Beneath Still Waters

by Alex Archer

  Annja nodded, then struggled to her feet as Garin helped Paul do the same. Between the two of them they got Paul belowdecks and into his cabin. Garin helped support him while Annja stripped off his wet clothing and then together they helped him get into bed.

  While they were doing that, Garin casually asked, “What were you doing out on deck anyway, Paul?”

  The journalist mumbled something about trying to get pictures of the storm.

  That made sense to Annja—Paul was a freelancer and therefore always thinking about the next project he could pitch—but Garin didn’t seem satisfied. He lingered in the doorway and seemed about to say something else before Annja scowled at him, shooed him out the door and followed in his wake.

  Back at the table in the galley, Annja asked, “What was all that about?”

  “What was what about?”

  “Interrogating the guy who almost drowned.”

  She knew “interrogating” was a bit strong, but she was feeling protective of the man she’d just risked her life to save.

  “Aren’t you curious about what your sweetheart was doing out on deck in the middle of the night?”

  “Of course I am,” she replied. “But I can wait until he’s had some rest before I ask him.”

  “Yes, but by then he’ll have had plenty of time to come up with an answer.”

  Annja couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Come up with an answer? What, do you think he was lying?”

  “I don’t know what to think.”

  “Get real, Garin. We’re in the middle of nowhere. What else would he have been doing?”

  Garin looked away, frustrated. “I don’t know. Maybe he told someone else about the treasure and he was signaling to them when we weren’t looking.”

  Annja’s thoughts flashed to the dark shape she thought she’d seen sliding through the water near them, but then she pushed it aside, convinced that she’d been imagining things.

  We’re out here alone, and it was nothing more than a stupid accident, she reminded herself, and said the same thing to Garin.

  “All right, all right,” he said. “I’ll leave it alone for now, but I’m telling you…”

  A long grinding sound filled the boat, interrupting him. Both Annja and Garin grabbed the table in front of them as the boat collided with something hard on the port side.

  “What on earth?” Annja asked.

  Garin wasn’t waiting around to give an answer; he was already climbing up the companionway, flashlight in hand.

  Annja followed.

  Back out on deck they found that the rain had finally stopped and the sky was starting to clear, with a bit of moonlight now showing through the rents in the clouds. The seas were still choppy, but not as bad as they had been earlier, allowing both Annja and Garin to make out the dark shape of the coral outcropping that the Reliant had just scraped past.

  “Where did that come from?” Garin exclaimed, even as he rushed back to the cockpit and started the engines again.

  Looking ahead, Annja could see more of the reef poking above the water, and she began to call out directions to Garin as he worked the wheel, guiding the Reliant around and through the maze of coral and rock.

  They had been at it for only a couple of minutes when Annja spotted something large looming ahead of them. She peered through the semidarkness, trying to make out what it was.

  The clouds momentarily moved away from the moon, giving her a decent view.

  “Look!” she shouted, pointing.

  An island was a few hundred yards ahead of them. They could see its tropical foliage and sheer cliffs emerge from the darkness as they drew closer. Pure chance had kept them from wrecking on the rocky outer reef that surrounded the island, and now that they were inside its range Garin decided it would be best if they found a place to drop anchor and wait out the remainder of the night, continuing on in the morning.

  Annja agreed.

  They made a slow circuit of the island, seeing nothing for long moments but sheer cliffs rising right out of the surf.

  It’s not going to be easy climbing those, Annja thought.

  But then, about three-quarters of the way around the island, she spotted the entrance to a narrow inlet between two large pillars of stone. It looked deep enough to accommodate the boat, so Garin steered toward it, passing between the cliffs for several minutes until they emerged into a sheltered cove that seemed the perfect place to wait out the rest of the night.

  Annja switched on the electric windlass, dropping the anchor to secure the boat, while Garin shut down the engines. Satisfied that they’d done what they could for the night, they retired to their cabins to get some sleep.

  Chapter 23

  When Annja got up the next morning, she found Garin and Paul sitting at the galley table enjoying a breakfast of fresh fruit and coffee. Annja grabbed a cup of her own and slid in next to Paul.

  “Are you doing all right?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I’m good,” Paul said. “And thanks. I wouldn’t be here without you, I’m told.”

  Annja waved his thanks away, but Paul persisted.

  “No, really, I appreciate what you did, both of you,” he said, looking from one to the other. “It was stupid of me to endanger the mission like that. I shouldn’t have been out there in the first place.”

  “What were you doing, anyway?” Annja asked, reaching for an orange and peeling it.

  “Trying to get pictures of the storm.”

  Garin opened his mouth to say something, but Paul held up a hand, stopping him. “I know. You don’t have to tell me. It was a dumb idea. I didn’t think it through to be honest.”

  Annja agreed that it had been dumb, but she’d also made her own share of mistakes in the past and didn’t hold it against him. Everyone had survived; that was the important thing.

  Still, she was curious. “So what happened exactly?”

  Paul sighed. “I was leaning on the boom, using it to stabilize one of my shots, when it shifted beneath my weight and swung outward, dumping me into the water. Even then I would have been okay if a wave hadn’t come along right at that moment and carried me away from the boat. No matter how hard I swam, I couldn’t seem to get back to it.”

  “And your camera?” Garin asked.

  “I lost it when I fell overboard,” Paul told him. “No doubt it’s at the bottom of the sea by now.”

  “Well, I’m sure you can buy another one, heck, another hundred, with your share of the treasure when we get back home.”

  Paul smiled. “That’s true, isn’t it?”

  The thought seemed to make him feel better and that made Annja happy.

  “Speaking of treasure, how soon until we leave?” she asked. “Unless the storm blew us radically off course it can’t be that much farther to Wolf Island, can it?”

  Garin got up and poured himself another cup of coffee. “Oh, I don’t think it’s very far at all,” he said, “but I’m surprised you want to leave so quickly.”

  “We’re on a deadline, remember?” Annja said, perplexed by his laissez-faire attitude. He didn’t seem to be in a hurry to go anywhere even though every minute they stayed here was another minute wasted in their search for the lost Nazi headquarters.

  Garin shrugged in response. “Hey, I get it. We can leave anytime that you’re ready, really. I just figured that you’d want to check out the Nazi U-boat moored in the lagoon outside before we went anywhere, but if you don’t want to…”

  Annja blinked at him in surprise. “U-boat?” she asked.

  Garin nodded. “I think it’s U-648,” he said with a near-expressionless face. “But I might be reading the number on the conning tower wrong. It is faded a bit from being in the sun so long, after all.”

  Annja sat there, at a loss for words as she tried to process what he’d just said. When it finally sank in, she jumped up and headed over to the companionway leading above, practically falling on her face in her haste to get up the steps.

  Behind and b
elow her, she heard Garin chuckle.

  If he’s pulling my leg, I’m going to gut him like a fish, she thought as she stepped out onto the deck and looked around.

  Garin wasn’t kidding.

  Less than fifty yards away a World War II German U-boat lay moored against the rotting remains of a wooden pier jutting from the white sand beach just beyond. The boat was rusted and its paint job faded from being in the water and sun for so long, but the red-and-black swastika painted on the conning tower could still be faintly seen.

  Annja couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

  A U-boat, short for Unterseeboot, or undersea boat, was a German military submarine used to disrupt both Allied fleet activities and commercial shipping, especially resupply, during World Wars I and II. The Germans had the largest submarine fleet in the world at the time and made spectacular use of it during the Battle of the Atlantic in WWII, so much so that it was the only time that Winston Churchill had ever contemplated the need for Great Britain to surrender.

  Organized into “wolf packs” or groups of U-boats working together to attack a common target, the U-boat commanders became the bane of Allied shipping after the fall of France, operating out of multiple bases on the French coastline and having easy access to the North Atlantic, the English Channel, and the Mediterranean. After the United States entered the war, the U-boats ranged from the Europe to the coast of the Americas, from the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico to the waters of the Arctic. It wasn’t until the United States, in conjunction with its British allies, gained superiority in the air later in the war that the situation began to change. Without the air cover previously provided by the Luftwaffe, and limited by the time they could spend below the surface as a result of their weak batteries, the U-boats were forced to spend more and more of their time on the surface. This made them vulnerable to Allied airplanes as well as the increasingly sophisticated submarine-hunting tactics that were developing at the time.

  Gradually the tide had turned against them and the U-boats and their commanders were picked off in increasingly higher numbers as the war was brought to a close. Of the forty thousand men who went to war as part of the German U-boat fleet, thirty thousand of them were to die in their iron coffins, earning them the record for the greatest number of losses in any combat unit in the history of war.

  It was a humbling statistic.

  It had often been rumored that a number of high-ranking Nazis had used the last of the U-boats to flee for the safety of Argentina, Bolivia and Uruguay, countries with no extradition treaties with the United States and Great Britain, but it had never been proved.

  Seeing the boat docked in the middle of the South Pacific gave some credence to those rumors. It also suggested that Annja and her companions had at last reached their destination.

  Somehow, in the midst of the craziness of the previous night’s storm, they’d managed to find Inles Wolf without even realizing it!

  She was still staring at the vessel in amazement when the other two came up the steps and joined her on the deck.

  “Will you look at that!” Paul exclaimed when he turned and saw the U-boat for the first time.

  Garin, of course, didn’t say anything; he was too busy standing there with a smug look on his face.

  Annja turned and punched him on the arm.

  “Ow! What was that for?”

  “For not waking me up the moment you saw it, you idiot!”

  Rubbing his arm, Garin said, “After last night, I thought you deserved a rest.”

  She had needed the sleep, but she wasn’t going to admit that to him. Instead, she said, “Did you check the GPS? Are we at the proper location?”

  “Do you know what the odds are of that U-boat being here if this wasn’t Inles Wolf?” Garin shot back.

  “I don’t care about the odds. Did you or didn’t you check the GPS?”

  “Yes, I checked it. We’re in the right location, as near as I can tell.”

  That was a relief.

  Annja smiled. “Okay, who wants to go look at the U-boat?”

  * * *

  THEY HAD NO idea what condition the boat would be in after all this time, so they gathered a few supplies and loaded them aboard the dinghy before lowering it into the water. Annja and Paul sat up front, holding on to the gunwale, while Garin moved to the rear of the boat and fired up the outboard motor. After that, it only took a few minutes to cross the lagoon to the hulk of the submarine.

  Unlike modern submarines with their rounded hulls and bulbous front ends, the U-boat had a sharp-edged front that cut through the water like a knife and a sleek wedge-shaped body that resembled a shark more than anything else. Even after decades of inactivity, the boat still looked dangerous and Annja couldn’t imagine what it had to have felt like for the merchantmen who were the vessel’s typical prey to look out across the water and see one of these monsters rise from the depths to attack.

  They approached from the side, so Annja was able to clearly see the conning tower, with its periscope and snorkel, as well as both the deck gun in front of it and the antiaircraft gun in its swivel mount behind.

  Annja mentally reviewed what she knew about U-boats as they drew closer. The average boat was roughly 220 feet long and displaced about 700 tons of water. It carried a crew of 35 men, was loaded with 12 torpedoes, and could remain beneath the surface for a little more than two hours on fully charged batteries.

  This boat had docked with its bow pointed toward the entrance to the cove, most likely so that it could put to sea quickly if it was discovered. That told Annja that the lagoon was probably much deeper than she expected, given how much room it took to maneuver a boat of this size.

  She wondered what had happened to it and why it was still here so many years after the war. Surely the captain and crew would have wanted to go home at some point, if they were still capable? Perhaps the boat had run out of fuel. Or was no longer seaworthy due to battle damage that they couldn’t be seen from the surface.

  Just looking at the thing she had a hundred more questions, and she hoped that they’d find some answers once they got aboard.

  Garin brought the dinghy alongside the dock on the side opposite the U-boat. Paul hopped out, testing the strength of the pier. When it seemed that the wood was solid enough to bear their weight, Paul grabbed the mooring line from Annja and tied the boat to one of the pier’s support poles. Once it was secure, Garin helped Annja onto the dock, passed the duffel bag full of tools up to her, then jumped out himself.

  They crossed the dock and stepped up onto the wooden deck of the U-boat. It had rotted through in a few places, but for the most part was still intact. “The hatch is this way,” Annja said, leading the two men toward the conning tower. She skirted the deck gun and mounted the steps on the other side of the conning tower to enter the central section. A hatch lay in the middle of the floor, leading down into the ship.

  Unsurprisingly, not only was the hatch closed but it looked as though it had been rusted shut for a long time.

  Still, one has to try, Annja thought.

  She bent, grabbed the wheel that opened the hatch and did her best to turn it.

  It didn’t move.

  “Give it a try, guys,” Annja said.

  She stepped back, letting Garin and Paul take her place. They grabbed hold of the wheel on opposite sides and leaned their weight into it. Annja could see the muscles in their arms bulging, but the wheel didn’t move.

  “All right, don’t give yourselves hernias,” Annja said. “Step back.”

  When they had complied, she took an aerosol can of nut and bolt loosener out of the duffel bag at her feet and sprayed it liberally over the point on the underside of the wheel where it met the crank shaft. She waited a few minutes, then took an oversized wrench from the bag. Lifting the tool over her head, she brought it smashing down against the wheel of the hatch. She did that half a dozen times, alternating spraying it and hitting it with the wrench.

  Satisfied, she stepped back
and inclined her head at the hatch again.

  The men got the message. Situating themselves on either side of the hatch, they tried again.

  Nothing.

  Annja stepped in and went through the whole routine a second time, then signaled Garin and Paul to give it their best shot.

  The wheel still didn’t turn.

  “Come on, you son-of-a-gun,” she said, stepping forward once more.

  The spray had to have finally had enough time to work some of the rust loose, for when the men tried, the wheel moved an inch to the left before getting stuck.

  “Yes!” Annja cried.

  Now they knew that it would open if they just kept working at it. Ten minutes later they were able to turn the wheel fully and unlock the hatch.

  “Ready?” Paul asked, and at his companions’ nods he pulled back on the hatch, opening it.

  Foul air rushed out of the opening, causing them to turn their heads for a moment, but it dissipated quickly. Annja traded her spray can and her wrench for a high-powered flashlight and shone it into the interior of the boat.

  At the bottom of the ladder, a human skull stared back at them through the light.

  Chapter 24

  “Hello, what have we here?” Annja said, upon seeing the skull. It wasn’t the first time she’d encountered human remains during her work and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. She moved the beam of the light around slowly, noting there were quite a few more bones at the bottom of the ladder. The ladder itself looked stable; they should be able to get to the bottom without a problem.

  What was waiting for them down there might be another story, though.

  Stop the nonsense, she scolded herself. This sub’s been locked up as tight as a drum for decades. If anything was waiting down there for you, it’s long dead.

  She ignored the little voice that chimed, “That’s what I’m afraid of!” back at her.

  They tied the hatch in the open position, so that it couldn’t fall and accidentally seal them in. When they had finished, Annja turned to the others. “I’ll go down first and have—”