Wyatt’s Hurricane / Bahama Crisis

DESMOND BAGLEY

ONE

The Super-Constellation flew south-east in fair weather, leaving behind the arc of green islands scattered across the crinkled sea, the island chain known as the Lesser Antilles. Ahead, somewhere over the hard line of the Atlantic horizon, was her destination – a rendezvous with trouble somewhere north of the Equator and in that part of the Atlantic which is squeezed between North Africa and South America.

The pilot, Lieutenant-Commander Hansen, did not really know the exact position of contact nor when he would get there – he merely flew on orders from a civilian seated behind him – but he had flown on many similar missions and knew what was expected of him, so he relaxed in his seat and left the flying to Morgan, his co-pilot. The Lieutenant-Commander had over twelve years’ service in the United States Navy and so was paid $660 a month. He was grossly underpaid for the job he was doing.

The aircraft, one of the most graceful ever designed, had once proudly flown the North Atlantic commercial route until edged out by the faster jets. So she had been put in mothballs until the Navy had need of her and now she wore United States Navy insignia. She looked more battered than seemed proper in a Navy plane – the leading edge of her wings was pitted and dented and the mascot of a winged cloud painted on her nose was worn and abraded – but she had flown more of these missions than her pilot and so the wear and tear was understandable.

Hansen looked at the sky over the horizon and saw the first faint traces of cirrus flecking the pale blue. He flicked a switch and said, ‘I think she’s coming up now, Dave. Any change of orders?’

A voice crackled in his earphones. ‘I’ll check on the display.’

Hansen folded his arms across his stomach and stared ahead at the gathering high clouds. Some Navy men might have resented taking instructions from a civilian, especially from one who was not even an American, but Hansen knew better than that; in this particular job status and nationality did not matter a damn and all one needed to know was that the men you flew with were competent and would not get you killed – if they could help it.

Behind the flight deck was the large compartment where once the first-class passengers sipped their bourbon and joshed the hostesses. Now it was crammed with instruments and men; consoles of telemetering devices were banked fore and aft, jutting into promontories and forming islands so that there was very little room for the three men cramped into the maze of electronic equipment.

David Wyatt turned on his swivel stool and cracked his knee sharply against the edge of the big radar console. He grimaced, reflecting that he would never learn, and rubbed his knee with one hand while he switched on the set. The big screen came to life and shed an eerie green glow around him, and he observed it with professional interest. After making a few notes, he rummaged in a satchel for some papers and then got up and made his way to the flight deck.

He tapped Hansen on the shoulder and gave the thumbs-up sign, and then looked ahead. The silky tendrils of the high-flying cirrus were now well overhead, giving place to the lower flat sheets of cirrostratus on the horizon, and he knew that just over the edge of the swelling earth there would be the heavy and menacing nimbostratus – the rain-bearers. He looked at Hansen. ‘This is it,’ he said, and smiled.

Hansen grunted in his throat. ‘No need to look so goddam happy.’

Wyatt pushed a thin sheaf of photographs at him. ‘This is what it looks like from upstairs.’

Hansen scanned the grained and streaky photographs which had been telemetered to earth from a weather satellite. ‘These from Tiros IX?’

‘That’s right.’

‘They’re improving – these are okay,’ said Hansen. He checked the size of the swirl of white against the scale on the edge of the photograph. ‘This one’s not so big; thank God for that.’

‘It’s not the size that counts,’ said Wyatt. ‘It’s the pressure gradient – you know that. That’s what we’re here for.’

‘Any change in operating procedure?’

Wyatt shook his head. ‘The usual thing – we go in counter-clockwise with the wind, edging in all the time. Then, when we get to the south-west quadrant, we turn for the centre.’

Hansen scratched his cheek. ‘Better make sure you get all your measurements first time round. I don’t want to do this again.’ He cocked his head aft. ‘I hope your instrumentation works better than last time.’

Wyatt grimaced. ‘So do I.’ He waved cheerily and went back aft to check on the big radar display. Everything was normal with no anomalies – just the usual dangerous situation ahead. He glanced at the two men under his command. Both were Navy men, skilled specialists who knew everything there was to know about the equipment in their charge, and both had flown on these missions before and knew what to expect. Already they were checking their webbing straps to see there would be no chafe when unexpected strain was thrown on them.

Wyatt went to his own place and strapped himself into the seat. As he snapped down the lever which prevented the seat turning he at last admitted to himself that he was frightened. He always felt scared at this stage of the operation – more scared, he was sure, than any other man aboard. Because he knew more about hurricanes than even Hansen; hurricanes were his job, his life study, and he knew the ravening strength of the winds which were soon to attack the plane in an effort to destroy it. And there was something else, something newly added. From the moment he had seen the white smear on the satellite photographs back at Cap Sarrat he had sensed that this was going to be a bad one. It was not something he could analyse, something he could lay on paper in the cold symbols and formulae of meteorological science, but something he felt deep in his being.

So this time he was even more frightened than usual.

He shrugged and applied himself to his work as the first small buffet of wind hit the plane. The green trace on the radar screen matched well with the satellite photographs and he switched on the recorder which would put all that data on to a coiled strip of plastic magnetic tape to be correlated in the master computer with all the other information that was soon to come pouring in.

Hansen stared ahead at the blackness confronting the plane. The oily black nimbostratus clouds heaved tumultuously, driven by the wind, the formations continually building up and shredding. He grinned tightly at Morgan. ‘Let’s get on with it,’ he said, and gently turned to starboard. Flying in still air at this particular throttle-setting the Super-Constellation should have cruised at 220 knots, and so his air-speed indicator showed, but he was willing to bet that their ground-speed was nearer 270 knots with this wind behind them.

That was the devil in this job; instruments did not read true and there was no hope of getting a valid ground-sighting because even if the clouds broke – which they never did – merely to see a featureless stretch of ocean would be useless.

Suddenly the plane dropped like a stone – caught in a down-draught – and he fought with the controls while watching the altimeter needle spin like a top. He got her on to an even keel once more and set her into a climb to regain his altitude and, almost before he knew what was happening, the plane was caught in an up-draught just as fierce and he had to push the control column forward to avoid being spewed from the top of the wind system.

Through the toughened glass he saw rain and hail being driven upwards, illuminated by the blue glare of lightning. Looking back, he saw a coruscating flash spreading tree-wise from the wingtip and knew they had been struck. He also knew that it did not matter; there would be a mere pinhole in the metal to be filled in by the ground staff and that was all – except for the fact that the plane and everything in it was charged up with several thousand volts of electricity which would have to be dissipated when landing.

Carefully he edged the Constellation deeper into the storm, flying a spiral course and finding the stronger winds. The lightning was now almost continuous, the whipcrack of the close discharges drowning out the noise of the engines. He switched on his throat mike and shouted to the flight engineer, ‘Meeker, everything okay?’

There was a long pause before Meeker replied. ‘Ever … ng fine.’ The words were half drowned in static.

Hansen shouted, ‘Keep things that way,’ and started to do some mental arithmetic. From the satellite photograph he had judged the diameter of the hurricane at 300 miles, which would give a circumference of about 950 miles. To get to the south-west quadrant where the winds were least strong and where it was safest to turn inwards to the centre he would have to fly a third of the way round – say, 230 miles. His air-speed indicator was now fluctuating too much to be of any use, but from past experience he judged his ground-speed to be a little in excess of 300 knots – say, 350 miles an hour. They had been in the storm nearly half an hour, so that left another half-hour before the turning-point.

Sweat beaded his forehead.

In the instrument compartment Wyatt felt that he was being beaten black and blue and he knew that when he got back to Cap Sarrat and stripped he would find weals where his harness had bitten into him. The stark functional lighting dimmed and flared as lightning flashes hit the plane and momentarily overloaded the circuits, and he hoped that the instrumentation held up under the beating.

He cast a glance at the other two men. Smith was hunched in his seat, expertly rolling as the plane lurched and occasionally resetting a knob. He was all right. Jablon-sky’s face had a greenish tinge and, as Wyatt looked, he turned and was violently sick. But he recovered quickly and applied himself to his job, and Wyatt smiled briefly.

He looked at the clock set into the panel before him and began to calculate. When they turned in towards the centre of the hurricane they would have to fly a little over a hundred miles to get to the ‘eye’, that mysterious region of calm in the midst of a wilderness of raging air. There would be fierce crosswinds and the ride would be rough and Wyatt estimated it would take nearly three-quarters of an hour. But then they would be able to idle and catch their breaths before plunging into the fray again. Hansen would circle for fifteen minutes in that wondrous stillness while Wyatt did his work, and they would all rub the soreness from their battered bodies and gird themselves for the flight out.

From the moment they turned in to the centre all instruments would be working, recording air pressure, humidity, temperature and all the other variables that go to make up the biggest wind on earth. And on the way through the hurricane they would drop what Wyatt called to himself their ‘bomb load’ – marvellously complex packages of instruments jettisoned into the storm, some to be tossed for an hour or so in the wind before touching down, some to plunge down to float on the raging sea, others that would sink to a predetermined depth beneath the waves. But all would be sending radio signals to be caught by the complex of receiving instrumentation in the plane and recorded on tape.

He steadied himself in the seat and began to dictate into his throat mike which was hooked up to a small recording machine. He hoped he would be able to disentangle his own voice from the storm noises when he replayed the tape back at base.

Half an hour later Hansen turned in towards the centre, buzzing Wyatt as he did so. Immediately he felt a difference in the quality of the wind’s attack on the plane; there was a new set of noises added to the cacophony and the controls reacted differently under his hands. The Constellation became more difficult to control in the cross-winds which he knew were gusting at perhaps 130 miles an hour; she plunged and bucked and his arms began to ache with the constant corrective movements he was forced to apply. The gyro-compass had long since toppled out of action and the card of the magnetic compass was swinging violently in the bowl.

Wyatt and his crew were very busy. Deafened by the murderous sound and shaken like dice in a cup, they still managed to get on with their work. The instrument capsules were dropped with precision at regular intervals and the information which they immediately began to radio back was stored on the inch-wide, thirty-two track tapes which Smith and Jablonsky hovered over solicitously. In the intervals between dropping the capsules Wyatt continued his running commentary on to his private tape; he knew this data was subjective and not to be used for serious analysis, but he liked to have it for his private information and to compare later with the numerical findings.

It was with relief that he heard the racket end with almost shattering abruptness and knew they had penetrated to the eye of the hurricane. The plane stopped bucking and seemed to float through the air and, after the noise of the storm, the roar of the engines seemed to be the most peaceful sound he had ever heard. Stiffly he unbuckled his straps and said, ‘How are things going?’

Smith waggled his hand. ‘Average score. No humidity readings from number four; no air temperature from number six; no sea temperature from number seven.’ He grimaced.

‘Not a cheep of anything from number three, and none of the sinkers worked at all.’

‘Damn those sinkers!’ said Wyatt feelingly. ‘I always said that system was too bloody complicated. How about you, Jablonsky? What about direct readings?’

‘Everything’s okay with me,’ said Jablonsky.

‘Keep at it,’ said Wyatt. ‘I’m going to see the skipper.’ He made his way forward to the flight deck to find Hansen massaging his arms while Morgan flew the plane in a tight circle. He smiled faintly.

‘This one’s a bastard,’ said Hansen. ‘Too rough for this mother’s son. How about you?’

‘The usual crop of malfunctions – only to be expected. But none of the sinkers worked at all.’

‘Have they ever?’

Wyatt smiled ruefully. ‘It’s asking a bit much, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘We drop a very complicated package into the sea in the middle of a hurricane so that it will settle to a predetermined depth. It broadcasts by sonar a signal which is supposed to be picked up by an equally complicated floating package, turned into a radio wave and picked up by us. There’s one too many links in that chain. I’ll write a report when I get back – we’re tossing too much money into the sea for too little return.’

‘If we get back,’ said Hansen. ‘The worst is yet to come. I’ve never known winds so strong in the south-west quadrant, and it’ll be a damn’ sight worse heading north.’

‘We can scrub the rest of it, if you like,’ offered Wyatt. ‘We can go out the way we came in.’

‘If I could do it I would,’ said Hansen bluntly. ‘But we haven’t the gas to go all the way round again. So we’ll bull our way out by the shortest route and you can drop the other half of the cargo as planned – but it’ll be a hell of a rough ride.’ He looked up. ‘This one is really bad, Dave.’

‘I know,’ said Wyatt soberly. ‘Give me a buzz when you’re ready to move on.’ He returned to the instrument section.

It was only five minutes before the buzzer went and Wyatt knew that Hansen was really nervous because he usually idled for much longer in the eye. He hastily fastened his straps and tensed his muscles for the wrath to come. Hansen had been right – this was a really bad one, it was small, tight and vicious. He would be interested to know what the pressure gradient was that could whip up such high winds.

If what had gone before was purgatory, then this was pure unadulterated hell. The whole fabric of the Constellation creaked and groaned in anguish at the battering it was receiving; the skin sprang leaks in a dozen places and for a time Wyatt was fearful that it was all too much, that the wings would be torn off in spite of the special strengthening and the fuselage would smash into the boiling sea. He was plagued by a stream of water that cascaded down his neck, but managed to get rid of the rest of the capsules with the same well-timed precision.

For nearly an hour Hansen battled with the big wind and, just when he thought he could bear it no longer, the plane was thrown out of the clouds, spat forth as a man spits out an orange pip. He signalled for Morgan to take over and sagged back in his seat completely exhausted.

As the buffeting lessened Wyatt took stock. Half of Jablonsky’s equipment had packed up, the tell-tale dials recording zero. Fortunately the tapes had kept working so all was not lost. Smith’s tale was even sorrier – only three of a round dozen capsules had returned signals, and those had suddenly ceased half-way through the flight when the recorder had been torn bodily from its mounting with a sputter of sparks and the tapes had stopped.

‘Never mind,’ said Wyatt philosophically. ‘We got through.’

Jablonsky mopped water from the top of his console. ‘That was too goddam rough. Another one like that and I’ll take a ground job.’

Smith grunted. ‘You and me both.’

Wyatt grinned at them. ‘You’re not likely to get another like that in a hurry,’ he said. ‘It was my worst in twenty-three missions.’

He went up to the flight deck and Jablonsky looked after him. ‘Twenty-three missions! The guy must be nuts. Ten is my limit – only two more to go.’

Smith rubbed his chin reflectively. ‘Maybe he’s got the death wish – you know, psychology and all that. Or maybe he’s a hurricane lover. But he’s got guts, that’s for sure – I’ve never seen a guy look so unconcerned.’

On the flight deck Hansen said heavily, ‘I hope you got everything you wanted. I’d hate to go through that again.’

‘We’ll have enough,’ said Wyatt. ‘But I’ll be able to tell for certain when we get home. When will that be?’

‘Three hours,’ said Hansen.

There was a sudden change in the even roar and a spurt of black smoke streaked from the port outer engine. Hansen’s hand went like a flash to the throttles and then he feathered the airscrew. ‘Meeker,’ he roared. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Dunno,’ said Meeker. ‘But I reckon she’s packed in for the rest of the trip. Oil pressure’s right down.’ He paused. ‘I had some bother with her a little while back but I reckoned you didn’t feel like hearing about it just then.’