‘Grub’s up,’ he said, putting the tray on the table and grinning at Jack. ‘Isn’t that what your old seadog grandfather used to say?’
Jack took a coffee and smiled. ‘Hel o, Jeremy. Is Rebecca awake?’
‘I’l knock on her door if you want.’
‘No,’ Jack said. ‘It’s only just dawn, and she is stil a teenager.’
Jeremy grinned again. ‘As you keep reminding me.
She can’t wait to see you.’
‘Let’s see what Mikhail has to say first.’ Jack leaned forward, took a gulp of coffee and put the mug down on the table. He pointed to where the Lee–
Enfield lay beside three other weapons, a Ruger 10/22 semi-automatic rifle, a Beretta side-by-side 12-gauge shotgun and a revolver, alongside a cardboard box fil ed with ammunition. ‘That’s quite an arsenal.’
‘Ben and John are both carrying Glocks,’ Mikhail said. ‘These are just my farm guns, for hunting and personal defence. I know how good you are with the Lee–Enfield, from shooting with you here last year, but I’ve only just sighted it in for new ammunition I’ve reloaded myself so I’l take that. If the need arises, Rebecca has the shotgun and Jeremy the Ruger.’
Jack looked questioningly at Jeremy. ‘Have you done much shooting?’
‘I grew up in rural Vermont, where just about every boy I knew had a 10/22. You just have to know the limitations of the .22, even the hyper-velocity rounds.
For anything bigger than a squirrel, that means less than fifty yards and always a head shot. But with the right shot placement, that rifle could kil a man instantly.’
There was a rustle from a corner of the room and Rebecca appeared bleary-eyed around a door, her long dark hair hanging over an oversized T-shirt. She gave a smal wave, then shut the door again. Jeremy turned back to Jack. ‘I know what you’re asking. I haven’t pul ed a gun on a man before, but I’l do what it takes. We’ve got assets to protect.’
Jack reached over and picked up the revolver, a heavy break-top Webley. ‘So it looks as if this is mine.’
‘It’s an old British service revolver,’ Mikhail said. ‘A lot of Webleys were sold as surplus into the States in the fifties and sixties. It’s a man-stopper, .455 calibre, designed to put down fanatical tribesmen on the Afghan frontier. It’s my home defence weapon.’
Jack spun the cylinder, then cupped his hands around the grip and aimed the pistol. ‘Scott Macalister has one of these, and I’ve practised with it from the ship.’ He pressed the lever on the receiver with his right thumb and broke the pistol open, pivoting the barrel and cylinder forward and letting the ejector snap out and fal back again. He reached over to the cardboard box and took out a container of .455
ammunition, opened it and loaded six cartridges into the cylinder, leaving the pistol broken open and laying it back on the table. ‘If Saumerre’s men do try to attack, what’s the dril ?’
Mikhail sprang up from his chair and went up to the window on the opposite side of the house from the barn, gesturing for Jack and Jeremy to fol ow. Jack mounted the stairs and stood beside him, looking over the lush green winter wheat that carpeted the field towards the pine and maple trees bordering the forest beyond. Mikhail opened the mosquito screen on the window, took a compact laser rangefinder from the ledge below and peered through it, finding a target and holding the rangefinder steady with both hands while he pressed the activator on the top. ‘That large dead pine at the end of the field is three hundred and twelve metres away,’ he murmured.
‘That’s the furthest line-of-sight distance in any direction from the house.’ He took down the rangefinder and pointed to a large aerial photograph of the farm pinned to the wal beside the window, showing the three main fields extending off from the buildings like fingers penetrating the forest. ‘It’s al near enough for me to shoot using the battle sights on the Lee–Enfield without any need for range adjustment.’ He looked back, scanning the far edge of the field for a moment, and then pul ed shut the mosquito screen. ‘It’s been done before,’ he said, looking at Jack. ‘During the war of 1812, the place withstood a combined British and Iroquois attack. The farmer and his boys only had flintlock longrifles, but it did the trick.’
‘Should one of us be standing lookout?’ Jeremy said.
Mikhail shook his head. ‘No need until we’re certain there’s a threat. Best to rest and keep alert. At the moment Ben is the first line of defence, and the dogs provide an early-warning system. I built the pen so they have a ful run around the house. They’re very territorial and want to attack anything that intrudes on this place. They’l let us know.’
Jack gestured at a spotting scope on a tripod beside the window. ‘It looks as if you designed this room as a defensive outpost.’
Mikhail gave a wry smile. ‘I’m a pretty serious birder. Rebecca’s probably told you al about it. I used to drag her along to al kinds of places to spend hours sitting beside some swamp at migration time. When we bought this farm, the house was derelict and I had this room built as part of an extension, custom-designed as an observatory.’
‘And a place to write your books. I envy you that.’
Mikhail paused. ‘There’s another reason for the design of this room, the open-plan concept with the continuous window. Even when I’m absorbed in writing, I’m not comfortable in a room where I’m not aware of my surroundings. I can’t sleep unless the windows are open. It’s a smal legacy of war.’
Jeremy eyed him cautiously. ‘You were in Afghanistan during the Soviet war, weren’t you?
Before you defected? Rebecca told me, but I know you don’t like it spread about. Plenty of people here haven’t forgotten the Cold War and stil think of the Russians as the enemy.’
Mikhail walked over and opened the top drawer of a smal wooden chest beside the sofa. He took out two badges and tossed them on the sheepskin carpet on the floor in front of them. One was a hammer-and-sickle design within a star surrounded by golden sheaves of wheat; the other was a red-enamel pentagonal star containing a white-metal image of a Soviet soldier holding a rifle. He looked at them rueful y. ‘The Order of the Red Banner and the Order of the Red Star. They dished those out to everyone who fought in the battle for Hil 3234, to the men who survived and the families of the men who died. I was an intel igence officer attached to the 345th Independent Guards Airborne Regiment. We were ordered to occupy a nameless ridge 3,234 metres high overlooking the road from Gardez to Khost near the Pakistan frontier. It was the night of the seventh of January 1988. A single reduced company of thirty-seven men fought off waves of attacks by hundreds of mujahideen al night long. By the time we were relieved, we’d suffered thirty-four casualties.’
‘And you survived unscathed?’ Jeremy asked.
Mikhail pul ed up his left sleeve, revealing an ugly scar under his bicep. ‘You may have noticed that I can’t real y use al the fingers of my left hand. The mujahideen who shot me was using an old British service rifle, a Lee–Enfield. Somehow having one of those rifles here and being in control of it helps me to deal with the pain. He came right up to our perimeter and I kil ed him with a grenade.’
‘That’s one less Taliban today,’ Jeremy murmured.
‘Maybe. But if we hadn’t invaded Afghanistan in 1979, there’d have been no mujahideen and then maybe no Taliban and no al-Qaeda. The only thing I can be sure of is that I fought in the last campaign of the Cold War and that our defeat brought about what I so desperately wanted, the col apse of the Soviet Union. Just like Korea and Vietnam and numerous other proxy conflicts between communism and the West, fighting mujahideen on the Afghan frontier served as a pressure-relief valve that kept the prospect of nuclear annihilation at bay. That’s the way I see it as a historian, though as a soldier you only see yourself and your mates. Without the breakdown in the Soviet security system that was precipitated by the Afghan War, Petra and I might never have defected and I wouldn’t be a professor of history in the United States today.’
‘And Rebecca wouldn’t have had
such marvel ous foster-parents,’ Jack said.
Mikhail walked around and peered out of the window facing the driveway. ‘The difference between here and Hil 3234 is that we held a mountain ridge with three-hundred-and-sixty-degree visibility down into the surrounding val eys. What nearly finished us was the sheer force of mujahideen numbers, as wel as the rocky terrain that al owed them easy concealment as they came up the slopes, and the limitations of our weapons and ammunition supply.
What mainly concerns me here are the two places where the forest comes within seventy metres of the house. But let’s leave that to Ben and the dogs. I want to show you what I found in the archive, Jack.’
‘Good. The Embraer’s returning to Syracuse for me this afternoon.’
They walked down the steps and sat around the table. Mikhail picked up a large manila envelope from beside the guns and slid out a sheaf of papers that looked like scanned documents. He peered at Jack, his eyes alight with excitement. ‘You asked me for two things. First, to try to get the inside story on the discovery of those crates of Schliemann’s treasures in Moscow in the 1980s, the artefacts from Troy taken by the Russians in 1945 from Berlin. My contact in Moscow is looking into it, and it’s very promising. She says the curator who found the crates also discovered a package of documents with it, German military order books that the Russian soldiers who seized them must have shoved into one of the crates and then forgotten. She thinks they stil exist in the museum store, and she’s on the trail.’
‘Hoffman’s diary,’ Jack murmured. ‘Frau Hoffman told us he’d mentioned it to her during their brief final encounter before he embarked on the U-boat, that he’d left it with the crates in the Zoo tower for the Soviet intel igence people to find. He told her it contained everything he knew about the final months of the Third Reich.’
‘That could be explosive,’ Jeremy said.
‘As soon as we’re done here and Rebecca’s safely in your hands, I’m on a plane to Moscow,’ Mikhail said. ‘This kind of thing comes to a historian once in a lifetime.’
‘And the second thing?’ Jack said. ‘The reason why I’m here?’
Mikhail leaned forward. ‘You asked me to look for any reports of U-boat sightings in the Caribbean after the German surrender on the eighth of May 1945, for anything unexplained or odd. At first I was sceptical.
The Caribbean was a major area of operations for long-range U-boats in 1942 and 1943, with many merchantmen torpedoed and at least a dozen subs sunk in the area by Al ied aircraft and ships. But the last recorded attacks on Al ied shipping in the Caribbean were in July 1944, and the last known U-boat patrol there ended the fol owing month. Most reports of sightings after that can be put down to jittery coastguards, seeing dark shapes on the sea at night.
But it’s true there has always been a big question mark over the final weeks of the war. There are some who believe that U-boats secretly sailed through the Caribbean on the way to Costa Rica and Brazil and other south American destinations, taking fleeing Nazis and their plunder.’
‘A voyage like that could have extended wel beyond the eighth of May,’ Jack said. ‘A U-boat could have set off from the Baltic just before the surrender and then taken a circuitous voyage across the Atlantic to avoid detection.’
‘Right,’ Mikhail replied. ‘Two Type IX U-boats, U-530 and U-977, refused Grand Admiral Dönitz’s order and didn’t surrender until the tenth of July and the seventeenth of August respectively, both in Argentina.
But as for U-boats in the Caribbean, that’s only ever been speculation. By yesterday afternoon I thought I’d reached a dead end. But then I remembered something from research I did in the US National Archives in Washington almost twenty years ago, soon after my defection. In Moscow I’d been a student of military history and then a defence analyst before being cal ed up for service in Afghanistan. After my debriefing at Langley, I worked for several years as a researcher for the CIA historical division. They al owed me access to classified material in order to bring a Soviet intel igence perspective on periods of Cold War arms build-up that stil remained poorly understood. As you know, Jack, my speciality has become the shift of Al ied and Soviet strategic planning from the defeat of Nazi Germany to the Cold War stand-off, particularly during those crucial first months after the Nazi defeat. My interest real y began when my CIA handlers asked me to file a report on the earliest Soviet plans for tactical nuclear bombing, for the use of atomic bombs as battlefield weapons.
They let me look at classified files relating to comparable US plans, and that’s when I came across this account. I stil have security clearance and was able to order a scan of the contents and have it couriered to me yesterday evening. The access records show that from the date when the file was boxed away in August 1945, nobody else has ever looked at it. I’d remembered it because it was so unusual, and also because it was the eyewitness report of an experienced combat aviator who would have known what he was looking at.’
‘Go on,’ Jack said, leaning forward.
Mikhail took an A4 black-and-white photograph from the file and slid it over the table. ‘You recognize that?’ Jack stared, then nodded. The picture showed a large-bel ied four-engine aircraft in wartime British Royal Air Force camouflage, white underneath and on the fuselage sides, and khaki and olive green above, with a large RAF roundel on the centre of the fuselage and the red identification letters MA below the cockpit. In front of the letters was the image of a scantily clad woman and a roaring red dragon, and the words ‘Dragon Lady’.
‘It’s a B-24 Liberator,’ he said. ‘Somewhere in the tropics, judging by the palm trees beyond the tarmac.
That’s the RAF Coastal Command camouflage scheme, isn’t it? Was this a submarine hunter?’
‘It’s a Liberator of 111 Operational Training Unit, based at Nassau in the Bahamas and used to train new aircrew on four-engine bombers. A lot of the aircrew were Canadians of the RCAF, as wel as British and Commonwealth RAF men who had done their initial training in Canada. The Liberator had a longer range than the other main four-engine bombers used in the European war, and many of the crews were destined for the Far East to take part in operations against the Japanese.’
‘You mean about the time when the Americans were gearing up to drop the first atomic bomb.’
Mikhail nodded. ‘That’s what I was researching when I came across the records box with that picture.
The box was peculiar because it contained papers and logbooks relating to 111 OTU in May and June 1945, material that would normal y be found in England with the squadron operations records in the UK National Archives, or under restricted access along with other Second World War material stil held by the Ministry of Defence. Its location in the US
archives in Washington only made sense when I began reading the files and realized that they related to a secret training scheme co-ordinated by the US
and were intimately tied up with the events of early August 1945, with the atomic bomb programme.’
Jack peered at the photograph. ‘My father was an RAF Lancaster pilot in the final months of the war. He told me I owed my existence to a silver butterfly that had kept him and his crew alive. It was a pendant left in the aircraft by the previous pilot, who’d brought his crew through two tours. My father kept the butterfly and had it in his hand when he died as an old man.
That’s virtual y al I know about his wartime experiences, as he never spoke of them. He said he was one of the lucky ones who was able to live for the future. I think that pendant had something to do with it.
But he did talk a lot about his beloved Lancaster, so I grew up knowing a bit about planes. I was right, wasn’t I? This Liberator may have flown with a training unit, but she’s armed and equipped for operational flying.’
Mikhail nodded. ‘This is B-24D, serial number FK-856. You were right about Coastal Command. She’d been a Royal Canadian Air Force U-boat hunter based in Newfoundland, but with the Battle of the Atlantic winding down by early 1945, she was one of a
number sent to operational training units. You can see she stil has the chin fairing that houses the air-to-surface-vessel radar, and the airfoil winglets below the cockpit that carried eight five-inch rockets. Both of those features were removed when she went to 111
OTU, but the bomb-bay adaptation to carry depth charges was retained.’
‘What about the crew?’
‘That was what real y piqued my interest. When I looked at the crew lists, I saw something odd. The usual operational conversion crews were men straight out of flight school. But the final crew to fly this Liberator was very different.’ Mikhail picked up the scanned sheets and flipped through them. ‘An inordinate amount of attention was paid to their selection, with secret reports from their squadron and station commanders as wel as detailed intel igence assessments on each man. They were al highly experienced aircrew from the same elite RAF
pathfinder group, the bombers that had flown ahead in the raids on Nazi Europe and marked the targets.
Every member of the crew of FK-856 had flown at least a ful tour of thirty missions over Europe, several of them a lot more; al four of the NCO gunners had Distinguished Flying Medals, the officers had Distinguished Flying Crosses and the pilot had the Distinguished Service Order as wel . With the war in Europe over, many Lancaster crews were being remustered as part of “Tiger Force”, the plan to send RAF and Commonwealth squadrons to bomb Japan, and I could only think that this crew had been selected for special duties to get them to the Far East as soon as possible and were being converted to fly anti-submarine operations in the Pacific. But then I found the top-secret memo that explained it al . They were being given flight time on the Liberator before being sent to a secret destination in the Pacific to be upgraded to the Liberator’s successor, the B-32
“super-bomber”. They were being groomed to be the first generation of bomber crews to drop tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield, something Al ied commanders envisaged had the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs failed to persuade the Japanese to surrender.’
Gods of Atlantis Page 40
