“A void or avoid,” O’Brien said. “Or maybe disavow.”
Dave used a toothpick to spear a loose olive out of his martini. He chewed it and said, “A lot was at stake. Literally, our nation.” He looked down at a legal pad where he’d scrawled notes. “It’s now believed that Germany probably had gaseous centrifuge machines in 1945. Uranium oxide was mixed with fluoric acid to form uranium- hexafluoride gas. U-235, or HEU, was produced from the spinning gases.”
“But why carry the HEU on that sub?” O’Brien asked. “Were they going to try to somehow launch it over Washington?”
“When Germany was down and out, Japan was still in the fight. If they could have acquired this material, it may have changed the outcome of the war if they’d dropped it on say … New York or even San Francisco.”
“Is seven hundred kilos enough to make two bombs?”
“Enough to make a couple moderate-sized nuclear bombs.”
O’Brien stood. “Since Glenda Lawson said Billy saw two Japanese men, both dressed as civilians, with four German sailors that night … what’s the connection? What’s the tie to Japan receiving the deadly cargo you mentioned earlier?”
“There may be a connection.” Dave looked at his scribbled notes. “Here’s why: on U-boat 234, the one escorted into Portsmouth a few days before Billy Lawson was killed, there was an all-German crew that surrendered. Under interrogation, one of the officers admitted they had two Japanese officers aboard when they left from Kiel, Germany. When the crew of U-boat 234 got word of Germany’s surrender in the war, they could have turned themselves over to the Brits rather than the U.S. However, Commander Johann Fehler elected not to surrender in England, but to turn themselves in to the Americans. Fehler said when the two Japanese men on the sub heard the Germans were going to surrender to the U.S. Navy, the Japanese men said they could not. The honorable thing for them to do was commit suicide or hari-kari. They overdosed on pills and died in their bunks. After a couple of days, the Germans tossed their bodies overboard.”
“I can’t say I’d blame ‘em,” Nick said.
“So along comes yet another sub,” O’Brien said. “The one Nick and I found, U-boat 236, and it’s carrying Japanese, too. But these guys don’t commit suicide. They slip into the U.S. undetected. Well, undetected until Billy Lawson sees them, and then he’s killed as he makes a call to his wife. Maybe one of the Japanese shot him.”
“That’s a possibility,” Dave said.
“Abby Lawson told me her grandfather saw only two of the Germans walking back to the life raft. One was dead. So where was the third?”
“Good question,” Dave said.
“Maybe he’d hidden in the bed of the truck, hoping to kill Billy Lawson as he drove off. But he didn’t get a chance until Lawson stopped at that closed bait and tackle store where he made the call to his wife from the phone booth.”
Dave asked, “What happened to Billy Lawson’s truck that night?”
“Glenda said the sheriff told her, after Billy was mugged and robbed, that the perp stole Billy’s truck only to abandon it near the beach.”
“What if the shooter joined his comrades and got back in the life raft to row out to the U-boat?”
“Anything’s possible,” Nick said. “End of the big war. Maybe it did happen. Was some American really involved?”
“Maybe. How’d that sub go down?” O’Brien asked.
Dave grunted. “Couldn’t find that. But I’d be willing to wager that if Billy Lawson’s call was taken seriously, the Navy, so close at the Jacksonville Air Station, could have dispatched one of its planes and dropped a lot of depth charges on the sub.”
“Would they do that knowing it was carrying weapons-grade uranium?”
“Maybe they didn’t know, figured it was safer to sink it than take the chance.”
“Then why didn’t they recover the material Nick and I found?”
“Maybe they couldn’t find it.”
“I caught it on my anchor. How hard would it have been for the Navy to find it?”
“This was way before sophisticated underwater topography reading equipment. They could have hit the sub closer to shore and it managed to limp a long way out before finally striking bottom. After searching and not finding it, the Navy may have assumed they never hit it. Years drift by, Atlantic storms partially bury the twisted sub, and that footnote in the war fades away with those who died on the U-boat.”
“And along comes my boat, its anchor snags a World War II relic, not just any bottom dweller, but rather one that may be sitting with the earth’s deadliest luggage.”
Dave opened his laptop and looked at the photos he’d loaded from O’Brien’s camera. “I think these canisters are the real deal, U-235 or HEU. And I think if they somehow fell into the wrong hands today, they could inflict as much damage on us as they could have in the hands of the Japanese or Germans. Maybe more.”
Nick said, “But today it could be anybody-any sick-ass group or nation with a hard-on against the good ol’ U.S. of A.”
“And,” Dave said, “with a half-life of a million years, it’s good as new. We have some calls to make. Sean, it’d be a good idea to keep a close eye on Jason.”
“He’s learned his lesson.”
“That’s not what I meant. He may need protection.”
O’Brien looked at the media growing like a mob in the parking lot and said nothing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
At five minutes to six p.m., the Channel Nine control room filled with people. The general manager stood in the back of the room with the news director, group vice president, and the executive producer. They watched the monitors as the camera focused on the anchor team fitting earpieces in their ears, checking copy for last minute changes.
“Coming to camera one, ten seconds,” said the director. “Roll opening.”
“Rolling,” said a technician.
“Standby Mark and Angela,” said the director into the small microphone that fed the tiny earpiece in the news anchors’ ears.
The general manager leaned toward his news director and whispered, “This is going to be Peabody Award stuff.”
“Five seconds,” barked the director.
The anchor team said, “Good evening, I’m Mark Linsky.”
“And I’m Angela Franklin.”
“We have breaking news tonight.”
“This story sounds like a Hollywood script, but it’s real. We have dramatic pictures, images from the bottom of the sea taken inside a German U-boat that’s apparently been on the ocean floor since World War II. Was that U- boat carrying enriched uranium, the material used to make a nuclear bomb? Susan Schulman will tell us what her investigation is uncovering in terms of the potentially dangerous cargo. Amber Rothschild is at the University of Florida, where she has a historical perspective on the time the U-boat went down and how it may have gone down. Todd Knowles is at the Navy base in Jacksonville where he’ll have a report on what the Navy is doing about the situation, as well as what Homeland Security is saying tonight. But first let’s go to Susan Schulman.”
“Mark and Angela, the sub is said to be off the coast of Daytona Beach down about ninety feet,” Schulman began her report. “We want to show dramatic pictures of canisters stamped as U-235. This is a name enriched or weapons-grade uranium was called before the cold war had ended. The label was known to people working on the Manhattan Project, the top secret work done to build an atomic bomb to bring World War II to a fiery close. What was this dangerous material allegedly doing on a German U-boat just found off the coast of Florida? That’s the question a lot of people would like to have answered tonight. As Channel Nine first reported, Captain Sean O’Brien, Nick Cronus, and a college student hired as a deckhand, Jason Canfield, were fishing in the Atlantic, somewhere in the Gulf Stream, when they got their anchor caught on something. O’Brien and Cronus dove down to free the anchor
