The Titanic Secret (36 page)

He stepped away from the periscope for a few moments and glanced round the control room. Whenever the submarine was below the surface, these men all knew that technically it had already sunk, and all that was stopping it from continuing to plunge to the bottom of the ocean was the delicate balancing act conducted by the crew as water replaced air to subtly alter the boat’s buoyancy. If anything went wrong, they all knew that the submarine could begin an unstoppable and fatal descent without warning in a matter of seconds, and their faces reflected this inevitable uncertainty.

‘We’re about to embark on an unusual manoeuvre,’ Hutchinson said. ‘I know we’re out here in the middle of the Atlantic, but their Lordships at the Admiralty have decreed that while we’re here we will engage a target ship. That vessel is now being towed into position, and I expect that we will begin our attack within the hour. Once we have fired our weapons, we will retreat for a distance of about twenty miles, remaining submerged throughout, and then surface and report the results of the attack.’

Hutchinson paused and glanced around again. Many of the crew looked puzzled, which was entirely unsurprising because none of them had been involved in anything of this sort before. And, he thought, they would probably look a lot more puzzled before he’d finished.

‘The other unusual feature of this attack,’ he continued, ‘is that it is really a test of my abilities. I have been instructed to conduct the entire evolution by myself, with no help from any other members of the crew, except for the usual duties. That means that nobody else is to use the periscope for the duration of the attack. I will locate the target, plot a firing solution and issue all the appropriate instructions to release the weapons entirely independently. Is all that clearly understood?’

He’d been right. Now everybody looked confused. William Evans opened his mouth to say something, but Hutchinson got there first.

‘Those are my orders, Bill. They don’t make too much sense to me either, but that’s what I’ve been told to do, so we’d better get on with it.’

Hutchinson went back to the periscope, carried out a complete sweep to ensure that they hadn’t moved too close to any of the icebergs in their vicinity, then focused on the approaching liner. He could now see what kind of ship it was, because lights blazed from most of the decks, and even at a distance, he could tell that it was simply enormous. He looked at it for a few seconds more, then did another sweep.

It wouldn’t be long now.

14 April 1912
RMS
Titanic

Alex Tremayne was taking no chances. As far as he was aware, Voss didn’t know which stateroom he and Maria were occupying, but he also knew that the Prussian could find out easily enough, simply by checking the list of first-class passengers who had boarded the ship at Southampton and looking for the name ‘Maitland’. Staying in their stateroom could become a trap. They needed to get out of there, and merge into the crowds in the public rooms.

‘He’s still alive,’ Maria objected, ‘but he knows we’ve discovered his plans and taken the documents, so surely he’ll just stay out of our way now.’

But Tremayne shook his head. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘precisely because I’ve got those original documents. If he can get those back, he can still make his plan work, even though Bauer and Kortig are dead. Without those papers, Voss is powerless to proceed. The one thing I’m absolutely sure about is that he’ll now be doing his best to hunt down and kill both of us to get them back.’

Maria didn’t look particularly concerned. ‘There are two of us, and only one of him,’ she pointed out, ‘or one and a half, I suppose, if you include his bodyguard. And we’re armed and he isn’t, because I took the bodyguard’s pistol, and you took the one Voss was carrying.’

‘You’re quite right,’ Tremayne agreed, ‘but when I went back to Voss’s stateroom, the presentation case was open on his bed, and both the Luger pistols were missing. Just because I didn’t find any ammunition when I searched his room doesn’t mean that he didn’t have a box tucked away somewhere. And usually when you give somebody a weapon, it’s also normal to hand over some ammunition. I think we have to assume that he’s carrying one of the pistols, and by now he’s probably given the other one to the bodyguard.’

‘I should have killed him when I had the chance,’ Maria said bitterly, concern giving her voice an edge.

‘And I should have shot Voss, but I was worried that he hadn’t told me the truth about where you were. We’re going to have to be even more careful from now on. We’ll have to carry our pistols at all times, stay in the most crowded public rooms, and even, I think, take it in turns to sleep. I’m not the only person in the world who can pick a lock, and I don’t want to be woken up in the middle of the night to find Voss beside the bed getting ready to cut my throat.’

Maria shivered. ‘But it’s still two against two,’ she said. ‘We can beat these people.’

‘We will beat these people,’ Tremayne confirmed. ‘There’s something else I think we should do. I still reckon that I’ll be the main target for Voss. It’ll be me he comes after first, so it’d be a good idea if we split the copies and the originals. You take the originals and one set of copies, and I’ll take the other set. We’ll carry them with us at all times, just as Voss and the other two men did.’

‘Can’t we just destroy them? Burn them or something?’

Tremayne shook his head. ‘Frankly, I’d rather do that, but there’d be no way of convincing Voss about what we’d done, unless he actually watched us destroy them. And don’t forget that Mansfield Cumming wanted us to recover whatever lever Voss was going to use. We can tell him what we found and what the documents contain, but I’d rather hand everything over to him once we get back to London.’

‘So what do we do now?’

‘We go out for the evening,’ Tremayne said. ‘We take our weapons with us, and we go up to the à la carte restaurant, where there’ll be lots of other people, and we eat dinner. Afterwards, we’ll stay in the public rooms until the crowds start to thin out, and then we’ll come back down here. I’ll barricade the door as best I can. Then you’ll go to bed and I’ll keep watch until, say, five in the morning, and then we’ll change over. We’ll do the same tomorrow and every other day until we get to New York, and make it as difficult as possible for Voss to target us. And, obviously, if I get a chance, I’ll do my best to make sure that Voss does his bit for nature.’

Maria looked puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean I’ll try and throw him off the ship so that he can feed the fish. At least that way he’ll have done one useful thing in his life.’

14 April 1912
London

‘Look,’ Mansfield Cumming said into the candlestick telephone mouthpiece, ‘you have to do something. If you can’t raise the submarine then there’s only one other option. You have to contact the
Titanic
and warn the captain.’

He listened for a few moments to what the other man was saying to him, then tried again.

‘At this stage, I don’t think it matters what reason you give. Obviously, you can’t tell him that the British Government has ordered a Royal Navy submarine to sink this ship, but there must be other things you can suggest which will force the liner to divert from its route. It’s winter, in the north Atlantic. There must be dozens of icebergs in the vicinity. Signal the captain and tell him that you have received an iceberg warning or something, and suggest he alters course to avoid that area by a few miles.’

He listened again.

‘No, it doesn’t have to be far. The
Titanic
can do better than twenty knots. Dived, that submarine can’t even achieve half that speed, so the liner can actually outrun the sub, and the torpedoes have only got a fairly short range as well.’

Two minutes later, he finished the call and sat back in his chair. He hoped that the Admiralty would try to do something, but at this stage in the game, he had a horrible feeling that it was going to be far too little, and much too late.

14 April 1912
RMS
Titanic

Tremayne and Maria had eaten a fairly hasty dinner in the à la carte restaurant – neither of them had much of an appetite – and then retired to the lounge on the Promenade Deck – one of the more crowded public rooms – for an after-dinner drink. The American poker players were in there, already well into their game, and one of them called out to ask Maria if she’d like to join them.

But she shook her head. ‘Not tonight gentlemen, thank you,’ she said. ‘I think I’ve had quite enough excitement for one day,’ she added, with a smile.

She and Tremayne found a vacant table beside one of the large bay windows, and sat down there. Tremayne ordered drinks, and when they arrived they silently toasted each other.

‘What do you think the ship will do about the dead bodies? Bauer and Kortig, I mean?’ she asked quietly, making sure that they couldn’t be overheard.

‘I don’t think there’s a lot they can do,’ Tremayne replied, ‘except put them in cold storage somewhere. Unless they look very hard, I think most doctors would probably conclude that Bauer did die of a sudden heart attack. After all, the only sign he didn’t is a minute puncture mark in the crook of his left arm. There’s obviously no doubt that Kortig was shot, but I made sure that I left no clues in his suite that could implicate us.

‘There are no witnesses, and even if Voss or the surviving bodyguard were to come forward and claim that we did it, we have no connection with either of the two dead men, and no obvious reason to wish them harm. It would be our word against theirs. And there’s no evidence either. I’ve already chucked Mansfield Cumming’s bottles of instant heart attack over the side, along with the cosh and Vincent’s pistol, the one I used to shoot Kortig. I’ve kept the stiletto and our two Brownings. So we’re a couple of innocent passengers who just happened to be travelling on the same ship as two men who are now dead. And hopefully that will be the end of it.’

Maria nodded. ‘That makes sense to me,’ she said. She looked out the window and shivered slightly. ‘It’s a real shame the weather has turned so cold. There’s no moon, and it’s a real dark night out there. Let’s hope tomorrow is brighter.’

At that moment, Gunther Voss stepped into the lounge, his gaze swivelling around as he searched the faces of the occupants. Within seconds, he saw Tremayne and Maria, and for a moment he just stared at them. Then he gave a brief nod, turned on his heel and left the room.

Tremayne watched him go, then turned to Maria.

‘It’s not over yet,’ he murmured.

14 April 1912
HMS
D4

Hutchinson checked the time. It was just after eleven thirty, and his target was now clearly visible, and readily identifiable. He was trying to remain coolly rational about what he had been asked to do, reducing the evolution to a matter of geometry, of headings and angles and relative velocities, because only by doing that could he be certain of achieving the result that he wanted.

The forward torpedo room was ready, the two tubes, mounted vertically one above the other, were both flooded in preparation for weapon release, and the figure-of-eight-shaped single outer door had already been rotated to expose the ends of the tubes and allow the weapons to be fired. The submarine was steady on what he anticipated would be the firing course, which would send two torpedoes, with their 200-pound warheads full of nitrocellulose or gun cotton, streaking towards their target over a distance of a little under half a mile.

He ordered a slight heading change and reduced speed by half a knot. He checked the target position again, told the torpedo room to stand by and then waited for the perfect moment.

Five minutes, he estimated. That was all.

14 April 1912
RMS
Titanic

Voss, in fact, had done more or less what Tremayne had expected him to do. He’d checked the first-class passenger list, found the name ‘Maitland’ and noted the stateroom number. But he had been unable to force the door, though he’d frantically tried. Defeated, he’d returned to his own stateroom, locked and barred his own door, then dressed for the evening – he knew he had to keep up the appearance of normality – and had walked into the à la carte restaurant about five minutes after Tremayne and Maria had left.

After dinner, he’d tried Tremayne’s door again, but the stateroom was obviously still empty. He guessed that his quarry would be haunting the public rooms as much as possible, relying on the passive protection of other first-class passengers, and he’d confirmed that when he saw them together in the first-class lounge. But sooner or later, they would have to return to the room, and that would give him the opportunity he needed. If he waited until the middle of the night, he could force the door, perhaps even use a bullet from his Luger to destroy the lock if he couldn’t open it any other way. Then he could get inside, kill them both and grab the documents and get away, hopefully before the alarm was properly raised. He’d have to wait and see what the night would bring.

Then he had another idea. Voss walked back down to E-Deck, knocked on the door of his bodyguard’s stateroom, and waited. A few seconds later, Leonard opened the door. He looked a lot better, and even seemed to be walking more normally.

Voss stepped inside the room, then turned round.

‘Can you pick locks?’ he asked.

Leonard shrugged. ‘A bit,’ he admitted, ‘as long as they’re not too complicated.’

‘What about a stateroom door lock? And have you got the right tools with you?’

‘Yeah, I’ve got a couple of picks in my bag.’

‘Right,’ Voss said. ‘Get some sleep now, and I’ll see you outside my suite at three fifteen this morning. Make sure you bring the picks and the Luger. We’re going to pay a visit to that bastard Tremayne, kill him and the woman, and retrieve some property he’s stolen from me.’

Leonard grinned. ‘I’ll look forward to it,’ he said.

14 April 1912
HMS
D4