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
