Together they heaved on the painter. The skiff’s bow bumped against the bank, then began inching up the slope.
The powerboat was three hundred yards away. The men’s attention seemed focused on the opposite shore, but Sam knew that could change at any second. One stray glance and they were finished.
“Pull, Remi.”
Again they heaved back on the painter. Sam spread his legs and dug his heels into the soil, pulling until the tendons in his neck bulged. The skiff’s nose appeared over the lip of the bank, but now free of the water and subject to gravity the electric motor began fighting them. The skiff slipped backward a foot.
“One more good pull,” Sam said. “On three. One . . . two . . . three!”
The skiff arced up and over the lip and slid onto level ground. In lockstep Sam and Remi backpedaled, dragging the skiff deeper into the grass.
“Down, Sam.”
Remi dropped to her belly, followed a split second later by Sam. They went still, tried to slow their breathing.
“Think we made it?” Remi whispered.
“We’ll know shortly. If things go bad, I want you to run as fast as you can. Head for the forest and don’t look back.”
“No, Sam—”
“Shhh.”
The powerboat’s engine was growing louder by the second, seemingly headed straight for their spot.
Then, Scarface’s voice: “Anything?”
“Nothing. What are they in, anyway?”
“A skiff, about twelve feet long.”
“Can’t be on this side,” the voice said. “There’s nothing here. Got to be the other one. Plenty of side channels to hide in there.”
“Yeah.”
The engine noise began moving off, fading across the water until Sam and Remi could only hear its distant echo.
“They’ve moved into another channel,” Sam said, rising to his knees and peeking over the top of the grass. “Yep. Don’t see them. They’re gone.”
Remi rolled onto her back and let out a sigh. “Thank God.”
Sam lay down beside her. She laid her head onto his shoulder.
“What do you say?” he asked. “Stay or go?”
She didn’t hesitate. “We’ve come this far. Be a shame to leave the mystery unsolved.”
“That’s the woman I love,” Sam said.
“What, reckless and misguided?”
“No, courageous and determined.”
Remi sang softly, “ ‘You say potayto, I say potahto . . .’ ”
“Come on, back to work.”
Sam spit into his mask, dipped it into the water, then settled it onto his head. Remi stood on the bank, arms on her hips, face etched with worry.
“Just going to have a look around,” he assured her. “I’ll save the air in case we can get inside. This won’t happen, but if it shifts in my direction while I’m down there, just start working those ratchet blocks until it tips back. If I don’t come up within, say, four to six hours, you can start worrying.”
“Comedian.”
“Hold the fort, I’ll be back.”
Sam clicked on his flashlight, took a deep breath, and ducked beneath the surface. Left hand extended, he finned downward. Within only a few feet the algae-filled water turned a deep green and visibility dropped to only a few feet. Sediment and bits of plant life swirled in the flashlight’s beam, leaving Sam feeling like he was trapped inside a nightmarish snow globe.
His hand touched something solid, the hull. He kept going, letting his hand trail over the curve of the hull until finally the bottom appeared in his flashlight beam. The keel was perched atop a jumble of sunken logs, precariously balanced but stable enough that Sam felt a flood of relief knowing the sub wasn’t likely to roll over on him. He felt the ache in his lungs turn into a burning, so he finned for the surface.
“Everything okay?” Remi asked once he’d caught his breath.
“Yep. Good news. She’s sitting upright, more or less. Okay, going again.”
He ducked back under, this time estimating the hull’s diameter as he skimmed past it. At the keel, he turned aft. At about the midpoint he encountered a bracket of some sort jutting from the hull and running lengthwise. For a moment what he was seeing didn’t register on his brain. He’d seen this before . . . one of the pictures from his earlier research. When the answer came, Sam felt a knot form in his belly.
Torpedo rack.
He stopped swimming and cast the flashlight along the bottom, seeing it with new eyes. Was one of those seemingly harmless sunken logs something else altogether?
He kept swimming aft until his flashlight picked out the tapered cigar end of the sub, and jutting from its side a horizontal plane. When he drew even with it he righted himself and let himself rise alongside the hull until the last piece of the puzzle came into view. Rising from the back of the hull was another tube, about eighteen inches tall and about shoulder-width in diameter.
Entry hatch.
Sam popped back up to the surface and stroked over to the bank, where Remi helped him out. He shed his fins and mask and took a moment to gather his thoughts.
“Well?” she said.
“There’s a manila folder in one of the duffels. Could you grab it for me?” She was back with it in half a minute. Sam flipped back and forth through the loose pages for a couple minutes, then plucked one of the sheets out and handed it to Remi.
“Molch,” she read. “What in God’s name . . .”
Her words trailed off as she kept reading.
Sam said, “ ‘Molch’ means ‘Salamander.’ It was a class of midget torpedo submarine produced by Nazi Germany in 1944.”
Built for the Kriegsmarine by A. G. Weser, a company in Bremen, the Molch was the brainchild of Dr. Heinrich Drager. Measuring thirty-five feet long, three feet from deck to keel, and six feet from beam to beam, the Molch was designed to carry one crew member and two G7e torpedoes on port and starboard racks to depths of 120 feet and distances up to fifty nautical miles at a maximum submerged speed of three knots, a moderate walking pace.
As an offensive weapon the Molch, like most of Germany’s other midget subs, was largely unsuccessful: it was hard to steer, almost impossible to dive, and with a range so limited it was dependent upon auxiliary vessels for support and deployment.
“Are you sure, Sam?” Remi asked.
“I’m sure. Everything fits.”
“How in the world did it end up here?”
“That’s the part that doesn’t fit. According to everything I’ve read, these things only saw action in Holland, Denmark, Norway, and the Mediterranean. There are absolutely no records of Molches being deployed this far west.”
“How many of these things were there?”
“Almost four hundred, and most of those were lost, either sunk or vanished. They were death traps, Remi. Only crazy men volunteered for midget-sub duty.”
“You said a one-man crew. You don’t think . . .”
“Won’t know until I get in there.”
“And that other lovely word you used—torpedo.”
“That’s the dicey part. My hunch is it got pushed this far upriver by six-plus decades of storm surges. Probably both the torpedoes—if it was equipped with any to start with—were knocked off long ago.”
“Well, that’s some small comfort,” Remi replied. “Except for the unlucky fisherman who manages to snag one someday.”
“We’re going to have to tell somebody about this—the coast guard or the navy. How they’ll deal with it, I have no idea.”
“One thing at a time.”
“Right. Step one: Make sure it isn’t sitting atop a pair of sixty-year-old live torpedoes.”
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.
