The Hunt

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 Fuchse, 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.

“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.