"We flew over some buildings when we came into land, didn"t you notice? So that"s obviously the place to start. " He turned the airplane and taxied back the length of the gra.s.s-grown strip, ending on the edge of what looked like a small model village consisting of three or four white-painted wooden houses, several long low sheds fashioned from hemispherical corrugated iron, a tiny church with a spire and two large solid-looking concrete huts.
"Robin said the mushrooms grow in the corrugated iron sheds, " Kris announced, jumping down to the ground, "so we"d better take a look. " Unexpectedly, there were no locked doors. Also, as surprising, there were no people.
Final astonishment... no mushrooms.
I took a few photographs of no mushrooms.
There were long waist-height trays in the sheds full of compost containing oak-wood chips, and chanterelles at least, I knew, flourished in oak forests, their natural habitat. The air smelled musty and full of fungus spores. Nothing I could see or smell was worth the trouble of our travels.
I.
Kris wandered about on his own, and we met at length in one of the thick concrete huts to compare notes.
No fungi of any kind.
"Not even a b.l.o.o.d.y toadstool, " Kris said in disgust. "And very little else. " The houses were empty of people and were untidily furnished with clutter due for discarding. The church had had tablets on the white internal walls, but they had been unscrewed and removed, leaving rectangular darker patches. Water came supplied, not in the pipes provided, but in buckets lifted by ropes from underground rainwater tanks.
The hut we stood in, cool owing to windowless concrete walls about four feet thick, had once, we guessed, been living quarters of sorts, there were four plank bunk beds but no bedding, and there had once been electric lighting, but all that remained were wires coming out of the walls.
"There"s another hut that looks as if it once held a generator, " Kris said, and I nodded.
"The mushroom sheds had climate control once, " I said, "and an efficient-looking pumped sprinkler system. " "The whole place has been stripped, " Kris sighed. "We"re wasting our time. " "Let"s look at the landing stage, " I suggested, and we walked down a hill of dried mud from the village to a wood and concrete dock long enough for a merchant ship"s mooring.
Again, no people and precious little else. No ropes, no chains, no crane. It was as if the last boat out of there had cleared up everything behind it.
As for living things, apart from humans, there were hundreds of big dark blue birds with brown legs, thousands of all sizes of iguanas and a large slow-moving mixed herd of cattle that wandered free, ate gra.s.s and paid us no attention.
I photographed the lot, but by the end was no nearer understanding what Robin intended us to do there or see, and was still a light-year from the answer to why.
We"d landed on the island at fourteen minutes after eleven, and by the time we"d concluded our comprehensive but fairly fruitless wander around, it was more than two hours later.
The wind, which had been intermittently gusty since our arrival, suddenly strengthened into a steady gale from the north, alarming us both, as it meant the outer winds of Odin, cycling counterclockwise, would be buffeting not only us mortals soon, but would be threatening also the airplane, which could look after itself in the air, but might be blown onto its back on the ground.
We ran, the wind strengthening all the time, and Kris, scrambling into his seat, made only sketchy checks for once before starting the engines, and the briefest of gauge inspections afterwards. Then he pointed the airplane"s nose more or less straight up the runway and opened the throttles to maximum.
The airplane shook with protest but at a low ground speed leapt into the air so fiercely that Kris was fighting with quivering wrists to keep the climbing att.i.tude within safe limits, and although it was the worst minute for it, I thought of the hurricane hunters who had in the past disappeared without trace... and understood how it could have happened.
Kris, sweating, pushed the nose down and let the airplane rise like a hawk, and within a minute we were at three thouJ sand feet and climbing, and Trox Island had disappeared into the murk behind us.
It wasn"t until that moment that I realized that in our urgent race to be airborne I had somehow dropped my camera. All those careful pictures of nothing! I searched all my pockets and all round my right-hand flight deck seat, but without success.
Cursing, I told Kris.
"Well, we"re not going back to look for it. " He sounded annoyed, but found this idea preposterous, as I did. It was all he could do to hold the plane steady, but he was also happy to be back in the air, and with visible relief fished in his shirt pocket for his lunatic flight plan.
"Steer zero eight zero, just north of east, " he shouted, giving me instructions while he fished around for his headset and settled the microphone near his mouth. "That should take us to the eye. " "The eye isn"t where it was yesterday, " I yelled back, handing over the controls and putting on my own headset, in my turn.
"I thought of that, " Kris said, "and factored it in. " What he hadn"t factored in, though we didn"t know it at the moment, was that Odin, as hurricanes were likely to do, had thoroughly and suddenly changed course. The whole circulating ma.s.s was now heading due west, which would, within twenty-four hours, take it inexorably over the island we"d left.
At Trox we"d taken off our life jackets and left them lying in the cabin, and I went back there, once Kris looked more in control, and put mine on again. I took Kris"s forward and against his inclination made him put his on also.
"We"re not going to ditch, " he protested.
"All the same... " With reluctance he let me put the flat orange jacket over his head and fasten the tapes round his waist.
Our progress towards the center of Odin wasn"t in the least orderly or controlled. Clouds whipped past the window and gradually grew thicker and darker until we were frankly flying in a hundred percent humidity, or in other words, rain.
Though with his own furrowed forehead and tight mouth giving every physical impression of justifiable worry, Kris told me truculently that we weren"t giving up, however adverse the weather. The airplane, he insisted, was tough enough for the job and if I wanted to chicken out I should have done so back in Newmarket.
"Are you talking to yourself? " I asked. It was, indeed, hard to hear each other even through the headsets. "How fast are we going? " Kris didn"t reply. I reckoned that we had had the wind in its fury sweeping us sideways and we were now flying very fast in and through the circulatory pattern. I couldn"t even guess at our position on either map and with force insisted that we should join the world again by setting bona-fide frequencies on the radio. Kris tacitly gave in, but I harvested only shrieks and whistles and for human contact, weak and far away, a woman"s voice speaking Spanish.
The reawakened radio, however, prodded me into clearer thought, and so, despite the b.u.mping tumult all around us, I switched on both of Robin"s special measuring instruments, ignoring Kris"s yelled protests that they were for use only in the eye and eye wall. He shut up, though, and his eyes widened in incredulity when he saw the millibar indicator on the modified radio altimeter descend from the 990 we"d set on Trox down through 980 and 970 and 960 and waver on 950 before shaking there and falling towards 940.
If we followed the descent of the millibars, surely we would find that they bottomed out in the eye? The air pressure was at its lowest in the eye. Kris, converted by the sliding figures, began slowly and progressively steering left, going round with the winds.
Regular altimeters measured the outside pressure. Pilots set the sea-level pressure on the instrument and the change between the two was displayed as the alt.i.tude in feet. The radio altimeter measured our height by bouncing a radio wave back from the surface of the sea like radar. Without it we would have been in real trouble as we wouldn"t have known the sea level pressure even if the sea had been level. If we flew too low, we could hit the waves. It would have helped if I"d been given hours of instruction instead of simply pressing
"Start" b.u.t.tons when I felt like it.
The millibar count went on shrinking fast from 940 to 935... 930... 924. Too low, I thought. The new instrument had to be wrong. Had to be... or I was misreading it..
yet 880 had been clocked in a storm in the past. 924 wasn"t impossible, but 923? 921? We were lost, I thought. My theory was destroying us... 920... 919... it was over.
. The eye"s pressure had stood at 930 at Cayman that morning... it couldn"t possibly have dropped so fast... But 919... 919 and still falling... I glanced at the regular altimeter and tried to do the mental arithmetic. We were almost down at sea level...
dangerous... "Don"t go lower, " I told Kris urgently. "We"re in cloud just above the water... Go up, go up, we"ll hit..
Kris was a good pilot for a lunch trip to Newmarket. Neither of us had imagined the standard of skill a hurricane demanded. With a stubbornly locked jaw he made a slow left turn at 919 millibars, inching lower... lower... Then steadied on the nose, and I held my breath...
At just touching 918 millibars on the scale we burst out of cloud into bright sunlight.
We had hit the eye! We had actually done it! We were at the very heart of Odin. It was in a way our Everest, our lives" peak, the summit we would never see again. To fly through the eye of a hurricane... I had wanted to, but only at that moment did I realize how much.
We were sc.r.a.ping the limits at 918 millibars. Huge waves like mountains moved close below us, smoothly powerful but not licking upward to swallow our remarkable world.
There were tears on Kris"s pale cheeks and I daresay on mine also.
In that amazing moment of revelation and fulfillment I felt overwhelmingly and unconditionally grateful to Robin Darcy.
Never mind that I didn"t trust him across a peanut, never mind that he"d persuaded Kris to lie to me, never mind that the escapade to Trox had seriously endangered us, if it hadn"t been for his money, his airplane, his instruments, his enthusiasm and--yes--his hidden and possibly criminal purposes, we would both have been keeping our feet on the ground and following Odin"s progress from afar on a television screen, and
I.
" we could never have said, like my grandmother, "Been there.
Done that. " According to the airspeed indicator we were traveling fast enough to give us barely three minutes of calm before we flew into the fearsome winds in the eye wall opposite, and Kris, making the same calculations, immediately began to hold us in a tight circle, so that we stayed in Odin"s calm hub long enough to get used to it.
Below us--perhaps only two hundred feet below us--the moving sea was blue from the amazing sunshine that shone brightly also on the airplane, and threw angled shadows on our faces. Above us, the funnel, with only soft spirals of cloud in it, led far upwards to brief glimpses of blue sky. Kris kept the airplane circling in a slow climb until we were at, perhaps, four or five thousand feet above sea level, and had become accustomed to our extraordinary situation, and would remember it.