‘But then the war against Japan did end, and the programme was scrapped,’ Jeremy said.
Mikhael nodded, then pursed his lips. ‘Too late for these men, though. They may wel count as the last combat casualties of the war against the Nazis.’
‘Explain,’ Jack said.
Mikhail picked out one sheet with a yel ow marker stuck to it. ‘It was the morning of the third of June 1945. The crew had only been in Nassau for two weeks, having previously been involved in the airdrop of relief supplies to the emergency hospital units dealing with survivors of the Belsen concentration camp. One of their last bombing missions had been over Berlin, an attempt to use the “Tal boy” twelve-thousand-pound bomb to break the flak-tower defences. It was their expertise with those bombs that caught the eye of the US intel igence officers scouting for pathfinder crews suitable for conversion to nuclear bombing. The bomber crews were very tightly knit, and the pathfinders were the best of the best. The psychological reports show that these were not the kind of men who desperately counted down the last missions to the end of their tour, traumatized by what they had seen and done and by the constant fear. We often forget that some men relished it. The men in this crew seem to have been pleased to be selected to go out to the Far East ahead of Tiger Force, eager to get back into action again. These were precisely the kind of men the intel igence officers would have been looking for.’
‘So that day they were on a training mission?’ Jack asked.
Mikhail nodded, then took out a photocopied map with ruled lines on it. ‘It was their last operation in an intensive week. They were due to take their Liberator across the United States to the island of Guam in the Pacific the next day. They were ful y armed as if they were on an anti-submarine patrol, with three depth charges in the bomb bay and the machine guns in the turrets ful y belted up. The depth charges were an experimental type designed to bounce on the surface of the sea, hit their target and rol under it to explode, like the famous dambuster bombs. Their mission was to fly three hundred and fifty nautical miles east of Nassau to a designated live-fire zone just north of the central Bahamas chain, find a decommissioned minesweeper that had been anchored as a target and expend al their ammunition on it before returning in a clockwise route to Nassau. Their last radio contact shows that they made it to the live-fire zone, a rectangular area of about fifty square miles extending north from the island of San Salvador. Intermittently, there’s severe electromagnetic disturbance at this location, on the edge of the abyssal plain where the Bahamas shelf extends over the Atlantic plate, an extension of the Puerto Rico Fault Line that’s stil poorly understood. It’s the kind of thing that would get Bermuda Triangle fantasists al excited, but an oceanographer col eague of mine at Columbia University thinks it might be a localized upsurge of the magma that affects the geomagnetic field, an anomaly that might also disrupt compasses.’
‘I’ve heard that before,’ Jack murmured, thinking hard. ‘About the North Anatolian Fault off Turkey, at the site of Atlantis. It makes some meteoritic materials seem heavier.’
‘That reference on the pil ar at Lixus,’ Jeremy interjected. ‘“Where the pal adion becomes heavier.”’
Jack nodded, leaning over and staring at the map.
‘I take it there was no more contact.’
‘None whatsoever. Over the next few days hurricane conditions prevented search-and-rescue flights, and by the time the weather had cleared, the Nassau station commander deemed that there was little chance the crew had survived. They found the anchored minesweeper completely untouched, so assumed the Liberator must have gone down before reaching it, on a flight path that was meant to take them on a compass bearing of thirty degrees from the northern tip of San Salvador out to sea towards a coral ridge where the minesweeper was anchored.
The aircraft was meant to attack at very low level, and the base commander’s log concludes that she may have clipped the waves in the rising wind and gone into the sea intact, accounting for the absence of floating debris. That was pretty unusual for the Liberator, which tended to break up on ditching, but the pilot, Squadron Leader White, was exceptional y skil ed. The case was closed, but was briefly reopened nearly three weeks later, when a horrifying discovery was made almost three hundred nautical miles south-east of their target off the far end of the Bahamas chain.’
He pul ed out another photograph and passed it to Jack, who took it and stared. ‘Jesus,’ he said quietly.
‘I’ve seen harrowing pictures of survivors of wartime sinkings who’d endured weeks at sea in lifeboats, but this is one of the worst.’ He stared for a moment longer, and then passed it to Jeremy. It was a low-level aerial photo of a one-man inflatable boat Jack recognized from the survival equipment his father had once shown him in the RAF museum at Hendon. The pontoons were smudged and criss-crossed with markings. Inside was a man, apparently naked, beneath a scrappy awning that seemed to have been rigged using his battledress and life jacket. He was in a foetal position, but his face protruded under one side of the awning, blackened and horribly ulcerated.
‘Surely he can’t have been alive,’ Jeremy said.
‘He was, just,’ Mikhail replied. ‘He was so dehydrated that his eyebal s had shrunk into his head.
After his emergency rations ran out, he’d survived by fishing, making his first catch using pieces of his own flesh as bait. He’d been trying to drink his own blood.
That’s what those markings on the pontoons are, like finger painting, al kinds of numbers and slashes that must have been his way of marking the days. The Catalina aircraft that spotted him managed to land on the sea and pick him up, and he was taken back to Nassau. By then, 111 OTU unit had departed and everything was winding down. In the hospital he was debriefed by the last remaining US intel igence officer on the base, an inexperienced man who had been sent out to take the records of the secret programme back to Washington for classified storage. His report from that day is in the file. The rescued airman had no chance of recovery and died that night, but during brief periods of lucidity he told the story that caught my eye when I unearthed that box in the archives almost fifty years later.’
‘Go on,’ Jack said.
‘His name was Flight Sergeant Brown. He was the rear gunner of Liberator FK-856. You won’t find his name or those of any of the other crew on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website, as official y they were lost in a peacetime training accident. He was English but had emigrated to Canada to make a new life on the prairies. His parents had been kil ed in the Blitz and he had no other recorded family. He was twenty-six when he died. From the debriefing, it’s clear that the pilot was talking to the crew right up to the plane’s final moments, fighting to keep it level as it dropped towards the sea. The Boulton Paul rear turret on the RAF Liberators was a deathtrap at high altitude if a plane went down, but it often came away on impact in a forced landing, and that’s probably what saved him.
He said there was a fire, but the pilot managed to ditch the plane nose-up, dousing the rear turret with seawater before the flames reached him and causing the turret to break away. The Liberator’s poor ditching characteristics were mainly a result of the lightly built bomb-bay doors, which tended to col apse on impact, causing the fuselage to fil up quickly and sink. He said that when he recovered consciousness the aircraft had disappeared and the pilot and other crew were nowhere to be seen. At that location the plane could wel have gone down beyond the abyssal wal , where the ocean is more than a mile deep, and by the time the surviving crew had struggled out of their harnesses it may have been too deep for any hope of escape.’
‘So a fire caused the crash?’ Jeremy asked.
‘He claimed they were shot down.’
‘ Shot down? ’ Jeremy said in disbelief. ‘Nearly a month after the war had ended? No way.’
‘That’s what the intel igence officer thought. Flight Sergeant Brown was delirious, in and out of consciousness, and I think the officer recorded what I’m about to tel you only as a ma
tter of getting something into the debriefing report before closing the file. Brown kept repeating that they had depth-charged a U-boat over a blue hole, but had been shot down. The officer noted in pencil on the side that he’d checked Brown’s personnel record and seen that before joining the pathfinders he had done a tour with Coastal Command and had a similar experience, flying rear gunner in a Liberator in 1943 that depth-charged a U-boat off Newfoundland but was hit by machine-gun fire and forced to ditch. The officer evidently thought that the 1943 ditching was a traumatic experience that came out in Brown’s delirium. Even the blue-hole story was dismissed out of hand. Blue holes are a striking feature of the Bahamas from the air, and the officer noted that from his position of boredom cramped in the rear turret for hours on end, Brown may have become fixated on them.’
‘You mean the sinkholes where so many cave divers die?’ Jeremy said.
Jack nodded. ‘The Bahamas land mass is a limestone plateau, and during the last Ice Age the sea level was over a hundred metres lower than it is today.
Rainwater percolated through the limestone and created
huge
cavern
systems
that
became
submerged as the sea rose after the end of the Ice Age. Where the roofs of the caverns have col apsed, they appear as deep blue holes in the reefs, or as depressions where the limestone fragments from the ceiling have col apsed and fil ed up the caverns.’
Jeremy turned to Mikhail. ‘But when you read the file, you believed Brown’s story?’
Mikhail paused. ‘I’ve been to war, and I know about post-traumatic flashbacks. The streets and hospitals of Russia are strewn with veterans of the Afghan war who’ve never been able to deal with it. The trauma, the flashback, is rarely generalized or conflated. It isn’t a mishmash of memories. It tends to be one specific event, remembered in exacting detail.’
‘You’re saying that Brown’s account wasn’t a product of delirium.’
‘I’m saying that if he was traumatized by his U-boat experience with Coastal Command in 1943, he wouldn’t have seen a blue hole in the flashback. He would have remembered everything from that event in 1943, but not added other memories. And anyway, the trauma idea doesn’t ring true. The intel igence officer was assuming what we might assume, that experiences such as that 1943 ditching must have been traumatic. But that’s just wrong. Flying night raids over Germany was about the most terrifying thing a man could do in that war, yet Brown and his fel ow crew had done it over and over again, and volunteered for more. There was a reason they were selected for the nuclear programme. They were the toughest of the tough. Some people just don’t get traumatized.’
Jack peered at the map. ‘If he real y was describing one specific blue hole, the trouble is there are hundreds of them in the Bahamas over several thousand square miles. Al we have to go on is the last reported position of the aircraft over that sector north of the island of San Salvador.’
‘I looked into this with my oceanographer friend,’
Mikhail said. ‘At the co-ordinates of the target minesweeper noted in the file, the Liberator would have been beyond the land-mass plateau of the Bahamas and probably over the abyssal plain, beyond the huge underwater cliffs that run up from the Puerto Rico Fault along the Atlantic side of the Bahamas towards the coast of Florida. The plain is at least a mile deep and you won’t find blue holes there.
But there’s one crucial feature we noticed. Off San Salvador there’s an undersea ridge that extends about twenty-five nautical miles north-east, rising up from the abyssal plain. The detailed bathymetry was unknown in 1945, but I wondered whether there might be sections of reef shal ow enough to have been upstanding land mass in the Ice Age, enough for rainwater erosion to have formed caverns that might have become blue holes as the sea level rose. We just don’t know enough about the sea and reef at that point. That whole sector was a weapons test range, designated in April 1945 and in the event seeing little use. After the war it became part of the Atlantic Test and Evaluation range for anti-submarine weapons, continuing to be an exclusion zone even after the decision had been made to use another sector of undersea trench closer to Nassau for most testing.
The San Salvador ridge extends beyond the twelve-nautical-mile Bahamas territorial limit, but the weapons test zone remains in force beyond the end of the ridge and we couldn’t find any record of exploration or diving there. So it’s possible that there is a shal ow reef and a blue hole that has never been properly charted.’
Jack reached over and picked up the photograph showing the raft with the airman’s body slumped inside. He looked closely at the dark smears on the pontoons and the mass of marks the man had made with his own blood. He could just make out a sequence of numbers, possibly repeated several times, but the image needed to be magnified and sharpened for there to be any hope of reading it. He stared, his mind racing. Something was niggling him, something his father had told him when they had seen the survival equipment at the museum at Hendon, about how pilots were trained to think of what information the crew who escaped from a ditched aircraft might need to cal in a rescue. He needed to get this image to Lanowski.
At that moment Mikhail’s two-way radio crackled and he spoke into it briefly, then got up. ‘Okay. That was Ben. There’s a propane tanker truck beginning to back down the lane. This was scheduled. Ben’s going to remain concealed, and wil stay at the top of the lane until he’s relieved by John. I need to go out and make sure the path’s clear for the men to drag the hose to the propane tank. It’s hidden under a cedar growth beyond the barn.’
‘I’l come with you,’ Jeremy said, getting up and stretching. ‘I need some fresh air. I’l see if Rebecca’s out of the shower yet.’
‘Can I use the internet and a scanner?’ Jack asked.
Mikhail pointed to a monitor on a desk in an alcove.
‘Be my guest. It can be a little slow out here. There’s Skype if you need it.’
Mikhail and Jeremy left the room together, and Jack went over to the desk and sat down. He opened up the IMU home page and quickly logged on, then accessed his email account and clicked on the Skype. He checked his watch. Seaquest II was in a different time zone, one hour ahead of Bermuda, and he guessed that by now Lanowski and Costas would have their heads down over the computers in the operations room. He picked up the landline phone and dial ed IMU Headquarters in Cornwal . The phone was answered immediately. ‘Hel o, this is Jack Howard. Please patch me through to Seaquest II. Get me a secure line. This is a priority cal .’
21
Seconds later, the line crackled as the satel ite link connected Jack to the officer of the watch on Seaquest II, and then he was through to the operations room. A slightly annoyed voice answered.
‘Lanowski here.’
‘This is Jack. Switch on your Skype.’
‘Jack!’ The voice lightened up. ‘I was just in the process of terraforming the Caribbean during the Ice Age.’ A face materialized on Jack’s screen, the familiar lank fringe and little round glasses staring somewhere just below the webcam, presumably at another screen. Lanowski looked up and peered closely into the camera. ‘The computer isn’t up to it, as usual. But I refuse to dumb down and give it simplified data. Computer programs are only as big as the brains that create them. Costas tel s me I need to make my own, and he’s right. But meanwhile here’s the score. We’ve just been looking at the Bahamas outer ridge abyssal plain. Interesting layering of megaturbitides along the fault line, with magma extrusions rising alarmingly high into the plate divide.
Drop anything down there and it would sink through about a mile of silt and then into the molten core of the earth. I’ve got James Macleod and the geology team at IMU very interested in doing a sub-bottom probe survey.’
‘Is Costas with you now?’
An unshaven face appeared from one side of the screen. ‘I’m with you, Jack.’
‘Okay. Keep al that geomorphology data up and running. I�
�ve got a possible lead from Mikhail.’ He quickly ran through the story of the Liberator attack and the airman’s account. As he talked, Lanowski emailed through a link that flashed on his screen.
Jack clicked on it, opening up a detailed topographical and bathymetric map of the Bahamas islands. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I can visualize the flight route east from Nassau to the sector of sea north of the island of San Salvador.’
‘That’s beside the fault line we’ve been looking at, about dead centre on the map,’ Lanoswki said.
Jack zoomed in on the island. ‘Yesterday I cal ed James Macleod and asked him to trawl through our database for anything that might hint at undersea research in the Caribbean in the late 1930s, anything odd. I need to know if he found anything on the Bahamas.’
‘We’re on to it already. He’s been liaising with us this morning,’ Lanowski said. ‘Let me give him a cal now. This might take a few minutes. Stay online.’
Costas’ face reappeared on the screen. ‘How’s tricks?’
‘Mikhail’s got this place locked down,’ Jack replied.
‘Ben and the MI6 guy are doing perimeter security.
They know Saumerre’s men have been shadowing Rebecca since she arrived in New York from Turkey two days ago. The farm is about as remote as you can get in the Adirondacks, but Mikhail’s not taking any chances.’
‘I found out something interesting,’ Costas said.
‘The MI6 file on Saumerre passed to our security people shows that he’s a diver. He trained at Cambridge when he was a student and qualified with the British Sub-Aqua Club. If he thinks this place in the Caribbean is going to give him his biggest prize, he might want to get involved personal y this time and not just leave it to his henchmen.’
‘They’l al be divers too. You remember his previous men, the Russians we encountered in the mineshaft in Poland last year?’
Gods of Atlantis Page 41