by Jay Garnet
‘What am I in for?’
‘Five per cent of anything over twenty bars.’
‘Jesus, you trying to cut my throat?’
‘That’s the deal. If all the gold is raised, you still stand to make $4 million. Take it or leave it.’
Mike knew he had no choice, and agreed.
‘Fine,’ said Krassnik. ‘Now take down this address. Apartment 9a, 21 Albemarle Street, London W1. No name. What you do is ask your company for a personal favour – they gotta look after the families of the crew and divers, right? So what you do is get them to call a flower company and have them send a single rose to that address. Make it credible – dictate a card as if to a girlfriend. OK?’
‘Suppose so. What’s this address you’ve given me?’
‘Don’t worry about that. And don’t try to go there – it’s empty.’
‘Is that it? What am I getting into?’
‘The less you know, the safer we are, and the more certain it is that you get your share. Don’t ask questions. Just do your part and we’ll all be rich.’
A hijack.
How in God’s name would Krassnik arrange to hijack a ship in the Russian Arctic?
One thing was certain: neither the British nor the Russians planned on doing much to counteract such a threat. There was no attempt at providing security. Mike had a conversation about this with one of the diving supervisors, who told him why.
‘It’s not all that surprising,’ came the reply. ‘It’d be expensive – the British and the Russians would spend all the income in advance protecting us lot. Then the only people who’d make any money out of it would be us, the salvors. Far better to let us take the risks and they can share in the profits for nothing. Besides, who’s going to give us any trouble? It’s only just been announced that we’re going, and the coordinates haven’t been made public. And think of the conditions, the difficulty of finding us and the fact that we’re only just off the Russian coast anyway. Seems safe enough to me.’
But Mike knew different.
In his imagination he gave himself unlimited funds and began to plan what he would do if he had to hijack the gold. He fantasized an airborne attack. That way, you had range and speed. A helicopter assault would be best. Might be possible to get a chopper fitted with long-range fuel tanks to take it from the Norwegian coast to the Stephaniturm, put a few commandos aboard, blast the gold store, stack it in a cargo net and escape – all before the Russians or anyone else had time to send help.
Of course, there would then be the problem of shipping the gold southwards. But that coast was so wild and uninhabited that a well-organized team could vanish. They could easily have a transport plane ready to fly south, even have a ship nestling in one of the fiords. With a little forewarning – and God knows Krassnik had had that – anything was possible.
But planes were visible and vulnerable. They would be probing the northern flanks of both Western and Russian defences. Same with ships – at least the sort of vessels needed to mount a hijack. No, what would be needed would be something hidden, and reliable.
A sub. Of course. These waters were the natural haunt of submarines. Had been forty years before, and still were now.
So that would be it: a sub rising from the depths, a quick attack, slip off silently with the gold, and away to some safe and distant harbour, where he would be free to take his share and hop it.
His share. That was the bit he didn’t like. He had risked his life once, and dedicated many years since to this gold, and he was damned if he could see why he should arrange to hand over $80 million worth, yet receive only four million quid for his efforts. And there was no guarantee of getting even that. Who knew how much would be raised? Who knew how much Krassnik would let him have?
The more he thought about it, the more angry he became – at himself, and at Krassnik. He remembered how he had been treated. He remembered Sandra, all those years ago. He remembered the years of frustration and impotence.
And he remembered the Edinburgh, replaying his former life as if he were about to die. She was a war grave. His mates were down there, along with his vanished childhood. She was herself a body, the bones of a society in miniature. What right did Krassnik, or fucking foreigners, have muscling in on gold that he and hundreds of other British sailors, and now British divers, had risked and lost their lives for?
Come to think of it, why would the bastard need to have him alive? He’d said he could do the job without him. As long as he was alive he’d be a risk. He knew too much. Why then let the boat, the crew, the divers survive?
The more he thought about it, the more sense it made. Simplest thing would be to take the gold and kill everyone. Yes. That was it, that was it. . . What had Krassnik said? He didn’t need Mike . . . needed him only to raise the gold . . . so there would be no need to keep him alive. Or the crew.
Christ, the bastard was planning not just a hijack, but murder. Having him on the Stephaniturm was just a neat way of getting the guidance he wanted, then killing him off, along with the rest. No need to share. No need to risk identification. Just take the gold, sink the boat, kill everyone on board and run.
He had to stop Krassnik.
But how? He could simply go to the authorities with his information. And say what? That he was almost sure an American arms dealer was on the point of organizing a hijack in the Barents Sea? With a submarine? Whose submarine? Where was his evidence?
No. That would be almost as self-destructive as doing nothing. They would want to know all about his involvement with Krassnik. Much of that had been on the borders of legality, sometimes way over. If they didn’t believe him, they would at least detain him. If they believed him, they would cancel the whole venture and then there would be no gold at all, for anyone.
There had to be a better way, a way to seize control of his own destiny, and perhaps also secure for himself a proper reward for the years of slavery to one man.
He began to construct a scenario that would lead to guaranteed freedom and wealth. His options were few. To retain control, and do so with some hope of a decent reward, he had to comply with Krassnik’s orders, allow the salvage to go ahead, be on the vessel and make whatever arrangements he could to guarantee his position.
What were his assets? Only knowledge, the near certainty that if gold was raised it would never make it back to land. There would have to be a deal, of course. His information, such as it was, in exchange for a share of the gold. But once he had imparted that information, he would be impotent again, with nothing to prevent a double-cross.
He needed back-up, something that would give him some clout.
Nursing a whisky in his flat, he saw with sudden clarity the only possible way forward.
He needed his own private army. Perhaps not an army, but at least a group that would be ready to move faster than anyone else could possibly move, a group trained in combat at sea, a group that had access to dinghies, arms, limpet mines, radios, stun-grenades, parachutes; a group that would be ready to leave in minutes.
He needed people like those he had known in the war, or rather their latter-day counterparts. He had had enough contact to know he could talk to them about it, because for fifteen years after the war there had been the annual get-together with the lads who had been on the Mandracchio raid. But in fact the only one whose number he still had was Andy Cunningham, who had become a banker and was now something very grand in the City. Twice in the past five years, on London visits, Mike had called, been welcomed, invited for a drink after work; and once Cunningham had come to Aberdeen – something to do with oil investments – and the two of them had met at the bar of the airport hotel. Andy would help, if he could.
It took two calls: one brief to establish contact and pose the problem, and a longer one to lay the plan.
Yes, Andy Cunningham was in touch with the Marines and the current high command of the SBS. Yes, he would make the introductions and vouch for Mike. But he couldn’t have any further involvement, couldn’
t be seen to be a force behind such a wild, improbable venture. ‘Love to, Mike, you know that. Hint of the old days. But details will be strictly up to you.’
Then came the contact itself. A senior Marine officer whose name he never knew called. Mike explained the problem, and its peculiar status, with all its uncertainty.
‘So you see, sir’ – strange that he, a middle-aged man, should feel like a young corporal again – ‘if this turns out the way I think, the ship is going to need help, fast.’
‘Let me get this straight. You’re asking me to plan for rapid deployment to the Arctic of a force of – what? Twenty? Let’s say twenty men – who, on your say-so, will fly fifteen hundred miles to the area in time to forestall a hijack and seize this hypothetical submarine.’
‘Yes.’
A long pause.
‘It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. But let’s think it through. For one thing, your line of communication would be through the company to government, not to me direct. So we would be responding to the MoD. That’s as it should be. Next, it may never happen, so I can’t authorize much pre-emptive action. Just an informal stand-by operation. Interesting, Cox.’
Then a sudden decisiveness. ‘You know, we’re always looking for scenarios that will test us. Some of us have trained in the Arctic. Canoes, that sort of thing. Never know when you might have to sort out trouble in some God-forsaken place.’
Finally: ‘Very well. Leave it to me. Can’t tell you what will be done, but take it we’ll be standing by. One thing: if anything happens, tell your superiors to contact us. They know how.’
Mike saw the Stephaniturm for the first time when he joined her in Peterhead.
She was a gem of a vessel: fourteen hundred tons, two hundred and twenty-four feet long, twenty officers and crew, and up to thirty-seven diving and maintenance personnel. Full dynamic positioning with one stern propeller or ‘thruster’, two bow thrusters and a transverse thruster. Eight watertight compartments. Four generators and emergency batteries. A workshop. An A-frame hoist on her stern that could lift sixty tons. She was as tightly packed with electronic equipment as a space capsule – radar, radio direction finder, gyro compasses, autopilot, echograph, Decca Navigator, a main transmitter and an emergency transmitter, two main receivers and on emergency receiver.
All of this was to service the ship’s real heart – the diving-bell and the chamber, a separate universe in which the divers could live, eat and sleep under pressure for weeks. From their chambers they could transfer to the half-ton diving-bell, which would then be lowered from the ship’s hollow core – the ‘moon pool’ – to up to thirteen hundred feet below the surface of the sea. In the bell the divers could don their hot-water suits, supplied with water, gas and communications lines by an umbilical cord from the bell, open a hatch in the floor and let themselves through into the dark, cold Arctic waters. They would take with them lights and a video camera, to check that the wreck really was the Edinburgh and then to monitor their progress.
There were two main command structures. One line of organization saw to the running of the ship – captain, first mate, engineers, navigators, cooks, deck-hands and mess boys. The other division took care of the diving. A diving superintendent, nominally responsible to the captain, oversaw two diving supervisors, four life-support technicians, four electrical and mechanical technicians, four tenders, and then – in the chamber complex itself – the six divers. Between them the divers would work round the clock in eight-hour shifts, with two men on duty in the depths. Of these two, one would be in the bell, the other at the end of his umbilical cord in the Edinburgh.
As deck supervisor, Mike shared his work – which was mainly to oversee the working of the A-frame – with another deck supervisor. The two men each had control of a deck foreman and deck crew.
Finally, in addition to Mike and his small team, those on board were to include an enigmatic figure from the MoD, two stolid Russians, a journalist and a film cameraman.
In contrast to Mike’s own operation, this one was mounted with the full approval of the British and Russian governments. By the terms of the agreement, the salvors were to take forty-five per cent of the gold, and of the remainder, the British were to have one-third and the Russians two-thirds, in accordance with the risks as defined by the original insurance policy. The salvors had undertaken that every effort would be made to cause as little disturbance as possible to the site, and if any human remains were found they were to be buried at sea.
To reach such an agreement with such recalcitrant partners was a political master-stroke. But it was no guarantee of success. No one had done wet-suit saturation diving at that depth. There had been deeper dives – the record at that time was about two thousand feet, but that had been in the safety of a research chamber complex. Moreover, the conditions made the whole operation extremely risky. Anything, everything, could go wrong. The weather could make the dive impossible. They might not find the wreck again. The divers might not get into her. They might not even find the gold.
14
The journey to the Arctic began when the Stephaniturm left Peterhead without escort on 20 August.
Mike fulfilled the first part of his instructions without trouble. The telexed request was accepted and relayed along with a dozen other messages, all personal communications of some kind. Some of the crew even followed his example and ordered flowers. Mike’s was dispatched and forgotten as soon as it was sent: a single red rose to the Albemarle Street address, via Interflora, bearing the bland message: ‘All well, darling. See you soon.’ The only comment was from the communications officer: ‘Wife, Mike?’
‘Girlfriend.’
‘Bastard,’ the man said, with a wink, assuming Mike was married and having an affair.
In technical terms the trip was thoroughly routine. During the last few days of the eight-day journey, all six divers were ‘pressed down’ to a pressure equivalent to a depth of eight hundred feet, breathing their special combination of oxygen and helium at a pressure of 350lb per square inch.
Mike had virtually nothing to do except to review his own job in detail. The gold, if found, would be raised in a metal cage by the A-frame, be received by him, checked at once by the representatives of the British and Russian governments, carried to a small room that had been specially fitted with three locks – one for the salvors, one for the British and one for the Russians – and locked in. Each delivery would be meticulously recorded.
The Russians in particular were obsessed with security. They were clearly concerned that the divers themselves might be in a position to secrete bars of gold that would never appear on the official manifest. There were a number of conferences to convince them that there was no chance of such a thing. With TV cameras monitoring progress both outside and inside the diving-bell, inspection of the bell after the operation was finished and personal supervision of each bar as it went into its locked cupboard, the idea of theft was ridiculous.
Mike kept a deliberately low profile, though everyone knew of his experience on board the Edinburgh. He was called in on conferences to advise on how the divers might approach the bomb-room. He looked at videos of the torpedo hole. He pored over detailed plans of the Edinburgh.
There were a number of unknowns. The bomb-room had been flooded at the time of the explosion, but how big a hole had been blasted in that particular bulkhead? After all, Peaches had died slowly, because his little cabinet had been watertight. Mike hazarded a guess that there would be a way straight through into the bomb-room. But it could be full of all sorts of shit. Bomb-room, fuel tank, damage control room, mess deck, four-inch magazine, perhaps even the wireless cabinet itself after all these years, could all be open to the sea. The gold might be there and safe all right, but buried so deep it would take an age to find any of it.
All this was the subject of numerous conversations, and it merged into a communal obsession about how much gold there was down there and how much each man was going to get out of it. The diver
s, for instance, were risking not just their lives but their financial standing. This was a ‘no cure, no pay’ contract, for which their earnings could range from nothing to £4000 per week. Everyone aboard became an expert in the fluctuating price of gold. Aberdeen relayed the prices daily, along with exchange rates. Conferences and meals ended in a litter of scraps of paper covered in scribbled estimates of the booty’s worth.
Mike, of course, also had his own set of inner tensions to cope with. He constantly played out the many possible dramas in prospect should the gold be lifted. These included the hijack (what if he had guessed wrong? what if Krassnik had some other scheme in mind?) and the rescue (his information blocked, or the SBS delayed by bad weather). If anything went wrong he could expect at best poverty, more probably death.
He also found his mind increasingly taken up with the memory of the Edinburgh and his experiences of almost forty years earlier. Every night, several times, he relived the lurch of the explosion, the feel of the oily floor, the sudden fear that he was touching blood in the darkness, the sight of the buckled stern, the last conversation with the sleepy, dying Peaches, and the Edinburgh’s slow glide into the depths, interrupted only by that brief little curtsey. He thought about his own escape, about how easily he might have been one of those buried down there. He wondered what had happened to Peaches’ body. There shouldn’t be much left of the bodies; they’d all be broken up, and the bones probably decalcified. Anyway, as Mike himself pointed out, there shouldn’t be any bodies actually in the bomb-room, unless they had somehow drifted in there afterwards. Old Peaches, God bless him, should still be firmly encased in the wireless cabinet.
Meanwhile Krassnik’s arrangements with Gaddafi were following their own course.
The Albemarle Street flat was rented on a monthly basis, at an exorbitant rate, by the Libyan Embassy in London, or rather the ‘People’s Bureau’, as Gaddafi styled it. It had been used several times by Libyan agents planning to wreak ‘revolutionary vengeance’ on a few Libyans who had chosen to ignore their unpredictable leader’s order to return. Most of the time the place remained empty. In the second week of August, however, it was reoccupied.