The Solomon Effect

37

Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany: Wednesday 28 October

7:10 A.M. local time

By the time their connecting flight from Munich swooped down over the mountains of the Black Forest to land at Freiburg im Breisgau, it was early the following morning.

“These overnight flights are going to kill me,” said October as they caught a cab directly from the airport to the philosophy faculty of the university. “I must look like shit.”

“Lowenstein obviously didn’t think so.”

“Enough about that, already.” Settling into the cab’s backseat, she rummaged around in her bag for a brush and used it to draw her hair back into a clip. “I don’t even know what day it is anymore.”

“It’s Wednesday.”

She looked up at him, her arms stilling at her task. “The twenty-eighth?”

“That’s right.”

“Christ,” she whispered. Halloween was three days away.

“Be thankful for overnight flights.”

They drove past undulating renaissance facades of red sandstone and white plaster, past gently flowing canals that gurgled with the fresh waters of the Dreisam River. By the end of the Second World War, Jax knew, American and British carpet-bombing had reduced this elegant university city to a burned-out shell. But there was no sign of that now. The historic heart of the city had been painstakingly and lovingly restored.

They found Professor Herbolt stuffing papers into a battered brown-leather briefcase in his office. He looked up, his straight, pale blond hair falling forward to frame a soft, plump-cheeked face.

“Ah. There you are,” he said. Somewhere in his late thirties or early forties, he had gentle gray eyes and the slightly stooped shoulders of a man who’d spent too many years of his life hunched over books. “I’m on my way to a meeting at the Historisches Kaufhaus.” He buckled the straps of his briefcase and swung it off his desk. “Walk with me.”

The briefcase in one hand and a lumpy paper-wrapped package tucked under his arm, the professor led the way through a warren of restored university buildings to the Bertoldstrasse. “Matt told me something of what you’re looking for. How much do you know about Germany’s military records?”

Jax shook his head. “Nothing, really.”

The professor nodded, as if he’d been expecting as much. “The Allies seized all the German military and government archives they could find after the war,” he said, ushering them up the noisy, crowded street. “At first, the archives were held in Washington and London. But eventually most of the material was microfilmed and the originals were returned to us in the fifties. Since Germany was still an occupied, partitioned state, there was a reluctance to create a central archives at Bonn, so various archives were established in different parts of the country. The Bundesarchiv-Militararchiv was set up here, in Freiburg.”

“All the Naval records were sent here?”

“Most of them. The U-boat war journals weren’t declassified and returned to us until the late seventies. But then they came here, yes. The Naval records are by far the most complete. The Army, less so. The Air Force holdings were heavily destroyed and are very fragmentary.”

“So how complete are the U-boat records?”

“Not as complete as one might wish, I’m afraid, especially with regard to the later period. The archives have no material at all on nearly three hundred U-boats that were commissioned into service at the end of the war. The last months of the war were very chaotic, you know. The Allies carpet-bombed our cities virtually every night, killing hundreds of thousands-some say millions. Many records were lost. Some U-boats were commissioned that we don’t even know existed.”

Jax stared down the length of the Kaiser-Joseph-Strasse, to where one of the old medieval gates of the city was still visible. “Let me guess: U-114 is one of those.”

“I’m afraid so. Until the wreckage was found off Denmark, we had nothing on it. Your government originally identified it as a Type XB submarine, but as far as we know, only eight Type XB submarines were built. Two survived to surrender at the end of the war, and six are known to have been sunk. Because they were so large, they were very useful for carrying cargo long distances. But their size also made them disastrously slow and difficult to maneuver.”

“What do you mean, the wreckage was ‘originally’ identified?”

The professor was silent as they cut between two tall, narrow buildings to emerge in the Münsterplatz, the open marketplace surrounding the ancient cathedral. “I’ve been studying the photographs Matt sent of U-114 on the seabed,” he said, “and I don’t believe it was a Type XB. They were originally designed as minelayers, you know; when they were used as transports, they carried most of their cargo in their mineshafts. The XB was unique in that it only had two torpedo tubes, at the stern.”

Jax drew up short. “But U-114 definitely had a forward torpedo room.”

The German paused to look back at him. “You’re certain?”

“Yes.” He’d seen it himself.

Herbolt nodded. “Then I suspect we’re dealing with a Type XI-B U-cruiser.”

October said, “That’s significant?”

“Very,” said the professor, leading the way across the open square, “when you consider that there are no official records of any of the Type XI-Bs ever becoming operational. We know that four keels were laid down in the shipyards of Deschimag AG Weser, in Bremen. But it was assumed they were all scrapped prior to completion.”

Jax said, “They were big?”

“Oh, yes. Over one hundred sixteen meters long, and some nine and a half meters wide. They were quite large.”

“The XB class subs were-what? Three hundred feet long?”

“Eighty-nine meters, yes.”

Jax tried to picture the U-boat they’d seen resting on a barge in the shipyard in Kaliningrad. Had it been three hundred feet, or closer to four?

“There have been persistent rumors that at least one class XI-B was completed near the end of the war,” said the professor, “and sent out on a secret mission.”

“As part of Operation Caesar?”

Herbolt paused before a colorful renaissance hall with a ground-floor arcade and fancifully decorated gables. “It’s possible.”

“What kind of rumors are we talking about?”

“Reports from dockworkers, mainly.” The professor glanced at his watch. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help you more.” He started to turn away, then hesitated. “There is one other place you might try. The official archives are here, in Freiburg. But there is something called the Deutsches U-Boot Museum-Archiv, in Altenbruch. It began as a private collection held by a former submarine officer named Horst Bredow, but it eventually grew so large he turned it into a nonprofit foundation run by volunteers. They have gathered everything they can find on Germany’s U-boats, not just copies of the official records, but also things like letters, memoirs, transcriptions of firsthand accounts by survivors. If anything does exist on this U-114, that is where you’ll find it.”

Jax stared off across the old German square, filled that morning with market stalls piled with buckets of sunflowers and shiny pyramids of apples and trays of fresh pastries. “Do you think U-114 could have been carrying gold?”

Herbolt shrugged. “It is possible. After Stalingrad, many here in Germany knew the war was lost. Corporations such as I. G. Farber and Krupp Industries were converting their holdings into gold and sending it out of the country, to places like Portugal and Argentina. But if what I believe is true-that one of the XI-B class U-boats was rushed into commission and sent on a special mission-then I think it was carrying something more important than rich men’s gold.”

“Something like-what?”

The German shrugged again. “I’m not going to speculate. Talk to the people at the Deutsches U-Boot Museum-Archiv. I’ll tell them to expect you.”

October said, “Where is Altenbruch?”

“In Cuxhaven, on the North Sea.” Setting down his briefcase, he held out the bulky brown-paper-wrapped package. “I almost forgot. Matt wanted you to have this.”

“What is it?” said Jax, taking the parcel.

“Something he seems to think you may need.” The professor picked up his briefcase again and turned to leave. “Just be careful to open it in private. We have very strict rules on firearms here in Germany.”