“This year there are thirty-eight or thirty-nine plus guests,” she said. “It’ll be a zoo.”
“I would really have fit in well,” said Keegan. “Walking around in my knickers swatting golf balls.”
She looked at him slyly.
“You could flirt with the ladies.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“There’s one, Lady Penelope Traynor. She’d catch your eye.”
“What’s her father do, supply gold to the treasury?”
“He’s a journalist. She travels with him everywhere. If he weren’t so old I’d suspect incest.”
“You really are bitchy at times, Vannie.”
“I know,” she said with a laugh. “Anyway, you wouldn’t have a chance with her, she’s found a beau.” She arched her eyebrows and looked down her nose at Keegan, “John Ward Allenbee, the Third.”
“The Third, no less.”
“They make a grand couple, a union conceived in boredom. That cocktail party the other night cured me forever. It was so boring it was sinful.”
“I thought they were old friends of yours.”
“She is. . . well, not an old friend. She and her father have been going down to the island for years. Usually as guests of Grant Peabody. Everybody coddles old Willoughby because of that column he writes in the newspaper. She’s quite a dish, but a very cold dish.”
“What’s her old man’s name?”
“Willoughby. Sir Colin Willoughby.”
He went to the sink and washed off his hands.
“Hell, I know them,” he said. “Met them once.. . my God, it would have been the summer of ‘34. Longchamp racetrack, I think. Her husband was a soldier.. . no, he was a test pilot. Got killed.”
“That’s right, she’s a widow. Well anyway, it just isn’t like the old days.”
“The old days? You just turned thirty, my dear, how old can the days be?”
“Oh, you know what I mean. The old gang was fun. You would have liked them. From the time I was six until I was sixteen, it was a wonderful trip. We went for Thanksgiving and came back at Easter. Had our own little schoolhouse, our own teachers. Nobody was ever in a hurry. Everybody was friendly and got along. Oh, they used to have silly little spats. I remember once, Uncle Billy and Vincent got in this awful argument because Vincent parked his yacht in front of the Vanderbilt place and spoiled the view. Silly stuff like that.”
“Uh huh.”
“You know, Vannie, I keep forgetting how stinking rich you are.
“Look who’s talking!”
“No, I’m talking about rich-rich. The Astors, the Vanderbilts, those guys own the part of the world with the grass. And your old man’s one of them. How many of these rich guys were in the ‘old gang’ as you put it?”
“Well, let’s see, there was Cornelius Lee, Mr. Morgan. .
“J. P. Morgan?”
“Junior,” she nodded.
“Jesus! How about King Midas, did he drop by?”
She giggled. “No, but there were the Goodyears, Ed Gould, Jr., Charlie Maurice, the Rockefellers, Mr. Jim Hill . .
“Plus these royal social climbers. Lady Penelope and Whatsisname the Third.”
“Hardly social climbers, my dear. Willoughby’s a Knight, Kee.”
“Hell, half the plumbers in England are Knights,” Keegan said.
“Well, I will say they were both incorrigible name-droppers. And the new fiancé isn’t much better.”
“Really? What kind of names does he drop?”
“How about the Prince of Wales.”
“You mean Edward, the one that quit?”
“Yes.”
“How does one go about dropping the name of the former King of England?”
“We were admiring his cigarette lighter and he casually pointed out that it was a gift from the prince.”
“What kind of lighters does Prince Edward give out as gifts?” Keegan asked, sticking his hands back into the stuffing.
“Gold, of course.”
“What else? I’d like to know—just in case I do Eddie a favor.”
“It was a Dunhill, I think,” Vannie said. “Yes. That’s right. A Dunhill. With a wolf’s head on the top. It was really quite. .
Keegan couldn’t hear her anymore. His heart was pounding too loud.
“Listen,” he said, his voice demanding, his expression intense. “This guy with the lighter, does he have three scars on the side of his face?”
“Three scars?” She stared into space for a long time, trying to picture him. “He has a beard,” she said. “I couldn’t tell. Kee, what’s gotten into you?”
“Jesus! This old gang you were talking about that used to go down to Jekyll, how many were there Vannie? Exactly?”
“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 wh
at 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 dilapidated 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 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 Hunt Page 55