Phillip Wicks stared down the length of it and off into the fields beyond. He saw a line of trees, but the images were warped and patchy, distorted by the waves of heat. It was a beautiful day for flying, but the weather over the airstrip wasn’t his concern. Not this time, anyway. It was the weather over the ocean he had on his mind.
The pre-flight checks had gone smoothly, and he was confident that his co-pilot, a stocky young aviator by the name of Matt Schmidt, could handle the rest on his own. Phil had another stop to make before he was ready to climb into the cockpit, and he had just about enough time left to make it happen.
The control tower loomed on the left, and behind that were hangars, service bays, and a number of squat, nondescript brick buildings. They were left over from World War II. Some were still in service, housing various branches of the service in small detachments. Others housed the odd government agency, or special projects that didn’t rate new accommodations or top priority.
The last of these, a two-story office complex, was surrounded by a bustle of activity and a small fleet of vehicles. Out in front a single panel truck was parked with the call letters of the local news station on it. This truck had a number of wires and cables running out of its rear, and there was a smaller center of activity near the rear doors. Phil made a note to enter the building at the far end and avoid the news truck completely.
Phil was a tall man with wavy brown hair and deep-set blue eyes that glittered if the light caught them just right. He had made a long study on the art of catching that light. You play what you’re dealt, he liked to say, and his smile was an asset that had gotten him both into and out of more jams than he could recall.
Skirting the truck, its crew, and the streams of technicians and laborers filing in and out the main door, Phil turned left, walked the fifty feet to the corner of the building and pushed through a set of glass doors. There was no sign to tell him what building he had entered. Inside was a wide set of stairs, standard military style with high-gloss tiles and polished metal, non-skid, reinforced edges. The walls were a uniform “champagne.”
His footsteps echoed as he climbed, and the doors closed slowly behind him, shutting off the sounds of trucks and traffic and the distant whine of aircraft engines.
Down the hall from the stairway, double doors opened onto a long hallway that ran the length of the building. Office doors opened to either side of that hall, most of them locked and dusty. About halfway down, one set hung open, and light spilled out into the corridor. Above this door a simple wooden plaque had been hung. It read, “Operation Stormfury.”
Inside were desks, file cabinets, electronic equipment, an old Quartermaster’s chart table, and several radarscopes. All of these latter were manned by sailors in dungarees, their eyes pressed to the rubber hoods that blocked light from the screens. Their fingers danced over various intensity and focus controls. There were several officers and at least one pilot gathered around the chart table with maps spread out over its surface, and at the largest of the desks, buried behind piles of manuals and computer readouts, Andrea Jamieson scribbled furiously on a legal pad. Every few moments she shook her head in disgust, tore loose the page she’d been working on, and crumpled it angrily.
One of the radar operators called out a set of coordinates to the men at the chart table, and annotations were made. There was a long, sectioned arm that stretched across the drawing surface. It could retract to one side, or be drawn across the surface of the map. The mechanical arm made more exact course plotting possible. It was a compact team, and every member was focused on his or her particular task.
Phil stuck his head in the door quietly and looked around. He recognized the pilot at the table, another of the men assigned to his mission. He took in the radarscopes, and the desks. From where he stood, all he could see of Andrea was the top of her head, rising and falling as she wrote, crumpled, tossed, and started over on whatever it was she was working on.
Phil stepped into the room and walked to the chart table. The men looked up as he approached. Earl, the other pilot, nodded to him, but the others barely acknowledged his presence. They were intent on the lines they traced on the chart. Phil stepped closer and looked down.
They were charting a course past Bermuda and on a line with the coast of Florida. The airfield was inland, but still on the track they were carefully marking out.
“Is it going to hit here at all, do you think?” he asked no one in particular.
When none of the others offered an answer, Earl glanced up again. “Looks like there will be some wind, and some rain, but it shouldn’t be too bad. It’s been a long time since a storm got a direct hit this far inland. We should be okay.”
The sound of another sheet being torn from the legal pad drew Phil’s attention. When he turned, he saw that Andrea had stood. She had her hands flat on the desk, and her eyes blazed with—something.
“Don’t you ever think that,” she said, “and even if you do think it, don’t say it here. If you get used to storms not hitting, then you get lazy. If you convince yourself it won’t ever happen, that every one of them will pass right on by because the last two, or three, or twenty of them passed on by, you’ll become a statistic. We deal in those statistics here.”
She grabbed a handful of the computer printouts, huge folding sheets with lines and lines of numbers, text, and characters, and shook it at them.
Phil stood very still. He hadn’t seen the outburst coming, and from the look on his face, neither had Earl.
“I’m sorry,” the pilot said. “I didn’t mean to make light of it.” He turned back to the table, grabbed his goggles and flight gear from the corner, and clapped one of the officers on the shoulder. “Keep an eye on it for us, Lieutenant.”
Andrea still held the printout in her hand. She watched as Earl wound his way around the radarscopes on the far side of the chart table and headed for the door without a backward glance. Phil watched her. After a moment, he repeated his question, this time addressing her.
“Ma’am,” he said. “Do you think the storm is going to hit here? I’m not just curious for the sake of it. I’ll be flying out over your storm in a little while here, and I’ll be taking a lot of men and aircraft with me. We’ve got a mission to complete, and when we’re done, we have to come back. If we’re going to have a hurricane on our tails, or even close, then I need to have an idea of it before we go.”
She stared at him, and her hand lowered slowly until the papers rested on the cluttered desktop. Her lips moved, but she didn’t speak immediately, not so that he could hear. She was obviously having trouble calming herself after the outburst, and he wondered what had sparked it. Earl’s comment was no different than a thousand others he’d heard—possibly not the brightest way to look at hurricanes, but certainly not worthy of an attack.
“I’m sorry, Captain . . .” she hesitated.
“Wicks,” he said, stepping closer to her desk and holding out his hand. “Phil Wicks. I’ll be flying point today.”
She released her hold on the papers and took his hand. Her lips curled into an embarrassed smile. “I’m sorry about a moment ago,” she said. “I take storms very seriously. We all do.”
She realized that she’d held his hand too long and pulled hers back quickly. To hide the blush that rose to her cheeks, she stepped around her desk and walked past Phil to the chart table. The lieutenant moved aside as she approached, and Phil followed her, watching as she pointed to the line of the approaching storm.
“This isn’t a hurricane yet, Captain,” she said. “It’s a tropical depression. The winds are only about sixty miles per hour. It’s moving quickly though, nearly twenty miles per hour, and we believe it will slow down here,” she pressed her finger onto the chart on a line with where they had plotted the course. “It may strengthen here, perhaps to a Category one storm—meaning about seventy-five mile per hour winds. We are counting on it to strengthen, but not too much.
“At that point,” she turned to look at
him, and Phil caught something in her eyes, something similar to the fire she’d displayed when she’d turned on Earl a few moments earlier, “one of two things will happen. Either the cold front moving down from the East will slow it and bump it toward the south,” she traced a line that curved down toward the southern tip of Florida and off to the west, “or, if the cold front is too slow, or the storm has already gathered enough strength by the time the two fronts meet, it could shift north, or northeast.”
“It could hit here, then,” Phil said. It was a statement, not a question, but her smile widened for the first time.
“It could, but the odds are against it. Also, unless the storm grows a lot stronger than we believe it will, it would be weakened considerably by the time it reached this far inland. Probably it will strike on the eastern shore and bump up the coast.”
“But not for certain,” he persisted.
“It is never ‘for certain,’” she answered. She held his gaze for a moment, and then turned back to the chart. “Nothing ever is. But this time you can be sure of one thing.”
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Well,” she said, smiling more brightly, “unless I’m underestimating you and the average airspeed of a C-130, you have nothing to worry about. If the storm strengthens, it will slow down to fifteen, maybe eighteen miles per hour. As long as you keep far enough above it to avoid the wind, and close enough to it to deliver your cargo, you should be back with several hours to spare before the first of the winds and rain actually reach shore.”
“Several hours?” Phil asked.
She nodded.
“That’s a problem,” he said, scratching his head and glancing down at the chart with a frown.
Now she looked confused.
“How can that be a problem, Captain?”
“Phil,” he corrected her. “It’s Phil, if you don’t mind. The problem is Miss . . .”
“Andrea,” she replied automatically, “Andrea Jamieson. I’m the senior consultant here.”
“Andrea,” he nodded, smiling. “The problem is with my dinner plans,” he said, turning away sadly.
“But,” she replied, following him around the chart table with a confused frown planted on her face, “I just told you, Capt . . . Phil. You’ll be back in plenty of time for dinner. How will it spoil your plans?”
He turned back with a wink. “I don’t have any yet,” he said.
She stood, staring at him with her mouth open for just a second, and he grinned at her.
“You just get up there and drop that load of silver iodide on the storm for me, Captain Wicks,” she said, reverting to his rank. He thought he caught the ghost of a smile on her lips, but he didn’t wait to push his luck. “We have a storm brewing,” she added.
Phil nodded and turned toward the door. On the way past Andrea’s desk he caught sight of a colorful brochure. It rested on top of a pile of others just like it. Across the top of the front it said OPERATION STORMFURY in bright blue letters. He laid his hand on top of it and glanced at the paragraphs below.
“Take it, Captain,” Angela called out. “It will give you something to read while you’re working out those dinner plans.”
Phil snatched the brochure and left the room. The questions about the storm had been important, but nothing he couldn’t have gotten from the tower once he was in the air. It was the process he was after. The reason for the mission and the flight were unclear to him.
Phil had heard rumors, but he was trained for combat missions, and the reassignment to Operation Stormfury was not one he’d wanted. It was a crackpot program, one the government was ready to cancel on a moment’s notice, but it had funding, and it had congressional backing, so here he was.
None of the other pilots could explain it to his satisfaction. Fly a bomber over a hurricane and drop a load of silver iodide into the storm, they said. Then, fly home and have a beer and take it easy until the next storm. It was his retirement assignment, he knew. You didn’t draw assignments like Stormfury when there were hot spots of aggression all through Southeast Asia if they were planning on sending you back into battle.
As he made his way back down the same stairway he’d climbed, he thumbed through the brochure. It was meant for the press, he saw, nothing too confidential, but it was more than he’d been able to get out of any of his companions.
Operation Stormfury is dedicated to finding the Achilles’ heel of hurricanes. Formed of a core group of meteorologists, engineers, and physicists working in partnership with the United States government and the four branches of the military, data are gathered from storms around the globe.
There were drawings of boxes that were undoubtedly intended to be computers with arrows indicating the flow of data. It was childish and comical, but oddly compelling, and he read on. There was some technical information about the supercooled water in storms, water cooled below its freezing point. When a “seed crystal” like silver iodide was introduced, the water solidified around it. If this process could be introduced over a large enough area it could disrupt the structure of the storm, possibly weakening the eye, or causing it to fall apart completely.
There was more—a lot more—but Phil was having trouble concentrating on it. He’d wanted to know, but now that he did, it didn’t seem as important. As he hurried back toward his plane, and his crew, he smiled.
He was thinking about dinner.
Chapter Seven
The air remained clear as Phil rolled down the runway and lifted off. There were four aircraft in all, and after their initial climb, they leveled off, tightened their formation, tipped their wings at the tower and banked off toward the Atlantic. It would take some time to reach the outer perimeter of the storm, and they intended to remain close until then. Phil wanted to maintain visual contact in case some trick of the hurricane’s winds caused unforeseen problems.
The plan was to remain far enough above the storm that the winds wouldn’t be a factor, but this was still a fairly new “science,” and dropping silver iodide into clouds was not exactly the same as dropping explosive loads over enemy lines. True, there would be no one gunning for them, and no strafing fire or anti-aircraft barrage would impede their flight. This didn’t mean they could relax. You could never do that if you wanted to live a long life, and Captain Phil Wicks intended to make it at least as far into the future as dinner.
“You okay, skipper?” Matt Schmidt, strapped in beside him, looked half-concerned, half-amused. “You look like you’re flying in your sleep.”
“Just thinking,” Phil laughed. “Sorry. I took a hit from a pair of bright blue eyes a little while ago. Still trying to get my bearings.”
Matt nodded and grinned. The two had flown together for a long time. Schmidt was a good pilot, but his specialty was communications. He’d been specially trained for this mission. They hadn’t wanted to bring gunners to drop the “seed” loads, because the process was different. Rather than expecting men to unlearn perfectly good and useful combat skills, the decision had come down from above to train whoever was available. Despite the funding and the interest from Washington, Stormfury was not a priority.
In Matt’s case, however, the man had wormed his way onto the team despite the ruling. He and Phil had flown together on hundreds of missions, and Matt considered the older pilot to be his mentor. Schmidt would be up for his own aircraft on his next assignment, and he could have had his choice of several active units, but he’d pulled some strings and called in some favors and gotten himself assigned, at least temporarily, to fly with his old partner.
Phil appreciated it, though he hoped that hitching his star to an old, nearly retired battlewagon like himself wouldn’t hurt the kid’s career down the road. If Phil were still in favor, he wouldn’t be here in the first place.
“You mean the weather lady?”
Phil nodded.
Matt’s grin widened. “She’s a looker all right.”
Phil banked the plane through the clouds and soared out over
the Atlantic, using the motion of the plane to mask his own grin. “That she is,” he whispered under his breath. “She surely is.”
~ * ~
Andrea stood at the window and watched the four planes disappear into the clouds. Behind her the radar operators still called out coordinates, and the lieutenant at the chart table continued to plot the storm’s course. Her legal pad lay forgotten across the top of her desk where she’d left it. Several more aborted attempts at the letter she’d been trying to draft had been crumpled and tossed, and she was no nearer to the words she wanted—that she needed to get her point across.
Beneath the other papers on her desk was a message from Washington DC. The funding for Operation Stormfury was going to be cut back to a small administrative load. The active branch of the program—her branch—would have their monies pulled. The government didn’t see that further experimentation in cloud seeding would bring about any useful results, and with the war in Vietnam hitting high gear, they could ill afford the resources that had been allotted, particularly the planes and the radar.
On the runway, a fifth plane had taxied into position for takeoff. This one was an observation plane. It was fitted with cameras, microphones, gauges and dials that would transmit atmospheric and weather conditions through a high frequency transmitter to the receivers installed in a bank against the wall, just behind the radarscopes. The outputs of these receivers would feed facsimile printers, plotters, and a pair of large gray Teletype machines behind her desk. The equipment was state of the art, borrowed, stolen, and begged from a dozen other projects.
Once that data had been gathered and recorded, Andrea’s real work began, as well as that of her closer associates. They checked the storm’s strength and structure at every moment before, during, and after the seeding process. They checked water temperature, wind temperature, the atmospheric pressure on each side of the storm—in short, they would know all that there was to know about the conditions surrounding this particular storm.
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