Spook's Gold by Andrew Wood

through the full files, but maybe only by doing so would he would find an essential clue that Schull had picked up on and followed.  Marner had to be sure to find it too. 
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    A growl of hunger from his stomach made him suddenly aware of how long he had been sitting examining the files.  His watch told him that it was now early afternoon and that he had entirely bypassed lunch, closeted in the tiny, windowless cell.  If he had hoped that Graf might send some coffee or even sandwiches to him as a courtesy, it had not been realised. 
    He had an acute ache in his buttocks and legs from four hours of sitting on the hard chair.  And had it been worth it?  The vast majority of the files were simply a typewritten copy of the captain’s logs, defining every tiny detail of the daily operations of the submarines during voyages that spanned months in some instances.  Everything was there, including comments on sightings of other craft, actions, navigation, cargoes, fuelling, mechanical and technical issues, discipline and more.  Marner could not understand how the captain would find the time to operate the vessel and yet still manage to document it all in such minutiae. 
    What was clear was that only two German submarines were involved in the transports, the U-180 and the U-195.  Based upon what he had read in the voyage records, they had avoided contact with other vessels, except in the earliest voyages during which they had sunk a couple of enemy ships.  This lack of ‘combat’ activity was explained by the later files which showed that both vessels had been heavily modified after the initial missions.  These modifications had included the removal of the torpedo tubes and some of the electrical batteries used to power the vessel when submerged, the objective being to increase their cargo carrying capacity.  Marner could see that the captains were patently unhappy with this from various disparaging comments about the poor manoeuvrability when fully laden and the need to spend more time on the surface recharging the reduced battery capacity.  As a consequence, their recent ‘combat’ activity was entirely evasive and the logs held the accounts of several emergency dives after having been spotted by enemy ships or planes. 
    The details of the cargoes were complex.  Primarily the two Axis powers seemed to be trading military and mechanical technology, although the logs also indicated that German and Japanese personnel were being carried as passengers and exchanged.  The list of cargoes included torpedoes, engines and various other items, the names and designations of which meant little to him.  Some were simply labelled as ‘miscellaneous’.  More military hardware was going to the Japanese, and the only gold mentioned was coming from the Japanese.  Possibly this was due to the relative lower value or lower technology of what the Japanese were offering, but the brief details of the cargoes and Marner’s limited knowledge of the complex terminology made this difficult to ascertain.  On some missions the exchange of cargoes was taking place at sea, with transhipping of cargoes between the submarines; on a few occasions the u-boats had gone all of the way to make landfall in Indonesia.  There were notations of items being lost overboard during the transfers due to the difficulties of handling such heavy items, but these losses were individually and minutely recorded and none of them were for the loss of gold. 
    U-195 had made one stop into a neutral Portuguese port for emergency repairs following damage to her steering gear by a depth charge.  Outside of friendly ports, refuelling was always by rendezvous with tanker ships or submarines in mid-ocean.  Meaning that stops between the point of loading of the gold and the off-loading at the final destination were extremely rare.  As Hoffman had stated, even these ports of off-loading of the gold were not common. 
    If there was an obvious clue within the