“And it explains why a line of Allied submarines were lying in wait off the coast of West Africa,” Costas said. “They were hoping to catch those Japanese and German cargo subs.”
Jack turned to Louise. “Some of those American officers you had your eye on at Bletchley might actually have been there to keep close to the action on this too. Roosevelt would have been as horrified by the possibility as Churchill.”
“Fascinating,” she murmured. “We didn’t even know about the Manhattan Project, of course, though I do remember overhearing some of our Cambridge chaps in the pub talking about physicist friends who had disappeared off to America. It was only after Hiroshima and Nagasaki that we realized the reason.”
Jeremy turned to Jack. “Back to Clan Macpherson. So what we’re talking about here is a really audacious heist. The Nazis loved Hollywood gangster movies, didn’t they? A high-seas robbery worthy of Al Capone. Japanese-trained agents take over the ship, transfer the gold to the U-boat, and ship it to Germany in payment for vital raw materials, maybe for a consignment of uranium.”
Jack nodded. “And meanwhile British submarines, alerted to Yanagi by encoded Enigma decrypts, were strung out along the coast of Africa waiting to pounce on long-distance U-boats heading to or from Japan.”
“So the sub that hit Clan Macpherson was diverted from that task, but actually by sinking the gold it was all part of the same game.”
“The diversion ostensibly being because of the Ahnenerbe treasure on the ship, but actually to sink the gold as well,” Jack said. “Quite astonishing. If we’re right about this, then Fan really was only pulling away one veil on a much bigger story.”
Louise picked up the third photo from the wreck of Clan Macpherson that Jack had taken out to show her. “Goodness me. Is that it? Nestled in among the gold bars?”
She placed the photo on the table, and Jack leaned forward. “It’s an incredible find. Jeremy is certain that the lettering is Phoenician, and relates to the voyage of the Carthaginian explorer Hanno around Africa in the early sixth century BC. We think the Phoenicians set up markers to record their voyages at various waypoints, just as the Portuguese did two millennia later. It’s not exactly a planting of the flag, but it shows those who might follow, colonists or traders, that they were on the right track. A big excitement from Jeremy’s reading of the text is that it shows Hanno about to head north again, suggesting that this was set up at the Cape of Good Hope. The surviving medieval rendition of Hanno’s Periplus stops somewhere on the west coast not far south of Senegal, and this is the first evidence that he went further and probably circumnavigated Africa, as many like me have suspected.”
“Assuming that the plaque is authentic,” Louise said.
Jeremy turned the laptop around and showed her his rendition of what could be seen of the text. “We went through that yesterday. I’m certain that these letters could not have been forged or duplicated. They’re identical in style to letters we’ve been finding on amphoras from a Phoenician wreck off Cornwall. I did a reverse analysis, taking letters from the wreck inscriptions and re-creating the text on the plaque. It’s virtually identical.”
She clapped her hands. “So you used the Cornwall text as a crib. Just as we used to do at Bletchley.”
“My doctoral supervisor, Jack’s friend Dr. Maria de Montijo, made me learn all of the Bletchley code-breaking material when I arrived in Oxford to study ancient paleography. She said it would train my mind and would be bound to come in useful one day.”
“So how does this relate to the Ark of the Covenant?”
Jeremy increased the magnification and pointed. “Take a look at that symbol at the end. It’s not Phoenician but a hieroglyph, and indeed is probably Egyptian in derivation. To be more exact, it’s a pictogram.”
She stared at the little image of the two men carrying the box, and then sat up, smiling broadly. “Well, that really is satisfying. Everything does interconnect.”
“Say again?” Jeremy said.
“Well, I’ve seen that image before.”
Jack stared at her. “You’ve seen that pictogram before?”
“Not the original myself, but someone else’s drawing of it.”
“Go on.”
The nurse came in, and checked Louise’s IV. “Ten minutes, no more,” she said. “Your physio is coming at two.”
Louise waved her arm irritably. “No time for that. What’s the point, at my age? It’s keeping my mind active that matters, and I haven’t had this much mental exercise in ages.”
“We’re almost done,” Jack said. “It’s been a marvelous visit.”
“Well, I’m not done,” Louise said. “Fan had her say in her letter, and now it’s my turn.”
The nurse turned to Jack, mouthing the words to him. He nodded, and she left. He turned back to Louise. “Do go on.”
“When I dug up Fan’s letter after you called, I thought about what she said at the end. About following the trail. I can’t exactly go traipsing about like Indiana Jones, but I can do a bit of research of my own.” She pointed to the desktop computer on the other side of the room. “You see, I’ve upgraded since the bombe. My grandchildren asked me how on earth we managed without the internet. Well, at Bletchley we wouldn’t have trusted it an inch. It’s a seedbed of misinformation and disinformation. The stuff we fed the Germans and the way we did it makes today’s hackers look like amateurs. But mum’s the word about that.”
They watched as she wheeled herself to the keyboard and began typing. A few seconds later, a scanned document appeared on the screen. “Fortunately, what I wanted was available as an original document online. This is part of the Nuremberg Trials records. I wanted to check out Fan’s story, to see if I could take it further.”
“You didn’t trust Fan’s account?” Jeremy said.
“I trust her implicitly. But what anyone says is only as good as their sources. You’re a paleographer, aren’t you? Well, you deal with it too, all those scribal errors, deliberate changes and additions that are then copied down the line and become received wisdom, just as you get everywhere on the internet. Always go back to the original sources. Always verify, always double-check. The cardinal rules of intelligence gathering.”
“Indeed,” Jeremy said.
“This is the final part of the interrogation report of May 17 1947 on one Ernst Schnafel, a former Obersturmbannführer in the SS. That’s not the army SS — the Waffen-SS — but the ones who ran the concentration camps and the Einsatzgruppen murder squads on the Eastern Front. A nasty piece of goods from a nasty bunch. Before that he had worked for the Ahnenerbe as a kind of bully boy who accompanied the archaeologists on their expeditions and roughed up any natives who stood in their way. I know about this because Ian Bermonsey had been at Nuremberg as part of the naval interrogation team shortly before he resigned and went to Canada with Fan. He spoke about it when we met up in Southampton for their marriage, and mentioned this unsavory character and his Ahnenerbe connection. Ian was something of an amateur archaeologist, having read classics at university before joining the navy in the early thirties.
“The transcript shows that Schnafel did indeed briefly mention his time in the Ahnenerbe, specifically an expedition involving agents in South Africa. At that point he became agitated because the chief interrogator showed no signs of accepting this information as a bargaining chip, and he clammed up. Apparently he’d already been interrogated by an American officer at the time of his capture in 1945, but I couldn’t find a record of that anywhere. After the end of the interrogation at Nuremberg he was left with Bermonsey for half an hour to clarify some details about Kriegsmarine movements at the end of the war in the Baltic, where he had been captured. That night Schnafel found a way of killing himself in his cell. A pity, really. I mean a pity that he cheated the hangman, but also that he didn’t say more.”