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 Fuhrer.
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 time I ever flew a papier- mache 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 thunderheads, 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
“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
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.
