Months later, Ian told me what the captain of Clan Macpherson had reported about the fate of the mutineers, an account that was never written down and never made it into the official documentation. The first torpedo from our sub blew a hole in the side of the ship but failed to sink her. A second torpedo had been fired, but lodged in the hull without detonating. Our sub could not linger after that to launch any more torpedoes for fear that it would be seen and recognized for what it was, a British sub and not German. Meanwhile, most of the crew had got off in the boats, leaving the six mutineers on board. The captain and his officers conferred and determined to get back on the ship, ostensibly to try to save her but in fact to attempt to finish the job and scuttle her, knowing that the mutineers’ success would otherwise become known and be a propaganda coup for the enemy. Four of the engineer officers volunteered to return and pull the stopcocks. In the event, they and the mutineers went down with the ship. Whether the engineers saw the unexploded torpedo and realized it was British, we shall never know. But those merchant seamen finished our job for us, sinking their own ship.
When you saw me upset that evening of April 30, Louise, it was not just because I knew that Clan Macpherson was doomed. It was also because this operation had sealed the fate of those other ships in the convoy that were torpedoed by U-515. That morning, Ian had orchestrated the usual conference to decide which of the previous night’s Enigma decrypts to act upon — which convoys we could try to save and how much we could “push the envelope,” as they would say nowadays, without arousing German suspicions that we had broken Enigma. We made the decision not to intervene with ONS-5 but to reroute TS-37. What I didn’t know until Ian took me into his office for the telephone call to the Admiralty was that it was all a charade. What he was involved in, what I then became part of for the remainder of the war, was so secret that not even the other people in that very top-secret hut could be allowed in on it. They would see the next day that TS-37 had been hit but would just think it was bad luck; not all convoy rerouting worked. But what we did that day, what we chose not to do, cost hundreds of lives, and that still keeps me awake at night.
The losses in ONS-5 were one thing; I can live with that. We probably could not have intervened successfully with that convoy anyway, and the ensuing battle proved to be pivotal for the Atlantic war. But TS-37 was a different matter. We knew the likely interception point with U-515, and we could have saved those ships. I can name them all from memory: Corabella, Bandar Shahpour, Kota Tjandi, Nagina, City of Singapore, Mokambo, and of course Clan Macpherson. You can go to the Merchant Navy Memorial beside the Tower of London and see the names of the men, including the four engineers. I just hope that whatever treasure it was that went down with Clan Macpherson was worth their lives to keep it from the Nazis.
There you have it. Maybe there will be a trail still to follow. Perhaps divers will one day find the wreck of Clan Macpherson. It’s astonishing what’s being discovered nowadays in the ocean depths, though the images sometimes give me nightmares. Seeing those tombs in the sea brings it all back, what we were really doing at Bletchley. We may have done our bit to win the war, but it wasn’t all about those euphoric moments you see in the films. And poor Alan. I can still picture him running at night on the road to our digs outside Bletchley, passing us with a grin. I can still see him there, if I shut my eyes.
15
Louise took the letter back from Costas, and then showed them a handwritten note from the same envelope. “Fan included this as well. It’s personal. It’s where she tells me she only has a short time to live.” She tucked the note and the letter back inside the envelope, and then turned to Jack, eyeing him keenly. “Well? Was she right? Is there a trail to follow?”
Jack leaned forward on his elbows, his mind racing. “It’s an incredible story. What I can do now is show you three more photos from the wreck of Clan Macpherson. I was holding back on these until we knew where we were going with this.” He picked up the folder from the table, took out another A4-sized print and handed it to her. It showed a mass of twisted metal covered with rusticules and marine accretion, and in the center a long cylindrical object nestled in the wreckage. It was the extraordinary view that had confronted Jack when he had followed Costas into the sunken hull off Sierra Leone a week earlier.
“It’s a torpedo,” Louise said, her hand shaking slightly. “I can see the propeller.”
“Unexploded, inside the hull,” Jack said. “Now take a look at the markings.”
“I can see numbers and words, in English. It’s a British torpedo.”
“A Mark VIIIC, to be precise,” Costas said. “A submarine rather than an aerial torpedo, much bigger. We’d already concluded that the sub that fired this must have launched a pair of torpedoes almost simultaneously, and that this one entered the breach in the hold created by the explosion of the first. We were baffled at how a U-boat could have got hold of British torpedoes. Fan’s letter solves that mystery for us.”
“And the second photo?”
Jack pulled it out, and paused. “The next two are a bit blurred. By the time I got to this part of the wreck we had only minutes left in the hull. We had something of a close shave.”
She gestured at his books on the table. “So what’s new?”
“All I needed to do was to unscrew the torpedo fuse,” Costas said. “Then everything would have been fine.”
“No it would not,” Jack said firmly. “Rebecca would not have had a father. Your beach friends would have missed their volleyball partner.” He turned to Louise. “The warhead had nearly come off the torpedo when it drove into the hull, which is how you can see those markings on the base. In the process of fiddling with the fuse, my dive buddy here caused the torpedo to dislodge, fall through the wreckage and come to rest with the warhead facing downward, held in place by a few tendrils of rust. One accidental brush, one waft with a fin, and boom.”
“I thought you two always worked as a team?” she said, her eyes glinting with amusement.
Costas nodded enthusiastically. “I go ahead where there are explosives to defuse, and Jack goes ahead where there’s archaeology to be found. That’s teamwork for you.”
Jack gave him a wry look. “In this case, teamwork got us out just in time and behind a ridge of rock before the torpedo broke free and detonated, causing the entire wreck to slip down the drop-off into the abyss.”
She pointed at the first picture. “So this is all gone?”
“Well, it’s still there, in a manner of speaking,” Costas replied. “Only it’s more than a mile deep, strewn down the slope of the massive canyon that lay next to the wreck.”