Десмонд Бэгли: Wyatt's Hurricane

Wyatt reached for them and Schelling said, ‘Hansen tells me you took quite a beating.’

‘He wasn’t exaggerating. Look at that lot.’ Wyatt waved at the chart on the wall.

Schelling walked over to the board and pursed his lips in a whistle. ‘Are you sure your instrumentation was working properly?’

Wyatt joined him. ‘There’s no reason to doubt it.’ He stretched out a finger. ‘Eight hundred and seventy millibars in the eye — that’s the lowest pressure I’ve encountered anywhere.’

Schelling ran a practised eye over the chart. ‘High pressure on the outside — 1040 millibars.’

‘A pressure gradient of 170 millibars over a little less than 150 miles — that makes for big winds.’ Wyatt indicated the northern area of the hurricane. ‘Theory says that the wind-speeds here should be up to 170 miles an hour. After flying through it I have no reason to doubt it — and neither has Hansen.’

Schelling said, ‘This is a bad one.’

‘It is,’ said Wyatt briefly, and sat down to examine the Tiros photographs with Schelling looking over his shoulder. ‘She seems to have tightened up a bit,’ he said. ‘That’s strange.’

‘Makes it even worse,’ said Schelling gloomily. He put down two photographs side by side. ‘She isn’t moving along very fast, though.’

‘I made the velocity of translation eight miles an hour — about 200 miles a day. We’d better check that, it’s important.’ Wyatt drew a desk calculator and, after checking figures marked on the photographs, began to hammer the keys. ‘That’s about right; a shade under 200 miles in the last twenty-four hours.’

Schelling blew out his cheeks with a soft explosion of relief. ‘Well, that’s not too bad. At that rate it’ll take her another ten days to reach the eastern seaboard of the States, and they usually don’t last longer than a week. That’s if she moves in a straight line — which she won’t. The Coriolis force will move her eastward in the usual parabola and my guess is that she’ll peter out somewhere in the North Atlantic like most of the others.’

‘There are two things wrong with that,’ said Wyatt flatly. ‘There’s nothing to say she won’t speed up. Eight miles an hour is damned slow for a cyclone in this part of the world — the average is fifteen miles an hour — so it’s very probable she’ll last long enough to reach the States. As for the Coriolis effect, there are forces acting on a hurricane which cancel that out very effectively. My guess is that a high-altitude jet stream can do a lot to push a hurricane around, and we know damn’ little about those and when they’ll turn up.’

Schelling began to look unhappy again. ‘The Weather Bureau isn’t going to like this. But we’d better let them know.’

‘That’s another thing,’ said Wyatt, lifting the form from his desk-top. ‘I’m not going to put my name to this latest piece of bureaucratic bumf. Look at that last request — “State duration and future direction of hurricane.” I’m not a fortune-teller and I don’t work with a crystal ball.’

Schelling made an impatient noise with his lips. ‘All they want is a prediction according to standard theory — that will satisfy them.’

‘We don’t have enough theory to fill an eggcup,’ said Wyatt. ‘Not that sort of theory. If we put a prediction on that form then some Weather Bureau clerk will take it as gospel truth — the scientists have said it and therefore it is so — and a lot of people could get killed if the reality doesn’t match with theory. Look at Ione in 1955 — she changed direction seven times in ten days and ended up smack in the mouth of the St Lawrence way up in Canada. She had all the weather boys coming and going and she didn’t do a damn’ thing that accorded with theory. I’m not going to put my name to that form.’

‘All right, I’ll do it,’ said Schelling petulantly. ‘What’s the name of this one?’

Wyatt consulted a list. ‘We’ve been running through them pretty fast this year. The last one was Laura — so this one will be Mabel.’ He looked up. ‘Oh, one more thing. What about the Islands?’

‘The Islands? Oh, we’ll give them the usual warning.’

As Schelling turned and walked out of the office Wyatt looked after him with something approaching disgust in his eyes.

That evening Wyatt drove the fifteen miles round Santego Bay to St Pierre, the capital city of San Fernandez. It was not much of a capital, but then, it was not much of an island. As he drove in the fading light he passed the familiar banana and pineapple plantations and the equally familiar natives by the roadside, the men dingy in dirty cotton shirts and blue jeans, the women bright in flowered dresses and flaming head scarves, and all laughing and chattering as usual, white teeth and gleaming black faces shining in the light of the setting sun. As usual, he wondered why they always seemed to be so happy.

They had little to be happy about. Most were ground down by a cruel poverty made endemic by over-population and the misuse of the soil. At one time, in the eighteenth century, San Fernandez had been rich with sugar and coffee, a prize to be fought over by the embattled colonizing powers of Europe. But at an opportune moment, when their masters were otherwise occupied, the slaves had risen and had taken command of their own destinies.

That may have been a good thing — and it may not. True, the slaves were free, but a series of bloody civil wars engendered by ruthless men battling for power drained the economic strength of San Fernandez and population pressure did the rest, leaving an ignorant peasantry eking out a miserable living by farming on postage-stamp plots and doing most of their trade by barter. Wyatt had heard that some of the people in the central hills had never seen a piece of money in their lives.

Things had seemed to improve in the early part of the twentieth century. A stable government had encouraged foreign investment and bananas and pineapples replaced coffee, while the sugar acreage increased enormously. Those were the good days. True, the pay on the American-owned plantations was small, but it was regular and the flow of money to the island was enlivening. It was then that the Hotel Imperiale was built and St Pierre expanded beyond the confines of the Old City.

But San Fernandez seemed to be trapped in the cycle of its own history. After the Second World War came Serrurier, self-styled Black Star of the Antilles, who took power in bloody revolution and kept it by equally bloody government, ruling by his one-way courts, by assassination and by the power of the army. He had no opponents — he had killed them all — and there was but one power on the island — the black fist of Serrurier.

And still the people could laugh.

St Pierre was a shabby town of jerry-built brick, corrugated iron and peeling walls, with an overriding smell that pervaded the whole place compounded of rotting fruit, decaying fish, human and animal ordure, and worse. The stench was everywhere, sometimes eddying strongly in the grimmer parts of town and even evident in the lounge of the Imperiale, that dilapidated evidence of better times.

As Wyatt peered across the badly lit room he knew by the dimness that the town electricity plant was giving trouble again and it was only when Julie waved that he distinguished her in the gloom. He walked across to find her sitting at a table with a man, and he felt a sudden unreasonable depression which lightened when he heard the warmth in her voice.

‘Hello, Dave. I am glad to see you again. This is John Causton — he’s staying here too. He was on my flight from Miami to San Juan and we bumped into each other here as well,’