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 HIDES BEHIND EVERY MAN’S EYELIDS

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

—  Adolf Hitler

 

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

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

Strange luck, remember?

The stench of diesel and Amine filled my nose, making me want to gag. I fought the impulse. Amine, you ask?

Since Submarines remain submerged with a sealed atmosphere, they rely on a chemical called Amine to remove carbon dioxide. This chemical makes everything stink with a fishy odor.

It remains 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. No smell of fried food, thankfully. This was a midget submarine after all.

No room for a galley.

The environment overall was pretty chilly from the air conditioning trying to keep the electronics cooled, which helped keep the odors from overwhelming me.

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

All total, I should be in this damn thing no more than four hours. And in between I would be doing a good bit of swimming in cold ocean water along the coast collecting samples …

Unless I was riddled by Nazi bullets … then stinking to high heaven would be the least of my worries.

I would start worrying if I passed the minimum requirements to enter Heaven.

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

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

“Please tell me you’re joking.”

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

“Why?”

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

‘Very not funny, Blaine. The ladder to your left. Climb it. The sergeant and you are dressed for a midnight swim.’

I almost jerked in shock. Theo and I were in our shorts in the middle of this chamber of blinking lights so small that if I sneezed, I would bruise the front and back of my head.

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

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

“I don’t think we’ll do much sitting, Captain … unless the Germans capture us.”

“We can’t let that happen. It will be like writing Hitler a personal letter telling him exactly where the Allies plan to invade.”

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

I was beginning to think I should have stayed with that pistol longer.

As we slipped into the icy water, Sergeant Savalas whispered so low I almost missed it,

“The little poets sing of little things:

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

“Don’t look so surprised, Captain. I read, too.”

“I’m unfamiliar with that poet.’

“Oh, ye of little breeding. Robert E. Howard.”

In my head, Sentient sang softly,

‘The mighty poets write in blood and tears,

And agony that, flame-like, bites and sears.

They reach their mad blind hands into the night,

To plumb abysses dead to human sight.’

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

‘I get bored and slum through them. You two remind me of Brule and his King Kull. Of course, your majestic nature comes from me.’

‘Of course.’

We came in on a rising tide at the seaside village of Lucsur-Mer on the beach, later given the code name Sword. We could hear singing from the German garrison. I definitely was in no mood to join in with them. But they were making enough of a ruckus to mask our movements.

We crawled ashore, walked inland a bit, and went flat when the beam from the lighthouse swept over the beach. I hit the beach so hard and fast that I filled my mouth with wet sand.

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

I'm not what you 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 sure there 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'd have been hit by a car, but you'd never know it. I'm sure those kinds of things happen all the time.

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

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

From beach site to beach site, we swam and repeated the whole process again and again, noting the location of each on underwater writing tablets we wore on our arms.

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

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

We took a gasping, burning lungs breather, tried again, but were flung back a second time.

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

The third attempt, 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 in again. I felt like I had swallowed a third of the water in the English channel.

We didn’t quite lose contact.

Suddenly, Sgt. Savalas started yelling.

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

Sentient chided me. ‘No, Blaine. There are no sharks, but there are jellyfish. There is 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 many jellyfish.”

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

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

“What’s wrong, Theo?”

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

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

I floated back a bit. “You’re wrong, Sergeant-Major. No one has all the stars in his sky.”

“What are you going on about?”

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

“So?”

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

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

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

My voice broke, “My enemies will kill … Helen and let me live, to gut me, for I will know she is dead because … of me.”

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

Icy copper snowflakes slowly fuzzed away my vision and consciousness. For once, I did not mind.

 

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

― Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed