DEATH HIDES BEHIND EVERY MAN'S EYELIDS

 

From one suicide mission to another. 

Major Richard Blaine and Sergeant-Major Savalas must swim along heavily guarded shores to collect sand samples.

DEATH HIDESBEHIND EVERY MAN’S EYELIDS

“If youwin, you need not have to explain. If you lose, you should not be alive toexplain!”

—  Adolf Hitler

 

Abruptly,brilliant copper snowflakes fuzzed over my vision. My heart sank. It washappening again.

Sentienthad fully taken over my body. This time it was me that wanted to bay at themoon. No scent of pineapple mixed with cherry blossoms this time.

Strangeluck, remember?

Thestench of diesel and Amine filled my nose, making me want to gag. I fought theimpulse. Amine, you ask?

SinceSubmarines remain submerged with a sealed atmosphere, they rely on a chemicalcalled Amine to remove carbon dioxide. This chemical makes everything stinkwith a fishy odor.

Itremains in your pores for weeks after having been underwater on the ship.

 It was not the smell that really bothered me.It was the numb feeling in my mouth and the burning in my eyes that did. Nosmell of fried food, thankfully. This was a midget submarine after all.

No roomfor a galley.

Theenvironment overall was pretty chilly from the air conditioning trying to keep theelectronics cooled, which helped keep the odors from overwhelming me.

So, I wasaboard the midget submarine heading towards the Normandy coast. I did a fastmental calculation. An hour and a half to get there. The same amount of time toget back. Add in an extra hour for my strange luck to screw things up.

Alltotal, I should be in this damn thing no more than four hours. And in between Iwould be doing a good bit of swimming in cold ocean water along the coastcollecting samples …

Unless Iwas riddled by Nazi bullets … then stinking to high heaven would be the leastof my worries.

I wouldstart worrying if I passed the minimum requirements to enter Heaven.

My eyesbegan to slowly clear as I heard Sgt. Savalas mutter beside me, “I’ll forgiveyou going all remote and spooky again if you just know what all these dials andgauges mean, Captain.”

“For mostof them, Sergeant, I haven’t a clue.”

“Pleasetell me you’re joking.”

“That’sthe fun of being me. The Voice flings me into one situation after another withme only knowing the bare minimum … if that much.”

“Why?”

“I thinkthe Voice gets bored, and I’m the comic relief.”

‘Very notfunny, Blaine. The ladder to your left. Climb it. The sergeant and you aredressed for a midnight swim.’

I almostjerked in shock. Theo and I were in our shorts in the middle of this chamber ofblinking lights so small that if I sneezed, I would bruise the front and backof my head.

We were carryingpistols, daggers, wrist compasses, watches, waterproof flashlights, and a dozentwelve-inch tubes. I ditched the pistol. It was needless added weight. If welet the Nazi’s get that close, we would have to swim as fast as we could backto the midget submarine.

I flasheda weak smile at the sergeant. “Time to be swimming, sitting ducks.”

“I don’tthink we’ll do much sitting, Captain … unless the Germans capture us.”

“We can’tlet that happen. It will be like writing Hitler a personal letter telling himexactly where the Allies plan to invade.”

We scaledthe ladder like nervous monkeys. I began to miss my pistol. Down below itseemed smart to leave it behind. Now, not so smart. What did Einstein write? ‘It’snot that I am so smart. It’s just that I stay with the problem longer.’

I wasbeginning to think I should have stayed with that pistol longer.

As weslipped into the icy water, Sergeant Savalas whispered so low I almost missedit,

“Thelittle poets sing of little things:

Hope,cheer, and faith, small queens and puppet kings.”

“Don’tlook so surprised, Captain. I read, too.”

“I’munfamiliar with that poet.’

“Oh, yeof little breeding. Robert E. Howard.”

In myhead, Sentient sang softly,

‘Themighty poets write in blood and tears,

And agonythat, flame-like, bites and sears.

Theyreach their mad blind hands into the night,

To plumbabysses dead to human sight.’

I thoughtback to her. ‘I didn’t know you read our books.’

‘I getbored and slum through them. You two remind me of Brule and his King Kull. Ofcourse, your majestic nature comes from me.’

‘Ofcourse.’

We camein on a rising tide at the seaside village of Lucsur-Mer on the beach, latergiven the code name Sword. We could hear singing from the Germangarrison. I definitely was in no mood to join in with them. But they weremaking enough of a ruckus to mask our movements.

Wecrawled ashore, walked inland a bit, and went flat when the beam from thelighthouse swept over the beach. I hit the beach so hard and fast that I filledmy mouth with wet sand.

I feltevery orifice in my body become as tiny as a pepper seed. I heard Theo let outa low breath of relief when it passed our bodies without stopping to spotlightus. That had been too close.

I'm not whatyou would call a fatalist. Sister Ameal would not call me a religious person …though she probably calls me a few other colorful terms.

I'm surethere are close calls that we're not even aware of hundreds of times a year.You cross the street, and if you'd crossed the street two minutes later, you'dhave been hit by a car, but you'd never know it. I'm sure those kinds of thingshappen all the time.

I toldmyself that over and over. My body still goose-pimpled and shivered though. Ilie to myself so often that I could do it for a living.

We walkedsome more. I made sure to have us stay below the high-water mark so that ourtracks would be wiped out by the tide before morning. We quickly stuck ourtubes into the sand, gathering samples as fast as we could.

Frombeach site to beach site, we swam and repeated the whole process again andagain, noting the location of each on underwater writing tablets we wore on ourarms.

Havinggathered all the samples, we started back to the midget submarine. Of course,that is when my strange luck hit.

Thebreakers were quite heavy, and we were positively swamped and cluttered withall our tube-filled kits. We made a stab at getting out to sea. No good. Wewere flung back.

We took agasping, burning lungs breather, tried again, but were flung back a secondtime.

So, wewent as far out in the water as we could. Smaller waves kept washing over us.  We watched the rhythm of those breakers untilwe could time it.

The thirdattempt, having timed it just right, we got out, but we got separated a bit,and we swam like hell to make sure we weren’t going to be pitched back inagain. I felt like I had swallowed a third of the water in the English channel.

We didn’tquite lose contact.

Suddenly,Sgt. Savalas started yelling.

I froze.Had he gotten a cramp or something worse. A shark?

Sentientchided me. ‘No, Blaine. There are no sharks, but there are jellyfish. Thereis a multitude of jellyfish out in these waters.’

“Great!We evaded a small army of Nazis only to have him stung by who knows how manyjellyfish.”

But whenI got close enough to him, all he was yelling was ‘Happy New Year!’

I wasabout to call him a moron when I caught the tremor of a sob in his voice.

“What’swrong, Theo?”

“You!That’s what wrong, Captain. No, Major Got-It-All-Together. Nothing fazesyou. Nazi search beams, swimming the channel, the Still Small Voice guiding youpast Laska’s deathtraps. Nothing.”

Hesobbed, “You saw those fortifications, those barriers, those clusters ofmachine guns, all that damn barbwire. The rest of us are going to die on thisdamn beach. But not Major Got It All Together.”

I floatedback a bit. “You’re wrong, Sergeant-Major. No one has all the stars in hissky.”

“What areyou going on about?”

“The stars you see above usright now? The people swimming at night off South America’s Cape Horn?They look up and see completely different stars. The different ends of theearth face different constellations.”

“So?”

“So, eachof us have different thorns in our sides.”

I took adeep breath. ‘I will never see Helen Mayfair again.”

His eyes sankinto his face as I went on, “I have too many enemies. Too many. They will endup killing me. Or worse …."

My voicebroke, “My enemies will kill … Helen and let me live, to gut me, for I will knowshe is dead because … of me.”

Sgt.Savalas nodded as if suddenly understanding and whispered low, “No one has allthe stars in his sky.”

Icycopper snowflakes slowly fuzzed away my vision and consciousness. For once, Idid not mind.

 

“We'reall islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.”

― RudyardKipling, The Light That Failed