The Hunt (aka 27)

  "Exactly? Let's see, there was Uncle Joe and . . ."

  "My God, do you have to count them all?"

  She closed her eyes, counting faces in her mind, and shook a hand at him. "Just a minute, just a minute . . . uh, twenty-five . . . twenty-six . . . and old Crane, the toilet man we used to call him. His cottage has all gold fixtures in the bathrooms and . . ."

  "There were twenty-seven of them?"

  "As close as I can remember . . ."

  But Keegan wasn't really interested in the answer. His mind was racing now. Twenty-seven millionaires, he thought. On a remote island off the coast of Georgia.

  "My God, that's it!" Keegan cried out. "That's got to be it. What's his name again?"

  "Who?"

  "The one who's marrying . . ." he stopped again. "Jesus," he said aloud, "they must be in on it, too. They set it up! They're the connection!"

  "Kee . . ."

  "Christ, it was probably Willoughby's idea!"

  "Francis, whatever are you talking about?"

  Twenty-seven of the richest men in America, he said to himself. My God, could that be it?

  He wasn't thinking about their names anymore, he was thinking about associations: steel, railroads, shipping, newspapers, the stock market, oil, automobiles, coal, banking, real estate. You name it, they were there.

  Twenty-seven of the richest, most powerful people in the United States. People who controlled almost every facet of business and banking in the country. Isolated on an island two miles wide and five miles long.

  Twenty-seven!

  Twenty-seven millionaires! Siebenundzwanzig was going to neutralize America—and how better than to take these twenty-seven men and hold them hostage on that island!

  But . . . that wouldn't work. Couldn't. One man could not hold the whole island captive. Stupid notion, he thought.

  Unless he planned to take them off the island. . . .

  He dug out an atlas and found Brunswick, Ga. The island was a mere spot on the map. For the next thirty minutes, Keegan was on the phone. But at one in the morning on the night before a holiday, he could not raise Smith and finally gave up.

  No one else would believe him. He had no credentials.

  And that left him only one choice.

  Dryman had been asleep about fifteen minutes when Keegan burst in the room with Vanessa close behind. He had a mug of black coffee and two aspirin in hand.

  "H.P., it's Keegan. Wake up."

  Dryman was dead to the world. He didn't even groan. Keegan shook him roughly.

  "Dryman!" he yelled. "Reveille!"

  "Huh," the pilot muttered without opening his eyes.

  "Coffee in bed," Vanessa said sweetly.

  Dryman rolled over and peered through one half-open eye.

  "Wha'time'sit?"

  "It's late," Keegan said. "Here, wash these aspirin down with this coffee. You'll feel much better."

  "G‘way. S'a holiday."

  "Listen to me, H.P. Wake up!"

  "Yeah, yeah," he mumbled.

  "Are you awake?"

  "I'm awake."

  "H.P. I know what Twenty-seven means. I know who he is, where he is and what he's going to do."

  Dryman's bleary eyes began to clear. He stared at Keegan.

  "You been in the champagne."

  "You heard me right, pal. He's on Jekyll Island, off the coast of Georgia. He calls himself John Ward Allenbee, the Third.

  "Uh huh. And what's he going to do?"

  "He's going to take the twenty-seven richest men in America hostage."

  "Aw Christ, Kee. That's bullshit. It's one-thirty in the damn morning and you want to pull practical jokes."

  "I couldn't be more serious. You remember me telling you Vannie had been invited on a Thanksgiving trip with a bunch of rich boys?"

  "Yeah."

  "Well, they're not just rich boys! They control shipping, railroads, oil . . . My God, if and when we do go to war, these men will run our war machine. And they're all on one island off the coast of Georgia. Think about it, H.P. They're sitting out in the ocean with no protection and our friend Twenty-seven is right in the middle of them."

  "How did you come up with . . ."

  "Listen, Captain, I can't get Smith. Everybody with any muscle is off for the holidays. The FBI would laugh me off the face of the earth if I told them this. If I call down there, they'll hang up on me. We've got to fly down there."

  "Damn it, Kee, it's all over. We're out of it. You don't even have any credentials. All you've got is this cockamamie story. I'm on furlough and I'll be a civilian in another month. And we ain't got no airplane! Are you forgetting I had to give Delilah back to the Air Corps?"

  "Drink your coffee. It's not over until it's over, pal. We got a plane ride ahead of us."

  "That's a thousand miles down there."

  "About seven-fifty as the crow flies."

  "What're we gonna do, jump off the roof and flap our arms?"

  "We need an airplane."

  "Where are we gonna find an airplane on Thanksgiving Day? And anyway, who's gonna loan us their plane. I don't know anybody who even rents airplanes."

  "C'mon, think. You must know somebody, H.P. . . ."

  The town of Farmingdale was little more than a crossroads on Long Island an hour's drive out Jericho Turnpike. Dryman turned down a dirt road toward a hangar. It was a delapidated arc of wood and corrugated metal patched with rusty signs and it stood in the middle of a sprawling farm. At rest for the winter, its fields boasted only dead cornstalks and dried-up tomato plants which added to the gloomy atmosphere of the place. The wind sock, a tattered cone of parachute silk, flopped lazily in the calm morning air.

  A narrow alleyway had been cut through the fields and leveled off.

  "That's the strip," Dryman said with scorn.

  "How long have you known this guy?" Keegan asked.

  "We flew together for a while. He took the roof off the Officers' Club down in Panama City and they grounded him for life. When his tour was up, he retired."

  "Don't they have any sane pilots in the Air Corps, H.P.?"

  "I heard there was one up at Westover Field but it's only a rumor."

  Barney Garrison was waiting inside the hangar office, huddled between an oil stove and the ruin of a desk. He flashed a winning smile when Dryman and Keegan entered the tiny room.

  "Son-bitch, H.P., never thought I'd see you again."

  "How's it goin', Loop?" Dryman said, giving his lean, freckled, weather-beaten ex-wingman a bear hug and introducing him to Keegan.

  "Can't complain. Do a little farmin', little crop dustin'. I'm doin' okay. Better'n taking a lot of guff from some chicken shit ground officer. I'm surprised you're still playin' soldier boy."

  "I'm on separation furlough. Right after Christmas I'm off for China."

  "You gonna fly with Chennault?"

  Dryman nodded. "You ought to think about it, Loop. Pay's great. They got P-40's. Gonna be a picnic."

  Garrison snorted and shook his head. "Hell, I thought maybe you'd gotten over being crazy by now. China, my ass! Bunch of noodle eaters. Well, come here, take a look at the old lady."

  He walked to a door leading to the main hangar and wiped a round spot in the greasy window with his sleeve.

  "There she is," he said proudly.

  "The old lady" was a blue and yellow PT-17, a single-engine biplane with a homemade canopy built over its double cockpit. It looked like a World War I antique. Keegan stared through the streaked window in stunned silence.

  "You're in luck. I got my dustin' tanks off for the winter, cleaning 'em up. Just tuned the engine. Got all new sparks in'er. She's stripped down to move."

  "What'll she do?"

  "I'd say if you pick up a little tail wind, maybe one-fifty."

  Dryman turned to Keegan with a sullen glare.

  "That's six hours in a drafty cockpit with no heater and the temperature's in the fifties."

  "Close to freezing up there," Garrison threw in
.

  "Any radio?"

  "Nope. Never use one."

  "Intercom?"

  "There's that little tube you can yell back and forth through. Works fine. Where'd you say you were goin'?"

  "Brunswick, Georgia."

  "Where the hell's that?" Garrison asked. He opened a desk drawer and the bottom fell out of it, spilling a dozen wrinkled, oil-stained maps and charts all over the floor.

  "Down near Florida someplace," Dryman said.

  Garrison got down on his hands and knees and started rooting through the maps, finally finding enough of them to piece together the trip.

  "Here it is," he said. "Be damned, they got a little landing strip there. And here's a navy base right down the road from it."

  "We can't fly into a navy base without any radio," Dryman said. "They'll think they're being attacked."

  "In that?" Keegan said, pointing to the biplane.

  "What's the weather like down there?"

  "It's fine until we get down around South Carolina. Then we're gonna start chasin' a rainstorm—or vice versa. It's moving down toward the coast, if you believe the weather bureau."

  "Well," Garrison said quite seriously, "sometimes they get it right. What kind of ceiling you got?"

  "A thousand feet and two miles visibility."

  "That ain't bad."

  "Better than we had in Colorado," Keegan offered.

  "I don't want to talk about Colorado. If God hadn't put that pass where he did, we'd be part of the scenery now." Dryman stopped for a moment and shook his head. "Jesus, Kee, can't we ever go anywhere in good weather?"

  "How about winds?"

  "If the storm keeps tracking the way it is, twenty to thirty miles an hour."

  Garrison chewed on a toothpick and thought for a few moments. He leaned closer to Dryman. "Listen, I ain't got enough insurance on this crate to cover a flat tire. You sure this guy's good for it, I mean if something happens to my plane?"

  "I'll buy you a new plane," Keegan said.

  "And he can do it," Dryman said, nodding.

  "Okay, if you say so, H.P.," Garrison said, although there was still a touch of skepticism in his tone. He stared back at the maps and shrugged.

  "Hell, you might make it," he said. Doubtfully.

  FIFTY-ONE

  When they stopped in Hampton, Virginia, to refuel, Dryman checked the weather. The storm had increased in intensity and was blustering toward the coast. Cape Fear, in the tidewaters of North Carolina, was reporting cloudy skies and intermittent rain. The weather bureau was predicting the storm would hit the northern coast of Georgia about the time they got there.

  "She's blowing in off the sea and heading right down the coast," Dryman said, checking his map. "We'll come in right behind it, if we're lucky."

  "And if we're not?" Keegan asked as they climbed back in the rickety old two-winger.

  "We'll get the living shit kicked out of us," Dryman grumbled.

  Leiger squinted through the eyepiece of the periscope, twisting it slowly, watching the shoreline slide past. Pine and willow trees crowded down to the beaches. Nothing else.

  "It's beautiful country," he said to nobody in particular.

  "Looks warm. Not like home. Lush. It is very lush. Trees grow down to the sea. You know what I was thinking? I was thinking it would be nice to take my wife on a picnic right over there. Just six thousand meters away." He turned to the chief engineer. "Take a look," he said. The engineer looked.

  "Like a forest growing right down to the beach," he said. "Is it always this green?"

  "I don't know," said Leiger.

  Leiger turned to the navigator. "Fritz, what is our position in miles?"

  "Twenty-nine miles south of Jekyll Island, sir."

  Leiger took the scope and swept the horizon. The wind was picking up and it was turning cloudy. There were two shrimp boats a mile off the port bow, bobbing in the churning sea. Then farther out, off starboard, he saw a tanker. A fat, black cat sitting heavy in the water. Loaded with oil and heading out to sea. England bound.

  "Mark," he said.

  "Four thousand meters."

  A sitting duck, Leiger thought. But his orders forbade him from engaging or sinking enemy vessels. He cursed to himself. Leiger looked at his watch. Two-twenty. He had five hours to get into position.

  "Chief, bring her up to fifteen meters, all ahead full. Keep an eye on the 'scope. If you see any planes, go to seventy meters. In these seas they'll never spot us at that depth."

  "Yes sir."

  "We should be at the mouth of the channel with time to spare," Leiger said.

  Allenbee sat in his room going over the list he had drawn up. He had decided he would kill one man—Grant Peabody—as they were leaving. It would be an effective shock to the American nervous system.

  He would start at exactly 6:30, planning to get back to the dining room at 7:25. If the U-boat was on time, he would only have to deal with the impending hysteria in the dining room for five minutes. If they got out of hand, he would kill Peabody immediately. That would straighten them out.

  His adrenaline was pumping hard. He rubbed his hands together and smiled to himself. Three hours. Three hours and he would be on his way home with the richest prize anyone had ever offered the Führer.

  The storm looked like a black wall stretching before them. Thunderheads roiled up to twenty thousand feet, their tops swirling even higher, like smoke pouring from a chimney. Lightning streaked from the flat bottoms of the ominous storm clouds, snapping at the earth through rain-swept skies. As they flew closer to the front, they could see winds beginning to pummel the trees on the ground.

  Keegan looked at the chart in his lap. He was navigating by pilotage, reporting through the speaking tube to Dryman. They had passed over Ossabaw Island and were approaching St. Catherines, thirty miles from their destination. But it would be a hard thirty miles. Wind began to buffet the small plane and rain pelted the homemade canopy over the cockpits.

  Dryman pushed the stick forward, dove down to eight hundred feet to get under the clouds. He had to crab into the wind to keep on course. They had refueled in Charleston so gas was not a problem. He shoved the throttle to the limit to keep up his speed.

  They struggled on, passed over the edge of St. Catherines Island and suddenly were swept inland by the roaring wind.

  "I've flown through some pretty hairy weather in my day, Kee, but this is the first time I ever flew a papier-mâché kite into a gale," Dryman cried into the tube.

  "I have every confidence in you," Keegan answered. "They don't call you H.P. for nothing."

  "After today they might."

  "Just remember I'm behind you all the way."

  "Very funny."

  The wind buffeted the small plane like a leaf in a wind tunnel. At first Dryman just let the plane bob with the wind currents, then the turbulence got worse. The roaring winds, circulating through the thunderheads, burst from the bottom of the clouds and suddenly slammed the plane toward the ground. Dryman fought the controls, got the plane under control, pulled it out of its sudden dive. He leveled off at five hundred feet as the plane rocked and tossed in the sky, almost out of control.

  Then barely discernible over the howling winds, Dryman heard a rending sound. Looking out, he saw the fabric on the wings begin to peel back, ripped by the battering gale. The struts were quivering. A guy wire snapped with a twang and whipped back against the fuselage.

  "Christ, Kee, we're breaking up!" Dryman yelled in the tube. "Find us a clear spot, we're gonna have to go down."

  As he spoke another guy wire pinged loose. One of the struts started breaking loose from the wing. More fabric curled from the wing surface, flapping madly in the roaring winds.

  Keegan searched through wind and mist, looking for a clear place on the ground. They were over the coast highway, a two-lane blacktop with pine trees crowding its narrow shoulders. The road was barren except for a small truck fighting its way through the tempest, its headlights sw
allowed up by the driving rain. To the east was barren marshland and the ocean.

  "I think we got a problem," Dryman yelled.

  The plane suddenly lurched up on one wing and peeled off, its engine growling as it slipped toward the ground. Lightning crackled around them. As Dryman battled to get the plane back under control, the wing strut tore loose and was ripped away in the gale. The wing, held only by one remaining strut and two guy wires, was vibrating wildly. More fabric peeled loose. They were flying almost at treetop level, at the mercy of the howling squall, when the canopy shuddered and gave way. Keegan ducked as it disintegrated into slivers of glass and wood and was whipped away.

  "I got to put'er down," Dryman yelled.

  "Where?!" Keegan demanded.

  "Edge of the marsh!" he yelled back. "Tighten your belt and brace yourself, we're about to lose a wing, too."

  Keegan pulled his seatbelt so tight it cut into his legs. He braced his arms against the control panel as Dryman tried to guide the wildly erratic plane over the trees toward the flat swamp.

  The wheels ripped into the treetops and tore loose. The plane dipped and as it did, the top wing wrenched loose. Struts and wires popped as it gave way and the two wings separated. With one last mighty effort, Dryman hauled the stick back, hoping to straighten the hapless craft out.

  With wheels dangling loose, it skimmed into the tall grass of the marsh. The wheels tore away and the nose plunged into the windswept bog. The right wings tore away and the gas tank, located in the top wing over the cockpit, split. Water, mud and gasoline showered over the plane as it cartwheeled and splintered to a stop upside down.

  Keegan, dazed but unhurt, stared over his head at the soggy earth. He grabbed the side of the plane, popped his belt loose and swung out of the cockpit, landing calf-deep in the murky water. Lightning snapped around them. The engine, torn asunder by the crash and sticking up out of the water, burst into flames with a dull fumpf!

  "H.P.!" Keegan yelled above the raging storm as he sloshed through the bog toward the front of the plane. Dryman was hanging upside down, his foot jammed in the control pedals, his arms hanging straight down. Keegan supported him with his shoulder, reached up and snapped the safety belt loose. The two men fell into the marsh as the flames leaped back across the wet fuselage toward the gas tank.