Crucified (34 page)
He awoke with a start.
Gotta be, Wyatt thought. How else could Ack-Ack have made the Judas package vanish from the sub?
"Wake up, Liz." He shook her.
"Uh?" she groaned.
"The Beast wants Beauty to hit the road."
"What time is it?"
"Too early."
"Where are we going?"
"Guess."
"Why are we going there?"
"Meet me in the shower and I'll scrub your back."
Allied destroyers tracking deep-running U-boats were often puzzled by the sound of a huge underwater explosion, followed by silence. It was assumed that when a sub sank in bottomless seas, the hull gradually collapsed. After the war, however, the Royal Navy did tests with surplus subs and found they suffered a sudden catastrophic implosion instead. That's what caused those mysterious "explosions" when no depth charges were being dropped.
While reading in bed last night, after he and Liz were carnally reacquainted, Wyatt had wondered which would be worse: to be trapped in a sub plunging to the bottom of the sea, praying the implosion came before rivets started popping and tearing through bodies like bullets, or sinking to the seabed with the air supply dwindling, as your gasping buddies suffocated to death around you?
That in mind, Wyatt had turned out the light.
His night was plagued by dreams of U-boat escapes as harrowing as the one Nick Alkemade had made by freefalling out of a Lane. In October 1943, a plane sank U-533 in the Gulf of Oman. Three crewmen stayed calm enough to unclip a hatch cover and let the sub sink until the pressure inside blew them clear. One survived by drifting for thirty hours before reaching land. In August 1944, U-413 fell ninety feet to the bottom of the English Channel. An engineer rushed forward to assess the damage, and an air bubble blew him out of the sub and to the surface. The other men perished. In January 1945, U-1199 sank in 240 feet of water. A petty officer opened the tower hatch and used his Drager apparatus—a facemask attached to an oxygen canister—to swim to the surface. That remains the deepest-known operational escape.
Swim out, Wyatt's sleeping mind had thought, and that jerked him awake.
Where had he read those words?
That
had to be how Ack-Ack made the Judas package vanish from the sealed sub.
He didn't break the seal!
Yesterday, during Liz and Wyatt's escape north from Yorkshire after the funeral, she had pointed east to the coast as they neared the border with County Durham.
"Yonder lies the port of Whitby, where a ship crashed into the pier under East Cliff. A big dog jumped down onto the sand and disappeared into the darkness. Pray tell, Mr. Walking Encyclopedia, who had just arrived in England?"
"Dracula."
"Ahead lies Croft-on-Tees. The River Tees is the border between Yorkshire and Durham. Lewis Carroll's father was the rector of a church by a bridge over the water. In
Alice in
Wonderland,
Carroll created the Mad Hatter. Hatters really did go mad. Why?"
"Mercury poisoning. Mercury was used in curing felt.
Exposure to the vapors caused confusion, hallucinations, and severe tremors called 'hatter's shakes.'"
"You're a sponge," Liz marveled.
"You're asking the right questions. There's an interesting juxtaposition in those two examples. Horror from without, and horror from within.'
Dracul
is Romanian for 'devil.' Our Lenny with the holes through his hands? Is he possessed? Or a mad hatter?"
"Vlad the Impaler?"
"Good pun. You're my kinda girl."
"Remember the White Rabbit that Alice follows down the hole?"
'"I'm late, I'm late for a very important date.'"
"Men rushing across the bridge from Durham to Yorkshire used to shout something like that as they passed the church run by Carroll's father. Why?"
"You've got me," Wyatt conceded.
"Because the pubs stayed open longer on the Yorkshire side."
Today, after a healthy English breakfast of kippers, bacon, sausages, eggs, beans, tomatoes, toast, and a yummy fried slice, they forsook rainy England for soggy Scotland. They angled east to the coast at Lindisfarne, for centuries a hub of early Christianity, and followed vast stretches of tawny sand up to the border. Gray, gray, gray was the color of the day, with towering gray cliffs sheltering small gray fishing ports battered by a gray sea beneath a gray sky. This coast was rife with monuments to men who had lost the eternal battle of the brine. Seabirds by the hundreds wheeled and dived offshore.
"Gloomy," Wyatt said.
"How's your wound today?"
"It still aches. But you're a soothing nurse."
They passed Dunbar to round the bulge of East Lothian, the gateway to the Firth of Forth. This stretch of Scotland was known for its golf. Too many pubs had names like the Golf Bag and the 19th Hole. Links ran for miles along the water. Muirfield was the headquarters of the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, founded in 1744. Wyatt's mind, however, probed the dark nooks. East Lothian was the birthplace of Sawney Bean, head of a mythic cannibal clan. Back in the 1500s,
The Newgate
Calendar
says, his incestuous kids waylaid travelers and butchered them for meat. Limbs hung from hooks in their seaside cave, and leftovers were pickled in barrels. Captured, the Beans were hauled in chains to Edinburgh's Tolbooth jail, then executed without trial. Hands and feet were cut off the twenty-seven men, and the twenty-one women had to watch them slowly bleed to death. Then they were burned like witches.
Wyatt cleared his throat.
"Ahem. Testing, testing, one, two, three. 'The Ballad of Sawney Bean.' Or, 'Local Boy Makes Good,'" he said:
Go ye not by Gallowa'
Come bide a while, my frein
I'll tell ye o the dangers there;
Beware o' Sawney Bean.
There's naebody kens that he bides there
For his face is seldom seen
But tae meet his eye is tae meet your fate
At the hands o' Sawney Bean.
For Sawney he has ta en a wife
And he's hungry bairns tae wean
And he's raised them up on the flesh o men
In the cave o' Sawney Bean.
And Sawney has been well endowed
Wi daughters young and lean
And they a' hae ta'en their faither's seed
In the cave o' Sawney Bean.
An Sawney's sons are young an strong
And their blades are sharp and keen
Tae spill the blood o' travelers
Wha meet wi Sawney Bean.
So if you ride frae there tae here
Be ye wary in between
Lest they catch your horse and spill your blood
In the cave o' Sawney Bean.
They'll hing ye ap an cut yer throat
An they'll pick yer carcass clean
An they'll yase yer banes tae quiet the weans
In the cave o' Sawney Bean.
But fear ye not, oor Captain rides
On an errand o the Queen
And he carries the writ of fire and sword
For the head o' Sawney Bean.
They've hung them high in Edinburgh toon
An likewise a' their kin
An the wind blaws cauld on a' their banes
An tae hell they a' hae gaen.
"Heavens above!" said Liz. "I'm chauffeur to Robbie Burns. What brought that on?"
"As a young bairn, I learned that a well-placed poem helps seduce the lassies."
"And
that's
the poem you think will work on me?"
"Stop here," Wyatt interrupted.
"North Berwick? Why?"
"Out there hides the answer to our sealed-sub puzzle. That's where the Royal Navy seized the
Black Devil."
They parked the car, got out, and strolled along a shore battered by salt-spraying waves. In calmer weather, you could see across the Firth of Forth to Fife; but today, the inland waterway was eerie with Scotch mist, a clammy combination of fog and drizzle. North Berwick was a dignified, though shabby, Victorian seaside resort, twenty-three miles east of Edinburgh.
Behind its harbor loomed the volcanic cone of North Berwick Law, visible for many miles in all directions. It was topped by the ruins of a watchtower built for the Napoleonic Wars and a lookout used in the Second World War. Flanked by sandy bays, the rocky harbor was home to the town's yacht club, the Scottish Seabird Centre, and Auld Kirk Green.
To the mournful bellows of ships passing in the Firth, Wyatt and Liz, huddling together on the harbor wall, peered into the haze to glimpse the islands offshore. When Robert Louis Stevenson lived in North Berwick, his imagination turned Fidra into Skeleton Island, in
Treasure Island.
To the east, Bass Rock loomed where the Firth of Forth joined the North Sea. Legend says it dropped there off Satan's cudgel when he waded home from doing evil. It used to be a prison—"Scotland's Bastille"—but now cameras transmitted live images of its colony of gannets to the seabird center for the entertainment of tourists. Lost in the fog, closer to Fife, was the Isle of May. There, French Masons say, the Knights Templar stashed their treasure before being burned at the stake for heresy on Friday, October 13, 1307.
The origin of paraskavedekatriaphobia?
Fear of Friday the thirteenth?
There, too, less than an hour before the official end of the Second World War, the
Avondale Park
became the last merchant ship sunk by a U-boat. As fireworks signaled the peace onshore, a convoy of five ships and three armed escorts sailed from port on Fife. Cut off from its headquarters and arguably unaware of the order to surrender, U-2336 lurked in the Firth. As the convoy sailed by the Isle of May, the sub's first torpedo hit the Norwegian freighter
Sneland I.
It exploded in flames. The second—and last—torpedo struck the
Avondale
Park.
It sank in two minutes. Though a destroyer pursued it firing depth charges, the U-boat—a Type XXIII
Elektro
boat like the
Black Devil
—escaped.
And that tale contained the final clue Wyatt had used to solve the locked-room puzzle.
"Don't tell me you're going to recite
The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner
," Liz teased.
"By my calculation, the
Black Devil
was there," Wyatt said, pointing. "The destroyer coming at it was nearer to Fife. The sub fired both torpedoes toward the ship. One torpedo missed, but the other one hit. We know both torpedoes were launched because there's no record in the skipper's log of an earlier firing, and both were gone when the sub surfaced."
"Got it!" said Liz, snapping her fingers. "Carr's sixth explanation—it's a murder committed by a killer
outside
the room, although it seems as if the killer must have been
inside."
"How do you sneak a sardine out of a tin can that's sealed, and remains sealed after the sardine is gone?"
"You can't, unless the sardine is hidden
outside
the seal."
"Unlike other U-boats, the Type XXIII was stocked with ammunition from outside. The sub's stern would be tipped down in dock and the torpedoes dropped in like shot into muzzleloaders. The torpedoes were a new 'swim out' kind.
In effect, a torpedo fired at a target was a gyro-controlled mini submarine."
"Risky operation."
"Audacious. The best kind of plan. By 1944, subs were taking any crewmen they could get. The Judas conspirators smuggled Ack-Ack into the
Black Devil
as a technical specialist tasked with testing its new torpedo computer.
The Judas package was hidden in a dummy torpedo dropped into one of the tubes in Germany. The trip to Scotland was a test run, not an attack mission. Not only was Ack-Ack in control of launching the torpedoes, but he also punched in the coordinates that determined where they went. The computer, of course, wasn't electronic like nowadays. It used gears and mechanical linkages to calculate the trajectory needed to hit the target, and to adjust the gyroscope aiming the torpedo.
A torpedo that missed its target was designed to sink at a preset distance. So once the
Black Devil
entered the Firth of Forth, Ack-Ack could launch the torpedo containing the Judas package and program it to sink where British frogmen could retrieve it."
"And if the torpedo got lost?"
"Then Judas would lose the nebulous Christian relics, but not the atomic secrets. He'd have copies of those and could try again."
"Got it!" said Liz with another snap. "The torpedo that missed the destroyer!"
"Bingo!" Wyatt beamed. "At the end of the war, another sub sank two ships in the Firth of Forth.
Both
torpedoes hit. Here, just one found its mark. Maybe everything that could go wrong didn't. The destroyer attacked the
Black Devil
before the dummy torpedo got launched, so Ack-Ack ignored the coordinates he got from the skipper and instead set the torpedo to miss. Off went the Judas package to sink safely in the Firth near Fife, then—for self-preservation—Ack-Ack fired the live torpedo at the destroyer and hit. Those involved in the plot were killed or never talked. Because Churchill never knew that the sub had the Judas package, there was no hunt for the dummy torpedo."
"It's still out there!"
"Maybe. Maybe not. But we've got everything to gain and nothing to lose from a scavenger hunt."
