The Boss spat his gum into a bin, then took out a handful of green leaves from his pocket and stuffed them into one cheek. “Whatever you say, man.”
Landor turned back to Collingwood. “Drink?”
Collingwood lurched sideways again. “I think I’ll pass.”
“Straight to business, then. As soon as you called us three days ago with the heads-up on the U-boat, I took a gamble and set us on this course. You’d better be right.”
Collingwood sat down heavily on a chair beside the chart table in the center of the room, bringing his briefcase up and opening it. “I’ve never had a lead as exciting as this one in all my years researching.”
Landor sat down again opposite him and leaned forward, eyeing him intently. “I need everything you’ve got, and I mean everything. We’re only forty-eight hours from Somali territorial waters and we need to be ready to strike fast and get out of there as soon as we can. This time we’re not waiting for some joke UN inspection like we did with Clan Macpherson.”
“Is that where your friend comes in?” Collingwood gestured at the Somali. “Keeping away unwanted attention?”
“You call him the Boss.”
“That’s right.” The man spat a jet of green juice into the bin. “You call me the Boss, I call you English. The only names we need.”
Collingwood looked at him uncertainly, and back at Landor. “Right. The Boss. I’ve got it.” He clutched his briefcase to stop it sliding down the table, and then delved inside it, passing over a sheaf of papers and a file. “That contains copies of all the original source material I unearthed from the Deutsches U-Boot archive, and my summary and assessment. There’s nothing more.”
Landor arranged the material into a neat pile in front of him, and then put his hands on it. “Okay. I want a quick briefing. First, the U-boat.”
The ship lurched again, and Collingwood swallowed hard, gripping the table. “U-409. She was a top-secret Type XB cargo boat designed to be used in the trade in raw materials and gold between the Nazis and Imperial Japan, laid down in November 1942 and first deployed four months later. She carried out two successful runs right under the noses of the British and Americans, despite the fact that at least one operative at the German B-Dienst intelligence facility believed that the Allies had broken Enigma and were on to the secret trade. Luckily the operative wasn’t believed, otherwise the Battle of the Atlantic might have gone catastrophically wrong for the Allies in the middle of 1943. Not only that, but with Enigma being shut down, some of the secret U-boats that were intercepted and destroyed by the Allies on the basis of Ultra intelligence might have got through with cargos that could have changed the course of the war.”
“You mean the cargos you told me about on the phone. You’re certain of that?”
“We already knew that the U-boats on this mission were used to transport uranium ore to Japan. None of it, thankfully, was ever put to any use, other than one consignment captured by the Americans that probably went to the Manhattan Project, the A-bomb program. But the risk was always there, the terrifying possibility of the Germans or the Japanese developing a nuclear weapon. And the risk with material that remains unrecovered is still there today, only the enemy is different and the value much higher, now that we know how uranium can be used to make dirty bombs as well. A consignment of uranium worth two tons of gold back then would be worth ten times that now, and a number of potential customers have those kind of resources.”
“That’s my business, not yours,” Landor said testily. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be here, about to risk my ship in a potential war zone. Just tell me about this U-boat.”
“According to my informant, the last time anyone heard of U-409, right at the end of the war, she was heading toward the Horn of Africa off Somalia with as much gold as she could carry, as well as a secret cargo, very possibly uranium ore. Judging by the consignment captured by the Americans, it would have been unrefined, and sealed inside lead cubes to minimize radiation. There was no record of her sinking. She vanished without trace.”
“And you’re certain about the secret U-boat pen on the island?”
“It was built just before the war under instructions from the Ahnenerbe, Himmler’s so-called Department of Cultural Heritage. That in itself was odd. I can only assume that the Ahnenerbe were intending to store artifacts in it from their crazed expeditions around the world to find lost treasures, a kind of halfway house before working out a way to get them to Germany. Perhaps the captain of U-409 had been involved in transport for the Ahnenerbe at some earlier point in the war and knew its location, and then remembered it as an ideal place to stash his loot — better than surrendering to the Allies or carrying on to Japan, with the Nazi war over. I feel certain that’s where he went.”
“Your source?”
“As I told you on the phone. A verbal testimony from a former SS Ahnenerbe man who gave himself up after the war and spilled the beans to an American interrogator, in return for an assurance that he would not be executed for other crimes. Unfortunately for him, the assurance he was given could only be empty, as he had gone on to work for the SS Einsatzgruppen liquidating Jews in Ukraine; but fortunately for us, his death meant that the story stopped there until I uncovered it. Any account mentioning the uranium transport was considered so secret that no written record was ever made of it. I know about it only from speaking to a former US naval intelligence interrogator who died a decade ago. I kept the story to myself, and was only able to link it to U-409 after my visit to the Deutsches U-Boot archive last week.”
Landor held up the file. “Once again, you can assure me that nobody else knows about this?”
The ship lurched, and Collingwood gripped the table again, looking pale. He shook his head. “Listen, I’m not doing too well here. Maybe I will have that drink. Water.”
Landor opened a drawer behind him, put the file inside and locked it, then turned back to Collingwood, relaxing in his chair and smiling pleasantly. “Water won’t help. What you need is to get off this ship.”
“Jack Howard sends his greetings, by the way. Said you were old friends.”
Landor’s demeanor suddenly changed. “Jack Howard? How? You’ve been talking to him?”
“I met him at the National Archives yesterday.”
Landor glared at him. “What do you mean, you met him?”
“Quite by chance. I’m always meeting people there. He and I had ordered the same box of convoy files to look at, and had to work out between us who was going to see them first. He was looking at a file on Clan Macpherson.”
“What the hell for?” Landor exclaimed. “Clan Macpherson is a done deal. He and his sidekick Kazantzakis saw to that by doing whatever it was they did to sabotage the wreck during their dive. I never bought the story they spun about unstable munition cooking off. It’s too much of a coincidence that the wreck should blow up and slide into the abyss just after they happen to be there. I should never have agreed to that inspection. Howard has let me down once too often, and now he owes me big time.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Collingwood said. “But remember, Jack’s an archaeologist and historian, not a treasure hunter. If he was trying to get to the bottom of something in the archives, it’s not because he’s after gold.”
“I know full well what Howard is. He’s someone who has cost me far too much. Not recovering any gold from Clan Macpherson has put the whole Deep Explorer operation in jeopardy. We’re out here now on a wing and a prayer because of him.”