The Hunt aka 27 (54 page)

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 chasm’ 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.

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 adrenalin 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
t
ime 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 thun
d
erheads, 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 swallowed 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 asun
der 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.

Keegan grabbed Dryman under the arms and dragged him through the water, fighting the wind as the flames lapped across the belly of the shattered plane, hit the gasoline and exploded. Keegan shoved Dryman into the marsh and fell across his body as the craft was totally ripped apart by the explosion. Bits and pieces splashed around them. A ball of fire swirled up into the gale and just as quickly was snuffed out.

Keegan rolled off Dryman, struggled to his knees and cradled him in his arms. There was a deep gash in Dryman’s forehead and his leg was twisted grotesquely.

“H.P.!” he yelled.

Dryman groaned, squinted up through the rain at Keegan.

“Are we alive?” he stammered.

“Just about.”

“How about Loop’s plane?”

“Forget it.”

Dryman smiled, then flinched with pain. “Good landing,” he groaned. “We walked away from it.”

Through the howling wind, Keegan heard an engine groaning, then saw headlights. A truck lurched down a muddy road and stopped at the edge of the marsh. The driver opened the door and leaned out into the rain.

“Anybody alive?” he yelled.

“Yeah, but we can use some help,” Keegan yelled back. He stood up and got Dryman up on one leg. Together they struggled through the marsh toward the truck.

“Man, what a mess,” the driver said, looking at what was left of Loop Garrison’s PT-17.

The clinic was a one-story brick building with two offices, a lab, two examining rooms, a waiting room and two recovery rooms with adjoining bathrooms. Keegan used one of the washrooms to clean up while the doctor, a short, cheerful man named Ben Galloway, worked on Dryman. Keegan stared at himself in the mirror. His clothes were wet and muddy. One knee was torn out of his pants and there was a splash of Dryman’s blood on his shoulder. But he was uninjured except for a few bruises.

He used a towel to wipe off his clothes, tried to straighten up before he went back to the waiting room. The truck driver who had picked him up was gone but there was a tall, lanky man in his late twenties sitting in the room, nervously smoking a cigarette. He looked up as Keegan came back in the room.

“You okay?” he said.

“I’m fine.”

“Never knew anybody to walk away from an airplane crash.”

“I had a good pilot.”

“That him in there?” he asked, jerking a thumb toward the examining room.

Keegan nodded.

“How’s he doing?”

“
I
don’t know.”

“Old Ben’s a good doctor. He’ll be okay. Name’s Tommy Smoot. Wife just had a little baby boy. I was in with her when you came in.”

“Congratulations,” Keegan said, shaking his hand. “I’m Frank.”

“Where you headed?”

“Brunswick. Actually Jekyll Island. You familiar with it?”

“Sure. I work at the shipyard down there.”

“You know anybody with a boat? I need to get out to that island.”

“What, tonight?”

“As soon as possible.”

“How you gonna get to Brunswick?”

“Be damned if I know. I don’t suppose there’s a taxicab anywhere around here?”

Smoot laughed heartily. “A taxicab?
H
ell, I don’t think most folks around here ever even
heard
of a taxicab. Why you goin’ out to Jekyll?”

“I have a very important appointment.”

Smoot thought for a moment, then said, “Well, the rain’s slacked off some, but there’s another storm comin’ in right behind that last one. Look, Doc wants my wife to spend the night here. If it’s real important, I’ll run you down to Brunswick.”

“Mr. Smoot, I guarantee you, it is most important.”

“Well, then, it’s done. Only take us half an hour to get down there. But findin’ a boat, I’ll have to give that some thought.”

Dr. Galloway came out of the office wiping his hands on a striped beach towel. He was a gentle man, gentle in attitude and voice.

“Well, you’re lucky, suh,” he said softly. “The clinic was closed for the holiday but Lucy Ann’s little boy couldn’t wait until tomorrow.”

“I can’t tell you how grateful I am.”

“Why, I’m just glad I was here, Mr. Keegan.”

“We were lucky all the way around,” Keegan said. “Truck happened to see us go down. Dryman in there, got us into a marsh, otherwise we’d have both bought the farm. How is he?”

“Broken ankle. Two broken ribs. Concussion. Ribs didn’t puncture anything. Simple fractures. We got him fixed up just fine. He’ll be a bit sore for a while.”

“Can I talk to him?”

“Yes, suh, but I gave him a sedative. He’ll be passing out soon. Better hurry on in there.”

Keegan entered the small recovery room. Dryman was stretched out under a sheet, his head bound in bandages.

“H.P., can you hear me?” Keegan said, leaning over him. Dryman’s eyes fluttered. “Huh?” he asked dreamily. “It’s me, Keegan. Can you hear me?”

“Why
are
you in China?”

Keegan laughed. “No,” he said. “We’re in Darien, Georgia.”

“Darien, huh.
. .
how far?”

“About fifteen miles from Brunswick. I’ve got a ride down there. You’re going to be okay, pal. Just take it easy. I’ll be back when I finish the job.”

Dryman’s eyes roved crazily in their sockets as he tried to focus.

“Feel great, Kee.”

“Yeah, the doctor gave you a little boost.”

“H’bout th’ plane? We lose th’ plane?”

“You did great. The plane didn’t make it.”

He grimaced. “Aw, shit
. . .
poor ol’ Loop

“Don’t worry about the plane, okay? We’ll get him a new plane. You just take it easy.”

Dryman closed one eye and tried to focus with the other.

“Wha’sa matter w’me?” he asked, his speech getting more slurred with each sentence.

“Broken leg, couple cracked ribs. You’ll be fine, H.P. I’ll be back before you wake up.”

“Won’t groun’ me wi’they?”

“Over my dead body.”

Dryman smiled and focused groggily on Keegan. “Do’n say that
. .

They both laughed.

“I gotta go now, pal,” Keegan said. “Take a nap. I’ll be here when you wake up.”

“Kee

“Yeah?”

…..
careful, ‘kay? Watch y’back door.
.

“You bet.”

“Sorry...”

And he dozed off.

Rain began to pelt Smoot’s two-door Chevy as they reached the outskirts of Brunswick. The only light came from the headlights reflecting off the macadam pavement. Keegan checked the time. It was quarter to seven.

“The only man I know crazy enough to go over to Jekyll on a night like this is Tully Moyes,” Smoot said. “He’s a shrimper, lives out on the marsh. But the road may be underwater.”

“Get me as close as you can to his place and point me,” Keegan said. He reached in his pocket and took out a roll of bills, peeled off three hundred-dollar bills and folded them into the palm of his hand. In the blue light of the lightning, Keegan saw a vast marsh spread before them. A two-story house seemed to be brooding at the edge of the bay off to their right. Beyond it, across the sound, Jekyll Island crouched in the dark. The tide was up and the narrow dirt road leading to the house was begin- fling to flood. The Chevy began to fishtail..

“Let me out here, Tommy. I can walk the rest of the way.

You don’t want to be stuck out here in the marsh with a new baby waiting for you. I can’t thank you enough.”

“Southern hospitality, Frank. God was good to me tonight, I’m just passing it on.”

They shook hands and Keegan pressed the bills into Smoot’s fist. The young man looked down at them and began to shake his head.

“Tommy, believe me, you’ve done a lot of people a great service tonight. The baby’s on me. Thanks.”

He slammed the door and sloughed up the muddy road toward Tully Moyes’s house. It was a rambling shed at the edge of the bay with a wooden walkway from the end of the road to a balcony that surrounded the first floor. Crab traps, fishing nets and loops of heavy ropes hung from the banister. Keegan knocked on the door and it was opened almost immediately by a tall, slender, weather-hardened man with a gray beard and thinning hair. He stared out at Keegan, a drowned rat huddled against the rain.

“Mr. Moyes?” Keegan said. “My name’s Frank Keegan.
I
’m with the U.S. Intelligence Service. Can I talk to you?”

Moyes looked him up and down.

“You’re one hell of a mess, Mr. Keegan,” Moyes said. “Step in. You got some identification?”

“Mr. Moyes, all I’ve got’s the craziest story you ever heard and one hell of a favor to ask.”