Testament

by David Gibbins

  “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.”

  “Is that how Fan knew about the code word Ark?”

  “Ian must have got that out of him in that last half hour, after the of
ficial stenographer had left. Having mentioned agents in South Africa, that was clearly what he was about to reveal to the chief interrogator when he became agitated.”

  “Nothing more?”

  “Not from Schnafel. But then I had a brainwave. I remembered hearing about someone who’d worked at Wewelsburg Castle, Himmler’s headquarters for the Ahnenerbe. Not one of the SS, but a civilian girl who’d been a typist. Almost all of what she typed up was deliberately destroyed by the SS as the Allies closed in on the castle, but she told what she remembered to the intelligence officer of the US unit that finally took Wewelsburg in April 1945. None of it was of tactical value, and most of it was accounts of Ahnenerbe expeditions that the interrogator found too far-fetched to believe, real Indiana Jones stuff. So the officer didn’t do a transcript of the interview and only made a brief report. It was one of my friends in the old West German intelligence service who came across it when she was remitted to archive the surviving Wewelsburg material on the Ahnenerbe, and I told her what I knew of Bermonsey’s interrogation of Schnafel.”

  “You had friends in West German intelligence?” Jeremy said.

  “I told you that my work didn’t end with Bletchley. It was another war, another veil of secrecy. It helped that I’d studied Russian at university alongside math.” Her monitor began flashing red and emitting a low alarm. “Oh blast,” she said irritably. “This thing’s telling me I need some meds. I do apologize.”

  The nurse entered the room, walked over, checked Louise’s pulse and eyes, and hooked another tube into the IV on her wrist, taping it back up. Then she turned to Jack. “It’s time to go. She needs a rest.”

  “Not likely,” Louise said. “I haven’t had this much fun since Bletchley. Anyway, I’m not she, I’m Louise.”

  “Yes, Louise. My apologies. Five minutes then, no more.”

  Jack nodded at the nurse, and she left. He leaned forward. “So where did you see that pictograph?”

  “During her interrogation at Wewelsburg, the girl jotted down several images, and that symbol was one of them. She said that in late 1942, just after she arrived at Wewelsburg, she was assigned as typist to a Dr. Pieter Ritter, an archaeologist working for the Ahnenerbe. I looked him up. He seems to have been one of the more sane ones of the group, a genuine scholar, and also seems to have paid the price for it, probably for speaking out against some of the nonsense, as he disappeared in early 1944 and was never seen again. Anyway, all the US interrogator noted down was that Ritter had been in charge of a program called Ark, and that it concerned the Nazi hunt for the lost Ark of the Covenant.”

  “Anything else?” Jack said.

  “The girl was well educated, a student of history at Heidelberg University before the war, so what she remembered can be taken seriously. She told the interrogator that the Ark had been in Ethiopia. No great surprise there, as the present-day Ethiopians believe it is hidden away in a church at Axum, as doubtless you know. But she also said that it had been discovered in the mid-nineteenth century by King Theodore of Abyssinia, in a cave in his mountain fastness at Magdala. She said there were those among the British expedition against Theodore in 1868 who knew the whereabouts of the Ark and were intent on discovering it themselves. One of them was the journalist Henry Stanley.”

  Jack stared at her. “But that expedition was to rescue British hostages.”

  “All I know is what the American interrogator decided to write down, what he found plausible, before closing the file. The war was still on, and his job as his battalion’s intelligence officer was to collect any tactical information about German positions and movements ahead, not what he would understandably have viewed as fairy-tale Ahnenerbe nonsense.”

  “So we don’t know whether they went there and hunted for it,” Costas said.

  Jack took a deep breath. “What we have to go on is that plaque. The Ahnenerbe archaeologists scoured southern Africa for artifacts in the years before the war. Some South Africans of Boer origin were not exactly sympathetic to the British, and there were many poor local people who might have been persuaded to part with artifacts that no longer had cultural meaning for them. Let’s imagine that the plaque falls into the hands of the Ahnenerbe that way, perhaps aided by a thug like Schnafel. The war has started, and the problem is how to get it undetected back to Germany. The opportunity finally presents itself with the shipment of that gold consignment in 1943, and the plan to get it onto a U-boat. The Ahnenerbe archaeologists might have been able to make some headway with translating the Phoenician, and they may well have recognized the pictogram for what it was. Before that, aided by information we haven’t yet got, something perhaps from Stanley, they may have gone into Abyssinia while it was under the control of their Italian allies, and made it up to Magdala. What happened then is anyone’s guess.”

  The nurse returned and stood with her arms resolutely folded. Jack gathered the photos and stood up, Costas and Jeremy doing the same. “Thank you so much, Louise. Whatever happens next, you’ve played a very big part in this story.”

  “Game on?” she said, pointing at the books. “You see, I really have read them. How do my grandchildren put it? I can talk the talk.”

  Jack smiled broadly. “You can talk the talk. And yes, game on.”

  “Do you have to go yet? You haven’t even had any tea. Let me get you some.”

  Jack saw the yearning in her face, the frustration. “We’ll keep you in the loop. I’ll email you with any updates.”

  She reached down into the bag hanging on the side of her wheelchair and held up a phone. “Texting is better. You can send pictures, too. And video clips.”

  “It’s a promise. And then we’ll come and see you again when it’s all over.”

  “I so wish I were coming with you.”

  Jack leaned down and kissed her on both cheeks, and she smiled up at him. “Now I like that.” Costas did the same, and then Jeremy. “My lucky day,” she said. “You know, I don’t think I’ve been kissed by as many men on one day since the war. That reminds me. There was a chap I used to meet behind the bombe hut—not my future husband, I fear. One day I wore lipstick and he forgot to clean it off. There was hell to pay from his commanding officer. Compromising hut security cavorting with a girl from another hut, or some such nonsense. Never did see him again, but there were plenty of others in the queue. Cheerio!”

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, Jack accelerated down the narrow paved lane that led from the house toward the main road, over cattle grids and through fields dotted with sheep and cows. “I’ve got my work cut out now,” he said. “Do you remember me discussing with Rebecca the 1868 Abyssinia material in the Howard archive? It contains a manuscript by a Captain Edward Wood, a fellow officer of my Royal Engineers ancestor, but there’s also some correspondence from Henry Stanley the explorer, among others. I glanced at it for the first time properly before we left Cornwall yesterday and it looks like fascinating stuff. I really want to get my teeth into it this evening and reconstruct the full story, to move from 1943 to 1868, to immerse myself in it. I’m quite excited by that, as I love those time shifts where there’s an unexpected thread running between them, but most importantly I think there’s a good chance of finding material in there that will help us make major headway with our quest.”

  “What you’re saying is you’ve got that feeling,” Costas said.

  “I’ve got that feeling.”

  “That’s good enough for me.”

  “You’ll be busy too,” Jack said.

  “Not much call for submersibles engineers up in the mountains of Ethiopia, if that’s where you’re thinking of going.”

  “I meant while I’m in the library, you’re going to be in charge of the Phoenician wreck,” Jack said.

  “What do you mean, in charge?”

  “I mean in charge. Archaeologist.”

  “You must be joking. I can barely spell the word.”

  “Maybe, but after all these years you can talk the talk, just as Lou
ise said. Anyway, Jeremy will help.”

  “Me?” Jeremy said, looking up from his tablet. “Bit nippy in the sea off England, I find. If you want any help in the Indian Ocean, though, I might be persuaded.”

  “I need you on site in case any more inscriptions come up. And in case Costas needs help spelling that word.”

  Jeremy’s phone vibrated. “Will Rebecca be there? Anyway, I thought she was taking over the site.”

  “You should know. It seems you’re engaged. Anyway, I’m going to need Rebecca’s help with the Abyssinia material. Maybe that’s her calling you now.”

  “Nope. Text from Maurice,” Jeremy said, munching an apple and trying to read the screen as the vehicle bounced over a cattle grid. “Seems a bit miffed that you’re not answering your phone. That’s all.”

  Jack glanced at his phone. There were no new texts or phone messages, just missed calls. His pulse quickened. That meant Maurice would only speak to him personally, and that usually meant something big. He remembered Rebecca saying that he was saving up something he had found at Carthage. He pulled the vehicle up on the grass verge before reaching the main road and quickly returned the call. A familiar voice answered, cursed in German as the phone seemed to go flying and then issued instructions loudly in French, the sound of a muezzin’s call to prayer competing with the roar of machinery in the background. Jack clicked on the speaker phone. “Maurice, is that you? Costas and Jeremy are here too. Tell us what you’ve got.”

  Part 4

  16

  Magdala, the Central Highlands of Abyssinia, April 1868

  Captain Edward Gillespie Wood of the Madras Sappers and Miners stood with his telescope on a ledge behind the battlefield, staring at the wide saddle that separated his position from the great granite plateau of Magdala less than half a mile to the west. It was an extraordinary sight, at the end of an extraordinary expedition. For more than two months since leaving their forward supply base at Senafe, he and his sappers had reconnoitered ahead of the main force, surveying, taking photographs, and tracing the road that had been hacked out of the rock for the animals to get through. On the way they had encountered almost every physical obstacle known to man: scorching salt pans on the coast, nearly impenetrable juniper forests in the foothills, terrifying ravines and defiles beset by rock falls, and almost impassable scree slopes, an obstacle course that only seemed to get worse as they ascended ever higher to the upland plateau of Magdala, a dead end that had made it nearly impregnable as a fortress.