The Wind From Nowhere

by J. G. Ballard

  So Van Damm was still alive. The captain who had laid on the Terrapin had told Lanyon confidentially that the general would almost certainly be dead by the time they reached Genoa, but whether this was the truth or merely an astute piece of psychology—everybody else in the crew seemed to have been fed the same story—Lanyon had no means of finding out. Certainly Van Damm had been severely injured in the plane smash at Orly Airport, but at least he was lucky enough to be alive. The five-man crew of the Constellation and two of the general’s aides had been killed outright.

  Now Van Damm had been brought south to Nice and the Terrapin would have another shot at rescuing him. Lanyon wondered whether it was worth it. Up to the time of his accident Van Damm had been expected to declare himself the Democratic candidate in the coming election, but he wouldn’t be of much interest now to the party chiefs. However, presumably some debt of honor was being paid off. After three years as NATO Supreme Commander, Van Damm was due anyway for retirement, and probably the Pentagon was living up to its bargain with him when he had signed on.

  There was a knock on the door and Lieutenant Matheson, Lanyon’s number two, stuck his head in.

  “OK, Steve?”

  Lanyon swung his legs off the bunk. “Sure, come in.”

  Matheson looked slightly anxious, his plump face tense and uneven.

  “I hear Van Damm is still holding on? Thought he was supposed to peg out by now.”

  Lanyon shrugged. The Terrapin was a small J-class sub, and apart from himself Matheson was the only officer aboard. What frightened him was that he might have to take on the job of driving up to Nice and collecting Van Damm.

  Lanyon smiled to himself. He liked Matheson, a pleasant boy with a relaxed sense of humor that Lanyon appreciated. But Matheson was no hero.

  “What’s the programme now?” Matheson pressed. “It’s a 250-mile run round the coast to Nice, and God knows what it might be like. Don’t you think it’s worth trying to get in a little closer? There’s a deep anchorage at Monte Carlo.”

  Lanyon shook his head. “It’s full of smashed-up yachts. I can’t take the risk. Don’t worry, wind speed’s only about ninety. It’ll probably start slacking off today.”

  Matheson snorted unhappily. “That’s what they’ve been saying for the last three weeks. I think we’d be crazy to lose two or three men trying to rescue a stiff.”

  Lanyon let this pass, but in a quiet voice he said: “Van Damm isn’t dead yet. He’s done his job, so I think we ought to do ours.”

  He stood up and pulled a heavy leather windbreaker from a hook on the bulkhead over the desk, then buckled on a service ·45 and glanced at himself in the mirror, straightening his uniform.

  After putting on his cap, he opened the door. “Let’s go and see what’s happening on deck.”

  They made their way up to the conning tower, crossed the gangway onto the narrow jetty on the wall of the sub-pen. A stairway took them over the workshops into the control deck at the far end of the pens.

  There were a dozen pens in all, each with room for four submarines, but only three ships were at their berths, fitting out for rescue missions similar to the Terrapin’s.

  All the windows they passed were bricked in, but even through three feet of concrete they could hear the steady unvarying drone of the storm wind.

  A sailor guided them to one of the offices in Combined Personnel H.Q. where Major Hendrix, the liaison officer, greeted them and pulled up chairs.

  The office was snug and comfortable, but something about Hendrix, the fatigue showing in his face, the two buttons missing from his uniform jacket, warned Lanyon that he could expect to find conditions less equable outside.

  “Good to see you, Commander,” Hendrix said hurriedly. A couple of map wallets and a packet of currency were on his desk and he pushed them forward. “Forgive me if I come straight to the point, but the army is pulling out of Genoa today and I’ve got a million things to do.” He glanced up at the wall clock for a moment, then flipped on the intercom. “Sergeant, what are the latest readings we’ve got?”

  “A hundred fifteen and 265 degrees magnetic, sir.”

  Hendrix looked up at Lanyon. “A hundred fifteen miles an hour and virtually due east, Commander. The troop carrier is waiting for you out in the transport bay. There are a navy driver and a couple of orderlies from the sick bay here.” He stood up and moved around his desk. “The coast road is still open, apparently, but watch out for collapsing buildings through the towns.” He looked at Matheson. “I take it the lieutenant will be going to pick up Van Damm, Commander.”

  Lanyon shook his head. “No, as a matter of fact I will be, Captain.”

  “Wait a minute, sir,” Matheson started to cut in, but Lanyon waved him back.

  “It’s O.K., Paul. I’d like to have a look at the scenery.”

  Matheson made a further token protest, then said no more.

  They made their way out to the transport bay, the sounds of the wind growing steadily louder as they passed down the corridors. Revolving doors had been built into the exits, each operated by a couple of men with powerful winches.

  They picked up the driver and Lanyon turned to Matheson. “I’ll call you in six hours’ time, when we make the border. Check with Hendrix here and let me know if anything comes in from Tunis.”

  Zipping his jacket, he nodded to the driver and stepped through into the entry section of the door. The men on the winch cranked it around and Lanyon stepped out into sharp daylight and a vicious tornado of air that whirled past him, jockeying him across a narrow yard between two high concrete buildings. Stinging clouds of grit and sand sang through the air, lashing at his face and legs. Before he could grab it, his peaked cap sailed up into the air and shot away on a tremendous updraught.

  Holding tight to the map wallets, he lurched across to the troop carrier, a squat 12-wheeler with sandbags strapped to the hood and over the windshield, and heavy steel shutters welded to the window grilles.

  Inside, two orderlies squatted down silently on a mattress. They were wearing one-piece plastic suits fitted with hoods roped tightly around their faces, so that only their eyes and mouths showed. Bulky goggles hung from their necks. Lanyon climbed over into the co-driver’s seat and waited for the driver to bolt up the doors. It was dim and cold inside the carrier, the sole light coming from the wide periscope mirror mounted over the dashboard. The doors and control pedals were taped with cotton wadding, but a steady stream of air whistled through the clutch and brake housings, chilling Lanyon’s legs.

  He peered through the periscope. Directly ahead, straight into the wind, he could see down a narrow asphalt roadway past a line of high buildings, the rear walls of the sub-pens. A quarter of a mile away was what looked like the remains of a boundary fence, tilting posts from which straggled a few strands of barbed wire. Beyond the boundary was a thick gray haze, blurred and shimmering, a tremendous surface duststorm two or three hundred feet high, which headed straight toward them and then passed overhead. Looking up, he saw that it contained thousands of miscellaneous objects—bits of paper and refuse, rooftiles, leaves, and fragments of glass—all borne aloft on a huge sweeping tide of dust.

  The driver took his seat, switched on the radio and spoke to Traffic Control. Receiving his clearance, he gunned the engine and edged forward into the wind.

  The carrier ground along at a steady ten miles an hour, passed the sub-pens and then turned along the boundary road. As it pivoted, the whole vehicle tilted sideways, caught and held by the tremendous power of the wind. No longer shielded by the sandbags, there was a continuous clatter and rattle as scores of hard objects bounced off the sloping sides of the carrier, each report as loud as a ricocheting bullet.

  “Feels like a space ship going through a meteor shower,” Lanyon commented.

  The driver, a tough young Brooklyner called Goldman, nodded. “Yeah, there’s some really big stuff moving now, Commander.”

  Lanyon looked out through the periscope. This had a
90-degree traverse and afforded a satisfactorily wide sweep of the road ahead. A quarter of a mile away were the gates into the base and a cluster of single-story guard houses, half obscured by the low-lying dust cloud. On the right were big two- and three-story blocks, fuel depots, with their underground tanks, windows sand-bagged, exposed service plant swathed in canvas.

  Genoa lay behind them to the south, hidden in the haze. They swung out through the gateway and took the coast road that ran about half a mile inland, a wide concrete motorway cut into the leeward side of the low hills reaching toward the mountain shield at Alassio. All the crops in the adjacent fields had long been flattened, but the heavy stone farmhouses nestling in saddles between the hills were still intact, their roofs weighed down with tiers of flagstones.

  They passed through a succession of drab villages, windows boarded up against the storm, alleyways jammed with the wrecks of old cars and farm implements. In the main square of Larghetto a bus lay on its side, and headless statues stood over the empty fountains. The roof of the 14th-century town hall had gone, but most of the buildings and houses they saw, despite their superficially decrepit appearance, were well able to withstand the hurricane-force winds. They were probably stronger than the mass-produced modem split levels and ranch homes of the big housing developments back in the States.

  “Can you pick up any news on this rig?” Lanyon asked Goldman, pointing to the radio.

  The driver switched on and swung the dials, avoiding the army and navy channels.

  “For once the air force got nothing to say,” he commented with a short laugh. “AFN Munich should still be on the air.”

  A rain of pebbles against the side of the carrier drowned out a newscaster’s voice, but turning up the volume Lanyon heard:

  “…no news available on the Pacific area, but heavy flooding and winds of hurricane force are believed to have caused thousands of casualties in islands as far apart as Okinawa and the Solomons. Indian Prime Minister Pandit Nehru has outlined full-scale relief measures, and Iraq and Persia are to collaborate in organizing essential supplies to stricken towns and villages. In the UN Assembly the Afro-Asian bloc has tabled a resolution calling on the United Nations to launch a global relief mission. Widespread flooding has brought unprecedented damage to the Middle West. Damage is estimated at four hundred million dollars, but so far few lives have been taken…”

  That’s one good thing, Lanyon thought. The flooding might bring the danger of typhoid and cholera, but so far, at least, even in the Pacific area, loss of life had been low. A hurricane like the one he had seen down at the base at Key West two years earlier had swooped in from the Caribbean without any warning, and just about the whole Atlantic seaboard had been caught without warning. Scores of people had been killed driving their cars home. This time, though, the gradual build-up in speed, the steady five miles an hour daily increase, had given everyone a chance to nail the roof down, dig a deep shelter in the garden or basement, lay in food stocks.

  They passed through San Remo, the lines of hotels shuddering as the wind thrashed across the hundreds of shuttered balconies. Below, the sea writhed and flickered with mountainous waves, and spray dropped the visibility down to little more than a mile.

  One or two vehicles passed them, crawling along under loads of sandbags. Most of them were Italian military or police trucks, patrolling the windswept empty streets.

  Lanyon dozed off in the cold greasy air inside the carrier. He woke just as they crossed the main square of a small town and heard a heavy pounding on the steel plates behind his head.

  The blows repeated themselves at rapid intervals, and through the thick armor plating Lanyon heard the dim sounds of someone shouting.

  He sat up and peered into the periscope, but the cobbled street ahead was empty.

  “What’s going on?” he asked the driver.

  Goldman flipped away the butt of his cigarette. “Some sort of rumpus back there, Commander. Couldn’t make it out exactly.”

  He leaned a little harder on the accelerator, pushed the carrier’s speed up to 15 miles an hour. The pounding stopped, then took up again more insistently, the voice hoarser above the wind.

  Lanyon tapped the steering wheel. “Slow down for a second. I’ll go back and check.”

  Goldman started to protest, but Lanyon straddled the back of his seat, stepped past the two orderlies sitting on the mattress, and got to the rear doors. He slipped back the shutters, peered out through the grille. A small group of people clustered around the porch of a gray-walled church on the north side of the square. There were several women among them, all wearing black shawls over their heads, backing into the recessed entranceway. A loose heap of rubble lay in the square at their feet and clouds of dust and mortar were failing around them.

  The church tower was missing. A single spur of brickwork, all that was left of one corner, stood up 15 feet above the apex of the roof. The wind was tearing at the raw masonry, stripping away whole pieces of brick.

  One of the orderlies crawled across the mattress and crouched next to Lanyon.

  “The tower’s just collapsed,” Lanyon told him. He indicated the stack of cartons. “What have you got inside there?”

  “Plasma, oxygen, penicillin.” The orderly peered at Lanyon. “We can’t use it on them, Commander. This stuff’s reserved for the general.”

  “Don’t worry, they’ll have more supplies at Nice.”

  “But Commander, they may have run out. Casualties are probably pouring in there. It’s a small hospital—just a dysentery unit for overtired weekenders on the Paris mill.”

  Just then a figure appeared around the end of the carrier and pressed his face to the grille, jabbering in Italian. It was a big gaunt man with bulky shoulders, and black hair low over a tough face.

  The orderly backed away but Lanyon started to open the doors. Over his shoulder he shouted at Goldman.

  “Reverse up toward the church! I’ll see if we can lend a hand.”

  “Commander, once we start helping these people we’ll never get to Nice. They’ve got their own rescue units working.”

  “Not right here, anyway. Come one, you heard me, back in!”

  As he slipped the catch the big Italian outside wrenched the door out of his hands. He looked angry and exhausted, and pulled Lanyon out of the truck, yelling at him and pointing at the church. Goldman was reversing the carrier out of the street into the square, the orderlies jumping down and bolting the door behind them.

  As they reached the church, brickwork and plaster shattered down onto the pavement around them. The Italian shouldered his way through the people in the entranceway, and led Lanyon through into the nave.

  Inside the church, a bomb appeared to have exploded in the middle of a crowded congregation. A group of women and older men and children crouched around the altar while the priest and five or six younger men pulled away the mounds of masonry that had fallen through the roof when the tower had collapsed, taking with it one of the longitudinal support beams. This lay across the pews. Below it, through the piles of white dust and masonry, Lanyon could see tags of black fabric, twisted shoes, the hunched forms of crouching bodies.

  Above them, the wind racing across the surface of the roof was stripping away the ragged edge of tiles around the ten-foot-wide hole, hampering the men tearing away the rubble over the pews. Lanyon joined the big Italian at one end of the roof beam, but they failed to move it.

  Lanyon turned to leave the nave and the big Italian ran after him and seized his shoulder, his face contorted with anger and fatigue.

  “Not go!” he bellowed. He pointed to the pile of rubble. “My wife, my wife! You stay!”

  Lanyon tried to pacify him, indicated the truck that had backed into the entranceway, its doors open, one of the orderlies crouched inside. He tore himself from the Italian and ran out to the truck, shouting: “Goldman, get the winch running. Where’s the cable?”

  They pulled it out of the locker under the end board, clipped
it into the winch and then carried the free end through into the nave. Lanyon and the Italian lashed it to the main beam, then Goldman gunned up the great 550-hp engine and tautened the cable, slowly swinging the beam sideways off the pew into the center of the aisle. Immediately two or three people trapped below the pews began to stir. One of them, a young woman wearing the remains of a black dress that was now as white as a bridal gown, managed to stand up weakly and pulled herself out. Between her feet Lanyon could see several motionless figures, and the big Italian was digging frantically with his hands at the masonry, hurling it away with insane force.

  More figures pressed into the nave behind him, and Lanyon turned to see that a squad of uniformed troops, with a couple of police carabineri, had arrived, carrying in stretchers and plasma kits.

  “Every thanks, Captain,” the sergeant told him. “We are all grateful to your men.” He shook his head sadly, glancing around at the church. “The people were praying for the stop of the wind.”

  Lanyon and the orderlies climbed back into the carrier, sealed the doors and moved off.

  Massaging his bruised hands and trying to regain his breath, Lanyon turned to the orderlies slumped down on the mattress. “Did either of you see whether that big fellow got his wife out?”

  They shook their heads doubtfully. “Don’t think so, Commander.”

  Goldman accelerated the engine and straightened the periscope. “Wind speed’s up, Commander. One ten now. We’ll have to keep moving if we’re going to make Nice by dark.”

  Lanyon studied the driver for a few moments, watching the cigarette butt rotate nastily around his mouth. “Don’t worry, sailor,” he said, “I’ll concentrate on the general from now on.”

  They crossed the border at Vintemille at 7 P.M. and cleared through by radio with Nice and Genoa. The flimsy customs sheds and wooden turnpikes had disappeared; the frontier guards on both sides were dug into sandbagged emplacements below ground surface.

  They reached Nice within a couple of hours, taking the Corniche road through the hills. The hospital compound was packed with hundreds of trucks and jeeps, their drivers huddled in the entrances to the loading bays. A couple of MP’s steered the carrier over to one of the rear wings, where Lanyon and the orderlies climbed out and battled their way inside.