by Dick Francis
We were scraping the limits at 918 millibars. Huge waves like mountains moved close below us, smoothly powerful but not licking upward to swallow our remarkable world.
There were tears on Kris’s pale cheeks and I daresay on mine also.
In that amazing moment of revelation and fulfillment I felt overwhelmingly and unconditionally grateful to Robin Darcy. Never mind that I didn’t trust him across a peanut, never mind that he’d persuaded Kris to lie to me, never mind that the escapade to Trox had seriously endangered us, if it hadn’t been for his money, his airplane, his instruments, his enthusiasm and—yes—his hidden and possibly criminal purposes, we would both have been keeping our feet on the ground and following Odin’s progress from afar on a television screen, and we could never have said. like my grandmother, “Been there. Done that.”
According to the airspeed indicator we were traveling fast enough to give us barely three minutes of calm before we flew into the fearsome winds in the eye wall opposite, and Kris, making the same calculations, immediately began to hold us in a tight circle, so that we stayed in Odin’s calm hub long enough to get used to it.
Below us—perhaps only two hundred feet below us—the moving sea was blue from the amazing sunshine that shone brightly also on the airplane, and threw angled shadows on our faces. Above us, the funnel, with only soft spirals of cloud in it, led far upwards to brief glimpses of blue sky. Kris kept the airplane circling in a slow climb until we were at, perhaps, four or five thousand feet above sea level, and had become accustomed to our extraordinary situation, and would remember it.
We were alone in the eye. Down to blue sea, up to blue sky, no one else shared our strange revolving world.
“Stadium effect,” Kris noted happily.
I nodded. The stadium effect meant that the eye was wider at the top, and narrower at the water’s surface; like a sports stadium, in fact.
All around the calm hub the terrifying winds in the whirling wall looked impenetrable. It was one thing to reach the golden sun in the center, but now we had to calculate the way home. Kris again produced the card with the headings, though even he admitted that the fourth set was no longer right.
“Work it out,” he told me. “You can do it.”
We hadn’t even tried to follow the professional hurricane hunters’ flight pattern of three passes straight through the eye at ten thousand feet. We were, in effect, on our own.
I reckoned by computer that if we headed north we would make a landfall, if not in Cayman, actually a small target, then in Jamaica, or as a last resort, Cuba. We just had time and gas to stay aloft for that, and with luck, long before then we would be alive on the radio again and could ask for directions. Embarrassing, but better than crashing.
Kris agreed to fly north in general but to head east to enter the eye wall, as the counterclockwise winds that were at their maximum there would tend to sweep us round to the north anyway, until we were clear of the first sixty miles or so and had reached the outer areas of the hurricane.
The second wind of a hurricane on the ground came when the eye had passed, taking with it the illusion that the storm was over. The second wind of a hurricane hit from the southwest like a moving wall of concrete, catastrophically destroying everything that had survived the first onslaught.
The second wind of a Category 5 hurricane screamed and shrieked and traveled faster than a champion could serve a tennis ace. The second wind brought inches, torrents, of mud-liquefying rain. It brought misery and homelessness and washed away bridges—and to get back safe to Grand Cayman we had to fly again through the storm’s fury.
“Work out our height,” Kris said. His voice sounded unsteady and his eyes were alarmed. I made the simple calculation that air pressure normally fell by one millibar every thirty feet of height ... but mental concentration always fell with altitude ... and neither Kris nor I were any longer razor sharp because of the by-then buffeting noisy leap-around world enveloping us.
Kris headed east and, at eight thousand feet on the altimeter, resolutely set course for land. Even with full power thundering in the engines we were both sure that we’d underestimated drift and that the rotating wind system was blowing us anywhere but where we wanted to go.
Blue sky had vanished. The sea tumbled and raced, gray and brown.
Cloud and rain closed around us. We were blind. and couldn’t measure our forward progress. Kris was giving up trying. His thoughts were a straight line.
For minutes I lived with the certainty that Kris and I and the airplane weren’t up to the job. My grandmother’s heebie-jeebies raised my skin in bumps. Kris. visibly losing his nerve, said. “Mayday. Mayday. Mayday” repeatedly into the headset. broadcasting a plea that no one heard.
We might have made it, even then. if we’d held to the northerly course and if nothing had gone wrong: but from one second to the next, with the speed of most disasters, a simple mechanical change tossed us straight into the realms of chaos, to the turbulent territory of all the demons.
The right-hand engine stopped.
Immediately the whole aircraft lost its balance, tipped sideways. spun in a circle. put its nose up. put it down again ... Kris was shouting. “Full opposite rudder, stick forward. full opposite rudder,” and stamping hard down with his left foot, and I remembered that “stick forward. full opposite rudder” brought a single-engined airplane out of a spin, and I didn’t know if it made the asymmetric wildness of a dead twin-engine better or worse. I tried the radio again, to broadcast Kris’s voice, and heard only Spanish, very faint.
Space and time got jumbled. Thought became reduced for both of us to one idea at a time. My own mind clamped down onto the one reassurance that there was a life raft dinghy behind me in the passenger cabin, and that as airplanes didn’t float, we would need it.
Bashing around in the restricted tumbling spaces I somehow got my hands onto the big bundle and clutched it, holding on even when any sort of steering became doubtful and Kris, still hauling rightly or wrongly at the control column, began chanting again over and over, “Mayday, Mayday, stick forward, full opposite rudder ... Mayday ...” and in desperation, “I’m heading back to Trox Island. Back to Trox.”
Though his voice chattered on uselessly he nevertheless successfully muscled a lopsided control of the bucking, twisting, rocking aircraft while it dropped against his will from about eight thousand feet, and only when I yelled at him to be ready to jump did he seem to realize that having only one embattled and hard-worked engine overheating in that tempest meant that we were losing the fight. He could see the galloping waves, but even then would have denied their inevitability ... except that seawater splashed on the windshield.
With a screech of awakening terror he stretched out stiff fingers to the switches and pulled the nose up crookedly, with the port engine and propeller still racing at full power, and somehow we met the water flat on the belly on a frightful accelerating wave. At first contact the Piper skipped back up into the air twisting violently to the left and dropping its nose. The second strike was heavier and, in that strange way that the mind wanders even in emergencies, I thought of the exam question, set long ago, which discussed the best material for a seat belt and how it had to stretch and absorb the kinetic energy to protect the occupant in a sudden collision. As the airplane buried itself into the near vertical face of the next towering whitecap, our seat belts fulfilled their purpose, absorbed our energy and brought us to a teeth-rattling halt.
Almost in the second of impact I kicked open the rear door and jumped into the raging water, clutching the dinghy with me for precious survival and yanking at the cord that inflated it. It swelled hugely at once and as it unfolded the weight of it tore it out of my arms, all except a narrow rope circling it, for people in the water to hang onto. I did hang on for a very short while, but the screaming gale made a farce of any strength I might have thought I had, and I devastatingly knew I couldn’t hold it in place while Kris too unbuckled himself and left the sinking ship.<
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He came very fast indeed out of the front door, though, and by luck jumped first with one foot onto the already flooded wing and then fell straight into the almost fully inflated dinghy, at the moment it tore itself out of my hands. The wind and waves seized the expanding craft instantly and blew it a great way from the sinking airplane. and for a moment I could see Kris’s long horror-filled face looking back at me. Then clouds and rain enveloped and parted us violently into invisibility and for only a brief time longer could I see even the waterlogged airplane until it completed a fast wing-down sliding disappearance into oblivion and was gone forever.
Without much hope I pulled the inflation cords of the life jacket that represented my only chance of survival, and the fact that the jacket inflated swiftly in the designed manner seemed truly the only faint shred of possible security, and not much of that, anyway.
My shoes came off, and I slid also out of my pants, so that I wore only underpants and a once-white shirt and the orange fluorescent life jacket. The Caribbean water, comparatively warm, might throw me about, but I wasn’t going to die of hypothermia. There were comforting stories of lost sailors being picked up after days at sea. Disregard, I thought, the awkward info that they hadn’t been battling hurricane-size waves.
It was daylight, and my watch had stopped, water-filled, at 2:15 P.M., when we had ditched. At home I kept a cheap waterproof watch for swimming: idiotic that I hadn’t brought it. Such silly thoughts. Time had no meaning in the sea.
Yet when Kris and I didn’t reappear at the Cayman airport, Robin Darcy would surely send out rescuers. Kris’s orange dinghy could be seen for miles, and my life jacket, though a smaller dot in the ocean, was purposely bright. I shut my mind to the driving rain and fearsome colossal waves that would keep a life-jacket-seeking helicopter safe on the ground at home.
Odin was a slow-moving hurricane, but even the slow ones eventually passed. I, to live, had first to outlast Odin, and then to be visible, and then to be preferably visible on a regular cross-Caribbean air route.
Thoughts came slowly, none of them joyful. For instance, a thought unwelcome: the Caribbean was a very big sea. For another instance, another thought: I might be a practiced surf rider, but first, I didn’t have a surfboard handy, and second, no surfboard ever could realistically ride a thirty-foot storm surge.
With useless jumbled thought, then, and no constructive decisions, I struggled simply to stay afloat with my head up out of the water. The life jacket was at least one of those with the main flotation collar in front supporting one’s chin, so that even when overwhelmed by the curling crest of a towering wave, the life jacket slowly righted its wearer—like a saturated cork rising.
One could swallow saltwater and gasp painfully for air. One could claw oneself constantly upright into surface-whipping winds and stay there for a while, just able to breathe, but after the late afternoon had passed miserably into darkness, one could begin, in the endless heavy battering of racing waves, to feel that nothing, now, could grant deliverance, or reprieve.
One could pass into delirium, and one could drown.
5
Along time after coherent thought of any kind had stopped ... when flashes of illusion still made me believe my grandmother in silver was swimming in the waves not far ahead ... a long time after the apparitions of Robin and Kris, holding hands, had dissolved from beckoning me wetly towards them to be shot ... in the roaring non-human severity of Odin, while the remains of instinct flickered still in heart valves and groped for life in brain stem, a monstrous wave picked me up and lifted me high and flung the rag doll I’d become against an impossibly towering peak.
The peak wasn’t water ... it was rock.
Far from giving me joy, it knocked me out.
This gift of a spared life. I gleaned a fair time later, came from the rock wall forming one end of the deserted jetty where ships had once docked to unload the life-blood stores for Trox Island.
There were the remains of scrubby bushes and sticklike saplings still growing indomitably from cracks and ledges, and it was among them, and gripped by them against an uneven and abrasive rock face, that I had come to rest.
Held fast there, I slowly seeped back to consciousness, and it seemed at first natural, and then with woozy reflection, extremely unnatural, that I should know where I was.
The knowledge came without strength or desire to do anything about it. I turned myself slightly to look along to the end of the dock and found that more than half of the structure, though built of very heavy timber and rooted in concrete, had been torn away as if made of cardboard.
Consciousness drifted away again into a troubled bad-dream-filled utterly exhausted state that was as much daze as sleep.
Several centuries or so later I noticed it had been raining ever since I’d opened my saltwater-swollen eyes. Rain washed the salt from my limbs but all my skin was crinkled from too long an immersion. and in spite of water water everywhere nor any drop to drink. I had like any ancient mariner a scorchingly painful salt-induced thirst.
Rain ... I opened my mouth to it hungrily. It filled my throat, it filled my mind. I realized that my grandmother wasn’t really out there in silver. swimming. Robin Darcy’s gun was back in Sand Dollar Beach, scaring the shit out of intruders.
Weakness went on, however, encouraging me to lie still. On the other hand, I was halfway up a low cliff, lying among roots that the constant rain was loosening: and as if on cue, some of the bushes slid out of their anchorage and sent me tumbling and slithering with a lot of scratches down and down until I reached the hard surface of the dock itself.
By good luck the dock, though now smashed. had originally been built for the mooring of merchant ships, which meant the surface of the dock itself was above the turgid water. Brown rough waves sped threateningly along beside its length now, but only a few slapped heavily over its surface, as if searching for things to suck back into their grasp. The height and vigor of the waves that had managed my arrival had died down by nearly half. Seas of the present weight couldn’t have ripped up something as heavy as the dock.
So I lay a bit longer in the rain and thought of Kris and the eye of Odin, and the whole day seemed unreal.
The whole day ... The light was gray ... but it wasn’t night, and it had been night when I’d been on the edge of drowning.
Yesterday, I thought with incredulity ... Kris and I had come here yesterday ... and I’d spent all night in the black water, and I’d seen the shape of the cliff I’d crashed onto because the tired old world was spinning slowly towards the return of gray morning.
Turning over again on the shattered dock, I realized that it hadn’t been so much damaged on the day before. There hadn’t been any damage at all. I simply hadn’t the energy to do more than conclude that the destructive winds of Odin had crossed the island since we’d left. Soon, I told myself, soon I would go back up the hill to the little village. Soon I would get on with living. I had actually never before felt so weak.
As if to prod my flagging spirits. the heavy rain abruptly stopped.
To make some sort of start, I fiddled with the clips fastening the life jacket and managed only to tie the tapes into more difficult knots. Undoing them took ages. It was stupid how much my arms ached.
I still had no impression of hours. Day was light, night was dark. When day began fading again I finally put some resolution into things and with more effort than normal struggled to my bare feet and very slowly trudged up from sea level to the village, which sat on the cliff top at a height of roughly two hundred feet. Storm surge waves might not wash away whole communities at such a height, but hurricane winds came with no such inhibitions. The little village of the day gone by, the houses, the church and the mushroom sheds, all had been blown to destruction.
I stood stock still, the life jacket dangling from my hand.
The concrete rectangles where the houses had stood were still in place; the roofs had vanished and the timbers of their walls were heaped
and scattered with broken window frames twisted, glass gone. The water-catching cisterns were full of debris and mud, with no buckets to be seen.
The church had no roof. The spire and two walls had collapsed. All the mushroom sheds had vanished, though on the ground in outline one could see where they had been.
The only structures still standing were the two ultra-thick-walled concrete huts, and even they showed marks of battery from other flying debris.
Without shoes—and with socks sea-lost also—I found the village area made for even more uncomfortable progress than the hill. but I trod my way gingerly to the nearest of the thick-walled huts, the one that had contained the bunk beds. and went inside.
The doorway—with no door—led through the four-foot-thick wall into deepening gloom, where my eyes took time to adjust. The entrance, I reckoned at length. had been almost face-on to the wind, in view of the chaotic results. A good quantity of wood was still inside the hut, even though no longer neatly organized into bunks. Hefty planks seemed to have been hurtled across the interior space to crash like battering rams into the walls. The force needed for the holes they had dug in the plastered walls gave me the thankful shivers: Kris and I might have thought we would find safe shelter in there if the storm had caught us on land.
Shelter ... It occurred to me that the roof hadn’t blown off, as it had off everything else, except perhaps off the other hut. The tangled planks, and the concrete floor, were mostly dry. Outside it was still not raining, though the light was fading against a heavy sky.
No one would come now before night. No one could have seen little Trox earlier in blinding rain. Accept it, I thought with tiredness; in twelve hours, but not before, someone would come.
Believe it.
Someone will come.
In the remains of light I laid several planks side by side on the dank inhospitable concrete, and with the flotation collar for a pillow I lay down on my back ... and couldn’t sleep.