Horse Under Water
After that he stripped off the rubber suit and rubbed himself with camphorated oil and a rough towel. He carefully parted his hair with the aid of a small pocket mirror, slipped into a pair of carefully pressed blue cotton trousers, white shirt and black cashmere pullover before he turned to me and said, ‘It is not extremely difficult.’ He said there was no need for Singleton to dive, and distributed black cheroots. The old man spun the motor and wound in the anchor and we began to wonder what Charlotte had fixed for lunch.
After lunch Giorgio used a magic marker pen to show the position and condition of the U-boat.
‘This is a rock-sided trench. There is what I judge to be a five-knot current pressing the hull against it … thus.’ Giorgio’s command of English was on firmer ground when dealing with reports like this. He made arrow marks across the white paper.
‘This is a type XXI U-boat,’ Giorgio continued. ‘Luckily this is something which I know from drawings, although this is the first I have seen. It is about eighty metres long with about seven metres’ beam. That makes it a big boat. But all this …’ On his side view of the submarine Giorgio now drew a line along the middle and indicated the area under his line. ‘… is filled with batteries. The space beneath the conning-tower has to be the control room. Beneath that are the magazine and compression tanks. Aft of it accommodation and galley. Aft of that: motors and engines. Forward of the control room there is crew accommodation. That’s there. Nearly sixty sailors on this sort of boat. At that bulkhead the battery-storage ends. The next compartment uses the full depth of the hull and is very big. This is the torpedo stowage compartment. Don’t get hurt going through that bulkhead – it’s a long drop to the floor. This is all full of armed torpedoes, and there is a large break in the hull there,’ he indicated the rear of the T.S. compartment, ‘at the torpedo tank. Six tubes – three each side of the bow. All bow caps closed.’
I noticed that the cuts on the back of Giorgio’s hand were bleeding again.
‘The boat is lying at a slight angle; this section is completely collapsed. The main engines have fallen through the pressure hull and jammed together with broken hydroplane into this rock fissure. Lucky the engine compartment is no concern. The rear-most section is torn completely open and many bodies of men in advanced decomposition are visible inside here. The hull here is very sharp and is dangerous bacteriological risk due to the corpses. Anyone diving here must treat even a small cut immediately.
‘The control section can be searched in twenty diving hours unless the floor has collapsed. There are ways in which the floor can fall that would make searching under it impossible without lifting apparatus. Another risk is that the hull has been rolled along the ocean floor by water movement subsequent to the control-room floor collapsing. But this is to look on the blackest side of the coin. Tomorrow I shall go inside the hull, if the weather stays as good.’
13 More to do
London: Tuesday
In the West London air terminal they have electric coin-in-the-slot razors. There was time to shave before Jean came to meet me in Dawlish’s old Riley. It was 9.39 a.m.
‘Whatever could you have done for Dawlish that he loans you England’s answer to the space race?’
Jean said, ‘He ripped the bumper off my Mini-Minor yesterday morning. Don’t mention it – he’s still very touchy.’
It’s a wonder he didn’t make you use the car pool.’
‘We’ve been having a little argument with the car pool since you headed into the sunshine.’
‘Don’t say it,’ I said. ‘What was it that Bernard’s file on the C.I.A. estimated they spent per year? And we are having difficulty with the car pool.’
‘Never mind,’ she said, overtaking a post van, squeezing past an oncoming bus, tuning the radio and lighting a cigarette. ‘How are things in Portugal?’ She glanced at me. ‘You don’t seem any more relaxed.’
‘I was all right until I entered this car; anyway I’ve been up since three a.m.,’ I said. The rain beat heavily against the windows. Outside Woolworth’s a woman in a plastic raincoat was smacking a child in a Yogi Bear bib. Soon we stopped at Admiralty Arch.
‘Admiralty Library,’ said Jean. ‘You must leave here by three forty-five at the very latest if you are going to get that BE 072 back to Lisbon this afternoon.’
Inside the library it was jumping with books. A girl read a Daily Express headed ‘A Commonwealth Tour for Tony?’
‘You remember all that stuff I sorted through for the Weapons Co-ordination Committee last year?’ I asked.
‘Yes sir,’ she said. She folded up Woman’s Realm and the Daily Express and tucked them under a pink cardigan and a bottle of hand-lotion in a little secret shelf under the desk.
‘I’ll want some of it again,’ I said. The whole place smelt of damp melton overcoats. ‘I’m trying to trace details of a scientific discovery made by a high-ranking officer, or perhaps a scientist who sailed from Germany during March or April 1945. Also I’ll want to see the Assessment Board Reportsfn1 during that period.’ There was a lot to be done before I caught the plane back to Lisbon.
14 Portuguese O.K.
Albufeira: Wednesday
Giorgio worked exactly on schedule. He began the search of the control room. The hull was badly silted up and Giorgio decided that looking around haphazardly wouldn’t do, so he began at the control bulkhead, port side. I’d told him to look for currency of any sort, or any documents, the log book or the metal cases that German naval ships’ papers were kept in.
Within a few days we had a comfortable routine. We would rise about 7.30 to watch the sun come up and have coffee. Then we would go out in the boat and Giorgio would do forty minutes. Singleton would go down for another forty, then Giorgio would do about twenty or so before they came back. By that time mud had been raised so badly that the beam of light wouldn’t penetrate the water. We’d get back for lunch about noon and Charlotte would have been to market, tidied the house and fixed lunch.
Singleton had been pressing for a second dive in the afternoons; but I thought it would look too odd, and Giorgio said that it would bring the air consumption over a twenty-four-hour period up to a point where slow surfacing would be necessary in order to be safe from ‘decompression sickness’. So afternoons everyone sunned themselves on the beach by order. But the following Saturday clouds were flitting around the sun like moths around a candle, and there was a bite in the air whenever the sun vanished. Charlotte said she’d go up to the house and make tea, when I noticed someone walking towards us up the beach. He was a muscular figure, perhaps a little overweight. His black hair was cropped close to his skull and his chest featured more hair than his head. A small gold crucifix dangled from a hair-fine chain around his neck. He wore a small pair of yellow swimming trunks and carried a white towel which he rubbed against his head as he walked. It was only the towel and shorts that marked him as a visitor, for he was tanned to the same ancient-furniture colour as were the local fishermen.
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