"Over to the left, about fifty metres away, there is another shape in the snow," Beth said. "It is lower, about two metres high, maybe a little less, and flat along its top...probably between three and four metres long. We are best to look at the big object first, I think."
They walked carefully down the reverse slope until they stood, almost within touching distance of the object. Sparke reached over his shoulder and pulled out his ice axe which he had tucked in behind his rucksack. He pushed it into the snow until it hit a solid surface. He looked over to Beth, who shrugged her shoulders. He pushed in hard and this time there was a clear metallic clang. Across five continents, almost ten thousand screens now displayed Sparke and Beth simultaneously as they discussed the find.
"It's metal, it sounds to be quite solid," said Sparke. "Perhaps we can get a bit of snow off it."
He took his ice axe by its spiked end and dragged the flat top around the base of the object, carving a band of snow off the structure half a metre wide. It resembled a man lifting shaving foam off with a razor. With the band of snow and ice removed, Sparke walked back to the sled and unstrapped a ski pole from it. Holding it in both hands he struck the exposed metal a resounding blow. A huge sheet of snow now fell off, sending a cloud of white powder into the air. As it settled, both cameras pointed up to the tip of the object. The paint had long faded into unrecognisable flat tones, but clearly discernible was a line of raised metal lettering.
"I see the letters S, I, and M," said Beth. "There is a letter that looks to be missing, but there is an N, and I am pretty sure that is an E."
"Santa Simone," said Sparke.
The pair turned to look at each other, and then simultaneously turned towards the low flat shape.
"No way this can be part of the ship." said Beth.
"Hard to imagine how a ship could be broken apart like that. No way to find out until we look under the snow." They walked slowly towards to shape.
Sparke repeated his probing with his ice axe. "Sounds like wood, don't you think?"
"Shovels?" asked Beth.
"Shovels," nodded Sparke.
It took only ten minutes of effort to remove the snow from the short end of the structure, with two broad, brightly-coloured plastic snow shovels. Since they had walked directly from the remains of the Santa Simone to the wooden structure, they had followed exactly the same path as Opitz and Filchner over a hundred years ago and therefore they uncovered the same area of wall where they had stood. The break in the thin wooden wall made by Opitz stared at them.
"That wall is not strong," said Beth. "We can't put any weight on it. If we try to climb in we could bring the whole thing down." Her words were now being listened to on over a hundred thousand computers and hand held devices around the world. Three global broadcasters were just about to start live streaming.
"Let's have a go with the Brick?" said Sparke. Beth nodded.
The Brick was, in effect, a micro version of the military Albatross drones Sparke had seen in the Falkands. Slightly larger than a house brick and a similar shape, it flew using four tiny stabilising rotors and contained a battery of microscopic cameras. It was ungainly looking, hence the ironic nickname of "Flying Brick''.
Sparke pulled it from the sled and laid it on the ground. Then, using the computer wrapped around his left forearm, he gently flew the device up and through the torn gap in the wall. As it entered the hut, a cluster of LED lights came on and the camera feed was relayed directly through to the web broadcast.
The brick disappeared into the darkness of the hut and slowly moved the length of the inside of the building near ceiling level.
At first the images were too dull and dark to make any sense to the people watching, who now numbered in the millions. Sparke slowly lowered the drone until it was a metre above what seemed like a table top in the centre of the room, then he tapped on an icon on his control screen, "Illuminate". A second set of more powerful lights now sprang into life, throwing a tight cone of light across the room and instantly flashing a close up of the frozen face of the Captain of the Santa Simone from less than a metre away, across the world.
Around the world a million viewers screamed simultaneously as the Captain's dead black eyes stared directly into the camera of the drone.
Chapter Thirty Four
Four hours after arriving in Feldkirchen, the column of vehicles formed up and headed back to Munich. Opitz watched them go. He had not even spoken to the commanders of the Friekorps about his decision to stay in the village. The Driver spoke with Munich and told Opitz that everyone agreed that he had contributed enough to the cause. He was back in his own village and should now act as regional commander until civil power could be re-established.
He walked the length of the village to his father's old farm, opened the back door, dropped his rifle and pistol onto the table and went to find some wood for the stove.
The next morning he spent two hours cleaning up the yard, then went back into the village. At the house of the doctor he received the sad but unsurprising news that the old librarian had not survived; the beating by the soldiers had been too severe.
"You knew him, I think?" said the doctor.
"Everyone knew the librarian," said Opitz quietly.
He walked to the small Village Hall, where he found some of the civilians whom he had spoken with the previous day. They seemed to be the councillors.
"The librarian is dead," he told the group, who nodded silently, making no effort to welcome him. Eventually, one of them addressed Opitz.
"So, you have come back home. Do you need anything?"
"Actually, yes," he said. "I need a job. I would like you to consider me for the position of librarian."
The village councillors looked at each other, and then looked at Opitz. Then the senior councillor looked at Opitz, nodded, and went to a small cabinet on the wall of the office and handed Opitz the key to the library.
Opitz took the key, returned to the family farm, put his weapons in the cupboard under the stairs, and spent a long day getting the buildings clean and into shape. He made his old bedroom as comfortable as possible and that night slept a long deep sleep, the best rest he had enjoyed since his ship had been sunk in the South Atlantic five years before.
He woke before the dawn light and went out into the yard to fill a bucket with water from the pump. As he turned back to enter the farm he stopped dead. During the night the door had been daubed with red paint in a crude Star of David, and on the window ledge someone had left a bullet.
Opitz washed, dressed and got ready to reopen the library. Just before he left he went into the cupboard beneath the stairs, buckled the pistol holster around his coat and slung his rifle over his shoulder. He walked through town, occasionally stopping when he met a villager.
"Good morning, the library will open today at 9.00." The villagers all nodded and thanked him for the information.
At 9.00 am, Opitz finished tidying the library and opened the door to find a group of people waiting. One of them, a small elderly man whom Opitz remembered as being the owner of many good apple trees, which he had often raided as a child, was in the front.
"So, the library is open?" he said, unsmiling.
"Yes, we are open," said Opitz, waving the small group inside.
At noon, Opitz, who had been restoring the small collection of books to a useable order, closed up the library, strapped on his pistol, checked his rifle and headed home for lunch, looking out for snipers as casually as he could.
On his return from lunch, he saw a small carriage parked outside the library with two men chatting beside it.
"Herr Opitz," said the younger of the two men. "I wonder if we could trouble you for a few moments. We are from the newspaper and we would appreciate a photograph of the new librarian."
"The newspaper is running?" asked Opitz.
"It will be by Friday," said the man. "Please, if you could stand in front of the library sign."
Opitz stared hard at the two
men. It would be a good way to make someone a target: to have them stand still, posing for a photograph. He looked at the windows around the square and scanned the roofs. He continued to hold his rifle with a practiced ease and unclipped the cover of his holster.
The camera flashed, the men from the newspaper smiled and nobody shot at Opitz. As the photographer dismantled his camera, the journalist shook Opitz by the hand.
"Now we have a library again and a newspaper on Friday," he said, smiling. Opitz smiled back, probably for the first time in years, then he unlocked the library and went to work.
Chapter Thirty Five
Sparke looked directly into the face of the Captain of the Santa Simone on the computer wrapped around his forearm and screamed as loudly as any of the millions of viewers around the globe. The shock of the image made him throw his head back, causing him to slip on the icy surface and he crashed down onto the snow, bashing the control system as he fell.
The Brick, sensing the loss of control, did what it was programmed to do, it settled down to land gently on the nearest flat surface, which was the rough table at which the Captain and his crew sat.
The viewers saw the camera slowly pan down over the body of the Captain until it landed and began to go into a "hibernate" state to save power. As it shut down, the last image it captured remained on the screens.
It was the hand of the captain, resting on a small book on the table. Despite the long years under the snow and ice, there was very little frost in the hut so the image was clear. Wrapped around the hand of the captain was a thin black ribbon which bore some faded, but legible, writing.
"Kaiserliche Mar..." It was the hatband from the cap of a sailor of the Imperial German Navy from the early twentieth century.
Within seconds, people around the world who had been following events made the connection. There was a desperate race to be the first to update Wikipedia by scores of contributors and the image made the website of every German media organisation within minutes.
In Feldkirchen, the volume of incoming calls was so great that the local telephone network crashed. Fortunately, the additional website created by Sparke's team was hosted elsewhere and continued to broadcast.
There was chaos in Buenos Ares and a meltdown in both the Ministry for Information and the Diplomatic Service as they saw their strategy for claiming exclusive rights in a huge section of Antarctic waters dissolve before their eyes. Across Latin America, scores of media outlets were repeating and reinforcing the tale of the Santa Simone as she had left port and fought through massive storms before being trapped in the ice, thousands of miles from where the Argentinian Government had planned to claim they had landed. Before Sparke had time to brush the snow from his survival suit several members of the Argentine civil service knew their careers were over.
Now that he was back on his feet, Sparke reactivated the Brick and had it pass several times along the length of the hut, filming everything in detail.
Finally, happy that every part of the hut had been recorded, Sparke manoeuvred the Brick back through the gap in the wall and set it down next to the sled.
With this done, he motioned for Beth to turn and face him so that he could speak directly to her camera, aware that, much as he hated dealing with the media, this was a moment which would become a sound bite.
"This is Peter Sparke. We have completed our initial survey of the wreck of the Santa Simone and the last refuge of those men who survived the sinking. We will now leave the site intact and turn it over to the international authorities and, I am sure, to the care of the Argentinian people who will want to honour their brave dead."
Chapter Thirty Six
The Great Influenza Epidemic which swept the world that year left millions of dead in its wake. Prominent amongst the dead were young adults who seemed particularly badly hit. The plague did not leave Feldkirchen alone.
The driver of a postal truck, Stephan Ebisher, arrived in the village early one morning from Munich and complained of feeling ill. He lay down to rest on a bench in the small parlour of the post office. By lunchtime he was showing a fever, by late afternoon he was barely conscious, and by the next morning he was dead. Compared to the suffering of millions of others of victims, his death had been easy.
The village council called a meeting, ordered all public places to be closed, including the library, and stopped all non-essential journeys outside to the city. At this meeting, Opitz became infected by the postmaster, who had tended to the dying postal driver.
When Opitz tried to rise the next morning, a Sunday, he knew immediately that he was a victim of the disease. His joints were wracked with pain, he was bathed in sweat and his limbs were as weak as a kitten's. The chances of survival were slim and there were no known treatments. Trying to sit up exhausted him and he fell back into a shallow, restless sleep for much of the day.
Waking again, he resolved that lying in bed to die alone was not an attractive option, so, agonisingly, he dressed himself as best he could, and then slowly pulled himself up to the loft of the farmhouse. There, amongst some childhood toys, Opitz had hidden a small tin box. He pulled the box downstairs to the kitchen, banging it on each step on the way, too weak to carry it. Now, in the kitchen, the brightest room in the house, he took a sharpening steel from the drawer and snapped the box’s flimsy lock. The key was long lost.
He lifted out a package, wrapped in waxed cloth, containing two small books. One was a copy of the report he had written on the navigation of the Second German Antarctic Expedition across the frozen ice, one of only a few hundred copies printed. The other was the handwritten navigation log of the Santa Simone, taken from the hut so many years before.
Sweat drenched his body as he tried to pull on an overcoat, but the task was too great a challenge for him. He was beyond feeling cold anyway.
He left the farm door open behind him and shuffled along the quiet evening Feldkirchen street until he reached the library. Unlocking the door took him almost five minutes. At one point he dropped the keys and moaned out loud at the effort required to bend and pick them up.
Eventually he got the door open and slumped down behind his desk, dropping the two small volumes in front of him. The heavy Register of Titles, which contained a list of all the books the small library possessed, felt as though it was made of lead as be pulled it towards him. The effort was too great and blood began to trickle from his nose and mouth.
He opened the Register and managed, somehow, to lift his pen and dip it in the inkpot.
As he felt his life begin to ebb away, he used the last of his energy to commit these two books into the care of the little library. They now belonged to the village.
Staring at the entries to make sure that his shaky handwriting was legible, Opitz lent hard against the desk, leveraged himself up to a standing position and lurched towards the door. He had spent too much of his life in ships, in barracks, or in a prisoner of war camp to want to die anywhere except outside, in the fresh air of his own hometown.
The sun was beginning to set as he stumbled outside and sat heavily down on the bench next to the horse trough. He felt the last of the sun's rays slightly warm his face as he sat there, then as the last bright glow of sunshine left the sky, the pain left his body, his head fell forward and his life left him.
Epilogue
Sparke slouched comfortably in his office chair talking to the Chief Secretary on the huge computer screen on his wall.
"The whole thing seems to have been resolved rather neatly," said the Chief Secretary. "Our friends in Buenos Aires are none too happy, but by the time they could even think about trying to challenge the story, their own media had turned the Santa Simone voyage into a national epic. It turns out that the storm the ship was caught in was one of the largest on record. Several ships were lost.
"Of course, the fascinating thing is that the whole discovery could only have been made thanks to two decisions made by that mad Kaiser. If he had not sent the Expedition to the Antarctic in the fi
rst place, your man Opitz would never have stumbled on the Santa Simone, and if he had not insisted on sending his ships out to defend his worthless colonies, Opitz would never have been captured by our chaps."
"The lives of millions revolve at the command of a Kaiser," agreed Sparke. "Well, I am pleased that things worked out, but to be honest I am happy to get back to more mundane matters."
"Well, on that happy note we look forward to reading the full report from your team when they get back. Thanks for all your efforts, Mr Sparke."
The screen quickly faded when the Chief Secretary rung off.
Sparke swivelled his chair back to face his desk and realised that he had rather more mundane matters to deal with than he had thought. He had barely started to read a lengthy proposal from his head of HR, Lynne, about new paternity leave allowances when his Skype screen pinged with a text message, "Are you free for a moment?"
The message came from a professor in Scotland, Matilda (called "Tilly" by everyone) Pink. The idea of talking to Tilly was far more attractive than European Guidelines on Paternity Leave.
He clicked Tilly's name on his home page and a few seconds later her face appeared on the screen.
"Peter, you are in the news again," she said breezily. "You've been to the South Pole or somewhere."
"Yes, being in the media is not really good news, to be honest. My policy is to ignore all contact from the media, but it is not always easy. They can be very insistent."
"I can imagine. Talking about insistent people, I had a very assertive lady in my office today who asked me a lot of questions about you."
The Kaiser’s Navigator (Peter Sparke Book 2) Page 15
