Testament

by David Gibbins

  “There’s always a paymaster,” Jack said grimly. “Who’s behind it all?”

  Ibrahim pursed his lips. “For the terrorist organizations, the Somali coast is more important as a recruiting ground for foot soldiers. We’re not talking about suicide bombers, fanatics, but about cannon fodder, low-cost mercenaries who are expendable and easily replaced. It’s these guys we’re killing when we take on the terrorists just as much as the naïve Western recruits and the hard-core jihadists.”

  “So the extremists aren’t interested in the actual piracy operations.”

  Ibrahim shook his head. “A few million dollars raised annually from ransoms would be nothing for them compared to the huge amounts they’re making from controlling the oil supply in the Middle East and Libya. They know that if we detected that kind of involvement in piracy, the Western response might count badly against them. We’re not talking drone strikes, military action, but about cyber warfare, shutting down bank accounts and stopping transactions. Unless a ransom is paid in hard cash, those demanding it have to reveal banking details somewhere along the line in order to get paid, and that’s their Achilles heel. Most of the terrorist organizations have astute financial management and are very careful to avoid anything like that. Even their recruiting activity among the villages is difficult to pin down, because they use the same agents as the ones used by those who bankroll the pirates. A few hundred dollars changes hands, a few more young men disappear either out to sea or to the terrorist training camps in the north, and some of them never return. Gradually the fishing communities have the lifeblood sucked out of them. It’s become the way of life here.”

  “So who pulls the purse strings for the pirates?” Costas asked.

  Ibrahim gave them a grim look. “Western investment consortia, hedge fund operators, working through so many layers of financial complexity that they’re impossible to identify. We’re not talking about some evil mastermind here, just about those same brokers who will quite happily put money into arms companies that sell to despotic regimes, or drug companies that hike up their prices when they have a monopoly. When you try to understand how a child soldier can gun down his neighbors in central Africa, or a mother die untreated in a village because she can’t afford the drugs, it’s the same as seeing a bullet-ridden pirate floating in the sea off Somalia or a terrified hostage in a ransom video. The real culprit is the ordinary investor living in Western affluence where these realities can barely be imagined, who hands his money to a broker with instructions to reach a certain profit margin. For those down the line who channel the money to the frontlines, it makes no odds whether it’s oil exploration or mining or pharmaceuticals or armaments or piracy, and morality rarely comes into it.

  “You can add to that list the problem we have with overfishing. With the upwelling of the current along this coast, these should be the richest waters off Africa, and yet our fishermen are among the poorest. Why? Because foreign fishing companies underwritten by Western investors took advantage of the anarchy in Somalia to dispatch large trawlers and factory ships into our waters, knowing that we had no way of policing them. The result is that our fish stocks were decimated and have only just begun to recover. More Western investors reap profits, more of our people fall below the breadline as a result. That’s the reality of capitalism and the Third World for you.”

  “We see something of the same with treasure hunting,” Jack said. “The investors who fund it through similar kinds of consortia are often decent people who are likely to be appalled when they see images of the destruction of ancient sites by terrorists, and who love to visit museums with their children. Few of them have any idea that their money is contributing to the wanton destruction of archaeological sites in the search for loot.”

  Ibrahim nodded thoughtfully, and then straightened up, looking at his watch. “So. What can I do for you? Zaheed is an old friend, and of course I wanted to meet the famous Jack Howard. But you didn’t come here to fight pirates.”

  Jack took out his phone, opened a photo, and pushed it across the table. “What do you know about this vessel?”

  Ibrahim glanced at the image. “Deep Explorer. Zaheed told me you were on her trail. We’ve been tracking her for the past three days, since she came up on our screens. She’s owned by a salvage company of the same name, specializing in shipwrecks. You, of course, will know all about them.”

  “Costas and I were the UN monitoring team two weeks ago that checked out a Second World War wreck off Sierra Leone they were intending to rip apart. Let’s just say the outcome didn’t exactly go in their favor. I know their boss personally, a guy named Landor, what makes him tick. Our own IMU satellite monitoring told us that they’d sailed from Sierra Leone around the Cape and into these waters. Have you seen anything to indicate why they’re here?”

  “They’ve stayed just beyond territorial waters, so they’re outside our jurisdiction. When they first appeared, we ran the usual background check and everything seems legitimate: registration, officer qualifications, all the paperwork in order. There was no obvious cause for concern—that is, until yesterday morning.”

  Jack stared at him. “Go on.”

  Ibrahim gestured to one of the officers beside him, a young bearded man, immaculately turned out. “I’d better let Lieutenant Ahmed take over. This has been his operation.”

  The officer stood up abruptly, speaking perfect English. “Firstly, Dr. Howard, let me say what a huge pleasure it is to meet you. I’m a keen diver and an avid follower of all your adventures, those of Dr. Kazantzakis too,” he said, nodding toward Costas. “If there’s anything I can do to help, especially underwater, please let me know.”

  “Much appreciated, and we will,” Jack said, smiling. “Now, tell us what you’ve got.”

  Ahmed pointed at the chart on the table. “At about 1100 hours yesterday, four crewmen from Deep Explorer came ashore in a Zodiac at this village on the northeastern Somali coast. We have informants in all of the main coastal villages, so we were kept abreast by phone of everything that went on. They recruited one of the most notorious of the pirate gangs. The pirates call themselves badaandita badah, ‘saviors of the seas,’ which the leader of this gang has abbreviated to Badass Boys. Unlike the local Somali men who have been forced into piracy by unemployment, the Boys are thugs from Mogadishu and further inland, former street gunmen who have only known war. Their leader, who spent his teenage years in America and goes by the name of the Boss, has only just got out of jail. Each time he’s imprisoned he gets out on a technicality, we think because the Western investment operatives who fund him pay backhanders to the judiciary. He and the Boys have orchestrated half a dozen ship seizures over the past year and several million in ransom payments. He’s also a brutal sadist, responsible for numerous murders, including his own gunmen when they displease him.”

  “I can’t believe the Deep Explorer people have gotten involved with piracy,” Costas said, shaking his head. “They may be unscrupulous, but that would be sheer madness.”

  “They’ve recruited the pirates as players, but we believe their objective has nothing to do with piracy.” Ahmed sat down, pulling his chair up and leaning forward, looking at Jack intently. “My club has dived the Somali coast extensively since things became more settled here, and we know the location of many shipwrecks. Several of us have a special interest in wrecks of the Second World War, and we’ve researched them comprehensively, including original documentation from Italian, German and Allied observers who were based in this region. There aren’t that many along this coast because it was away from the main theaters of war, but one of the most intriguing is the account of a Type XB U-boat, U-409.”

  Jack stared at him. “What do you know about it?”

  “She was last seen on the twenty-sixth of May 1945, almost three weeks after the war with the Nazis had ended. Her last known position was off the southern Somali coast, when she was spotted by a USAF Liberator out of Aden carrying out a routine patrol. It was assumed th
at she’d surfaced preparatory to surrendering, but she dived after the aircraft came into view and was never seen again.”

  “What was her course?”

  Ahmed laid a ruler on the chart. “According to the Liberator’s log, the U-boat was heading at approximately 230 degrees. From her recorded position, that puts her on a course directly for the Socotra archipelago.”

  Jack looked keenly at Ahmed. “Is anything else known about her?”

  Ahmed shook his head. “Very little. It’s as if she’d been erased from history.”

  “At that point there were U-boats taking fleeing Nazis and their possessions to safety, weren’t there?” Ibrahim said. “Isn’t that how some of them reached South America?”

  “The northwest Indian Ocean seems a pretty unlikely place to try and establish a new Reich,” Ahmed said.

  Costas looked at him. “Weren’t the Type XB cargo subs used in the secret trade between Germany and Japan?”

  “Exactly what I was thinking,” Jack replied, remembering what Louise had told them a few days earlier. “The exchange of gold for raw materials and technology. U-234 is a documented example, captured at the end of the war in the North Atlantic with arms, medical supplies, optical glass, even a broken-down Me 262 jet fighter, all destined for Japan in exchange for gold.”

  “If gold is in the offing and the Deep Explorer researchers have got wind of it, then that’s surely enough to explain their presence here,” Ibrahim said.

  Jack thought hard for a moment. He remembered his encounter at the National Archives with Collingwood, the indications that he had been on to something new for Deep Explorer and Landor to find in these waters. Everything was beginning to fall into place.

  “U-234 was carrying something else, wasn’t she, Jack?” Costas said quietly.

  Jack felt himself go cold, and swallowed hard. “Yes, she was,” he said. “It was classified for years after the war, kept secret by the US intelligence officers who emptied her after her capture. She was carrying fifty lead cubes about ten inches across labeled U-235, as well as gold-lined lead cylinders with the same label. U-235, just to be clear, is not a U-boat designation.”

  “Uranium-235,” Ahmed said. “Uranium oxide.”

  “About twelve hundred pounds of it, enough to yield almost eight pounds of U-235 after processing,” Jack said. “It’s thought that the Americans who captured it sent it on in secret for use in the Manhattan Project, and that it may even have ended up in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, a terrible irony if so, given that it had been destined originally for use by Japan. It would have made up about ten percent of the fissile material needed for one of those bombs. In its unrefined state, anyone with basic bomb-making knowledge could use it to make dozens of dirty bombs, enough to irradiate cities across the world.”

  “Good God,” Ibrahim said quietly. “That raises the stakes horrifyingly.”

  “Landor wouldn’t stoop to that, would he?” Costas said. “The only possible takers would be terrorists.”

  Jack gave him a grim look. “I don’t think he has much in the way of morality left.”

  Costas tapped the map. “What I still don’t understand is where the U-boat was going. Were there any supply bases in this area?”

  Ahmed leaned forward, looking at Costas intently. “With this coast being under Italian control in the early part of the war, it seemed conceivable that they might have built a secret pen for their long-distance submarines. The breakthrough came when my club was diving off the village of Bereeda in the northeastern extremity of Somalia, only fifty nautical miles from the nearest islands in the Socotra archipelago. An old fisherman who knew of our interest in Second World War wrecks told us that he had seen an Italian cargo ship anchor close to one of the islands during the summer before the war started, and unload heavy machinery. The ship remained there and men carried on working at the island for several months afterward, and then they disappeared. There was little to be seen for all their efforts except a small naval coast guard station, and he and the other fishermen were warned off when they got too close. He never returned to the island after the war, as the fishing was no longer any good.”

  Costas looked at Jack. “What drives a U-boat captain to take his sub to a secret pen way off the route between the Atlantic and Japan after Germany’s war is finished?”

  “Turn the question on its head,” Jack replied. “What would drive a U-boat captain to continue delivering his cargo to Japan? Not all U-boat captains were fervent Nazis, and by that stage many of them probably just wanted the war to be over. And even for the Nazis among them, there was little love lost for the Japanese and little interest in furthering their cause after Germany had been defeated.”

  “So you’re saying he found a bolthole to ride it out, a secret pen far from the war zone?”

  “Possibly more than that,” Jack said. “If he was also carrying a consignment of gold, he and his crew might have been able to get something out of the war after all.”

  “Providing they hadn’t irradiated themselves as well,” Costas said. “Maybe that’s why the fish all died out.”

  Jack turned to Ahmed. “Can we speak to the fisherman?”

  Ahmed glanced at Ibrahim. “He disappeared two days ago. His boat is still in the harbor, and his wife said that men came in the night for him. I’m afraid that happens quite a lot around here, but there’s been a particular development that might explain this case. Over the last few days, since Deep Explorer arrived offshore, there have been questions asked all along the coast about the location of wrecks. The men asking the questions are the same agents who normally recruit for the pirates or for the terrorists, and we think they’ve been paid by someone who came ashore from the ship. One of them was questioning fishermen in Bereeda the day before the old man disappeared.”

  Jack exhaled forcefully. “Do you know where the island is?”

  Ahmed put a finger on the chart. “Near the islands of Samhah and Darsah, within the archipelago that lies between Socotra and the Somali mainland. The island is uninhabited, though nominally under Yemeni control. We haven’t had a chance to get out there yet.”

  Jack turned to Ibrahim. “Let’s assume that our friends on Deep Explorer have got hold of this account of U-409. How do you think they are going to play it?”

  Ibrahim thought for a moment, and then pointed at the chart. “Deep Explorer is here, about two days’ sailing from Socotra. We know they’ve employed the Badass Boys from their base about two thirds of the way up the coast, only about a hundred nautical miles from the island. During piracy raids, the Boys operate from a trawler that acts as a mother ship to the fast skiffs they use to board the merchant vessels. Here maybe Deep Explorer is the mother ship, and the trawler is the vessel that’s going in. The trawler would be far less conspicuous, a factor of particular concern with the Iranians beginning to fly aggressive sorties along that sector.”

  Jack’s mind was racing. If there were a secret U-boat base on the island, could it also have been a place used by the Ahnenerbe to store the artifacts they had stolen during their expeditions in northeast Africa, from places such as Magdala? It would have made sense to transport the artifacts back to Germany by U-boat, a plan that might have been stalled indefinitely while the sea lanes were controlled by the Allies. He stared at the chart, looking at the island of Socotra and the smaller cluster to the west, midway between the Horn of Africa and the Arabian shore. Then he glanced up at Ibrahim. “You say you have good cooperation with the Yemeni navy?”

  The other man nodded. “The trouble is that they’re about as well equipped as we are, and preoccupied with their own civil war as well as the Iranian situation.”

  “I’ll speak to my friend in command of Combined Task Force 150,” Jack said. “But my guess is that they’ll only be able to react if there is an imminent threat or an incident, and what we’re able to tell them now with certainty won’t be enough to justify sending a warship when they’re under such pressure elsewhere. Our own
research ship, Seaquest, is getting here as fast as she can from her current project off Sri Lanka, but that will be several days, and I’d only be willing to commit her to those waters with a CTF 150 escort, especially given the increasing threat of air attack from the Iranians.”

  Ibrahim sat upright. “Then we have no choice. This is a situation that calls for direct action. I’m going to authorize the deployment of our own assets.”

  “How soon can you get us out to that island?”

  Ibrahim glanced at the officer on his other side. “Commander Fazahid and I will work up the operational details. My plan would be to send one of the two missile boats based in the northeast of the country, the closest we have to the island. We’ll fly you up with a section of marines by helicopter to join the boat and be ready to embark within twelve hours. I will take command of the vessel myself. Even if we overtake the trawler, we have to work on the assumption that the pirates might already be on the island, and that there could be a showdown. The Badass Boys sound like a joke, but I assure you they are not. They’re hardened fighters from Mogadishu who were involved in numerous atrocities before they were recruited into the gang. They show no mercy, and we will show them none either. With these people, you shoot to kill.”

  Jack got up, took out his phone and glanced at his texts. “Zaheed’s outside waiting for us now. I need to update him and get in touch with IMU, and then visit the British Embassy.”

  Ahmed got up as well, picking up his cap. “If we’re looking at a submarine pen dug into the rock, it’s going to be at least partly submerged. I’m guessing that we might be needing some diving equipment.”