The Courier: A Ryan Kealey Thriller (2 page)

Captain Largo Kealey did not want to be here. At the same time, there was nowhere else he wanted to be other than running Operation Blackbird, named for the color and insignia of the target.

He had already done the groundwork at Anklam, followed the trail here. Done some interrogating at the perimeter of the facility—rough, ugly, but necessary. It had been an exhausting haul, and the Florida native needed a long rest.

Not long as in
permanent,
Lord
, he thought, in case God was listening.
Just a couple of months, sir
.

It was nearly dusk as Kealey, having picked his way through high grasses, his radio on his back, crouched behind a concrete bunker. Inside the aboveground structure was a pair of Germans doing exactly what he was doing: looking out to the sea through two narrow, pane-less slits in the concrete. The Germans were watching to see if the RAF appeared from across the Channel just as the stubble-jawed Marine watched for the
Luftwaffe
. By six p.m., if there was no air support making a test-run fly-over, he would send the simple code “Doughboy” to his liaison in the town proper and then leave. If he saw enemy fighters coming after the vessel, he would send the code “Broadsword” and then leave. In the first case, the mission would proceed in roughly thirty-six hours in a surgical formation, increasing the chance of hitting the target. If the latter, fighters would have to be dedicated to battle the German planes, leaving fewer to strike at the objective.

Two of those planes had been earmarked as “Stopgap 1” and “Stopgap 2.” It meant that if the bombing run looked like it was going to fail, they were to kamikaze the target like Japanese flyboys. It was
that
important. Compared to them, Captain Kealey’s escape plans were like a day at the beach. His survival, his wife’s status as “married” instead of “widowed,” depended on the two young men in the bunker—one an
Unteroffizier
, a corporal, the other a
Mannschaft
, a junior enlisted man
—
doing their primary job so well that they were unaware of him, which meant reporting on the incoming planes; it also depended on the German soldiers of the 266th Infantry opting to safeguard the harbor
at
the harbor, as they usually did, and not take up positions on this overlook, as they occasionally did. If they came up the road behind him, saw him with the radio, that was where he would die.

The sun was just vanishing into the blackness to his right. He got as comfortable as he dared here. He had chosen the spot so the glow from the radio would not be seen below, by spotters in the harbor. He had memorized the route back since he would have to negotiate it in the dark. Escape should be easier than his belly-crawling approach. If this place was to be where he made his final stand, this mission his last, at least it was a responsibility that validated him and the life he had chosen.

A life? Largo Kealey was just twenty-two and it had only been three years since war broke out in Europe and he joined the French Foreign Legion. He returned after Pearl Harbor and enlisted in the Marine Corps. Because of his reconnaissance work behind the lines in Poland and Austria, he was sent to the Recruit Depot on Parris Island, South Carolina, for two months as an assistant training officer. After that he was shipped to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, to join the Twenty-third Marines, where he attended parachute school. That had always been his ambition since watching the gulls swoop and glide off Key Largo: to fly, not in a cigar tube but on wings.

Because his mother’s side was Cajun, Kealey spoke French. That, his experience in Europe, and his flawless jump record brought him to the attention of the nascent Office of Strategic Services. The OSS had been formed to coordinate Allied activity behind enemy lines—and France, now, was a main target of their activities. Colonel Kent Gailey of the Division of Plans and Policies at OSS contacted Kealey’s superior, seconding him to the Army through COMINCH, the chief of naval operations, commander in chief, U.S. Fleet. In that same communication, Colonel Gailey recommended a promotion to first lieutenant. Kealey got that, and then a bump to captain after a successful stint in Tangier, Morocco, where he worked recruiting informants while serving as assistant naval attaché.

Then came France. He parachuted into the Haute-Savoie region, which was home to more than 3,000 French Resistance fighters who would form the backbone of any diversionary action to distract the Germans whenever D-Day finally arrived. The collaborative effort with American, French, and British spies was code-named UNION and, against all odds, German troops and supply lines were hounded right up until the landings. In mid-June of 1944, Kealey was called to England to prepare for his current mission. That included a crash course in German so he could eavesdrop on the enemy in Anklam—which was actually safer than being in France because he spent the entire time in that German town hiding by the Peene River. Now, he lived with a French baker and made daily deliveries to the occupied port. Hiding in plain sight was the more difficult task by far.

No mission on the planet, perhaps no task in all the war, was more important than this one. The one that rested almost entirely on his shoulders.

And now the day he had been preparing for was here. He refocused his binoculars from the air to the sea. It wasn’t just aircraft he was watching for. It was the vessel that was due to leave the submarine pen that morning. He had been tracking the movements of the presumptive captain since his arrival. It had made sense that the Germans would give their most important assignment to their most decorated U-boat commander.

It was a showdown Kealey had been both looking forward to and dreading. Kealey hoped that the German high command hadn’t done to him what the Allies had done to them: placed one of their top commanders, General George S. Patton, in charge of a fake army to draw attention from the real army being readied for D-Day.

No
, Kealey told himself as the last of the sun glittered red across the water.
It is too late in the war for tricks
.

This was a project the Germans needed to succeed.

Karl Rasp was the man for the job.

 

 

As the Allied armies pushed south and west through France, the men who lived and worked at the U-boat bunker in Brest were working around the clock to evacuate essential materiel, persons, and most important, the boats themselves from the sprawling facility. The Flotilla Secrets Act of 1941 had largely been lifted here after the D-Day landings, allowing crews and engineers from the ten different bays to exchange information, personnel, and equipment as needed to expedite the evacuation of the facility.

However, that did not apply to the personnel working in Pen 10, where the U-246 was berthed. Korvettenkapitän Karl Rasp was about to embark on a mission of Blank 69 importance: nothing about its cargo, schedule, and destination was written. Everything was communicated verbally from the
Abwehr
, German Military Intelligence in Berlin, directly to Korvkpt. Rasp. He told no one but his second-in-command, Oberleutnantzur See Fritz Kuehle; if anything happened to Rasp once they were underway, the new commander would tell his own second, Leutnantzur See Curt Vater. That information was never to go further than the next officer or petty officer in succession. With the crew of forty-five traveled the sole hope for Germany to win the war, but secrecy was the key to the mission. If the men themselves knew what was onboard, some of them might become distracted—even afraid—and there were few things that could frighten men who had seen so much since the vessel was commissioned in October, 1941.

It was shortly after dusk when Rasp took his place on the conning tower, just after Helm, the anti-aircraft gunner, took his position aft of the tower. If the ship were to be attacked, its captain was protected.

His crusher-style cap was pulled low and tight against the damp wind that swept from the sea, its brim tugged low to shield his eyes from the glare of the lights. The brutes were affixed to the underside of the ceiling, which was concrete 6.2 meters thick. The lights shone directly down on the U-boat, stern to stern, with virtually no bleed into the water. The illumination was efficient and it was safe: to strike the target, an aircraft would have to fly directly into the boat’s guns for half a kilometer. No Allied plane could survive that assault, especially if the other U-boats joined in the defense.

Rasp was dressed in a leather jacket for warmth, zippered over his two-piece navy blue uniform. He was squinting through the glare, watching for the arrival of the convoy from Haigerloch. They had taken a route that carried them in a long, looping journey to the south; Berlin did not want them running into advance units from the US VIII and XV Corps, among the few that were pushing south instead of east to Paris. High Command had run the risk of fielding the three trucks without air cover; presumably, Allied spotters and even the occasional aircraft were scouting for trouble spots, and a squadron of Messerschmitts would have attracted their attention.

Rasp hooked back the jacket sleeve and glanced at the illuminated face of his watch. The trucks were due in less than two minutes. The last radio check, from Lorient, had it precisely on time.

That validated the U-boat philosophy
, Rasp reflected.
Travel under the surface and they will learn of you when it is too late.

His gloved hands gripped the iron rail that had been freshly scraped of rust and repainted. He sucked down the clean air, if breaths tinged with sea salt mingled with the heavy odor of diesel fuel could be called fresh. For someone who lived on recycled air, it was close enough. He stood there and thought about the cargo they were to carry. It scared him, too. He and his crew understood ordnance. They knew how to stalk and sink ships. They were experts at transporting fifth columnists and putting them ashore. They were masters at decoy, using themselves as bait to draw destroyers or aircraft into position for counterattack.

But this
—

The officer didn’t see the headlights of the lead truck because they were swallowed in the glare of the overheard arcs. But he heard the rumble of the diesel engines. They stood out among the squeaking of gears and pulleys, the hum of transformers, the whine of drills, the sputtering of screws under the surface, the slap of the water on the hull, noises to which he’d grown accustomed during the three days they had been here. In a U-boat, one’s survival often depended on noticing sounds that were out of the ordinary, from the hiss of a leaking pipe to the hum of an approaching vessel. Though it was the lack of sound that was most unforgettable: the awful silence of every hand, of the shutdown of every unnecessary system, that anticipated the explosion of a depth charge.

The vehicles were all three-ton Opel “Blitz” trucks, painted in camouflage green with matching canvas backs. These were the later versions with tires, not the original, treaded Maultiers meant for rapid movement through field and wood. On this mission, speed was essential, and aerial scouts had determined that the road conditions were satisfactory.

Rasp swung over the ladder and climbed to the deck. He jumped from there to the concrete pier. If the cargo worried him, the importance of the mission was an effective counterbalance. Succeed and the Reich could be saved. Fail—

No
. The reaction was instant, emphatic. But Rasp had never failed. Not in his resolve to join the German navy, not in his determination to be assigned to a U-boat crew, not in his rapid rise from a
Maschinist
, a motorman responsible for maintaining the engines, to an
Electro Obermaschinist
, a chief petty officer who looked after the electric motors and batteries, and then through the officer ranks, nor in sinking more enemy vessels than any other U-boat commander. It had been a rewarding seventeen years. Rasp had his differences with the Reich, though he never articulated them. Hitler had raised Germany from the ruins of the First World War, a war that had cost him his father. Though he was in his thirties, telegraph operators were needed at the front and they had sent that loving man to France shortly after his son’s tenth birthday. He was killed when an artillery shell made a direct hit on his trench. His mother went to work as a typist for the local newspaper, then as a secretary for one of the first offices of the German Workers Party in 1919—the group that evolved into the National Socialist movement. She encouraged her son’s military career, not that he needed the push. She wanted him to avenge his father’s death, to punish the oppressors, to destroy those who sought to twist the German character into something weak and decadent.

The Russians and the British, whom he already disliked. Now the Americans. No, a push had not been required.

The convoy stopped at the inner mouth of Pen 10, just twenty meters from the gently rocking prow of the U-boat. A complement of eight armed guards surrounded the vehicles. Rasp went directly to the second truck. His contact was a civilian, Professor Paul Dammann, who would identify himself with a single word. That word had been radioed to Rasp on the submarine just an hour before from
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
, the Armed Forces High Command in Berlin. It had been given to Professor Dammann when he left. The OKW had also given Rasp one additional instruction.

A slender young man in a white overcoat and black fedora stepped from the back of the truck. He was followed by two brawny soldiers. They lowered a wooden crate from under the canvas and carried it between them. It was about the size of a steamer trunk and was supported by two strong leather handles.

Rasp was the only one standing on the pier, and Dammann went up to him. He examined the chevron of rank on the officer’s cap. Then his pale blue eyes drifted to the brown eyes of the commander.