The Courier: A Ryan Kealey Thriller

 

 

 

 

PINNACLE BOOKS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

Table of Contents

W
hen he was growing up in Altona, Germany, Karl Rasp owned a wooden boat he used to sail on the Elbe. It was a hand-carved replica of a steamer, and it had been given to him on his eighth birthday by his grandmother. He named it
Adelheid
, in her honor, his father having told him that ships were always named for women. Each Sunday, if it wasn’t raining, Karl and his father would go to church, have lunch at a busy café, and walk to the riverbank. There, after attaching the hook-eye at the front of the vessel to a sturdy rope, the boy would watch it surge forward on the current, then twitch from side to side when it could go no farther. While he watched the boat struggle, Karl would listen to his father talk, between thoughtful puffs on his pipe, about dispatches he received at the telegraph office where he worked. This was the part of the ritual Karl loved best. The messages had come from places around the world, many with exotic names like Calcutta and Veracruz, some of which, the elder Rasp assured him, were filled with very dangerous people—just like the evil knights and deceitful lovers in the books they read and the operas his mother played on the piano while singing “arias.” The stories sometimes frightened Karl, but his mother’s voice made him feel safer, as did the confined, cozy embrace of the tiny salon in their small flat right on the border of Hamburg.

After each excursion, Karl would take the boat home and repaint the hull—bright blue with a green stripe along the top—to repair the ravages of the current. Without the paint, the hollow balsa wood would take on water and the vessel would sink. Karl also went to his father’s old atlas and looked up some of those places, determining which of them were connected to the Elbe. From the stories and operas, he learned to be afraid of the Russians and the Britons—and marked carefully on his own hand-drawn maps how they might reach Altona via the river, from the ocean.

Shortly before his tenth birthday, Karl decided it was time to let the
Adelheid
go. He had watched it struggle for nearly two years and it was listing now, ailing. Besides, he wanted a larger boat, one that would sit lower in the water, command the current a little more. He wasn’t sure what kind, but he would find one—perhaps a fireboat with working hoses—and put it on his birthday list. Without telling his father, the short, gangly boy picked at the strands of the cord with a piece of broken bottle he found in the empty lot beside the school he attended. He frayed it in the center so his father would not be tempted to lunge after a strand trailing along the shore. Into the smokestack on top, Karl stuck a rolled, handwritten note that read:
Russians and English: do not come to Germany. I, Karl Rasp, will stop you
.

It was a chilly October morning when the ship set out on its final voyage. With his heart thumping hard in his little chest, Karl watched as the tiny fibers strained and unraveled, like the fair little hairs on his arm in the cold. Then, in a particularly strong current that tugged the boat left, then right, the rope snapped.

“Oh!” he cried, not in loss but in a sudden rush of excitement.

To Karl’s surprise, his father did not run after it. Standing behind the boy in his old wool sweater, his slender shoulders hunched forward against the wind blowing from behind them, he put a firm, restraining hand on his son’s shoulder, expecting that it was Karl who would give chase.

“Father—”

“She craves her freedom,” his father said softly.

“But she is trapped—”

“The river craves her as well, and the river is mightier,” his father said. “Do not grieve. We had a good run with her.”

Karl did not mourn the loss but his own thwarted plans. Now, who would warn the invaders to stay away from their shores? He watched the boat rise and fall and occasionally twist like a weather vane on the rapid waters. The young boy watched until he could see her no longer, and then with a misty rain rising against their necks, they went home.

The next day, on his way to the schoolhouse seven blocks away, Karl walked along the river as always. Only this time his eyes were not on the other children or the automobiles or the horse carts that moved through the cobbled streets. It was on the murky olive-colored waters. Nearly at the school, he saw something that caused him to stop short. His little boat was lying on its side in the shallows, on the rock, more under the water than above it; he had seen the blue and green colors glinting dully in the sun. The rope he’d sawed in two was tangled on a metal projection from a barge parked along the shore: it had snagged the toy boat and dragged the
Adelheid
backward. There was a tiny rent in its hull and water burbled in and out. It reminded him of the ocean liner his parents had been talking about two or three years earlier, the British ship that had collided with an iceberg and went down.

Karl was sad, but only for a moment. His ship was dead, but there was something peaceful, natural, even beautiful about it. The
Adelheid
had ceased to be something belonging to people and was now more of a fish. He mentioned at supper that night what he had seen; his father smiled.

“So! It is still just resting.”

“Yes . . . we need to find a way to free her. Perhaps we can throw stones, sticks.”

“You do not understand,” his father said with a wink at Karl’s mother. “It has changed into something wonderful, like a caterpillar into a butterfly.”

“Father?” Karl asked, confused by that and by his mother’s smile.

“It has become an
Unterseeboot
—a U-boat.”

“A U-boat,” he repeated. The word, the mysterious way his father said it, sounded fascinating and strange; for a moment the boy forgot his loss. “What is a U-boat?”

“It is a ship that sails beneath the water,” the man replied.

“
Beneath
?” the boy said reverently.

His mind immediately conjured a version of the
Adelheid
with a tail and a fin made of metal like a smokestack, with mermaids in the bridge and on deck. But after dinner his father took him to the desk where he wrote his correspondence and, dipping a pen in ink, drew out a cigar-shaped object with stick-figure men inside and an air tube running to the surface of a roughly sketched sea. He added a pump inside, in the back, and explained that from what he had read the boats draw in air, then withdraw the tube and submerge. He sketched a propeller in the back and explained that, like an automobile, it used fuel to drive the U-boat forward.

Karl never thought of the
Adelheid
again.

In all their talks, in all their reading, in all his own studies, in all the classes he had sat through, Karl had never heard of anything like that. Immediately after eating, the young boy went across the hall to Herr Lang, a retired schoolteacher who sometimes helped Karl with mathematics and who owned more than an atlas and a dictionary: he possessed an encyclopedia, an incredible
library
of knowledge. Together, Karl and the old bachelor looked up “U-boats.” There was a little about how the French author Jules Verne inspired engineers with his novel
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea
in 1869, how the first working designs were tested later in the 19th century, and how the U-boats were being deployed to protect Germany from the aggression of the English and the French in the Great War.

Even though Karl had seen troops in the cities and batteries of guns beyond it, the idea of war was foreign and terrifying. But underwater was a world Karl could imagine,
had
imagined, many times. He had been to the two artificial lakes in Hamburg—the
Binnenalster
, the Inner Alster, and the
Außenalster
, the Outer Alster. He had gone many times to the beaches at the North Sea. He had pictured the fish, the whales, the old sunken vessels and skeletal sailors he had read about. The world below excited him, and now he was transfixed by the idea that men could travel under that water. He had seen an airplane once, and the idea of flying had never appealed to him. Humans could not fly, but they could swim. In the air, your machine could malfunction. You could fall. Or someone could shoot you down for sport or out of fear. Only angels flew, not men. But a man could not harpoon a metal whale or snare it with a hook. And if something did happen, you could come to the surface and float on life preservers or you could swim. Undersea, you could go farther than by air. You could travel to those places with strange names, spy on them, even stop those who would seek to hurt you. That would make his father proud and his mother safe!

“But you know,” said Lang, “the sea is a place of mystery. Unlike the empty sky and the void of night with its stars, which we can study with telescopes and record with cameras, we cannot see very far in the water. We do not know what creatures inhabit the depths, what wrecks, what dangers.”

Karl already knew those things, and that made it even more exciting. He knew, at that moment, at that young age, the moment his eyes had settled on the drawing in Herr Lang’s volume, just what kind of larger boat he wanted.