South from the Seychelles

By Duncan Watt

In the sixteenth book in the Wallace Boys series, Nigel and Bruce are aboard their yacht the Silver Spray cruising the Islands of the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean. Out of the blue, they are invited by Barry Jones – readers may remember him in The Sands of the Skeleton Coast and Trouble in Tristan – to help with a slight problem.

His motor yacht, the St Valery II, has been hired by a group of rather sinister individuals to visit the remote Kerguelen Islands in the South Indian Ocean. He needs the boys' help. It promises to be a hairy ride to one of the most inhospitable places on earth, also called the Islands of Desolation. They also visit the even more remote, desolate Heard Island.

The destination is Nazi gold!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Duncan Watt
• Release date: Apr 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476034171

Duncan Watt

I was born in Africa where I grew up; but I have lived in countries like England, America, Papua New Guinea and Japan. I have now lived in Singapore for 35 years.When I was teaching in Zambia I wrote a couple of books in simplified English for my students and these were published by Oxford University Press. Since living in Singapore, where I have, among other things, appeared on the TV News for nearly twenty years, I have written 20 books in my Wallace Boys Series - 11 of which were published here in Singapore.Please visit The Wallace Boys Web Site to find out more about the books, and there is more about me too.

Book preview

South from the Seychelles

An Adventure of the

Duncan Watt

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Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Duncan Watt

License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Maps and yacht plans by Duncan Watt

Contents

1. Confession

2. Marooned

3. Life on Kerguelen

4. From Castaway…

5. …To Stowaway

6. An Invitation

7. South

8. Further South

9. Bruce is Fitted with a Girdle

10. Rupert Explains

11. Kerguelen

12. Are We There Yet?

13. Iced

14. Scuppered

15. With Old Friends

16. On the Trail

17. Boarding Parties, Stand By

18. The End of the Affair

Notes about the Kerguelen Archipelago, Heard Island and the South Indian Ocean

Compass Bearing

Biggles

Barry Jones

Maps

The South Indian Ocean

Kerguelen

West Coast, Kerguelen

Monument Bay, Crique du Sac à Plomb

Deck Plans of the St Valery II - Bridge, Upper Deck, Lower Deck

Christmas Harbour, Kerguelen

Kerguelen to Heard Island

Heard Island

West Coast, Heard Island

Cave Bay, Heard Island

Atlas Cove, Heard Island

Position of Kerguelen and Heard Islands

Kerguelen Archipelago

My sincere thanks

I should like to thank those at The Medusa Trust who gave me a lot of help with details about Harbour Defence Motor Launches - HDMLs.

You might like to visit their Web Site:

http://www.hmsmedusa.org.uk

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Also my sincere thanks to Dr Simon Goldsworthy of the Aquatic Sciences Division of the South Australian Research and Development Institute for allowing me to use his photographs.

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Also thanks go to Dr Perpetua Turner of the University of Tasmania for allowing me to use one of her photographs.

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My thanks also to Keith Gooley for allowing me to use his fantastic photograph of Big Ben.

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My apologies to those I have not been able to contact.

1

Confession

The interior of St Jodok’s Church, Schruns

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.

And before the priest on the other side of the wooden tracery in the confessional could say anything, the old man continued. We killed them all. We machinegunned them down in cold blood - every time - we slaughtered them - men, women and children. They never had a chance. The man’s voice cracked and he paused. A tear spilled down his pale, lined cheek.

"It was for the gold, you see. Tonnes of gold, it was. We were acting under orders. Even after the war was over, we killed. We murdered all the sailors of a Royal Navy supply ship. She was called the Tern, I remember. Not a big craft. She went down in seconds. Just one torpedo it took. We’d had plenty of practice, of course. The voice was bitter. He didn’t even need to torpedo the Tern. He did it out of spite. Now that Germany had lost the war, his hatred of the British had increased. He hated the British with a hatred you wouldn’t ever understand.

"Only two youngsters from the Tern - young deckhands - managed to get onto a life raft. She went down that fast. I was at the periscope and could see their bewildered faces. They didn’t know what had happened. It was all so sudden and unexpected, and who expects to be sunk nearly a year after the war is over?"

For a moment there was silence in the confessional, broken only by the breathing of the old man, laboured and wheezy.

They were only my age, and I wasn’t even twenty at the time, the old man continued. "We were all so young then. I looked right into their frightened eyes. It was then that Captain von Schönbeck asked me if there were any survivors as I swung the periscope round. The Tern had gone, leaving the water covered in an oily slick. For the next few seconds I held the two men’s lives in my hands and to my everlasting regret, I gave the wrong answer. ‘Yes, Captain. Two.’

"Von Schönbeck immediately ordered the U-517 - that was our U-boat - to surface, and First Lieutenant Thom was sent to the for’ard machinegun. I watched it all from the conning tower: the two boys had their hands raised in surrender, but Thom fired and continued firing, even after the bodies had fallen to the deck of the life raft.

"Almost immediately after that, we heard the sound of an aeroplane. How one could be in that place and at that time, I then had no idea. Who would expect an aircraft thousands of kilometers from land in the vast reaches of the South Indian Ocean? But there it was.

"The Klaxon sounded, loud in the confines of the submarine. Within seconds, the U-517 had submerged and we pulled back away from the area. With the periscope barely above the surface, I watched the flying-boat land. It was a Tarpon class, amphibious monoplane - it had wheels as well as floats. She didn’t stay long; just long enough for one of the crew to crawl along its port wing to examine the two dead sailors. Then she took off and, after circling twice, headed for the Kerguelen Islands. We knew then that we were in for trouble. At that time, we didn’t know how much trouble, but the British were after us, and they weren’t going to let us get away if they could help it. Somehow, they had found out about us and were going to stop us from taking the tonnes of gold we had plundered over the past three years. We had regularly attacked ships from Australia heading to Britain, dozens of them. They had been passenger ships, you know. The ones they carried the gold on. Because there were not many ships plying the route from Australia to South Africa, there were no convoys to protect them, like in the Atlantic between America and England. Just ordinary lone passenger ships; not that many passengers would be travelling during the war but there were some; and those were who we killed. We attacked the ships, looted the gold, herded the passengers and crew into the lifeboats, and then… The old man paused. He removed his thick glasses and dabbed at his eyes with a handkerchief. And then we mowed them down, like a field of wheat. We never left a single survivor to take word to the outside world what was happening in the South Indian Ocean. Men, women and children.

"And I took part in all this as well. We were all steeped in blood, all of us aboard the U-517, and for more than sixty years I have born this guilt in silence. I have built a life based on lies and lived here in your little village for all that time with this sin on my soul. My time is nearly come, and I want to leave this world absolved.

"But all those deaths at our hands were anonymous. They were just the enemy. Faceless and unknown. Death at a distance. But somehow I must have let my feelings show when Thom gunned down the two Tern sailors. Von Schönbeck must have seen my face, for I had to murder someone face to face; I was made to do it by von Schönbeck himself. If I hadn’t done it, someone else would have, and I would have been gunned down myself.

It was later that day that I had to... A stifled sob broke the silence in the confessional. "We had captured a small Norwegian whaling ship a day or two earlier, you see. We were going to use it to carry the fuel we would need to sail to South America. That’s where we were going with the gold, you see. We couldn’t bring it back to Germany as the war was over. So we were going to make for Chile and split up the gold, though I don’t know if that would have actually happened once we got to South America. Captain Ulrich von Schönbeck and Lieutenant Thom probably had other ideas. I don’t think that all of us were going to survive aboard the U-517 during the next couple of months.

"Anyway, back to what I was made to do. An officer of the Norwegian whaler was not proving cooperative, and von Schönbeck wanted to make an example of him; we needed some of the Norwegians to man the ship and we wanted a docile crew. I was ordered to shoot him - von Schönbeck had already dealt with the captain some time before, you understand. I was ordered to shoot one of the ratings too. The officer was a very decent fellow. His name - I still remember it after nearly sixty years - his name was Sven Honritzen. He stood quite casually on the deck of his boat, the Solveig. She smelt horribly of blubber and rendered whale fat, I remember. He had a sneer on his face and didn’t even look at me as I fired the Luger that von Schönbeck gave me to use. And the rating - he was a little younger than me - he followed the example set by his officer. The Norwegian crew stood with their heads bowed and their caps in their hands. They didn’t say a word.

"I was then made to throw the two bodies over the side of the Solveig. But it was then that I knew I wasn’t going to survive the journey to South America. I had proved untrustworthy in von Schönbeck’s eyes, even though I had shot the Norwegian officer and the young sailor.

And that is why I am here today, Father. For all this time, I have borne this guilt. I have tried to lead a good life, and I hope that the people of Schruns think well of me.

The old man paused, and the dim figure on the other side of the wooden tracery shifted his position. He spoke for the first time. He cleared his throat and he spoke in comforting tones. It was all a long time ago, my son, and you were acting under orders. Surely no guilt can attach to you after this time, and your good work is well-known in Schruns, my son.

Thank you, Father. That is what I wanted to hear.

Your story, my son, intrigues me. So you were fighting in submarines in the Second World War. Can you tell me more?

Yes, Father. Anything. Now that he had confessed, there was a feeling that a great weight had been lifted from his bowed shoulders.

You mention gold, lots of gold. What happened to it?

The British managed to get most of it.

Most of it?

Yes. That aeroplane, I mentioned. The crew had been sent out to sniff out the U-517, and they managed to outwit Captain von Schönbeck and Thom.

But they didn’t find all of it?

No, Father. There was another big cache together with some other stuff, but I never found out what it was. Something highly secret. I remember hearing von Schönbeck talking about it to Thom and saying it could be more valuable than the gold; but what it was I have no idea.

And where is it? The gold. Where is that?

"I can’t remember where it was hidden. I don’t think I even knew where. During those three long years I was aboard the U-517, we visited most of the lonely islands in the South Indian Ocean some of whose names we were never told. I am not even sure if they even had names at that time. But later I found a few places I recognized in an atlas. There were islands like St Paul’s and Amsterdam, I remember. They were north-east of Kerguelen; one of them was a sunken crater - a perfect harbour. And then there were the Crozets to the west, far to the west. Sometimes when we got to these islands, von Schönbeck and his cronies left the others of us behind. Later when I was marooned on Kerguelen, however, I found most of von Schönbeck’s documents and I was able to piece some things together. It gave me something to do during those two years on the islands."

So you know where everything is hidden?

As I said. No. I can’t remember, but I did write everything down in my diary.

And where is that diary?

"I left it in my shelter on Kerguelen. When I saw an opportunity to leave the islands, I took it and didn’t have time to go back to collect anything. So everything is still there. I shouldn’t think that anyone has visited that little bay where the U-517 was blown up. That narrow little entrance may still be blocked by the Norwegian whaler, the Solveig, which was scuttled by the British and the Norwegians. They did that to prevent the U-517 from getting out."

What was the name of the bay? Do you remember?

"Yes, Father. I believe it was called Monument Bay - at the entrance there was a needle of rock, a sea stack from which it got its name. I recall that it was nearly a completely circular bay with a very narrow entrance, partly hidden by this little island, the one shaped like a tall needle. It was on the west coast of Kerguelen - a really forbidding area of cliffs and long bays, like fjords. And, by chance, the British airmen had established their base in the next bay to the north. It was called Invisible Bay and that was a good name for it. Even von Schönbeck never discovered it until it was too late, the old man chuckled at the memory. That’s all I remember. It was about midway along the coast. Oh, yes it was fairly near the Île de l’Ouest. But why all these questions, Father? I am feeling very tired now and I want to get home."

Yes, yes, of course, my son. I was just interested. That’s all. And now, my son, are you ready to receive absolution?

I am, Father. I am. The old man’s voice was a mere whisper.

So be it. I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. As he said these words, he raised his right hand and made the sign of the cross. The old man could see the movement through the wooden lattice.

Thank you, Father.

Go in peace, my son.

Interior of St Jodok’s

Slowly the old man stood up. His hands were shaking as he pushed open the door to the confessional and he was sweating, his brow clammy. The strain of the last half hour told on him, and he staggered as he stepped out into the light, airy church. The fresh air revived him somewhat, and he crossed to the nearest pew. He sat down carefully and gazed around at the familiar old church, one he had attended for nearly sixty years. This was the fine, baroque Church of St Jodok in the little town of Schruns in the mountainous Montafon region of South-West Austria. He gazed around at the lovely frescoes, and he leaned far back in the pew so that he could look at his favourite above him on the arched ceiling high above him. It showed St Jodok, the hermit, himself in the countryside by his rough hut. He was seated on a pile of wood and he was reading; a bible lay open in his lap and next to him, quite unafraid, were two deer.

Ceiling fresco of St Jodok

The old man sat there studying the fresco for a time until he felt his strength returning. What he needed was a quick glass of schnapps and he knew exactly where to go. Just outside the church and down a couple of steps was the Ernest Hemingway Bar in the Gasthaus zum Kreuz, and then a nice hot meal at the Hotel Taube on the other side of the square. "A Rösti would be nice, he thought, and a glass of red wine to go with it."

For the first time for many years he had a feeling of lightness. It was as though a cloud had been lifted, and he regretted that he had never been to confession before.

The entrance to St Jodok’s church

St Jodok’s Church

He made his way out of St Jodok’s and turned to the right where, in the warm glow of the Kreutz Keller, he found himself in the Ernest Hemmingway Bar. He tossed off two glasses of schnapps and then slowly made his way to the Hotel Taube. He shuffled under the shady trees of the town square past the church. The onion spire towered above him, and then he stopped at the eastern wall of St Jodok’s to look at the fresco of St George spearing a dragon. Below this was a bronze plaque with a list of names, headed with the words Die Heimat Ihren Gefallenen - Those who have fallen. It was a list of names of those from the area who had died in the two world wars, dozens of names. All so young, the old man murmured to himself. He reached out and ran his finger down four of them, all brothers, he had found out: the brothers Mangeng. They were Albert, Ferdinand, Franz-Josef and Wilhelm. Slowly, he rubbed the name Wilhelm.

Die Heimat Ihren Gefallen (Those who have fallen)– part of the Memorial on the wall of St Jodok’s church, showing the terrible loss suffered by the Mangeng family.

When they had met briefly once in Hamburg in 1943 while waiting to join their U-boats, the old man had been slightly younger than Wilhelm. Wilhelm had been assigned to the Wolf Pack, those submarines attacking Allied convoys in the Atlantic. The old man later learned that Wilhelm was killed in 1944 when his submarine went down without trace. It was that brief encounter in Hamburg all those years before, however, that had led the old man to the village of Schruns and a new identity and a new life hidden away from the War Crimes Trials after World War Two.

Thank you, Wilhelm. Thank you, the old man murmured, fingering the raised lettering on the plaque. He turned away to the Hotel Taube, the hotel where American writer Ernest Hemingway stayed during the winter of 1925/1926 while writing his book Fiesta.

The old man found a seat on the verandah and ordered a Rösti. As he sat there, he looked out over the little town of Schruns nestled in the mountains and let his mind wander. Opposite was the great wall of rock, the Vandanser Steinwand. The number of times he had climbed those cliffs with some of his older pupils. He could pick out the Zimbajochsteig, the path over