“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 more, 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 site 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 Schlussel 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 adding three to the first number, subtracting three from the second, adding three to the third and subtracting three from 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.