Geoffrey Jenkins - A bridge of Magpies

'No wonder my researches ran dead!' exclaimed Jutta. '

You know the rest,' added Kaptein Denny.

'Except why you were left behind.'

"The Japanese officer in U-160 who was to be my aide was a stickler for rank and protocol, and the Master was more than someone. He was set on doing me all the honours; he wasn't even going to allow me to wet my feet. He'd first taken the Book of Tsu out to the U-boat's dinghy, intending to come back and piggy-back me out. Then the liner alarm went and the dinghy raced away back to the U-160. I was left standing on the beach.'

That's that, then.' Jutta's voice was flat and empty. I added, 'I appreciate now why you don't want Sang A to know where U-160 sank.'

'She didn't sink,' said Kaptein Denny. 'She's due any time now at Albatross Rock:

It felt as if there'd been some delayed blow-back into my brain from my paralysed hearing earlier. It simply wouldn't function to accept what Kaptein Denny said. The paralysis seemed to have spread to my vocal chords too.

Jutta's incredulity took the common form of demanding a repeat of a statement that you'd heard perfectly well in the first place, anyway.

'What did you say?'

Then her voice wobbled and went temporarily lame. Denny said, 'U-160 didn't sink. Bul she didn't remain afloat either.'

'For Chrissake,' I interjected-'you can't have it both ways!' '

You can-and the U-boat did.'

'I need a shot of dop-en-dum – without the dune

`Gousblom's attack put U-160's ballast pumps out of action and wrecked aJl her valves. It's there on the tape. I came to the same conclusion when I saw her first.'

'Saw? First?'

I felt a tide of excitement rising inside me. If I could get my hands on the Book of Tsu, the C-in-C would gel more than he'd bargained for.

'I've watched her surface every winter for close on thirty years.'

'That accounts for the X-ray-eye weather watch.' '

Aye.

It's the upwell cell, of course?'

'Yes and no, but mainly yes.'

'You must have seen the spot where she went down, and marked it and now with the upsurge of water..

'That isn't the way it works. I myself didn't witness what happened to U-160. All I know is that there was a long oil patch next morning, after the action round Broke Rock, and a couple of mines floating about. Everyone said they'd got U-160. There was no mason to doubt it?

'Until?'

'Until after the war and J was on my way home-sick 184 and disillusioned and feeling not a little guilty about the whole tragedy of losing the Book of Tsu. Jn fact, at one stage J seriously contemplated committing hara-kiri. I was taking myself to Cape Town in Gaok, preliminary to shipping to Japan. It was winter, as now, and the weather was the same. I didn't know about the upwell cell in those days; off Albatross Rock I sighted what I thought was a whale on the surface. When I got closer I saw it wasn't It was a waterlogged submarine. And when I got closer still I made out her recognition number – U-160. I thought I had gone out of my mind. I nearly did, when I went aboard. The conning tower and its escape hatch were smashed fast. Inside that floating steel coffin was a whole crew – and the Book of Tsu. There was nothing I could do to get at it. The last straw came a couple of hours later when the U-boat started to go down under my feet and I had to abandon her. That was near the Bridge of Magpies, where the current had carried her. I followed the sinking hulk up the channel and to the open sea-when it vanished altogether. I think I was a little insane that night,'

'It's not possible – that she should go and come back?' '

That's what I thought For the second time I'd lost everything that was most precious to me.'

'She'd got caught in a dense salinity layer and that brought her to the surface?' I asked.

'Yes, that's it I didn't rationalize it like that at the time, though. You don't, when a ghost shows up and you live with it for a few hours and then it slips back again into its grave. U-160 was damaged at the critical moment when they were flooding her tanks to dive. Because of that, she couldn't blow them and she couldn't fill them. She had to go on, half – submerged. The crew was trapped. It must have been an awful death. Escape was so near and yet so far.'

'That is why she never signalled U-boat headquarters as she promised,' interjected Jutta. There was a lurking dismay behind her eyes, as if she feared she had no option now bul to live out whatever trouble was in store for us. I think she also secretly mistrusted Kaptein Denny.

'If she went down at the northern entrance to the channel-what are we doing here in the south?' I demanded. 'Perhaps Sang A's location wasn't so far out after all'

'They're wrong.' His eyes looked as old and tired as if he'd been watching over the Book of Tsu all its eight hundred years. 'I found it all out the hard way. I became possessed with Possession. I lived, sailed, sounded, searched: everything I knew; everything I remembered about the hulk's course; and about tides, winds and currents to try to find her again. Nothing. Salvage can be frustrating enough when you have modem gear; imagine what I felt like using primitive means like sounding leads and fishing trawls and nets, trying into the bargain, to bluff everyone that I was a simple fisherman?'

'But you knew where she went down!'

'So I thought, so I thought. It was only a year later that I discovered that U-160 didn't go down, but away.' 'What are you saying?'

The waterlogged U-boat was carried away from the coast by the current. The farther she went the less the density of the sea became, and the deeper under the surface she went. God alone knows where in the South Atlantic she drifts, under water, all year -Brazil? Antarctica? The Falklands? The West Wind Drift? I've given up trying to work it out. All I know is that it's a regular cycle, because she comes back and surfaces each year when the Bridge of Magpies wind blows.'

'It's blowing now.' There was a curious tightening in my throat.

'And she's coming. She always does. Her landfall's always the same-Albatross Rock. Captain Schlebusch himself couldn't do better. Then she works her way up-channel, on the surface.'

Jutta said, in a carefully controlled voice, 'You need have no fear that you haven't kept faith with your office. Keeper. Watcher Isn't it enough? Thirty years – it's a whole life? He said, more gently than I'd ever heard him speak, '

Keeper. Watcher. True. But it's not enough, Miss Jutta. I wonder if you or anyone else could know how it feels to have an inch of rusty steel plating of a dead U-boat's hull stand between you and everything that matters in your world

– and your country's?'

The wraps were off him now.

Snap out of it, I told myself, don't buy this Eastern line of a magic staff in one hand and a gun in the other. He's had nearly thirty opportunities, on his own admission, lo take a crack at opening up U-160-alone- or with the help of others.

I couldn't keep the sceptlcism out of my voice. 'From what you say U-160 should have been a piece of cake as far as salvage goes. A tug or a ship to assist and the Book of Tsu would have been in the bag.'

He gestured at the coffee-and-cream whitecaps streaming in from the south; and the desert gale overhead sandblasting their crests to dirty foam.

'Take a look at the risk element. As an ordinary salvage proposition a U-boat is worth peanuts. You've said so yourself. Just after the war you couldn't have sold one for a thousand pounds, even to a film company. With the exception of the Book of Tsu, U-160 carried nothing of value. Add to that the fact that you can only attempt anything with U- 160 just at a time when all the risks are at their maximum. The skipper of a Japanese trawler I prevailed upon to try it nearly lost his ship on Penguin's Turning. He was an exNavy man himself, and I sold him a yarn about U-160 carrying important naval documents. I think he's cursing me still.'