Testament

by David Gibbins

  Ian was able to tell me all this because Churchill had personally selected him to be part of a directive within Bletchley whose remit encompassed the Ark operation. Enigma intelligence, as you know well, was Ultra, for ultra top-secret; this organization was one stage of secrecy above that, and never had a name. The only others in on the operation at Bletchley were Captain Pullen, who you will remember, Alan Turing and another cryptographer, and me. I was recruited by Ian just before TS-37 was hit, so I was with him when he put through the call that sealed Clan Macpherson’s fate, though not as the Nazis had envisaged it. Unknown to me, Churchill had vetted me already when he spoke to me during one of his covert visits to Bletchley a month or so earlier.

  I mentioned that there was a bigger picture, the wider remit for our group that Ian and I agreed never to speak about; the operation against the Ahnenerbe was, if you like, a fold within that picture, though closely intertwined with it. All I can say is that because of that wider remit, we already had in place a line of specialized hunter-killer submarines off the west coast of Africa, one of them off Sierra Leone. By the time we knew of the Ark plan from the interrogation of the Nazi agent in Durban, it was too late to warn Clan Macpherson; without knowing the names of the six men, it would have been impossible for the captain to take effective action, and worse still, it might have alerted B-Dienst that we were on to them and had possibly broken Enigma.

  Churchill himself made the final decision. Our submarine would shadow the convoy, wait until it saw a ship straggling, and then torpedo it. With U-515 meanwhile embarking on its attack on the main body of the convoy to the north, nobody would be any the wiser. History would record Clan Macpherson as just another one of U-515’s victims on that terrible night. Whatever the treasure was, whether or not it was the Ark, would be lost forever, and another small victory would have been scored against the Nazis, unknown to history and cloaked under a veil of secrecy that would see almost all of those in the know taking the story with them to the grave.

  And that’s what happened. Clan Macpherson went down at about 0540 on May 1. The takeover by the six men was put down to a mutiny by disaffected Lascars influenced by the Indian nationalist movement, at a time when Lascars on other British merchant ships were refusing to serve in the North Atlantic. Even so, the survivors were met by naval intelligence officers who had been flown out to Freetown to swear them to secrecy for reasons of national security, on the grounds that knowledge of a mutiny would be utilized for propaganda by the Nazis and might result in even more widespread disaffection among the Lascars, a potential disaster at that critical point in the Battle of the Atlantic. The captian of Clan Macpherson, who survived the sinking, agreed to go along with it, and to write critically to the trade division at the Admiralty about the weakness of the convoy escort in order to deflect any wayward attention from the circumstances of Clan Macpherson’s sinking, the reason why she might have fallen back behind the convoy.

  Months later, Ian told me what the captain of Clan Macpherson had reported about the fate of the mutineers, an account that was never written down and never made it into the official documentation. The first torpedo from our sub blew a hole in the side of the ship but failed to sink her. A second torpedo had been fired, but lodged in the hull without detonating. Our sub could not linger after that to launch any more torpedoes for fear that it would be seen and recognized for what it was, a British sub and not German. Meanwhile, most of the crew had got off in the boats, leaving the six mutineers on board. The captain and his officers conferred and determined to get back on the ship, ostensibly to try to save her but in fact to attempt to finish the job and scuttle her, knowing that the mutineers’ success would otherwise become known and be a propaganda coup for the enemy. Four of the engineer officers volunteered to return and pull the stopcocks. In the event, they and the mutineers went down with the ship. Whether the engineers saw the unexploded torpedo and realized it was British, we shall never know. But those merchant seamen finished our job for us, sinking their own ship.

  When you saw me upset that evening of April 30, Louise, it was not just because I knew that Clan Macpherson was doomed. It was also because this operation had sealed the fate of those other ships in the convoy that were torpedoed by U-515. That morning, Ian had orchestrated the usual conference to decide which of the previous night’s Enigma decrypts to act upon—which convoys we could try to save and how much we could “push the envelope,” as they would say nowadays, without arousing German suspicions that we had broken Enigma. We made the decision not to intervene with ONS-5 but to reroute TS-37. What I didn’t know until Ian took me into his office for the telephone call to the Admiralty was that it was all a charade. What he was involved in, what I then became part of for the remainder of the war, was so secret that not even the other people in that very top-secret hut could be allowed in on it. They would see the next day that TS-37 had been hit but would just think it was bad luck; not all convoy rerouting worked. But what we did that day, what we chose not to do, cost hundreds of lives, and that still keeps me awake at night.

  The losses in ONS-5 were one thing; I can live with that. We probably could not have intervened successfully with that convoy anyway, and the ensuing battle proved to be pivotal for the Atlantic war. But TS-37 was a different matter. We knew the likely interception point with U-515, and we could have saved those ships. I can name them all from memory: Corabella, Bandar Shahpour, Kota Tjandi, Nagina, City of Singapore, Mokambo, and of course Clan Macpherson. You can go to the Merchant Navy Memorial beside the Tower of London and see the names of the men, including the four engineers. I just hope that whatever treasure it was that went down with Clan Macpherson was worth their lives to keep it from the Nazis.

  There you have it. Maybe there will be a trail still to follow. Perhaps divers will one day find the wreck of Clan Macpherson. It’s astonishing what’s being discovered nowadays in the ocean depths, though the images sometimes give me nightmares. Seeing those tombs in the sea brings it all back, what we were really doing at Bletchley. We may have done our bit to win the war, but it wasn’t all about those euphoric moments you see in the films. And poor Alan. I can still picture him running at night on the road to our digs outside Bletchley, passing us with a grin. I can still see him there, if I shut my eyes.

  With love from

  Fan

  15

  Louise took the letter back from Costas, and then showed them a handwritten note from the same envelope. “Fan included this as well. It’s personal. It’s where she tells me she only has a short time to live.” She tucked the note and the letter back inside the envelope, and then turned to Jack, eyeing him keenly. “Well? Was she right? Is there a trail to follow?”

  Jack leaned forward on his elbows, his mind racing. “It’s an incredible story. What I can do now is show you three more photos from the wreck of Clan Macpherson. I was holding back on these until we knew where we were going with this.” He picked up the folder from the table, took out another A4-sized print and handed it to her. It showed a mass of twisted metal covered with rusticules and marine accretion, and in the center a long cylindrical object nestled in the wreckage. It was the extraordinary view that had confronted Jack when he had followed Costas into the sunken hull off Sierra Leone a week earlier.

  “It’s a torpedo,” Louise said, her hand shaking slightly. “I can see the propeller.”

  “Unexploded, inside the hull,” Jack said. “Now take a look at the markings.”

  “I can see numbers and words, in English. It’s a British torpedo.”

  “A Mark VIIIC, to be precise,” Costas said. “A submarine rather than an aerial torpedo, much bigger. We’d already concluded that the sub that fired this must have launched a pair of torpedoes almost simultaneously, and that this one entered the breach in the hold created by the explosion of the first. We were baffled at how a U-boat could have got hold of British torpedoes. Fan’s letter solves that mystery for us.”

  “And the second photo?” />
  Jack pulled it out, and paused. “The next two are a bit blurred. By the time I got to this part of the wreck we had only minutes left in the hull. We had something of a close shave.”

  She gestured at his books on the table. “So what’s new?”

  “All I needed to do was to unscrew the torpedo fuse,” Costas said. “Then everything would have been fine.”

  “No it would not,” Jack said firmly. “Rebecca would not have had a father. Your beach friends would have missed their volleyball partner.” He turned to Louise. “The warhead had nearly come off the torpedo when it drove into the hull, which is how you can see those markings on the base. In the process of fiddling with the fuse, my dive buddy here caused the torpedo to dislodge, fall through the wreckage and come to rest with the warhead facing downward, held in place by a few tendrils of rust. One accidental brush, one waft with a fin, and boom.”

  “I thought you two always worked as a team?” she said, her eyes glinting with amusement.

  Costas nodded enthusiastically. “I go ahead where there are explosives to defuse, and Jack goes ahead where there’s archaeology to be found. That’s teamwork for you.”

  Jack gave him a wry look. “In this case, teamwork got us out just in time and behind a ridge of rock before the torpedo broke free and detonated, causing the entire wreck to slip down the drop-off into the abyss.”

  She pointed at the first picture. “So this is all gone?”

  “Well, it’s still there, in a manner of speaking,” Costas replied. “Only it’s more than a mile deep, strewn down the slope of the massive canyon that lay next to the wreck.”

  Jack passed her the second photo. “And that includes what you can see here.”

  She stared at the image from Jack’s helmet camera, her hands shaking. “Crikey,” she said quietly. “So they really were on board. Gold bars.”

  “That’s the reason we were diving on the wreck in the first place, as I explained to you on the phone. A researcher for the salvage company we were monitoring had got hold of a bill of lading, evidently made by an over-scrupulous clerk in Durban, who must have filed it away before the security people supervising the lading could see and destroy it. It showed that Clan Macpherson was in Durban to pick up a consignment of South African gold.”

  “There are a lot of bars there.”

  “About five hundred million pounds in today’s money.”

  “Crikey. The salvage company can’t have been too pleased about your little escapade, then.”

  “Not too pleased, though we told them nothing about seeing the gold. Apart from a select few at IMU and those of us here in this room now, nobody else has seen that photo or knows what we found. As far as the salvage company is concerned, we drew a blank and the explosion was just an unhappy accident with unstable Second World War ordnance. Being a treasure salvor is generally like that, one disappointment after another.”

  Louise’s eyes glinted. “You can rely on me. I’m a Bletchley girl. I’m pretty good at keeping secrets.”

  Jack looked at her intently. “I’m thinking of those Nazi agents in Durban that Fan mentioned. In a major port like Durban, their day-to-day work would presumably have been spying on ships’ movements and cargo lading. The arrival of such a large consignment of gold from the mines would have been difficult for the authorities to conceal.”

  “What are you suggesting?” Jeremy said.

  “I’m suggesting that there might be more to this than meets the eye. More than Fan was able to tell in her letter. Bletchley was all about folds of secrecy, right? Every time something is revealed about the workings of that place, it seems to point to another operation. Open the wrapping and you reveal another layer.”

  Costas eyed him. “You mean the story of Clan Macpherson is not just about the Ahnenerbe and ancient antiquities. Ask me, and we’re talking about a heist. A Nazi gold heist.”

  “A heist, yes, but one that fits into the wider picture, the operation that Fan and Bermonsey had sworn never to reveal. An operation that would have been a far greater concern to Churchill than lost Jewish antiquities. The reason why I think there was a British submarine on station off Sierra Leone in the first place.”

  “Go on,” Costas said.

  “You mean the Yanagi program,” Louise said quietly.

  Jack turned to her. “You know about it?”

  “I was the one who spotted the decrypt,” she said.

  “I’m astonished. I shouldn’t be, of course, knowing what went on at Bletchley. But you were adamant that you’d only worked on the bombe.”

  “In the bombe hut. Once the thing was up and running, clanging and belching away, there could be hours when there was very little to do, and eventually someone in Hut 8 decided that the more mathematical of us in the bombe rooms should be put to use cribbing, trying to find patterns in the code that might fit with words we knew should be there. I spotted the Japanese word yanagi on one of the decrypts, and passed it on. My father was a British trade attaché in Japan while I was growing up, so I know some Japanese. I knew this was the word for willow, though I had no idea until after the war that Yanagi was the code name for the Japanese exchange program with Nazi Germany.”

  “Did Fan know about your role in this?”

  “I never told her. I was sworn to absolute secrecy. There was a fear that the Soviets had got hold of Japanese encryption machines in Manchuria, and after the war, anything to do with Japanese code breaking was a closed shop. I was still in the game then, you know.”

  “I didn’t know. I thought it ended with Bletchley.”

  “For Fan, yes. For me, not quite.”

  “The Yanagi program,” Costas said. “What kind of stuff was exchanged?”

  Jeremy tapped on his computer and scanned the page. “From Germany, mainly technology: weapons and blueprints, optical glass, radar equipment, jet engines and so on. An exchange of scientists and engineers. Oh, and some Indian nationalist leader, traveling from Berlin to Tokyo. From the Japanese, mainly raw materials: rubber, tungsten, tin, zinc, quinine, opium, coffee. Oh, and here we go. Transferred from a Japanese submarine to a U-boat on the twenty-sixth of April 1943. That’s only four days before Clan Macpherson was sunk. Two tons of gold.”

  “Holy cow,” Costas said. “Where?”

  “Off Mozambique. Transferred from Japanese I-29 to German U-180, and destined for the U-boat base at Lorient on the western French coast and then Germany.”

  Jack sat forward, speaking slowly. “Two tons of gold. And we believe there were also two tons of gold on Clan Macpherson. Look at the dates. U-180 would have passed the Cape of Good Hope and been up the west coast of Africa exactly in time to rendezvous with U-515 after she’d hit the convoy.”

  “What are you suggesting?” Costas said.

  “Got it,” Jeremy interjected, staring at the screen. “U-180 was a Type 9D1 transport U-boat. That means she was a cargo carrier. U-515 may have been the boat tasked to take the gold off Clan Macpherson, but she was an attack sub, not a cargo carrier, and it would have made sense for her to transfer the gold as soon as possible to a specialized U-boat in the vicinity designed to take that kind of load.”

  Jack nodded. “And at that point, all going well, U-180 parts company with U-515 and makes her way undetected to Lorient, with a whopping four tons of gold on board. Two tons come from Japan, and the other two tons could be considered Japanese booty, the heist having been carried out on Clan Macpherson by Japanese-trained agents.”

  “Hold it there,” Jeremy said, swiping the mousepad and staring intently at the screen. “I think I might just have seen the bigger picture. The one that Fan couldn’t reveal to us.”

  “Go on,” Jack said.

  Jeremy cleared his throat. “I mentioned that most of the German export seemed to be manufactured products, high technology. Well, it wasn’t always that way round. When the long-range cargo submarine U-234 put out for Japan in December 1944, she was indeed carrying examples of the latest military tec
hnology, including a crated Me 262 jet fighter. But she was also carrying twelve hundred pounds of uranium oxide.”

  “Good God,” Jack said, sitting back. Of course. “That explains all the secrecy at Bletchley. That’s what the gold was for.”

  “Uranium for what purpose?” Jeremy said.

  Jack pursed his lips. “In April 1943, the Manhattan Project was still a good way from coming to fruition, and there would have been a lot of concern about the possibility of similar research being carried out by physicists in Germany and Japan. By then Germany was beginning to receive the full brunt of the RAF and USAAF bomber offensive. The Americans in the Pacific had not yet taken islands close enough to put Japan within easy range of the US bombers then available. Japan would have been a safer bet for research and development, and the Germans may even have entered into some kind of scientific collaboration. They may never have been close to developing a fusion bomb, but uranium oxide could have been used to make a radiological weapon, a dirty bomb. If a few of those had been shipped back to Europe and put on top of V-2 rockets, Hitler could have devastated the population of London. That terrible possibility would really have stoked the fire under Churchill.”