Specimen & Other Stories (11 page)

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before they’d withdrawn from the headland, he’d found Kanti and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 continued 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.