by Jay Garnet
‘From here on in, I wanna know the state of the game every three months, and of course any time there’s a big break. I have to be in a position to make arrangements, and not just with you. I know you’ll do this, Michael, because the alternatives for you would not be pleasant.’
As it happened, events played into Krassnik’s hands. In the course of the next few years electronic and engineering techniques produced solutions to all the outstanding problems. Helium unscramblers knocked out the distorting upper register in divers’ voices. Satellite telemetry and computer-controlled engines responding to signals from seabed beacons combined to produce ‘dynamic positioning’ vessels which could lock on to a spot on the surface to an accuracy of a few square yards. Complex hydraulic systems compensated for the motion of the waves, allowing diving-bells to hover motionless even while the supply ship was riding a heavy swell. In 1975 a Yarmouth company patented a diving suit heated by water pumped down from the supply ship: the water bathed the diver’s body beneath his suit and flowed out at the cuffs and ankles. It became possible to recover helium and recycle it after use. Finally, in 1976, came the first remote-controlled submersible TV cameras.
During these years Mike immersed himself in technical information and in planning. He wrote to diving companies, salvage firms, marine archaeologists and the research departments of universities and multinational companies. He scanned the literature. He subscribed to specialist magazines. He compiled price lists, schedules, budgets, manpower estimates. He devised ways of ensuring security. He became respected for his expertise, and told no one of his true ambitions.
There was one major, indeed crucial, lack: he could not specify exactly where the Edinburgh lay. To find her by scientific methods might take days or weeks of sonar scanning, which would add a whole new dimension to the operation. Fortunately, there was another way. It is not uncommon for trawlers to snare wrecks, especially if their exact site is uncharted.
As soon as he moved to Aberdeen, therefore, Mike had established contact with any trawler captain who had fished the Barents Sea in case their nets had tangled on any unspecified wrecks. He always explained that his reasons for wanting this information were purely personal. He bought drinks, went to the right pubs. Pretty soon his interest was known and accepted. Every few months someone would contact him with some snippet of information.
There had been plenty of reports through the 1950s and 1960s of nets snaring something that might have been the Edinburgh. But at that time trawlers could not record their position accurately enough and anyway there was no way of checking whether the wreck actually was the Edinburgh. By the 1970s, however, satellite telemetry enabled any vessels with suitable equipment – and trawlers needed such equipment to track their increasingly elusive prey – to pinpoint their position to within a few yards.
In 1978 Mike stumbled on the information he had been hoping for. He heard of it, as often, via a friend of a friend. A meeting was arranged at a pub.
The results were more than Mike could possibly have imagined.
‘Nearly lost all our effing nets,’ said his source, a captain, a wiry little Scot with a beard so huge it seemed to be fake. ‘Funny thing, though, same thing happened a few months back a couple of miles away. We had a record of that, of course, and gave the place a wide berth. Then, bugger me, if we didn’t run into this other one. Took us three hours to get clear, and cost us £1500 in repairs.’
‘Big ship, was she?’
‘Aye. Showed up as about six hundred feet long, once we got her clear on the sonar. At about eight hundred feet.’
Two wrecks that close – they had to be the Hermann Schoemann and the Edinburgh. Mike kept the tension out of his voice. He took a pull at his pint.
‘Another, Ken?’
‘Aye, I think I will.’
Mike ordered and said: ‘Sounds interesting. You noted the position?’
‘Aye, of course. So’s we don’t do the same bloody thing again.’
‘Can you let me ’ave the coordinates? I’d like to try to identify the wrecks.’
‘No problem. I thought you’d be wanting them.’
The trawlerman pulled a scruffy piece of paper from his anorak. On it were four sets of figures, enough for Mike to be certain that he could, with the aid of his memory, identify which was which. He’d gone over it so often in his mind: the Hermann Schoemann had been well west and a little south of the Edinburgh the last time he’d seen her.
‘One thing, Ken. ’Ow many people know about this?’
‘Why? Does it matter?’
‘Not really. Just wondered.’
‘I won’t be talking, because not many people are that interested. But there’s nothing secret about it, you realize. It’s in the company records. We’d tell any trawlerman who asked. Besides, we’re not the only ones up there. Others have snared those wrecks before; someone’s bound to do it again. It’ll be general knowledge within a few years, like it or not.’
‘Suppose so. Thanks. One for the road?’
11
He was ready to move. But it had to be soon.
He called Krassnik in Washington on a Thursday. The return call the next day told him to be over at the weekend. He gathered his papers together, caught the evening plane to London and then booked himself on the first Washington flight on Saturday.
It was the first time he’d been to Washington, and he saw almost nothing of it. He arrived at midday and was met by a black chauffeur who took him in limousined splendour to an apartment block off Virginia Avenue. The chauffeur accompanied him in silence in the lift to the twenty-third floor.
Krassnik’s Washington penthouse, with its sweeping views, was also his headquarters. There was a bedroom, a sitting room and an office with two desks, electric typewriter, telex, TV and two leather sofas. Filling one was Krassnik, who did not rise. He must have been seventy, Mike realized, but age had withered him hardly at all. The moustache was gone – too much grey perhaps – but the huge face, with its bald, domed scalp, seemed to have no more wrinkles than it had had twenty-two years previously. The flesh, still full and firm, exuded a fearful vitality. He was dressed in weekend garb – a checked sports jacket even more ample than his paunch, and a flowered shirt without tie.
‘It’s been a long time, Michael.’ A steady stare from unsmiling eyes. ‘Sit down. What do you have for me?’
As direct as ever, scary as ever.
Mike handed over his sheet of papers, the summary on the top, and tried to match the big man’s authority.
‘Requirements,’ he said. ‘Estimates. Equipment. Numbers. Proposed mode of operation.’
Krassnik grunted. He hardly glanced at the papers.
‘I’ll check it out later. Meantime, know the price of gold? As of yesterday, a touch over $100. Word is, that price is going up higher. Through the roof, like ’73. Inflation is running high. Gold is undervalued. We could see another doubling, even trebling of its value over the next two, three years.
‘I see your estimate: $4 million. A decade ago that would make the scheme no go. Right now, it looks good. Now when the price of gold skyrockets again, this haul is going to double or treble again in value. Eighty-plus million dollars for an outlay of four million? That’s real business.
‘But the same idea’s gonna hit others. We have to be ready first. So here’s what to do. You leave your job. I pay you a regular salary: whatever you get now plus fifty per cent. I arrange an advance payment of a hundred grand to get things moving.
‘I want that gold, Michael. I’ve wanted it since you first told me about it. And you’re gonna get it for me. Do we have a deal?’
Mike paused.
‘And my share?’
‘Ten per cent of what you raise.’
Mike’s face betrayed no emotion. But he thought: Christ, my gold, the gold I nearly fucking died for, and the bastard wants ninety per cent of it.
Out loud he said: ‘Look, this is my big chance. An ’ole lifetime’s gone into it. I’ve
gotta come out of it with money to burn. Guarantee me a million dollars.’
Krassnik’s voice went ominously quiet. The sound of it, a deep, throaty rumble, took Mike back twenty-six years, to that day when his life had hung in the balance on board the Argo.
‘No goddamn deal. You think I’d guarantee a million when that’s all you might raise? Hell, you do this right, you get your million anyway – and more. Screw it up and you pay for it. Don’t try to negotiate with me, Michael. I’m telling you. And, as you well know, you have no choice in the matter.’
‘OK, OK. You got your deal.’ Mike raised his hands in a placating gesture. ‘Just tell me one thing: is it just you I’m working for?’
Krassnik’s mood switched again. He grinned. ‘No. You screw this up, I’m not the only one you’ll have to tangle with. I want this, and I want it bad, but I’m not about to gamble four million of my own dollars. I put up the front money, but I have backers. Let’s say the economics and politics of this thing are about to escalate. And if you get out of line the world won’t be big enough to hold you.’
Mike nodded resignedly. But there was no resignation inside, just a slow-burning commitment to make the salvage go his way.
12
Mike came back from his interview with Krassnik filled with conflicting emotions. He was exhilarated that at last he was moving towards the gold, yet sick at heart that he still found himself enslaved. He could see no way out of that. The alternative would have been a formal approach to the British government and – inevitably – to the Russians. Equally inevitably, this would lead either to a blank refusal of permission or complicated negotiations that would involve splitting the booty at least three ways. His share of the final pay-off might well be not much more than he would get from working with Krassnik. Whichever way he looked at it, it had to be a one-man show.
Krassnik himself set a seal on that arrangement. Within ten days $100,000 was credited to the bank account he had set up for the purpose in Guernsey. The following day, to the amazement of his UK employer, he handed in his resignation.
‘Mike, we need you. Why are you doing this now?’ his boss wanted to know. ‘The company, the whole industry, it’s going from strength to strength. You’re cutting your own throat.’
‘I don’t think so, Jim. The company’s doing well, but we both know there’s no chance of me getting in on the profits.’
‘So what are you going to do? Retire?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Come on! You’ve been in this business over thirty years. You know the problems better than anyone, and you’ve been part of the solutions. You know the potential. You’re not trying to tell me you’re just going to stop?’
‘I’m not sure, Jim.’
‘You mean you’re not going to tell me. OK, if that’s the way you want it. But just think what you’re doing, man. Giving up a rock-solid, inflation-proofed income. In my book there’s only one reason for doing that. You’re setting up on your own.’
‘I’m sorry, Jim. I can’t tell you.’
Within a month Krassnik’s first monthly payment – $10,000 – was credited to Mike’s offshore account.
For that he would have to show some results, and soon. He became even more of a recluse, working on his own, from his flat, mainly on the phone, making comparative lists of diving support vessels, possible diving concerns, divers he knew who might be interested, helium suppliers. He asked for quotes from a number of shipping companies. He checked on depth capabilities, types of diving-bell, hot-water suits, helium unscramblers, the sophistication of various systems of dynamic-positioning equipment, the reliability of compensation mechanisms.
It was already too late to organize an expedition for the summer of 1979. To do anything during the winter was out of the question. The earliest possible opportunity was May 1980, and it was that date that he quoted.
Security was a problem. One of his closest contacts, a Norwegian named Bjørn Johannsen, whose company owned a diving support ship, told him: ‘Mike, you know, there is talk. You are asking many questions. Everyone knows you want a ship and divers for a North Sea operation. Soon, if people are going to have confidence in you, you must say what your plans are.’
Had Mike been about to undertake a normal commercial operation, he would have had no hesitation in moving ahead fast. As it was, he didn’t want his potential suppliers to become greedy; nor did he wish to risk official action against him but Bjørn Johannsen was different. He might be the key to the whole operation, and for that reason Mike flew to Bergen to tell him of the scheme.
Johannsen wanted to be involved. ‘But,’ he said, ‘I don’t think you can stay down long enough. You might not be able to get into the wreck. You will have to be prepared to blast her, you know?’
* * *
During this time Krassnik had also been busy. Over the previous twenty-five years he had grown extremely rich supplying arms to practically every Middle Eastern country, and was known as a businessman who served any political master who was prepared to pay him. But his true master was profit. He made that starkly clear to anybody who approached him. He was fond of stating that he would be just as willing to serve the enemies of his present paymaster. He promised only two things: arms and discretion. He never divulged information about any of his contracts. In this way he had supplied first Israel, then most countries in the Arab world with weapons from Europe, America and the Eastern bloc. It was a simple formula and it worked. He never stored any arms himself, acting only as a middleman.
Krassnik’s success had brought him to the attention of Libya’s new young strong man, Gaddafi, when he came to power in 1969, and in fact they had already met in Egypt when the future Libyan leader was studying in Cairo, imbibing the spirit of Arab nationalism from Nasser. Gaddafi presided over an oil-rich economy, which he promptly turned to the service of his own grandiose and fanatical designs. He saw himself as Nasser’s heir and, in his determination to become sole leader of all Arabs, supported terrorists to undermine any government – including Arab ones – of which he disapproved.
Over the years Gaddafi’s name had been linked with an army of terrorist organizations and a kaleidoscopic array of wild schemes. It was said that he had sent a hundred Russian rifle-propelled grenades to the Provisional IRA; armed the Black September killers of Jewish athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972; backed the take-over of the OPEC headquarters in Vienna in 1975 (paying its perpetrator, ‘Carlos’, £1 million); commissioned several assassination attempts on President Sadat of Egypt; tried to overthrow the Sudanese government; offered the Tunisian Prime Minister $1 billion to allow the unification of their two countries; and sent cash and arms to Muslim revolutionaries in the Philippines. All of this he could do because he personally ran the Libyan economy and himself authorized any spending over half a million dollars. It was also said that he kept a slush fund of $1 billion simply to finance any project or group that seized his fancy.
The fact that Gaddafi was an unpredictable eccentric worried Krassnik not at all. His approach was typically direct. He was open about his own philosophy, told Gaddafi whom he might call in Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iraq to back his claims and promised to supply him with whatever he wanted.
It turned out that there was much Gaddafi wanted. He wanted fighters, transports and men to train his hit squads. He even talked grandly of acquiring nuclear capability. In 1975 he bought $500 million worth of Soviet arms – two thousand tanks and two squadrons of MiG 23 fighter planes. On the whole he, like other Middle Eastern leaders, wanted land and air weapons; but there was one other dimension to Gaddafi’s ambitions: naval capability. He wanted to be able to deliver troops by sea if necessary, and was obsessed with the fear that his coast was wide open to an Israeli seaborne assault. He wanted submarines; if not nuclear submarines, then at least the best non-nuclear ones. This ambition was sharpened by an extraordinary incident in 1973.
It was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of Israel. The QE2 w
as on her way through the Mediterranean to Haifa with hundreds of Jews on board. There were at the time in Tripoli two Egyptian submarines on secondment to Libya. Gaddafi ordered the subs to torpedo the liner. Horrified by the order, the Egyptians cabled Sadat for confirmation, and Sadat ordered the submarines to abandon the mission and return to Egypt. Gaddafi had no other submarines capable of accomplishing the crazy scheme – a situation he swore would be remedied.
What Krassnik managed to find for him were three old but serviceable American submarines. They had been launched in 1945, escaped service in the Second World War and had then been handed to the Shah in the early 1960s. Iran was now moving on to grander things, and Krassnik took possession of the three submarines in part payment for a deal he helped to arrange in 1975 between Iran and Great Britain for the supply of Chieftain tanks. By the end of 1976 Libya possessed crews trained to run them.
Krassnik’s relationship with Gaddafi went beyond that of an agent supplying arms. The Argo was a welcome visitor in Tripoli harbour because Gaddafi’s ambitions demanded the administration of funds outside Libya. In this context Krassnik proved an ideal business partner, making no political, religious or moral judgements. On Gaddafi’s behalf he established a Swiss bank account. The system they ran was a simple one. Krassnik supplied arms; Gaddafi would overpay him; Krassnik would pay the excess directly into Gaddafi’s account. That money in its turn, now well laundered, could be paid to any one of a number of sources – the Baader–Meinhof Group, Basque separatists, Palestinians. There was even one payment of $100,000 to a tiny group of Austrians fighting to free the South Tyrol from Italian rule.
It was therefore quite natural that Krassnik should choose to approach Gaddafi with the scheme that Mike had presented to him.