affair had been a wild-goose chase from start to finish, and a waste of taxpayers’ money. And he had lost eight good men.
He would carry out an investigation. Regulations demanded that a proper reporting process had to be adhered to, but with Monteith’s defection, the likelihood that they would come up with any satisfactory conclusions was close to nil.
The launch had broken up on the rocks, and to date only a small part of the wreckage had been located. The life raft had been found farther along the coast, fully inflated and equipped, which had added to the speculation. Something had gone seriously wrong, and Saunders wasn’t buying into the accidental-drowning scenario.
Fischer had been a seasoned veteran, and so had every member of his team. They should have survived what had amounted to a recreational dive on a sunken wreck in calm waters. With no witnesses other than a fishing boat that had seen two launches in the vicinity, and no bodies or evidence beyond the wrecked launch and the life raft, there was little chance that answers would ever come to light.
But he did know one crucial piece of the puzzle that the press hadn’t stumbled on yet. Todd Fischer’s team hadn’t only been searching for a cache of drugs and guns; they had been hunting Nazis.
Saunders’s ulcer burned every time he thought about the briefing for the mission. Monteith must have been senile.
He would make it his personal mission to ensure that that particular piece of information never saw the light of day. The media had already done enough damage. It was better that Fischer and his team were perceived as deserters than that the U.S. Navy was made into a laughingstock.
One
Present day
Lieutenant Commander Steve Fischer stepped into the records room of the Jackson Naval Air Station, Florida, and handed the clerk a list of the files he wanted to view. There were nine in all. Eight didn’t require a security clearance; one did. On request, he produced his ID and security clearance and waited for his details to be verified against the computerized register.
Several minutes later, the files were deposited on the counter, checked and signed off by a second records officer and Fischer was cleared to carry them through to the cramped work cubicles that ran the length of one wall.
Taking a seat, he placed the eight files he had chosen at random, and in which he had no interest, to one side, and selected the file labeled Akidron. In a recent overhaul of the filing system, Akidron had suddenly appeared. The reference number tied it in with a group of files containing material on operations in the Middle East, but the coincidence that Akidron spelled backward was Nordika had been enough to pique his interest.
He examined the security classification and a seal that had been put in place in 1984 and had never been broken, indicating that he was the first person to view the file since it had been taken out of circulation. The fact that the file had been off-limits for over twenty years and had a high security rating was notable but not unusual. Jacksonville was the center for the Southeast Command, which included twenty-one naval installations, among them Guantanamo Bay and Puerto Rico. With Cuba on their doorstep, a number of files contained sensitive material that could affect the security of the United States.
He broke the seal and opened the file. On the first page Akidron was reversed to spell Nordika.
He skimmed the pages that detailed the information supplied by George Hartley, a wealthy manufacturer based in Houston, and which had been passed on to Monteith. Hartley claimed that ex-Nazi SS officers, in league with Marco Chavez, head of a major Colombian drug cartel, were involved in smuggling arms and drugs. The arms were bound for terrorist and military factions in South America and Cuba, the cocaine was moving stateside. Military personnel were reportedly involved, although Hartley hadn’t been able to supply a list of names. When the divers had gone missing, an attempt to follow up on the details Hartley had supplied had been stalled by Hartley’s unexpected death. According to the coroner’s report, the fatality had been caused by a lethal cocktail of prescription medications and an excess of alcohol, and had been deemed an unfortunate accident.
Suddenly the lack of information available on the wreck of the Nordika and the disappearance of eight navy personnel made sense. Monteith had not only run from the scandal of the loss of an entire SEAL team and the ridicule that would result from a failed Nazi hunt, he had been afraid for his own life. Hartley had been executed, and Monteith had recognized that he would be next.
In a botched attempt to kill the affair, he had concealed all the evidence he’d obtained by renaming the file and closing it. He had banked on the fact that twenty years after the Nordika tragedy, there was likely to be little interest in a follow-up investigation. Monteith had died just eighteen months later, reportedly of natural causes.
The back of his neck crawling, Steve flipped through the last set of pages, which contained the mission brief and the orders issued to Todd Fischer and his men. The documents had been signed off by Monteith. As he turned the last page, an envelope attached to the rear file cover with tape that was cracked and perished by age detached. Glossy prints and a set of negatives spilled across the desktop.
The first photo—a splash of bright turquoise and the primary yellow of a mask and snorkel—was of himself at age eight, underwater, in the family swimming pool. The second was a shot of his best friend, Marc Bayard, the third of his cousin, Sara.
The fourth print was of Todd Fischer, sitting on the bottom of the pool, holding his breath and waiting patiently while Steve had fooled with the camera, trying to get a cool shot of his dad.
Chest tight, he picked up the print, careful to handle only the edges, and stared into a piece of the past he had never expected to find. He remembered the afternoon the photos had been taken as clearly as if it had been yesterday. It had been approximately two weeks before his father had disappeared. The weather had been hot and sultry and his dad had been home on leave, giving them snorkeling lessons and, when they’d pestered him, a lesson on underwater photography. Normally, they weren’t allowed to touch the camera, because it was an expensive piece of equipment and the shutter release was ultrasensitive.
In the next photo the luminous turquoise of pool water changed to cool blues and lilacs. Seawater. The absence of red and yellow tones in the coral indicated the depth as being from between forty to sixty feet, maybe a little more.
Through the murk he registered the focal point of the shot, the stern of a vessel and three numbers. The reason Monteith had kept the film, which should have been passed on to Eleanor Fischer, was now obvious. The numbers, remnants of Lloyd’s Register numbers, were familiar. Two years previously Steve had spent a few days in Costa Rica, chartered a launch and had found the wreck of the Nordika. Because of its remoteness, the site was not a popular dive location, but it was noted on the sea charts. He had dived on the wreck and had taken almost the exact same photo.
A set of prints depicting the cargo hold and the ancient diesels in the engine room followed. The sensation, as he flipped through the prints, was eerie as he viewed the same scenes he had photographed, only this time seen through his father’s eyes.
The next photo made the tension in the pit of his stomach escalate: a diver and, off to the side, the shadowy, encrusted shape of the Nordika’s hull. The final two snapshots were markedly different. The first was an off-center flash of a face distorted by a diving mask and a cloud of dark fluid—blood. The second, aimed upward, as if the camera had dropped to the sea bottom and the shutter mechanism had triggered, capturing the divers suspended above, one arching back as a spear punched into his shoulder.
Steve stared at the print. The snapshot was skewed, but the picture it had produced was sharp enough. He could make out the U.S. Navy marking on the wounded diver’s scuba tank, as well as the tattoo on Todd Fischer’s bare shoulder—the same tattoo that was visible in the holiday snap of his father sitting in the bottom of the Fischer family swimming pool.
For a split second the image of his father that he had “seen” more than twenty years before was superimposed over the print. He had never told his mother, or anyone, the full truth,