Wyatt's Hurricane / Bahama Crisis

by Desmond Bagley

  David Wyatt was a dedicated scientist, unversed in the ways of the world and very young for his years.

  BAHAMA CRISIS

  THE BAHAMA ISLANDS

  To Valerie and David Redhead with much affection

  PROLOGUE

  My name is Tom Mangan and I am a Bahamian—a white Bahamian. This caused some comment when I was up at Cambridge; it is surprising how ill-informed even supposedly educated people can be about my home islands. I was told that I could not be a Bahamian because Bahamians are black; that the Bahamas are in the Caribbean, which they are not; and many confused the Bahamas with Bermuda or even Barbados. For these reasons and because an understanding of the geographical and political nature of the Bahamas is essential to my story it seems to me that I must describe them and also give a brief account of my family involvement.

  The Bahamas are a chain of islands beginning about fifty miles off the coast of Florida and sweeping in an arc 500 miles to the south-east to a similar distance off the coast of Cuba. They consist of 700 islands (called cays locally, and pronounced ‘keys’) and about 2000 lesser rocks. The name is derived from the Spanish baja mar which means ‘shallow sea’.

  I am descended from one of the Loyalists who fought in the American War of Independence. Surprisingly few people are aware that more Americans fought in that war on the side of the British than ever did under the rebel generals, and that the war was lost more by the incompetence of the British than any superiority on the part of George Washington. Be that as it may, the war was lost by the British, and the American nation was born.

  Life in the new United States was not comfortable for the erstwhile Loyalists. Reviled by their compatriots and abandoned by the British, many thought it prudent to leave, the northerners going mostly to Nova Scotia and the southerners to the Bahamas or to the sugar islands in the Caribbean beyond Cuba. So it was that in 1784 John Henry Mangan elected to settle with his family on the island of Abaco in the Bahamas.

  There was not much to Abaco. Shaped something like a boomerang, Great and Little Abaco Islands stretch for about 130 miles surrounded by a cluster of lesser cays. Most of these smaller cays are of coral, but Abaco itself is of limestone and covered with thick, almost impenetrable, tropical bush. Sir Guy Carleton intended to settle 1500 Loyalists on Abaco, but they were a footloose and fractious crowd and not many stayed. By 1788 the total population was about 400, half of whom were black slaves.

  It is not hard to see why Carleton’s project collapsed. Abaco, like the rest of the Bahamian islands, has a thin, infertile soil, a natural drawback which has plagued the Bahamas throughout their history. Many cash crops have been tried—tomatoes, pineapples, sugar, sisal, cotton—but all have failed as the fertility of the soil became exhausted. It is not by chance that three settlements in the Bahamas are called Hard Bargain.

  Still, a man could survive if he did not expect too much; there were fish in the sea, and one could grow enough food for one’s immediate family. Timber was readily available for building, the limestone was easily quarried, and palmetto leaf thatch made a good waterproof roof. John Henry Mangan not only survived but managed to flourish, along with the Sands, the Lowes, the Roberts and other Loyalist families whose names are still common on Abaco today.

  The Mangans are a thin line because, possibly due to a genetic defect, they tend to run to girls like the Dutch royal family. Thus they did not grow like a tree with many branches but in a straight line. I am the last of the male Mangans and, as far as I know, there are no others of that name in the Islands.

  But they survived and prospered. One of my forebears was a ship-builder at Hope Town on Elbow Cay; most of the local ships sailing the Bahamian waters were built on Abaco and the Mangan family built not a few and so became moderately well-to-do. And then there was the wrecking. As the United States grew in power there was much maritime traffic and many ships were wrecked on the Islands of the Shallow Sea. The goods they contained contributed greatly to the wealth of many an island family, the Mangans not excepted. But the great turning point in the family fortunes came with the American Civil War.

  The Confederate south was starved of supplies because of the northern blockade, and cotton rotted on the docks. Any ship putting into Charleston or Wilmington found a ready market for its cargo; quinine costing $10 in Nassau brought in excess of $400 in Charleston, while cotton costing $400 at the dockside was worth $4000 in Liverpool. It was a most profitable, if risky, two-way trade and my great-grandfather saw his opportunity and made the family rich in half a decade.

  It was his son, my grandfather, who moved the family from Abaco to Nassau on New Providence—Nassau being the capital of the Bahamas and the centre of trade. Yet we still own land on Abaco and I have been building there recently.

  If my great-grandfather made the family rich it was my father who made it really wealthy. He became a multimillionaire which accounts for the fact that a Bahamian was educated at Cambridge. Again, it was running an American blockade which provided the profit.

  On 15 January 1920 the United States went dry and, as in the Civil War, the Bahamas became a distribution centre for contraband goods. The Nassau merchants known as the Bay Street Boys, my father among them, soon got busy importing liquor. The profit margin was normally one hundred per cent and the business was totally risk-free; it was cash on the barrel and the actual blockade-running was done by the Americans themselves. It was said that there was so much booze stacked at West End on Grand Bahama that the island tipped by several degrees. And, for a Bahamian, the business was all legal.

  All good things come to an end and the 18th Amendment was repealed by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, but by then my father was sitting pretty and had begun to diversify his interests. He saw with a keen eye that the advent of aircraft was going to have an impact on the tourist industry and would alter its structure. Already Pan-American was pioneering the Miami-Nassau route using Sikorsky seaplanes.

  Bahamian tourism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was confined to the American rich and the fourmonth winter season. An American millionaire would bring his family and perhaps a few friends to spend the whole season on New Providence. This, while being profitable to a few, was of little consequence to the Bahamian economy, millionaires not being all that plentiful. My father took the gamble that aircraft would bring the mass market and invested in hotels. He won his gamble, but died before he knew it, in 1949.

  I was eleven years old when my father died and had as much interest in money and business as any other boy of eleven, which is to say none. My mother told me that a trust fund had been set up for me and my two sisters and that I would come into my inheritance on my twenty-fifth birthday. She then continued to run the family affairs which she was quite capable of doing.

  I went to school in Nassau but spent my holidays on Abaco under the watchful eye of Pete Albury, a black Abaconian whom I thought was old but, in fact, was about thirty at the time. He had worked for the family since he was a boy and looked after our property on Abaco. He had taught me to swim—a non-swimming Bahamian being as common as a wingless bird—and taught me to shoot, and we hunted the wild pig which are common on Abaco. He acted in loco parentis and tanned my hide when he thought I needed it. He stayed in my employ until his death not long ago.

  Those early years were, I think, the most enjoyable of my life. In due course I went to England to study at Cambridge, and found England uncomfortably cold and wet; at least in the Bahamas the rain is warm. I took my degree and then went to the United States for a two-year course in business studies at Harvard to prepare myself for the administration of my inheritance. It was there I met Julie Pascoe who was to become my wife. In 1963 I was back in Nassau where, on my twenty-fifth birthday, there was much signing of documents in a lawyer’s office and I took control of the estate.

  Many things had changed in the Bahamas by then. My father’s hunch had proved correct and the coming of the big jets brought the mass tourist market he had predicted. In
1949, the year he died, 32,000 tourists came to the Islands; in 1963 there were over half a million. It is worth adding that next year the estimated total is over two million. My mother had looked after our interests well, but now she was getting old and a little frail and was glad to relinquish responsibility into my hands. I found that one of the things she had done was to become involved in the development of Grand Bahama. At the time that worried me very much because Grand Bahama was turning sour.

  Wallace Groves was an American who had a dream and that dream was Freeport on the island of Grand Bahama. He persuaded Sir Stafford Sands, then Minister of Finance in the Bahamian Government, to sell him over 200 square miles of government land on Grand Bahama upon which he would build a city—Freeport. His intention, not actually realized in his lifetime, was to create a duty-free area for the benefit of American corporations where they could avoid American taxes. In 1963 the scheme was not working; no immediate enthusiasm was being shown by any corporation anywhere. Groves switched the emphasis to tourism, recreation and residential housing, and twisted Sands’s arm to allow the building of a casino to attract custom.

  Sands was a quintessential Bay Street Boy who could catch a dollar on the fly no matter how fast it went. It was he who was primarily responsible for the vast increase of tourist traffic. Reasoning that the tourist needs much more than mere sun and sand he saw to it that the whole infrastructure of the tourist industry was built and maintained. He acceded to Groves’s request and the casino opened in 1964.

  It was the worst mistake Sands could ever have made. The shadowy figure supervising the running of the casino was Meyer Lansky who used to run casinos in Havana until he was tossed out of Cuba by Castro. Having put out a contract on Castro for $1 million Lansky looked for somewhere else to operate and found Grand Bahama. The gangsters had moved in.

  Politics and economics walk hand in hand, largely revolving around the question of who gets what, and the black Bahamians saw the wealth created by the tourist industry going into the pockets of the white Bay Street Boys who also controlled the House of Assembly and ran the country in the interest of the whites. Something had to give, and in 1967 the largely black Progressive Liberal Party led by Lynden Pindling squeaked into power with a two-seat majority. The following year Pindling unexpectedly held another election and the PLP got in with twenty-nine seats out of the thirty-eight.

  This landslide came about because of the mistake made by Stafford Sands. As soon as Pindling came to power he decided to take a closer look at Freeport and, in particular, the casino. He found that Groves and Lansky were giving kick-backs to Sands and others in the form of dubious ‘consultancy fees’ and that Sands himself was reputed to have taken over $2 million. When this was disclosed all hell broke loose; Sands was discredited and fell, bringing his party down with him.

  But Groves had been right—the casino had brought prosperity to Grand Bahama, and Freeport had boomed and was thriving. There were plans for vast residential developments—great areas were already laid out in streets, complete with sewerage and electricity. The streets even had names; all that was missing were the houses on the building plots.

  But investors were wary. To them a Caribbean revolution had taken place and what would those crazy blacks do next? They ignored the fact that it had been a democratic election and that the composition of the Assembly now compared with the ethnic composition of the Bahamas; they just pulled out and took their money with them and the economy of Grand Bahama collapsed again and is only now recovering.

  And what was I doing while this was going on? I was trying to keep things together by fast footwork and trying not to get my hands too dirty. To tell the truth I voted for Pindling. I could see that the rule of the Bay Street Boys’ oligarchy was an anachronism in a fast changing world and that, unless the black Bahamian was given a share in what was going, there would be a revolution and not a peaceful election.

  And among other things I got married.

  Julie Pascoe was the daughter of an American doctor and lived in Maryland. When I left Harvard we kept up a correspondence. In 1966 she visited the Bahamas with her parents and I took them around the Islands; showing off, I suppose. We married in 1967 and Susan was born in 1969. Karen came along in 1971. The propensity of the Mangans to breed daughters had not failed.

  Although I had been worried about the investments on Grand Bahama, three years ago I decided that an upswing was due. I floated a company, the West End Securities Corporation, a holding company which I control and of which I am President. More importantly I moved my base of operations from Nassau to Freeport, and built a house at Lucaya on Grand Bahama. Nassau is an old town, a little stuffy and set in its ways. Brave new ideas do not sprout in an environment like that so I left for Grand Bahama where Wally Groves’s dream seems about to come true.

  I suppose I could have been pictured as a very lucky man—not worrying where my next dollar was coming from, happily married to a beautiful wife with two fine children, and with a flourishing business. I was a lucky man, and I thought nothing could go wrong until the events I am about to recount took place.

  Where shall I begin? I think with Billy Cunningham who was around when it happened just before the Christmas before last. It was the worst Christmas of my life.

  ONE

  Billy Cunningham was a scion of the Cunningham clan; his father, uncle, brother and assorted cousins jointly owned a fair slice of Texas—they ran beef, drilled for oil, were into shipping, newspapers, radio and television, hotels, supermarkets and other real estate, and owned moderate tracts of downtown Dallas and Houston. The Cunningham Corporation was a power to be reckoned with in Texas, and Prince Billy was in the Bahamas to see what he could see.

  I had first met him at Harvard Business School where, like me, he was being groomed for participation in the family business, and we had kept in touch, meeting at irregular intervals. When he telephoned just before Christmas asking to meet me on my own ground I said, ‘Sure. You’ll be my guest.’

  ‘I want to pick your brains,’ he said. ‘I might have a proposition for you.’

  That sounded interesting. The Cunningham Corporation was the kind of thing I was trying to build West End Securities into, though I had a long way to go. I had a notion that the Cunninghams were in a mind for expansion and Billy was coming to look over the chosen ground. I would rather cooperate than have them as competitors because they were a tough crowd, and I hoped that was what Billy had in mind. We fixed a date.

  I met him at Freeport International Airport where he arrived in a company jet decked in the Cunningham colours. He had not changed much; he was tall, broad-shouldered and blond, with a deep tan and gleaming teeth. The Cunninghams seemed to run to film star good looks, those of them I had met There was nothing about him to indicate he was American, no eccentricity of style which might reasonably be expected of a Texan. Texans are notorious, even in the United States, for their unselfconscious and nostalgic frontier rig. If he ever wore them, then Billy had left his tengallon hat, string tie and high-heeled boots at home, and was dressed in a lightweight suit of obviously English cut. Being a Cunningham he would probably order them casually by the half-dozen from Huntsman of Savile Row.

  ‘How’s the boy?’ he said as we shook hands. ‘I don’t think you’ve met Debbie—this is my little cousin.’

  Deborah Cunningham was as beautiful as the Cunningham menfolk were handsome; a tall, cool blonde. ‘Pleased to meet you, Miss Cunningham.’

  She smiled. ‘Debbie, please.’

  ‘Tell me,’ said Billy. ‘How long is the runway?’

  That was a typical Billy Cunningham question; he had an insatiable curiosity and his questions, while sometimes apparently irrelevant, always had a bearing on his current train of thought. I said, ‘The last time I measured it came to 11,000 feet.’

  ‘Just about handle everything,’ he commented. He turned and watched the Cunningham JetStar take off, then said, ‘Let’s move.’

  I drove them throu
gh Freeport on my way to the Royal Palm Hotel. I was proud of the Royal Palm; for my money it was the best hotel in the Bahamas. Of course, it had been my money that had built it, and I was looking forward to seeing Billy’s reaction. On the way I said, ‘Is this your first time in the Bahamas, Debbie?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mine, too,’ said Billy. That surprised me, and I said so. ‘Just never gotten around to it.’ He twisted in his seat. ‘Which way is Freeport?’

  ‘Right here. You’re in downtown Freeport.’ He grunted in surprise, and I knew why. The spacious streets, lawns and widely separated low-slung buildings were like no other city centre he had seen. ‘It shows what you can do when you build a city from scratch. Twenty years ago this was all scrubland.’

  ‘Oh, look!’ said Debbie. ‘Isn’t that a London bus?’

  I laughed. ‘The genuine article. There seems to be a mystique about those all over the English-speaking world—I’ve seen them at Niagara, too. I think the London Transport Board makes quite a profit out of selling junk buses as farflung tourist attractions.’

  In the foyer of the Royal Palm Billy looked around with an experienced eye. The Cunningham Corporation ran its own hotels and knew how they ticked. He glanced upwards and gave a long, slow whistle. The foyer rose the entire height of the hotel, a clear eight storeys with the bedrooms circling it on mezzanines. ‘Wow!’ he said. ‘Isn’t that a lot of wasted space?’

  I smiled; even the Cunninghams had a lot to learn. ‘It might be in a city hotel, but this is a resort hotel. There’s a difference.’

  Jack Fletcher, the hotel manager, was standing by and I introduced him to the Cunninghams. He booked them in with as few formalities as possible, then said, ‘Here are your room keys—Mr Cunningham, Miss Cunningham.’ He gave Billy another key. ‘Your car’s in the garage.’