Spartan Gold

CHAPTER 9

Using one of the Spair Air pony canisters, Sam inspected the bottom beneath the Molch from stem to stern, lightly tapping on each log with the tip of his dive knife and praying he didn’t get a metallic clank in reply. Their luck held; all he heard was the soft thump of rotten wood.

Given the appearance of the logs near the top of the heap, many of which still showed some remnants of bark, Sam suspected the Molch had been deposited here recently, pushed by the storm out of the main channel and into this inlet. If so, any torpedoes she’d been carrying were likely lost somewhere in the main channel of the Pocomoke, between here and the bay, some twenty miles to the south.

A sound theory, but a theory nonetheless, Sam reminded himself. He finished his survey of the bottom, then moved on to his next task. Though he’d seen no external damage to the Molch’s hull it didn’t mean she wasn’t flooded, and if so they were out of luck. Small as it was compared to its counterparts, the Molch was still no lightweight, weighing in at eleven tons. Add to that the volume of water her interior could hold and this midget submarine might as well be the Titanic for all the good their ropes and ratchet blocks would do them.

Moving from the aft end forward, Sam tapped along the hull every few feet with his knuckle, listening to the echoes. They were hollow. Damn, could they be this lucky . . . ?

He returned to the surface and climbed back onto the bank.

“Good news, bad news,” Sam said. “Which do you want first?”

“Good.”

“I’m ninety percent sure the torpedoes aren’t down there and ninety-nine percent sure she’s not flooded.”

“And the bad?”

“I’m only ninety percent sure the torpedoes aren’t down there.”

Remi thought it over for a moment, then said, “Well, if you’re wrong, at least we’ll go together—and in spectacular fashion.”

Sam spent the next hour rigging the lines to the sub, checking and rechecking their placement, the angles, and the anchor points for the three ratchet blocks, which they’d spread out in a fan shape along the bank, each secured to the base of a full-grown tree. Sam had hooked the other ends to the Molch’s bow cleat, around the entry hatch, and then around the propeller shaft.

Twice during their preparations they again heard the rumbling of a boat engine and each time crawled through the grass to their vantage point overlooking the river. The first boat turned out to be a father and son trolling for pike. The second boat, just five minutes later, was Scarface and his crew heading back upriver toward Snow Hill. As before, they slowed at the mouth of each inlet on the opposite shore, Scarface steering while one of the others knelt on the bow and scanned the waterway with binoculars. After ten minutes of this they disappeared around the bend. Sam and Remi waited another five minutes to make sure they had truly moved on, then got back to work.

Even with the sub full of air, rolling her was going to take just the right amount of force, applied in just the right way. Sam scratched out the calculations on his notepad, figuring the force vectors and buoyancy variables until certain they were as ready as they were going to get.

“We’ll know as soon as it slides off the logs,” Sam said. “If it sinks, it’s over. Opening the hatch will just flood it. If it floats, we’re still in the game.”

They rehearsed their plan one more time, then took up their positions, Sam at the center ratchet block, Remi on the stern block.

“Ready?” Sam called.

“Ready.”

“As soon as you see it drop off the logs, start cranking.”

“Shall do.”

Sam started cranking slowly on the ratchet, one every second or so, listening to the line thrumming with tension and the groaning of steel. Thirty seconds and forty cranks later there came a soft crunching sound from the water and then, as if moving in slow motion, the Molch’s periscope began swinging toward them.

There was another muffled crunch and Sam could see in his mind’s eye the logs beneath the keel cracking. He felt a faint shudder beneath his feet, then the line went slack.

“Go, Remi, fast as you can!”

Together they began working the ratchets. After ten seconds Sam’s line went taut again. He sprinted to the bow ratchet block and cranked it until the line was shivering with tension. Sam glanced over to Remi and saw her line was also vibrating.

“Okay, stop!”

Remi froze.

“Start walking backward into the grass, then lie down on your belly and wait till I give you the all clear.”

If any of the lines parted under the strain they would snap back with lethal force.

Sam walked forward, hand lightly trailing over the line, feeling it tremble. He reached the lip of the inlet and looked down.

“Gotta love physics,” Sam whispered.

The Molch was lying against the bank at a thirty-degree angle, periscope poking into the tree branches and her slime-encrusted entry hatch jutting from the water.

Remi appeared at his shoulder. “Wow,” she whispered.

“‘Wow’ is right.”

They added a second line to the one around the hatch, then slowly let out the bow and stern blocks, doubled up those lines, and rese cured them around trees closer to the bank. Using one of the lines for balance, Sam gingerly stepped onto the Molch’s deck. It groaned, shifted, and dipped a few inches, but otherwise held.

“Would you like the honors?” Sam asked, nodding at the hatch.

“Sure.”

“Here.”

Sam tossed her the hammer and she grabbed it in midair, then stepped onto the deck and knelt beside the hatch. She gave each of the hatch’s four dogging levers a solid rap, then set the hammer aside and tried them. They didn’t budge. Three more times she repeated the process before each of the levers let loose in turn, sliding aside with a screech.

Remi took a breath, looked at Sam with wide-eyed anticipation, then lifted open the hatch. Immediately she wrinkled her nose and jerked her head back. “Oh, God, that’s awful. . . .”

“I guess that answers the question of whether her crew’s still aboard,” Sam said.

“Yeah, there’s no doubt about that,” Remi replied, pinching shut her nose and staring into the open hatch. “He’s staring me right in the eye.”

The body was wearing a Kriegsmarine cap and a dark blue jumpsuit. Then again, the word “body” seemed a woefully inadequate description of what Sam and Remi were looking at.

Trapped inside the dry, airless interior of the Molch for sixty-four years, the corpse had undergone a transformation Sam could only describe as part liquification, part mummification.

“Pretty safe to assume he suffocated,” Remi said. “Once he was dead the body would have started decaying, but without oxygen the process ground to a halt, leaving him . . . half-baked, if you will.”

“Oh, that’s lovely, dear. I’ll carry the image always.”

The position of the remains, which lay sprawled on the deck at the bottom of the ladder with one petrified arm draped over a rung, spoke volumes about the man’s final hours or minutes. Trapped inside this darkened cylinder, knowing death was tightening its grip on him with every inhalation of oxygen, it seemed natural that he would have gravitated to his only exit, half hoping for some miracle that he knew in his heart would never come.

“I assume you won’t mind staying up here while I poke around,” Sam said.

“Be my guest.”

He clicked on the flashlight, then slid his legs into the hatch, probed with his foot until it found a rung, then started downward. A few feet from the bottom, Sam stepped off the ladder, opposite the body, and used his arms to lower himself to the deck.

Immediately Sam felt a gloom wash over him. He wasn’t particularly claustrophobic, but this was different somehow. Not high enough to allow him to straighten up and barely wider than his outstretched arms, the interior had a dungeonlike feel to it. The bulkheads, painted in a dull gray, were festooned with cables and pipes, all seemingly going everywhere and nowhere at once.

“How is it?” Remi called down.

“Disgusting is the only word to describe it.”

Sam knelt down beside the corpse and began carefully checking the pockets. All were empty save the breast pocket, inside which he found a wallet. He handed this up to Remi, then turned and moved forward.

According to what few descriptions of the Molch’s interior he had been able to find, the front section of the bow held the craft’s main battery and behind this, between a pair of trim ballast tanks, an operator’s seat with rudimentary controls for steering, navigation, speed, power, and trimming, as well as a primitive hydrophone for detecting enemy vessels.

Under the operator’s seat Sam found a small toolbox and a leather holster containing a Luger pistol and a spare magazine. These he pocketed.

Bolted to the bulkhead beneath each trim tank was a rectangular footlocker. In one he found a half dozen water jugs, all empty, and twice that number of empty food tins. In the other footlocker he found a leather satchel and a pair of hard-backed black leather journals. He slipped them into the satchel, then took one last look around. Something caught his eye: a piece of fabric sticking out from behind the footlocker. He knelt down and saw that it was a burlap sack; inside was a hinged wooden box the size and shape of a loaf of bread. He tucked the sack under his arm and returned to the ladder, then handed all the items up to Remi and climbed up. At the top, he stopped and looked back down at the corpse.

“We’ll make sure you get home, Captain,” he whispered.

Back on deck, Sam held the line steady to make Remi’s leap back to the bank easier. As he braced his feet, his toe bumped the burlap sack. From inside came the muted tinkle of glass.

Curious now, they both knelt down on the deck. Remi opened the sack and slid out the box, which was devoid of markings. Gingerly she pried open the brass latch and swung open the lid, revealing a sheaf of what looked like aged oilskin. Remi peeled back a flap.

For a long ten seconds neither of them spoke, gaping at the object catching the sunlight. Remi murmured, “It can’t be. Can it?”

It was a bottle, a green glass wine bottle.

Sam didn’t reply, instead using his right index finger to lift the end a few inches out of the box, revealing the punt.

“Good Lord . . . ” Remi murmured.

The symbol etched into the glass was all too familiar: