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“Okay. And you two?”
“We’ve got some reading to do,” Remi replied. “This bottle was aboard the UM-34, left there by Manfred Boehm. We find out where the UM-34 and Boehm started, we find out where the bottle came from.”
They worked on Boehm’s diary and the UM-34’s log late into the night, Remi jotting notes she thought might help them better understand the man; Sam trying to retrace the UM-34’s course backward from its final resting place.
“Here,” Remi said, straightening in her chair and tapping the diary. “This is what we’ve been looking for: Wolfgang Müller. Listen to this entry: ‘August 3, 1944: For the first time as brothers in arms Wolfi and I ship out together tomorrow. I pray God we succeed and prove worthy of our commands.’ ”
“Brothers in arms,” Sam repeated, “and the man with the other bottle. So Müller was also in the Kriegsmarine—Boehm the captain of the UM-34, Müller the captain of . . . what? Gertrude, perhaps? Boehm’s mother ship?”
“Perhaps.” Remi picked up her cell phone and called down to the workshop. “Selma, can you work your magic on something for us? We need anything you can dig up on a World War II Kriegsmarine sailor named Wolfgang Müller. In summer or fall of 1944 he might have commanded a ship of some kind. Right, thanks.”
True to her reputation, Selma called back thirty minutes later. Remi put her on speakerphone.
“Found him,” she said. “You want the short or long version?”
“Short for now,” Sam re
plied.
“Fregattenkapitän Wolfgang Müller, born 1910 in Munich. Joined the Kriegsmarine in 1934. Standard promotions, no disciplinary action. In 1944 he was assigned to captain the auxiliary ship Lothringen. Home port was listed as Bremerhaven, her duty area the Atlantic. According to Germany’s naval archive database, Lothringen was orginally laid down as a French ferry named Londres. The Germans captured it in 1940 and converted it into a mine layer. It was reassigned for ‘special duty’ in July of 1944, but there was no mention of the particulars.”
“A mine layer?” Remi said. “Why would they—”
“By that time in the war the Germans were losing and they knew it—everyone but Hitler, that was,” Selma said. “They were desperate. The kinds of auxiliary ships they would have normally used to transport the UM-34 had either been sunk or converted into troop escorts.
“I also found a website entitled Survivors of the Lothringen, along with a fair number of blogs dedicated to the subject. It seems the Lothringen was attacked and disabled during a storm by a U.S. Navy destroyer in September of 1944 off Virginia Beach.”
“About fifty miles south of Pocomoke Sound,” Remi said.
“Right. Only about half the Lothringen’s crew survived the attack. Those who did spent the remainder of the war in a Wisconsin POW camp called Camp Lodi. The Lothringen was towed to Norfolk and sold to Greece after the war. As far as I can tell, there’s no record of it ever being scrapped.”
“What about Müller? Any idea what happened to him?”
“Nothing yet. Still looking. One of the Lothringen blogs, run by the granddaughter of a survivor named Froch, is sort of a diary in itself. The entries talk a lot about the weeks leading up to the attack. If we’re to believe the account, the Lothringen spent about a month undergoing a refit at a secret German base in the Bahamas and frolicking with the native girls. Someplace called Rum Cay.”
“Selma, did the Lothringen have facilities to do refitting?”
“Not even close. The best it could have done was simply strap the UM-34 to the deck, cover it in a tarp to keep it hidden from prying eyes, then transport it across the Atlantic.”
“That would explain why they didn’t do whatever refitting was required at sea,” Remi said.
“True, but why didn’t they do the refit in Bremerhaven before they left? Maybe they were in a hurry. As I said, they were getting desperate by that point.”
“Wait a second,” Sam blurted out, then grabbed the 34’s logbook and began paging through it. “Here, right here! At the beginning of his log Boehm mentions a place, but only by initials: R.C.”
“Rum Cay,” Remi murmured.
“Has to be.”
“It fits,” Selma agreed.
Sam looked questioningly at Remi, who smiled and nodded back. “Okay, Selma, time to put on your travel-agent hat. Get us on the next flight to Nassau.”
“Will do.”
“And a rental car,” Sam added. “Something fast and sexy.”
“I like your style,” Remi said with a sly smile.