by Jay Garnet
Then, shortly before midday on the twenty-second, the Interflora agent in nearby Berkeley Square delivered a single red rose to the flat. The messenger was an eighteen-year-old student doing a summer job. He got an abrupt reception. The door was opened quickly by a dark-skinned, middle-aged man in sunglasses.
‘Is this . . . ?’ was all the student had time to say, for the occupant simply grunted, ‘Yes,’ took the cellophane-wrapped flower and slammed the door.
The student thought it a little odd that the sentimental gift should have been so obviously expected, and the recipient’s curt behaviour struck him as peculiar. But, with several more calls to make before lunchtime, he dismissed it from his mind and returned to the van parked outside. He had another delivery to make not far away in Dover Street, and so was in time, on his return past the block, to see the same man hurrying out of the building.
The Libyan was going to the People’s Bureau, from where he made two telephone calls: one to Tripoli, the other to Washington.
That afternoon an unmarked American submarine slipped out of Tripoli harbour and headed west. A mile out to sea, she dived, then proceeded at a steady eighteen knots. Two days later she slipped through the Strait of Gibraltar. There was no sonar to record her progress, but the USA, working as part of NATO, had long since positioned microphones at regular intervals on the seabed to pick up the noise of any passing nuclear submarine. Computers in Gibraltar were programmed to match any noise to the sound-print of any one of a hundred nuclear submarines of which NATO had a record. The sound of this particular submarine fitted no known pattern, and came only briefly to the attention of the duty officer. He guessed it was either Italian or Israeli, and gave it no further thought.
The sub proceeded northwards for seven days, surfacing daily to recharge its batteries by switching to diesel, and covering five hundred miles a day. She passed well west of Ireland and approached the Arctic through the Orkney Gap. Again the sound of engines was recorded. Again it was ignored: so many submarines passed to and fro in the icy waters south of the Faroes that only Russian nuclear subs were officially logged. The rest – especially the old conventional ones – were assumed to be of Scandinavian origin.
The Libyan submarine, travelling almost twice as fast as the Stephaniturm, arrived at the designated spot, a hundred and twenty miles north of Murmansk, a full day ahead of her prey. She was able to trace both the Edinburgh and the Hermann Schoemann in good time, and slipped down alongside the German wreck. There she was utterly safe: no sonar could separate her image from that of the Hermann Schoemann and, with engines silent, no microphone, however sensitive, would have picked her up.
There she lay, awaiting the signal that would tell her the Stephaniturn contained sufficient gold to make an attack worthwhile. Then she would be free to pick her time. Her captain had been told to use his own initiative. He had also been promised a percentage of the booty, and the longer the Stephaniturm worked, the more there would be for him. He had therefore made his decision: if the weather did not force his hand he would attack only when she headed for Murmansk.
Meanwhile he and his crew had nothing to do but wait.
The Stephaniturm arrived above the Edinburgh on Thursday 3 September. The ship’s computers kept her fixed in position, ensuring that once the diving-bell was lowered it would drop exactly above the Edinburgh.
Early on Friday morning the bell was lowered from the ship’s moon pool. There were three men on board on that first dive, but they found the space in the bell too constricting and decided from then on to work in pairs.
Then, for the next few days, there followed the slow exploration and penetration of the hull itself. There were numerous minor snags – hot water failed to circulate properly through the suits, a heat exchanger leaked, the camera threatened to foul its own cables. A couple of times divers scalded themselves in their own hot water. There were several cases of headaches, motion sickness, stomach upsets and ear infections. For a week Mike supervised the retrieval of the debris, among which was a piece of steel plate measuring three feet by two feet six inches – it was received on board as if it were the very door to the bomb-room – and a good deal of live ammunition. The shells were defused and the rest was stacked in a container on the stern of the ship.
Only after about two weeks’ work was it possible for the divers to enter the bomb-room.
At that time, late on 16 September, Mike was off duty in the diving control room, listening to the conversation on the intercom and watching the muddy pictures from below. He had a feeling that if the gold was in the bomb-room at all, the divers were about to get it. He was therefore part of the group that were the first to learn that it had been found.
It was hard to see anything at all in the silt kicked up by the divers’ activities, despite the powerful arc lights set up inside the hull. A twenty-seven-year-old diver called Rossier was lifting small bits of metal into the basket, working by touch. One piece of metal felt uncannily smooth beneath his rubber gloves. He raised it: it was very heavy. At that moment he knew he had succeeded. He lifted the bar slowly up to the level of his face-plate, then shouted, ‘I’ve found the gold! I’ve found the gold!’ In his exhilaration he executed a sort of slow-motion dance of joy, reminding those watching on the TV monitor of the blurry jumping astronaut they had seen during the first moon landing.
At once, others on board heard his shout and took up the cry. Men came running from the mess decks, a couple of them upsetting a game of Scrabble in their haste.
Though Mike was not technically on duty, he wanted to see the raising of the first bar of gold, and went out under the arc lights on the stern to watch the cage being lifted by the A-frame.
As the cage broke surface, and he saw the bar glinting dully amidst the other debris from the bomb-room, he found himself in tears. Suddenly, in his imagination, with the wind whistling all around him and the lights glaring above him, he was back on the damp deck of the Edinburgh watching the crane lift up the first few crates of gold from the barge beneath.
‘Come on!’ someone shouted. ‘Let’s have it!’
The supervisor on duty heaved out the bar and stood there testing the weight of it in his hands, before passing it round. No one had thought of capturing the significance of the moment, no one had anything but cliché to express their reactions. God, they said, it’s heavy. One of the Russians said with stolid formality that this was a historic moment.
Everyone was photographed holding the bar. Then it was shown to the off-duty divers through the tiny porthole of their pressurized chamber and locked away.
There was little sleep that night, for bar followed bar minute by minute, at £100,000 a time. Throughout the following day Mike supervised the raising of the gold, with only brief pauses as the divers burrowed into a new pile of silt, took time out to handle ammunition or changed shifts.
When his shift ended, at six p.m., he had lost count of the number of bars he had handled. A glance at the manifest held by the watching officials reminded him: one hundred and twenty. More than enough to make Krassnik’s attack worthwhile. More than enough, if he could guarantee even a minuscule royalty, to keep him in luxury for the rest of his life.
Now was the time to slip down to the communications room and request permission to send a telex. He hesitated briefly. What if no message was received? Almost certainly it would make no difference. Having come so far, whoever was in command would not simply return empty-handed.
‘I have to have it checked,’ said the officer on duty. ‘Blackout for anything remotely sensitive. Even then, we have to use code, so keep it short. We’re not ready yet to risk announcing anything publicly. Otherwise the journalist chappies would go berserk, right?’
‘Well,’ said Mike, ‘this is personal. Same as before.’ He grinned. ‘I’m getting on. I can’t afford to let a young chick like this think I’ve forgotten her, see?’
So his request was sent: a single red rose to go to 9a, 21 Albemarle Street, London W1, with a
card reading simply ‘Love, Mike’.
15
For the next two weeks work proceeded more routinely. Down below, the divers, with their supply lines snaking out through the hole in the bomb-room bulkhead up to the bell twenty feet above the hulk, wrestled their way past heavier debris – ammunition trolleys and a compressor, lying in sediment still thick with oil. Often it was hard for the divers to identify what they were loading into the cage along with the gold. It was part of Mike’s job to sort through these odd, slimy pieces of debris. Once he found a couple of human bones, femurs, which were buried with due ceremony. Someone he had known? Old Jim Goodall, whose body had drifted out through the hole? Sometimes he came across a four-inch shell, possibly one he himself had handled during his time on the Edinburgh.
His mind was therefore constantly in two worlds – present and past; up here and down there. Even while he cast an eye at the horizon, wondering when Krassnik’s helicopter was going to turn up, he would be reminded of the times the German reconnaissance planes appeared over those same horizons.
He found each load would jog his memory, so that images of himself as a boy seaman surged up from his subconscious in a random sequence. Whenever he lifted a bar he could hear Peaches’ awed murmur ‘Cor!’ He lost count of the times he thought of the chief and his ‘Russian gold dripping with blood’. ‘Bloody gold . . . not what a fighting ship’s for . . . not trying to nick it, Cocky . . . want the truth, son? . . . deserves his tot like the rest of us!’
Nevertheless he was totally unprepared for what came out of the cage on Saturday 3 October. Memory could have played no part in predicting it, and indeed would have rejected it as impossible. But in that confined space in the Edinburgh, stirred randomly for thirty-nine years by the Arctic currents, any particular combination of objects became a possibility.
This time the cage came up twisted in its cable. It must have caught on the hull as it was hauled through. The crane operator swung the A-frame and the cage, pouring water, swung down to the deck. The cable seemed to be knotted strangely over the cage’s door. Inside were several bars and the pile of oily debris.
‘Best cut it,’ said Mike. ‘Then get another cage down to them.’
A blowtorch arrived from the workshop. It was Mike himself, watched by the usual team of bureaucrats, who cut the strands of the mesh cage. When the square of the mesh was almost clear, he shouted to his foreman to raise the cage a few inches. Mike gripped it and jerked at the cut section, which bent towards him. The cage tipped, the contents shifted and then, in a sudden rush oiled by the slimy sediment, spewed out on the deck at his feet. He saw half a dozen bars of gold, some .303 cartridges, fabric of some kind, a good deal of mud and a little dark circle that looked like a coin.
Mike picked up the first bar and, as he usually did, brushed the dirt away with his glove to glimpse the number.
It was his: KP 1926.
‘’Ere,’ he said. ‘This is the bar I ’eld.’ He grinned round at the crowd that had pressed in upon him. Someone patted his shoulder. ‘My bar,’ he repeated. ‘My bar.’
Indeed the bar was bound to come up eventually, and there was a fifty-fifty chance of Mike receiving it. But what happened next was more remarkable. After handing the bar on, Mike reached down to the little coin-like object. As he raised it he saw it had a chain attached to it. It was not a coin, but a British Navy identity disc. Mike held it between finger and thumb, rubbed away the silt and held it to catch the light. It was badly corroded, but still legible: ‘Derek Hoskins. 36798.’
He stared for a long time, saying nothing.
Everyone was watching him, waiting for him to reach for the next bar. Instead he went on staring at the little disc.
‘What is it, Mike?’ said his foreman.
‘Peaches. Bloody Peaches. My mate. It’s ’is dog-tag. Derek ’Oskins. But ’ow could ’e . . . ?’
Somehow the disc had drifted out of the wireless cabinet and down into the bomb-room.
‘Come on, Mike. Get on with it.’
‘No, ’ang about. This is odd. ’Ave I missed something? Perhaps I was asleep. Was there any mention any time of the wireless cabinet door?’
‘What’s he on about? Mike, for Pete’s sake, let’s move this gold.’
‘All right, all right.’ He forced himself back to the present, and turned to the MoD man. ‘I want this. Can I have it?’
The man frowned. ‘Really I should . . . this is a war grave . . . the family . . .’
‘Yeah, I know. But look – ’e was my mate. I stayed with ’is family. I’ll find them better than anyone, if there’s any of them left.’
‘Very well.’
After that Mike returned to work. But his mind was elsewhere. He’d already begun to devise a plausible explanation.
Peaches must have woken again. He’d found the phone link cut off. Perhaps he’d panicked. The only way out would have been through the watertight door. Water was leaking underneath. But he’d previously heard cries on the other side. He must have forced up the handles. The water would have begun to pour in faster, balancing the pressure and easing his task. Then, with the air foul around him, and icy water up to his waist, the last catch must have given. Peaches hadn’t suffocated at all. He’d been drowned, and in ensuring his own death in this fashion he’d opened a way, via damage control, to the bomb-room itself. He had died, as he wanted, touching the gold. It might even have been his bones that Mike had seen consigned to the deep several days before.
The theory thus elaborated over the next few hours was mixed in his mind with other memories. The tag. He’d forgotten all about old Peaches saying it was ‘like writing on his grave’. It was as if he’d known there was a sub waiting to get them. Those subs, lurking like cold-water sharks, lurking like Krassnik’s sub now.
Suddenly, what with the memories and the tag and the bones and burial, the Edinburgh became more than a treasure store.
By then the gold had been emerging from the depths regularly for two weeks. How long had it taken his message to be received and relayed? How long before the hijack itself? How long, in fact, did he have to save his own life and the lives of all the others? Possibly, if he was lucky, until the Stephaniturm left the Edinburgh. But what if the weather deteriorated and they had to leave prematurely? Or if the Libyans decided to cash in on what had been raised already?
He chose to move at the end of his next day’s duty.
He asked for a private interview with the captain, a German called Werner Kohlmeyer, a bulky, clean-shaven man of fifty-two whose utter professionalism had won him the respect of all the Englishmen on board. The only comment Mike had heard from his was when he came in to see the TV-monitor pictures of the torpedo hole. Kohlmeyer had nodded and said with a smile: ‘That is quite a hole!’ His English was very good, with only a hint of an accent. ‘We made damn good torpedoes!’
In Kohlmeyer’s well-appointed office on the forecastle deck on the port side, the two men sat on the corner sofa. Kohlmeyer was leaning back. Mike was hunched forward over the circular, plastic-covered coffee table. He was confident enough of his decision, but all too well aware of how crazy he would sound, of the difficulty of carrying conviction, of the impact his words would have once he was believed.
‘I . . . I have some information that is vital to the future of the gold and everyone on this vessel,’ he began.
The captain frowned. ‘Yes?’
‘The Stephaniturm’s about to be ’ijacked.’
Kohlmeyer gave a wry smile.
‘Oh, come on, Mr Cox – Mike, may I call you Mike? Hijacked? Out here?’
‘It’s no joke. There’s a bunch of people waiting out there right now. I must ask you to contact Aberdeen right away and ask for ’elp.’
‘Help? This is really ridiculous. What help? Against what? Who?’
‘I’m ready to tell you . . . but I want something in return. And for that you’ll ’ave to contact Aberdeen. And London. And Moscow.’
Kohlmeyer
nodded, but still forced a smile.
‘Mike. This is really very amateur. Are you yourself a hijacker, perhaps, and you wish to hold us all to ransom? A foolish joke, if I may say so . . .’
‘I’m quite serious, sir.’
‘Then you are crazy. You think I should take you seriously? You say you’re part of an attempt to hijack . . .’
‘It ain’t me, sir. I’m not organizing it. But I did ’ave a role to play. I know what I’m talking about. I’m cut in on the share of the proceeds. But now I want to tell you about it, and stop it.’
‘Then please’ – there was no smile left on Kohlmeyer’s face – ‘do so.’
‘Not yet. As I said, I need to have a guarantee of my own security afterwards, I need enough money to last me and I need my freedom.’
‘You are serious.’ But Mike could see he was still being humoured. ‘I have to understand,’ the captain went on, as if playing for time. ‘Why don’t you let them go ahead?’
‘I got to thinking. I was told I’d be all right. I was told you’d all be all right, too. But now I’m not so sure. I don’t want to take that risk. They could just as easy blow this ship out the water.’
‘I see. Rather late to think about that, is it not?’
‘Look, we’re in a rush. I’ll tell you the details and someone’s got to take action. You’ll ’ave to talk to Aberdeen, and a whole lot of people in Britain and Russia will ’ave to talk to each other. See, I’ve been living this for weeks now. There is an organization back ’ome ready to help. But we’ve got to get the information through first. Now. So can we get on with the business?’
Now Kohlmeyer was beginning to waver. ‘I don’t know if I believe you. If you are not telling me the truth we have no business.’
Mike’s frustration suddenly became too much for him. ‘Of course I’m telling the bloody truth! You think I’d risk my position ’ere, my whole professional life, just for some sick joke? Look, you can’t afford not to believe me.’ His anger, his obvious conviction, broke through the last of Kohlmeyer’s reluctance to act.