Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [184]
“The surest way to encourage somebody to dream up some wierd plot like this would be for even the slightest trace of a hint to leak out, suggesting that we have been talking about this or that I might be concerned.”
Hughes was, of course, concerned. Yet even as he sat naked on his unmade bed compiling a catalog of the dangers outside his closed world, he continued just as feverishly to plan his escape from the dangers within.
By now he had a vast array of getaway vehicles on stand-by. Chartered jet planes under special guard at remote airfields. Private railroad cars pulling in to obscure junctions. Yachts being appraised at distant ports. Mobile homes being outfitted for cross-country travel. Whole fleets of unmarked cars and limousines and customized vans waiting for his “go” signal.
Train schedules and flight-condition reports, weather reports and road maps littered his bedroom.
And his loyal Mormons stood on alert, packed to go ever since Hughes first decided to make his escape.
But the billionaire would not, could not budge.
August 1970. Howard Hughes lay sprawled on his bed watching the eleven-o’clock news when the utter and complete desperation of his sorry situation suddenly crystallized on the TV screen. Hit him as it never had before.
Almost a year had passed since Hughes first planned his big getaway, month after month of frantic stop-and-go preparations, but at last he was actually ready to escape Nevada and set off for paradise—Paradise Island, in the Bahamas.
Not one, but two entire floors in two different hotels were reserved, sealed, under guard, and awaiting his arrival. Hughes was, in fact, about to close a deal to buy the whole enchanted island.
But now, late on the evening of Friday, August 7, right there on his television, came the shocking news. Nerve gas! Sixty-six tons of lethal nerve gas, one-ninth of the Pentagon’s entire poisonous stockpile, 12,500 decomposing old M-55 rockets encased in concrete “coffins,” all being loaded onto trains at army depots in Kentucky and Alabama, hoisted by derricks into open freight cars guarded by soldiers wearing gas masks, trains headed for U.S. Navy ships in North Carolina, ships that would carry the thousands of leaking canisters south and dump the entire deadly cargo into the Atlantic Ocean, sink it all right off the coast of the Bahamas—just 150 miles from Paradise Island.
Hughes watched the incredible spectacle in stunned horror. What he saw was beyond his worst paranoid vision.
Tons of GB and VX gas—the same gas that had killed the sheep!—gas so lethal that a few pounds could kill thousands in minutes, gas so deadly that one-ten-thousandth of an ounce could destroy the central nervous system, simply dissolve the enzymes that transmit nerve impulses, leave a man twitching horribly and choking for air until he just stopped breathing and died, all that gas was right now headed straight for his secret safe haven.
The one place fit for his exile was about to be irrevocably poisoned by another invisible plague. A plague fully as terrifying as atomic radiation, indeed somehow even more insidious, more threatening to a man obsessed with the purity of fluids.
Hughes grabbed his bedside legal pad and scrawled an urgent allpoints bulletin to all his key aides and executives.
“Bob—
“Chester—
“Roy—
“George—
“John—
“& Bill Gay in Los Angeles
“I want this to be an all, all out effort beyond anything we have ever mounted before on anything, and putting aside all considerations of expense,” he wrote, mobilizing his Mormons and their leader, Bill Gay, calling in his chief counsel, Chester Davis, no longer willing to rely on Maheu alone, Maheu who had failed him on the bomb.
“I want you to hire one of those Washington or N.Y. public relations firms that specializes in single difficult emergency political problems such as this, …” Hughes continued, mapping out his antigas campaign.
“I want every available avenue of effort to be pursued, but I think the