Free Glory Boys by Harry Bingham Page A

once been. And on the other hand, there stood Abe himself; everything he was now, everything he’d ever learned about himself. The two sides struggled for mastery. Neither side won.
    Angrily, treating his controls with uncharacteristic roughness, Abe brought Poll round in a long curve that would bring her back up the coast, five miles out to sea and a mile and a quarter above it. Then holding himself directly in between the Marion coast and the eye of the sun, he circled. The mouth of Okefenokee River, a few miles east of Independence, was marked by a cluster of ragged green islands and the branching tongues of a little delta.
    Still angry, still grim, but always careful, Abe began to study the sea below. At first glance, the ocean seemed littered with vessels of all sizes, ploughing the violet-blue with trails of random foam. Abe watched until the shapes gradually resolved themselves into a pattern. The smaller ones were mostly fishing boats, tracking shoals of fish. Further out to sea, bigger ships were cruising, paralleling the coast. Abe looked at the whole pattern of shipping, but kept the Okefenokee River always in view.
    He didn’t see what he was looking for on that flight, nor any time that day. He felt relieved. The war that had been raging inside him had resolved itself in this way: he had given Hennessey and Brad and all the other figures in his head twenty-four hours exactly. If he found what he was looking for in that time, he’d continue to investigate. But if he didn’t… Waves of relief, of freedom, washed through him at the thought. Abe thought of flying Poll out over the ocean to the islands. The blue ocean with its alternate tints of purple and green, its crests of white, the far horizons, and only the sky above… Abe hoped against hope, that the sea would stay empty.
    When darkness fell, he unrolled his sheepskin sleeping roll on a beach a little way north of Brunswick. An hour before light the next morning, he woke up, walked waist-deep into the sea, where he dunked his head and scrubbed himself clean. Then he returned to shore, dressed and took off. By the time the sun nudged over the horizon, he was in position, lodged invisibly in the glare of dawn.
    He watched the coast, watched the boats, searching for what he knew had to be there.
    Searched, then, with a sinking heart, he saw it.
    Two boats, the size of launches, broke from the green-fringed islands. They could have been fishing boats, only these launches were faster, sharper, lighter, keener. The two boats chugged out to sea, then headed south. Abe, holding his position in the eye of the sun, his stomach churning with a feeling that he couldn’t put into words, turned to follow.

15
    It was 31 May 1926.
    Willard stood, face washed and shoes shined, in Ted Powell’s eighteenth-storey office. The banker was on the telephone and held up a finger, indicating that Willard should neither move nor speak. The call ran on for six minutes before Powell hung up. He stared at Willard.
    ‘It’s eight-thirty,’ he said.
    ‘You said I should come by first thing.’
    ‘We start at eight.’
    ‘Oh.’
    ‘Never mind. Tomorrow. I’ll show you around.’
    Brusque and unfriendly, Powell shot his newest recruit around the premises. Powell never knocked on any door. He just threw them open and snapped out the name of each department or office as he did so. ‘Typing Pool’, ‘Mail Room’, ‘Mr Barker and Mr Grainger, in charge of our trade finance operation’, ‘Legal’, ‘Letters of Credit’, ‘Settlements’, and so on. Powell Lambert occupied four floors of its building. Although Willard saw everything at too great a speed to take it in, he was given the impression of a purposeful, dynamic, dedicated business enterprise. The more routine areas of the bank – the Typing Pool, the bay where the settlement clerks went about their business – were neat but functional. The parts of the bank open to clients or reserved for senior officers were