"How fast can you activate Siebenundzwanzig?"
"I am ready to order the U-boat south, mein Führer."
"Who is in command?"
"Captain Fritz Leiger."
"Ah!" Hitler said with raised eyebrows. "The U-17. And Siebenundzwanzig?"
"We are in touch with him through the newspaper ads. We can activate him immediately."
Hitler eyed Vierhaus with suspicion.
"You anticipated my decision, Willie?"
"Not exactly, mein Führer," " Vierhaus said, not wishing to bruise Hitler's fragile ego. "With the war in Europe, I am afraid Leiger may change his plans. Go someplace else. This may be our last opportunity."
Hitler smiled. He put his hands behind his back, slapping the back of one in the palm of the other. "Of course you realize Operation Gespenst will force an open confrontation with the Americans."
"They are supplying the British anyway. All they need is an excuse to get into it. They have just approved eighty-five million dollars for new aircraft, most of which we suspect will go to the Allies. Now is the time, mein Führer. The longer we can delay the Americans, the better."
"Of course, of course, I agree. We have nothing to lose anyway. When will the U-boat be in position?"
"It should take three weeks."
"And when do you plan to carry out the mission?"
"The third week in November. On their Thanksgiving holiday. The timing could not be better."
Hitler smiled. He went back behind his desk, patting his hand rapidly on it and then nodded.
"Gut, Willie. You have done an excellent job and so has Siebenundzwanzig . Activate him immediately. He has waited long enough. And so have we."
The conning tower cut the smooth surface of the sea like a knife and a moment later the U-boat silently surfaced. The captain rapidly climbed the ladder up through the narrow con and, opening the hatch, stepped out into a cool September breeze. Two other officers followed. Below him, two gunners emerged from the deck hatch to man the 8.8-centimeter gun. Nobody made a sound.
The captain peered through his glasses, scanning the black sea ahead of them, keening his ears. In the silence, he heard the deep rumble of engines, barely audible. He strained his eyes. Dimly in the dark, ships began to take shape. He counted them, aware that a hundred yards to his starboard, a second U-boat, the U-22, had surfaced.
"Small convoy," the captain whispered. "I make six ships. No escort yet."
"Shall I signal?" the mate whispered.
"Not yet . . ."
Like many of Germany's U-boat commanders, Fritz Leiger was not a Nazi. A career navy man, he was a militarist with little interest in politics. But like most German military officers, he resented the Versailles treaty for the damage it had done to Germany's pride and economy, so he favored the war against the British and French. He was a short, heavyset Austrian with a thick mustache and a stoic personality. He knew the dangers of U-boat service as well as the stress his crew would suffer before the war was over, so he cultivated few friends among his men. Although he was a fair and compassionate skipper, he felt he could not afford the luxury of comradeship.
In this first month of World War II, there were fifty-two Unterseeboote operating in the North Atlantic, type VIIC U-boats with a crew of forty-four men, a single deck gun, two antiaircraft cannons and five torpedo tubes. Leiger had been one of the first of the U-boat commanders. He had helped to develop the wolf-pack strategy, shadowing convoys and summoning other U-boats which would then launch nighttime surface attacks on British ships carrying aircraft and armaments from America to Great Britain. In twenty-eight days of war, the wolf packs had sunk nineteen British ships. Leiger's sleek, gray shark, the U-17, had accounted for four of these, including the passenger ship Athenia, which had gone down with 1,400 crew and passengers, twenty-eight of them Americans.
Leiger suddenly stopped scanning the darkness and leaned forward. Refocusing his binoculars, he saw what a submariner fears most, the bubbling white water spraying off the bow of a British destroyer as it circled wide in front of the convoy and straightened out. The U-17 was directly in its path.
"Destroyer!" he yelled down into the con. "Prepare to dive."
The warning horn blasted as Leiger and the bosun leaped through the hatchway and dropped down the narrow tube to the command deck of the sub. The bosun pulled the hatch closed behind him and locked it.
"Con clear!" he yelled.
"Take her to thirty meters," the captain ordered. "We can't risk a surface shot. Up periscope."
He had his cap on backward and as the sub leveled off and the periscope rose, he swung it around. The destroyer was in the cross hairs, one thousand meters away and closing fast. He could see her silhouette clearly now as she sliced through the ocean toward them. He swung the scope around and focused on the convoy.
"Mark," he said.
"Six hundred and fifty meters," came the answer.
Leiger hesitated for only a moment before making his decision.
"First?" he said, still peering through the periscope.
"Yes, sir?"
"We'll take the two lead ships. Launch four torpedoes, speed thirty-five, then we'll dive immediately to sixty meters and go under the convoy."
"Under the convoy, sir?" was the mate's surprised answer.
"That's right. The destroyer's closing fast. When we fire, she'll be looking for us on this side of the convoy."
The first mate quickly nodded.
"Yes, sir."
The captain, ignoring the destroyer, fixed the cross hairs on the first ship in the line. Just behind it, partially hidden by the shadow of the first ship, was a second vessel. By plan, the second submarine would take the last two ships in the convoy. Evasion was up to the individual sub.
"Reading?" the captain asked.
"Five hundred meters."
"Mark."
"Mark."
"Down periscope."
The slender tube slid soundlessly below the deck. Leiger looked at his watch, counted soundlessly to himself.
"Fire one."
"Fire one . . . one away."
"Fire two . . ."
He and the mate repeated the ritual until they had launched four torpedoes. Then:
"Take her to sixty meters, First. Ten degrees left. All ahead full."
The U-boat tilted sharply. There was a clatter of falling objects along the length of the narrow vessel as she dove and leveled off. They could hear the steel fish whining through the water. A moment later they heard the first explosion, then the second.
"That's one," Leiger said with a smile. They waited, heard the sound of the third torpedo diminish.
"Missed," the captain said with disappointment. Then the fourth one hit.
A series of explosions echoed through the sea as the boilers in the first ship exploded. Then the second blew up. The U-boat crew held their positions, staring at the steel hull over their heads as if it were a mirror reflecting the surface above them, wondering where the Brit destroyer was.
Then they heard four more torpedoes screaming through the ocean, heard two more explosions.
"Gut!" Leiger said. "U-22 got one of hers."
The thunder of the convoy engines grew louder as the U-17 slid neatly beneath it. The sub was filled with sounds: rumbling engines; tortured steel as the first ship slid beneath the waves; the groaning of steel plates; the sharp twang of them buckling and popping from the pressure of the sea as the shattered ship dropped to the bottom; the dull phoom of depth charges reverberating through the water as the destroyer assaulted the U-22.
Safely on the opposite side of the stricken convoy, Leiger brought the U-17 up to twenty meters and raised the scope. The black sky was afire. Two of the torpedoed ships were still afloat but ablaze and listing. The rest of the convoy was scattering, taking evasive action. Beyond it, in the garish red light, the destroyer was careening through the sea as it launched depth charges from its stern.
They could easily take two mor
e, Leiger thought. Only one destroyer and she's occupied. One of the ships, a tanker, her gunnels almost awash from the weight of her heavy cargo of oil, made a sharp turn and suddenly was a perfect target. Five hundred meters away.
"Is the rear tube loaded?"
"Yes, sir."
"All back two-thirds . . . prepare to launch . . . four hundred meters, mark . . . fire five . . . all ahead full."
He watched the tanker through the periscope, counted the seconds silently to himself, then the torpedo struck. The whole ship seemed to explode in a great, broiling inferno. A few seconds later they heard the explosion and felt the U-boat shake slightly.
"Direct hit amidships!" he cried out and the crew cheered.
"She's an oil tanker, burning to sea level," Leiger continued. "There goes her backbone . . . she's breaking amidships . . . and she's going down. Down periscope, First. Take her to two hundred and seventy degrees, Bosun . . . all ahead full."
An hour later they were safely away from the stricken convoy and its guardian angel. The crew was quiet, dispirited. They had heard nothing from the U-22 and presumed she was sunk.
"Excellent show, gentlemen," the captain told the crew to bring up their spirits. "We'll ride at twenty meters for half an hour and then we can all get some fresh air."
He went back to his cabin. Ten minutes later, the radioman appeared at his door.
"I have a message, Captain."
"Yes?"
"It was from Mother. She kept repeating one word . . . Halloween."
Leiger's expression changed only slightly. He nodded.
"Thank you."
When the radioman departed, Leiger closed and locked his cabin door.
"Damn," he said to himself, opening the safe and removing an official envelope marked Geheim and below it, Gespenst.
"What the hell is this going to be about?" he wondered angrily. He withdrew the orders for this top-secret mission, which he knew simply as "Ghost."
Leiger's eyes narrowed with curiosity and annoyance. He had suddenly been ordered south, out of the killer lanes where the action was and into the clear waters of the southern Atlantic, where the 220-foot-long steel cigar could easily be spotted from the air.
To make matters worse, for the length of this new mission he was under the command of Die Sechs Füchse, an intelligence unit of the Schutzstaffel. Leiger hated the SS and the Gestapo with a passion, as did most military men in Germany. He considered Hitler and his cronies thugs, psychopaths. This professor, Wilhelm Vierhaus, was to him one of the worst. Although they had only met once, Leiger had taken an instant dislike to the crippled intelligence chief, an arrogant man so thirsty for victory that he had lost all sense of honor.
Leiger pored over his charts with a pair of dividers, measuring the distance to his destination, the eastern coast of Grand Bahama Island in the Bahamas. His ship had a surface speed of about seventeen knots, seven underwater, and if necessary could dive comfortably to a depth of 120 meters. They could stay underwater for up to twenty-two hours at a "creep" speed of four knots.
Calculating his distance, Leiger figured if he traveled at maximum surface speed during the night, underwater during the day to avoid detection, and the weather held up, the trip from his position southeast of Greenland to Grand Bahama would take about seventeen days. He had three weeks to make the journey.
"Verdammt!" he said, angry that he had been ordered away from the action for some stupid "intelligence" mission.
In Bromley, New Hampshire, which had less than 2,500 residents, an old man struggled through the lobby of the only hotel in town. His hair was a white wisp, his face prune-wrinkled. His clothes, though neat and clean, were a size too big and sagged on a body obviously shrunken with age. His back was bowed and he wore wire-rimmed glasses. He used a cane to support his right leg, which appeared to have been weakened by a stroke.
"Good morning, Mr. Hempstead," the desk clerk said.
"Hello, Harry," Hempstead answered in a shaky voice. "Any mail today?"
Harry checked the mail slot, knowing it would be empty. Hempstead had been at the hotel for almost a month now. Every day he looked for a letter from his son but in the time he had been at the hotel he had received no mail.
"Sorry," Harry told him.
The old man shuffled out the door, went toward the diner as he always did. On the way, he stopped at a newsstand and picked up The New York Times. As he walked on, 27 felt very proud of himself. The disguise was perfect. The wrinkles on his face hid the three gouges in his cheek. It was unlikely that whoever was after him would look for a seventy-year-old man in southern New Hampshire. He settled in a corner booth of the diner, ordered sausage and rolls and coffee, and turned to the Personals section of the paper.
The code was known as Schlüssel Drei, the Three Code. The base message was a fake, identified by a series of numbers within that message. The actual message was then derived by subtracting three from the first number, adding three to the second, subtracting three from the third and adding three to the fourth. Reading through the personals, he stopped suddenly. His heart began to race. There, in the third column halfway down the page, was the message he had been waiting six years to read.
Charles: Have 8 seats for the show on the 14th. Will meet you at 9 P.M. at the 86th Street station. Elizabeth.
Twenty-seven decoded it as 5, 17, 1800 (6 P.M.) and 89.
5.17.1889—Hitler's birthday.
"My God," he said, smiling to himself, unable to conceal his excitement. "The mission has been activated."
Eighteen days later, in the last week of October, the U-17 slipped around the eastern shore of Grand Bahama Island and found a suitable hiding place among the brush on its eastern tip, hopefully hidden from the prying eyes of U.S. Navy PBYs, which patrolled the entire area. With lookouts liberally posted, Leiger decided to permit his men the luxury of swimming, fresh fish and fruit and eggs, which they could buy on cautious visits to the villages a few miles away. He had been advised that he would have to remain in these waters for almost a month, so his plan was to move every three or four days, waiting until dark, then seeking out a new and sheltered cove or inlet in which to hide.
Leiger was to wait for a relayed signal from a mother ship farther out at sea before opening his second set of sealed orders. But now that he was safely alee on Grand Bahama, he could wait no longer. He locked the door to his cabin, opened the safe, removed the envelope and tore it open.
He read the instructions slowly, drumming his fingers on the desktop as he scanned the orders. When he was finished, he slid the sheaf of papers back in the envelope and returned it to the safe. Only then did he sit back and mentally digest what he had just read.
"Mein Gott, " he said half aloud. A daring plan. Insane really.
And yet . . . it might just work.
FORTY-EIGHT
The drop was a safe deposit box at the Manhattan National Bank to which both 27 and a courier in New York had access. The courier would leave a message in the box which 27 would then pick up and answer the same day, or vice versa.
Twenty-seven had taken a bus to New York and checked into a modest midtown hotel. He decided to stay in character, although he wore a properly fitting suit. He projected the image of a well-to-do seventy-year-old lawyer or banker when he presented himself to the guard at the deposit box safe. His key to the box had been one of his most closely guarded possessions.
"Box 23476," he said.
"Name?"
"Swan." It had been almost six years since he had used that name. This would be the last time.
"Yes, Mr. Swan. Sign the card, please."
He sat in the small cubbyhole provided for box holders and examined the contents of the small steel container. There was a single eleven-by-fourteen brown envelope inside containing a passport, a driver's license, a leather packet of business cards and a birth certificate, all identifying him as John Ward Allenbee III. Born: 1895 in Chicago, Ill.; an import broker with an office in San Francisco.
He opened a hand-printed note that accompanied the documents.
"You are John Ward Allenbee III," it read. "You are a conservative, very proper American import broker, born in Chicago and operating out of San Francisco. You have an office on High Street (cards enclosed) and accounts in two banks with deposits of $20,000 and $30,000, bank books enclosed. You also have an account at the Manhattan National with $50,000 on deposit. You have been traveling all over the world off and on for the past year-and-a-half. Allenbee is quite wealthy, very refined, dresses in the height of fashion. You must sign the enclosed bank signature cards. There is also a new safe deposit box. The key is here and the necessary signature card. Do this upon leaving. This box is no longer active. Get a new passport photo made and leave a copy of it in the new box. If you need a wardrobe you might try Balaban's on Fifty-third near Park. You will be contacted with further details."
Twenty-seven immediately vetoed the idea of leaving a photograph of himself in the box. He would turn it around, order the contact to leave his picture, which he would use to identify the contact. He dropped a note back in the box:
"No photograph. Leave yours. Assignment, please."
He quickly decided that once he learned the nature of the assignment, he would kill the contact. He would not risk being identified by anyone. He signed the new signature card, left it with the guard and went back to the hotel. He took out his makeup box and his blue business suit. He would steam it out in the shower that night.
He removed his makeup and wig and cleaned his face with cold cream, then washed it off and stared at himself in the mirror for several minutes. The bear scars on his face were still quite visible. The scabs were gone; they were now three thin red lines down the right side of his face. Studying that face, he decided what John Allenbee should look like.
Using scissors, he cut his hair back in a sharp widow's peak then, lathering his shaving brush, he began shaving the widow's peak clean. He opened the makeup case and took out black and gray hair dye, spirit gum, material for whiskers and pale blue contact lenses. Then he went to work.
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