5 Days to Landfall

by Robert Roy Britt

  The eye. The eye. I went through this and I don’t even get to see the damned eye.

  Amanda didn’t need any numbers, or any graphics out of a computer, to tell her that she was smack in the middle of the powerful right-side eyewall. If they could just hang on until it passed, the wind would drop by an amount equivalent to the storm’s forward speed. She held Jack. The waves thrashed them for several minutes. It seemed longer.

  Suddenly Amanda felt sand under her feet, but she was pulled away again. Again she felt the sand. The surge was dropping. Soon the water would be rushing the other direction, back out to sea. Amanda could see that they had been swept across the street and were tangled in the pilings of another destroyed house.

  In the distance, emerging from the water and resting atop submerged pilings, was a six-foot by twelve-foot section of floor, all that remained of Bill Leaderman’s hurricane-proof home. There was no sign of Leaderman or Rico.

  The place they crashed into was no more than a few wall sections piled atop one another. Between the two former homes was the road, several feet down. Amanda raised her head and shouted into the eye of the storm, “Damn you, Gert! You can’t take us! We beat you! Ha!”

  She knew it was a lie. Gert had taken Juan Rico and Bill Leaderman. The wind had lessened only slightly and would be around for hours. The waves were still dangerous. Fear, anger and sadness overwhelmed her and her head slumped into the cold water.

  I won’t drown.

  She labored onto a ruined section of floor. “C’mon. We’ve got to get out of the water.” She pulled Jack up and tied the loose end of the rope off to a wall stud that protruded from the floor.

  Jack lay on his chest, sprawled like a crime-scene chalk figure, conscious but quiet in the noisy night, deep breaths noted by a rising back. She put a hand between his shoulder blades, rubbed gently.

  Amanda scanned into the darkness for any sign of Rico. Nothing. Wooden furniture and other floatable household items crashed in the waves, pausing and searching for a direction as the surge rested before its soon-to-come retreat. Sections of wall. A dark shape, round. Moving across her field of vision in what had been the street.

  “Juan!” she shouted. The shape disappeared.

  Nothing. Reappeared. Still moving. A splash amid a thousand splashes, then another.

  “Juan!”

  The shape turned, a scant-light reflection. A face. Began moving toward her.

  Juan Rico stuck a tired hand out through the froth, Amanda pulled on it. Rico wasn’t much help, his other arm hanging limp. She finally got him up on the small piece of floor. The Nikon hung around his neck.

  “Other bedroom,” Rico shouted. “Jesus fuck.”

  Amanda pulled Rico into her and made a pile of three terrified humans with their backs to the storm.

  “Arm’s broken,” Rico shouted through chattering teeth. “It almost over?”

  “No,” Amanda said.

  “Jeeee-sus fuck.”

  ~ ~ ~

  EXCERPTED FROM HURRICANES: HISTORY AND DYNAMICS, BY DR. NICHOLAS K. GRAY, HUMBOLDT UNIVERSITY PRESS (1998)

  In 1941, George R. Stewart published the novel Storm, about a tremendous low-pressure system that moved in off the Pacific and did significant damage in the United States. A character in the book, a San Francisco meteorologist, deduced it was easier to name such a storm than to refer to it as a low-pressure system. He also reasoned that a storm so powerful and destructive deserved a name, something that up until then only happened after the fact. So the forecaster in Stewart’s book called the storm Maria. The book was popular among meteorologists, and the idea took hold with military weather forecasters during WWII, when storms began to get women’s names.

  In 1950 the World Meteorological Organization agreed to an alphabetical naming system, using the military’s radio code. The first named Atlantic hurricane was Able in 1950. That year, there were twelve tropical storms, three of which developed into full-blown hurricanes. The last earned the ironic name of Hurricane Love.

  Soon officials realized the naming convention would cause problems in the history books if more than one powerful Hurricane Able made landfall. So, in 1953 the organization adopted a rotating series of women’s names, planning to retire names of significant storms. Feminists urged the WMO to add men’s names, which was done in 1979. The boy-girl-boy-girl naming convention evolved to include French and Spanish names, reflecting the languages of the nations affected by Caribbean hurricanes. Twenty-one names are reserved each year (the letters q, u, x, y and z are not used, a residual consequence of the days when only English names were used). The names are recycled every six years, minus those retired. There will never be another Andrew, or another Hugo.

  ~ ~ ~

  Tuesday, August 24

  CHAPTER 8

  Point Pleasant Beach,

  New Jersey

  12:20 p.m.

  “Don’t bump your head.”

  Sarah giggled and ducked as Joe Springer bent his knees and slipped through the sliding glass door onto the deck.

  With Sarah on his shoulders, Joe stepped carefully down the short flight of wooden stairs onto the narrow sand pathway between his house and the next. He doubled back and walked immediately up a slightly shorter set of stairs onto the boardwalk that stretched for hundreds of yards in either direction. A warm breeze blew out to sea, slapping the tops off large waves that rolled in from thousands of miles away. Against a pale blue sky, thin fuzzy clouds meandered harmlessly, farflung signatures of yet another hurricane that didn’t come this way.

  Joe Springer bounced his daughter atop his shoulders. “Where to, kiddo?”

  “To the beach,” Sarah shouted, pointing at the waves with one hand, using the other to slap the shoulder of her horse.

  “OK, but I told you we can’t swim today.”

  “Can we at least put our feet in?”

  “We’ll see. But you’ll have to walk, OK?”

  “No,” Sarah said firmly.

  “I can’t carry you all that way.”

  “But Daddy.”

  She’s got her father’s stubbornness, he thought. I hope she has her mother’s brains. He might have made her walk, but Joe Springer had so little time with his daughter anymore that it was unbearable to disappoint her. He looked at the 200-foot stretch of creamy sand between the boardwalk and the waves, took a deep breath, and trudged off.

  Instead of a steep slope, the beach was fairly flat until a sharp dive into the surf. All but the tops of the waves were hidden from view until they neared the drop-off. The recent high tide had topped the crest, leaving a pool of ankle-deep warm water behind it. They splashed through it, then Joe bent forward to let Sarah slide off her horse onto warm, wet sand.

  Sarah tugged at her bathing suit, stretching it as much as she could. They’d bought it last evening on the boardwalk, and though her father said it was too small for her, Sarah had insisted on buying the only two-piece pink swimsuit they could find in the tiny shop. Now she was pulling at it, pretending that it fit.

  Joe looked at the steep drop-off. The large waves spawned by Gert had carved into the embankment, making it even more pronounced. Another wave rolled in, hesitated, then thundered into the bank and carried more sand out to sea.

  “Can we go in Daddy?” She tugged at his shirt.

  “No way, kiddo. It’d suck you right out. You see how big those waves are?” Joe pointed. Sarah frowned. She looked down at her feet, wriggled them into the sand. “Will you bury me?”

  “Sure.”

  Sarah’s frown disappeared, and she lay down and started piling wet sand around her thin, bony body. Joe Springer scooped sand and piled it around her, too. Sarah giggled again.

  “I wish Mommy was here,” she blurted out.

  Joe didn’t flinch. He was used to that sentiment. In fact, he shared it. “Me too, kiddo.”

  “How come you don’t invite her?”

  He wasn’t quite as prepared for that one. “Well, I guess I would, exc
ept I don’t think Mommy would come.”

  “I know, I know,” Sarah said with rolling eyes. “You guys would start talking, and then you would start arguing, then you would yell and Mommy would cry.”

  Joe bunched his lips together. “Guess you got it all figured out, don’t you?”

  “How come you and Mommy can’t get along?”

  He didn’t want to answer this one at all. At least not truthfully. But he knew that it was mostly his fault. He was the one who had caused most of the fights, coming home late after too many beers. And he was the one who left, who had given up on things too soon. Who knows, maybe it never would have worked out. Maybe it wasn’t meant to work in the first place. But maybe…

  “I think I just made Mommy angry too many times,” he said. “Sometimes when you do that, it’s hard for the other person to forgive you.”

  Another wave slammed into the beach and rolled nearly to the crest of the drop off. They both watched it to make sure it wouldn’t get them. Joe Springer looked back at his daughter. She looked away and piled sand onto herself again.

  “Honey, don’t be sad about Mommy and…”

  “Last summer there weren’t any waves,” Sarah butted in. “How come they’re so big this year?”

  Joe Springer sighed. “The hurricane sent them.”

  “Is it coming here?”

  “No. Just the waves.”

  “How come?”

  “I don’t know. Hurricanes never come here.”

  “Never?”

  “Well, almost never.”

  “What if it did? What if the hurricane came here?”

  “Then I guess we’d have to leave.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the wind would blow real hard, and the waves might get even bigger.”

  “You’re chicken, Daddy.”

  “What?”

  “You’re chicken. Mommy wouldn’t leave. She’s brave. She’s always chasing hurricanes anyway. If it was coming this way, she’d stay and watch it.”

  Joe Springer smiled at his daughter, let a handful of soggy sand go plop on her belly. “Maybe Mommy’s a little too brave sometimes,” he said.

  “More sand, Daddy. More, more.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Manhattan

  1:20 p.m.

  Harvey. Amanda thought it might be hard for people to fear a storm named Harvey. She’d been worried about it since the storm first became a hurricane, two days ago. It was easier to fear a name like Hugo. Or Gert.

  But Harvey sounded so benign or… happy.

  And after looking at the latest information on the storm, she didn’t want anyone to think Harvey was happy. Gert had been a deadly reminder of what hurricanes could do, of how they could surprise. And Gert had hit an area that was prepared, a coastline where people were used to evacuating. Still, CNN was reporting a list of twenty-seven dead. One of them was Bill Leaderman.

  At least three more names had nearly made that list.

  The Coast Guard chopper had picked them up just after dawn today in a routine rescue and flown them to Wilmington. Amanda would never forget the pilot. Lieutenant Meg Evans was a small, thin, attractive burst of energy in her late twenties with a surprisingly bullying attitude and, it turned out, a reputation for being one of the best chopper pilots in the East. So good, in fact, that the Coast Guard shuttled her from station to station ahead of hurricanes, so she’d always be on scene.

  “What the hell were you doing out there?” Meg Evans had asked.

  It sounded like a childhood admonishment from Amanda’s mother. Amanda explained the thin scientific merits of their mission. Lieutenant Evans had scoffed. “I got enough people in trouble without the forecasters looking for it! Holy cow!”

  By the time they’d landed, though, the two women had found some common ground and developed a mutual respect. In their own ways, they each threw themselves wholly into protecting other people from bad weather.

  “Just stay the heck out of the water next time,” Meg Evans had requested.

  The doctors in Wilmington said the break in Juan Rico’s arm was clean and would heal fine. Amanda had some sprained fingers taped. Her cheek was badly bruised but the cheekbone not broken. The cut on her leg took stitches, and those on her face were taped. One just above her eye took three stitches. Jack Corbin was exhausted, but OK. Frank Delaney pulled in some favors and got them on a military plane for a quick flight to New York.

  Jack went straight to the newsroom, mumbling something about an editor having his ass if he didn’t file.

  Amanda wanted to go visit Sarah. No, to go get Sarah. Only a two-hour drive separated them. The near-death experience had stirred a biological need to envelop her child. But even if it were OK with Joe Springer—which Amanda was sure it wouldn’t be—Sarah would be frightened by the tape on her mother’s fingers, the bruise on her cheek and the small cuts all over her face. Being apart from Sarah was harder on Amanda than anything. A dull ache of loneliness had set in while she stared at unfamiliar walls waiting for Rico, who’d given her a spare key to his apartment before he went to see his doctor.

  Amanda let her mind run, daydreaming, as odd thoughts, images, and statistics rattled through her head. It was her version of Zen, to let seldom-used knowledge drift to the surface; it was also a way of retaining those odd, disparate pieces of information, valuable or not, that she might need one day.

  A storm like Harvey, the catalogues of her mind told her, released the power of three Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs every sixty seconds. A single large hurricane could serve the country’s electric needs for half a year, if it could be harnessed.

  Amanda loved having such trivia in her head. Handy whenever she was trying to convince someone of the force of these great storms. She knew more. Really trivial stuff, like where the name came from. The Carib Indians of the West Indies used the word huracan, which may be traceable to Huracan, a Central American god of evil. But what Amanda knew most about was the danger of wind. She knew that a seventy-five mile an hour wind pushed on a wall with 450 pounds per square foot of pressure, while a 125-mile-an-hour wind packed a walloping 1,250 pounds per square foot.

  Waves as tall as a ten-story building can be spawned in the open ocean during a major hurricane. And, her favorite statistic of all: The highest gust of wind ever recorded, which was 236 miles per hour in Typhoon Paka back in 1997. The low barometric pressure from that storm sent nine pregnant women on Guam into labor.

  Some 1,000 miles southeast of her, just a few hundred miles north of Puerto Rico, Hurricane Harvey grew. The island would feel no more than a tickle from the Category 3 hurricane, as tropical storm-force winds brushed its northern beaches. The clockwise-rotating winds around the Bermuda High whisked Harvey along at a brisk pace: twelve miles an hour. Amanda expected this speed to increase. By tomorrow morning, the storm would pass north of the Bahamas—within two days of Florida. But none of the computer models showed the storm hitting Florida.

  She studied Harvey from Juan Rico’s desktop computer, which had the requisite Internet connection. Her laptop was somewhere in the Atlantic. She would replace it before Harvey hit.

  The computer glitch she’d seen last night—the blip in the GFDL forecast—crowded into her thoughts. She worried about it. In the final crucial hours and moments before a storm made landfall, there was no room for that kind of error. Things in the forecasting room were hectic enough.

  Amanda imagined the momentary fits Frank Delaney and the other forecasters must have had last night. And Delaney would be cursing now. It had been a busy season. He was tired. He didn’t need Harvey so close on the heels of Gert. And now he’d be having to figure Harvey out without Amanda’s help.

  Delaney would take the advice Amanda had given him long ago: He would talk to Harvey, try to get to know him, put his arm around him.

  Like Jimmy Stewart with his invisible friend Harvey, the tall one with the long ears. Was it a giant rabbit? Is that where the name for this storm came from? Talk
to him long enough, Frank, and you’ll hear something. Something that was inside your head already that you just weren’t listening to.

  Delaney would try to sweet talk Harvey into giving away a secret or two, some shred of data that would be the clue to where he planned to go. Would the storm move now, quickly ahead of the developing high and slam into the coast? Wait a day and slide north, ride the wind out to sea?

  Get inside the mind of the storm. Harvey’s going to break, one direction or another. Sometime.

  “Catch Harvey leaning,” she whispered.

  Amanda felt out of the game. She’d been away from the Hurricane Center for just one day, and already she was antsy to go back.

  The phone rang, startling Amanda. She picked it up without thinking that it wasn’t her phone.

  “You hungry?”

  “Juan, hi. What’d the doctor say?”

  “Said I was fine, to quit complaining. Want to meet me at Chez Henri?”

  “Is food all you think about?”

  “Half.”

  “Don’t you want to come home first?”

  “I’m tired,” Rico said. “I come home I fall asleep. Need a good meal first. Go get a table, OK? Meet you there in twenty.”

  ***

  Juan Rico emerged from the Canal Street subway station, left arm in a cast and bent at the elbow, half-drugged and worn out. He headed toward the Hudson River.

  Rico paused to absorb a slight breeze at the angled intersection of Varick and Canal, into which the Holland Plaza Building wedged itself like a piece of pie. He looked up at the simple brick building, which had dozens of aged factory windows—each with fifty small panes of glass surrounded by rusted steel—on every floor.

  Behind the building was the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, swallowing into its depths the rush of slow-moving cars headed back to New Jersey.

  He angled off toward the Hudson and soon he was at the entrance to Chez Henri, the corner restaurant in the old factory building next to where he lived. Juan Rico loved the ornate six-story building. It was constructed of beautiful almond-colored brick, with red brick trimming and arching over the windows. Gothic gables adorned the west side and green patinated copper numbers attested to the durability of the structure, built in 1891.