-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There *was* one story I watched on PBS way back when the USSR (c.1985, as I recall) was still around.
The 'flagship' for one of the Murmansk convoy runs was a UK 6" CL.
When the convoy left Murmansk to return, the CL had some of it's ballast replaced w/ a Soviet gold payment to the UK.
Not too long after leaving port the CL got into a running firefight w/ some of those big GER DD's that carried 6" guns too.
The CL was sunk & so was the gold.
Deals (for % 'cuts') had to be made w/ a number of govs, incl the USSR, before the project could get started but, in the end, the wreck was found & the gold was recovered.

--------------------------------------------
On Tue, 2/23/16, Greg Chalik <mrg3105@gmail.com> wrote:

 Subject: Re: [TML] Salvage Operations (and Submarines)
 To: xxxxxx@simplelists.com
 Date: Tuesday, February 23, 2016, 1:45 AM

 I often marvel at
 these ''lost gold of the Second World War''
 stories. When USSR made paymeents in gold to the USA, it
 required over a dozen signiatures and a small team to escort
 each payment of 10kg.
 And a sub-load?
 :-)
 Greg C
 On 23/02/2016 7:34 AM,
  <xxxxxx@mail.de>
 wrote:
 Speaking of salvage operations
 and submarines as starship analogies...
  
 I just watched the film Black Sea, starring Jude Law,
 and got me thinking that the plot is ripe for a Traveller
 adaption (apologies if this has been pointed out before). A
 bunch of not-so-young British submarine crewmen are laid off
 by an Evil Firm specialized in salvage operations and in the
 following meeting at a bar, one of them explains that his
 crew located a fabled WWII submarine full of gold (which,
 since in the movie it was sent by Stalin to Hitler,
 necessarily had to be the gold the soviets stole from Spain
 in the civil war, but that is another story). Unfortunately
 the firm could not recover it because a newly-erupting
 military conflict put it in a disputed zone in the Black
 Sea, with the Russian navy patrolling nearby. The crewmen
 manage to get a reasonable investor and get their hands on a
 rusty old bucket of a sub and set to recover the gold
 themselves, never mind that the one with the hint commits
 suicide before they leave.  The investor sends them a
 corporate overseer, who is of course useless, and the crew
 needs to take a group of Russians in because the sub they
 will be getting close to location is Russian. The plot is
 that the Evil Firm has set them up (the investor was an
 actor) so that they will take all the risks and when they
 emerge away from the Russian area, the fleet of the other
 involved country will be waiting to impound everything,
 sharing the profit with the firm. Unfortunately, before that
 can happen tensions between the Russians and the Brits
 explode, the rusty bucket sends them to the bottom,
 etc...
  
 I have absolutely no idea how realistic the submarine
 action of the film was. But substitute starship crew for
 submarine crew, Zhodani or Vargr for Russian, add a bunch of
 Vargr NPCs instead of Russians, locate it in an asteroid
 belt to reproduce the navigation difficulties, and you have
 an instant Traveller salvage adventure with a couple of
 twists.

 --
 Carlos Alós-Ferrer
 Chair of Microeconomics, University of Cologne
 http://www.decisions.uni-koeln.de
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