I don't own Harry Potter, I just own this story.

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The Treasure Hunter.

The problem with stealing a boat in the middle of the night was it was so pathetically easy, Harry mused to himself as he clambered into the boat, dragging with him his air tanks and the rest of his diving equipment and the rest of his supplies which he'd need later for breaking into the U-Boat and then leaving. With a bit of luck, he should only be a few hours and be back in the morning before anyone realised he had stolen the boat. However, if anyone realised he'd taken it earlier, it wouldn't be a problem since he could always just leave the boat in a bay or something. Once he was finished with the boat, why should he care what happened to it afterwards?

Getting out of the harbour was easy, he just simply left the harbour with the boat without bothering to silence the engine. No-one was bothered, nobody cared.

Once he was on the water far from the coast, Harry tapped his wand on the sides of the boat and the boat accelerated while he pointed his wand and mentally focused on the runes he had carved into the U-Boat's hull to make it easy to track down, and with the speed which the boat was proceeding it shouldn't take too long to reach.

When the boat finally arrived, Harry was doing his best not to question the wisdom of diving at night. Night dives were risky considering the predators that were in the water, but even as a wizard he knew he would need to take care. After stopping the boat and anchoring it, Harry gathered up his equipment and got ready. He donned a wetsuit and he put on his flippers before he checked the air tanks and the gauge carefully. Good. The supply in both tanks should last for four hours, although it shouldn't really be needed considering this was an in and out job Harry was an experienced burglar, and he knew things could and did go wrong. This was far more hazardous, and he was taking no chances.

He cautiously reached for the explosives he'd managed to get a hold of thanks to integrating into the local underworld. He'd gotten the most powerful explosives for underwater work. He knew the police would be informed, but the trouble was they'd have no idea what he had done with it, and since he had used a glamour charm to fool the people he'd gotten into contact with and paid them off quite well, no-one would know who'd really taken it.

After slipping on his face mask and shoving the breather into his mouth Harry flipped over the boat's side with his wand in his hand. As soon as he sank beneath the water, he found himself in inky blackness while some of the bioluminescent life swarmed around him which made him feel like he was a giant floating in the cold, hard vacuum of space rather than in the liquid mass of the ocean.

Harry lit his wand with a mental command, scaring away a large shark in the process. After thinking indignantly to himself that was a rotten way of starting off a caper, Harry cleared his mind and using the same spell to track the rune he swam downwards through the inky water. He reached the wreck fairly quickly, but the trouble immediately began as he started making the trip to the bow.

A shark suddenly appeared.

Harry quickly stopped, knowing sharks would leave him alone if he stayed still. It certainly seemed to work, the shark swam off….and then it came back, seemingly interested in the light from the tip of Harry's wand.

The shark came closer, forcing him to back away slowly. The shark's teeth were capable of ripping his arm off, and his mind raced as he tried to work out what he could do to get the powerful animal away from him. He didn't want to harm the shark unless he could help it. He had always felt a kinship with animals like this, like him they just trying to survive.

But when the shark went for him again, Harry realised he had no choice once he realised that his options were limited. He aimed his wand and with some regret, he slashed his wand at the shark while he made sure to push enough power into the spell to make it as strong and as powerful as he could. The spell hit the shark in the mouth, splitting the shark open right down the middle, blood spilling into the water. As he was immersed in the now bloodied water and couldn't see what had happened to the split shark, Harry quickly left the scene before any other shark or some other predator attracted to the blood spilt into the water came over for an easy snack. Hopefully, he reasoned, with the split shark, the animals hunting at night would be more interested in the shark than in him. He headed over to the bow end of the U-Boat with that in mind, although he made sure to keep an eye out for any other marine predator.

Harry slipped the air tanks off of his back and put them in the tube with the breathing tube still in his mouth to feed him air, and he pushed the tanks up ahead through the narrow, corroded walls of the tube, and thanks to his wand light, he eventually found himself in the torpedo bay or torpedo room, he didn't know and frankly did not really care what submarine crews called it, and was amazed while he locked the tube up.

While the water had badly corroded the metal of the room, there was more than enough in the room to give him an idea of what the place had been like when the U-Boat had been fully operational, and he shivered when he saw the corroded forms of the torpedoes slung in front of the tubes.

Thanks to his passion for treasure and knowledge, Harry knew quite a bit about the First and Second World Wars. He knew the Germans in both of those wars, and the Americans during their own efforts against the Japanese after that mess with Pearl Harbour, had used submarines loaded down with torpedoes had hunted down merchant shipping like sharks or wolves in a pack. The U-Boat had been one of the most principal weapons of Nazi Germany, whose strategy for Britain was straightforward enough. Britain relied heavily on trade, and the Nazis had known it. They had tried to starve Britain into submission while the allies came up with dozens of tactics and defences to destroy the submarines prowling around the Atlantic while the Nazi's used other weapons.

The Second World War had left a formidable legacy. Not only had millions died, both in the muggle world and in the magical world because Grindelwald was waging his own war, but unexploded bombs had been left behind. The moment he saw the torpedoes he wondered if they were still dangerous. Knowing his luck, he guessed they were.

Gathering up his air tanks and slipping them back onto his back, Harry swam over to the hatchway leading into the rest of the U-Boat, giving the torpedoes a wide berth along with a few nervous looks sent their way. Lifting his wand, Harry fired a low powered explosive curse at the door. The door burst open and Harry braced himself before the suction yanked forwards with a pull on his chest. He only had a second to brace himself before he collapsed to the deck. Harry lay there for a minute before he pushed the pain of the impact with the deck away, and he stood up, holding up his wand as he did before he slipped off his breather and mask.

The air was breathable, just but it was musty. Harry had no problem with that, he had his air tanks and in any case, this shouldn't take too long. As he walked through the musty submarine, Harry came across more than a few of the crew who'd long since decomposed and had become skeletons. Harry bent over each of the skeletons, examining all of them without any interest or care that he was grave robbing. To him, there was no such thing as morality when it came to making money. In any case, archaeologists went over the remains of the dead, and whatever they might say Harry knew the lines were blurred. He just bypassed the morality and went for it.

Alright, so occasionally he found a few photographs showing the faded images of the submariner's families. Harry looked at them all, seeing the happy faces of the wives and children, who probably had grandkids of their own by now. Harry put them inside the watertight bag he'd brought with him down to plunder the wreck, although he had no idea at the present time of how he was going to send them back to their owners.

Harry carefully went over the bones, ignoring the mouldy clothing and hats, but he had no problem taking rings, old watches which had long since stopped ticking. As he walked into the control room, he held his wand up over the small chart 'table,' which didn't deserve the name since the builders of the submarine seemed to have stuck it in like an afterthought, just like the bunks which had been stacked up on top of one another, which was another great source for treasure. In the control room, Harry looked through the charts and the logbook, and he selected what hadn't been too badly damaged in the musty U-Boat atmosphere before he put it all in the waterproof and watertight bag before he moved on and thoroughly searched the rest of the control room before he moved on.

By the time Harry reached the end of the wreck of the U-Boat, he considered everything he had done to be a success so far. Not only had he collected the logbook and a handful of charts from the control room of the submarine, but he'd also grabbed some of the navigational instruments as well. From the crew head stolen diaries, photographs, rings, insignia. However, something was wrong.

While he had already stolen from a good number of the U-Boat's crew, Harry felt that there should be more crew members on a submarine this big, but as he went through the submarine he found a sight which made him pause as he poked his head through a hatchway and he was sure this was the reason why he had only found a small number of submariners.

On the floor in front of him were a pile of skeletons belonging to members of the now-dead crew, but they were all armed with rifles and guns, and there were spent shells from the weapons all over the floor. Harry's eyes narrowed as he tried to work out what had happened since he had examined the rest of the skeletons in the rest of the U-Boat already, and there was no sign of a fight. What was different here, was it just the SS officer? Harry was willing to bet it was. Very carefully he picked his way over the skeletons, scanning each one in turn with his eyes before he moved on, and then he found a skeleton in a uniform he recognised immediately as belonging to the SS.

Harry was surprised to see the dreaded black uniform of the SS and he bent down to better examine the body while he went over possible ideas about what would make the SS send one of their own onboard a U-Boat although what the point would be he didn't know. He knew from his history as well as from other sources the SS had been truly fanatical about the Nazi ideology, but he hadn't expected to see one onboard a sunken U-Boat. For a moment, he got the idea the SS guy was just there as part of an assignment which had failed when the U-Boat was sunk, but he had no idea what the mission could have been to warrant the need for one of these fanatics on board a submarine. Didn't ordinary German sailors and soldiers despise the SS? Harry was positive that was the case.

Standing up again Harry looked around the room, hoping this section of the U-Boat had been the place where the SS officer had been bunking rather than being with the others, although he guessed they would have rather eaten a jellyfish raw and die of poisoning than spend five minutes with him. Sure enough, Harry found a tattered leather briefcase, damp with age and decay but he had no problem opening them and he pulled out a sheaf of papers. He read them, thankful he had magically learnt languages such as French, German, Latin, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, Chinese in several dialects, Russian, Swedish, and Indian, and thanks to his proficiency in the mind arts it didn't take Harry too long to read through the SS officer's orders.

It was all there. But it surprised him.

Harry had expected the SS officer to have been given orders to travel to someplace on the globe for a new weapon, to visit some top-secret base where the Nazis had safeguarded themselves for the day where they could once again come out and conquer the world and force their sick ideology Harry knew Voldemort had adopted in some manner on the human race.

But no. This was something he could not believe.

A painting? The SS had conned a U-Boat captain as well as the Kriegsmarine itself just to transport a fucking painting that was rumoured to have been painted by Hitler himself to a place where it would be safe. Harry snorted. He had seen copies of some of Hitler's work, and he knew it was as tacky as fuck, but what made him resist the urge to truly laugh at the ridiculousness of the whole thing and how the painting would inspire the so-called Aryan race into conquest again.

It wouldn't work, of course. It took more than a painting to make people do things like that. Religious wars like the crusades had been made possible for both Christianity and Islam alike because religious leaders worked in tandem with those in power to spread the so-called word of God and drive their peoples to want war.

But this... This was the same kind of bollocks he'd expect from Nazis.

Harry pushed those thoughts aside and he looked around the room for any sign of the painting while he took a look at the date. The orders had been issued in 1945, but the month…he would need to do some double-checking, but he was positive the U-Boat had been despatched on its last mission in the final months of the war itself. Interesting. Harry put the papers in his bag before he thoroughly searched the room for the painting. He found a thin package eventually right underneath a bunk. Opening it up and holding his lit wand over it, Harry examined the painting.

He knew with just one glance this painting hadn't been painted by Hitler. The dodgy moustached bastard had only been capable of drawing and painting mediocre landscape paintings and work which was soulless. The Vienna State opera house painted in 1912 had been colourful and detailed, yeah, but it was robotic.

But this painting….

It showed twelve knights surrounding that looked like a Valkyrie, brightly painted with a lot of work done on the visible faces and details of the knights themselves, something Hitler had never done as an artist. Harry sneered as he examined the painting. While it was striking, he had to admit, he couldn't find anything inspiring about it if he was honest with himself and he could not see how this thing would inspire Nazi wannabes. But what Harry didn't like about the painting was just how detailed the fucking thing was, making him wonder if the artist had been trying a bit too much. Harry had seen more inspiring pieces of art after someone had puked on the ground outside a pub.

Harry rewrapped the painting and shoved it in his bag before he put it on a bunk before he examined the skeletons in the room. Again, he focused on things like medals and jewellery, but here he had access to a few old WW2 guns, which should net him a very fine price when it came for him to sell them off.

Once he was positive he had finished with this part of the submarine, he went through the entire ship again to see if there was anything he had missed the first time around. He managed to get hold of a few medals and over pieces of jewellery, and he even found a Japanese military officer who had driven a katana into his chest, but since he didn't know their uniform styles he didn't know and frankly did not care if the Japanese had been army or navy. From the Japanese officer, he got hold of a sheaf of papers which were plans for weapons which reminded Harry of the V2 rockets which the Germans had used to rain death over Britain along with other weapons.

Harry wasn't surprised to find this, somehow anymore than he was surprised to find the Germans had used their own submarine force as a taxi service; with their range and their ability to submerge, it was a logical choice even if the Kriegsmarine had made the Allied forces determined to destroy each and every single stray submarine they found and made such voyages incredibly hazardous even with all their surveillance of the enemy. It wouldn't surprise him if this U-Boat, in particular, was one of many submarines used in this matter or for a different kind of mission in general and had been sunk.

As part of the axis powers, it made sense for the Japanese and the Germans along with the Italians to exchange information, but Harry wondered what the officer had thought of the SS officer. And he also wondered how the U-Boat crew felt about the newcomers.

No matter. Harry searched the Japanese officer, coming away with not just the papers and the plans, but also the katana which was rusty, but not too badly corroded. Harry found the sheath and slid the sword into it before putting it into the bag. Harry looked around the submarine again before deciding he'd been down here long enough.

Walking back to the control room, Harry pulled out one of the bombs he'd prepared specially for this little trip. He was just about to climb up the ladder to the conning tower of the U-Boat and plant the bomb in the hatch wheel. He reflected that he could have placed the bomb at any of the other submarine hatches, but he also reflected that he had always wanted to swim out of a conning tower of a submarine. He just hadn't expected to do so in this manner. Harry had just reached the top of the conning tower when he felt the entire U-Boat shake.

"What was that?" He asked out aloud.

There was another shake. Spooked by the shaking and curious about what was causing it, Harry went back down the ladder until he found himself back in the control room. When he got there, he was surprised when he heard the sounds of footsteps further down the submarine and the sounds of whispering voices caught his attention. He was so surprised that other people had come into the U-Boat like he had he was rooted to the ground, wondering why he was no longer alone.