Jack ducked under the entrance to the tent and sat down on a folding chair, holding the mug of tea that he had just brewed up in the kitchen tent on the far side of the clearing. He took a sip and stared out at the shimmering sea visible through the tent flap, the surf at high tide lapping the foreshore only a stone’s throw away. Ahead of him, rising to a grassy knoll above the tents, was the promontory that split the bay into two coves and provided shelter from the prevailing westerlies that could blow to severe gale force even in summer. Today, though, the sea was almost dead calm, as near to flat as he had ever seen it, with only the hint of a swell from the Atlantic pulsing gently against the shoreline. It was Cornwall at its best, the sea warm enough to swim in without a wetsuit and the breeze that ruffled the grass on the edge of the clearing keeping the heat at bay.
He took a deep breath and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. After their perilous dive on the wreck of Clan Macpherson only five days before, he felt as if he had been given a reprieve, and he was still awash with the euphoria that came from survival, still buoyed by residual adrenalin. He knew that the questioning would come soon enough, the quiet discussions with Costas about what had gone wrong and what could have been done better, the occasional sleepless night. But for now he was still riding a wave of excitement over their discovery of the bronze plaque and the mystery it had opened up. The video from their helmet cameras had gone straight to their colleagues at the Institute of Palaeography in Oxford for decipherment of the symbols. Meanwhile Jack had focused on Clan Macpherson herself, researching everything he could about the circumstances of her loss and how she might have come to be carrying such an extraordinary artifact.
The IMU campus was only half an hour away, off the Fal estuary on the other side of the peninsula; he had deliberately come across this morning with time to spare before his dive on the Phoenician wreck, his first since returning from West Africa. Apart from a conservator dealing with finds in one of the other tents, the rest of the team were either on the research vessel Seafire anchored beside the wreck or underwater working on the excavation. The coastal footpath that passed the camp was quiet, not yet filled with the hikers who thronged it during the summer months, and the beaches were empty. He was itching to get on the wreck, a swim in a pool compared to Clan Macpherson, but he had wanted some time to himself in order to run through what he had discovered in the archives over the past few days and to think about what might lie ahead.
He sipped his tea, crossed his legs, and opened the file he had brought with him from the campus that morning. He still could not get the image of Clan Macpherson out of his mind. It was not so much their close shave that preoccupied him as the knowledge that something about the sinking, something about the convoy action on that day in 1943, was not quite right. The presence of a British torpedo in the wreck — a torpedo that could only have been fired by a British submarine — was baffling, to say the least. He stared at the two photos clipped to the inside of the file, the upper one showing the ship in her smart peacetime livery on the Mersey, with Liverpool in the background, and the lower one in her drab wartime gray, with guns fore and aft and her lifeboats swung out on their derricks ready for immediate use. He remembered his own first image of the ship, the looming, rusted hull and the twisted metal where the torpedo had exploded, and thought of the last sight of her by the men in the lifeboats, the vessel that had been their home disappearing in a terrifying final plunge that had transformed her into the wreck that he and Costas had seen over a hundred meters deep on the edge of the continental shelf off Africa.
Yesterday he had gone to the National Archives at Kew and had seen the original convoy dossier, including documents that would have passed through the hands of naval intelligence over those fateful days, perhaps even the code breakers at Bletchley Park who evaluated the Ultra decrypts and decided which convoys to reroute on the basis of intercepted German U-boat movement reports. He had been to Bletchley with his daughter Rebecca for a school project a couple of years previously, and remembered sitting behind the desk in Alan Turing’s office, looking at the wartime convoy chart on the wall and then out into the main operations room where the deciphered German naval orders were analyzed and passed up the line for possible action. The file he had handled at Kew yesterday had smelled musty, like stale cigarette smoke, and brought home the reality of Bletchley more than seventy years ago in the darkest days of the war: not the sanitized, scrubbed huts of the modern reconstruction but places fugged with smoke and stale sweat, with the wispy rising steam of mugs of tea, where the intelligence work was not just a mathematical puzzle but a deadly calculus of ships and men caught up in the most savage and costly sea war in history.
He sifted through the dossier, scanned copies of the originals. The first part contained the convoy commodore’s report, a fold-out pro forma with the bare facts of the convoy’s progress penned in; clipped to that had been a sheaf of pink and white slips with decrypted radio messages between the Admiralty, the convoy commodore and the Royal Navy escort commander. All of that was standard fare for a convoy file; they showed that the convoy had made a few minor course deviations at the commodore’s own discretion, none of them as a result of a rerouting order from the Admiralty. Clearly, if an Ultra intercept at Bletchley had revealed U-boats in the area, the Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Center had decided not to act on it, a decision that would have been based on a risk assessment that such action might reveal to the Germans that Ultra had been broken.
The second group of scans came not from Kew but from the Clan Line archive, a mass of documents that had survived the closure of the shipping company and been preserved as a historical record. The archivist had delved into material yet to be catalogued and had come up trumps, uncovering the report of the master, Captain Gough, after the sinking of Clan Macpherson, and an exchange between him and the director of the trade division at the Admiralty.
Jack reread the parts of the master’s report that he had highlighted after receiving the documents from the archivist the previous evening. It is now with very great regret that I report the loss of Chief Engineer Robertson, Second Engineer Marshall, Fourth Engineer MacMurtrie and fifth Engineer Cunningham, who went down with their vessel. Gough had described how, after the ship had been torpedoed, three of the deck officers and an apprentice had gone below in an attempt to shore up the breached hold, using sacks of groundnuts from the cargo like sandbags to build up a bulkhead. No praise is too high for the courageous spirit and dauntless devotion to duty that was shown by my officers, engineers and volunteer crew in their magnificent attempt to save their ship.
Jack looked up for a moment, squinting against the reflection of the sun on the sea, imagining the grim reality behind Captain Gough’s report — soaked and freezing men piling bags as the stricken ship groaned around them, and the engineers living out their worst nightmare, realizing too late that she was going under, desperately scrabbling for air space as the waters rose and the ship buckled and shrieked on its plummet to the abyssal darkness below.
He drained his tea, and then looked at the pages that had kept him awake after first reading them the evening before. Unusually for a merchant captain, Gough had been openly critical of the Admiralty. Jack could picture him as he sat down in Freetown to write his report, after seeing that the survivors from Clan Macpherson had been brought safely ashore and then hearing the terrible news that his ship was one of seven from the convoy to have been sunk that night. Even before the attack, there had been concern over the inadequate escort and the absence of air cover. A very strong feeling exists, Gough wrote, that many of these vessels, if not all, have been needlessly sacrificed. He pointed out that the armed trawlers in the escort could only do eight knots, slower even than the most sluggish of the merchantmen, and that the speed of the convoy was therefore gravely constrained. Jack read Gough’s two burning questions, sensing the ire behind the sober phrasing: whether, knowing there were submarines on the track of this convoy, it was not possible for destroyers to be sent out from Freetown to give the necessary protection; and whether the courses which the convoy was instructed to take were, in the circumstances, the right ones.