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
“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
“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.
