The Iron Coffin

Chapter 1: The Dead Man's Gift

The envelope arrived on a Tuesday, which should have been Tommy Sullivan's first warning. Nothing good ever happened on a Tuesday.

He was elbow-deep in the engine compartment of the Meridian Star when his first mate, a wiry Scotsman named Angus McBride, came down the dock waving a manila envelope like it contained a winning lottery ticket.

"Registered post," Angus called out, his voice carrying that particular excitement that meant trouble. "From Hamburg. Some lawyer's office."

Tommy wiped his hands on a rag that had long since stopped being useful for cleaning anything and climbed out of the engine bay. The Meridian Star was a 180-foot salvage vessel that had seen better decades, but she was his—mostly his, anyway, with the bank holding a significant interest in her continued operation. He'd bought her three years ago with everything he had, and she'd repaid him with nothing but headaches, small jobs, and the constant threat of insolvency.

"I don't know anyone in Hamburg," Tommy said, taking the envelope.

"Maybe it's one of those Nigerian prince things, but German," Angus suggested. "A Nigerian baron, perhaps."

Tommy shot him a look and tore open the envelope. Inside was a letter in precise English, a photograph, and a smaller sealed envelope with his name written in a shaky hand.

The letter was from a law firm—Richter and Associates—informing him that one Karl Brenner had passed away and left specific instructions for this package to be delivered to Thomas James Sullivan of Portland, Maine, upon his death.

Tommy didn't recognize the name. He opened the smaller envelope.

The handwriting was different here—older, less steady. The letter was written in English, but the phrasing suggested a native German speaker.

"Captain Sullivan," it began. "You do not know me, but I know of you. I have followed your career with interest. You are a man who finds things that others cannot, and you are known to be honest in a business full of thieves. I am 94 years old and will be dead when you read this. I have carried a secret for 78 years, and I have decided to give it to you."

Tommy's hands tightened on the paper.

"In March of 1945, I was a young radio operator aboard U-2519, a Type XXI submarine under the command of Kapitänleutnant Werner Hartmann. We were not on a combat mission. We were running. In our cargo hold were 847 gold bars, stolen from the treasuries of occupied nations. The gold was to be transported to South America, where certain officials planned to begin new lives after the war they knew was lost."

Angus had moved closer, reading over Tommy's shoulder. "Jesus Christ," he breathed.

"We never made it. A British destroyer caught us on the surface two hundred miles off the coast of Newfoundland. Hartmann ordered us to dive, but we were hit before we could get deep enough. The submarine sank in 380 meters of water. I was the only survivor, pulled from the sea by the very destroyer that had attacked us."

Tommy turned to the second page.

"I have kept the coordinates all these years. I do not know why. Perhaps I thought I would go back someday, but I never did. I was too much of a coward. I am giving them to you because I have read about your work recovering the cargo from the Helena Marsh, and I believe you will do this properly. I ask only one thing: if you find the submarine, please recover the remains of my crewmates and give them proper burials. They were young men who did not choose their war. They deserve to rest somewhere other than an iron coffin."

The letter was signed simply "Karl Brenner, Funkmaat, U-2519."

Behind the letter was a single sheet of paper with a set of coordinates written in the same shaky hand.

Tommy looked at the photograph. It showed a group of young men in German naval uniforms, standing in front of a submarine. One of them, barely out of his teens, had circled his own face with faded ink.

"847 gold bars," Angus said slowly. "At current prices, that's..."

"About four hundred million dollars," Tommy finished. "Give or take."

They stood in silence for a long moment, the sounds of the harbor filling the space between them—the cry of gulls, the slap of water against hulls, the distant rumble of a fishing boat heading out to sea.

"Could be fake," Angus said, but his voice lacked conviction.

"Could be." Tommy looked at the coordinates again. "But why would a dying man in Germany pick me specifically to send a fake treasure map?"

"Because he's mental?"

"Maybe." Tommy folded the letters carefully and slipped them back into the envelope. "Or maybe he's been carrying this around for almost eighty years and finally decided to let it go."

"What are you going to do?"

Tommy looked out at the Meridian Star, at her rust-streaked hull and her tired engines and her mountain of debt. He thought about the bank notices piling up in his office, about the crew he could barely afford to pay, about the three jobs he'd lost this year to better-equipped competitors.

Then he thought about 847 gold bars sitting at the bottom of the North Atlantic.

"I'm going to make some calls," he said.