Night Over Water - Ken Follett [91]
He put the postcard in the pocket of his uniform jacket and turned away.
“So you’ll do it?” Luther said anxiously.
Eddie turned back and gave him a cold stare. He held Luther’s eyes for a long moment, then walked away without speaking.
He was acting tough but in truth he was floored. Why were they doing this? At one point he had speculated that the Germans wanted to steal a Boeing 314 to copy it, but that far-fetched theory was now washed out completely, for the Germans would want to steal the plane in Europe, not Maine.
The fact that they were so precise about the location at which they wanted the Clipper to come down was a clue. It suggested there would be a boat waiting there. But what for? Did Luther want to smuggle something or somebody into the United States—a suitcase full of opium, a bazooka, a Communist agitator or a Nazi spy? The person or thing would have to be pretty damned important to be worth all this trouble.
At least he knew why they had picked on him. If you wanted to bring the Clipper down, the engineer was your man. The navigator could not do it, nor could the radio operator, and a pilot would need the cooperation of his copilot; but an engineer, all on his own, could stop the engines.
Luther must have got a list of Clipper engineers out of Pan American. That would not be too difficult: someone could have broken into the offices one night, or just bribed a secretary. Why Eddie? For some reason Luther decided on this particular flight, and got hold of the roster. Then he asked himself how to make Eddie Deakin cooperate, and came up with the answer: kidnap his wife.
It would break Eddie’s heart to help these gangsters. He hated crooks. Too greedy to live like regular people and too lazy to earn a buck, they cheated and stole from hardworking citizens and lived high on the hog. While others broke their backs plowing and reaping, or worked eighteen hours a day to build up a business, or dug for coal under the ground or sweated all day in a steelworks, the gangsters went around in fancy suits and big cars and did nothing but bully people and beat them up and scare them to death. The electric chair was too good for them.
His father had felt the same. He remembered what Pop had said about bullies at school: “Those guys are mean, all right, but they ain’t smart.” Tom Luther was mean, but was he smart? “It’s tough to fight those guys, but it ain’t so hard to fool ’em,” Pop had said. But Tom Luther would not be easy to fool. He had thought up an elaborate plan, and so far it seemed to be working perfectly.
Eddie would have done almost anything for a chance to fool Luther. But Luther had Carol-Ann. Anything Eddie did to foul up Luther’s scheme might lead them to hurt her. He could not fight them or fool them: he just had to try to do what they wanted.
Seething with frustration, he left the harbor and crossed the single road that led through the village of Foynes.
The air terminal was a former inn with a central yard. Since the village had become an important flying-boat airport, the building had been almost entirely taken over by Pan American; although there was still a bar, called Mrs. Walsh’s pub, in a small room with its own street door. Eddie went upstairs to the operations room, where Captain Marvin Baker and First Officer Johnny Dott were in conference with the Pan American station chief. Here, amid the coffee cups and ashtrays and the piles of radio messages and weather reports, they would take the final decision whether to make the long transatlantic crossing.
The crucial factor was the strength of the wind. The westward trip was a constant battle against the prevailing wind. Pilots would change altitude constantly in a search for the most favorable conditions, a game known as “hunting the wind.” The lightest winds were generally found at lower altitudes, but below a certain point the