“The U-boat is already in place,” said Willoughby. “The coded message you will send to the U-boat is in this envelope. It is in the Drei cipher. Not even I know what it is.”
He handed the envelope to Allenbee who tapped it against his cheek for a moment or two.
“And when do we do this?”
“The private train leaves in ten days. The trip down takes five. The timing is perfect. Poland is ours. France is in turmoil. The British have four divisions in France along the western lines. If America is neutralized, France and England will have to sue for peace.”
“That’s an oversimplification.”
“Not at all. The Wehrmacht will be on the coast, ready to invade. And jolly old England will be sitting out there all alone with her bloody pants down . .
“And,” Allenbee said, interrupting him again, “we’ll have the industrial and financial power of America in our hands.”
“Exactly.”
“What made such a good Nazi out of a stuffy old British bastard like you, Willoughby?” Allenbee said in a monotone, his expression still hiding his reaction to the scheme.
Willoughby chuckled. He sat down behind his desk and leaned back in his chair.
“1 interviewed the Führer for the first time in 1927,” he said. “He was nothing then—but I could feel his power. Then I became a disciple of Mein Kampf I’ve worked for Jews for years, been exploited by them for years. The Empire is finished, Allenbee. That faggot, Edward, running off with the American bitch. Canada gone. India will be gone. Just a matter of time. A great empire dead of dry rot and run by gutless ninnies. Need I go on?”
Allenbee slowly shook his head. “And you, Lady Penelope?”
“What has England ever done for me?” she said coldly.
He lit another cigar. “What’s my cover?”
“Why, you and Penelope are betrothed, old boy,” Willoughby said with an almost mischievous grin. “We’ll announce it here at a cocktail party two nights before we leave, that way there won’t be time for anyone to check on your background, if they so desire, which I doubt. We’ll be going down in Andrew Gahagan’s private car. There w11 be twelve private cars on the train. I’ll write the first story about the coming nuptials—parental pride and all that. If someone in the press begins to look too carefully into your background, it will be too late. We’ll be off to Georgia.”
“And what’s our story?” he asked Lady Penelope.
“I met you on our last trip to the Orient,” she said. “We fell in love in Hong Kong and you followed me back. All very romantic.”
“They’ll welcome you with open arms,” said Willoughby. “I’ve always written lovely stories about the place so they coddle me. You’ll find that the very rich are just as vain as anyone else, perhaps more so.”
“Tell me more about the plan. I don’t need lectures on human nature.”
“Quite. The island’s contained, only two miles wide at its broadest and about five miles long. The cottages are all in a nice, tight little cluster around the clubhouse less than a hundred yards from the docking facilities for their yachts—plenty deep enough to bring our sub in and take thirty people aboard.”
“1 thought you said twenty-seven.”
“Well, there’s you and me and Penny, we’ll have to leave. I will act as the negotiator.”
“Okay.” He stared at the smaller map for a while. “So there will be twenty-seven millionaires, their wives and guests, is that it?”
“Actually thirty-two. When we conceived this plot, twenty- seven regulars and their guests went down to the island every year. Since then the players have changed a bit.”
“And we take twenty-seven of them?”
“The list is right here,” Willoughby said. “We can take our pick. But it is my understanding that thirty is the limit.”
Twenty-seven picked up the list and perused it.
“How spread out is this compound?”
“Perhaps three city blocks square. But everyone will be in the dining room at precisely eighteen-thirty hours for dinner that evening. It’s the big meal of the year and by club rule everyone must eat dinner in the clubhouse.”
“How many total at dinner?”
Willoughby rustled through the papers in a file folder and separated one sheet from the rest.
“Here is the roster of all the members and their guests. Thirty-two members; their wives, children, nannies and secretaries total one hundred and twelve. In addition, there will be a total of thirty-three guests. That comes to a hundred and forty-five people eating dinner.”
“At eighteen tables?”
“No. Nannies, secretaries and the smaller children eat in the staff dining room. It’s adjacent to the main room right here.” Willoughby pointed to the smaller room on the plans. “Actually the dining room has twelve tables seating eight.”
“So now we have two dining rooms to worry about.”
“But connected.”
“How about security?”
“Just walkabout guards at night, to prevent anyone from coming ashore and stealing from them.”
“How many?”
“Three.”
“Staff?”
Willoughby opened a file folder and sorted through a half dozen sheets of paper, lifting one out.
“Kitchen staff, seven; waiters, twenty . .
“Twenty!”
“One for every two tables.”
“Exorbitant, aren’t they.”
“Quite. These men are used to getting things their own way.”
“That too will change,” Allenbee said with a smile.
Willoughby went on. “Kitchen and waiters, twenty-seven; security guards, three; two radio operators, a switchboard operator and the resident engineer. The teaching staff, maids, caddies, clean-up people, all leave on a six o’clock boat to the mainland.”
“That’s thirty-four, not counting the rich boys.”
“That sounds right.”
“145 and 34, that’s 179 people.”
“Yes, but all you have to do is radio the submarine if everything is clear and keep order until it gets there.”
Allenbee laughed. “That’s naïve thinking.”
“Naïve?” Willoughby was insulted.
“There are radios and telephones on this island. They have to be taken out. There are three security men. They have to be taken out. There will be a hundred and fifty people or so in the dining room, not counting anybody who might be sick and staying home that night. We’ll have to cover a hundred and fifty people until the U-boat patrol arrives to help us.”
“I, uh. . . am not too good at.
“I’ll tell you what to do,” Allenbee snapped. “This is my operation, we will do it my way. You two will do exactly as I tell you. is that clear?”
“That’s why you were picked for the job, Swan. You . .
“It’s Allenbee, damn it! My name is Allenbee. Swan does not exist!”
“Of course, of course,” Willoughby stammered. “It was a silly error. I won’t make the mistake again.”
“See that you don’t. I don’t want this whole thing to go down the drain because of some stupid blunder like that.”
“I said I’m sorry. It will not happen again.”
“So,” Allenbee said, stepping back from the map and staring at it with his hands across his chest. “We must single-handedly lay siege to an entire island and hold almost one hundred and fifty people hostage until the U-boat arrives.”
“We can’t take a chance on bringing anyone else into the plan,” Penelope said. “Since the beginning our biggest fear has been a possible breach of security. At this moment only six people know about this. The three of us, Vierhaus, Adolf Hitler and by now, the boat commander. If we bring in more people, the chances for failure will increase.”
“Failure?” Allenbee said brusquely. “It’s not going to fail! I’ve been waiting six years for this mission. I will kill anyone who jeopardizes it, anyone who gets in my way—and that
includes you two. Is that clear?”
“Perfectly,” she said.
“I will remind you, sir,” Willoughby said, “that this was my scheme. If it were not for me, you wouldn’t be invited to the island in the first place .
“And I’ll remind you, sir, that if I must I will get on the island and carry out this operation without you and your damned invitation.”
Allenbee continued to stare at the material on the table and the map on the wall.
“There will be two changes in the plan. In your plan. First, we will kill one of our millionaires before we leave .
“What!”
“We’ll select one of them, important but not crucial, and kill him. That way they will know we mean business. Second, ultimately we will divide these men into twos and put them on our U-boats. We will then advise Mr. Roosevelt that every time the British sink a German submarine, they could be killing two American millionaires. And every time two die, we will inform them. That’s the way to play this game, Sir Colin.”
He turned to Penelope.
“So, what do we do about a ring, my darling?”
Willoughby reached into his vest pocket, took out a small black box and snapped it open. A blue diamond, half the size of a marble, gleamed on a bed of velvet.
“This should be appropriate. Two carats, perfect cut. Straight out of Tiffany’s tray.”
“How much did I spend for this?”
“A mere thirty thousand.”
Allenbee finally smiled.
He took Penelope’s hand, slid the ring on her finger, then pulled her to him and kissed her roughly on the mouth. As they separated, he said with a grin, “To a glorious future together, my darling.”
Allenbee sat on a fallen tree on the north beach of Jekyll Island, peering through his binoculars, scanning the island a half mile to the north. It had been a balmy day but the wind was beginning to shift from the southeast and the air was getting crisper. The weather report was encouraging. A northeaster was moving in and by the next day the storm would hit, providing a moonless, rainy night for the lift.
He and Penelope had ridden the two miles to the north end on horseback; now she sat at his feet in the sand with a map spread out before her. There were several notations on the map, little things Allenbee wanted to remember. Although navigating the sound that separated St. Simons and Jekyll was the U-boat commander’s problem, Allenbee wanted to check everything.
Old Captain Horace Mackelwain, master of one of the yachts that had stopped en route to Palm Beach to drop off a couple of passengers, had explained the island’s peculiarities to them over dinner the night they arrived; how the channel that coursed through the sound between the islands was ninety feet deep and curved around the inland side of Jekyll into a wide bay, providing easy access for yachts like the Vanderbilts’ Alva and J. P. Morgan’s Corsair III how perfect the island was situated because even in a storm the channel was relatively calm and easy to maneuver; how the St. Simons lighthouse was a perfect landfall when entering the basin.
Allenbee swept the glasses to his right and checked out the lighthouse, then swung them back to the bay.
“How about the Coast Guard station?” Penelope asked, looking at the location on the St. Simons Island map.
“A good two miles up the beach on the ocean side,” Allenbee answered. “They have a small rescue boat, I doubt they’ll be out in stormy seas unless somebody’s in trouble.”
He lowered the glasses and continued to casually study the sound. He smiled to himself.
“A piece of cake,” he said. “The whole run won’t take more than an hour and we can ride the bad weather halfway to the Bahamas.”
Allenbee had been nervous ever since making contact with Willoughby and Penelope two weeks earlier. There had been the cocktail party to introduce him to the bluebloods and a full week of packing and waiting around before the train left. But once the long private train had pulled out of Grand Central Station, Allenbee had relaxed. He could not imagine a safer place to be than on a millionaire’s private Pullman car traveling south to the most isolated private playground in the world.
The trip had been a revelation, an introduction to a pampered world of self-indulgent wealth beyond his imagination. The private Pullman cars were a marvel of utilization. Every square inch seemed to be used up. Crammed into a sixty-five- foot car were a parlor, kitchen, dining room, two staterooms, a private bedroom and three toilets. Each car was unique. Tiffany glass fans and windows, chandeliers and candelabras, custom made Pintsch compressed oil lamps, a homage to earlier days, were common, as were electric fans since smoke and cinders from the engine made open windows hazardous and uncomfortable. The twelve private cars on the train had one thing in common—indulgent elegance.
Allenbee had used the train trip to familiarize himself with his wealthy victims. In the afternoons or after dinner in the evening he sat with them as they sipped Jameson’s Irish whiskey, Old Crow or John Dewar’s Extra Special scotch, smoked their Overland cigars, and subtly matched egos, each one casually trying to top the other.
Isolationism and profits dominated conversations. The talk was about impending war and the need for America to stay out of it. It quickly became obvious to Allenbee that most of these men wanted the U.S. to remain neutral. Allenbee listened, studying these men who mastered the country’s industry and finance. Fortunes—or greater fortunes—could be made by supplying the contestants on both sides without actively becoming involved in the wars now raging in both China and Europe.
On the last night, they were the guests of Grant Peabody, a Massachusetts industrialist who manufactured ball bearings and had the most opulent dining car on the train. It was mirrored, draped in scarlet with satinwood trim, had a crystal chandelier, gilded sconces, gold candelabras and Louis XIV furniture. Fresh flowers were provided at every stop. The meal was a connoisseur’s delight: a choice of oysters or terrapin soup, venison, pheasant or grilled salmon, several kinds of vegetables, Piper-Heidsieck Brut and G. H. Mumm extra dry champagnes, along with a variety of fresh berries for desert.
Throughout the meal, Allenbee quietly imagined how this pampered and self-indulgent millionaire would deal with the danger, the heat, the discomfort, the odors, the cramped quarters and rancid food of a U-boat on patrol.
Each night during the five-day trip, Allenbee—and he was Allenbee now, immediately entrenched in his new identity— Penelope and Sir Colin gathered in Willoughby’s stateroom to discuss the individual millionaires and revise the list of the twenty-seven men they would kidnap.
Now, sitting on the beach, he was savoring the mission, the power of knowing that the fate of America’s wealthiest men was literally in the palm of his hand.
Penelope suddenly shuddered.
“Are you getting cold?” Allenbee asked.
She shook her head. “I was just thinking about the submarine. It terrifies me.”
“Don’t worry about it. Leiger’s the best skipper in the whole Unterseeboot command.”
“I tend to be a bit claustrophobic.”
“Well, you’d better get over it by tomorrow night,” he responded brusquely.
Since they had arrived three days earlier, he and Penelope had been the talk of the island. Like true lovers, they wandered around the small residential compound, arm in arm, smiling, amiable, whispering to each other as lovers do, except their whispers were hardly the stuff of lovers. Allenbee had observed every facet of life on this secluded isle, revising every phase of their operation to conform to layout, temperament and time.
They had located the radio room, the phone exchange, the gun room, where most of the hunting weapons were displayed in locked glass cabinets. They studied the access to the dock, distances from one place to another, and the idiosyncrasies of the individuals. The previous night they had charted the route of the three guards, who were unarmed.
Allenbee leaned over and stared down at the map. They had walked off the various distances from place to place. The yacht do
ck, which was empty now, was two hundred yards from the clubhouse dining room. The radio room was a hundred yards beyond the clubhouse adjacent to the indoor tennis courts. The guards spent most of their time on the dock, making a sweep around the cottages, the Sans Souci apartments and the clubhouse, once an hour.
He would make his move after 6:30 when everyone was in the dining room. He had to take out the three guards and the radio operator, destroy the radio and the phone switchboard, and be back to seize the dining room by 7:30, when the U-boat was supposed to dock. Then he would hold everyone at bay until the U-boat patrol came ashore to help load the hostages aboard. He could not count on Willoughby or the woman for anything except to get the kitchen help, children and servants into the main dining room at precisely 7:30.
He looked at his watch. At ten, the radio operator would close down his station for the night. He would have to break into the radio shack and radio the U-boat:
“One, seven... the ghost has ris en.”
Decoded: U-17. . . all clear for 19:30 tomorrow.
At one A.M., Keegan and Vanessa were in his kitchen making dressing for the Thanksgiving turkey. He stood over a wooden chopping block, dicing celery. Vanessa was sitting on the counter behind him, massaging his back with her feet. They had decided to cook dinner for Marilyn and her husband and Dryman, who had decided to spend his separation furlough in Keegan’s guest room.
“1 had to give up my plane, but I don’t have to give up the bar and the Rolls-Royce yet” is how he had put it.
“You’re sure this can’t wait until morning?” Vanessa asked.
“This is an old family recipe,” Keegan answered. “It has to bubble all night.” He plunged his hands into the bready mixture and began kneading it. “I promise you, the meal I cook tomorrow will make the chef on Jekyll Island look like a dishwasher. You’ll be glad you stayed here.”
“I’m already glad I stayed here.” She wrapped her arms around his shoulders.
“A fine time to get cozy,” he said, holding up his sticky hands. He twisted his head around and kissed her. “You’re sure you don’t miss the old days?”
The Hunt Page 54