“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.”