A Trilogy of Wolves

A Trilogy of Wolves

In 1975, sitting on the bottom of the Norwegian Sea in a French mini-submarine, enjoying a lunchtime Pastis, chunks of cheese and garlic liver sausage, with Olivier, my pilot, I was distracted by the sonar screen, painting a

strong target at a range of around four-hundred meters. "Let's take a look, I said, could be interesting."

Olivier gave a Gallic shrug and leaned across me to take a look for himself. "Looks like something, maybe nothing," was his opinion as he sliced off another chunk of foul-smelling cheese with his pocket knife.  We were on charter to Statoil of Norway, surveying the site where a massive concrete oil production platform was to be installed. The area was strewn with glacier boulders, which we either blasted with explosive, or simply netted, for anchor handling rig boats to tow away. There were also the wrecks of sunken fishing boats, abandoned well heads and the garbage dropped overboard by exploration drilling, and generally smothered in abandoned fishing nets.

As operations manager for the submarine company, I instructed Olivier to humour me, by taking a closer look at the sonar target. Grudgingly he let a little air into the ballast tanks, engaged thrusters and we motored forward. The target was a U-boat, not the usual Type VIIs or even a more advanced Type XXI. This one was more streamlined, more hydrodynamic, with no deck gun or flak gun platform. There were bullet holes in its port side main ballast tank, but more remarkably, it was moving, albeit slowly. 

Two weeks later, the mystery U-boat had disappeared.

Months later, while in Kiel, on naval business, I discovered she had been an advanced, experimental submarine, that had vanished, during the last weeks of the war.

Incarcerated in a military rehabilitation unit, after undergoing major orthopedic surgery for an injury sustained at sea, shortly before being mobilised for the Falklands War, I got to imagining what such a submarine could have been doing, that far north.

And began writing my first novel........ 

Book One follows the careers of two U-boat commanders, Karl Gerricht and Max Lurssen.

The initial setting is Berlin in 1937. Karl is from minor Prussian aristocracy, while Max is a first mate in the merchant marine, and a naval reservist.

During the last Kiel Regatta, before Britain declares war, Max befriends a British naval officer, Rupert Briggs, a naval reserve lieutenant serving aboard a submarine.

As the story progresses, Karl and Max, now in command of U-boats, operating out of La Rochelle,  in the North Atlantic, cross paths with Rupert Briggs, by now in command of an anti-submarine corvette, and later, a frigate, on convoy escort duties..

In parallel with the three men's stories, I have woven the stories of the women in their lives: Gisella, Karl's sister, an intrepid aviator; Katia, a reporter for a Berlin newspaper and an ardent communist; Sophia. a reporter for Tatler magazine, on assignment in Berlin, having to cope with the rise of Hitler's Brownshirts and the frenetic lives of those on the cabaret scene; Colette, a young French woman, running errands for the Resistance in La Rochelle, where Karl and Max's U-boats are based.

Book Two is set in the North Atlantic, and follows Admiral Karl Doenitz's U-boat war against the Allies' trans-Atlantic convoys in the harshest conditions imaginable.

Book Three draws all the strands together, set in Berlin as the Wall comes down, and neo-Nazis from the DDR are on the march. Max Lurssen is now a Stasi officer, head of security in East Berlin, while Karl has been selected as the next Secretary General of the United Nations and a Nobel Prize winner. Rupert is deceased, but his son, Brett, a former captain in the Royal Marines, and a recovering alcoholic, is seconded to the SIS and tasked with hunting down a neo-Nazi organization, The Grey Wolf Kameraden, headed by a former associate of Karl's, whose last U-boat, sunk by the British en route to Japan, from Northern Norway, carries a terrifying secret. All is revealed in the exciting finale .....

A brief outline of the story, based on my experiences in Alaska, back in 1996......

 I fulfilled an obligation to an old friend, a former employee, and took part in a diving expedition to Alaska....

After fitting out our little ship, we sailed from Tacoma, north to Juneau, through the Inside Passage, in search of the bow section of the Canadian Pacific Navigation Company's ss Islander, which had sunk in 1901, after supposedly hitting an iceberg, off Douglas Island. Onboard were miners from the Klondike Gold Fields, returning home with the spoils of their labours, together with a quantity of gold bullion, reputedly stowed in lockers, guarded by Mounties, in the forepart of the ship. But 33 years later, when the hull was eventually raised, at great expense, and moved to nearby Admiralty Island, the whole bow section, from the stem bar to the well deck, was found to be missing...... 

Roll on to August 1996, exactly 95 years after her sinking, almost to the hour, when I located the wrecked bow, on sidescan sonar, lying in over 350 feet of water. Deploying our ROV - remotely operated vehicle to investigate, the first thing I discovered was the eerie remains of a zinc-lined coffin, in which could be seen the gleaming white leg bones and pelvis of an adult.

The image has stuck with me over the years, so much so, that I decided to write a book about it...... 

The year is 1900, and a recently widowed young English woman, travels to Dawson City on the Yukon to bring the body of her late husband, back to England for burial. Killed while mining for gold, his accidental death is not all it seems. Fortunately a young Mountie is on hand to help her and together they embark on a series of adventures, including the sinking, in August 1901,of the ss Islander.

The story then shifts to 1996 and the discovery of the missing bow, containing both her husband's remains, and a number of secrets......

A work in progress, the book's final chapters are now coming together.. 

Lots of photographs on my (very amateur!) website at: https://www.pandosnco.co.uk/islander_part_two.htm