Wyatt's Hurricane / Bahama Crisis

by Desmond Bagley

  ‘Oh, God!’ said Mrs Warmington. ‘I can’t do it—I just can’t do it.’

  ‘You must,’ said Rawsthorne. ‘We have to get on a northern slope, and it’s on the other side. Come on.’

  Julie prodded Mrs Warmington to her feet and they left the huts. She looked at her watch—it was four-thirty in the afternoon.

  By five-thirty they had crossed the plateau and were halfway up the ridge, and the wind had strengthened to a gale. It seemed to be darkening much earlier than usual—the clouds were now thick overhead but no rain had fallen as yet. The wind plucked at them as they scrambled up, buffeting them mercilessly, and more than once one or other of them lost his footing and slid down in a miniature landslide of dust and small stones. The wind whipped the branches of the stunted trees, transforming them into dangerous flails, and the dry leaves were swept away along the ridge on the wings of the gale.

  It seemed an eternity before they got to the top, and even then they could not see down into the Negrito. ‘We must…get down…other side,’ shouted Rawsthorne against the wind. ‘We mustn’t…stay…’ He choked as the wind caught him in the mouth, and staggered forward in a crouch.

  Julie followed, kicking Mrs Warmington before her, and they stumbled across the top of the hill, exposed to the raging violence of the growing hurricane. There was a thick, clabbery yellow light about them which seemed almost tangible, and the dust swirled up from the barren earth in streaming clouds. Julie could taste it as she ran, and felt the grittiness between her teeth.

  At last they began to descend and could see the floor of the Negrito Valley a thousand feet below dimly illuminated in that unwholesome light. As soon as they dropped below the crest of the hill there was some relief from the wind and Rawsthorne stopped, looking down in amazement. ‘What the devil’s happening down there?’

  At first Julie could not see what he meant, but then she saw that the lower slopes were alive with movement and that thin columns of people were moving up from the valley. ‘All those people,’ she said in wonder. ‘Where did they come from?’

  Rawsthorne gave an abrupt laugh. ‘There’s only one place they could have come from—St Pierre. Someone must have got them out.’ He frowned. ‘But the battle is still going on-I think. Can you hear the guns?’

  ‘No,’ said Julie. ‘But we wouldn’t—not in this wind.’

  ‘I wonder…’ mused Rawsthorne. ‘I wonder if…’ He did not finish his sentence but Julie caught the implication and her heart lifted. All the people down there must have left St Pierre long before there was any indication that there was going to be a hurricane, and as far as she knew, there was only one man who believed the hurricane was on its way—an undeviating, obstinate, stubborn, thick-headed man—David Wyatt. He’s alive, she thought, and found an unaccountable lump in her throat. Thank God, he’s alive!

  ‘I don’t think we’d better go right down,’ said Rawsthorne. ‘Isn’t that a ravine over there?’

  There was a cleft in the hillside, an erosion scored deep by weather and water which would give shelter from the wind on three sides. They crossed the hillside diagonally and clambered down the steep sides of the ravine. Here the blast of wind was even less although they could hear it howl above their heads on the open hill, and they found a little hollow carved beneath a large rock, almost a cave, in which they could sit.

  It was here that Rawsthorne finally collapsed. He had only been held together by his will to get the women to safety, and now, having done what he had set out to do, his body rebelled against the punishment it had been forced to take. Julie looked at his grey face and slack lips in alarm. ‘Are you all right, Mr Rawsthorne?’

  ‘I’ll be all right, my child.’ He managed a pallid smile and moved his hand weakly. ‘In my pocket…a bottle…rum. Think we all…deserve…drink.’

  She found the rum, uncorked the bottle and held it to his lips. The raw spirit seemed to do him good for some colour came back to his cheeks, or so she thought, for it was difficult to see in the fading light. She turned to Mrs Warmington, who was equally prostrated, and forced some of the rum through her clenched teeth.

  She was about to have some herself when there was an ear-splitting crash and a dazzle of vivid blue light, followed by the steady rolling of thunder. She rubbed her eyes and then heard the rain, the heavy drops smacking the dusty ground. Wriggling out of the little shelter she let it pour on her face and opened her mouth to let the drops fall in. Thirstily she soaked up the rain, through her mouth and through her skin, and felt her shirt sticking wetly to her body. The water did her more good than the rum would ever do.

  III

  The wind roared across St Pierre, fanning the flames of the burning buildings so that the fires jumped broad streets and it seemed as though the whole city would be engulfed in an unquenchable furnace.

  Then the rain came and quenched it in fifteen minutes.

  It rained over two inches in the first hour, a bitter, painful downpour, the heavy drops driven by the wind and bursting like shrapnel where they hit. Causton had never been hurt by rain before: he had never thought that a water drop could be so big, nor that it could hit with such paralysing force. At first he mistook it for hail, but then he saw the splashes exploding on the ground before the foxhole, and each drop seemed to be as much as would fill a cup. He blinked and shook the hair from his eyes, and then a drop hit him on the side of the face with frightening force and he ducked to the bottom of the hole.

  Dawson moaned in pain and turned over on his side, holding his bandaged hands under his body to shield them. No one heard his sudden cry, not even Causton who crouched next to him, because the noise of the wind had risen to a savage howl drowning all other sounds.

  Wyatt listened to the wind with professional and knowledgeable interest. He estimated that the wind-speed had suddenly risen to force twelve, the highest level on the Beaufort Scale. Old Admiral Beaufort had designed the scale for the use of sailing-ship captains and had been sensible about it—his force twelve was the wind-speed at which, in his opinion, no reasonable seaman would be found at sea if he could help it. Force twelve is sixty-five knots or seventy-four miles an hour, and the Admiral was not concerned about wind-speeds greater than that because to a sailing captain caught in extremis it would not matter either. There are no degrees in sudden death.

  But times have changed since Admiral Beaufort and Wyatt, who had helped to change them, knew it very well. His concern here was not for the action of the wind on a sailing ship but on an island, on the buildings of the towns. A force twelve wind exerts a pressure of seventeen pounds on each square foot, over three tons on the sides of an average house. A reasonably well-built house could withstand that pressure, but this hurricane was not going to be reasonable.

  The highest estimated wind-speed in Mabel’s gusts had been 170 miles an hour, producing pressures of well over a hundred pounds a square foot. Enough to pick a man off his feet and hurl him through the air as far as the wind cared to take him. Enough to lean on the side of a house and cave it in. Enough to uproot a strong tree, to rip the surface soil from a field, to destroy a plantation, to level a shanty town to the raw earth from which it had sprung.

  Wyatt, therefore, listened to the raging of the wind with unusual interest.

  Meanwhile, he held his head down and sat with Causton and Dawson in a hole full of water. The two drains spouted like fire hoses at full pressure, yet the hole never emptied. It was like sitting in the middle of a river. All around them streams of water gushed down the slope of the ridge, inches deep, carving courses in the soft earth. Wyatt knew that would not last long—as the wind-speed increased it would become strong enough to lift up that surface water and make it airborne again in a driving mist of fine spray. That was one thing—no one he had heard of had died of thirst in a hurricane.

  This rain, falling in millions of tons, was the engine which drove the monster. On every square mile over which the hurricane passed it would drop, on average, half a million tons of
water, thus releasing vast quantities of heat to power the circular winds. It was a great turbine—three hundred miles in diameter and with almost unimaginable power.

  Causton’s thoughts were very different. For the first time in his life he was really frightened. In his work he covered the activities of men, and man, the political animal, he thought he understood. His beat was the world and he found himself in trouble-spots where students rioted in the streets of big cities and where bush wars flared in the green jungles. Other men covered the earthquakes, the tidal waves, the avalanches—the natural disasters.

  He had always known that if he got into trouble he could somehow talk his way out of it because he was dealing with men and men could be reasoned with. Now, for the first time in his life, he found himself in trouble where talking was futile. One could no more reason with a hurricane than with a Bengal tiger; in fact, it was worse—one could at least shoot the tiger.

  He had listened with vague interest to Wyatt’s lecture on hurricanes back at Cap Sarrat Base, but he had been more curious about Wyatt than about the subject under discussion. Now he wished he had listened more closely and taken a keener interest. He nudged Wyatt, and shouted, ‘How long will this go on?’

  The dark shape of Wyatt turned towards him and he felt warm breath in his ear. ‘What did you say?’

  He put his mouth next to Wyatt’s ear, and bellowed, ‘How long will this go on?’

  Wyatt turned again. ‘About eight hours—then we’ll have a short rest.’

  ‘Then what happens?’

  ‘Another ten hours, but coming from the opposite direction.’

  Causton was shocked at the length of time he would have to undergo this ordeal. He had been thinking in terms of three or four hours only. He shouted, ‘Will it get worse?’

  It was difficult to detect any emotion in Wyatt’s answering shout, but he thought he heard a cold humour. ‘It hasn’t really started yet.’

  Causton crouched deeper in the hole with the rain flailing his head and thought in despair, how can it get worse?

  The sun had set and it was pitchy black, the impenetrable darkness broken only by the lightning flashes which were becoming more frequent. Any thunder there might have been was lost in the general uproar of the gale, which, to Wyatt’s ear, was taking on a sharper edge—the wind-speed was still increasing, although it was impossible to tell without instruments any reasonably exact speed. One thing was certain, though—it was pushed well over the further edge of the Beaufort Scale.

  Wyatt thought with grim amusement of Causton’s question: will it get worse? The man had no conception of the forces of nature. One could explode an atomic bomb in the middle of this hurricane and the puny added energy would be lost—swallowed up in the greater cataclysm. And this was not too bad. True, Mabel was a bad bitch, but there had been worse—and there had been far greater wind-speeds recorded.

  He closed his mind to the howling of the wind. Now what was it—oh, yes—two hundred and thirty-one miles an hour recorded at Mount Washington before the instrument smashed—that was the record reading. And then there were the theoretical speeds of the tornadoes. No chance of recording those, of course—the very fast winds in excess of six hundred miles an hour—but it took a fast wind to drive a straw through an inch-thick plank of wood.

  And yet tornadoes were small. Comparing a tornado with a hurricane was like comparing a fighter plane with a bomber—the fighter is faster, but the bomber has more total power. And a hurricane has immeasurably more power than any tornado, more power than any other wind system on earth. He remembered the really bad one that crossed the Atlantic when he had been a student in England back in 1953. It had been the very devil in the west Atlantic, but then it had crossed and passed to the north of England, choking up the waters of the North Sea very much as Mabel was doing down there in Santego Bay. The dykes of Holland had been overwhelmed and the waters had surged over East Anglia, bringing the worst weather disaster Europe had known for hundreds of years. The hurricane was the devil among winds.

  Dawson held his hands to his chest. He was soaked to the skin and felt that he would never be dry again. Had he not liked game fishing, he thought that he would have spent the rest of his life in some nice desert which never knew a wind like this—say, Death Valley. But he did like fishing and these were the waters for it and he knew that if he survived this experience he would come back. On the other hand—why go away at all? Why not settle in San Fernandez? There was nothing to keep him in New York now and he might as well live where he liked.

  He grinned tightly as he thought that even in this he would be continuing the programme mapped out for him by his press agent, Wiseman, who had plotted mightily to cut Hemingway’s mantle to fit Dawson’s different figure. Hadn’t Hemingway lived in Cuba? To hell with that! It was what he wanted to do and he would do it.

  Curiously enough, he was not frightened. The unexpected courage he had found in facing up to Roseau and his thugs followed by the catharsis of his confession to Wyatt had released something within him, some fount of manhood that had been blocked and diverted to corrupt ends. He should have been frightened because this was the most frightening thing that had ever happened to him, but he was not and the knowledge filled him with strength.

  Smeared with viscous mud, he lay in a water-filled hole with the wind and the rain lashing him cruelly and was very content.

  The hurricane achieved its greatest strength just after midnight. The very noise itself was a fearsome thing, a malignant terrifying howl of raw power that seared the mind. The rain had slackened and there were no large drops, just an atomized mist driving level with the ground at over a hundred miles an hour, and, as Wyatt had predicted, the flooding ground water had been lifted in the wind’s rage.

  Lightning now flashed continuously, illuminating the ridge in a blue glare, and once, when Wyatt lifted his eyes, he saw the dim outlines of the mountains, the Massif des Saints. They would resist the terrible wind; standing there rooted deep in the bowels of the earth they were a match for the hurricane which would batter its life away against them. Perhaps this slight barrier would take the vicious edge off Mabel and she would go on her way across the Caribbean only to die of the mortal wound she had received. Perhaps. But that would not help the agony of San Fernandez.

  Again in a lightning flash he saw something huge and flat skim overhead like a spinning playing card. It struck the ground not five yards away from the foxhole and then took off again in sharply upward flight. He did not know what it was.

  They lay in their hole, hugging to the thick, viscous mud at the bottom, deafened by the maniacal shriek of the storm, sodden to the skin and becoming colder as the wind evaporated the moisture from their clothing, and with their minds shattered by the intensity of the forces playing about them. Once Causton inadvertently lifted his arm above ground level and the wind caught his elbow and threw his arm forward with such power that he thought it was broken, and if the arm had been thrown against the shoulder joint instead of with it, it very well might have been.

  Even Wyatt, who had a greater understanding of what was happening than the others, was astonished at this violence. Hitherto, when he had flown into the depths of hurricanes, he had felt a certain internal pride, not at his own bravery but at the intrepidity and technical expertise of mankind who could devise means of riding the whirlwind. But to encounter a hurricane without even the thin Duralumin walls of an aircraft to enfold a shrinking and vulnerable body was something else again. This was the first hurricane he had experienced from the ground and he would be a better meteorologist for it—if he lived through it, which he doubted.

  Gradually they fell into a stupor. The brain—the mind—can only take so much battering and then it automatically raises its defences. Over the hours the incredible noise became so much a part of their environment that they ceased to hear it, their tensed bodies relaxed when the adrenalin stopped being pumped into the bloodstream and, beaten into tiredness, they fell into an uneasy d
oze, their limbs flaccid and sprawled in the mud.

  At three in the morning the wind began to ease slightly and Wyatt, his expert ear attuned to the noise even in his unquiet inertness, noticed the change immediately. The rain had stopped completely and there was only the cruel wind left to hurt them, and even the wind was pausing and hesitating, sometimes gusting a little harder as though regretting a slight check, yet always dying a little more.

  At four o’clock he stirred and looked at his watch, rubbing away the slimy mud from the dial so that he could see the luminous figures. It was still pitch dark and there was less lightning, but now he could hear the thunder rolling among the clouds, which meant the wind was not as intense. He stirred his limbs and tentatively thrust his hand above ground-level. The wind pushed hard at it but not so much that he could not resist and he concluded that the wind-strength was now just back on the Beaufort Scale—a nice, comfortable storm.

  Once roused, his mind was active again. He had an intense curiosity about what was happening on the other side of the ridge, and the itch to know got the better of him. He tested the strength of the wind again and thought it was not too bad, so he turned over and eased himself out of the foxhole on his belly and began to crawl up the slope. The wind plucked at him as he inched his way through the mud and it was worse than he thought it would be. There was a great difference between sitting in a hole and being caught in the open, and he knew that but for the foxhole they would not have survived. However, driven by the need to know, he persevered and, although it took him fifteen minutes to traverse the twenty yards to the top of the ridge, he made it safely and tumbled into water two feet deep in a foxhole that had been dug to protect against a storm of steel rather than a storm of air.

  He rested for a few minutes in this shelter, glad to be out of the worst of the wind, then lifted his head and peered into the darkness, his hands cupped blinkerwise about his eyes. At first he saw nothing, but in a momentary lull before a gust he heard something that sounded very much like the sea and the splash of waves. He blinked and stared again and, in the glare of a lightning flash, he saw a terrifying sight.