The Kaiser’s Navigator (Peter Sparke Book 2)

by Scott Chapman

  Sparke nodded.

  "What the Albatross does is use the listening systems up on top to identify the various frequencies that an asset, such as a ship, uses. Then the Munch down here emits a long, very nasty electronic scream on the same frequencies.

  "It will make any surface ship deaf, dumb, and blind for hours. It will be able to move, but in military terms it will be useless."

  "Will this interfere with civilian systems?"

  "Not so far as we have been able to tell," said McCafferty. "But we will need your people to do some work on defining the systems which are liable to be used."

  "And what happens to any ship out there in the South Atlantic when all of its systems get screamed down?"

  "Well, in that case, we will offer any help we can to assist them to a safe port," said McCafferty without a trace of irony. The idea of immobilising an Argentinean warship then publicly offering to rescue it was almost a definition of military humour.

  "So your first response to any moves by Argentina does not involve shooting of missiles and sending out gunboats?"

  "More a case of farting and screaming," replied McCafferty, almost smiling.

  The pair stood back from the road to avoid a group of heavily armed soldiers who drove past in some sort of armoured vehicle which Sparke had never seen before, and then turned to watch a fighter aircraft take off with a noise that was deafening, even at this distance. Farting and screaming was not the whole range of options available to the Brigadier and his people.

  As the noise subsided, McCafferty reached inside the Land Rover and pulled out a small canvas briefcase.

  "Now, of course, we still need to discuss this." She reached out, holding a small object in her hand. Sparke looked down at a small, cylindrical leather case. Embossed faintly on the cover were the words, "S.S. Santa Simone, Buenos Aires, 1906".

  Chapter Nineteen

  The German survivors of the Gneisenau were landed in Port Stanley a few days after the battle, then, after a delay of a few weeks, they were taken on board a cargo ship headed back to the United Kingdom. Again, they were treated well, not even being closely confined. There was nowhere for them to escape to.

  Once at Portsmouth, the officers and men were separated, and one at a time they were interrogated by, what Opitz assumed was, an officer of Royal Navy Intelligence.

  The officer interrogating Opitz had excellent German and seemed to be far more interested in chatting with Opitz about his private life and experience during the battle than anything of military relevance.

  As far as Opitz ever recalled the conversation, it seemed to have consisted largely of the British officer telling a long series of funny stories about his time studying in Germany before the war. It turned out that he had visited the German Naval Academy as part of a British delegation at the same time as Opitz had been there as a cadet and they had known some of the same people. The officer asked after several German officers by name and wondered how they were doing. He mentioned the names of a few German Naval officers who were currently British prisoners of war and explained, where he could, how they had been captured and how they were doing.

  He asked no obvious questions of military value, but did seem curious about the mood of the German people and the relationships between officers and men in the Imperial Navy. Tea was brought in and Opitz was given a copy of a recent German newspaper to read which covered the sinking of his ship.

  Towards the end of the discussion, the officer opened the drawer in the desk he was sitting at and pulled out a thick manila envelope. "Your personal possessions, taken from you when were fished out of the sea." He put the envelope on the desk between them. Opitz had never expected to see these things again and tried hard not to express his delight.

  The officer read the contents of the package and placed them on the desk one at a time as he spoke. "Watch, probably dead, I'm afraid. Pity. Pocket knife. Mechanical pencil. And, what is this? Oh, telescope. Amazed that wasn't nicked, to be honest."

  He held the small, heavy telescope in his hand, then squinting he read out the name on the leather case. "Santa Simone, Buenos Aires." He weighed the telescope in his hand, feeling the obvious quality of the item.

  He squinted curiously at Opitz. "This is nice. Would you care to explain how you come by such a nice thing?"

  Opitz said nothing, increasing the interest of the Royal Navy man, who continued, "You must have been very young to have received this in 1906 in Buenos Aires. This is yours, I take it? It was with your other possessions."

  At last Opitz spoke. "It is just a keepsake. It was a gift."

  "A gift from whom, may I wonder?" The tone of the man's voice had changed suddenly. The pleasant conversationalist was transformed into an interrogator.

  Again Opitz, who had begun to realise that this kindly, apparently aimless officer was almost certainly a highly efficient specialist, paused. "A family friend," he said.

  "An Argentinian family friend, or someone who had been there, perhaps? You have friends in the Argentine?"

  The silence of a few seconds was all the answer the officer needed.

  "Let me give you a receipt for this," said the officer. "We might want to keep hold of this just for the moment."

  At the end of the interrogation, Opitz was escorted to the holding area for transfer to a prisoner of war camp. The officer wrote up the information he had gleaned from Opitz.

  There was little of real value, but it did confirm that the stars of the faction within the German Navy who favoured immediate battle with the British in the North Sea seemed to be on the rise at the expense of cooler heads.

  He slumped down into his chair and called across the office to his assistant. "Fellows, do me a favour would you? Try and find out what Lloyds Register has on an SS Santa Simone out of Buenos Aires, would you?" He picked up a newspaper and began to work on the crossword, chewing calmly on the end of his pencil. Distracted, he put down the paper and picked up the telescope again. "Curious," he said, bouncing it in his palm gently.

  It was still on his mind when, some days later, Fellows came back with the news that, according to Lloyds, the Santa Simone had gone down with all hands in the North Atlantic.

  "When?"

  Fellows looked at his small notebook. "1906, sir."

  "Fellows, could you do me a favour and make copies of our report on Herr Opitz? Make sure it is referenced in our Argentine file, and where was he picked up. Falklands wasn't it?" Fellows checked the file and confirmed that Opitz had been captured after the Battle of the Falkland Islands.

  "Better add a note in the Falklands file. One never knows."

  And so the file of the interrogation of Lt. Opitz was filed, cross referenced, and tucked away in the vast archives of the Royal Navy Intelligence Department where it stayed, completely undisturbed for ninety years.

  In 2005, the massive job of converting these paper files into digital records was nearing its completion and, as the data entry clerk entered the entry for the interrogation, his system prompted him to the fact that the same file had been entered under different locations. It asked him if he wanted to cross link each of these files. He clicked on the "Yes to all" icon so that when, several years later, Walkinshaw, on a job for the Chief Secretary ran a query on the subjects, "Falkland Islands," "Argentina" and "1906", his was the first file that popped up.

  The file entry gave a link to a location in the artefacts store, and therefore on the same day that the file popped up, a clerk walked along a rack of storage shelves and located, exactly where it should have been, the Santa Simone telescope.

  Chapter Twenty

  Holding an object so closely linked to past events always gave Sparke a strange thrill. It was almost like touching part of a time machine.

  "So, our Opitz was taken prisoner here in 1914?" said Sparke.

  "Yes, he was one of the few survivors of an entire squadron of German ships that tried to attack the islands. There was a major force of RN ships here which happened to be refuelli
ng, who chased them down and more or less wiped them out," answered McCafferty. "Opitz was very lucky to have survived the battle and even more lucky that he was picked up in time."

  "Why was he even asked why he was carrying this telescope?"

  "He was interviewed by one of our people from the Naval Intelligence Department once he was shipped to the UK. I understand the old NID was the best counter-espionage organisation in the world at the time. Anything out of the ordinary, even seemingly trivial things, were recorded."

  "Your Mr. Walkinshaw sent me a copy of the interrogation report," said Sparke. "It seemed to be pretty much all gossip about German Navy internal politics."

  "Someone as junior as Opitz wouldn't have known much of real value," answered McCafferty. "The gossip was the real value."

  "What else do we know about Opitz? Do you have his service record?" asked Sparke.

  "No, almost the entire archives of the old German Imperial Navy were destroyed in a bombing raid in 1943. We do, however, have a home address in Germany. Prisoners were allowed to send mail home via Sweden." McCafferty flipped open her laptop. "Not far from your neck of the woods, actually. Bavaria, town called Feldkirchen."

  "Feldkirchen? Can you send me the details?"

  McCafferty tapped briefly at her keyboard. "Gone. You should have it in a second."

  Sparke walked over to his bag and pulled out his computer. He unrolled the screen and dug out a small cylindrical case about twenty centimetres long. He popped open the lid and pulled out a long piece of dull metal, the length and thickness of a strand of spaghetti and flicked out a small extension. McCafferry watched with interest as Sparke folded the thing over his head and positioned the extension just over his left eye and then pushed a button at the end of the unit. A small blue light appeared at one end.

  "That's a very neat headset," said McCafferty.

  Sparke smiled. "It is quite. I am a sucker for new toys." He fixed his gaze into the middle distance and said softly, "Screen."

  Several thousand miles away, the big screen in Sparke's Munich office began to glow softly.

  "Mr Sparke, good afternoon," said the voice system of his screen through the tiny earpiece on Sparke's head.

  "Screen, remote screen share. RSD."

  The extension of Sparke’s headset glowed slightly as the retinal scan display projected an image of the big screen directly into the retina of Sparke's left eye. McCafferty watched as Sparke stood and seemed to fix his gaze on a blank section of the wall.

  "Screen, search Opitz, German Navy, World War One."

  The screen displayed a small cartoon of a man in a hard hat digging a hole in the ground, next to that was the legend, "We're working on it!"

  "No records match," said the screen.

  "Screen, search Martin Opitz, 1906, Argentina."

  "No records match," said the screen, again.

  Sparke turned to McCafferty. "How old would he have been in 1914?"

  "Early twenties probably."

  "Screen, search birth records, Martin Opitz, Feldkirchen, Germany, 1888 to 1894."

  "We have a match for you, Mr. Sparke," said the screen after several seconds. The image appeared of a copy of a birth certificate, dated 1892. Sparke looked at the document, searching amongst the formal handwriting for an address, then finding it, he glanced down at the screen of his personal computer. It was the same address.

  "Screen, search death certificates, same name, same town, 1918 to 1992."

  Several seconds later the screen said, "We have a match for you, Mr. Sparke." A copy of another document appeared, this time the details had been typed in.

  "Same address," said Sparke to McCafferty. "He was born, lived, and died in the same village. Date of death, February 1921. Cause of death is given as 'Grippe', influenza. Occupation is 'Bibliothekar'. Looks like Lt. Opitz went back to the farm and became the town librarian."

  "And died of flu?" asked McCafferty.

  "The Great Influenza Pandemic," said Sparke, "It killed up to 100 million people right across the world, predominantly young healthy adults."

  "Screen, search newspaper obituaries, Martin Opitz, 1921."

  "No records match."

  "Screen, search local newspapers, Feldkirchen, Germany 1922."

  The names of three newspapers appeared on Sparke's retina. Next to each were the words, "No digital files available."

  "Screen, down," said Sparke. He removed the headset and slipped it back into its case as the big screen in Munich faded back into hibernation.

  "Smart computer you have there," said McCafferty.

  "No such thing as a smart computer, just an efficient one. They are still dumber than donkeys. One thing that seems for sure is that computers will not take us much further on this."

  "So you will go back to Germany, to this village?"

  "That would seem to be the only option, unless you think we should look at doing some research in Buenos Aires on the Santa Simone?"

  "That would be quite sensitive I think," said McCafferty. "Best not to have a UK civilian wandering around Argentina asking questions about this just at the moment. Beside, we are doing a little digging on that one ourselves."

  "Let me guess," said Sparke, "some of 'our people', as you call them, are on the job."

  McCafferty looked at him blankly, "I have no idea what you mean, Mr. Sparke."

  "Will you want to accompany me to Germany, Captain?"

  "I need to be here when your team arrives," answered McCafferty, "We can’t have a bunch of foreign civilians wandering around getting lost."

  "And I suppose that it is not the best idea to have a British officer wandering around Germany without their cooperation."

  McCafferty appeared not have heard Sparke's last comment, saying only, "So, it appears that Lt. Opitz left his small village, joined the Navy, came back home and became the town librarian. Apart from surviving the Gneisenau, it seems that he probably had a completely uninteresting life."

  Chapter Twenty One

  Four years in prison, any prison, will take a toll on a person, and his time as a British prisoner of war hung as heavily on Opitz as on any of thousands of German and Austrian captives held in the United Kingdom.

  In 1914, Britain seemed ill-prepared for the influx of prisoners and in the first months Opitz was frequently moved between makeshift camps, even spending some time on board the hulk of an old troop ship moored in the Thames.

  The issue was doubly difficult in the case of Opitz as there were so few naval officers amongst the prisoners and the British seemed nearly obsessed with the idea that things should be done in a certain way. Having Opitz held with German army officers seemed to be particularly vexing for the captors. In one large barracks, where he spent a month, Opitz was given a bunk at the extreme end of the room and a length of string hung between the walls bearing a sign saying "Naval Personnel" to separate him from the army officers sharing the room.

  Eventually, he was told to gather his few possessions and report to the main guardroom. When he had been pulled from the sea, his uniform had been discarded and he had been wearing ill-fitting bits and pieces of British uniform ever since. His scruffy appearance had been a constant cause of concern to him, especially as the army prisoners had invariably been captured in their uniforms, sometimes even with luggage.

  He stood to attention in the guardroom, facing the Assistant Commandant of the camp, an elderly captain, recalled to serve after many years in civilian life.

  "Optiz," said the Assistant Commandant.

  "Opitz, sir," corrected Opitz.

  "Very well, Olpitz. This is for you." He heaved a package, wrapped in brown paper onto the desk. "New clobber. Can't have you running around looking like a navvy."

  Opitz had no idea what the officer was saying. He had thought he had a reasonable command of the English language but was constantly surprised by how little of it seemed to be used by the natives.

  The officer glared at Opitz. "Take it, man," he said pushing the
bundle towards him.

  Opitz took the bundle in his hands and opened it. It was a German Navy uniform, sent via Sweden.

  "You're leaving us today, Olpitz." He lifted his head. "Corporal." A soldier appeared from behind Opitz. "Got this man's bill of lading? Good, good. See him off the premises then."

  Opitz took the parcel, saluted the officer who had already gone back to his paperwork and followed the corporal out into a yard, where he saw a canvas covered truck waiting. In the back of the truck were several prisoners, all wearing the oddments of German navy uniforms.

  "Leutnant Opitz," he said to the men.

  The man nearest Opitz reached out his hand to help pull him up. "Captain Schmidt." He then turned and said loudly, to the other occupants, "Make way for the officer!"

  The truck rattled along quiet English streets for some hours, until it stopped and the canvas back was pulled aside by the guard. "Legs stretch, five minutes."

  The men clambered out onto the small street of a country village. The guard lit a cigarette as the men stretched and yawned. Two women walked out of the small store, near where the truck had parked and stared openly at the prisoners.

  "Jerries?" said one of the women to the guard.

  "Yup, Bosch," he replied.

  The two women looked at the prisoners. One leant towards the men and said with exaggerated slowness, "Ger-man. You're Ger-mans, eh?"

  "Yes, madam," said Opitz, "We are Germans."

  The woman looked at Opitz for a moment, and then reached into the wicker basket she was carrying and pulled out an apple, offering it to Opitz. He smiled, shook his head and said, "Perhaps for one of the men, madam."

  The woman looked at the other prisoners, walked over to the youngest among them and offered him the apple. The young man looked towards Captain Schmidt, who nodded slightly, then reached out his hand to take the fruit. He bowed slightly in thanks, and then took a huge bite. Chewing it slowly, with obvious delight, he passed the apple to the man next to him, who also bowed towards the women before biting into it. The apple was passed from hand to hand until all of the men, but not the two officers, had shared it. The guard, the women, and the prisoners stood quietly together for a few moments until the driver reappeared. The men climbed back into the truck and just as the flap was being secured, Opitz saw the two women wave slightly. He raised his hand and waved back.