As he approached the dark hull, Woolsey nodded to the sentry who, for the first time he could remember, was standing at the base of the gangplank. He tried to will the hands that gripped the crate to look relaxed, yet still hold tight. Just a box of radio equipment, he had told the captain when he left the boat that morning for launch to Hamilton to go to pick it up. A radio with new frequencies the Germans weren’t on to yet. He’d tried to sound like he knew what he was talking about, all the while being vague enough not to arouse suspicion.
“So long as you are back aboard by this afternoon,” Captain Lamoreaux had told him. They were to sail for Panama on the tide that evening. So he’d promised to shake a leg to make it back to the boat in time. Woolsey smiled at the thought. The captain wanted to make certain he returned to the boat. The fool.
The sentry’s jersey was wrinkled and stained with what looked like coffee, and the red pompom on his cap hung loose by a thread. A cigarette dangled from a corner of the man’s mouth. He glanced at the crate Woolsey carried, but he made no move either to question him or to offer assistance.
What was the point of keeping a sentry if the bloke was too lazy to even have a look at a crate of equipment coming aboard? Blithering idiots, the French. They deserved what was coming.
Once on board, Woolsey made his way through the hangar and down one deck to the signal room. He was surprised to discover both the companionways and the radio room were empty. He encountered only one man who opened a door a crack, widened his eyes, then clanged the door shut. The giant sub seemed strangely quiet apart from the constant hum of her generators and fans. Woolsey stepped over the coaming into the cramped compartment, set the crate on the floor and slid the metal door closed behind him.
He leaned against the door for a moment. God, he’d be glad to get away from this stink. Sweat, those damned French cigarettes, and the ever-present smell of diesel fuel combined in a pervasive stench they could no longer wash out of his clothes.
Taking his sailor’s rigging knife from his pocket, he knelt on the deck next to the crate and pried up first one of the wooden slats, then another. The device looked just as lethal as they had told him it would — all tubes and wires on the side of a black box. Carefully, he lifted out the timing pencil detonator and crushed the copper end under the heel of his boot as instructed. This, they’d told him, would release the cupric acid that would then eat through the wire holding back the striker.
“You’ll want to get out of there fast as you can,” the chap had said when he showed him how to arm it. “We design them to go off in twenty-four hours, but explosives are funny, ya’ know? They sometimes have a mind of their own.”
Woolsey hadn’t said so aloud, but he didn’t see how blowing oneself to bloody bits could be considered funny.
Twenty-four hours. He consulted his wristwatch. It was half past four. Assuming they did sail in two hours as the captain had promised, that would still leave plenty of time for the massive sub to get well away from the island and other prying eyes. She would be out where they measured the depth in miles instead of fathoms when she disappeared.
Without him. Woolsey had no intention of being aboard when Surcouf took off on her final voyage.
He tucked everything back in place, not wanting to touch it now any more than he had to. Once he replaced the staves, the crate looked untouched. He stood and folded the blade back into his knife, noticing his palms were wet with sweat. The only one among the French crew who ever ventured in here now was Henri Michaut, their signalman and interpreter, a wiry, scrappy little chap from Normandy. Mullins had nicknamed the man Kewpie because he had a strawberry birthmark on his right cheek in the shape of a heart. Woolsey left a note for Michaut and the two Brits warning them not to touch the crate, that it was fragile radio equipment.
He glanced at the clock on the bulkhead and resisted the urge to grab his gear and race off the boat as fast as he could. If he did, they might not leave port, they might stay to search for him. He needed to get the locked and lead-sealed mailbag from the strongbox and then head up to the bridge to show the Captain the decoded message from London detailing his reassignment. He had prepared it himself the evening before. He’d leave the codebooks behind. They could go down with the boat. But the man who had passed him the mailbag from the Canadian frigate two days out of Bermuda had told him the documents inside that bag had to get to the US as soon as possible. He would deliver them to New Haven, personally, as promised.
He had just started to dial the combination to the strong box when he heard footsteps and shouting outside in the companionway. The door flew open and Ensign Gohin, a huge weight-lifter-type, filled the doorway and waved a pistol in the air.
“Allons, depeche-toi, Anglais.”
“What the bloody hell?”
Henri Michaut squeezed his little ferret-like face into the doorframe. He spoke the best English of any of the crew. Whenever he was excited, the birthmark on his cheek darkened, and at the moment it almost pulsed with color. “Lieutenant Woolsey, you must come with us.”
“What the devil’s going on, Michaut?”
Gohin began babbling in French. He grabbed Woolsey’s arm, jamming the gun against his ribs.
“Lieutenant, please,” Michaut said. “Do as he says.”
The beefy ensign shoved Woolsey ahead, marching him down the narrow passage, barking what Woolsey gathered were insults aimed at his English parentage. One huge hand gripped his shoulder, the other held the gun hard against his side.
Through the deck, Woolsey felt the throb of the sub’s twin Sulzer diesels revving up. It was too early, damn it. The captain had said evening — they couldn’t be leaving yet.
He struggled against the ensign’s iron grip and was rewarded with a stunning blow to the side of his head. Blood filled his right eye, nearly blinding him as he staggered against the bulkhead. Gohin pulled him forward.
Michaut said something to the bigger man. Woolsey sensed the young signalman was arguing on his behalf. When Ensign Gohin replied, it was with words all seamen understood.
He told him to go to hell.
At the sub’s massive cargo hold, Gohin stopped and handed Michaut the Captain’s key ring. Michaut unlocked the padlock and chain that secured the watertight door, and Woolsey caught the frightened look in the young man’s eyes. Once Gohin turned the wheel and released the seal, the door swung inward. Woolsey planted his feet and struggled to wrench his arm away from the big man. His mind was focused on the device he’d left hidden in the signal room. This could not be happening to him.
“Stop! I’ve got orders to get off this ship! Back in the signal room. Wait! You’ve got to get me off this ship. I’m not to sail!”
The opening to the cargo hold yawned like the mouth of a black adder, and the air wafting out smelled of their goddamn rotting cheese.
“Allez!” Gohin shoved him hard into the darkness.
“No!” Woolsey cried out, but he was falling into the black as the steel door slammed shut.
CHAPTER TWO
The island of Guadeloupe
March 25, 2008
10:15 a.m.
Cole Thatcher steered his Boston Whaler dinghy through what passed for surf on the leeward side of the island, cutting his engine and lifting the outboard just before the bow nosed onto the black volcanic sand. He slid over the side and grabbed the line on the bow, then dragged the boat up the beach away from the tug and pull of the waves.
The small, isolated cove was familiar to him. He had been diving a search grid in the area for over two months now. After he peeled off his wet suit and booties, he stood still, leaning his leg against the bow of the boat, feeling the warmth of the late morning sun erase the cold from his naked body. The Caribbean waters were warm enough at the surface, but at the depths where he’d been diving, the chill reached right through the neoprene suit to his bones.