chris collyer

PART ONE - ATLANTIC OCEAN 1945

During the closing stages of World War Two, Kapitanleutnant Heinz Pringler in command of U718 is ordered to sail from La Rochelle and rendezvous with a ‘milch-cow’ supply submarine off the coast of north-west Africa. There he is loaded with a number of sealed wooden cases and four torpedoes. Two high ranking Army officers announce that Pringler is to take both them and their cargo to South America and produce orders from Grossadmiral Doenitz to this effect.

Under protest, Pringler sails as ordered but, en route is caught on the surface by a patrolling Allied aircraft. With two dead and some wounded U718 escapes but is later detected by surface vessels alerted by the aircraft. After a series of attacks the U-boat fakes destruction by jettisoning the two bodies along with oil and wreckage and escapes once again badly damaged. HMS Perseus registers a ‘kill’.

Pringler makes for the Cape Verde Islands where he intends to beach the sub and carry out repairs but the weather has other ideas and U718 makes her last dive some hundred miles or so short of the islands.

The battle scenes and last moments of U718 are vividly depicted following extensive research and with cooperation from a former U-boat Officer.

PART TWO - ATLANTIC OCEAN 2003

Hans Zeitler has a Salvage/Diving/Charter operation based in Gibraltar and, on one of his regular visits to his ailing mother who is in a sanatorium near Munich, she dies shortly after confessing to Hans that, following an air raid, she and her best friend’s baby were the only survivors and that, in fact, his real name is Hans Pringler. She tells him what little she knew of his naval officer father.

Hans decides to find out more and visits the records office of the Kriegsmarine in Kiel where he learns that his father commanded a U-boat which was sunk in an action with the Royal Navy in 1945 somewhere off the coast of north-west Africa.

His visit is reported to an arm of a neo-nazi group who know of the extremely valuable cargo that U718 carried and are very anxious to gain possession. They assume wrongly, that Hans knows more than they and threaten him with dire consequences if he fails to help them. They tell him that his father was a traitor and was not destroyed as reported, but absconded with the cargo of gold now worth millions of dollars.