Found: A Matt Royal Mystery (14 page)

“You’re wet,” she said.

“It’s raining.”

“Go change. I’ve got something to show you guys.”

When we came back into the living room, J.D. pointed to the television screen that showed somebody’s right arm and hand. “What’s that?” I asked.

“Katie’s hand. From the picture she texted last night. Look at what’s written on it. Can you make that out?”

I stared at the screen for a moment, studying the hand. “Looks like it says ‘U166.’ Does that mean anything to you?”

“No. I thought you might have an idea.”

“A rock band?”

J.D. laughed. “I don’t think so.”

“How about something to do with your sorority?” asked Jock.

“I doubt it,” said J.D. “If it is connected to the sorority some way, I don’t remember it.”

“That’s not a tattoo,” I said. “Looks like somebody used a Sharpie to write it. Is Katie right-handed?”

“No. I already thought about that. She’s left-handed, so she could have written it herself.”

“It obviously has some meaning to her,” Jock said.

“Apparently so.” said J.D. “But why would she be trying to give me some information that I can’t decipher?”

“Either she thinks it’ll mean something to you or it’s some kind of code,” said Jock. “Maybe it’s only part of a message.”

“But why would she send me only part of a message?” J.D. asked.

“There’s probably more to come,” said Jock. “We’ll just have to wait until she sends you another text.”

“U166,” I said. “What the hell is U166?”

U-166 was rigged for attack and running on the surface, racing at flank speed through the calm waters of the northern Gulf of Mexico, closing in on her target with the intensity of a cheetah going for the kill. The night was dark and hot and the German submarine was running without lights. Her target was blacked out too, no lights showing, but the lookout atop the U-boat’s conning tower had the passenger freighter in sight. She was an American flagged ship, the
Robert E. Lee
, although the U-boat’s captain, Oberleutnant zur See Hans-Günther Kuhlmann, had no way of knowing that. She was a medium-size American ship carrying passengers and cargo, and Kuhlmann didn’t need to know her name.

U-166 was a new boat, launched in 1941. She was a IX C class
Unterseeboot
, one of the infamous U-boats that stalked the seas, killing Allied seamen, and sending millions of tons of seaborne cargo to the bottom. She was two hundred fifty-one feet of steel with a range of thirteen thousand nautical miles. She had left her home port of Lorient, France, on June 17 and was now forty-three days into her first combat patrol under the command of Captain Kuhlmann, a twenty-eight-year-old career naval officer.

Kuhlmann had been tracking his target for several hours, keeping to the depths, viewing the
Robert E. Lee
through his periscope. He could only make four knots while submerged and because of the need to recharge the batteries that propelled his boat while under water, it was necessary to surface more often than the captain thought prudent.

The U-166 had been patrolling the approaches to the Mississippi River, the captain sure that sooner or later a fat target would present itself,
either coming or going from the Port of New Orleans. It had been late in the afternoon when Kuhlmann first sighted the lumbering freighter on the horizon. He quickly ordered the boat onto a course to intercept the target and returned to his place at the periscope. The U-166 was in position an hour later. The target was headed straight toward the U-boat as she approached the mouth of the Mississippi. Easy pickings, Captain Kuhlmann thought.

As the target grew larger in his viewfinder, Kuhlmann saw another ship moving up from astern of the freighter. It was faster than the target and in a few minutes Kuhlmann identified the new ship as a U.S. Navy patrol craft. He quickly checked his book of silhouettes and determined that she was a new type, a sleek warship one hundred seventy-eight feet long with a top speed of twenty knots. She carried four large guns and equipment to launch depth charges from either side and off the stern. She was escorting the merchantman, and Kuhlmann knew that once he fired at the target, the escort would come after him. If he didn’t perform his killing mission with perfection, the depth-charge attack that was sure to follow might prove fatal to his boat and the forty-nine men under his command.

A surface attack with the U-boat’s torpedoes provided the best chance to make the kill, but it also gave the American patrol boat a better chance to find and destroy the submarine. Kuhlmann’s crew was anxious to sink something worthy of their efforts. The boredom of life at sea in a steel tube that spent all day underwater was taking its toll on their morale. They had only sunk three small vessels since they left France. Two of them had been too small to rate a torpedo and Kuhlmann had attacked on the surface, sinking them with gunfire.

The captain checked his position again. He was about forty-five nautical miles south of the entrance to the Mississippi River. The patrol boat had slowed and was now matching the speed of the
Robert E. Lee
, slogging along on her port side. Kuhlmann positioned U-166 so that he would be on the starboard side of the freighter as she came abreast of him. With any luck, he could get his torpedoes away and submerge before the patrol boat recognized the danger and came searching for the attacker.

Time seemed to creep by as the
Robert E. Lee
slowly sailed toward her doom, the patrol boat oblivious to the danger, unaware that a submarine
lurked nearby. Kuhlmann looked at his watch, ten o’clock in the evening. He made a quick notation in his logbook and turned to the young Leutnant zur See sitting at the plotting table. “It won’t be long now, Paulus. We’ll take this one out and head for Texas.”

Leutnant zur See Paulus Graf von Reicheldorf nodded. He was not a submariner. He was a courier for Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, the German intelligence agency. Captain Kuhlmann was the only man aboard the U-boat who knew of his mission. Von Reicheldorf had come aboard shortly before the boat sailed, and his presence on the patrol had not been explained to the crew.

The captain activated his microphone and spoke to the crew. “We’re going after a cargo ship, but she has an armed escort. As soon as we fire the torpedo, we’ll dive and begin evasive maneuvers. We’re going to take some depth charges, but we’ve got a lot of water under us, so we should be fine. We surface in five minutes.”

Reicheldorf was twenty-two years old and had been in the navy since he dropped out of Heidelberg University. He spent his first year as an officer aboard surface ships. He’d inherited the title of Graf, which was the equal to the continental counts or English earls, when his father was killed in the Royal Air Force’s bombing of Hamburg on the evening of May 17, 1940. His mother had also died that night, leaving the young graf with no immediate family.

Admiral Canaris had been friends with the graf’s dead father since they’d first met during their time as naval cadets. Canaris had remained in the navy following the First World War and eventually became head of the Abwehr. Like most of the men and women of that agency, Canaris was not a Nazi. Paulus’s father had never accepted the party either, even though he served it as a diplomat. He saw himself as working for the greater good of his beloved Germany and thought that sooner or later the Nazis would disappear from the earth and sanity would again prevail in German politics.

When the elder graf died, Canaris plucked Paulus from the fleet and installed him in the Abwehr offices, thinking the new duty station would give him a better chance of surviving the war. The young officer worked for the agency for a year, acting essentially as a clerk. He chafed under the
repetitive and boring tasks, and asked the admiral on several occasions to assign him work in the field. He completed some rudimentary courses, learning the basics of the spy trade, and hectored his boss to give him an assignment that would be more meaningful than filing documents sent by real field agents.

On a fine morning in early June in Berlin, when the sun shone over the city not yet destroyed by the incessant bombing of the British and American air forces, the young graf was summoned to the admiral’s office. “Paulus,” the admiral began, “you’ve been after me to send you into the field, and I’ve resisted those efforts.”

Paulus smiled. “I’m aware of that, sir.”

“I brought you into the Abwehr because I wanted to keep you safe. You’ve already sacrificed too much. You lost both your parents to the British bombers, and I wanted to make sure that you survive this madness. You come from a proud family with a long history. I think it necessary for those good names to survive this war. Somebody will have to run Germany after the war.”

“Sir, I understand, but I think my father would want me to fight for the fatherland just as he did. Not spend the war shuffling papers.”

“I agree, Paulus. I’ve put a lot of thought into this and I think your father would be unhappy with me for keeping you here. I’ve decided to send you on a mission.”

Paulus sat back in his chair and drew a deep breath. “Thank you, sir.”

“You have a command of the English language that we need for this mission and, frankly, I don’t have any other agents available that can match that.”

“Am I going to England, sir?”

“America,” said the admiral.

“How?”

“A U-boat will be leaving Lorient, France, in a week, bound for a war patrol in the Gulf of Mexico. The captain’s primary mission is to destroy shipping, but he can take you in close to the Texas coast near Galveston. From there, you’ll be on your own.”

“Texas?”

“Yes. We have a very active ring working in San Antonio, right in the
middle of several important military installations. Your job will be to deliver some documents to them.”

“How will I get from the coast to San Antonio?”

“Ah, my young friend, that is where your own ingenuity comes in. Since we don’t know exactly where the U-boat will be able to safely put you ashore, we can’t arrange a pickup. We don’t want you using a phone to call San Antonio, so you’ll have to make your own way. You’ll be provided with documents making you an American citizen. I don’t think it’ll be that difficult for you to reach San Antonio and make contact with our people there.”

“How far is San Antonio from where I’ll land?”

“About four hundred kilometers, or two hundred fifty American miles.”

“How will I get out when the mission’s finished?”

“Our people in San Antonio have an escape route through Mexico already established. It’s easy to cross the Mexican border into Mexico, but since the war started the Americans have beefed up their border security to the point that we cannot get anybody
into
the United States.”

“How does it work?”

“You’ll be taken across the border and then some Mexicans who sympathize with us will get you to the port of Veracruz. You’ll board a neutral merchant ship and be taken to Spain. We’ll get you home from there.”

“Sounds like a lot of trouble for the delivery of some documents. They must be important.”

“More than you will ever know,” the admiral said.

The operation was well underway. The documents he was to carry to San Antonio were in a waterproof briefcase locked in the U-boat’s safe. They were in code, a simple cypher that depended on page, line, and word number from a specific book to unlock.

He’d been at sea aboard the U-166 for more than six weeks and was anxious to get on with his mission. The documents section of the Abwehr had provided him with a fake identity, the papers establishing him as an American citizen. He had a passport, birth certificate, driver’s license, American money, and a legend, the fabricated story of his life. His documents and money were in a waterproof money belt that he wore at all
times. He did not want to take the chance of a crewman finding them. In a way, the documents for the group in San Antonio were not as critical to hide. Nobody would be able to figure out the code without the key, and Paulus was the only person other than the admiral who knew the name of the book that would unlock the code.

The sub carried a two-man rubber raft that Paulus would paddle ashore. The U-boat would come in as close to the beach as the water’s depth would allow, but there would still be a lot of paddling involved. The plan was for him to land on a deserted section of the shore. A knife thrust would let the air out of the boat and he would bury it behind the dunes, dropping the small shovel into the hole before pushing the sand over it.

Von Reicheldorf would be wearing civilian clothes, and he knew if he was captured and his cover was blown that he would be executed, the penalty meted out to spies.

The two young officers, Kuhlmann and von Reicheldorf, found they had much in common, including a love of Germany and an abhorrence of the Nazis. They kept their anti-party feelings between them. One never knew if a crewmember might report them to the Gestapo over some careless remark. During the long days of the voyage from France, they’d formed a friendship that they thought would outlast the war. If they survived. But they both knew their chances of that were not good.

I was still staring at the hand on my TV screen when J.D. said, “I also talked to Jamison again.”

“Anything new?” I asked.

“I went through all the pictures with him. He identified everybody in them, including the two men who used to have coffee with him and Cracker. Said both died of old age.”

“What about the other people in the pictures?” Jock asked.

“The ones he knows about are all dead. Two of the people had moved away, and he said he didn’t know what happened to them. He assumed they’re dead, too. But I think he was lying again.”

“About what?” I asked.

“He told me that one of the men who showed up in a couple of the pictures had moved to New Jersey back in the early ‘50s, and he didn’t know what happened to him. I’m pretty sure he was lying about that.”