by Nigel Seed
“See anything?” asked Jim.
“Not much. There are some shapes down there, but this light isn’t powerful enough at this distance.”
“Tell you what though. It stinks in there.”
“After nearly seventy years without ventilation I’m not surprised.”
“How deep do you reckon that is, boss?’ asked Geordie.
Ivan reached out and dropped his crushed beer can in to the hole. It seemed a long time before they heard the sound of it striking metal.
He looked up, “Judging by the time to fall and using my mathematical genius I would say it’s approximately chuffing deep.”
Jim nodded, “We need climbing ropes to get into there and something to help get us back out again. We will need to get ready for an abseiling expedition tomorrow. Our contact should not have any trouble acquiring climbing kit for us.”
They dropped the steel plate back into place carefully and disassembled the tripod. They had earned their salt today and despite the tiredness were extremely pleased with themselves.
Chapter 6
The next morning found the team on top of the hill with wet trouser legs from the dew on the grass, but with the tripod and pulley assembled. Jim checked and found that the almost flat top to the hill meant they were not visible from the roads and farms around them. Once again the winch cable was hauled out of the drum on the front of the Land Rover and looped over the pulley, the heavy duty hook was forced around the edge of the plate and the sheet of steel was dragged up. There was considerably less resistance this time, but it was still an effort with a hatch cover of this size. Once the steel sheet was secured firmly in the open position with angle iron beams holding it up, climbing ropes were tied securely to the front of the Land Rover and dropped into the darkness below.
Jim and Ivan had decided they would descend with Geordie providing safety cover from the top of the hill in case anything went wrong. Wearing caver’s helmets with lamps and carrying lightweight back packs of equipment, they prepared to lower themselves over the edge with Jim taking the lead. As he dropped below the hatchway he stopped and looked back up.
“Have I ever told you how much I dislike dark enclosed spaces?”
The ropes disappeared into the darkness below him and he dropped slowly and carefully down. They had tied a stopper knot at the end of each rope to ensure they did not slide down too far and start a sudden free-fall, which, with the lack of visibility was some comfort. Jim felt rather than saw the huge space vanishing into the silent darkness as he slid down into the forgotten night of the hill. The helmet lamp showed indistinct shapes below him. As he dropped further into the past these became clearer.
The first shape below him started to resolve into something large and black. A conning tower appeared below him with periscope tubes and antennae pointing at the top of the cavern. He was dropping on to the rear deck of a large submarine. He slowed the descent even more and was soon standing on the metal gratings of the boat to the rear of the conning tower. He checked the grating beneath his feet. It was dry and sound. He swiveled his head to let the helmet lamp sweep around to check for hazards. As far as he could see there were no sharp upright poles or anything else that could ruin Ivan’s day as he dropped in. He opened the patch pocket on the leg of his trousers and pulled out the small VHF radio. Thumbing the transmit button he called back up to the surface.
“OK Ivan, you’re next to drop into history.”
He saw Ivan’s legs appear over the rim of the hatchway high above him and then Ivan himself appeared swinging slightly as he slipped down the rope. Ivan’s helmet light tracked around, but it was as weak as Jim’s and the huge echoing space he was dropping into remained a mystery.
Beyond Ivan, Jim could see Geordie’s head outlined against the sky as he lay on his belly staring down and breathing in the seventy-year-old air. From where he lay the helmet lights showed only tantalizing glimpses of what the others were seeing.
Ivan joined Jim on the aft deck of the submarine and unclipped his harness.
“We really must find the marble staircase into this place.”
They walked to the edge of the grating and looked over the side of the boat. They saw no water beneath them reflecting their helmet lights back.
Ivan looked at Jim, “Dry dock?”
“Looks like it.”
They walked toward the conning tower. This seemed to be a big boat by World War Two standards, but in the darkness it was hard to judge. They walked around the conning tower expecting to see the deck gun in front of them. There was a raised platform and a mounting, but no gun. Apparently the designers had changed their minds or the boat had not been completely equipped when the base was abandoned. They stood on the empty gun platform and looked forward.
In front of the platform, let into the deck they saw a large rectangular hatch, but strangely it had no external means of opening it. Forward of the large smooth hatch, two parallel metal beams were secured to the deck as permanent features. They walked forward between these beams and found that, as they neared the bow, there was a pronounced “up tilt” in them.
Jim looked at Ivan. “This looks a bit like the ski jump fitted to a small aircraft carrier.”
“You think they were going to launch aircraft from this?”
Jim shrugged, “Who knows what they were going to do? The Germans were doing some weird and wonderful things by the end of the war.”
They turned back to the conning tower still puzzling about the strange contraption on the forward deck. They passed around the conning tower again and made their way back to the aft deck looking for a way off the boat. If this was a dry dock there must be a gangway to the dockside somewhere, but there was nothing on the submarine.
Ivan shrugged off his back pack and having retrieved a more powerful flashlight, he swept it along the dockside. There was a gangway, neatly stowed on the dock with no way to reach it from the deck they stood on. He held the flashlight out as far as he could and shone it down to confirm there was no water below them.
They went back to the conning tower. Set into the side of the structure were rungs leading up. They climbed the rungs and Jim was the first to fling his leg over the top. Ivan followed close behind. They found themselves on the command bridge deck, intended for use during surface operations. Set into the deck gratings was a round hatch with a locking wheel in the center. Jim tried to open the deck hatch. The wheel would not move.
“Ivan, give me a hand with this.”
“In a minute boss. I think you might want to see this first.”
Jim stood and looked where Ivan was pointing. With the more powerful flashlight they could now see another U-Boat in a second dock. He stared. How big was this place? Ivan tapped him on the shoulder and pointed the other way. As he turned, Ivan moved the big flashlight to show him a third U-Boat sitting quietly in its own dock.
“Have you noticed something strange?” said Ivan.
“What? Stranger than standing on the deck of a seventy-year-old submarine that’s sitting inside a hill?”
“Maybe not that strange. But I thought all U-Boats had a U and a number on the conning tower as their designation?”
“I think they did. Why?”
“Look again at that one,” said Ivan pointing the torch.
The number was there, but not a U. The numbers on the side of the conning tower read V4-1. There was a stylized red fire breathing dragon painted below the numbers. He pointed the flashlight back at the other boat to read V4-3. Another dragon graced the side of this conning tower as well, this one was yellow. Heaving himself up on the guard rail he looked down at the conning tower of the boat they stood on. The lamp from his helmet showed V4-2 and a blue dragon breathing fire.
Ivan swung the flashlight round to look along the back of the boat. Even with the beam from this more powerful light, the wall of the base behind them was indistinct, although it looked as if there might be doors at that end of the dock. Looking forward was even more unproduc
tive. From the conning tower the flashlight was picking up very little in the way of identifiable features. They returned to the hatch in the deck of the conning tower. Even with two of them heaving on the lock wheel, they could not move it.
“I suppose at the age of seventy it’s entitled to be a little difficult,” said Jim. “We probably need a good long lever to get this moving.” They stood and looked around again.
“Looks like our employer has hit the mother lode down here. How he expects us to sneak these out without the German authorities noticing should be fun to discover. Anyhow, Ivan, can you grab the camera and start taking pictures? He will definitely want to see this.”
Ivan took the digital camera out of Jim’s backpack and started to take the photographs. He walked along the forward deck and took pictures of the deck rails, then the large hatch. The aft end of the boat seemed unremarkable. He walked all the way back to the vertical stabilizer that rose at the stern. This boat seemed to have two rudders, one above and one below. He dropped to his belly and slid aft. As he looked over he could just see the two bronze propellers and photographed them.
Below them, he could now confirm, was dry concrete. There was a ladder of rungs built into the end wall of the dry dock and he could now see a large rail-mounted lifting gantry with a crane cab slung below it parked at the end of the dock. Hanging from the gantry was a massive red, white and black Nazi flag.
This was clearly a well equipped dry dock; purposely built to service the needs of these specialized U-Boats. He returned to the base of the conning tower. Jim had been searching for another way into the boat without success. There was a further hatch set into the main deck, but it too was unwilling to open after lying undisturbed for all these years.
“Not much else we can do here, boss, these ropes are not long enough to drop us down to the bottom of this dry dock.”
“OK, let’s start back up. I’ve not been looking forward to this bit.”
Again Jim went first. Using one of the descent ropes as a safety line, he clipped the two moving hand grips from his pack onto the second rope and started to pull himself up, with Geordie reeling in the safety line as he rose. It was a long climb and he was out of practice with climbing equipment. The ascender hand grips made the climb easier, but not easy. The muscles in his arms felt like they were on fire by the time his head emerged from the roof entrance near Geordie’s feet. He was out of breath and sweating when Geordie helped him out of the hatchway. Despite the massive size of the base it was still dark and underground and his claustrophobia had been waiting for him to crack.
He had recovered slightly by the time Ivan joined them and he was immensely cheered to notice that, despite his strength, Ivan was just as red in the face.
They briefed Geordie on what they had found. He was keen to take his turn and go down as well, but they had to report in and he was promised the chance to descend the next day. The equipment was packed away and the steel hatch cover dropped into place. The tripod was disassembled and everything removed from the site. From the bottom of the hill no casual passerby would see anything. They drove down the hill and out onto the narrow lane that skirted it. By way of a small celebration, they called in at a roadside Gasthaus for a cold beer and a Bratwurst on the way to their temporary home. Geordie flipped through the photographs they had taken with the digital camera.
“Quite impressive,” he said. “I’ll look forward to seeing these on a bigger screen when we get them onto the laptop.”
Back at the villa, they fired up the computer and downloaded the pictures from the camera. On the larger screen they were far clearer and they were eager to get back into the cavernous base tomorrow to explore further. While Ivan cooked a late supper, Geordie opened the cold beer from the fridge. If nothing else all this climbing was giving them an excellent thirst. Jim emailed the photographs to the gray man in London with a report of what they had found and a rough outline of what they planned for the next day. He also included a list of the extra equipment needed to survey the base, now that they had a better idea of what they were up against.
All three men were dog tired and were fast asleep seconds after their heads hit their pillows.
Chapter 7
By morning they had a return email detailing where to go to pick up the equipment they had requested. It took a couple of trips back and forth in the Land Rover to get it all in place. Much of it would be staying inside the hill once they had it positioned.
Ivan was the first to go down into the base and the extra ropes and floodlights were lowered to him. He positioned these out of the way on the submarine’s aft casing. Jim and Geordie heaved the petrol driven generator into position and lifted it out over the entryway suspended from the winch pulley. Jim abseiled down, past the hanging generator, to be at the bottom to help with handling it when it arrived. The generator was dropped slowly onto the submarine and positioned in the center of the deck grating.
The extra climbing ropes were tied off to the conning tower and the two men clipped on their abseiling harnesses and walked backwards down and around the submarine pressure hull, then dropped down to the floor of the dry dock. Ivan picked up the beer can he had dropped when they first opened the roof hatch and tossed it into the corner of the large concrete basin. They looked around at the towering concrete walls which seemed to be in remarkable condition for their age.
From below, the submarine looked huge and menacing. The massive wooden blocks that it sat on were examined and found to be sound. They walked to the end of the dock; their footsteps echoing off the concrete walls and climbed carefully up the rung ladder in the end wall, checking, as they went, that time had not destroyed the iron or the concrete it was mounted in.
At the top they walked around the dock to the gangplank they had seen on their first visit. Using the rollers it was sitting on, they managed to heave it across the gap to the deck of the submarine. Jim went across first, with Ivan balancing his weight, and secured the inner end to the deck rings aft of the conning tower. The generator and the floodlights were moved across to the concrete dock and set up so that the central area of the base could be illuminated. The generator was modern and quiet, and the floodlights were lightweight and equipped with telescopic mounting poles. It was the work of less than an hour to have lights strung out and the generator running. Jim looked up to see Geordie’s head hanging over the entry hatch waiting for the big reveal. Ivan flipped the switch and the lights flickered on.
Even these lights could not fully illuminate a space of this size. The ends of the dock area were still fairly dimly lit. He could see that the boat they had originally landed on was in the center of the complex, with another boat to each side of it. Beyond that in one direction was what looked like another dry dock, but without a U-Boat in it. In the other direction, beyond the submarine labeled as V4-1, was a wide concrete area with equipment stacks, heavy looking wooden crates and work benches. Above them in the darkness they could just see dangling lights hanging from the roof gantries. Running across the whole space was a tall moving crane mounted on tracks set into the concrete which at first glance looked as though it had been designed for very heavy lifting.
Despite the urge to explore immediately, discipline took over and they continued to bring down the supplies they needed to carry out a full survey of the base. Extra generator fuel, food, water, tool boxes and oxy-acetylene cutting gear were all dropped down and maneuvered across the gangway onto the dock. To save their aching arms at the end of the day they installed a Boatswain’s Chair to lift them back up to the entrance when they finished their work.
After a couple of hours of hard physical labor they were out of breath, sweaty and glad of a rest. They sat at the side of the central dry dock to watch Geordie abseil down from the entrance high above, and wondered if their faces had been like his when they first looked around at this incredible sight. Geordie had brought down cheese sandwiches and a flask of coffee for the three of them before they started to investigate. As they ate
their sandwiches, they stared in awe at the sheer size of their surroundings, a place that had been lost to the world for seventy years. It seemed a little inadequate to be eating something so mundane in a location of such remarkable historical significance.
Chapter 8
Naturally they all wanted to climb inside the submarines, but they decided to survey the base itself first to ensure it was not in a dangerous condition. They split up. Ivan took one of the big flashlights and headed into the workshop and storage area at one end of the base, Jim found his flashlight and took the area in front of the three submarines, and Geordie headed off toward the empty dry dock at the end away from Ivan.
Jim walked slowly along the dock, checking the condition of the concrete as he went and found himself looking down into yet another apparent dry dock. This one was much larger, with room for any of the submarines to move out of the individual dry docks and maneuver to line up with what appeared to be large exit doors on the far side, behind which there had been some kind of rock fall. There were winches set around the sides to assist with turning the boats which were unlikely to have bow thrusters and other modern conveniences. Jim was about to walk around to investigate the other side of the great doors when he heard Geordie’s call echoing through the gloom of the great open base.
“Boss! Ivan! You have to come and see this!”
Walking back down the dock he could see Ivan approaching from the workshop area carrying something. Geordie was waiting for them. As they joined up Ivan handed Jim a dusty steel helmet of the type the Germans used during the war.
“What’s so special about that? There’s probably quite a bit of personal kit hanging about.”
