In the last days of World War II, an American bomber sinks a German submarine in the West Indies. The crew manages to board life rafts but a squall approaches and the weather turns deadly. Weeks later, off the Florida coast, a fishing boat recovers a life raft with two dead men aboard. One of the men is the submarine's captain, Oberleutnant von Weizsacker. The fishing boat captain finds a diary in a waterproof pouch sewn into von Weizsacker's jacket. He scans a few pages but is unable to read German. The captain tosses the diary and other personal effects into a shoe box. He turns the corpses and their identification tags over to the coast guard but neglects to mention he retrieved some personal effects. Twenty-eight years later, the diary turns up at a Florida flea market.