Crash - the Last Rendezvous Read online

"Ted, you know me. We'll work this thing out together."

  "Oh, yeah?"

  Miller's encouraging slap on O'Brian's shoulder did not have the effect intended. For a moment there was silence, then the rising smoke from the smoldering operating consoles and monitors flipped a switch in O`Brian's head. "Can someone turn on the air conditioning?"

  "Don't look so serious. We'll get it working again. We'll go up to get a bit of fresh air."

  To talk about fresh air in an atmosphere above the water that must have been hot and full of ion storms was just pure irony and not calculated to lift O’Brian's mood. Finally he rolled up his shirt sleeves and reached for a screwdriver in front of him. "OK, let's see what we can still do with this miserable heap of electronic crap."

  Repairing burnt-out cable lines under all the operation tables was not exactly one of his favorite occupations. When O`Brian got back to his cabin that evening to freshen up and try to get his strength back, he felt the effects of all the crawling around in his back - he was exhausted. Still, as far as his mental state was concerned, he didn't feel quite so depressed as he had in the morning. Whereas before there had only been a mixture of emptiness, sadness and helplessness in his head, the constructive thoughts now began to get the upper hand. The crew, even when it joined forces, had not had much success dealing with the electronic blackout, but there was still a certain feeling of optimism. Maybe they could get the radio working tomorrow.

  In a situation where military action was more or less excluded the good old shortwave would become more important than the sonar. O`Brian was relatively sure that the crew would shortly be able to take soundings at a greater distance so that they could keep a lookout for possible survivors of the catastrophe.

  As the day finally drew to a close, O`Brian felt so empty and exhausted that all he wanted was to get back to his cabin. As soon as his head touched the pillow, he was asleep.

  CHAPTER 3

  Atlantic Ocean

  North Korean submarine DA BAK SOL

  25th December

  The DA BAK SOL was now at the surface and ploughing almost in slow motion through a sea that was as smooth as glass and might have been created by an imaginative science fiction writer. The water seemed to glow as far you could see - colored by the light reflection of a sky in which ion particles were engaged in a brutal struggle with hydrocarbon atoms, emitting a garish flame-red radiation through the closed blanket of cloud in the direction of the ocean. The bizarre cloud formations looked as if they would roll as far as the horizon like a wide lava flow. It couldn't look any more ghostly or fantastic than it must do on an inhospitable and waterless planet like Mars, Nam Chol Pak thought as he checked the position of his protective goggles.

  "So this is the end" the Captain, who had obviously with drawn into himself, snarled. He was standing with his First Officer next to Pak and looking at the scenery with a mixture of horror and fascination.

  "We've survived the wave through a miracle of some sort, it's not the end by a long way," Pak coolly replied to the much older man and secretly had to admit that Captain Yong-Jo was possibly right. If the end of the world did not look like this, what did it look like?

  Ji turned his head to Pak and disapprovingly cleared his throat. Pak, behind his metallic glasses, could only guess what sort of contempt there was in the eyes of his experienced military companion. Pak had read the file compiled by the Secret Service about the Captain of the DA BAK SOL and knew that he had seen and experienced a lot. For Yong-Jo Ji military discipline, war and sabotage had been his lifelong companions. He had trained countless numbers of cadets and always reported, loyal to the Party, to Pyonyang if one of the sailors had complained about the system or made abusive remarks about the Party Leader. But in the last few years the reports had become less frequent, a signal that the superiors had interpreted as signs of resentment or rejection of their own country and so had sent him, Pak, on this mission. The younger man was supposed to keep the older man clear about the correctness of suicide missions, with daily pep talks about the unshakeable conviction that their Beloved Leader could not be mistaken in their struggle against the hated imperialist powers.

  The fact that Ji was still Captain was probably due to the fact that this mission was doomed to failure from the start and nobody outside these ghostly corridors reckoned with a glorious return. Ji`s wife had died two months before from lung cancer, which made the childless widower a dispensable commodity for the System. There was nothing they could use to blackmail or threaten him. Ji`s applications for pain-killing medicines and expensive equipment for his wife had all been rejected. The State had to be regarded as a whole and could not take individuals into account in economically difficult times.

  Pak had therefore been instructed to keep the Captain focused on the magnanimity of the Leadership. After all, an honorable journey into the heart of the enemy would be a distraction from the painful grieving over his recently deceased wife. So Ji had always reacted to Pak's words with silence.

  Pak was the only leading officer on board who had anything to lose at home. A treasure that could not be weighed in bundles of won: Yang, his pregnant wife. And it was thinking about her that diverted his attention from the problem with the Captain and from looking at the flame-red sea. He could hear her warning him to be careful and advising him to go below and snatch a quiet moment where he could think. As from a great distance he heard a voice that was his own and sounded like a whisper.

  "Captain, stay on course, even we have no eyes or ears. We don't know the enemy has also survived. If he has, we'll track him down and sink him. We owe it to our Beloved Leader and the North Korean people."

  Pak then forced himself through a narrow hatch and left the Captain and the First Officer alone on deck.

  The almost unbearable heat outside was followed by an oppressive and stifling humidity on board. The narrow confines of the submarine stank of faeces, sweat, steamed gimchi, putrid brackish water and burnt-out cable. Somewhere there was a clatter of plates. The cook was clearly determined to keep up the morale of the small crew by means of the last usable food items on board. Pak caught a glimpse of the galley and saw flames licking around a wok before he retired to his own modest little kingdom, which had paid the price inflicted on it by the monster wave of the previous day and was in a state of total chaos. The floor was covered with water, which was full of loose sheets of paper. Toiletries, books, plastic plates and a few items of clothing. The gurgling noise of a bilge pump was the only sound to be heard in an otherwise almost morbid silence. Only the monotonous drone of the motor shaft, which was turning slowly in keeping with creep speed, found its way as a vibrating and lulling something through the steel torso of the DA BAK SOL.

  Pak sank on to his primitive bed in the small recess and lay on his back, staring at a row of roughly welded nuts and bolts on the ceiling. The sight of rusty steel and olive-green peeling paint was anything but a mood-lifter. He suddenly realized that his whole life so far had been one long orgy of grey, brown, olive, dark green, blood red, black as well as earth-colored and dirty tones.

  North Korea was not a country of blooming and fresh colors. No splendid multicolored kaleidoscope of the sort that you see when looking at magnificent garden in the spring. North Korea - Pak was searching feverishly for a visual comparison - was like the encrusted palette of a blind landscape painter who, after a lifetime of looking through smog, had managed to capture a concrete wall on canvas: lifeless, anemic, depressingly monotonous and cheerless.

  It suddenly occurred to him: I'm going crazy. He made a determined effort to get up, straightened his hair and clothes and leaned back against the headboard of his modest bunk. Then he took his small notebook out of his military jacket and looked for the old ballpoint pen that he had jammed into the bed frame somewhere. He stuffed the damp pillow behind his back and found a reasonably comfortable sitting position in the semi-twilight claustrophobia of his cabin. The only light was from an unshaded barred light on the metal ceilin
g. In front of him on his lap the last words to his wife Yang seemed to stare back at him like a challenge, and he felt guilty about not having reported so far about the events on board.

  My beloved Yang, this is my first entry since the great wave. Forgive me for leaving it so long to write. What happened yesterday, on December 24th, hit us with the force of enormous fists and shook our little boat so much that we were afraid it would tear us apart. Terrible things have happened on board, five men are dead. They were hit or drowned in a part of the crew cabin that has since been sealed off. The water's still coming in, but the mechanics have now the situation under control. It looks as if we will even be able to dive, if all goes well.

  The wave can only have been caused by the meteorite, unless, and you know more than we do, the imperialists have exploded a bomb. We don't know if the meteorite flew past or struck. Can something that passed so near to Earth have caused a chain reaction on the Atlantic, even triggered off a tsunami?

  Besides all the technical problems we normally have, the location systems have now failed, so we are completely isolated and nobody else can help us. We can't locate anyone, we can't receive any signals. We are sailing completely blind through a blood-red ocean that looks like our national flag. That's some consolation. Even when I look at the sky, all I see is red, as far as the eye can see, the red of our party, the red of our proud land!

  Pak stopped and caught himself - he was embellishing the situation to Yang. He remembered a moment last year, when he and his wife and a select group of the Supreme People's Assembly had seen a film called INDEPENDENCE DAY – THE RETURN in a private cinema in the State Palace. Aliens had attacked Earth, and of course it was the Americans who had saved the world from evil. The Leader, who had been present at the time and had become visibly upset, held an inflammatory speech after the performance and accused the US government of mass hypnosis.

  "This colorful film shows one thing", Pak recalled the words of their Leader. "America has the money to produce expensive films and present itself as the savior of mankind. And the American people is stupid enough to believe it. But the North Korean people is intelligent enough to show that it is not impressed by this cinematic war of attrition. We devote our attention to people - and not to celluloid fantasies!"

  The speech was greeted with applause lasting several minutes and Pak and his wife had clapped vigorously under watchful eyes. Later, in the privacy of their home, Yang spoke almost apologetically about how American homes looked so much more modern and how kitchen equipment so much more practical. Pak responded by playing a scratchy recording of opera that had supposedly been written by the Leader himself, a way of indicating that this delicate topic was closed.

  The strange fragments of the memory that were playing themselves out in his mind brought Yang almost bodily close to him, even though she was thousands of miles away and he did not know how she was at the moment. He would not and could not admit the possibility that she was already dead. He was a man of reason, and there was still not the slightest evidence that the population of the world had suffered a dreadful fate. Even if the sky was bleeding: He was still alive; why shouldn't others have managed to survive too?

  He crossed out the last two sentences of his notes. He did not deceive himself or Yang and erased from the yellowing page the story of red oceans that supposedly reminded him of the North Korean flag and gave him comfort. Instead he wrote:

  Although it's as hot as in a desert inside and outside, my heart feels cold. I don't know how you are and what you're doing right now, but I miss you so much, my darling Yang. Here on board we don't speak about private things. Because it's my job to stop that. I have to give the survivors strength and make sure that the Captain does everything to get the submarine operational. We have a mission to fulfill and an enemy to destroy. As long as I don't know what really happened yesterday, I have to do my duty, if necessary at the risk of my own life. We will seek out and attack the symbol of decadence, this American cruise ship. We will take the blame for it, as the USA has done in countless wars and conflicts, whether with weapons or generous financial gifts to corrupt nations. Perhaps the meteorite really did strike. Perhaps the meteorite is a sign and a way of redefining the rules on this planet. Perhaps this is our hour, our chance of victory!

  Darling Yang, I hope you are in the best of health and, like me, are counting the minutes, hours and days until we are with each other again. A kiss for you and the baby. If fate wishes it, we'll soon see each other.

  Your devoted husband

  Pak finished his notes and stared lost in thought and with moist eyes at the postcard sized photo of his wife that he kept all the time between the small book covers, when there was a sudden knock at the door. He pulled himself together, jumped up from the rudimentary bed, stashed the diary in his jacket pocket and got rid of all doubts connected with the mission, the uncertainty about the fate of Yang and the rest of the world, and the system in Pyongyang - he had a mission, and that's why he had been sent on board.

  "Yes?"

  "Comrade Political officer, the Captain would like to see you on deck."

  "What is it?"

  A slight hesitation behind the door signaled to Pak that the young man was afraid of raising his voice and was terrified of falling from favor. The daily words seemed to have an effect; the arm extending from Pyongyang, in the form of Pak's presence on board, was clearly producing results.

  "Comrade Pak, you should see for yourself, please!"

  Pak hesitated for a moment and then opened the door. The youngest member of the crew, an almost boyish youth from the province of Hoengjang, whose parents, according to secret files, were overseers near prison camp 22, devoutly lowered his head.

  "After you, Comrade Political Officer."

  Pak put on his grimmest face and stepped over to the ladder. All those still on board tried to avoid eye contact with him as he slipped on his protective goggles.

  When he came on deck, Pak was hit double: first, the furnace-like heat given off by all the firestorms in the atmosphere; second, the gruesome sight that greeted his eyes.

  The DA BAK SOL was ploughing through a sea of death, in which hundreds of horribly disfigured corpses, bloated and partly eaten by sharks, were floating packed together near the surface. Some distance away the silhouette of a huge ship with sharp prow and revolving motor cabin on the stern jutted out of the water and pointed threateningly to the blazing sky. The capsized luxury liner was floating upturned like a massive steel coffin in the waves.

  "We're too late", Captain Ji said quietly. He was standing alone on the conning tower and checking the area with his binoculars. "Our target, the Pride of America, has already met its end."

  CHAPTER 4

  Atlantic Ocean

  American submarine USS George W. Bush

  26th December

  The repair of the radio and location systems was taking some time, and nobody wanted any longer to say if and when they could count on the systems working again. The optimism of the previous evening had given way to a renewed attack of reality. The men tried to deal with the situation with world-weary humour.

  "Ted, give me the 13 wrench. And a cool Bud. Otherwise it's just too much in here," said Jason Miller.

  He just said aloud what all his shipmates were thinking: Without alcohol this smelly barren death station, in an even more stifling and barren outside world, was barely supportable for the crew. If they all had to go, then at least with some anaesthetic. But the commandant had prohibited the consumption of alcohol during working hours. So Miller's wish for a cold one remained just that, a wish.

  But what nobody on board at that moment knew was that the mood would sink to a new low before the sun went down. The reason would become clear after they had surfaced. When O`Brian felt the hand of the Captain, Frank Hudson, on his shoulder and head his growling voice, he began to fear the worst.

  "Looks like the sonar's still not working. We'll go up to the surface and take a look from the tower.
So you can stretch your legs on deck. O`Brian, get up off your ass and get out!"

  "Aye, aye, Captain! What's the weather like up there. Worth putting a swimsuit on?"

  This was the first joke O'Brian had made for days. It sounded strained.

  "Let's see. You boys have still not gotten the radio working, otherwise we could get the weather forecast."

  The reaction of those standing around was an embarrassed throat clearing. Just like Miller and his men O`Brian decided it was best not to make any further comments. The crew simultaneously raised the cables lying on the floor, which were like a Gordian knot. The Captain then gave the signal to sound the horn.

  There was a gentle movement of the ship before it got to periscope depth. Shortly afterwards they reached the surface.

  "All engines stop!"

  Frank Hudson reached for his binoculars and got ready to climb up on the tower first. Peter Oates, the First Officer, followed the white-haired gaunt 52 year-old with night vision equipment. The local time was given as 4:43 p.m., but even though it was the early part of the afternoon, it was as dark outside as after sunset.

  "Large object on the starboard side, three miles ahead." It was Hudson himself who first saw the silhouette on the fuzzy horizon.

  "It's a ship. Doesn't look military, " Oates added with a slightly trembling voice. All of a sudden the oppressive routine gave way to hectic activity.

  The Captain issued an order over the loudspeaker: Commandant on the bridge. Eight degrees to starboard. Engines half-speed ahead."

  O’Brian felt his heart beat faster with expectation. He squeezed through the hatch and joined the small group looking to starboard. Would they really find any survivors? He had wanted to be so positive, when a gruesome sight suddenly put an end to his optimism.

  The first corpses that crossed the path of the USS George W. Bush were those of two young women in brightly colored holiday clothes, an older man in a Hawaii shirt and three children in swimsuits. Their skin was unnaturally pale, and even at a distance you could see traces of decomposition.