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 still 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 intelligence 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 Allied aircraft and ships. But the last recorded attacks on Allied shipping in the Caribbean were in July 1944, and the last known U-boat patrol there ended the following 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 well 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 Donitz’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 called up for service in Afghanistan. After my debriefing at Langley, I worked for several years as a researcher for the CIA historical division. They allowed me access to classified material in order to bring a Soviet intelligence perspective on periods of Cold War arms build-up that still remained poorly understood. As you know, Jack, my speciality has become the shift of Allied 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 really 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 still 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-bellied 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 well 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 normally 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 still 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 virtually all 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 still 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 really 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 well as detailed intelligence assessments on each man. They were all 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 full tour of thirty missions over Europe, several of them a lot more; all four of the NCO gunners had Distinguished Flying Medals, the officers had Distinguished Flying Crosses and the pilot had the Distinguished Service Order as well. 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 all. 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 Allied commanders envisaged had the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs failed to persuade the Japanese to surrender.’
‘But then the war against Japan did end, and the programme was scrapped,’ Jeremy said.
Mikhael nodded, then pursed his lips. ‘Too late for these men, though. They may well count as the last combat casualties of the war against the Nazis.’
‘Explain,’ Jack said.
Mikhail picked out one sheet with a yellow marker stuck to it. ‘It was the morning of the third of June 1945.
