The Kaiser’s Navigator (Peter Sparke Book 2) Page 4

  "That is, of course, a reasonable starting point. But the crucial difference here, you see, is that in the North Sea there is no realistic chance that any of the nearby nations might end up getting into such a nervous state that they end up shooting at people."

  Sparke took a moment of silence to think. "I know nothing about military matters, I'm afraid."

  "Don't worry, we do. But the thing is, we really need to make sure that all the clever things you and your firm know how to do, and all the clever things our military people know how to do, join up somehow. We wouldn't want to find ourselves in a situation where, theoretically of course, some boatload of people with ill-intent were to start pointing guns at civilians and they did not know what number to call, as it were."

  "And I suppose," said Sparke, "you would not want your people to start shooting off bullets at something that might cause a lot more damage than they expected?"

  The Chief Secretary beamed. "Precisely, Mr. Sparke. You have it precisely."

  Sparke had, in fact, a very reasonable working knowledge of how the military mind worked. His work in crisis management meant that he lived in a world where the unthinkable was a regular occurrence. The truth was that virtually every major emergency plan he had ever worked on had, as a last resort, the use of the military, either as a last ditch rescue service which would go where no civilian force would send its people, or as a means to deliver deadly force.

  Three years ago Sparke had been in charge of managing the crisis response team which was struggling to deal with the chaos in one of their company's African oil fields in a river delta region called the G'swaglo Washlands. The company facility had every known safety and security system in place, including private armed security. It wasn't enough.

  Sparke was called in when the systems were put to the test and found wanting. The money normally used to bribe a local warlord had been stolen by the local government official who was supposed to have delivered it. When the money did not arrive, the gunmen picked up their weapons, climbed into their Toyota pickup trucks and started shooting.

  The company's armed guards were killed or scared off, his firm's staff captured at gunpoint and several badly beaten. All negotiations failed and as things spiralled out of control and the violence escalated, Sparke knew that events were passing out of the realm of normal civilian life.

  When his last options had been exhausted, it had been he who had turned to the officer in charge of the tiny group of British armed forces which had been rushed to the country, and uttered the phrase, "There are no further options available to us, we need your support and assistance."

  It was a prearranged sentence, known only to Sparke and a handful of other senior civilians. Its use indicated that all civilian options had been tried, and the only recourse open was to hand over to the military. By the time Sparke had finished speaking, the officer had left the control room and was striding towards a waiting helicopter speaking urgently into a satellite phone.

  Shortly after dawn the next day, all of the twenty-eight staff from Sparke's firm had been released, at least twenty of the gunmen had been killed, the survivors scattered and all of their vehicles and heavy weapons destroyed.

  Two British soldiers had been wounded and one killed on the mission. Sparke was acutely aware that none of the soldiers involved earned much more than the car park attendants in the head office of his company in Munich.

  Sparke was by no means a military hawk, but he was aware that the comforts and freedoms he enjoyed were safeguarded, ultimately, by the likes of the army officer and his men who were prepared to put themselves into situations of deadly danger and do terrible things on his behalf. Despite being a civilian, he did have some understanding of the military mind.

  He also knew that there was no possibility that any valuable natural resources under the seabed of the South Atlantic would be left unexploited indefinitely. The only question was the care with which it was done and the safety of those who did it. Perhaps half a dozen people on earth were as qualified as Sparke to take on this task and it was precisely why his firm had established Sparke's team as a separate company.

  "Of course our firm will be happy to work on this," said Sparke.

  The Chief Secretary nodded slightly. "Before we go any further, you should know that there is another aspect to this which your, should we say, unique personal experience may be of value."

  Sparke looked blankly at the civil servant.

  "You see, complex as this matter already is, there is another factor to be considered."

  As he spoke, the door to the small office opened and a smiling grey-haired man entered.

  The Chief Secretary stood. "Mr. Walkinshaw, thank you for joining us. I was just starting to explain to Mr. Sparke here our little issue. Perhaps you can talk us through the main points?"

  Mr. Walkinshaw shook hands with both the Chief Secretary and Sparke. Then he poured himself some tea.

  "Do you know much about the German Kaiser and early Antarctic exploration, Mr. Sparke?"

  Chapter Seven

  Opitz and Filchner stood at the opening they had made in the wall of the cabin. Several pieces of broken plank lay around them on the hard packed snow.

  The rest of their group had been left on the far side of the small hillock oblivious to the discovery Opitz had made the previous night. Opitz was first through the hole, landing on a pile of empty wooden boxes which shattered as he crashed onto them. Filchner followed him down more carefully, landing surprisingly gently.

  Both lit their lamps and stared at the tableau before them. Apart from two bodies stretched out on the floor, all the figures were gathered around a makeshift table which seemed to be made from a wooden hatch cover. Both men walked slowly around the group in opposite directions, moving their lamps to illuminate the dead figures. They met at the head of the table. Filchner cast his beam the length of the table.

  "No plates, no knives," he said. "No food, I wonder?"

  Opitz cast his lamp around the walls of the hut. It seemed to be constructed from the timbers of a lifeboat and pieces of deck timber. Nothing that he saw showed signs of provisions. No spare gear or clothing could be seen anywhere.

  "Only the prow of the ship is visible. The stores would have been in the hold," he said.

  After a long silence, Opitz turned to his expedition leader. "Their ship must have been pinched in the ice. Crushed suddenly," he said. "These men must have escaped with barely the clothes they were wearing."

  The frozen evidence all around them told an obvious, but horrible story. A ship locked in the ice, the crew probably asleep when one of the massive but unpredictable shifts in current, which occurred here frequently, caused millions of tons of ice to start moving. The strength of the ship's construction would have counted for nothing against the mass of sea ice, and it would have been smashed like porcelain.

  Filchner said nothing, but Opitz kept talking, perhaps to escape the feeling of being in a mortuary. "The prow of a ship is more narrow and light, so if it was pinched it could have been forced upwards. Midships and stern would have filled with water and been dragged down."

  Finally, Filchner looked up at Opitz. "They either starved or froze to death. They must have known they stood no chance, even when they built this hut."

  The idea of over a dozen men building a makeshift shelter from timbers scavenged from the carcass of their ship, knowing that rescue was impossible, filled the minds of both Opitz and Filchner.

  Both men now recovered from the shock of their discovery and began to look in detail at the bodies.

  They were mainly dressed in heavy woollen and tweed clothes, not military uniforms, but obviously well made, specifically to deal with cold weather.

  "They are English, I think," said Filchner. "They are dressed like English. A whaling ship?"

  The idea had already occurred to Opitz. There was a huge fleet of ships dedicated to killing whales in the southern oceans, and the idea of one, for whatever reason, becoming lost
in the ice was certainly a possibility.

  In the middle of the table, there sat an upright figure who, alone amongst the bodies, wore a peaked naval cap. By the light of the two torches, the men could see that under his right hand, resting on the table, there were two books. At some point, this man had placed his hand on these books, sat up straight at this rough table and starred directly into the face of his own freezing death.

  The covers of the two books seemed to confirm Filchner's theory. One had the legend "Ships Log" and the other, a much slimmer volume, had 'Navigation Log' embossed on the cover in English. On both books the name of the ship had been added later. Obviously these were standard issue books, sourced from a ship’s chandler. Opitz scrapped away the light covering of frost and peered at the name.

  "S.S. Santa Simone," he said out loud. He looked up at Filchner, "Santa Simone is not an English name for a ship."

  He cracked open the ship's log. "Spanish?" he said. Filchner peered over Opitz's shoulder to look at the writing.

  "Spanish," he confirmed, then looked at Opitz. "English clothes, English ship's books but Spanish writing and a Spanish ship name? Where were they headed?"

  Opitz carefully turned the pages of the navigation log to the entry showing their last point of departure. He was unable to read the actual content of the entry as it was written in Spanish, but the brief details of their departure were obvious, written as they were in an international protocol for all ships leaving port.

  Opitz read the details out loud to Filchner.

  "Port of departure: Buenos Aires, Date of departure: June 6, 1905, Port of destination: Trondheim, Norway."

  He looked up at his leader. "Not a whaler." No whale hunter would leave the southern seas to work in the north. The traffic was all the other way. After a moment’s thought, he added, "A Spanish ship leaves Buenos Aires six years ago bound for Norway and finds itself crushed in the ice in Antarctica? It is not possible. She would have had to drift for weeks, months even, to reach here. A ship with no power could never have survived for that long in the southern seas."

  Both men knew that a ship which could not make its own way in the sea would inevitably have been swamped by the storms that swept unrestrained around the globe at these latitudes.

  Filchner picked up the ship's log. "She was from the Argentine, not Spain."

  "So," said Opitz, "an Argentinian ship leaves Buenos Aires in good sailing season for Norway, but finds itself crushed in the ice in the Antarctic?"

  Filchner remained silent for a long moment. "Our priorities are elsewhere at the moment, Herr Leutnant. This is not a matter for us, or for this expedition."

  The use of his rank brought Opitz out of his reverie. "Of course, sir," he said.

  "We cannot carry anything with us which is not absolutely essential to our own survival and there is no value in sharing this information with the rest of the group."

  Opitz was only a navigator, and moreover a junior officer, under the command of Filchner. There was no question of him dissenting.

  "We will continue with our march and say nothing of this to anyone until we reach home, and only then to the proper authorities," ordered Filchner.

  "Yes, sir," said Opitz,

  Filchner looked around the shabby hut. "Leave everything as we found it and let us rejoin the group."

  Getting out of the hut was more difficult that clambering in. Opitz had to lift Filchner by the foot to allow him to reach the opening in the wooden wall.

  Alone in the hut, Opitz looked around at the last, frozen moments of a group of doomed men. Almost without thinking, he reached across the rough table top and picked up the smaller of the two journals, the navigation log, and tucked it into the large pocket in his cotton over-jacket.

  For some reason, he felt unable to leave. Despite the cold, he removed his thick hood and pulled off his naval cap and stood, bareheaded, watching his breath cloud the space in front of him. He ran his finger over the embroidered lettering on the cap band of his hat, remembering the pride he felt when he first wore his naval uniform. Then he looked at the dead men before him.

  As he moved a wooden crate over towards the opening so that he could clamber out, his eye fell on a small, well-made leather case, exactly the size and shape used to hold a captain's pocket telescope. He looked briefly at the case under the light of his lamp, seeing the words "S.S. Santa Simone, Buenos Aires, 1906" beautifully embossed on its cover. He added it to the navigation log in his pocket and left the bodies of the dead to their icy tomb.

  Chapter Eight

  Sparke's knowledge of the exploration of the Antarctic continent consisted of a few black and white movies and a couple of paperback books read on planes. Mr. Walkinshaw, however, was obviously something of an expert.

  "I won't bore you with detail, but from the start of the twentieth century it was pretty much akin to the space race; a contest for national prestige wrapped up in scientific pretence, on the whole."

  Sparke nodded, but said nothing. Working with experts for so long had taught him the value of patient silence. Walkinshaw continued.

  "None of the governments which took part were actually trying to claim territory in the classic explorer sense, but they were all aware that, at some point in the future, there could be some legal value to be gained by having their people land, chart the place, and raise a flag."

  "Land, chart, and raise a flag?" repeated Sparke.

  "Yes, silly as it sounds, those three things were internationally recognised by the imperial nations as how to lay claim to a piece of land. Plus, of course, you would have to live to tell the tale. To put your legal stamp on a piece of land then, you really had to show some ability to defend it and that meant staying alive, obviously."

  "Obviously," repeated Sparke. "But the people who explored the Antarctic didn't claim it on behalf of their country?"

  "No, but they all made very sure that everyone knew that they had been there, just in case anyone else decided that they wanted to make such a claim. Antarctica has been 'title-less’ since the first organised modern expeditions."

  None of this was actually new information to Sparke, but he knew that it had to be leading somewhere.

  Walkinshaw drew a deep breath, looked at the Chief Secretary, then continued. "It seems now quite possible that this situation may be about to be disturbed. We understand from some of our people that one specific nation may, in fact, be about to make a claim that they were the first country to put people on a particular part of the continent and that since they were not party to the agreements made by the major exploring nations, all bets are off, and they seem to be getting ready to make a legal case for possession."

  The Chief Secretary leaned forward in his seat, "Perhaps we could provide Mr. Sparke with some further specifics?"

  Walkinshaw nodded slowly to himself, preparing his words carefully. "It looks as though the Government of the Republic of Argentina is about to make a public statement claiming that, in 1906, they successfully landed on, charted and claimed a very significant part of the Antarctic landmass, and they plan to use this claim to establish a dominant position in the international legal wrangle over who controls that patch of seabed which you see on the screen."

  He lifted his pencil and pointed to a group of islands near a peninsula that jutted out from the main landmass and petered out in an archipelago.

  "At the time of the claim, 1906, no one had ever been there. It had never been charted."

  "And now Argentina is going to state that they discovered these islands and staked a claim on them?" asked Sparke.

  "Precisely, Mr. Sparke," said the Chief Secretary. "You have it in a nutshell."

  Years of involvement in the world of exploration had taught Sparke that legal issues such as this were rarely resolved quickly, if ever. The value was often in the fact that a realistic claim could be made at all.

  "But this has not been made public yet?" asked Sparke.

  Walkinshaw looked towards the Chief Secretary, h
anding him the floor.

  "In just over two months time," he said, "there will be a debate in the United Nations over the commercial exploitation of the seabed in this region. Some of our people tell us that the government of Argentina intends to use that event as a platform to make this claim."

  Sparke had heard the phrase "some of our people" used by individuals such as the Chief Secretary in the past. He knew better than to ask who those people were, and how they found out the information they were now discussing.

  "The Argentinians must have some evidence to support such a claim?" he said.

  "Indeed they must," said Walkinshaw, "and indeed they, possibly, have."

  He opened a slim leather portfolio that he had been carrying and brought out a sheaf of papers which he laid out carefully on the low table between the men.

  "In 1906, The Argentine was, in effect, a British commercial colony. The railways, banking, the shipping lines, the mining were all owned by British interests, as was the insurance industry. This," he said, offering a piece of paper to Sparke, "is the insurance certificate for a ship of Argentine registration called the Santa Simone. She was insured by Lloyds and left Buenos Aries bound for Norway in June of 1906. This," he said, laying another page on the table, "was a report filed by one of our people about the ship. According to this report, the ship was too small to be of commercial value on a long voyage, carried far too large a crew, carried no cargo to speak of and the supplies she boarded were vastly greater than she would have needed for a trip to northern Europe."

  "Your people seemed to have been very perceptive," said Sparke.

  The Chief Secretary nodded. "Our people were very perceptive indeed. And numerous."

  Sparke read through the papers carefully, realising immediately that he was not holding copies, but the original documents, both over a hundred years old. He marvelled that the men he was talking with lived in a world where documents of such an age were treated with the same degree of immediate relevance as an email which arrived a few seconds ago. History and time meant something different to people like this.