She Read online

  “There is only one perfect flower in the wilderness of Life.

  That flower is Love!

  There is only one fixed star in the midst of our wandering.

  That star is Love!

  There is only one hope in our despairing night.

  That hope is Love!

  All else is false.”

  H. Rider Haggard

  COPYRIGHT 2015

  INTRODUCTION

  He should kill himself. That’s the only safe and certain way out of life.

  Marco cringed in that snake ridden plethora of a swamp, holding perfectly still and silent to the sound of his own breathing and the constant humming of the mosquitoes that surrounded him. No doubt they carried malaria, yellow fever, encephalitis, and god knows what else. If that’s what killed him now though he would welcome it. It was certainly preferential to what was out there ahead.

  Sweat dripped from his brow as he waited beneath the high noon sun in hiding amid the hanging jungle vines and sword ferns. The sultry air was so thick with humidity one could cut it with a knife. Insects in size and numbers he had never imagined crawled upon the fallen leaves of the tropical island ground floor everywhere about him. An obnoxious bird kept calling from somewhere. A spider of hideous size not four feet away fed upon its prize caught in its web – a giant cockroach. What spider could possibly be that big? Yet his intent eyes were elsewhere and not even on it.

  It was one thing to be eaten alive by mosquitoes. It was another to be eaten alive by alligators. Given his choice he’d take the mosquitoes. Unfortunately the alligators weren’t giving him a choice. They were out there ahead and in front of him with their eyes just above the filthy pond water, waiting for him –Just waiting for him to move; to try to get to the water. He could see their golden irises with their slitted pupils watching him patiently, knowing he had to come. Sooner or later everything comes to drink. It’s just a question of time.

  And, if the alligators didn’t kill him, the water he drank probably would. Who knows what was growing in it? He could see the vermin and film of green algae covering it from here. No doubt it was an open invitation to dysentery and intestinal worms. Yet, with his canteen empty, it was either drink it or die. Even the rotted fruit on the ground next to him was full of worms. An animal’s skeleton half submerged in the water ahead marked where something else had tried to drink here before him - unsuccessfully.

  He heard the huge leathery wings of one of those dreadful “things” settle in the branches above. No doubt it was hunting him too. Was there anything here on this island that wasn’t hunting him?

  And yet there was always the siren’s call of that mysterious woman, the one called “She”, the one who was so incredibly beautiful that, like the legendary Helen of Troy, had a face that could launch a thousand ships. Yet again he might be better off with the gators than her. They at least offered an end to his suffering. Hers was eternal.

  He had spent two and a half years in the royal naval academy training to not know fear. Yet he certainly knew it now. Always before fear had been a mere split second experience; the time when he was twelve and he took the corner on his bicycle too fast and there was an oncoming car or that time the pickup truck he was riding in the back of with the caged chickens rolled over. Fear had been swift, sudden and unexpected then.

  Not like this though – No. It was over in an instant back then. Not here. Here it was patient. Here he knew it up close and personal. He knew its cold emptiness, its callous indifference and its patient waiting. What he had known of fear before had just been a momentary glimpse, simply a taste – a mere capful. Now he could look at it eye to eye and know it would never blink. And there was more to fear than just seeing it looking back. He didn’t know it before but fear has its own flavor. In one way it’s like dry sand in your mouth. The tongue sticks to the roof of the mouth yet, in another, the nervous sweat running down his forehead and dripping off his nose tasted like salt.

  And you can smell fear. Its rotting stink filled the air mixed with the pungent smell of manure. What awful things left such monstrous dung heaps? He had to hold his hand over his mouth to keep what little he had eaten from coming back up from the sheer stench of it. And you could hear fear in those rustling wings above waiting for their chance at him. And, if you wanted to touch it, it was as close as those alligators gazing at him.

  And you can feel fear. That’s the worst of all. The heart beats faster, pounds actually, priming you to explode in sudden movement. Yet that very same fear keeps you from moving at all for to move is to give away your position to that which hunts you. So the senses keen up to react in explosive movement and the mouth dries while the body perspires. Yet the body dares not move for to move is to die just as certain as not to move was to die.

  Fear is indecision.

  Fear is hell.

  And it has no time limit. It’s not on a clock. He might live five more seconds, five more minutes, or even five more hours although the latter was certainly unlikely. Whatever he did next dictated that. That water ahead was a roll of the dice of life. No wonder he was sweating. Even his palms were.

  What was he even doing here? He was a sailor! How did he get here of all places?

  CHAPTER 1

  AUGUST 8, 1942 4:00 PM

  Somewhere off Bermuda

  “I can’t see anything. Can you?” asked Marco of the other man over their boat’s diesels while peering through his binoculars.

  “Not a thing, sir,” replied 1st Seaman De Angelo from the starboard watch. “Any idea where we are?”

  Lieutenant Commander Marco Aita studied the foggy haze around him from atop the bridge of their submarine’s conning tower with the absolute certainty that something was wrong. They had been running on the surface for several hours in this unrelenting fog, the black waters flat calm as their twin screws propelled them ahead at their designed cruising speed of twelve knots. They had just ended their second Caribbean war patrol and their boat, the Morosini, was on her way back to her home base in Bordeaux, France.

  “Does getting lost frighten you?” Marco asked him back with just a hint of a grim smile. For they were, indeed, lost.

  “Fog is fog,” replied the seaman. “If we can’t see we might as well submerge. We have no business being out here.”

  “Wherever here is.”

  They had departed from La Pallice, France on June 2 with their fellow Italian submarine Torelli for an anti-shipping patrol in the south Atlantic, successfully sinking the American freighter Millinocket in the Caribbean and then the Dutch freighter Tysa between Puerto Rico and San Salvador as part of Operation Neuland. They were now to return to base and rendezvous off the Gironde Estuary of southwest France with orders to run submerged by day to avoid Allied attack.

  Yet, two hours ago, they had suddenly lost both the helmsman’s compass and the engine room compass. Both were mysteriously spinning uselessly. Unable to navigate underwater, they had been forced to surface in order to get a fix on the sun, only to find themselves surrounded by this dense fog and hopelessly lost.

  “What about your hand compass?” Angelo asked.

  “Nothing.”

  The handsome, cool eyed Marco had joined Seaman Angelo on the topside watch for they were, indeed, in a very dangerous spot. The most critical part of any patrol is in the last three days to reach home for the enemy knows the submarine base you came from and must return to and so will lie in wait in its approaches to intercept you with planes, destroyers, and even other submarines. Thirty days, sixty days, or even ninety days out, one must eventually return to France to refuel and refit and the enemy knew this and would simply wait outside Bordeaux for them to show. This is a submariner’s greatest vulnerability. The closer one comes to returning home, the closer one comes to death. It is why they we
re to approach their base submerged. Yet they weren’t doing that now.

  “Do you really think it’s safe to run surfaced?” the seaman raised the subject again for he was obviously having doubts about it.

  The other man held tight to the iron railing, his knuckles white. The enemy had to be smiling a grimly at the plight of the helpless sailors. You couldn't tell where the grey skies ended and the grey seas began. There was nothing to even mark the curve of the horizon.

  Yet Marco showed no fear. Even if he felt it he would never show it, not in front of a subordinate.

  Although the fog would ground enemy aircraft for today it would not prevent their destroyers and submarines equipped with radar from finding them on the surface and they had no such radar themselves to detect them back. The enemy could already be tracking them, ready to come out of the fog at any moment and either fire on them point blank or simply ram them. Either way they’d be dead.

  So, no, it wasn’t safe. It’s why Marco had joined the watch and why the seaman wanted to submerge.

  He did not answer De Angelo’s question. Although the other man intended to ask it casually enough there was something that bordered on apprehension in his voice. You could feel it; a nervous tension that came perilously close to fear.

  And Marco shared his unease. The son of an Italian school teacher, he had been three years in the Navy and had seen fog before but nothing like this. Something was different about it. There was an edge to this fog, a sort of creepy, crawly sensation of not knowing what’s ahead or even what’s behind. It had the gloom of death.

  A vast blanket of white hung heavy over the boat. It suffocated both men. Even the fore and aft deck guns and the green and white flag of Italy hanging at their stern showed only as mere grey specters or silhouettes of their former selves and with both the bow and stern vanishing into the empty oblivion. They were being swallowed, erased, and eradicated by this enveloping whiteness. Marco held out his hand in front of himself and watched to see if it too would become partially obscured. It seemed that thick.

  For over two hours they had been in it, each minute worse than the last but now was the worst of all. There was no denying it anymore. They were lost, lost in the middle of the Atlantic and cruising through a deadly still, grim air that almost seemed to be trying to choke them. He kept thinking they’d come out of it and yet they didn’t. It only got worse.

  He gazed down again at the useless compass in his hand, once more wondering why none aboard worked. One maybe might fail but all of them?

  No matter how he held or moved the compass the needle either never turned at all or simply wandered aimlessly back and forth. Usually, when a compass gets off, it points to something magnetic aboard the boat. Yet this needle pointed to nothing at all. He’d never seen that before.

  Despite the fact that he wasn’t cold he felt himself shiver as he once again pocketed the now useless compass. Even his binoculars were useless. Their vision was simply whited out by the impenetrable white soup surrounding them.

  Denied human sight with which to pierce that ghostly veil, Marco now intently listened instead for sounds of the enemy. Yet trying to hear over the roar of his own boat’s black smoking, 3,000 horsepower diesel engines made it impossible for him to hear another ship. But running on the diesels meant they could travel faster than when submerged and so they would get home in three days now instead of five regardless of the danger and the crew wanted to get home.

  Yet getting home had now become a problem. Where was it? Without a compass the only thing Marco knew was that their last known position was somewhere between Miami and San Juan, Puerto Rico off the Bahamas at 41° 00’ N 33° 00’ W. That was useless information now.

  “Shut down all engines,” he called below.

  It was his own decision to join the bridge watch. He trusted no one else but himself to do it. Within less than a minute of his order, Commander D’Alessandro stuck his head up from the hatch below leading up to the conning tower and called up.

  “Why the command? What do you see?”

  His last words were shouted a little too loud as the big twin diesels suddenly went silent in response to Marco’s order and the stillness that abruptly followed. The only sound left was that of the hull still shushing ahead through the watery calm as it quickly lost forward speed and then came the lapping sound of their own wake catching up and passing them and then… stone cold quiet. The sea, perfectly calm, must have been like a peaceful lake for its soft murmurs were scarcely audible. The waves seemed to sleep. There was only unseen spreading ripples of nothingness. Marco motioned his skipper up to join them as he stared out in the still air and listened.

  His captain climbed the conning tower ladder to see why he had given the order.

  The early morning fog loomed as far as Marco could see. It was tangible and shrouded everything in a thick white veil till not even the sun could manage to penetrate the haze nor even give a clue as to its position. The sounds of wind and lapping waves that should have been filling the air around him all seemed to have disappeared, even his captain’s footsteps had been smothered by the greedy beast.

  “So, Blondie?” his skipper asked again, joining them at the rail and wanting to know. “What do you see?”

  Marco was nicknamed Blondie or “Flavio” meaning “golden haired” for his striking light blonde hair which was rare amongst men his age. Blue eyed, fit, trim, and quite handsome, he was often mistaken for a German officer for his Aryan features and steady demeanor. It was what allowed him to be the boat’s second officer when he was then only twenty-six years old, that and the fact of being first in his class at the Italian Naval Academy.

  “It’s what I don’t see. I don’t see anything,” Marco replied dryly. “I have never seen fog like this. Have you? Have you noticed the boat is dry? When is cold steel parched on a foggy day?”

  A dry ship in fog was unheard of. The railings should be damp and wet from beaded condensation and yet they were all bone dry. This fog was as dry as smoke and just as welcome.

  “We are in the tropics,” answered the bearded, thick-waisted, forty-four year old D’Alessandro. “It is warmer here. It is not cold enough to chill the boat to condense the fog into water drops. It’s your first patrol this far south. This is not the North Atlantic. You’ll get used to it.”

  D’Alessandro had been in the Navy twenty-three years, seven in a submarine. He was probably right but Marco still asked the next question:

  “You’ve seen fog like this before?”

  “No,” admitted D’Alessandro. “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

  Watching the two of them, one could tell Seaman De Angelo also shared Marco’s opinion about this fog. It’s why he wanted to submerge. He had been two years in the service but this was only his second war patrol. His first had been one of sea sickness and throwing up topside. He laughed about it afterward. With six months patrol duty now under his belt he was a veteran of the sea and this endless fog should have had no terrors for him. They weren’t going to hit anything out here.

  But De Angelo wasn’t laughing now. He was agreeing with Marco. You could see it in his eyes. It was written on his face. All day De Angelo had been thinking something was wrong, that something was out there, something cold and implacable that promised only fear. He had been wondering if Marco felt it too and he had no qualms about saying it now if asked.

  Yet neither officer asked him his opinion. They are trained not to. To ask is the admission of doubt and doubt is the seed of fear. No one asked De Angelo anything.

  Right now not so much as a breath of air was blowing and it was just deathly still on the bridge as they drifted. De Angelo had just asked Marco before whether he thought it safe or not to run on the surface but the first officer had not given him an answer and he was noticing that. Officers don’t have superstitions or, if they do, they have the sense to keep them to themselves. Yet Marco had just raised his own doubts to their skipper.

  “The li
eutenant’s right,” he now voluntarily confirmed to their commander when he wasn’t going to be asked. “It gives me the creeps. Something about this just doesn’t feel right. I feel like I’m freezing out here and it’s not even cold.”

  Captain D’Alessandro nodded in agreement with the sailor.

  “It does for me also but there is a reason for that,” he told him with a reassuring smile. “To us Italians these waters are a strange place just by their latitude. We think everything should be like in the Mediterranean,” and then he turned back to his first officer. “So why did you order us to shut down the engines?”

  “Listen,” said Marco, holding up his hand to his ear while looking out.

  “Listen to what?”

  “Birds,” answered Marco.

  “Seagulls?” asked D’Alessandro.

  “No. They’re not seagulls.”

  “You think we are near land?”

  “Maybe,” he answered. “I don’t where we are. See how the water color is wrong? This water is dark when it is should be clear blue. It is not blue, not even gray, but pitch black! Have you found the compass problem yet?”

  “No. We are still working on that. The water is black though,” explained D’Alessandro to him, “because of the fog. We are still near Bermuda and in blue water but the sun does not shine through the fog to light the water so now it looks black. Once we reach the Bay of Biscayne and the sun comes back out the water color will be normal. You’ll see. So has anyone ever told you, Blondie, that you have the personality of a pessimist? You are much too negative. It is only fog. I have calculated our position to be 44°30'N, 04°45'W. We are on course to reach France.”

  That was different from their last calculated position, Marco noted. He wondered how he did that. To him it all looked the same. With every knot of speed the boat took forward, she seemed to have moved nowhere.