That first strike by U-515 at 8:55 p.m. on April 30 was followed within five minutes by three others, and then a further three ships were sunk in another devastating five-minute attack in the early hours of the morning. Clan Macpherson had been the last to go, straggling behind the convoy, settling down by the head and listing to starboard. Captain Gough survived, but the ship had taken almost her entire complement of engineer officers with her when she finally plummeted to the seabed and came to rest on the edge of the continental shelf more than one hundred meters below Jack now.
Jack ran through a checklist of her cargo: pig iron, groundnuts, linseed, jute, tea. At least there was no record of munitions, other than ammunition for her own guns. Diving into wrecks with unexploded ordnance, their fuses decayed and unstable, was not usually Jack’s favorite pastime. But there was no way of knowing for sure. The discovery that she had also secretly been carrying two tons of gold had shown what could be missing from cargo manifests. For a moment, thinking of Costas somewhere below him, risking his life, Jack wished that the researcher in the archives had never found that record, and he felt a flash of anger at the salvage company and its investors. He was damned if he was going to let that gold line anyone’s pockets. He would fight tooth and nail to see it go to humanitarian relief, using the considerable weight of IMU’s board of directors and their legal team to drag it through the international courts as far as it could go.
And there was another factor that weighed on Jack’s mind, the official reason for his inspection. If Landor and the salvage company had imagined that war grave designation was something they could simply brush aside, they would be wrong. It was something else that made Jack want to spin out an ownership dispute as long as possible. New UN legislation currently in its final reading, spearheaded by IMU, would prevent salvors who transgressed from dealing with the financial institutions of signatory nations. To transgress would make them into pirates, only able to sell their finds and launder their money on the black market, making it easier for law enforcement agencies to shut them down. Investors lured into supporting them with promises of sunken treasure would pull out and put their money elsewhere. Jack was here today because this scheme was the best hope of protecting historically important wrecks in international waters. Above all, he would do all he could to protect a war grave from being plundered; persevering with the dive and making a case against Deep Explorer was his commitment to the memory of the men who had gone down with this ship on that terrible night in 1943.
He stared into the depths again. He had seen enough wrecked merchantmen from the two world wars to have some idea of what to expect. A ship that was not heavily laden could sink slowly, allowing enough time for its interior compartments to fill with water before it went down; the wreck could be substantially intact, damaged only by the torpedo strike and by the impact with the seabed. A fully laden ship that sank quickly could be another matter entirely, its compartments still filled with air and imploding as the ship sank, leaving jagged masses of metal. Clan Macpherson had been carrying more than 8,000 tons of cargo, an enormous dead weight once buoyancy had been lost.
There was one aspect of those sinkings that haunted Jack the most. Men must often have been trapped inside air pockets, alive after the ship had disappeared from the surface. Their deaths would not have been like those portrayed in Hollywood films: a final few moments as the churning waters rose, a gulp of seawater and unconsciousness. Instead they would have been horrific, surrounded by the shrieking and cracking of the hull, the air pockets lasting long enough for the titanic pressures of the ocean to bear down on them, bursting their eardrums and collapsing their sinuses, a final unspeakable agony as the ship plummeted to its grave.
Men who went to sea in ships knew full well the horrors of Davy Jones’s Locker. It was what singled them out, what made them tough. Jack came from a long line of such men, sea captains who had defended England’s shores at the time of the Spanish Armada, explorers and adventurers who had pushed the boundaries of knowledge during the Age of Exploration, merchants who had built fortunes on the spice trade with the East and the riches of the West. He himself was another, modern kind of explorer, one who had dared to go where his ancestors could scarcely have imagined, who had descended into the world of their nightmares, who had touched the void. His boundary was no longer the distant horizon that had beckoned his forebears, but he knew the same siren call of the unknown as he stared into the depths. He knew their excitement, and he knew their fear.
The LED display on his computer flashed green. The computer had fixed the fault, and the rebreather was good to go. He took a deep breath and steeled himself. It was time to dive.
2
Jack raised his head out of the water one last time and gave a thumbs-down signal for the benefit of the crewmen on Deep Explorer who were watching him. The ocean swell was now producing two-meter troughs, and he needed to get below the turbulence. He grasped the shot line beneath the buoy and pulled himself down, feeling the hiss of air into his suit as his automated buoyancy system compensated for the change in pressure, keeping him neutral. Five meters down, he was below the main effect of the swell, but the current was stronger than on the surface, pulling him out almost horizontally from the line. He clicked his buoyancy compensator to manual, pinched his nose through his visor to equalize the pressure, and grasped the line with his other hand, letting it run through his fingers as he slowly dropped spread-eagled into the depths. He had watched Costas do the same, holding on as he plummeted out of sight, and prayed that he had kept hold of the line until reaching the wreck. To let go would mean being swept off site beyond the edge of the continental shelf, and surfacing far from the ship. With no means of communication and the current trending southeast, that could only mean a long, slow ride into the middle of the Atlantic, with little chance of ever being picked up.
Jack was in his element. The tension he had felt on the surface, the slight edge of seasickness in the swell, had disappeared. As he descended further, his intercom began to crackle. “Costas,” he said loudly. “Do you read me. Over.” There was still no response. He rolled over, seeing the smudge of Deep Explorer’s hull still visible above him, then turned back to face the green-blue gloom below. He had reached sixty meters, the safe limit of compressed-air diving, and was now entering the realm where his life depended on the continuing function of his oxygen rebreather. If the glitch recurred now, before he reached Costas, his only chance of survival would be an emergency ascent using the system’s bailout regulator, a dangerous move that would put Costas beyond his help should anything go wrong. If all went well, the rebreather would allow him an hour at 120 meters, the maximum depth of the wreck indicated by the sonar. But their expectation had been for a bottom time shorter than that. All Jack needed to provide evidence for a war grave designation was to verify the identity of the wreck.