There was a moment of silence on the other end of the phone. "Thank you, Mr. Sparke. An excellent summary," said the Chief Secretary. "This information has never been made public before?"
"The information on the German expedition was published over a hundred years ago in an academic journal, but as far as we can see it has never been posted online and there are no references to it in other major publications. But, it is published independently and anyone could find it if they knew where to look, or they could find it by accident. The Navigation Journal of the Santa Simone is the original document. As far as we can tell it has never left the care of the library here, and there is no record of it ever being accessed."
"Was the Santa Simone in the area where we think our friends are going to say they made a territorial claim?"
"I looked at the last recorded position and it seems to be nowhere near the area in question."
"How long until we know if it visited that area earlier in its journey?"
"We will have the whole journal scanned in a couple of hours. That will give us a day-by-day map of the whole voyage of the Santa Simone."
"So, Mr. Sparke," said the Chief Secretary, "I look forward to talking to you the instant that information is in your hands."
Sparke had learned young that there was nothing to be gained by peering over the shoulders of experts as they did their jobs. They knew what had to be done and they knew better than anyone else how to do it. Waiting was not a problem for Sparke. He spent the two hours learning what he could about the strange young German naval officer, dead for a century, who brought him to this tiny village, and who would doubtless be at the centre of an international furore in the very near future.
Just before the two hours were up, Sparke wandered over to his team and sat quietly in the background. "Ready," said Birgitte.
Sparke walked over to her computer. The screen showed a map of the Southern Ocean with a strange zigzag line, drawn as though by a child, starting at Buenos Aires and meandering down to its final resting place. "Can you run that route day-by-day?"
Birgitte touched an icon near the top of the screen and the line disappeared, then gradually began to unfold, showing the route the Santa Simone took every day from its departure.
Sparke was no sailor, but the line told its own story. He called the Chief Secretary.
"Mr. Sparke, right on time."
"Indeed. Well, based on the plot from the navigation log, the Santa Simone left Argentina and never touched land until it ended up in the location where Opitz seems to have found it. We are matching the coordinates now, but it looks clear that Opitz and his party passed right by the last recorded position of the ship."
"Both documents need to be verified, of course," said the Chief Secretary.
"We have asked the local librarians here to contact the University of Munich on that subject. Better that it comes from the actual owners of the documents than anyone else. I have offered to cover any costs incurred."
"In this matter, cost is not an immediate concern," replied the Chief Secretary. "How do you plan to proceed?"
"Proceed?" asked Sparke. "Is there a need to take this any further? Once the information is verified and published I would have thought the matter would be for others to resolve."
"We would appreciate it if you were to find a resolution for us, rather than leave any loose threads."
"The only obvious route forward is to travel to the location and see what remains there. That will take months to organise. A trip to the Antarctic is a massive thing, surely?"
"Where there is a will, there is a way, Mr. Sparke. I hope you have no other pressing engagements at the moment?"
"You mean right now?"
"Please let us know how soon you can be in the UK. I hope you can be here tonight. We will arrange everything else. Is that all right with you?"
Sparke did not even consider his response. "I will head to Munich airport now and let your office know my flight times."
"Thank you Mr. Sparke, but you might want to pack a few warm clothes."
Chapter Twenty Seven
The shock to Opitz following the attack on the police building was the lack of shock he felt. The building still rang to the echoes of running and shouting men, but seemed strangely quiet whenever he listened closely. He looked around at the men who had followed his orders and charged into the police building and he felt virtually nothing.
The building filled quickly with armed men, more than he had brought with him in the truck, as some stragglers had followed the noise. Not knowing what else to do, he began to walk through the rooms of the police headquarters. It was a pleasing building, large rooms, good windows, stoves in the corner. A nice place to work for a policeman, thought Opitz. Drunks, petty criminals, and the occasional domestic murder. He peered through a frosty window into the small courtyard below, which now had a line of strange shapes on the ground. Opitz walked down the central staircase, then out into the back to look at the straggle of dead bodies. There was nothing he could tell about the people who used to inhabit the bodies, no uniforms to say where their allegiance lay.
The Driver appeared at his elbow. "Kommandant, you need to see this."
Opitz looked blankly at the Driver and followed him back into the building and down some steps into a long, windowless part of the building.
These were the prison cells. Most were empty, but in the last two were shapes that Opitz could not recognise at first. After some time he realised that he was looking at battered bodies, their faces no longer recognisable, their clothes torn, their hair standing up stupidly.
"Who were they?" Opitz asked the Driver.
"Police," answered the Driver. "Political. Looks like the Reds gave them a pretty hard time."
Opitz turned to the small group which had gathered around him and started issuing a stream of orders, pointing as he spoke. "You two, collect any weapons and ammo you can find. You, you, and you, collect prisoners and bring them down here. If anyone tries to harm a prisoner, you will be personally answerable to me. Understand?"
The men understood.
Within minutes the men had the police building under control. Those Bolsheviks who had been captured came cascading down the cell room stairs propelled by kicks and shouts. Weapons were being piled up in the small police armoury room.
"Who are these people?" asked Opitz to the Driver, gesturing towards the prisoners.
"A few are former soldiers. Most lost their jobs in the docks or railways. Some are politicals, real Reds. That man over there is the baker from the Grand Hotel. He is just an idiot who follows anything. Last year he was weeping when the Kaiser caught a cold, now he is a communist."
"You seem to know everything," said Opitz. "When will we be relieved?"
"Let me find out how things stand," said the Driver.
Half an hour later, the Driver reappeared and told Opitz that there would be a phone call coming through for him from Ehrhardt with the main column. So Opitz and he sat in the small telephone room of the police station, looking out the window as the first civilians began to appear in the streets outside.
The noise of the phone came as a shock. The Driver answered, spoke into the candlestick receiver then handed it to Opitz, who suddenly realised that it had been more than four years since he had used a telephone.
"This is Opitz, yes?" barked the voice.
"Yes, sir, Leutnant Opitz."
"You did good work at the police station, I hear. Is there any threat to your position?"
"No, sir. There seems to be no further opposition in the area. Civilians are starting to move around."
"Very good. Now, we need you to leave a small detachment there and get over to City Hall and do the same thing there that you did at the police building. How many men can you muster?"
Opitz turned and looked at the Driver. "Pick four steady men to guard the prisoners and the building, and have everyone else out in front in five minutes. How many do we have?"
"We have p
icked up some more volunteers, probably about twenty-five or so in total," said the Driver.
"We will have about twenty we can bring. What are your orders?"
"Approach the City Hall from the east. As soon as you are ready, attack the building. When we hear you move, we will come in from the west and north sides. Werner will show you the best approach."
"Who is Werner?"
"I am," said the Driver.
Opitz glanced at the Driver, wondering why a civilian was close enough to the commander to be referred to by his first name, but still seemed content to take orders from a young officer he barely knew.
Five minutes later Sparke climbed into the cab next to the Driver. More than twenty men were crammed into the back of the truck, all heavily wrapped in scarves and overcoats against the biting cold, festooned with weapons and belts of ammunition across their chests.
They drove the short distance to City Hall in silence; no other traffic was on the roads and nervous glances followed them down the roads from behind closed curtains.
Opitz and the Driver dismounted and walked towards the last street corner before the Hall. "What are we looking at?" asked Opitz.
"They have a machine gun there, on the left, covering the whole area. You can't approach it by cover or from any other direction. It is pretty tight, well placed." Opitz turned and walked back to the truck.
"I need four men who will come with me down the street to seize a machine gun. Everyone else will go with the Driver to provide covering fire. If you are not with the storm party, you will be firing at the machine gun. It does not matter if you can see a clear target or if you hit anything. All you need to do is fire at the machine gun position and keep firing until we get close enough. Which four will come with me?"
The men who had been with him when he first attacked the police headquarters stepped forward, followed almost immediately by another man who, Opitz noticed, was not carrying a rifle, but had in his hand a short shovel with its blade sharpened to a gleaming edge.
"Get everyone else into good firing positions and let me know when you are set. When I wave, make sure everyone fires and keeps firing until they can't fire without hitting us. You have plenty of ammunition?" The Driver nodded and then led the men behind the buildings facing the Hall.
Opitz walked towards the corner of the street and looked up to the buildings facing the City Hall where he expected the Driver to be. He did not look behind him to see if the men followed, and was unsurprised when they did.
After a few minutes, Opitz felt a stone bounce against the wall above his head. He turned to see the Driver, hidden in the shadows well inside the building opposite, waving to him. Opitz held his right hand out towards the Driver with his fist clenched and thumb held out vertically upwards, in the British fashion. The Driver copied the gesture.
Opitz nodded, glanced towards the men behind him, and then waved his hand towards the Driver. A few seconds later, several windows of the building erupted in fire from more than a dozen Mausers, all aimed at the machine gun position. Opitz watched as the sandbagged position seemed to disintegrate into a cloud of dust as the firing party poured out a barrage of fire.
He did not look behind him or issue any orders, but simply started sprinting towards the machine gun. Of all the shocks in Opitz's life, nothing surprised him more than the fact that, as he ran, he was actually overtaken by two of his men. The man with the sharpened shovel was in the lead and had leapt over the sandbagged barricade before Opitz had reached the position. Opitz saw the shovel rise and fall as the man hacked at the cowering gun crew. By the time Opitz pulled himself over the defences, the men had already begun dragging the machine gun, a heavy object on a tripod with a belt of ammunition, inside the building.
Inside the building, Opitz could see that the space had been divided into offices by wooden and glass partitions. The man with the shovel heaved the machine gun on a table, which he and the other man who had beaten Opitz to the barricade had pulled into place to face directly towards the centre of the building. By the time this was done, more than a dozen other men had joined then from their firing positions.
"On the order, fire directly through the building," said the shovel man to the two men who now manned the machine gun.
"You and you with me. Grenades." He looked at Opitz. "Sir?" he asked.
Opitz looked at the dozen or so men, turned towards him, weapons raised and aimed blindly into the belly of the building.
"Fire," said Opitz.
The massive machine gun, firing directly into the wall, exploded into life and instantly destroyed every piece of glass in its path. The Bolshevik defenders in the offices were surrounded by a cloud of shattered window, plaster dust, and bullets. As soon as the firing started, Opitz, the man with the shovel, and two others began to run down the central corridor of the ground floor lobbing heavy, wooden handled grenades into rooms and firing at any figures they saw until they reached the central hall.
The exploding grenades blew out the windows facing the front of the building and as soon as this happened, the men attacking from the front rose up and rushed towards the entrances of the City Hall. Above the din, Opitz could hear the ragged cheer of the attackers outside.
The defenders of the building were swiftly pushed back up the stairs, then onto the open roof. The last, tiny group of Red Volunteers stood in the farthest corner at the top of the building, clustered around a red flag held by one of the men. The gunfire was so strong that the Red defenders actually bent their heads into the torrent of bullets as though faced with a hailstorm, until they were mown down.
As the last of the revolutionaries fell dead, the pace of firing changed. Instead of the constant, industrial roar of gunfire, the city now seemed to be alive with tiny, isolated pockets of shooting. With the centre of the Bolshevik defence broken, the action turned into a vicious manhunt, as Red survivors tried to regroup or escape.
Back in the central hallway, Opitz saw the Driver approach, alongside a man he had never seen before. Opitz noticed that the Driver now wore an officer's belt with a pistol at his hip.
"This is Leutnant Opitz, sir," said the Driver. "Leutnant Opitz, this is Kapitan Ehrhardt, commander of the Marinebrigade."
"I did not realise you were a navy man. I assumed you were a marine," said Ehrhardt.
"No, sir, a naval officer."
"And a southerner, too, by the sound of your accent?"
"Yes, sir, from Bavaria, near Munich."
"Good, good, good," said Ehrhardt. "You will be pleased to know that as soon as we are secured here, we will be heading south to the Soviet Republic of Bavaria to tidy up down there, too. You have family there?"
"No, sir."
A sudden eruption of gunfire made both men pause.
"You should look after your men and get ready to move first thing tomorrow."
Opitz saluted, threw his rifle onto his shoulder and started to give the Driver a quiet stream of orders concerning the men, whom he now seemed to be responsible for.
Chapter Twenty Eight
There are three ways to reach the Falklands: the arduous, the unpleasant, and the unthinkable. The unthinkable option is to go by sea, something that few people ever do voluntarily, and fewer still ever do twice. The arduous is to take the commercial route, which involves several changes of aircraft and an overnight stop-over in Chile. The unpleasant is to put yourself in the hands of Britain’s Royal Air Force. There is nothing specifically wrong with the RAF flights from England to the Islands. It is just that every conceivably pleasant part of commercial air travel has been removed.
Sparke found himself, for the second time in as many weeks, standing at the RAF base in Brize Norton, going through the processes involved which allow a civilian to board a military flight. Once on board, he immediately began to pay the price of flying with an organisation which is focussed on the mission rather than the joy of the client experience, when the flight planners decided to delay their take off for almost two hours witho
ut feeling the need to explain to those on board what the delay was caused by.
The flight was unusually full and Sparke found himself sitting next to a military technician who specialised in radar systems. In fact, he was making the journey to be part of the project with Sparke’s own firm. His team would be travelling down the following week and the military wanted to have “all their ducks in a line” according to the man.
“I have to tell you, I was quite happy to be working with a bunch of civvies on this trip,” he said. Usually the only civilians we see down there are the Stills.”
“Stills?” asked Sparke. “I don’t know the term.”
“Well, the Islanders used to be called ‘Bennies’ by the forces after a character from a soap opera called Benny. He was a nice lad, but a bit of an idiot. The top brass were furious about that so they ordered everyone to stop using that term. So now they are called ‘Stills’ because whatever the brass says, they are Still a bunch of Bennies.”
“What do they think of all the military types they have to deal with?” asked Sparke.
“Actually, they are probably the nicest people in the world. All they want to do is to be left alone, drive around in their clapped-out Land Rovers, and mess around with old bits of farm machinery. The men are much the same.”
Sparke smiled at the strange relationship the military always seemed to have with the people they put their lives on the line for and reflected that, yet again, he was travelling thousands of miles to a place where he would almost certainly never meet any of the locals.
Nothing made flights like this any easier to bear. Sparke had tried noise-reducing headphones, recordings of whales calling to each other, meditation, and sleep deprivation; none of them worked so he fell back on sheer stamina.
Clambering out of the aircraft on the Falklands made Sparke feel like a newborn fawn: barely capable of walking and dazed by his surroundings. Captain McCafferty was waiting for him at the bottom of the aircraft steps. He noticed that she was dressed in civilian clothes.
The Kaiser’s Navigator (Peter Sparke Book 2) Page 12
