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Pitt swam, with Giordino at his side and slightly behind, over a bottom layered with smooth rocks.
Gradually, the rock-strewn bottom began to rise until the divers were pulling themselves along by hand.
Stopping and lying in the shallows, they saw steps leading up from a small concrete quay not far from the dock pilings. A single light globe cast its paltry glow over the quay, in contrast to the galaxy of lights illuminating from the shipyard, lighting up the front of small buildings that Pitt had memorized from the satellite photo as tool sheds. Only the side walls away from the bright lights were lost in the shadows.
"How does it look?" asked Giordino.
"Deserted," Pitt answered. "But there is no way of telling if anyone is lurking out there in the dark." He had no sooner spoken than Giordino, who was peering through his spectral image scope, spotted movement along the side of the nearest tool shed. He gripped Pitt's shoulder as a warning, as a uniformed guard with an automatic weapon slung over one shoulder emerged into the light and briefly glanced down at the quay. They lay unmoving and half submerged, partially hidden by the dock pilings.
As Pitt half expected, the guard looked bored, since he had never seen any suspicious person attempting to sneak into the shipyard. No burglar, thief, or vandal would have bothered to rob a facility over a hundred miles from the nearest town, and especially not one that was on the other side of several glaciers and the Andes Mountains. He soon turned and walked back into the gloom along the row of tool sheds.
Even before the guard faded into the darkness, Pitt and Giordino were on the quay, fins in hand, propulsion vehicles under their arms, stealing up the steps and moving hurriedly out from under the glare of the lights. The door to the first shed was unlocked, and they thankfully stepped inside. Pitt closed the door.
"Home at last," Giordino said blissfully.
Pitt found a painter's canvas tarpaulin and hung it over the only window, stuffing the edges into any cracks. Then he switched on his dive light and beamed it around the shed. It was filled with marine hardware-- bins heaped with brass and chrome nuts, bolts and screws, shelves neatly arranged with electrical supplies consisting of coils and bales of wire, cabinets stacked with gallon cans of marine paint-- all precisely organized and labeled.
"They certainly have a fetish for neatness."
"It carries down from their German ancestry."
Swiftly, they removed their dive equipment and dry suits. The orange uniforms were pulled from their chest packs and slipped on over their insulated underwear. Next, they removed their boots and replaced them with sneakers.
"I just had a thought," said Giordino apprehensively.
"Yes?"
"What if the Wolf personnel have names or some kind of advertising on their overalls the satellite photos didn't pick up?"
"That's not half our problem."
"What can be worse?"
"We're in South America," said Pitt mildly. "Neither of us can speak enough Spanish to ask directions to a toilet."
"I may not be fluent, but I know enough to fake it."
"Good. You do the talking, and I'll act as
though I have a hearing disability."
While Giordino studied the photo map of the shipyard, figuring the shortest path to the Wolf corporate offices, Pitt dialed his Globalstar phone.
THE atmosphere inside Sandecker's condominium at the Watergate was heavy with foreboding. A fire shimmered in the fireplace, a warm, restful kind of fire that looked comforting though it didn't throw off a wave of heat. Three men were seated on opposite sofas across a low glass table holding a tray of coffee cups and a half-emptied pot. Admiral Sandecker and Ron Little sat and stared spellbound at an elderly man in his middle eighties with snow-white hair, who related a story never told before.
Admiral Christian Hozafel was a former highly decorated officer in the German Kriegsmarine during World War II. He'd served as captain aboard U-boats from June 1942 until July 1945, when he'd formally surrendered his boat in Veracruz, Mexico. After the war, Hozafel had bought a Liberty ship from the US. government under the Marshall Plan and had parlayed it over the next forty years into an extremely successful commercial shipping venture, eventually selling his interest and retiring when the Hozafel Marine fleet numbered thirty-seven ships. He'd become a U.S. citizen and now lived in Seattle, Washington, on a large estate on Whidbey Island, where he kept a two-hundred-foot brigantine that he and his wife sailed throughout the world.
"What you're saying," said Little, "is that the Russians did not find the scorched remains of Hitler's body outside his bunker in Berlin."
"No," Hozafel answered firmly. "There were no scorched remains. Adolf Hitler's and Eva Braun's bodies were burned over a period of five hours. Gallons of gasoline siphoned from wrecked vehicles around the Reich Chancellery were used to douse the bodies, which were lying in a crater that had been blown in the ground outside the bunker by a Soviet shell. The fire had been kept blazing until there were only ashes and a few tiny bits of bones. Loyal SS officers had then placed the ashes and bones in a bronze box. Nothing was left. Every bit of ash and every scrap of bone was carefully swept up and deposited in the box. Then the SS officers had placed the badly charred and unrecognizable bodies of a man and woman who had been killed during an air raid in the crater, where they were buried along with Hitler's dog Blondi, who had been forced to test the cyanide capsules later used by Hitler and Eva Braun."
Sandecker's eyes were fixed on Hozafel's face. "These were the bodies found by the Russians,"
Sandecker said.
The old former U-boat commander nodded. "They later claimed that dental records firmly established the identities of Hitler and Braun, but they knew better. For fifty years, the Russians carried out the hoax, while Stalin and other high Soviet officials thought Hitler had escaped to either Spain or Argentina."
"What became of the ashes?" asked Little.
