The Target Read online

  “I’m looking for any information I can find related to that lost World War Two ship. I might find clues there that could point me in the right direction.” Jake knew he still had Admiral Dönitz’s orders to recover, but if Köhler came to stay, his cargo might also be on South Georgia Island.

  “Who you working for?”

  “It’s like I said. I’m a historian after a lost ship.”

  “You sure about that?” He narrowed his gaze, and this time Jake was sure he saw contempt.

  “What are you getting at?” Jake said.

  “I don’t know the first thing about you, stranger, though I can guess a lot. What are you, some kind of investigator or manhunter?”

  “What?” Jake paused and considered the bizarre comment. “What are you talking about? Of course not. You just said the place was abandoned.”

  “Don’t play games with me.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Rivera stared at him for a moment with his wary, measuring eyes.

  “Alright, I believe you. Why don’t you stick around? I’ve got a story or two I could tell you about Köhler. You don’t have any idea of the kind of man he was. I’ve got tea and a gas burner.”

  Jake was impatient but he figured he might learn something important. “I’ve been hiking a while. Tea sounds good.”

  Neither of them spoke while Rivera lit the gas burner and heated the water. He gave Jake a tin cup and walked to a big crack in the rocks that opened to a view of the coast.

  Rivera gazed silently out over the water for a couple of minutes.

  “Thirty-seven,” he said, still facing the ocean far below.

  “What?” Jake noticed that Rivera had left his pistol by his gas burner, so he shoved his Glock into his pocket.

  “Thirty-seven years,” Rivera said. “Think about how long that is.” He began taking down the strips of frozen seal meat from the stick racks and tossing them into a frayed canvas sack.

  Jake was quiet for a moment. “A long time.”

  Rivera came back over and sat down on a chair-size rock. “Thirty seven years alone, absolutely alone. Can you imagine that?”

  Jake shrugged. “A very long time.”

  “That’s how long Ivan Köhler lived at Lost Cove.”

  “All alone? Why? Why of all places on earth would he come here?”

  Rivera dragged his dirty, calloused fingers across his long, gray beard. “Köhler had a lot of guilt over his past. He came here to live alone and die alone. He called it the end of the world. There can be few more lonely places on the planet. As you can see, the storms are endless here, and they are major. It’s only 800 miles from Antarctica. The last few days have been mild, but that won’t last.”

  When Jake kneeled down to sit, he grit his teeth as the stretching wound felt like a knife in his thigh. His back thumped against a rock. Through gritted teeth he said, “Who else lives on the island?”

  “The researchers down at King Edward Point.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “The caretaker down at the station.”

  “He didn’t make it, Rivera.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Jake told him about the remains found in the torched whaler’s museum.

  Rivera was silent and looked like he’d seen a ghost.

  “I’m sorry,” Jake said. “I know it’s tough to lose friends.”

  Rivera shook his head. “I knew they were there, but I rarely talked to them.”

  “Why?”

  “Köhler and I shared one thing in common. We like privacy. Not just anyone can survive on their own in a place like this. Thing is I saw the smoke a few days ago. I thought they were just burning scrap wood.”

  Jake was silent for a minute. The wind picked up to an eerie scream, a forlorn cry of the lost and the lonely. Finally, he said, “Who else lives on the island besides the people down at the station?”

  “Scientists come and go from time to time. People visit the old whaling museum when cruise ships stop there on the way to Antarctica. Nobody lives here though. Most people couldn’t stand the isolation for long. Köhler succeeded, but he paid a price.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Rivera ran his fingers through his gray hair. “Think about it. Long winters and isolation take their toll, especially on someone like Köhler who was battling demons from his past.”

  “How well did you know him?”

  Rivera narrowed his eyes at Jake. “I was his only friend. I hunted seal for him and brought him fish every month or two. He paid me well for my trouble. He didn’t talk much. He was a quiet man, but he was always very thankful. Do you want to know something absolutely incredible?”

  “Sure.”

  “For almost thirty years I was one of the only people he saw. He had no news at all there. In those days there was no internet, and he had no electronics, including no satellite dish. He didn’t even have power in his cabin. Can you imagine that with all the long nights? For all those years?”

  “It sounds sad.” Jake didn’t see how Rivera’s social life was any better than Köhler’s, but he played along.

  “Oh, my God,” Rivera said. “You have no idea the kind of man we’re talking about here. I don’t know what kind of monster he was in Germany, but the Köhler I knew was a humble man, a broken man. He lived with the memory of his wife.”

  “Memory?”

  Rivera nodded and poured more tea. “She was a beautiful woman. I’ve seen pictures of her in her wedding dress. They were married just before the war. She died when the Russians overran Germany.”

  “What a mess.”

  Jake stared at Rivera, whose measuring gray eyes studied him right back through the rising steam of his tea cup.

  “Her death had a lasting impact on him.” Rivera lowered his head and frowned at a shovel. “Every time I went to his cabin, I heard him talk to her, even though she’d been gone for thirty years.”

  “A sad story.” Jake shivered as the cold wind howled through the rocks.

  “Yes, but I have not even scratched the surface of who Köhler was or why he was there.” Rivera shook his head. “I have never told these things to anyone.” He took a deep breath. “I need to go get water from the stream. If you want to stick around, we’ll talk more later.”

  “But you have to tell me more. You can’t just stop now.”

  “What’s your hurry?” Rivera snagged a couple of water jugs. “I won’t be long. I’d ask you to go with me, but I saw you trying to keep the weight off your leg there when you sat down.”

  After Rivera left, Jake wondered about the others and what was happening down at the whaling station.

  ***

  Professor Henry Grassman was walking through the station with an armful of driftwood and scrap wood to keep the barrel fires burning. Henry Grassman, Phd., from the University of Alaska, specialized in Cytology (cell structure). He was a zoologist who had helped to carry out an extensive study of bird cell structure back in Anchorage and had come to South Georgia to study penguins. He was walking around the back of the huge whale oil tanks when he came face to face with a gunman dressed in white. The man carried an assault rifle and had another very large rifle on his back. His gray eyes peered out from beneath a white stocking cap.

  Grassman stopped cold in his steps and couldn’t speak. A thought flew through his mind that this was the sniper. Grassman could hardly breathe, so tight was the grip of fear upon him.

  The sniper raised his rifle and smiled. His eyes were like silver and ice.

  “Where’s Jake Sands?” the shooter said.

  “You mean…? Wh--why do you want to know that?”

  “He’s my target. Where is he?”

  “He’s a—up in the mountains somewhere.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Yeah, I’m, yeah, that’s right.”

  “Wrong answer.”

  Professor Grassman staggered backwards and only then realized that he�
�d just been shot three times through his torso.

  Silenced! The thought seized his brain like the talons of a bald eagle. He’d been hit with a silenced weapon.

  He stood there for a second and then fell dead.

  ***

  Up in the higher elevations, Jake was still waiting for Rivera. While Rivera was getting water from the stream, Jake went over to the break in the rocks and gazed down on the coast far below. The katabatic winds moaned a sad song through the rocks, barreled down to the sea, and raked the waters far below. The frigid winds were so brutal that nothing grew more than grass even grew on the island. There was not a tree within a hundred miles. Tress could not survive here. Glaciers and snow and ice flourished.

  The wind’s sad song changed from one forlorn pitch to another. It was a funeral song that blew through the rocks. The weather patterns did not care about the weak. They did not care about the strong. A man either survived or he perished.

  There were those who thrived in harsh environments. Far below, Jake saw an albatross riding the wind in all its glory. The bird rose up and swooped down like a spirit. Jake did not know where these birds came from or where they were going, but this one was thriving in the brutal currents, thriving in the very conditions that had doomed other forms of life that could not adapt.

  Jake lay back against a rock and closed his eyes. He was awakened from his catnap when Rivera came back. The miner’s nose was running from the cold dripping onto his gray mustache. He wiped the arm of his gray work-jacket across his mouth.

  “Tell me more about Köhler,” Jake said.

  Rivera turned on the burner to boil more water. He narrowed his eyes and studied Jake in a way that made him feel he’d done something wrong. “It’s like I said, Köhler didn’t talk much.” Rivera frowned at his burner for a few minutes. “As you know, the Antarctic cruise ships stop at the station sometimes. Once a year I catch a ride to Buenos Aires. Been doing it for many years. Köhler always gave me packages that I delivered to his lawyer in town.”

  “How could you afford the trips?”

  “Köhler took care of his friends, meaning me. There were no others.”

  “What packages?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he sold crafts. Down here we don’t ask questions. I delivered supplies to Köhler at the mansion for twenty-some years and he never told me much until later.”

  “What did he do with his time? Why would he stay here?”

  “Some questions are best forgotten.”

  “I came here for answers.”

  “Like I told you, Köhler shipped in lumber and supplies for his cabin. He paid for everything. The ship wrecked on the reef in the bay where Köhler’s cabin is.”

  “Shipping in supplies sounds expensive. Where’d he make his money?”

  “He was … a sort of gold miner.”

  “Really?” Jake was amazed. “It sounds like he was quite successful. Where was his mine?”

  Rivera winced. “I’ll get to that. Mostly, I only visited him when I brought him seal meat and fish. He had me in for tea, but even then he was a quiet man. In all those years, he never once asked for news about the world beyond this island, and he knew when I’d just gone to town.”

  “That’s odd,” Jake said.

  “Not if you understand the man. In his later years, Köhler became ill, but refused to leave. I brought a doctor here a few times. As always, Köhler was generous. He paid the doctor and I well, but on our last visit, the old man was dying. We ended up staying in the cabin for more than a week. In the end, he passed away. One of his last acts was to give me his will. Imagine my shock when I realized that I was his primary beneficiary.”

  “Didn’t he have relatives?”

  “Yes, but some of them died during the war. Anyway, he wasn’t close to them and wanted no connection with them. He mentioned a couple of them, but he never once asked me to mail a letter for him.”

  “How sad.”

  “Yes, but I was pleasantly surprised that he left me the equivalent of $125,000.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “No. Keep in mind, we weren’t close. I only talked to him twice a year, but there was nobody else. I was his friend. He also left me all the furniture, but there wasn’t much, and I had no use for it.”

  Rivera poured hot water into the cups. He added tea bags and passed one to Jake.

  Jake shook his head. “He lived all alone in an empty mansion on South Georgia Island for all those years? That’s madness.”

  “Not for him. During Köhler’s last year when I was visiting more often, he finally opened up to me. It was as if he’d bottled up a thousand secrets for decades, and now he needed to get it all out. It was like a confession and an apology. It was a pitiful thing to see.”

  “What kind of secrets?”

  Rivera frowned at the dirt. “Köhler was a colonel in the Third Reich.”

  Jake cursed.

  “Oh, it gets worse. He ran the Auschwitz concentration camp for over a year.”

  Jake suddenly wondered what the hell was he doing out here in one of the most remote and gloomy places on the planet and thinking of going to what was shaping up to be a dark and evil place.

  “Keep in mind,” Rivera said, “that Köhler never wanted that burden. He told me that he was a coward and that fear drove him to rationalize that following orders was a matter of survival.”

  “Nice,” Jake said. “Wonderful.”

  “Well, Köhler was right. He was a coward, but he was also a dead man if he refused. One thing that you should understand is that he was the cousin of Alolf Hitler.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Rivera avoided eye contact, as if he was ashamed to have a friend like Köhler. “That’s what he told me, and I believed him. I had good reason to.” Rivera stood and walked over to the crack in the rocks and gazed toward the coast. He paced back. “Because of his intense guilt, he eagerly accepted a special assignment that brought him to South America, and he chose the most remote place to build a cabin for himself. He’d acquired a fortune in dental gold, silver, jewelry, and various currencies he’d taken off of doomed Jews. He’d also offered many victims freedom in exchange for passwords to their numbered accounts in Switzerland or deeds to other assets he could liquidate. He made a fortune, but the Jews who transferred assets to him were driven out of the camp and shot five miles down the road.”

  “Robbed and gunned down?” Jake was starting to feel nauseated. He was starting to feel like a lowlife for chasing down treasure with such a disgraceful past.

  Rivera swirled his tea around in his tin cup. “Let’s just say he skimmed. Official policy was that gold teeth and crowns were melted down. The gold was then transferred to the Reichsbank. Gold and silver bars and currency were purchased by the bank at full value from the SS. In the interest of secrecy, the Reichsbank disposed of these items itself. All the treasure from concentration camp inmates was taken out in truckloads, but Köhler diverted many truckloads to his warehouse. He also kept track of shipments to the Reichsbank from other locations and had some of them intercepted and confiscated.”

  Jake shook his head in disgust.

  “He told me that he was a coward,” Rivera said. “The way he saw it, the prisoners were going to die anyway, so he may as well skim a fortune so that he could use the money to disappear. As it turned out, he got the chance to leave anyway, to come to South America. How he ended up on South Georgia I don’t know. There was one thing he would never tell me.”

  “I have an idea about that,” Jake said. “He was hiding something. I believe that was the motive.”

  “Maybe. Anyway, the one thing he did tell me was how much he regretted his past. It haunted him for the rest of his life. As I mentioned, he gave me a lot of money, but that was a small piece of his fortune. In his will, he gave over $2,000,000 to Jewish charities.”

  “Where was the money?”

  “Banks in Buenos Aires.”

  “Humph.”

/>   “I asked you before,” Rivera said. “Why do you think he stayed here?”

  “I suppose that’s because Hitler’s cousin would have been a hunted man. He was afraid to risk capture and the death sentence, which is what might have happened if he returned to civilization.”

  Rivera frowned. “An interesting term—civilization. That’s the place where the Holocaust took place, is it not? It’s the place where Stalin murdered twenty-three million Russians. It’s the place where Mao wiped out seventy-eight million Chinese.”

  “So he blamed civilization for his own crimes?”

  “No, sir. He blamed people like himself. One thing I didn’t mention is that Köhler built a small chapel near his mansion. He told me that he went there every day to pray for forgiveness.”

  “Hmph.” Jake shook his head.

  Rivera dangled his tea bag over his cup. His long gray hair and beard also hung down over the tea cup. “Now we know about Köhler, but what I don’t know about is you.”

  “What more can I say? I’m a maritime historian doing research.”

  “What are you not telling me?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You said your ship was disabled by a saboteur. That’s some bad luck. It happened near a cove where murdering criminals are hiding a stolen cruise ship. That’s incredibly bad luck. Do you think there might be a connection?”

  Jake thought about it for a minute and had to agree that Rivera may have been onto something. Nevertheless, Jake was no longer especially welcome back at the whaling station, and that was fine with him. At least he didn’t have to watch his back as closely up here. Now, if he could avoid getting sniped in the mountains or gunned down along the shore, then he could let the others fend for themselves. He had something else on his mind, something he wanted to keep quiet anyway.

  CHAPTER 16

  Jake steered his zodiac southwest along the coast as 30 m.p.h. winds rose up. The blow dragged streaks of foam over the water and probably would have flipped the boat if he hadn’t loaded it down with some volcanic ballast rocks. Fortunately, these were not the feared katabatic winds that haunted the island, or Jake would be running for cover. He could only hope that the weather didn’t deteriorate more. Big swells lifted and lowered the zodiac. Salty spray as cold as ice dripped down his numb face over his lips. The boat slid up and down six-foot swells like a roller-coaster ride.