Jack passed her the second photo. “And that includes what you can see here.”
She stared at the image from Jack’s helmet camera, her hands shaking. “Crikey,” she said quietly. “So they really were on board. Gold bars.”
“That’s the reason we were diving on the wreck in the first place, as I explained to you on the phone. A researcher for the salvage company we were monitoring had got hold of a bill of lading, evidently made by an over-scrupulous clerk in Durban, who must have filed it away before the security people supervising the lading could see and destroy it. It showed that Clan Macpherson was in Durban to pick up a consignment of South African gold.”
“There are a lot of bars there.”
“About five hundred million pounds in today’s money.”
“Crikey. The salvage company can’t have been too pleased about your little escapade, then.”
“Not too pleased, though we told them nothing about seeing the gold. Apart from a select few at IMU and those of us here in this room now, nobody else has seen that photo or knows what we found. As far as the salvage company is concerned, we drew a blank and the explosion was just an unhappy accident with unstable Second World War ordnance. Being a treasure salvor is generally like that, one disappointment after another.”
Louise’s eyes glinted. “You can rely on me. I’m a Bletchley girl. I’m pretty good at keeping secrets.”
Jack looked at her intently. “I’m thinking of those Nazi agents in Durban that Fan mentioned. In a major port like Durban, their day-to-day work would presumably have been spying on ships’ movements and cargo lading. The arrival of such a large consignment of gold from the mines would have been difficult for the authorities to conceal.”
“What are you suggesting?” Jeremy said.
“I’m suggesting that there might be more to this than meets the eye. More than Fan was able to tell in her letter. Bletchley was all about folds of secrecy, right? Every time something is revealed about the workings of that place, it seems to point to another operation. Open the wrapping and you reveal another layer.”
Costas eyed him. “You mean the story of Clan Macpherson is not just about the Ahnenerbe and ancient antiquities. Ask me, and we’re talking about a heist. A Nazi gold heist.”
“A heist, yes, but one that fits into the wider picture, the operation that Fan and Bermonsey had sworn never to reveal. An operation that would have been a far greater concern to Churchill than lost Jewish antiquities. The reason why I think there was a British submarine on station off Sierra Leone in the first place.”
“Go on,” Costas said.
“You mean the Yanagi program,” Louise said quietly.
Jack turned to her. “You know about it?”
“I was the one who spotted the decrypt,” she said.
“I’m astonished. I shouldn’t be, of course, knowing what went on at Bletchley. But you were adamant that you’d only worked on the bombe.”
“In the bombe hut. Once the thing was up and running, clanging and belching away, there could be hours when there was very little to do, and eventually someone in Hut 8 decided that the more mathematical of us in the bombe rooms should be put to use cribbing, trying to find patterns in the code that might fit with words we knew should be there. I spotted the Japanese word yanagi on one of the decrypts, and passed it on. My father was a British trade attaché in Japan while I was growing up, so I know some Japanese. I knew this was the word for willow, though I had no idea until after the war that Yanagi was the code name for the Japanese exchange program with Nazi Germany.”
“Did Fan know about your role in this?”
“I never told her. I was sworn to absolute secrecy. There was a fear that the Soviets had got hold of Japanese encryption machines in Manchuria, and after the war, anything to do with Japanese code breaking was a closed shop. I was still in the game then, you know.”
“I didn’t know. I thought it ended with Bletchley.”
“For Fan, yes. For me, not quite.”
“The Yanagi program,” Costas said. “What kind of stuff was exchanged?”
Jeremy tapped on his computer and scanned the page. “From Germany, mainly technology: weapons and blueprints, optical glass, radar equipment, jet engines and so on. An exchange of scientists and engineers. Oh, and some Indian nationalist leader, traveling from Berlin to Tokyo. From the Japanese, mainly raw materials: rubber, tungsten, tin, zinc, quinine, opium, coffee. Oh, and here we go. Transferred from a Japanese submarine to a U-boat on the twenty-sixth of April 1943. That’s only four days before Clan Macpherson was sunk. Two tons of gold.”
“Holy cow,” Costas said. “Where?”
“Off Mozambique. Transferred from Japanese I-29 to German U-180, and destined for the U-boat base at Lorient on the western French coast and then Germany.”
Jack sat forward, speaking slowly. “Two tons of gold. And we believe there were also two tons of gold on Clan Macpherson. Look at the dates. U-180 would have passed the Cape of Good Hope and been up the west coast of Africa exactly in time to rendezvous with U-515 after she’d hit the convoy.”
“What are you suggesting?” Costas said.
“Got it,” Jeremy interjected, staring at the screen. “U-180 was a Type 9D1 transport U-boat. That means she was a cargo carrier. U-515 may have been the boat tasked to take the gold off Clan Macpherson, but she was an attack sub, not a cargo carrier, and it would have made sense for her to transfer the gold as soon as possible to a specialized U-boat in the vicinity designed to take that kind of load.”
Jack nodded. “And at that point, all going well, U-180 parts company with U-515 and makes her way undetected to Lorient, with a whopping four tons of gold on board. Two tons come from Japan, and the other two tons could be considered Japanese booty, the heist having been carried out on Clan Macpherson by Japanese-trained agents.”
“Hold it there,” Jeremy said, swiping the mousepad and staring intently at the screen. “I think I might just have seen the bigger picture. The one that Fan couldn’t reveal to us.”
“Go on,” Jack said.
Jeremy cleared his throat. “I mentioned that most of the German export seemed to be manufactured products, high technology. Well, it wasn’t always that way round. When the long-range cargo submarine U-234 put out for Japan in December 1944, she was indeed carrying examples of the latest military technology, including a crated Me 262 jet fighter. But she was also carrying twelve hundred pounds of uranium oxide.”
“Good God,” Jack said, sitting back. Of course. “That explains all the secrecy at Bletchley. That’s what the gold was for.”
“Uranium for what purpose?” Jeremy said.
Jack pursed his lips. “In April 1943, the Manhattan Project was still a good way from coming to fruition, and there would have been a lot of concern about the possibility of similar research being carried out by physicists in Germany and Japan. By then Germany was beginning to receive the full brunt of the RAF and USAAF bomber offensive. The Americans in the Pacific had not yet taken islands close enough to put Japan within easy range of the US bombers then available. Japan would have been a safer bet for research and development, and the Germans may even have entered into some kind of scientific collaboration. They may never have been close to developing a fusion bomb, but uranium oxide could have been used to make a radiological weapon, a dirty bomb. If a few of those had been shipped back to Europe and put on top of V-2 rockets, Hitler could have devastated the population of London. That terrible possibility would really have stoked the fire under Churchill.”