"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 what 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 delapidated 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 chasin' 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."