He gained altitude slowly, fighting for every inch. Sweat streamed down his back and into his eyes. He couldn’t see, but he didn’t need to. He was pulling up and that was all he needed to know, up and out of the grip of the storm—to safety. He felt the plane being dragged physically back to the storm, and he feared that he would be swallowed and forgotten, a gnat in that enormous, killing wind, but then he was free.
He burst through the clouds and with each foot he rose through the thinning air, the hold of the storm below diminished. He flipped the toggle for the dead engine once—twice—and on the third flip it roared back to life and stabilized his left wing, removing some of the pressure from his straining arms. He tried to breathe deeply, but it wouldn’t come. Then he tried again and the air shuddered through his mask. So close, so fucking close.
Below he heard the monstrous roar of the wind.
“What happened?” he whispered. No one answered. Without hesitation, he turned toward the west and steadied the aircraft at fifteen thousand feet.
He didn’t have much time to decide what to do, and if he was going to drop the silver iodide, it had to be soon.
“To hell with getting any lower than this,” he said. The storm screamed beneath him like a host of banshees, but he held steady on his course. He took a deep breath and glanced at his watch.
He tried the radio again, but neither the other seed plane pilots nor the cargo pilots responded. He heard nothing but static in return.
~ * ~
At the complex in North Carolina, Andrea stood, ashen-faced, and stared out the window into the growing gloom of late afternoon.
“What do you mean?” she asked the voice at the other end of the phone. She listened for a moment longer, and then let the phone’s receiver drop from her hand. It swung down on its cord and crashed to the floor, but Andrea was already turning away from it, her eyes glazed.
“What is it?” Scharf asked, leaping out of his seat and rushing to steady her. “Andrea, what’s wrong?”
“The storm,” she replied. Her voice was very quiet, almost childish in its awe of the words being formed, “They said it’s . . . they said . . . it’s gone.”
Scharf gaped at her. “Gone?” he asked. “We did that?”
Andrea shook her head. “They never dropped the silver iodide. Only three of the seed planes have reported in—Phil’s missing. The cargo planes will be landing in about an hour. I don’t know what happened, but the radar reading should be coming in soon. They said it strengthened, jerked to the west, and then . . . nothing.”
“But . . .” Scharf could think of nothing to complete the sentence. He turned to the facsimile printer and watched as the green data light steadied, and the paper started to spit slowly from the machine. He watched, expecting that it was a bad joke, or a mistake, but as the map that represented the Atlantic slid past, rolling on toward the floor, there was no indication of a storm. Not a thunderstorm or cyclone, and definitely nothing that even remotely resembled a hurricane. It was as clean as it had been the day before.
He turned back to Andrea, but she’d walked to the window and was staring out at the sunset. Tears streamed down her cheeks, but he didn’t know if it was because she thought that they had done it—or if she was worried about Phil—or both. He kept his silence. He stood beside her for a long time, until the shadows lengthened and deepened into night. Then, patting her gently on the shoulder to let her know he was leaving, he turned away to oversee the landing and docking of the planes. When he left the office, she still stood at the window, staring into the night sky.
Six planes returned. The three cargo planes landed with a bustle of excitement, and about an hour after that, three of the seed planes. There was less excitement at this. They all reported in, and Andrea listened to their stories distractedly, taking in the descriptions of how their watches had gone haywire, and how after pulling up at the first sign of the storm’s going crazy, the seed planes had found themselves suddenly alone, in clear skies, but she never took her eyes off the skyline.
Eventually they left her alone again. She dropped into one of the chairs and laid her head on a desk, her face tilted toward the window, and dropped into a fitful sleep.
The fourth plane did not return.
Not that night.
Not ever.
The U.S. Navy and the Coast Guard searched for nearly a week. No debris turned up, or evidence that the plane, or the storm, had ever existed. They were just . . . gone. There was a period of a few days when the newspapers ran stories about other strange happenings off the coast of Bermuda. The pilots were interviewed and repeated their stories of watches gone askew and vanishing storms.
In the end, the storm, which had never gotten close enough to be a real threat, and the pilot lost trying to stop it, were forgotten as a thousand other distractions lured the world away.
That was the beginning.
PART FOUR
The Jamieson-Wicks Complex—2006
Chapter Thirteen
It was late, but Andrea felt only the slightest touch of drowsiness. As the years piled up behind her, sleep became more elusive. Time asleep was time wasted, and there was so precious little of it allotted to any one person. At her feet, curled in a huge lump of muscle and white and tan fur, the sixth generation of Muriel’s long gone bulldog, Jake, lay curled into an impossibly tight ball. She had named him Elvis, though for the life of her she didn’t know why. Maybe because they said the king wasn’t dead, and Andrea could understand that kind of dream.
Her laptop was open on the desk before her, the screen lit up with a storm simulation program she’d developed a few years back—one of the many innovations her foundation had provided to the world. The software took the statistics at the beginning of a storm, queried the database on the HP mainframe computer on the first floor, and extrapolated the most likely strengthening, weakening, and path of a coming storm. It wasn’t a hundred percent accurate—nothing was.
No matter how many storms she tracked or calculations she made, there was always something she had missed, or something that was slightly different than at any time before. The program was good, but like life, it had its flaws.
The storm whirling in slow circles on her screen moved jerkily. Each time the winds spun to simulate the motion surrounding the eye the image blinked and refreshed. The software could handle continuous motion, but the laptop, state-of-the-art though it was, lacked sufficient memory for all the data coursing through its electronic veins.
Across the bottom of the screen a bar graphed the sustained wind velocity, the maximum gusts, and the speed at which the storm traveled. Beside this, in a slightly larger banner, she saw her own name. Andrea. All storms had names these days, and when that practice had taken hold, she had programmed it into her software. This was the first simulation she’d created—her storm—and she’d named it Andrea. She didn’t know, really, if she’d done this out of a personal connection with the storm, or out of simple guilt.
As their methods had improved, and the data poured in from all sides, the government and the weather stations, colleges, and universities participating and reaping the benefits of the software in return, the picture of what had happened so long ago had become clearer. She had no answers to her questions about where the storm had gone, or what had happened to Phil, because no answer was satisfactory in the face of the myriad questions. There was no explanation.
Storms don’t implode—or no other storm ever had. They don’t spin themselves into frenzied motion only to disappear. They don’t, in short, do what her storm had done. Ever. For all the data she’d gathered, and all the wizardry she could pull out of her computer system to chart and predict what would come of each new tropical depression that formed, she couldn’t even begin to guess what had happened to this one, tremendous storm, and of all the storms that had ever blown their way up the gulf, it was the only one she cared about.
She watched as the whirling mass on her screen ground its way toward Bermuda.
She’d watched this scenario a thousand times. She’d input more data each time, twisted the conditions first one way, and then the next. None of it made any real difference. She’d seen the computer-generated storm wash over Bermuda, leveling everything in its path. She’d seen it spin in circles and die at sea. She’d seen it hit nearly every point on the eastern seaboard of the United States, but she had never—not once—seen it weaken, or disappear. It just wasn’t possible.
Andrea’s version of the software, what she ran on her laptop, had some modifications that the commercially available and government versions did not. She had built in modules that represented the silver iodide seed planes, and another that simulated the effect of different sizes and levels of oil slicks on the water in the storm’s path. She even had a module, just for the hell of it, that involved the theoretical placement of an iceberg in the path of the storm. Thank you, Pam Jones, wherever you are.
If there was an answer to be found, she knew that it was in this extra data—the circumstances that most of the world had never been made fully aware of—that it would be found. The oil slick, which they had never reported to the government, had proven the most disturbing and confusing of all.
When she placed a slick approximately the size of Keith Scharf’s peanut oil slick in the direct path of the storm, she got a variety of results, but they were all similar. Dependent on the temperature of the water, the air, the barometric pressure, and several other variables she could program into the system, the storm either slowed, or jerked to one side or the other. The few times she managed to get it to slow, the storm hesitated, weakened slightly, but held its course. Eventually the slick broke up, and the storm continued.
It was the other simulations that bothered her most. She knew from radar pictures of her storm that just before it dropped off radar, the wind speed increased dramatically, and the storm lurched to the southwest. It was a sharp motion, as if the huge, roiling behemoth of wind, rain, and death had slammed into a wall and slid down the side, picking up speed from the pressure exerted. What had resulted, for just a few minutes, was a storm beyond the bounds of any scale.
Technically, it was still a Category five storm. Sustained winds of more than a hundred and fifty-six miles per hour, according to the Saffir-Simpson scale, were a Category five. Of course, if the sustained winds reached nearly two hundred miles per hour, as they had in her storm—Hurricane Andrea—they were still considered Category five winds. As you leaped up and off the charts with your numbers, the scale became silly. Categorizing something that improbable and out of proportion was arbitrary, and not really necessary in any sense but the most rudimentary and general.
In Andrea’s world, the numbers were viewed for themselves, and the breaking down of those numbers into categories was useful more for explaining things in a context that laymen would understand than it was for any scientific purpose.
After Andrew, Hugo, and more recently, Isabel and Ivan, the average American was at least basically fluent in what statistical vernacular like Category one or Category two meant in terms of damage, danger, and other basics. They didn’t know what the central barometric pressure meant, or what effect hurricanes had on the environment. Most of them would be shocked to find that there was actually a purpose to the storms, that they drew warm water up from the gulf, and without the aeration they caused, biological cycles could be thrown off completely.
Andrea hadn’t paid much attention to these facts either. Not a few years back, in any case. All she had wanted was to know how to stop them, to pay them back for stealing her father. What happened, instead, was that she had sacrificed another to her obsession, and though she was much closer to realizing her dream—actually controlling or stopping a storm completely—there were great, hollow caverns in her heart that she couldn’t fill no matter how she tried.
The storm spun closer to Bermuda, and Andrea brought up the oil slick module. She thought back over the pilots’ stories again, as she had so many times in the past, and searched for some word—some phrase she might have interpreted wrongly.
The thing they had never taken into account was the area itself. Bermuda—the Devil’s Triangle. It had sounded silly at the time, stories to scare young sailors, or good ghost tales for telling around the fire, but nothing to worry about in a real-world scenario. Except that when the pilots had flown in front of that storm with their loads of peanut oil, their watches spun at different speeds. Their radios had not worked as well as they should. Things had gone horribly and completely wrong.
The slick had been dropped unevenly, and far too soon. The lead pilot, Bradshaw had been the man’s name, had trusted his watch, and had lost his nerve somewhat in the face of the storm. Thinking about that—thinking about being in an airplane, soaring above the ocean, but directly in the path of something as huge as a hurricane, made Andrea’s throat dry. She didn’t know how any of them had done it. She never could have set foot in any aircraft going that close to the storm, so she didn’t blame the pilots for their hurried, poorly thought-out actions. Still, the slick had reacted exactly as they had hoped that it would, spreading and coating the water directly in the central path of the storm.
But the silver iodide had not been in position to be dropped, and by the time it was dropped—at least three loads of the four, that she knew of—the storm had blown out of control. It hit the wall of the oil slick, sought the path of least resistance and warmest water, and lunged in that direction—straight at the U.S. coast.
It should have developed into the worst natural disaster in the country’s history. It should have flooded the land with a tidal surge, battered the coast with winds that would have sheared homes and buildings from the ground and spit them at the heart of the country with contemptuous ease. It should have done all of these things, and if it had done them, it would have been Andrea’s fault.
Yes, the slick was Scharf’s idea. Yes, they were all involved in the program, the seeding and the slick were things they had discussed and worried to death in endless late night debates, but that changed nothing. When Operation Stormfury fell apart, it was Andrea who had obsessed. It was Andrea who had dragged them all along in her wake as she built her complex, fitted out the aircraft, and planned her assault on hurricanes, and it was Andrea they had all turned to for the final decision when they brought Scharf and his oil slick theory on board and decided to put it to the test.
The process intrigued them all, and they were all involved of their own accord, but the truth was very clear, and a bitter pill to swallow. Without Andrea as the catalyst to keep them all moving in the same direction, it never would have happened.
Yes, the storm, her storm, might still have turned. Yes, it might have hit the U.S. and caused a lot of damage. Yes, in the end, even their mistake had worked out—somehow. There had been no storm. In that much, they had succeeded, but it was such an empty sensation, such a hollow victory with no one to share it. Andrea knew this was a selfish way to view what, in some ways, had been a miracle, but she couldn’t help it. Her capacity for belief in miracles had been dwindling since childhood.
On screen, the storm hit the makeshift lopsided slick she provided. She watched the statistics bar on the bottom of the screen. The storm hesitated, just for a moment. The wind speed dropped about ten miles per hour, and then, very suddenly, it accelerated. The white cloud that represented the storm wall jogged to the left. The wind speed leaped up over a hundred and fifty, then over a hundred and seventy, and leveled off at about two hundred and ten miles per hour. The storm spread out from the end of the slick as if squeezed from a tube. The size was incredible, and on its present course it would strike midway between North Carolina and Florida.
Andrea knew that by the manipulation of water temperature and cold fronts she could influence which direction the storm would take. She could even, if she worked hard enough at it, force the storm back out to sea and hold it there until it dissipated. The problem was, she could only do this on her computer screen.
&nb
sp; The worst of it was that the oil slick could work. She still had no proof that the seeding would have mattered, but in about twenty percent of her simulations she was able to bring about an effect she called “The Coil.” When a hurricane went into “The Coil,” it tightened into a smaller, more compact mass of water and then, unable to sustain the evaporation that drew more moisture from the water, the storm simply devoured itself from within. It spun and spun until there was nothing left to fuel the energy, the storm wall broke, and the eye became ragged, then dissipated altogether. It was exactly the effect they had hoped for long ago, but it was too unpredictable.
The odds were as good that you would strengthen the storm as that it would reach “The Coil.” Other than in simulations on the computer, the method had been scrapped altogether.
The storm on her screen, now so large that it blocked the coastline almost completely, spun closer and Andrea hit the pause button. She stared at the screen, the storm, and the numbers at the bottom of the screen for a long time. She traced her finger over the spot on the virtual map where her home on the Outer Banks had been. She touched the spot directly over where she now sat, twenty miles inland from the North Carolina coast. None of it would exist, she knew. If the storm were real, it would erase her home and her work, most of the people that still mattered to her, completely. Nothing would remain.
She closed her eyes and in that instant saw her father and Muriel, his strong arm around her bony shoulders and her arm held up to keep the birdcage from banging as they tried to leap through her doorway to the porch. Andrea saw the house drop, the churning water beneath, and the boat, dancing empty and forgotten beneath the porch. She saw Jake barking—could almost hear him—and as if in answer to that thought, Elvis stirred at her feet.
The dog brushed her hand with his wet, inquisitive nose and licked the blue-veined back of her hand. Andrea opened her eyes. She rubbed him behind the ear with one hand, and with the other she flipped her trackball, clicked the button, and reset the program. Then she pressed enter yet again, and the storm began its endless, conjectural dance across the screen. Andrea needed sleep, she knew, but it eluded her.
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