Clive Cussler - Trojan Odyssey

"You're just lucky Dad is a better judge of women than you are."

"What's he got to do with it?"

"He gave Sara the boot when she showed up at his hangar looking for you."

"I wondered why she never returned my calls," said Dirk, without a hint of distress.

She gave him a baleful glare and studied the comb, trying to conjure up an image of the last woman to touch it, wondering what style and color her hair might have been. After a few moments, she carefully laid the ancient relic in her brother's open hands so she could photograph it.

As soon as Summer took several close-up photos, Dirk returned the comb to the cauldron. He was soon followed by Summer, who recorded more than thirty images of the bedroom chamber and the ancient artifacts on her digital camera before entering and shooting the ancient kitchen. Satisfied that she had achieved a detailed photographic inventory of the three chambers and their artifacts, she passed the camera to Dirk, who disassembled the lights and slipped it back into its aluminum container. Rather than reattaching it to Summer's back, he held the grip handle tightly in one hand as insurance against losing or damaging the case.

He made a final check of both their air gauges and determined they had more than an ample air reserve for the journey back to their habitat. Well trained by their father, Dirk and his sister were cautious divers who had yet to come remotely close to the fatal danger of empty air tanks. He led the way this time, having memorized the bends and curves in the coral they had passed through earlier.

When they finally reached the comfort of Pisces and passed into the main lock, the waves above were rising, driven by a mushrooming wind that forced the waves to build and pound the reef like a jack-hammer against a piling. As Dirk took his turn at fixing dinner, he and Summer looked forward to discovering the riddle of the underwater ghost temple. They relaxed and ate dinner under a false security. Neither had any conception of how vulnerable they were fifty feet beneath the surface of a vicious sea, certainly not with waves that were about to reach a hundred feet high, with troughs that would expose the habitat to the full force of the horrendous killer storm.

Punching into the whirling wall of the hurricane, scourged by screaming winds, blankets of hail and rain, and tossed by downdrafts and updrafts through unimaginable turbulence, the twenty-nine-year-old Orion P-3 Hurricane Hunter aircraft took the beating in stride. Her wings flexed and fluttered like blades on a fencer's sword. The big propellers on her four Allison forty-six-hundred-horsepower engines chopped her through the deluge at three hundred knots. Built in 1976, the Navy, NOAA and NUMA had never found a better aircraft that could stand up to the punishment of violent weather.

Remarkably stable, Galloping Gertie, as she was affectionately named, with an animated painting of a cowgirl riding a bucking bronco on her bow, carried a crew of twenty: two pilots, a navigator and flight meteorologist, three engineering and electronic communication specialists, twelve scientists and a media passenger from a local TV station who asked to come aboard when he learned that Hurricane Lizzie was building into a record-setting storm.

Jeff Barrett sat relaxed in the pilot seat, his eyes sweeping the instrument panel every other minute. Six hours into a ten-hour flight, the gauges and lights were all he had to look at, since the only thing to be seen through the windshield was a view similar to peering inside a washing machine on the soap cycle. With a wife and three children, Barrett saw no more danger in his job than if he were driving a trash truck through a downtown alley.

But danger and death lurked in the swirling cloud of moisture smothering the Orion, especially when Barrett made passes so low over the water that salt spray spun off the propellers and glazed the windows with a frostlike film before he spiraled up to seven thousand feet, flying in and out of the worst part of the storm. Corkscrew penetration was the most efficient way to record and analyze the hurricane's strength.

It was not a job for the unintrepid. Those who flew into hurricanes and typhoons were a special breed of scientists. There could be no observing storms from a distance. They had to get down and dirty, flying directly through the aerial maelstrom, not once but as many as ten times.

They flew without complaint under incredibly appalling conditions to sample wind speeds and direction, rain, air pressure and data on a hundred other measurements they sent to the hurricane center. There, the information was fed into computer models so meteorologists could forecast the strength of the storm and issue warnings for people living in the predicted track to evacuate the shoreline in an effort to save countless lives.

Barrett wrestled easily with the controls that were modified to endure extreme turbulence and checked the numbers on his Global Positioning satellite instrument before making a slight course adjustment. He turned to his copilot. "This is a real bad one," he said, as the Orion was jolted by a sudden wind surge.

The crew spoke through microphones and listened through headsets. Any conversation without the radio had to be shouted into an upturned ear. The shriek of the wind was so piercing it drowned out the exhaust roar of the engines.

The rangy man slouched in the copilot's seat was sipping coffee from a covered cup through a straw. Neat and fastidious, Jerry Boozer prided himself on never spilling a drop of liquid or a sandwich crumb in the cockpit during a hurricane stalk. He nodded in agreement. "The worst I've seen in the eight years I've been chasing these things."

"I'd hate to be living in her path when she reaches land."

Boozer picked up his microphone and spoke into it. "Hey, Charlie, what's your magic department reading of the storm's wind?"

Back in the science compartment packed with an array of instruments and consoles crammed with meteorological electronic systems, Charlie Mahoney, a research scientist from Stanford University, sat strapped in a chair facing a matrix of sensors that measured temperature, humidity, pressure, winds and fluxes. "You ain't gonna believe this," he answered in a Georgia accent, "but the last dropwindsonde profiling system I released recorded horizontal wind speeds of up to two hundred and twenty miles an hour as it fell through the storm toward the sea."

"No wonder poor old Gertie is taking a beating." Boozer had hardly mouthed the words when the aircraft soared into calm air and the sun glittered on the shiny aluminum fuselage and wings.

They had entered Lizzie's eye. Below, a restless sea reflected the blue of the sky. It was like flying into a giant tube whose circular walls were forged with swirling, impenetrable clouds. Boozer felt as if he was flying inside a vast whirlpool whose pit led to Hades.

Barrett banked and circled within the eye while the meteorologists behind gathered their data. After nearly ten minutes, he turned the Orion and headed into the tortured gray wall. Again, the aircraft shuddered as if it was under attack by all the furies of the gods. Abruptly, it felt like a giant's fist had smashed into the starboard, sending the plane over on one wing. Anything that wasn't tied down in the cockpit — papers, folders, coffee cups, briefcases — was hurled against the starboard bulkhead. No sooner had the gust passed than a blast of even increased force hurled the aircraft through the turmoil like a balsa wood glider tied to a fan, sending all that loose debris crashing against the opposite side of the cockpit. The double shock came like the blow of a tennis ball from a racket against a backstop. Barrett and Boozer were nearly frozen in shock. Neither had ever experienced a collision with a wind gust of that magnitude, and not one but two in almost as many seconds. It was unheard of.