The Courier: A Ryan Kealey Thriller Read online

  Also by Andrew Britton

  The Operative

  The Exile

  The Invisible

  The Assassin

  The American

  THE COURIER

  ANDREW BRITTON

  PINNACLE BOOKS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by Andrew Britton

  Title Page

  PROLOGUE - ALTONA, GERMANY, 1915

  BREST, FRANCE, 1944

  CHAPTER 1 - DAHLGREN, VIRGINIA, 2013

  CHAPTER 2 - WASHINGTON, D.C.

  CHAPTER 3 - BERGEN, NORWAY

  CHAPTER 4 - RABAT, MOROCCO

  CHAPTER 5 - WASHINGTON, D.C.

  CHAPTER 6 - TEHRAN, IRAN

  CHAPTER 7 - SALÉ, MOROCCO

  CHAPTER 8 - DAHLGREN, VIRGINIA

  CHAPTER 9 - SALÉ, MOROCCO

  CHAPTER 10 - FÈS, MOROCCO

  CHAPTER 11 - FÈS, MOROCCO

  CHAPTER 12 - FÈS, MOROCCO

  CHAPTER 13 - FÈS, MOROCCO

  CHAPTER 14 - FÈS, MOROCCO

  CHAPTER 15 - WASHINGTON, D.C.

  CHAPTER 16 - SOUK EL ARBA DU GHARB, MOROCCO

  CHAPTER 17 - MOULAY BOUSELHAM, MOROCCO

  CHAPTER 18 - TANGIER, MOROCCO

  CHAPTER 19 - ALGARVE REGION, PORTUGAL

  CHAPTER 20 - TANGIER, MOROCCO

  CHAPTER 21 - TANGIER, MOROCCO

  CHAPTER 22 - TANGIER, MOROCCO

  CHAPTER 23 - TANGIER, MOROCCO

  CHAPTER 24 - NATIONAL HARBOR, MARYLAND

  CHAPTER 25 - TEHRAN, IRAN

  THE OPERATIVE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Copyright Page

  PROLOGUE

  ALTONA, GERMANY, 1915

  When 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 corres
pondence 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.

  BREST, FRANCE, 1944

  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 presumpti
ve 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.