The Gods of Atlantis (53 page)

‘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 Dönitz’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. The crew had only been in Nassau for two weeks, having previously been involved in the airdrop of relief supplies to the emergency hospital units dealing with survivors of the Belsen concentration camp. One of their last bombing missions had been over Berlin, an attempt to use the “Tallboy” twelve-thousand-pound bomb to break the flak-tower defences. It
was their expertise with those bombs that caught the eye of the US intelligence officers scouting for pathfinder crews suitable for conversion to nuclear bombing. The bomber crews were very tightly knit, and the pathfinders were the best of the best. The psychological reports show that these were not the kind of men who desperately counted down the last missions to the end of their tour, traumatized by what they had seen and done and by the constant fear. We often forget that some men relished it. The men in this crew seem to have been pleased to be selected to go out to the Far East ahead of Tiger Force, eager to get back into action again. These were precisely the kind of men the intelligence officers would have been looking for.’

‘So that day they were on a training mission?’ Jack asked.

Mikhail nodded, then took out a photocopied map with ruled lines on it. ‘It was their last operation in an intensive week. They were due to take their Liberator across the United States to the island of Guam in the Pacific the next day. They were fully armed as if they were on an anti-submarine patrol, with three depth charges in the bomb bay and the machine guns in the turrets fully belted up. The depth charges were an experimental type designed to bounce on the surface of the sea, hit their target and roll under it to explode, like the famous dambuster bombs. Their mission was to fly three hundred and fifty nautical miles east of Nassau to a designated live-fire zone just north of the central Bahamas chain, find a decommissioned minesweeper that had been anchored as a target and expend all their ammunition on it before returning in a clockwise route to Nassau. Their last radio contact shows that they made it to the live-fire zone, a rectangular area of about fifty square miles extending north from the island of San Salvador. Intermittently, there’s severe electromagnetic disturbance at this location, on the edge of the abyssal plain where the Bahamas shelf extends over the Atlantic plate, an extension of the Puerto Rico Fault Line that’s still poorly understood. It’s the kind of thing that would get Bermuda Triangle fantasists all excited, but an oceanographer colleague of mine at Columbia University thinks it might be a localized upsurge of the
magma that affects the geomagnetic field, an anomaly that might also disrupt compasses.’

‘I’ve heard that before,’ Jack murmured, thinking hard. ‘About the North Anatolian Fault off Turkey, at the site of Atlantis. It makes some meteoritic materials seem heavier.’

‘That reference on the pillar at Lixus,’ Jeremy interjected. ‘“Where the palladion becomes heavier.”’

Jack nodded, leaning over and staring at the map. ‘I take it there was no more contact.’

‘None whatsoever. Over the next few days hurricane conditions prevented search-and-rescue flights, and by the time the weather had cleared, the Nassau station commander deemed that there was little chance the crew had survived. They found the anchored minesweeper completely untouched, so assumed the Liberator must have gone down before reaching it, on a flight path that was meant to take them on a compass bearing of thirty degrees from the northern tip of San Salvador out to sea towards a coral ridge where the minesweeper was anchored. The aircraft was meant to attack at very low level, and the base commander’s log concludes that she may have clipped the waves in the rising wind and gone into the sea intact, accounting for the absence of floating debris. That was pretty unusual for the Liberator, which tended to break up on ditching, but the pilot, Squadron Leader White, was exceptionally skilled. The case was closed, but was briefly reopened nearly three weeks later, when a horrifying discovery was made almost three hundred nautical miles south-east of their target off the far end of the Bahamas chain.’

He pulled out another photograph and passed it to Jack, who took it and stared. ‘Jesus,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ve seen harrowing pictures of survivors of wartime sinkings who’d endured weeks at sea in lifeboats, but this is one of the worst.’ He stared for a moment longer, and then passed it to Jeremy. It was a low-level aerial photo of a one-man inflatable boat Jack recognized from the survival equipment his father had once shown him in the RAF museum at Hendon. The pontoons were smudged and criss-crossed with markings. Inside was a man,
apparently naked, beneath a scrappy awning that seemed to have been rigged using his battledress and life jacket. He was in a foetal position, but his face protruded under one side of the awning, blackened and horribly ulcerated.

‘Surely he can’t have been alive,’ Jeremy said.

‘He was, just,’ Mikhail replied. ‘He was so dehydrated that his eyeballs had shrunk into his head. After his emergency rations ran out, he’d survived by fishing, making his first catch using pieces of his own flesh as bait. He’d been trying to drink his own blood. That’s what those markings on the pontoons are, like finger painting, all kinds of numbers and slashes that must have been his way of marking the days. The Catalina aircraft that spotted him managed to land on the sea and pick him up, and he was taken back to Nassau. By then, 111 OTU unit had departed and everything was winding down. In the hospital he was debriefed by the last remaining US intelligence officer on the base, an inexperienced man who had been sent out to take the records of the secret programme back to Washington for classified storage. His report from that day is in the file. The rescued airman had no chance of recovery and died that night, but during brief periods of lucidity he told the story that caught my eye when I unearthed that box in the archives almost fifty years later.’

‘Go on,’ Jack said.

‘His name was Flight Sergeant Brown. He was the rear gunner of Liberator FK-856. You won’t find his name or those of any of the other crew on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website, as officially they were lost in a peacetime training accident. He was English but had emigrated to Canada to make a new life on the prairies. His parents had been killed in the Blitz and he had no other recorded family. He was twenty-six when he died. From the debriefing, it’s clear that the pilot was talking to the crew right up to the plane’s final moments, fighting to keep it level as it dropped towards the sea. The Boulton Paul rear turret on the RAF Liberators was a deathtrap at high altitude if a plane went down, but it often came away on impact in a forced landing, and that’s probably what saved him. He said there was
a fire, but the pilot managed to ditch the plane nose-up, dousing the rear turret with seawater before the flames reached him and causing the turret to break away. The Liberator’s poor ditching characteristics were mainly a result of the lightly built bomb-bay doors, which tended to collapse on impact, causing the fuselage to fill up quickly and sink. He said that when he recovered consciousness the aircraft had disappeared and the pilot and other crew were nowhere to be seen. At that location the plane could well have gone down beyond the abyssal wall, where the ocean is more than a mile deep, and by the time the surviving crew had struggled out of their harnesses it may have been too deep for any hope of escape.’