Десмонд Бэгли: Wyatt's Hurricane

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. Jablonsky’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.’