Arctic Gold Read online

  Arctic Gold

  John Man

  Copyright © 2015 John Man

  John Man asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE: THE DELIVERY

  PART I

  THE SINKING

  1: THE CRUEL NORTH

  2: ‘DRIPPING WITH BLOOD’

  3: THE BIRTH OF AN OBSESSION

  4: HOMEWARD BOUND

  PART 2

  A TREASURE WON, A TREASURE LOST

  5: BECOMING A DIVER

  6: A NEW LIFE

  7: OF LOVE AND DEATH

  PART 3

  THE YEARS OF WAITING

  8: THE SLAVE MASTER

  9: PEERING INTO THE HIDDEN DEPTHS

  10: THE PLOTTERS

  11: THE LIBYAN CONNECTION

  12: PLANNING A HEIST, WITH VIOLENCE

  PART 4

  INTO THE DEEP

  13: TREASURE TROVE

  14: SHOW-DOWN

  15: EXIT, WITH GOLD.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  APPENDIX: THE REALITY BEHIND THE FICTION.

  PROLOGUE: THE DELIVERY

  Murmansk, Saturday 25 April 1942

  4.33 a.m., a bitter hour before sunrise. In the Arctic port, a 27-year-old lieutenant named Grigorenko shrugged up the collar of his greatcoat against an icy wind and spat out the stub of his black-papered cigarette. Flurries of snow whipped in from the darkness. His platoon, half a dozen men in heavy gloves, fur hats and ankle-length Red Army coats, were in pairs beneath two lights that threw swinging yellow circles on the snow-covered quay. Stubble-jawed and haggard with exhaustion, they were unloading metre-long wooden crates from the cavernous interior of a railway wagon and heaving them into a line at the edge of the quay. They’d been at it for a couple of hours – ninety-three boxes, fifty kilos each, as Grigorenko well knew. Only four more. He watched as two of his team dropped their load hard, the thump of wood on ice cutting through the wind.

  ‘Hey! Go easy!’

  One of the two men veered towards him.

  ‘Why, comrade? What’s in there?’

  ‘Stalin’s underpants. Move.’

  ‘Spare a cigarette?’

  ‘Move!’ He saw the gaunt face, the eyes narrowed by the biting gusts, and relented. ‘Later, Grekov. They’re waiting.’ He nodded at the darkness beyond the quay.

  Down there lay a flat-bottomed barge and a sturdy tug. No lights on them, but in the eastern sky, he noticed, the clouds had a tinge of grey. A warehouse hemmed the quayside, its windows gaping like eye-sockets in a skull. From the shadows came the glint of six rifles stacked against a wall. Southwards loomed the shadows of cargo ships and cranes. From the railhead other warehouses ran off towards the town. Brick chimneys rose from the ruins of houses. The place was a morgue, burned out by German bombers from over the Norwegian and Finnish borders 100 kilometres away.

  Another panting pair came past, and another. Grekov and his companion lifted the last crate from the wagon and carried it unsteadily to the quayside. Ninety-three, stacked in two layers along the harbour wall.

  Grigorenko slapped his gloves together. ‘You, you, you and you down there. Grekov and Yevchin, up here.’

  The four men climbed down to the deck of the barge. Grekov and his mate began to pass the boxes down to them. Good soldiers, all of them, even after eight days of misery. But they would endure, because they had no option, and because they knew their mission was almost over.

  *

  Hitler had occupied Norway in April 1940, extending German domination of the seas northwards to the Arctic, and then swept across western Europe. On 22 June 1941 he had invaded Russia. Within days all access to the West was barred, except for the sea route via Russia’s remote Arctic ports of Archangel and Murmansk. One quick push eastwards over the border, where Norway and Finland came together and Russia would lose even these two outlets. But in winter, across those hideous, snowy wastes of infinite woods and a thousand frozen lakes, there was no such thing as a quick push. The northern rail link from Moscow, though battered, remained intact.

  At the time of the invasion of Russia, Britain had stood alone for six months. Everywhere on mainland western Europe Germany had triumphed. But Russia was not such an easy target. If she could endure, she could tie down Hitler’s armies for months, years perhaps, and offer respite to beleaguered Britain. Churchill had therefore promised Stalin all the aid that could be spared. Supplies were to be sent in on convoys of ships ploughing northwards through gales and fog, edging between the Germans to the south and pack ice to the north, skirting the northern tip of Norway to Archangel and Murmansk.

  Murmansk lay ten miles inland, in the Kola Inlet. For Russia, this estuary was of vital strategic importance. Despite its position north of the Arctic circle, it was ice-free all year round. The sea was kept fractionally above freezing point by the last dying touch of the Gulf Stream as it curled along Norway’s northern coast, forcing back the pack ice that lay a few score kilometres away. Further east, the Gulf Stream gave up the last of its heat. Six hundred kilometres away, Archangel was blocked off by ice from December to June.

  The first convoy had arrived in October 1941. By the end of the first year the convoys, sailing every two or three weeks, had delivered 750 tanks and 1,400 vehicles. Britain could spare little more. But in December America had entered the war. From then on, most material would be from America. Until June the following year all of it would go to ice-free Murmansk.

  Stalin was an unwilling ally, united with Britain only by Hitler’s assault, but he had at least agreed to pay for some of America’s supplies. Rubles were useless, and Moscow held no dollars. Gold was the only currency. Grigorenko’s task had been to accompany the first payment of five and a half tons of gold to Murmansk, and there to hand it to the British for delivery to America. Ninety-three crates, counted in, checked and rechecked and signed for and countersigned, each one numbered and stamped with the official ‘CCCP’ seal – the Cyrillic equivalent of ‘USSR’ – and none of the others in the know.

  The journey from Moscow had been dismal. Once, there had been a line direct to Murmansk, but that was an age ago, when Hitler was still an ally. The route now lay 1,000 kilometres north to Archangel and then on north-west another six hundred kilometres around the White Sea. Throughout the late summer German planes bombed the railway and Murmansk itself almost daily. Under cover of the long Arctic nights, convict labourers, emaciated bundles of rag, repaired the rails. They had not the strength to do it well. In Moscow, Grigorenko was told the journey would take two and a half days; they had given him rations for five; and it had taken eight. The train had rolled at walking pace through the northern forests, past remote communities of wooden shacks – Belomorsk, Kern, Loukhi, Kandalaksha. The engine, its tender stacked with metre-long fir logs, pulled just a single enclosed wagon. In one half lay the boxes; in the other half wooden benches lined the walls. Above them hung wooden bed pallets slung from chains. A wood-burning stove kept the men from freezing to death, but, although it was red-hot for twenty-four hours a day, it never touched the ice on the inside of the truck. Grigorenko and his men had not undressed, nor even taken off their coats, for over a week.

  Now, unshaven and stinking like goats, they had nearly completed their task. They finished stacking the crates on the stern of the barge, and Grigorenko looked up at the tug, a tough little workhorse with a tiny wheelhouse open at the stern. He shouted; in the cab a shadow moved and the ancient single-cylinder engine thumped into lift. Grigorenko scrubbed t
he back of his glove along his stubbly chin, easing his frozen jaw, then shouted once more. The men clambered back on to the quay, walked over to their rifles, slung them over their shoulders and began to climb down again on to the barge. The last soldier cast off fore and aft, then jumped down to join his companions.

  The tug’s engine chugged out a more urgent rhythm. The men gathered in the well of the bows, seeking protection from the icy breeze. Tug and barge pulled away, leaving the dockside and its circles of yellow light, fading now as the grey dawn filtered through the scudding clouds. A shape loomed – a British cruiser, the Trinidad, moored at a sickening seventeen-degree list, the result of a torpedo strike on an earlier convoy. Grigorenko looked northwards, into the wind, across the twilit water.

  Ahead, eleven kilometres up the inlet, still hidden in the dusk, lay his destination: HMS Edinburgh.

  PART I

  THE SINKING

  1: THE CRUEL NORTH

  Aboard the Edinburgh no lights showed. She seemed asleep, a black hulk of turrets, guns and funnels. But directly beneath the bridge, in an open space amidships, a dozen ratings stood talking quietly and sipping hot cocoa.

  The space had been an aircraft hangar, one of two. When the Edinburgh was commissioned she was equipped with four Walrus amphibious planes that were used to spot enemy ships and also – if the opportunity arose – to bomb them. The Walruses were launched by catapult from the flight deck between the bridge and the forward funnel. After a mission each plane was lifted back on board by one of two fifty-five-foot cranes. The planes were then stored away, wings folded, in the hangars. But shortly before this convoy the Walruses had been withdrawn, their role being taken by planes from aircraft carriers. The hangars, their cranes still intact, had been converted to other uses: the starboard one was for stores, and the other, in which the ratings were now gathered, was a cinema, with chairs stacked round the bulkheads.

  Among the ratings was a sixteen-year-old seaman, Mike Cox. About all one would have noticed of him, buried in his voluminous duffle-coat, was a pair of startling blue eyes and a frank, enquiring gaze, contrasting with the subdued expressions of his bleary-eyed mates. Like them, he clasped a mug of thick cocoa, part of a sailor’s staple diet, as they all awaited further order. They had been turned out half an hour earlier, four from each of the ship’s three divisions – forecastle, top deck and quarterdeck. They were cold, and they wanted action.

  ‘What we doin’ up ‘ere, then?’ said Mike to one of the others, a lanky lad he had never seen before.

  ‘What d’you think I am? A bleedin’ prophet?’ the lanky youth said, aggrieved, and took another sip of cocoa.

  Mike shrugged and peered round the side of the hangar. He saw the chief bosun’s mate, an imposing man of six foot four with a fearsome hook nose, looking over the rails and down the inlet. He admired the chief, Charlie George, a Yorkshireman, partly because he was a powerful figure who exuded strength and confidence. But it was also because he was one of the ship’s four divers, which gave him a special aura hinting at adventure, danger and mastery of an unknown and fearsome environment. The chief nodded and stared more intently. Clearly there would be work soon, probably unloading stores of some kind. But why at this hour? He withdrew again into the hangar and raised his mug of cocoa.

  *

  Mike Cox was from Poplar, the heart of London’s docklands. His father, Harry, worked on the railway; his mother, Doris, kept a whelk stall. Mike had been born in 1926, a bad time to enter life in the East End; but he had been protected against the worst by luck and his parents’ strength of character.

  All around him as a child there were families who had lost fathers and brothers in the Great War; but Mike’s father, born with the century, fought at Ypres in 1918 and survived unscathed. All around in the 1930s there were men out of jobs; but Harry Cox kept his. Most families were large, whereas, whether by luck or choice, Harry and Doris had only two children, Martin and Mike.

  His father had been the pillar of Mike’s universe. Fortunately, Harry was a man of good sense. During the Black-shirt business, when the East End was torn by riots between fascist and anti-fascist mobs, he had kept clear. ‘Don’t you listen to that Mosley feller,’ he told ten-year-old Mike. ‘It ain’t the Yids and it ain’t the government what’s responsible for this mess. It’s that bleedin’ ‘Itler. If ‘e starts something, you give ‘im what for from me.’

  Harry was also a man of some imagination. Often, when commenting on the harshness of life in Poplar, he would say to his sons: ‘You two are lucky. You don’t have to put up with what your mum and me did. You can get out.’ Martin had done just that. He was three years older than Mike and joined the Navy in 1939.

  Twice he returned, self-confident and tanned, from tours in the Mediterranean. The sight of him was enough to convince Mike that he must follow in his brother’s steps.

  When war came, Mike was sent off with a gas mask and suitcase to a farm in Somerset, along with a trainload of other kids. He hadn’t worried. Dad was immortal, and Mum had old Lil – Mrs Reynolds – and the rest of the street. But in December 1941 he’d had a letter from his mum: Dad had been killed at work by a bomb. Mike came back for the funeral. By then, America and Japan were at it as well. The whole sodding world was at it. His mother tried to bury her own and the world’s tragedies in hospital work. Mike stifled his tears and said it was time to give the Jerries what for. In February 1942, a week after his sixteenth birthday, he joined the Navy, which was glad to have him. He was five foot ten, broad-shouldered, solid in body and character. Two weeks later he was aboard HMS Ganges at Ipswich for basic training in elementary seamanship.

  Mike was not a born leader, but he was tough and adaptable, with a self-possession and an easy charm that won him ready acceptance. In the case of Derek Hoskins it won him a good deal more than that. Hoskins was a gangling, pimply seventeen-year-old, taller than Mike by a couple of inches, but no match for him in confidence or strength. He seemed to tire easily and was often depressed by the skivvying required of a young would-be seaman. With his ravaged skin, he was the natural butt of the raw comments slung back and forth by the other lads. Mike never joined in. He had seen enough bullying in the East End. It was an activity of which his father had sternly disapproved.

  One day, when the boys were in their hammocks, after their tea, the talk turned to girls.

  ‘Ere, ‘Oskins,’ came a voice from across the mess deck. ‘You ever ‘ad it, ‘ave you?’

  ‘Nar, course ‘e ain’t. All ‘e’s ‘ad is the pox. Look at his mug.’

  ‘Where’d you get that, ‘Oskins? Too many hand jobs?’

  It was then that Mike stepped in.

  ‘Leave off,’ he said. ‘Just leave ‘im a-bloody-lone.’ Then, in the silence left by his sharp words, he defused the tension with humour. ‘Anyway, I dunno what you buggers are on about. His complexion’s like peaches and cream. And it ain’t ‘is face what the girls want, is it? A prick like a six-inch gun. Ain’t that right, Peaches?’

  It was a poor defence, but the first the unfortunate Hoskins had had. From then on Hoskins had become Peaches, and relied on Mike. The relationship worked for them both. Unkindness towards Peaches brought a swift and witty response from Mike. Peaches was still a cause for laughter, but it was no longer brutal, and he was grateful.

  Before the war, the boy seamen would have gone on to Chatham for a further six weeks’ training. But America’s entry into the war had changed all that. Mike and a couple of dozen other under-trained youngsters, Peaches included, were needed on the Arctic convoys. In March 1942, they were given rail tickets and told to join the Edinburgh at Greenock at the mouth of the Clyde.

  The Edinburgh had been launched four years before as a sister ship to HMS Belfast. When Mike joined her, she had already seen a good deal of convoy action, having been on runs to Malta, South Africa and Russia. She was a fine ship: 613 feet long, with four propellers. At full stretch her eight Admiralty boilers a
nd her Parsons turbines could drive her along at a shuddering 32 knots. Her crew was over 800 strong. Her armaments consisted of twelve six-inch guns, twelve four-inch guns, a scattering of Oerlikons, some torpedoes and a couple of eight-barrelled pom-poms.

  Some experts considered her under-gunned for her size. Fully laden, she displaced 14,700 tons; Fiji-class cruisers had the same armament yet displaced only 9,800. As one of the more experienced galley staff told Mike soon after his arrival on board: ‘She ain’t got much punch. But,’ he added, prodding a finger in Mike’s stomach, ‘I wouldn’t swap her. She’s safer than some.’ By this he meant she had more than her fair share of armour-plating, which was up to five inches thick along the most vital sections – boiler-room, engine-room and magazines.

  It was something of a relief to Mike, therefore, to find that when in action he was to be assigned to the four-inch magazine, four decks down, where his task would be to heft shells on to the endless-chain hoists that lifted the ammunition up to the flight deck. There, conveyor belts carried the shells aft to the three sets of twin four-inch guns set at twelve-yard intervals down both sides of the ship. When he was on normal duty his time would be taken up cleaning the mess decks and performing the ancient ritual of ‘holy-stoning’ the quarterdeck – scrubbing on hands and knees with a large, square stone known as the ‘Sailor’s Bible’.

  Within a week, holy-stoning was history. The Edinburgh was on her way.

  *

  As the cruiser pulled clear of the Clyde, the crew had no idea which direction they were to go – south to the Mediterranean or north towards Iceland and the Arctic? Only when she swung north was curiosity satisfied. On the mess decks, Mike overheard comments picturing for him the experiences he was in for.

  ‘The last convoy, PQ 13. The old Trinidad, she was torpedoed and only just made it into Kola…’