Remi took a breath, looked at Sam with wide-eyed anticipation, then lifted open the hatch. Immediately she wrinkled her nose and jerked her head back. “Oh, God, that’s awful. . . .”
“I guess that answers the question of whether her crew’s still aboard,” Sam said.
“Yeah, there’s no doubt about that,” Remi replied, pinching shut her nose and staring into the open hatch. “He’s staring me right in the eye.”
The body was wearing a Kriegsmarine cap and a dark blue jumpsuit. Then again, the word “body” seemed a woefully inadequate description of what Sam and Remi were looking at.
Trapped inside the dry, airless interior of the Molch for sixty-four years, the corpse had undergone a transformation Sam could only describe as part liquification, part mummification.
“Pretty safe to assume he suffocated,” Remi said. “Once he was dead the body would have started decaying, but without oxygen the process ground to a halt, leaving him . . . half-baked, if you will.”
“Oh, that’s lovely, dear. I’ll carry the image always.”
The position of the remains, which lay sprawled on the deck at the bottom of the ladder with one petrified arm draped over a rung, spoke volumes about the man’s final hours or minutes. Trapped inside this darkened cylinder, knowing death was tightening its grip on him with every inhalation of oxygen, it seemed natural that he would have gravitated to his only exit, half hoping for some miracle that he knew in his heart would never come.
“I assume you won’t mind staying up here while I poke around,” Sam said.
“Be my guest.”
He clicked on the flashlight, then slid his legs into the hatch, probed with his foot until it found a rung, then started downward. A few feet from the bottom, Sam stepped off the ladder, opposite the body, and used his arms to lower himself to the deck.
Immediately Sam felt a gloom wash over him. He wasn’t particularly claustrophobic, but this was different somehow. Not high enough to allow him to straighten up and barely wider than his outstretched arms, the interior had a dungeonlike feel to it. The bulkheads, painted in a dull gray, were festooned with cables and pipes, all seemingly going everywhere and nowhere at once.
“How is it?” Remi called down.
“Disgusting is the only word to describe it.”
Sam knelt down beside the corpse and began carefully checking the pockets. All were empty save the breast pocket, inside which he found a wallet. He handed this up to Remi, then turned and moved forward.
According to what few descriptions of the Molch’s interior he had been able to find, the front section of the bow held the craft’s main battery and behind this, between a pair of trim ballast tanks, an operator’s seat with rudimentary controls for steering, navigation, speed, power, and trimming, as well as a primitive hydrophone for detecting enemy vessels.
Under the operator’s seat Sam found a small toolbox and a leather holster containing a Luger pistol and a spare magazine. These he pocketed.
Bolted to the bulkhead beneath each trim tank was a rectangular footlocker. In one he found a half dozen water jugs, all empty, and twice that number of empty food tins. In the other footlocker he found a leather satchel and a pair of hard-backed black leather journals. He slipped them into the satchel, then took one last look around. Something caught his eye: a piece of fabric sticking out from behind the footlocker. He knelt down and saw that it was a burlap sack; inside was a hinged wooden box the size and shape of a loaf of bread. He tucked the sack under his arm and returned to the ladder, then handed all the items up to Remi and climbed up. At the top, he stopped and looked back down at the corpse.
“We’ll make sure you get home, Captain,” he whispered.
Back on deck, Sam held the line steady to make Remi’s leap back to the bank easier. As he braced his feet, his toe bumped the burlap sack. From inside came the muted tinkle of glass.
Curious now, they both knelt down on the deck. Remi opened the sack and slid out the box, which was devoid of markings. Gingerly she pried open the brass latch and swung open the lid, revealing a sheaf of what looked like aged oilskin. Remi peeled back a flap.
For a long ten seconds neither of them spoke, gaping at the object catching the sunlight. Remi murmured, “It can’t be. Can it?”
It was a bottle, a green glass wine bottle.
Sam didn’t reply, instead using his right index finger to lift the end a few inches out of the box, revealing the punt.
“Good Lord . . . ” Remi murmured.
The symbol etched into the glass was all too familiar:
CHAPTER 10
LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA
That poor man,” Remi said. “To die like that . . . I can’t imagine.”
“I don’t want to imagine,” Sam replied.
They were stretched out on chaise lounges in the solarium surrounded by potted palms and flowing ferns, the midday sun highlighting every tone of the Tuscan flagstone tiles. It was one of their favorite rooms in the house, not an easy choice by any measure.
Sitting atop the cliffs overlooking Goldfish Point and the indigo waters of the Pacific, the Fargos’ home and base of operations was a four-story, twelve-thousand-square-foot Spanish-style house with vaulted maple-beamed ceilings and enough windows and skylights to keep their maintenance man busy for eight hours every month.
The upper floor held Sam and Remi’s master suite and below this, one flight down, were four guest suites, a living room, a dining room, and a kitchen/great room that jutted over the cliff. On the second floor a gymnasium containing both aerobic and circuit-training exercise equipment, a steam room, a HydroWorx endless-lap pool, and a thousand feet of hardwood floor space for Remi to practice her fencing and Sam his judo.
The ground floor sported two thousand square feet of office space for Sam and Remi and an adjoining workspace for Selma, complete with three Mac Pro workstations coupled with thirty-inch cinema displays and a pair of wall-mounted thirty-two-inch LCD televisions. Mounted on the east wall was Selma’s pride and joy, a fourteen-foot, five-hundred-gallon saltwater aquarium.
Sam told Remi, “We can always hope he went quickly and peacefully.”
The man in question, the poor soul they’d found sprawled at the bottom of the Molch’s ladder, now had, thanks to the journals they’d found aboard, a name: Manfred Boehm. Korvettenkapitän(Commander) Manfred Boehm. One of the journals had turned out to be the Molch’s log; the other, Boehm’s private diary dating back to the early days of World War II.
Armed with rough translations courtesy of some software, Sam and Remi had dived headfirst into what quickly began to feel like the last will and testament of both Boehm and his submarine, which they soon learned had a given name: the UM-34—Underwater Boat, Molch type, thirty-fourth constructed.
Sam had been concentrating on the UM-34’s log, trying to piece together where it had come from and how it had ended up trapped in an inlet on the Pocomoke River, while Remi worked through Boehm’s diary, learning about the man beyond the uniform and rank.
After packing up the skiff and leaving the Molch behind, they’d thought it wise to avoid Snow Hill and Maxine’s Bait ‘n’ Boat, assuming Scarface and his friends would be lurking about awaiting their return. Instead, they’d motored ten miles downriver and put ashore just south of Willow Grove, where Highway 113 and the Pocomoke ran closest to one another. From there they’d first called for a Pocomoke City taxi, then Maxine’s. Sam kept his explanation vague and short, offering a generous tip for troubling them to come down and collect the skiff. His final call went to the B&B’s manager, who agreed to ship their belongings back to California.