by Dick Francis
“I suppose you’d better know.... Well, this figure, this second one, is the magnetic heading from Cayman to Trox Island. The next one is from Trox Island to Odin’s eye, and the fourth one is from the eye back to Cayman. If we go right now, these headings will take us round, you’ll see.”
I stared at him. thinking him halfway to insane. This Piper airplane, though, unlike Kris’s own Cherokee at White Waltham, this luxurious little transport did have all sorts of electronic capabilities. so while Kris did all his remaining checks meticulously, I read the slim instruction booklet on how to navigate by radio transmissions.
The whole enterprise, I reckoned, would degenerate into a jolly little flip far away from Odin. from which calm comer we could return to Grand Cayman safely, thanks to various land-based transmitters called non-directional beacons, or NDBs for short.
I learned much later that low-level navigation over the western Caribbean had once been easy, thanks to three strong directional beacons positioned at Panama, Swan Island and Bimini (in the Bahamas), but that with the advent of the global positioning system used by commercial aircraft, the amateurs’ standbys had been dismantled. Kris and I, the day we set off in blithe ignorance to Trox Island, could have benefited hugely from cross references from beacons at Panama, Swan Island and Bimini.
With Kris’s basic navigating kit containing always a set of plastic measuring pieces. I ruled a straight track line from Grand Cayman to Trox on both maps and. having squeezed the information out of Kris. who was still inclined to look backward to his feeling of obligation and to his new alliance with Robin, wrote in the airspeed, and consequently the time. that should deliver us to Trox.
My arrival time and heading weren’t much different from Kris’s own calculations, and “I told you so,” he said.
I sat back in my chair. “What does Robin want us to do on Trox Island? You keep avoiding any details. He’s spent a lot of money. as you’ve said. but we still don’t know why.”
“He wants you to take photographs.” He—and Robin also—who’d come out of the Ford house in his sleeping pajamas to wave us off in the truck, had checked that I hadn’t forgotten my camera.
“Photographs? What of?”
Kris shifted in his seat. “He just said photographs ... as if you would know what he wanted when you saw it.” But Kris. I knew later, was concocting again.
The enterprise looked less and less sensible to me, but in a stab at normal procedures I suggested we put on the life jackets at that point, leaving them of course uninflated, but ready if necessary.
Kris, having won the bigger battle, meekly strapped himself into the flat orange life vest and ignored it.
Along the row of parked light aircraft two or three were on the move. With a sharp inspection of his watch, and a grumble about a lot of time wasted, Kris climbed forward into the captain’s seat and, looking relieved not to have to answer more questions, finished his pre-takeoff checks by winding his altimeter needle to zero to give the home airfield’s present air pressure, which at sea level read 1002 on the millibar scale. Then he started the engines and asked the tower for permission to taxi.
I put on headphones. like Kris, and from the co-pilot’s seat, asked for permission for takeoff.
Permission was granted laconically, the tower on the whole preferring only authorized military aircraft to chase a hurricane’s eye. Kris, though, with determination and skill roared down the runway, soared out over water, and steered straight for Odin.
My surprise lasted about as far as the line-of-sight horizon from Grand Cayman. and then with the ground’s attention on the next plane after us, and the next after that, Kris altered course abruptly and headed instead for the mushrooms of Trox.
Kris was busy with hands on switches, and when everything had settled I found that we were no longer in radio contact with anyone, as the pilot had systematically turned the tuning dials to indicate out-of-area frequencies. We were, as no doubt he and Robin had planned, alone in the wide sky: and the wide sky was developing rough gusty patches, even though the outer edges of the hurricane lay by forecast a long way ahead.
Through the headsets which we both still wore, Kris said, “Flight time to Trox should now be twenty minutes, but the winds are stronger than I planned for. Start looking ahead in ten minutes. Robin said the island’s sometimes difficult to see.”
I said I thought our radio silence was madness. Kris merely grinned.
Ten minutes passed, and twenty. The wave crests multiplied over the gray water below us. the cloud shreds were thickening and the aircraft bumped heavily in increasingly unstable air.
No island. No small insignificant guano-covered rock. I re-did all the navigational calculations, and they put us still on course.
Trox Island, when to my vast relief it at last appeared visibly on our starboard bow, looked at first only like a straighter, longer, white-breaking wave crest. I shook Kris’s arm and pointed ahead and downwards, and saw the unacknowledged anxiety clear in a flash from his forehead.
He grinned again, vindicated. He lowered the aircraft from two thousand feet down to a few hundred, circling the narrow strip of dark-looking land carefully so as not to lose sight of it in the increasing cloud. He’d been told by Robin of the existence of the landing strip, but, look as we might. neither Kris nor I could distinguish it until he made an almost despairing pass across the narrowest width of land at no higher than three hundred feet, and again, as all my attention was looking for it, it was I who first spotted the indistinct flat roadlike line along the center length of the otherwise rocky strip. The runway, disconcertingly, was greenish-gray, not tarmac, and was made of flattened, consolidated earth, overgrown with grass.
Kris, seeing the rudimentary strip also, swung closely round and flew the whole length of it at barely more than a hundred feet off the ground, but neither to his eyes nor mine were there any rocks or any other obstructions along its length.
“Robin swore we could land here.” Kris’s voice through the headphones sounded more brave than convinced.
I thought that Robin hadn’t taken the fierce crosswind into account. Had Robin ever landed on the strip himself at all? Robin wasn’t a flier. But then, nor was I ... but I did at least understand wind.
Hands gripping the control yoke, Kris with tension in his whole body increased the engines’ power to near maximum and flew round the island again, gaining height and coming in finally to land from the other end of the runway, still in a crosswind but at least this time with a passable on-the-nose component.
Fighting the gusts, Kris forgot to lower the wheels—his Cherokee at White Waltham had a fixed undercarriage—and he looked horrified for all of five seconds while I pointed silently at the three lights that should have been green, but weren’t. Three green lights, I’d once read in a flying book, meant that all three landing wheels were down and locked in the landing position.
“God,” Kris shouted, “I’ve forgotten the downwind checks ... I’ve fargotten them all ... Brakes off, undercarriage down, fuel mixture rich, propellers fully fine...” His busy fingers set everything right ... all, I guessed, except his self-respect. “Harness buckled, hatches closed and locked, autopilot disengaged, as if I’d engaged the bloody thing in the first place, hold on. Perry, hold on, here we go ...”
He made, in the circumstances, a commendably adequate landing; and I’d been in some commercial tooth-rattlers that had shaken one’s spine a great deal worse.
“Sorry,” he said, which was unlike him. He stretched his fingers, loosening the muscles. “I forgot those bloody checks!” He sounded tragedy-stricken. “How could I?”
“We got down. Stop fussing,” I said. “What do we do next?”
“Um ...” In an absentminded trance he could think of nothing but his oversights.
I tried again. “Kris, we landed safely, didn’t we? So here we are, safe.”
“Well ... yes. Have you looked at the altimeter?”
I hadn’t, but I did then
. The millibar scale still read 1002, but the needle gave our altitude at sea level as minus 360 feet. When Kris wound the needle again to zero, the millibars had dropped to 990, and he gazed at this result as if mesmerized.
“Well, we’re not staying here at the end of the runway forever, are we?” I asked. “So how about snapping out of it? There’s Odin, don’t forget.”
His awareness seemed to click at once back to normal and as if I were stupid to ask. he said. “We flew over some buildings when we came into land, didn’t you notice? So that’s obviously the place to start.”
He turned the airplane and taxied back the length of the grass-grown strip, ending on the edge of what looked like a small model village consisting of three or four white-painted wooden houses, several long low sheds fashioned from hemispherical corrugated iron, a tiny church with a spire and two large solid-looking concrete huts.
“Robin said the mushrooms grow in the corrugated iron sheds,” Kris announced, jumping down to the ground, “so we’d better take a look.”
Unexpectedly, there were no locked doors. Also, as surprising, there were no people.
Final astonishment ... no mushrooms.
I took a few photographs of no mushrooms.
There were long waist-height trays in the sheds full of compost containing oak-wood chips; and chanterelles at least, I knew, flourished in oak forests, their natural habitat. The air smelled musty and full of fungus spores. Nothing I could see or smell was worth the trouble of our travels.
Kris wandered about on his own, and we met at length in one of the thick concrete huts to compare notes.
No fungi of any kind.
“Not even a bloody toadstool,” Kris said in disgust. “And very little else.”
The houses were empty of people and were untidily furnished with clutter due for discarding. The church had had tablets on the white internal walls, but they had been unscrewed and removed, leaving rectangular darker patches. Water came supplied, not in the pipes provided, but in buckets lifted by ropes from underground rainwater tanks.
The hut we stood in, cool owing to windowless concrete walls about four feet thick, had once, we guessed, been living quarters of sorts: there were four plank bunk beds but no bedding, and there had once been electric lighting, but all that remained were wires coming out of the walls.
“There’s another hut that looks as if it once held a generator,” Kris said, and I nodded.
“The mushroom sheds had climate control once,” I said, “and an efficient-looking pumped sprinkler system.”
“The whole place has been stripped:” Kris sighed. ”We’re wasting our time.”
“Let’s look at the landing stage,” I suggested, and we walked down a hill of dried mud from the village to a wood and concrete dock long enough for a merchant ship’s mooring.
Again, no people and precious little else. No ropes, no chains, no crane. It was as if the last boat out of there had cleared up everything behind it.
As for living things, apart from humans, there were hundreds of big dark blue birds with brown legs, thousands of all sizes of iguanas and a large slow-moving mixed herd of cattle that wandered free, ate grass and paid us no attention.
I photographed the lot, but by the end was no nearer understanding what Robin intended us to do there or see, and was still a light-year from the answer to why.
We’d landed on the island at fourteen minutes after eleven, and by the time we’d concluded our comprehensive but fairly fruitless wander around, it was more than two hours later.
The wind, which had been intermittently gusty since our arrival, suddenly strengthened into a steady gale from the north, alarming us both, as it meant the outer winds of Odin, cycling counterclockwise, would be buffeting not only us mortals soon, but would be threatening also the airplane. which could look after itself in the air. but might be blown onto its back on the ground.
We ran, the wind strengthening all the time, and Kris, scrambling into his seat, made only sketchy checks for once before starting the engines, and the briefest of gauge inspections afterwards. Then he pointed the airplane’s nose more or less straight up the runway and opened the throttles to maximum.
The airplane shook with protest but at a low ground speed leapt into the air so fiercely that Kris was fighting with quivering wrists to keep the climbing attitude within safe limits: and although it was the worst minute for it, I thought of the hurricane hunters who had in the past disappeared without trace ... and understood how it could have happened.
Kris, sweating, pushed the nose down and let the airplane rise like a hawk, and within a minute we were at three thousand feet and climbing, and Trox Island had disappeared into the murk behind us.
It wasn’t until that moment that I realized that in our urgent race to be airborne I had somehow dropped my camera. All those careful pictures of nothing! I searched all my pockets and all round my right-hand flight deck seat, but without success.
Cursing, I told Kris.
“Well, we’re not going back to look for it.” He sounded annoyed, but found this idea preposterous, as I did. It was all he could do to hold the plane steady, but he was also happy to be back in the air, and with visible relief fished in his shirt pocket for his lunatic flight plan.
“Steer zero eight zero, just north of east,” he shouted, giving me instructions while he fished around for his headset and settled the microphone near his mouth. “That should take us to the eye.”
“The eye isn’t where it was yesterday,” I yelled back,. handing over the controls and putting on my own headset, in my turn.
“I thought of that,” Kris said, “and factored it in.”
What he hadn’t factored in, though we didn’t know it at the moment, was that Odin, as hurricanes were likely to do, had thoroughly and suddenly changed course. The whole circulating mass was now heading due west, which would, within twenty-four hours, take it inexorably over the island we’d left.
At Trox we’d taken off our life jackets and left them lying in the cabin, and I went back there, once Kris looked more in control, and put mine on again. I took Kris’s forward and against his inclination made him put his on also.
“We’re not going to ditch,” he protested.
“All the same...”
With reluctance he let me put the flat orange jacket over his head and fasten the tapes round his waist.
Our progress towards the center of Odin wasn’t in the least orderly or controlled. Clouds whipped past the window and gradually grew thicker and darker until we were frankly flying in a hundred percent humidity, or in other words, rain.
Though with his own furrowed forehead and tight mouth giving every physical impression of justifiable worry, Kris told me truculently that we weren’t giving up, however adverse the weather. The airplane, he insisted, was tough enough for the job and if I wanted to chicken out I should have done so back in Newmarket.
“Are you talking to yourself?” I asked. It was, indeed, hard to hear each other even through the headsets. “How fast are we going?”
Kris didn’t reply. I reckoned that we had had the wind in its fury sweeping us sideways and we were now flying very fast in and through the circulatory pattern. I couldn’t even guess at our position on either map and with force insisted that we should join the world again by setting bona-fide frequencies on the radio. Kris tacitly gave in, but I harvested only shrieks and whistles and for human contact, weak and far away, a woman’s voice speaking Spanish.
The reawakened radio, however, prodded me into clearer thought, and so, despite the bumping tumult all around us, I switched on both of Robin’s special measuring instruments. ignoring Kris’s yelled protests that they were for use only in the eye and eye wall. He shut up, though, and his eyes widened in incredulity when he saw the millibar indicator on the modified radio altimeter descend from the 990 we’d set on Trox down through 980 and 970 and 960 and waver on 950 before shaking there and falling towards 940.
If we followed the
descent of the millibars, surely we would find that they bottomed out in the eye? The air pressure was at its lowest in the eye. Kris, converted by the sliding figures, began slowly and progressively steering left, going round with the winds.
Regular altimeters measured the outside pressure. Pilots set the sea-level pressure on the instrument and the change between the two was displayed as the altitude in feet. The radio altimeter measured our height by bouncing a radio wave back from the surface of the sea like radar. Without it we would have been in real trouble as we wouldn’t have known the sea-level pressure even if the sea had been level. If we flew too low, we could hit the waves. It would have helped if I’d been given hours of instruction instead of simply pressing “Start” buttons when I felt like it.
The millibar count went on shrinking fast from 940 to 935 ... 930 ... 924. Too low, I thought. The new instrument had to be wrong. Had to be ... or I was misreading it ... yet 880 had been clocked in a storm in the past. 924 wasn’t impossible, but 923? 921 ? We were lost, I thought. My theory was destroying us... 920 ... 919 ... it was over... The eye’s pressure had stood at 930 at Cayman that morning ... it couldn’t possibly have dropped so fast ... But 919 ... 919 and still falling ... I glanced at the regular altimeter and tried to do the mental arithmetic. We were almost down at sea level ... dangerous ... “Don’t go lower,” I told Kris urgently. “We’re in cloud just above the water ... Go up, go up, we’ll hit...”
Kris was a good pilot for a lunch trip to Newmarket. Neither of us had imagined the standard of skill a hurricane demanded. With a stubbornly locked jaw he made a slow left turn at 919 millibars, inching lower ... lower... Then 919 steadied on the nose, and I held my breath ...
At just touching 918 millibars on the scale we burst out of cloud into bright sunlight.
We had hit the eye! We had actually done it! We were at the very heart of Odin. It was in a way our Everest, our lives’ peak, the summit we would never see again. To fly through the eye of a hurricane ... I had wanted to, but only at that moment did I realize how much.