while he was in Berlin. The Hungarian knew that Hans was his son. The last time I saw him was in that house at Plon on the second of May 1945, only a few hours before Ernst arrived on his way to the U-boat. I never saw either man again. Within days, weeks at the most, both were dead.’
Jack glanced at the paper, reading the details, then carefully folded it and put it in his pocket.
‘Okay.’ He stood up ‘I have to ring Costas. And set up a flight to British Columbia. But before that, Maurice, I need you to ring your friend Major Penn. Heidi’s innocent act with that researcher may have put Saumerre off for the time being, but after Auxelle’s death, I suspect that everyone who knows anything about this will be eliminated as soon as they cease to be useful. I know Penn was desperate to do something after his sergeant was murdered, and I got the impression that he was frustrated not to be the one to take care of Auxelle. But providing round-the-clock protection for Frau Hoffman is as important as it gets.’
‘I’m sure he’ll be happy to oblige.’ Hiebermeyer took out his phone, then stood up, suddenly looking tired. ‘I’m going to take Tante Heidi home,’ he said. ‘Then I’ve got a pregnant wife to attend. Hope you don’t mind.’
Jack put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. ‘You know what I think.’
‘Aysha,’ Heidi said, suddenly beaming. ‘I can’t wait to meet her.’
‘Sevety-two hours,’ Jack said, looking at Hiebermeyer. ‘Then we’ll be planning that expedition to find Akhenaten’s treasure in Egypt.’
‘Promise?’
Jack looked at his friend’s face, remembering what he had gone through in the bunker, something he had volunteered to do in Jack’s place. ‘You can count on it. But meanwhile, the clock’s ticking. I need to visit Professor Schoenberg. And I need to think about diving again.’
17
Near Tofino, Vancouver Island, British Columbia
T he de Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver banked and swept low over the treetops, the roar of its single Pratt amp; Whitney 350 h.p. propeller engine intensifying as they dropped below the level of the surrounding hills. Jack was in the co-pilot’s seat, having just relinquished the controls to the woman beside him, a Canadian bush pilot who had considerably more experience than he did at landing on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. He pressed the microphone on his headset. ‘Thanks for that. I haven’t flown a Beaver since I got my pilot’s licence when I was at school in Canada.’
‘Best plane ever made,’ she replied, flashing him a smile. ‘Built in 1946, and still going strong. Out here, the people living in these remote bays wouldn’t be able to function without us. The last road along this coast ended twenty kilometres back.’
The aircraft levelled out for its approach. To the right, beyond the forest, Jack could see the distant peaks of the Coast Mountains of mainland British Columbia, and to the west the glistening expanse of the Pacific. It had been an exhilarating half-hour flight north from the fishing port of Tofino, complete with the spectacular sight of humpback whales breaching on their migration towards the waters off Alaska. Jack turned to Costas, who was sitting in the back gripping the pilot’s seat, looking like a wartime pilot in his headset and aviator sunglasses. ‘You good?’ he said.
‘Better now that you’re not flying. I always hated roller coasters.’
‘It’s called tactical flying.’
‘It’s called being rusty.’
Jack gestured at a book with a swastika on the cover that Costas had been reading, and a pad where he had been jotting down notes. ‘You missed the whales.’
‘I was boning up on this guy we’re visiting. What he and his colleagues in the Nazi Ahnenerbe were up to in the late 1930s. It makes for pretty unsavoury reading.’
The pilot interrupted them. ‘We’re landing now. Brace yourselves.’
Jack sat back, checked his seat-belt harness and watched as the floats beneath the aircraft skimmed the water and then sent up a sheen of spray, completely obscuring the view. A tremendous vibration shook the plane, as if they were in a car with a tyre blowout, and then the aircraft slowed and settled in the water, rocking on the ocean swell. He could see a wooden jetty sticking out of the rocky shore ahead, leading to a floating dock with a Zodiac inflatable boat tied up alongside. The pilot throttled down and manoeuvred the aircraft close to the dock, then switched the engine off, opened the hatch and jumped out, swiftly uncoiling the ropes that were lying ready and tying them to each end of the starboard float. She gestured for Jack and Costas to follow, and they both unbuckled themselves and jumped on to the dock. Costas made a beeline for a wooden deckchair at the end, splaying himself out and closing his eyes. ‘I’d really like to soak in the rays for a while.’
‘Don’t be duped by the weather,’ the woman said. ‘This place is shrouded in sea mist and rain for a lot of the year.’
‘Sounds as if that’d suit the guy we’re visiting.’
She shrugged. ‘We get a lot of recluses out here. We don’t ask questions.’ She pointed at the Zodiac. ‘You guys good with that? I guess so. It’s gassed up. His house is about two kilometres up the sound on this side. I usually deliver supplies for him every two weeks. Keep at least a hundred metres offshore to avoid the rocks, and then you’ll see the beach and a little jetty where you can pull up.’
‘How much time do we have?’ Jack asked.
She looked at the sky, and then at the sea. ‘The wind’ll pick up by early afternoon. I want to be out of here by noon. If you plan to leave his place at eleven a.m., that gives you an hour and a half from now. Is that okay?’
‘You’re the boss,’ Jack said. ‘I’ve got the radio. Call if you need us earlier.’
She nodded, let her hair loose from under her cap and sat down on the deckchair where Costas had been slumped. ‘My turn. This is the first sun we’ve had for a week.’
Jack jumped into the inflatable, squeezed the fuel pump on the 40 h.p. Mariner outboard and pulled the starter cord. It coughed to life, and he sat down beside it with his hand on the tiller. Costas untied the painter and leapt in, and then Jack put the engine into gear and swung out past the dock and into the centre of the channel, slowly opening the throttle. Costas slid back halfway down the opposite pontoon and raised his voice above the engine. ‘So you’ve never been here before?’
‘I came to Vancouver Island on holiday as a kid, but never this far out. I had no idea that Schoenberg lived here until Dillen told me. I knew he’d been a university professor in Ontario and then retired out west twenty-odd years ago, after his wife died. He must be in his early nineties now. His name was von Schoenberg, originally. His family was Prussian, fairly aristocratic. There were plenty of Nazis among the old Prussian elite, but many of them were contemptuous of Hitler and his cronies. My guess is he ditched the von when he was captured by the Russians.’
‘He was a prisoner of war in Russia?’
‘In the Gulag, in Siberia. He was one of the last batch to be released.’
‘I’ve just been reading that most of the surviving German prisoners not released by 1949 were judged by the Russians to be war criminals, and weren’t let go until after Stalin died in 1953.’
‘Dillen said Schoenberg tried to pass himself off as an ordinary Wehrmacht soldier, but he thinks the Soviets must have suspected him. Discovering he was one of Himmler’s select followers in the Ahnenerbe would have been enough to brand him a criminal. He would have been lucky to escape execution.’
‘So Dillen knows him from way back?’
Jack nodded, swinging the boat to port to avoid a patch of kelp. ‘Schoenberg came to Cambridge on sabbatical just before his retirement, and they worked together on a translation of ancient Greek inscriptions from Athens. Schoenberg had been a classical scholar before the war, and eventually finished his doctorate in Canada. He was in Cambridge when I was a graduate student, and I attended a seminar he gave on the early Greek geographers, his speciality. We talked afterwards, and he was fascinated by my diving expeditions. He said his greatest exhilaration had been an expedition he undertook to Iceland as a young man to search for archaeological sites. I think that talking to me took him back to the heyday of his youth in the late 1930s.’
‘That expedition was with Himmler’s Ahnenerbe, the Nazi Department of Cultural Heritage. Already the Jews in Germany were being persecuted and the language of racism was everywhere. It would hardly have been a
