As he said this, he banked the chopper to one side giving Sparke and Beth a clear view of the ground below. Sparke could not make out what the pilot was talking about. The ice was uniformly white.
"Object to your left. See the shadow?" asked the pilot.
Now Sparke understood. On an almost endless plain of white, the sharp, dark shadow now looked glaringly obvious.
"There is solid-looking ground about fifteen hundred metres east," said the pilot. "We'll set down there." The chopper buzzed low over the strange steeple-shaped object, the dull thudding noise being the first sign of human presence here since Lt. Opitz and the expedition commander Filchner had passed over one hundred years before.
Chapter Thirty One
Feldkirchen looked like a cluster of toy buildings from the wooded hill where Opitz and his men stood. He could see his father's farm at the far end of the village.
They had taken scores of small towns since Bremen, and every time the question was the same. Should they charge in, making a lot of noise to scare away any opposition or did they want to find a fight in order to inflict the maximum amount of casualties possible? In the end, it normally came down to a guess and a gamble.
The chances seemed low that a small farming village would have much of an armed revolutionary presence, but they had been surprised before. Their favoured method in a situation like this was to drive in at high speed, rattling over cobbles with the German national flag flying from every vehicle then pull up screeching in front of the largest public building in sight. Nine times out of ten there would be nothing more than a few sad pot shots from fleeing revolutionaries.
Feldkirchen looked quiet, but there was damage visible. The signposts on the main roads had been chopped down, the flagpoles stood bare in the pale blue winter sky, one of the buildings, perhaps the grain store thought Opitz, had scorch marks on its walls and had holes in the roof. The police station had no glass in its windows.
Opitz turned his back on the town below and looked at his small detachment. He had seven vehicles in his column: one armoured car, three trucks, and some touring cars which had been pressed into the service of the Friekorps.
"Send the armoured car and a truck with ten men in from the east on that road over there," said Opitz to the Driver. "We will see them from here and start moving as soon as they come out from the trees."
The Driver nodded and walked back to the column. A few moments later the two vehicles pulled out of the line and headed back down the hill to take the eastern approach. Within ten minutes, Opitz saw them crest a low pass and begin heading directly towards the town. He raised his whistle to his lips and blew twice, the ready sign.
"Keep down and keep your eyes open." The men quickly crouched down inside their vehicles and raised their weapons to ready state. Opitz did not give too many orders, so it was worth listening to when he did. "Do not be the first to fire, and only fire if you see a clear threat. There is movement amongst the buildings, but don't assume it is threatening." He paused for a moment. "If you see anything that appears to be a threat to you or your comrades, shoot to kill."
He climbed into the cab of his truck, blew his whistle again and the column moved off, down the hill into town, the sudden roar of several engines seeming impossibly loud over the frozen ground.
The closer they got, the more nervous Opitz became. The activity looked wrong. There was no focus for it. People were moving near the main road and on the outskirts. There was even some movement at roof height in the few tall buildings in the middle of town.
In the short time that he had been fighting with the Freikrops, Opitz had learned to read activity for the risks that it might signal. This did not look like people preparing for armed defence, but whatever it was, the sooner they were in town, and the harder they arrived, the better.
"Faster," he told the Driver. "Straight in and stop at the big building on your left." Then he hung out of the cab and waved to the cars and trucks behind.
The column hurtled in to the small town, dozens of rifles aimed at rooftops and windows; people scattered out of the path of the rattling convoy, but made no attempt to hide. The vehicles came to a screeching halt in the small cobbled square at the heart of the village, the men leaping from the trucks and running into the buildings that surrounded it, their steel-shod boots clattering on the frozen stone.
Two-dozen villagers stood like statues watching the sudden frenzy of activity. Some were standing by wheelbarrows, others held brooms and buckets full of debris, three men were mixing plaster on a wooden board on the ground, many carried tools. Opitz looked around at the village where he had grown up, barely able to recognise where he was.
Most of the damage seemed to be to signs. The names of companies had been painted over, Imperial Eagles had been smashed off of the few buildings that had borne them, the old notice board that stood between the inn and the livery stable had been painted in red primer.
His men had finished checking the buildings and now began to gather again in the square, already adopting the air of sullen boredom that soldiers seem to naturally adopt when they are not directly engaged in doing something. Opitz walked slowly over to the door of the Village Hall where a small knot of civilians now stood, dressed in what remained of their best suits.
"Munich is liberated. There will be trucks here in a few days looking for food. There will be money, real money, to pay for everything." Opitz looked at the civilians staring at him. "You are cleaning up. Was there much damage?"
"Not so much to the buildings, only what you see," said the youngest of the group of men. "But they took everything for the city for the Soviets."
"If you have nothing left to sell, then the trucks will leave empty. There will be no forced requisitions, but then you will have no money."
For a long moment an uneasy silence fell over the square.
"Are you the son of Old Opitz? Are you the navy man?" asked the civilian.
The question came as a blow to Opitz that he had not expected. He was home, but he was barely remembered, and then only as the son of his father. In truth, he had spent barely three months here since he was sixteen. Naval Academy, then the Antarctic, then the war, and now the war against the Bolsheviks. He felt suddenly very old.
"I am Leutnant Opitz, yes." He stared closely at the men before him. The last time he had seen any of them he had been a child and basically invisible to them. Now he stood at the head of dozens of armed men with a rifle over his shoulder, negotiating with his own village to buy food for a starving city.
"When the trucks come, I will be here. If anyone wants to sell food to the city, I will personally guarantee they will be paid. Are there any Reds still here?"
"No, they're gone. The last of them left by train when we heard that the army had arrived in Munich. We have been clearing up since they left." The man gestured around at the people, who all seemed engaged in returning their village to its tidy pre-revolutionary condition.
Opitz saluted the men. "I leave you to your work."
He turned and walked along the narrow street towards where his father's farm was located. He smiled slightly as he reached the small village library, a place that probably held more happy memories for him than even his home. His thoughts were interrupted almost immediately by a series of dark, low sounds, like someone grunting.
As he rounded the corner of the building he saw a tableau that, despite the horrors of his young life, shocked Opitz to his core. An elderly man lay on the ground, curled up with his arms over his head, trying vainly to protect himself from the blows being rained on him by two men. They were Opitz's men. As soon as they saw him they stopped, breathing hard at their exertions.
"He’s a Red Jew," said one. Opitz looked at the man who spoke as though he was a worm. Unlike the others he was not carrying a rifle, but had a short shovel slung over his shoulder, its edge sharpened to a blade. He had been one of the first men to follow Opitz when he charged the Bolshevik positions in Bremen and now they stared at each
other across the prone body of the old man.
It took Opitz less than two seconds to sling his rifle off his shoulder, chamber a round and shoot the man in the head. The second man froze with shock. Two seconds later he too lay dead. The shots brought a noisy clatter of men from the square. In the lead was the Driver. Almost a dozen armed men looked at the scene before them. Two of their comrades lay dead on the ground with Opitz standing over them, rifle in hand. The old civilian lay curled on the ground, obviously badly hurt, but moving. Opitz turned and spoke.
"You two men, take the old man to the house of the doctor. The rest of you take these bodies to the edge of the village and bury them in the field."
He looked coldly at the Driver. "Contact Munich. Tell them the area is secure and that we expect food to be delivered from the farms so long as we can pay. Tell them I shot two cowards who disobeyed my orders."
For a few long seconds the Driver looked at Opitz. Then he slowly reached for the pistol he always wore on his belt. Pulling it from its holster, he raised it towards Opitz.
"I will tell Munich," he said, slowly turning the gun so that the butt faced Opitz. "I think, perhaps you had better take this now. You may need it."
Chapter Thirty Two
In a quiet London office, the Chief Secretary lifted his phone and began to make a series of calls. The first two calls went to contacts in Germany, two more went to Spain, and a further two to numbers in the UK. Within ten minutes, the recipients of these calls had begun to make calls of their own. The Germans spoke with senior contacts in the media in Munich and Frankfurt, the Spanish spoke with their own media, and then called some people they knew in the Argentinian news networks. In the UK, the massive British communications and surveillance operation at GCHQ flexed slightly and began to scan the world's communications network, looking for mentions of a dozen new key words and phrases.
The Chief Secretary ordered tea and settled to down to watch the world's media go into action. Before the tea arrived, the phone in the tiny Feldkirchen Library had begun to ring.
Normally the small website of the library had a few dozen hits per day, all from local residents. Within the hour it was being hit by queries from a dozen European cities. Then the first Argentinian users began landing.
What the new visitors were seeing was a page-by-page facsimile of the navigation journal of the Santa Simone uploaded onto their screens with translations into modern Spanish, German, and English. On another tab was a graphical plot of the ship's course for each day of its last fateful voyage. A third section showed the route of the Second German Antarctic Expedition.
Although the website was the original Feldkirchen Library one, the pages, the documentation, the translation, and the graphics all came from Sparke's team, who were showing their gratitude to the library by providing some free resources in way of corporate sponsorship.
Within an hour of the first calls by the Chief Secretary, media websites around the world began running the story of 'The Lost Argentinian South Pole Expedition'. Once the raw information was out, it created a momentum that put it beyond any management or spin. It had an extensive entry on Wikipedia four hours after the Chief Secretary's first call.
The fact that the expedition had taken place at all and the likelihood that any evidence could still be at the location identified in the journals was swiftly eclipsed by the story of the voyage itself. Experienced sailors and famous yachtsmen were interviewed and all had the same perspective. The plot of the ship told the story of a sea journey from hell.
Of the many interviews and analyses, the one given on Argentinian radio by one of their most noted south Atlantic yachtsmen, Hector Bertolinni, was one of the best known and became, in effect, the standard telling of the tale.
Interviewer: Rather than continuing to head south towards Antarctica, the ship suddenly seems to have turned directly west for several days before changing course completely and heading east. Can you give us any explanation for this?
Bertolinni: I am afraid that this is something many sailors have seen before. This is the track of a ship caught in a very heavy storm. The weather in those waters moves from west to east; in a heavy storm it is impossible to sail side-on to the waves, you need to take it head-on or try and run before it.
Interviewer: So first they tried to fight directly into the storm?
Bertolinni: If you face a storm you have some chance to see the waves as they come to you, at least in the daylight. If a big wave hits you side-on you are finished. If a wave takes you beam-on, you can roll over and sink in one minute. They had no choice.
Interviewer: So why reverse course to the east?
Bertolinni: There is simply only so much a vessel and her crew can take. Heading into a storm means no sleep, it means taking waves over the bow every few minutes. It creates constant strain on a ship with the risk that the sea might break its way into the hold.
Interviewer: So turning was the last resort?
Bertolinni: They would have turned because they had to. Running with the sea would lessen the damage to the ship, but meant giving up any way of fighting against the storm. They fought the storm head on for more than six days and barely moved forward fifty miles.
Interviewer: And once they turned around with the storm at their back?
Bertolinni: At that point you are in a race between how long the storm will last and how much damage your ship can endure. It seems that this was a long storm. They headed east for days, pushed by the storm behind them.
Interviewer: So why do you think they continued to head south after the storm? Why not return home?
Bertolinni: The only reasons I can imagine is that either they chose to continue with their mission, or their ship was unable to make it back home due to damage or ice.
Interviewer: They eventually landed on the coast of Antarctica.
Bertolinni: Yes, you can see from the plot that it was the first land they saw. From the day they set sail from Buenos Aires, they never saw land until they reached their final location.
In Argentina, shock turned to fury within the government as they saw the world's media swiftly spread a story which seemed to fly directly in the face of their own version of the last expedition of the Santa Simone. The route of the ship now being viewed around the world took the ship nowhere near the land which they had planned to say had been claimed and charted as Argentinian.
A government press spokesman was pushed in front of the Argentinian media to comment on the sudden discovery of this national historical event. At the end of every response he made to questions, he reiterated that the actual route of the ship had still to be verified.
In his office in London, the Chief Secretary watched the news spread like a grass fire, quite content with what six phone calls could accomplish.
Chapter Thirty Three
The silence of the ice field was stunning. After days of flying and sailing, to be suddenly standing on a surface that did not move and where there was no engine noise or vibration was like a wave of calm breaking over Sparke.
The blades of the small helicopter slowly spun to a halt as Beth Brownlee pulled their equipment from the hold. She would tow a small sledge carrying a pile of equipment, tools, satellite communications, and cameras. The ice and snow underfoot was solid so they could walk easily without skis or crampons.
As well as several layers of bulky survival clothing, both Beth and Sparke wore shoulder mounted cameras with wide-angle lenses. The cameras and the microphones they carried relayed their data to the satellite communication system on the sled. The feed from both of them was uploaded to a hosting site which linked directly to the now-expanded website of Feldkirchen Library and was made available to anyone who could access the web.
Half a dozen more phone calls from the Chief Secretary made sure that all the right people found the site.
At first, the home page of the site contained nothing but a short message saying, "Welcome to the home page of the Commercial Survey Team inspection trip to
a site of potential cultural importance. Antarctica."
By the time Sparke and Beth were ready, the site was being watched by more than fifty major media organisations and messages relating to the website had begun cascading through Twitter and a host of other social media.
Suddenly, the home page of the site flickered and the screen split in two, each showing the direct feed from the cameras which Beth and Sparke wore. To the helicopter pilots, watching from a few yards away, the two looked comical, standing facing each other so that the cameras could capture the other person.
"Hello, my name is Peter Sparke and we are conducting an assessment of an area of potential historical or cultural importance. This site was identified through research carried out in Europe related to a commercial survey of a nearby seabed area. This actual area of land is not part of a commercial survey."
There was a pause, then Sparke pointed to Beth and made a waving motion with his hand.
"Hello, my name is Doctor Elizabeth Brownlee, accompanying Mr. Sparke. Our objective is to understand the nature of some slight anomalies in the landscape which are visible from the air. At first inspection from the air they seem potentially to be man-made. Okay, let's go see what we can find."
Sparke was pleased at Beth's calmness with the camera, and fell into step alongside her as she moved over a small hillock towards the shapes in the snow. As they walked, she kept up a gentle chatty description of the terrain, the weather, and the visibility. Occasionally, she would pose a conversational question to Sparke and their easy discussion kept the viewers, who now numbered over a thousand, glued to their screens.
"Now, we are just coming over the crest of the low hillock," said Beth. "The object we saw from the air is clearly visible. From here it looks like about eight or ten metres high, steeply angled on all sides...perhaps five metres across at the base." She stopped and turned her body back and forth to make sure the camera she was carrying captured an image of the whole area before it was tracked up by Sparke and herself. He copied her movements so the split screen on the website showed slow scans of the landscape.
The Kaiser’s Navigator (Peter Sparke Book 2) Page 14