by Dick Francis
As a committed fly-through prospect the satellite picture of Odin was soul-shrink daunting. Did I really intend to fly with Kris into the center of that?
I had brought with me by habit my small accurate camera, but even given the best lens in the world, I was not going to see any satellite’s-eye view. The circling top of a great hurricane, where the winds were coldest, rose to maybe fifty or sixty thousand feet. Kris and I, without oxygen, couldn’t go much higher than ten thousand: and we would fly into the quiet central hub, read and note the air pressure there, ditto the wind speeds in the eye wall. and fly out on the other side to make our way back to the home field. For most of the way, might we not be buffeted about in rain cloud? But we would be traveling faster than the wind.
How the hell, I thought privately, did one find the eye? How was I supposed to navigate? I’d had no rehearsals. Who would give me a quick course in hurricane dead reckoning? Who would distract me from the word “dead”?
Why did I, all the same, want to do that flight more than anything else?
The Weather Channel went on chattering in civilized tones about the downward march of millibars. those useful measurements of low air pressure and forthcoming disaster.
The television screen in the Ford house looked out from a clearly expensive wall fitment, and Amy. Michael and I sat around in lush armchairs glancing occasionally at the image of the wide white swirling mass while they told me that historically Grand Cayman had suffered few major direct hits. but that of course there was always a first time. Their blithe voices, though, said they didn’t believe it.
I’d heard jockeys describe the atmosphere in the changing room before they’d gone out to partner half a ton of horse in the Grand National Steeplechase over the biggest, most demanding jumps in the sport. They were going into break-neck paraplegic country, and they did it for love. I’d wondered why they felt compelled: and in the Fords’ clean bright wealthy sitting room. I found I knew.
During the several idle hours before Robin and Kris reappeared. I learned among other things that in the United States Amy had owned, managed and sold a string of video rental stores, while Michael had equipped gymnasiums and collected membership money.
They were both proud of their achievements. also proud of each other, and in those areas talked freely.
I learned that neither Amy nor Michael were themselves licensed pilots. though Amy had been taking instruction before she sold her aircraft to Robin.
“Why did you sell it to Robin?” I asked Amy without pressure, more as time-filling chitchat than as a purposeful inquiry.
Michael made a damping movement of his hand as if urging caution, but Amy answered limpidly, “He wanted it. He made a good offer, so I agreed.” She finished her tall glass of orange mixture. “If you want to know why he bought it, you’ll have to ask him.”
Robin and Kris came back at that moment in good spirits, so I did ask him straight out, lightly, there and then, as if it were merely again a conversational opening without purpose.
Robin blinked, paused, smiled, and in the same misleading way answered, “Amy wouldn’t want me to tell you that she could buy a diamond necklace if she sold me her airplane.”
“And more besides.” Michael heartily said, relieved.
I smiled warmly. They were all capable liars. Amy gave Kris a tall glass tinkling with ice and I told him neutrally, “Mine has rum in it:”
He was halfway up to a manic high, but nonalcoholic, as usual. He looked piercingly at the almost full glass standing beside me on a small table, then he tasted his own, set it down, and with sizzling enthusiasm told me the news.
“It’s a terrific plane. Two engines. I had an instructor put me through its paces. Passed with O.K. O.K., Robin’s happy. Everyone’s happy. Mind you, most people think amateurs should stay strictly away from storms, but they’ll take account of what we’ll measure, even if we don’t have a fully equipped flying laboratory ...”
“When are we going?” I asked.
Everyone looked at the Weather Channel’s update. Odin by that moment had dropped another couple of frightening millibars and had moved one minute northwest. A bright-mannered elderly studio visitor with—I guessed—a payoff from the tourist trade rejoiced that Odin was circling over water and doing no harm to holiday makers or people vacationing ashore. Kris looked at me cynically and shrugged, as in circling over a warm sea Odin was strengthening all the time.
“Tomorrow morning,” Kris said. “Oh-eight hundred. Eight o’clock. Before it gets too hot.”
Michael and Amy insisted on having Robin, Kris and me all stay overnight in their house. They gave us unending drinks, more rather than less alcoholic. to Kris’s embarrassment, and Michael grilled steaks on a brick-built barbecue with a flourish of proprietorial strength inside a shiny vinyl apron.
Kris and I were given small tasks to do, like folding napkins and filling a tub with ice cubes; small tasks that kept us close to Amy’s side. It became somehow understood that neither of us should wander away, and with Robin’s alarm system in mind. I stayed where my hosts wanted. It felt to me a shade like luxurious imprisonment. but I had little money and no good excuse for insisting on a hotel instead.
Michael, besides, though on the surface all friendly. a genial cook. had also, I slowly realized. an agility with all those muscles that spoke of combat rather than the exercise machines he had dealt in.
Odin on the television moved slowly. dangerously, northwest.
Amy, pleasantly, with my help, laying plates at a dining table in an insect-screened porch near the barbecue, exclaimed suddenly to the rest of us, “How good-looking Kris is! And you too, of course Perry. Does the BBC choose the forecasters for their ultra-attractive faces?”
Kris grinned. “All the time.”
I was used to the way Kris looked, but it was true, I knew, that at one time he’d clung onto his job in the aftermath of one of his more outrageous statements only because of the swoon factor in women viewers. Unusually, though, for such a handsome person, he was equally liked by men, and that, I thought, lay somewhere in his manic-depressive spectrum, from which he offered a friendship that could be wildly scatty but had no sex in it. His reliance on me was in the nature of an expedition leader being certain that whatever the catastrophe, he could absolutely rely on base camp being there for him.
He brought zany lightheartedness to that strange evening in Cayman, but he refused Robin’s request for a repeat recital of the Cape Canaveral verses: asked why not, he replied that the genesis of the verses had lain in depression and should stay there.
I watched Robin thoughtfully contemplate Kris. Robin had got himself more than a good amateur pilot, he’d got a British national celebrity, and I wondered if in his so-far-unexplained planning, this celebrity factor had been intentional or unforeseen.
By six-thirty the next morning, Odin had been firmly declared a Category 4 hurricane, traveling northwest at less than seven miles an hour.
Straight ahead, if it continued on that path, it would in a day or two smash into the house of Michael and Amy, blowing away its opulence, sweeping through the bright little room with a hundred tons of sand-heavy water.
Kris came to stand beside me, watching the deadly drama on the screen and being pleased at the sharp definition of the eye.
“Come on then,” he said. “we might as well go.” His eyes shone like a child’s ready for a party. “We’re not the only people flying,” he added. “And I’d better file a flight plan.”
We went back to the airfield in the orange pickup truck, with directions from Amy, and among a surprising number of light aircraft standing in a separated area designated “general aviation,” Kris singled out and patted approvingly the twin-engine propeller-driven Piper that Robin had bought.
“Why don’t you sit in this little beauty while I go and file the flight plan?” Kris suggested. “I won’t be long.”
“How about a map?” I asked.
He fiddled about unlocki
ng the door with his back to me and after a while turned and said, “What we really need is a direction to Odin’s eye, not a regular map.”
“Can they give you that direction from here?”
“They sure can.”
He more or less trotted off eagerly, leaving me behind.
He and I, I thought, had been friends for years and I’d seen him through enough suicidally bad times to know when he was avoiding telling me the truth. That morning in Cayman’s airport, he wouldn’t meet my eyes.
He came back from the offices waving a sheet of paper, which he thrust into my hands for me to read while he went through his external checks. Those checks, for that aircraft, only semi-familiar to Kris. were in stapled sections of instructions, a small heap of them lying on the captain’s seat. Kris checked the exterior of the airplane with the appropriate section of instructions in hand to refer to, and I read the flight information sheet he’d filed with the Air Traffic Service.
Most of it was to me double Dutch. When he’d finished the external checks, I asked him what was meant by the addresses given for instance as MWCRZTZX and MKJK-ZOZYX.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said.
“I’m not going unless you tell me.”
He stared, astonished, at my mild mutiny. “Well, then,” he said, “the first lot of letters is the address of Grand Cayman Tower, in this airport, and the second is Kingston Airspace, Jamaica, where we’ll find Odin, probably. Satisfied?”
He pointed lower down the form to our “destination airfield,” which was listed as ZZZZ, because we weren’t sure where we were going. “Odin,” he said.
“And how about a map?” I asked. “I’m really not going with you without a map.”
In England he would never have flown anywhere without a map. To set off into the wide Caribbean without one was madness.
“I know where I’m going,” he said mulishly.
“Then you don’t need a navigator.”
“Perry! ”
“A radio map,” I said. “One with Trox Island on it.”
His half-awakened sense of shock came fully alive.
He frowned. He said, “Robin will be livid.”
“Robin’s using us,” I answered him.
“How?” He didn’t want to believe it. “He’s been the tops for us. He’s paying everything for us, don’t forget. He even bought this airplane from Amy.”
I said, “What if he bought himself an aircraft so that he could do what he liked with it? What if he got himself a good amateur pilot, little known in this area, and one, what’s more, who’s an expert meteorologist, who can deal with and understand cyclonic winds?”
“But he’s just an enthusiast,” Kris protested.
I said, “I’ll bet he’s got you to include the island in our flight ... and perhaps it’s ZZZZ on the flight plan... and I’ll bet he persuaded you not to tell me where we’re going.”
“Perry...” He looked shattered, but denied nothing.
“So did he tell you why?” I asked. “Did he tell you what to do on Trox Island if we got there? Did he say why he wasn’t going himself? And, chief of the difficult questions, what is so odd about the destination or the purpose for going there, that it has to be camouflaged in a hurricane?”
4
Kris and I climbed through the rear door of Amy’s/ Robin’s truly terrific little airplane and sat in executive-style seats facing each other across a table. It had been designed originally for ten narrow people with only emergency male toilet facilities, but Amy (I guessed) had rearranged things to two flight-deck seats for pilots, four for passengers in comfort in a cabin and, at the rear, a reasonable privy with a lockable door.
Kris confessed without shame that Robin had indeed persuaded him to leave me out of the flight planning. “Robin was afraid you wouldn’t agree to go to Trox Island,” he said, “but I told him I would persuade you. And of course you will go, won’t you? I can’t do it all without help.”
“What would we be going there for?”
“To report back on the state of the mushrooms.”
“Mushrooms!” I didn’t believe him, and disliked the feeling.
“It’s on the way to Odin,” Kris said, cajoling. “Just a dogleg, and a brief stop.” He was trying to rationalize it. “And of course this super airplane has been fitted by Robin with extra instruments which will register air pressure in millibars and record it on tape from second to second, and wind-speed gauges too. They’re easy for you to operate from your seat. All you do is press buttons to activate the radio altimeter and it calculates everything by itself and displays the air pressure at sea level. I’ll show you.”
“And these special altimeter and wind-speed-measuring instruments are expensive?”
“Very. They were installed with storms in mind, I think, in time for Hurricane Nicky. That’s when Robin bought the airplane from Amy. And as you see, Robin’s put so much money into our trip.” Kris said plaintively. “I sort of had to agree to do what he asked.”
“Why isn’t he going himself?”
“You’re strong, he isn’t.” Kris rethought this and added, “He has an appointment back in Miami that he can’t avoid.”
“And what he wanted,” I suggested, “was for us to go to Trox, while I thought we were heading straight for Odin. because I had no map?”
Kris nodded without embarrassment. “We filled in most of the flight plan yesterday afternoon.”
The secrecy appalled me. but I did very much want to fly through a hurricane, and I was unlikely ever to have another chance. I settled for Trox. with or without lies and mushrooms, as the payment for Odin.
Kris, sensing it, and clearly relieved, pointed to various filled-in spaces on the form. “That’s the probable overall mileage. That’s fuel—we’re taking full tanks. That’s our cruising speed. That’s our flight level. Then, lower down, there’s our endurance, that’s the time we can stay airborne on full tanks. All of those figures allow for a dogleg to the island. Then we circled M. which means maritime because we’re going over water, and the circle round J says we’re carrying life jackets, and F means the life jackets are fluorescent.”
“And are they?” I asked. “And do we in fact have life jackets on board?”
“Perry! Of course we do. You’re so suspicious.”
“No,” I sighed. “Just checking, like you do.”
“Well ...” he hesitated, but pointed again. “To set your mind at rest, that D stands for Dinghy, and we do have one of those too, and it says on this form that it has a cover for shelter, and it’s bright orange, and will accommodate ten people.”
“Where is it?” I asked, and Kris, still slightly hurt, pointed to a wrapped gray bundle occupying one of the passenger seats.
“Robin bought a new one,” Kris said. “He’s made a point of doing everything right. Everyone around us knew he was giving us the best equipment:’
“Bully for him,” I said dryly, but Kris was oblivious to sarcasm.
“Then down near the bottom,” he said, continuing to point at the form, “there’s the color of this airplane, white, and Robin’s name and address as operator, that means owner in this case, and of course my own name as pilot, and my signature, and that’s the lot.”
“Great,” I said, though halfheartedly, with reservations. “But we still need a map.”
Kris surrendered. “All right. All right. We’ll take a bloody map. I’ll go and get one.”
I went with him this time, across the tarmac to a small building set apart from the main passenger areas and into a busy private pilots’ room filled with tables, chairs, a rudimentary cafeteria selling coffee and Danish pastries and eight or nine amateur aviators with strung-up nerves pretending icy calm in face of the cross-hurricane adventure.
Odin in all its terror claimed maximum attention, an update of its position and composition being displayed continuously on a television-type screen. Hurricane Odin. with winds now reported at 155 m.p.h. in the eye wall. had
just about reached Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale. The eye was currently located at 17.0 degrees north, 78.3 degrees west, and was moving northwest at six miles an hour. Pressure in the eye had last been measured at 930 millibars, having dropped from 967 overnight. The eye at present measured eleven miles across.
Two steps at a time, Kris went up the stairs, which apparently led to the desk receiving flight plans and to a kiosk selling small necessities for pathfinding, including topographical and radio maps. Kris bought both. carrying them down like trophies.
While he was gone. one of the other pilots, following Kris with his gaze, said regretfully, “Sad about Bob Farraday, wasn’t it?
I said, “Er ...” and was told Bob Farraday, Amy Ford’s instructor, had been killed in a car crash a month ago. “She sold her plane then, the one you and your friend are flying in. I thought you knew.”
I shook my head: but it explained why she’d sold such a gem.
The consensus among the earnest hurricane hunters all around us put the true direction of the eye at 152 degrees from Grand Cayman’s Owen Roberts airport: but that figure had to be modified by the awkward facts that compass needles didn’t point to true north, and that the cyclonic winds would change the aircraft’s heading from minute to minute. Naturally the whole eye, also, was on the move.
Listening to the knowledgeable chatter of the others, I thought that Kris and I were attempting an impossible task, but Kris himself. bouncing with energy and grinning with joy, simply took me and the maps back to Robin’s Piper and spread the maps out on the table.
“The eye to Odin is there,” he said firmly, drawing in pencil a small circle on the radio map, and, with the dexterity I was used to in him, he worked out, with the aid of a pocket calculator, the heading and speed at which he should travel to reach his target. It was, to do him justice, almost exactly the course he’d been going to fly even if I hadn’t insisted on the maps. He’d written his chosen headings on half a postcard, which at that point he produced with satisfaction from his shirt pocket: and there were other numbers written below the way to the eye, which after a pause he explained.