krause had disappeared.

  “Voorman? Is that you?”

  ~~~

  Agatak wiped his machete blade on the sleeve of the fallen man’s jacket. The man was not quite dead, and the eyes behind his glasses darted wildly about, as if there was someone who might stem the blood that gushed from his half-severed neck.

  Agatak squatted beside the man and plucked the barely-smoked cigarette from his still-twitching fingers. He took a long drag and let the smoke drift out his nose as he watched the man die.

  The last thing Hoffmann saw was a savage with hollowed eyes, firelight glinting off his high cheekbones, smoke curling from his nostrils like a demon.

  Agatak pinched the ember off and put the rest of the cigarette inside his jacket to save for later.

  ~~~

  On the beach Krause found Voormann stretched out and asleep in the dinghy. He prodded Voormann with the barrel of his machinegun.

  “Wake up, you idiot. If this were on deck watch, you’d be shot.”

  Voormann didn’t wake up. Krause slapped his face. His hand came away dark and slick with blood. He tipped Voormann’s head aside and saw the gore that had blackened his collar. Krause wiped his hand on his pants and turned with weapon raised.

  The desolation mocked him. Waves slapped up and down the dark shore. No enemy to be seen. He shuddered with a sudden panic. The last time he’d felt like this, they’d lain at the bottom of a Norwegian fjord as a British destroyer had dropped depth charges around them.

  Krause hurried up the trail. Just as he reached the summit, an arrow slammed into his belly. His gut reaction was to fire blindly in the direction from which the arrow had come, spraying rounds like a raw recruit. He staggered backwards, lost his legs and tumbled down the trail. His grip on the gun involuntarily tightened, pulling the trigger, emptying the rest of the magazine.

  Krause crashed to a halt on the rocky beach. The fall had twisted the arrow inside him but he managed to get a grip on the splintered shaft and pull it out. He sat up and groped in his field kit for a bandage. Stop the bleeding, he might survive this yet.

  Agatak came out of the darkness with a spear. Krause ejected the machinegun’s spent magazine and grabbed a fresh one.

  Agatak rammed the spear into the hole left by the arrow. Krause screamed. He dropped his weapon and seized the shaft of the spear. Agatak twisted it in his gut.

  Krause drew his combat knife and thrust it at his attacker but his reach didn’t extend to the savage at the other end of the spear.

  Agatak leaned his weight into the spear. This one wasn’t getting away.

  Krause gave up trying to stab. He reversed the knife to throw it at the savage. Six feet away, easy enough. This was his last chance – his only chance.

  Shogan came up behind Krause and seized his knife hand. He swung the machete overhead.

  Krause roared but there was no longer anyone but Agatak and Shogan to hear. And then the blade hacked into his neck.

  ~~~

  At 13h00 Berlin Time, the U-boat surfaced.

  Kapitan Wolff and Leutnant Richter stood in the conning tower with binoculars trained on the headland. On the foredeck, the gun crew traversed the horizon with their gun, bored to tears with daily drills, ready to fire on a real target.

  Wolff picked up the microphone. “Shark to Seagull. Mission accomplished. Come in.” No answer. “Shark to Seagull...”

  He and Richter listened as a haunting wail came over the speaker. Wolff tried the alternate channel, hoping for a better connection, but each time he returned to the open channel, the wailing was still there.

  ~~~

  The door flap of the empty tent fluttered in the wind. A few feet away, Shogan was sorting through the contents of Krause’s field kit. There was food and matches and candles and a sewing kit, all of which he knew how to use. And a radio, which he didn’t.

  Above the highwater mark, where the shore became a ridge, Agatak kneeled at a cairn of stones. Last night, before they’d withdrawn from the headland, he’d found Kanti and carried her body back. Now she lay under the cairn, with her baby brother, and Nuna’s arms around each of them. Agatak rocked back and forth, keening in pain like a wounded seal.

  The radio made a squawk. Shogan picked it up, fiddled with switch and button. A tinny voice came from the radio: “Shark to Seagull. Weather data transmission was perfect. Return to ship.” Pause. “Come in, Seagull…”

  Shogan turned the radio in his hands, puzzling over it, and pressed the SEND button on and off several times.

  “Shark to Seagull. I’m not reading you. Switch to Channel Two.”

  At the cairn, Agatak paused in his wailing and barked at Shogan. The voice inside the radio kept talking. Shogan picked up a large stone and hammered the radio until it squawked like a stricken seagull and died.

  ~~~

  Wolff and Richter listened in confusion. A brief flurry of violent hammering ended with a squeal of static and sudden silence.

  “Something’s wrong.” Richter scanned the headland with his binoculars.

  Wolff switched to ship radio and barked an order. “Two dinghies on deck. Shore crews in battle gear.”

  ~~~

  Agatak was still keening beside the burial cairn.

  Shogan climbed the ridge and walked toward the headland. He mounted a rock and looked out over the sea. He saw two dinghies approaching, four men in each, paddling as if in pursuit of a seal herd.

  Shogan slithered away and tumbled down the slope to the campsite. “More are coming,” Shogan warned his father. “Two boats.”

  Agatak paused wailing to say only, “I don’t care.”

  “You want to die too?”

  Agatak touched the cairn. “What does it matter now?”

  “You want me to die with you?”

  Agatak looked up and shook his head.

  Shogan extended his hand. “Let’s go.”

  They gathered their weapons and went to the kayak.

  ~~~

  The two dinghies landed a few meters from Krause’s. They found Voormann dead in it, and Krause dead ten meters away, both their necks almost severed. Richter and his crew cocked their weapons and scanned the shoreline.

  “First we take the summit and check the equipment,” Richter said.

  They split up and moved off. Meyer and his squad approached the cliff, looking for a path to the summit. Richter and his men headed 200 meters down the shoreline and took an easier path up onto a ridge that paralleled the shoreline.

  On the ridge they found Henckel with an arrow in his throat. They stood in a semi-circle looking down at him. They’d never seen a man killed by an arrow before.

  “Let’s go,” Richter said. “We’ll attend to him later.”

  Richter and his men continued north along the ridge. They hadn’t gone fifty meters before they found Schmidt. A deep stomach wound had soaked his pants with blood. His neck, mutilated by several massive wounds, had been chopped halfway through.

  They continu
ed to the headland where Meyer and his men stood around the ashes of a small fire. Beside it lay Hoffmann, his glasses still on, in a black pool of blood.

  The whirling anemometer of the weather unit made a humming sound. Richter walked to the cliff. From here he could see Voormann’s body in the dinghy and Krause’s further up the beach. Richter switched on his field radio and cleared his throat.

  “Osprey to Shark. Come in.”

  Wolff’s voice was harsh but distinct. “Shark here. What’s the situation?”

  “Hoffmann and all four shore crew dead.”

  “What? All five? How?”

  “It’s primitive. Arrow, hatchet, spear…”

  “And the installation?”

  “Fine. For whatever reason, they didn’t tamper with it.”

  “Maybe they really are savages.”

  “What now, sir?”

  “Our rendezvous is twenty-four hours away. I’ll give you two hours for recon. Search and destroy. You understand?”

  “What about our men, sir? Bury them?”

  “No. For all we know, those savages are cannibals. Bring them back aboard and we’ll bury them at sea.”

  Richter left four men at the headland to watch over the installation and the dinghies. He led the others in a recon a kilometer down the shore where they came upon a small cove with a tent and a boat.

  They noticed the cairn. One of the men uncovered the bodies and drew back. “Natives. A woman and two kids.”

  Richter felt nauseous and turned away. He coughed and spat to get the taste of it from his mouth.

  They went another kilometer down the shore and saw no one. Whoever had killed Krause and his crew were gone. Since they couldn’t kill the natives, they destroyed their camp. They tore the tent apart and broke up the boat. They made a fire and burned what they could, and stomped the shit out of everything else.

  They headed back along the ridge, picked up their dead and returned to the dinghies.

  ~~~

  After the men had gone, Agatak and Shogan returned to their campsite. They beached well south of it and went inland, creeping on hands and knees below the skyline of crag and rock. They lay flattened like seal skins on the shoreline ridge.

  Their tent hung in shreds from its wooden frame, a skeleton that had shed its skin. Their family boat, the uniak, lay crippled on its side, spine and ribs broken. Huge rents in the oiled sealskin gaped like open mouths that could only drink the ocean.

  Everything lay in a smoldering heap: boots and hats and mittens, the two bearskins under which they’d all slept, the baby’s basket of seal-rib and fox fur. Pots and pans, tin cups and plates were scattered, flattened or folded in defeat.

  A low growl clawed its way from Agatak’s throat as he descended the slope to the beach. He ran a hand across the slashed skins of his tent, feeling the pain of an animal that’d died twice. He stumbled to the wrecked boat and fingered its broken ribs, gauging his skill to mend this battered hulk. He looked around the campsite at all their things burned and scattered. His heart too was shattered, lurching in stricken steps through the memory of his years, seeing Nuna mother each baby...

  He picked up the baby’s rag doll, turned it in his hands. He laid it on his shoulder, cradled it against his neck. He patted its back, rubbed his nose against its face. Tears glinted in the corners of his eyes.

  ~~~

  Kapitan Wolff and Leutnant Richter stood on the bridge of the conning tower. On the deck below, ten sailors with rifles-at-arms stood brace-legged as the U-boat gently pitched in the long swells of the Labrador Sea. Beneath the deck gun’s barrel lay the five shrouded corpses of Hoffmann and the shore crew. They were covered, like children at a sleepover, under one large flag of the German Navy.

  “The Navy attracts the bravest men,” Wolff addressed his crew. “When we enlisted, we knew we’d sail into danger. Here we face not one enemy but two. As men at war, we battle each other. But the sea lies waiting to scuttle us all.”

  Richter nodded his approval. It was a good speech, short and simple and true. And after they’d done this hard thing and returned below, they would drink schnapps to toast the dead and living alike.

  “Today we mourn the passing of our comrades, and bid them farewell and Godspeed. Our mission here is complete, and its success will carry halfway around the world. In this, they served the Fatherland well.” He brought his hand up, not in the stiff-armed Nazi salute, but with elbow high and bent, fingers to his brow. “Heil Hitler.”

  “Heil Hitler,” the soldiers echoed.

  Wolff nodded to Richter, who barked, “Present arms.”

  Ten sailors raised their rifles at 45-degree angles.

  “Fire.”

  The ten rifles crackled like a shot of chain lightning across the bow.

  Wolff called out, “Send them on their way.”

  Five sailors handed their rifles to adjacent men, and each kneeled to grip the handles of a stretcher. To the edge of the heaving deck they went, tilted their stretchers and slid the corpses from beneath the flag. The shrouded corpses, with chains at their ankles, dove out of sight.

  ~~~

  Before the light faded, Agatak and Shogan climbed the ridge. Agatak was weary and felt like he carried a 20-pound stone in his stomach, cold and heavy and too hard to shit. They returned to the headland, seeing en route that the dead were gone. From the cliff, they looked down on a deserted beach. The gulls rose in a cloud of anger and birdshit, shrieking at being disturbed from their nests. Agatak knew how it felt.

  The men from the yellow boats had left something on the summit. A wooden platform with brackets sat bolted into the rocks. Atop it were two boxes, one wood, one metal. Next to the wooden box a long slim spear stood upright. Atop the metal box was a short mast with something like an arrow at the top, while halfway up were four arms with small cups that spun in the wind. Agatak stuck his spear into the orbit of the cups, brought them banging to a halt. He fingered the metal cups. He withdrew his hand and the cups resumed their humming spin.

  “What is it?” Shogan said.

  “I don’t know.” Agatak ran his hand up the radio antenna, admiring it, made of steel and straight as an arrow. He laid his spear down and took out his skinning knife.

  He removed the brackets at the base of the antenna. The steel spear was now his. He dismantled the anemometer spindle too, removed the cups and pocketed them. Nothing else interested him for now. Later, they’d come back to dismantle the platform for its wood.

  Inside the wooden box, something hummed and chirped. Agatak used his knife to force open a panel, revealing within a smaller metal box with a gauge and a dial and wires connected to the other metal box. He turned the knob and the box whined. Agatak picked up a rock and hit it. The thing shrieked like a bird. Shogan picked up a rock as well and they beat it until it was silent.

  ~~~

  Aboard the U-boat, the radio operator sat with earphones gripping his skull, fingers adjusting dials and switches. Above the steady shudder of the engines came a buzz of static from the radio. The operator’s hand was twitchy, signaling his frustration with the apparatus.

  Wolff and Richter entered the compartment. The radio operator pulled off his earphones.

  “No luck?” Wolff said.

  “Not a damn peep,” the radio operator said. “I don’t understand it. Yesterday’s test, the signal was so clear it was like coming from the next bulkhead.”

  “Could it be bad weather?” Richter said.

  The radio operator shook his head. “It was designed for all weather. The batteries are supposed to last six months.”

  “What about your equipment?” Wolff asked.

  “No problem here. I just received a message from Naval Command, clear as a bell.”

  “What did they want?” Wolff said.

  The radio operator handed him a message slip. “Confirmation of objective.”

  Wolff read it and handed it back. He ran his fingers through his hair.

  �
�What will you tell them?” Richter said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “We can’t go back to repair it. We’re scheduled to rendezvous...”

  “I know,” Wolff said. “We need to get underway. Would you set up the coordinates with the navigator?”

  Wolff left the radio room. Richter and the radio operator exchanged looks.

  ~~~

  Agatak sat on the beach, stitching together the ragged flaps of their tent. He finished a panel and took a break to watch his son.

  Shogan lay on a large rock a few yards offshore, eyes fixed on something beneath the surface. In one hand he held the radio antenna, poised like a spear. Suddenly he whipped his arm and hurled it into the water. In a moment, he reeled it back in with a length of cord. He held aloft a thrashing 10-pound char. The hand-tooled barb at the antenna’s tip protruded through the fish’s head.

  “Hah. Look at that.”

  “Big enough for my supper,” Agatak said. “What are you going to eat?”

  “The next one.”

  ~~~

  In the U-boat’s control room, the steady shudder of engines was punctuated by the ping of the sonar device. Valves sighed with intermittent hisses.

  At his console the helmsman adjusted the plane and rudder controls. His eyes moved back and forth across the instruments before him – heading, depth and air pressure.

  Wolff sat nearby, watching the flickering phosphorous green of the sonar screen. His complexion was slightly pockmarked, and in close-up resembled a lunar landscape under a green sun. There was a faraway look in his eyes, wherein was reflected the rotating sonar beam. His eyes were like tiny pressure gauges in some half-human machine, still functional but starting to deform with fatigue.

  ~~~

  Agatak and Shogan sat together beside the campfire, eating roasted Arctic char. Their faces were bronze with the glow of the flames and the warmth of the fish in their bellies. Agatak burped and smiled at his son. He tore off another handful of fish.

  Above them, the northern lights danced in ropes of colored fire.