The Hunt

“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