Десмонд Бэгли - Wyatt's Hurricane

Wyatt listened to the wind with professional and knowledgeable interest. He estimated that the wind-speed had suddenly risen to force twelve, the highest level on the Beaufort Scale. Old Admiral Beaufort had designed the scale for the use of sailing-ship captains and had been sensible about it — his force twelve was the wind-speed at which, in his opinion, no reasonable seaman would be found at sea if he could help it. Force twelve is sixty-five knots or seventy-four miles an hour, and the Admiral was not concerned about wind-speeds greater than that because to a sailing captain caught in extremis it would not matter either. There are no degrees in sudden death.

But times have changed since Admiral Beaufort and Wyatt, who had helped to change them, knew it very well. His concern here was not for the action of the wind on a sailing ship but on an island, on the buildings of the towns. A force twelve wind exerts a pressure of seventeen pounds on each square foot, over three tons on the sides of an average house. A reasonably well-built house could withstand that pressure, but this hurricane was not going to be reasonable.

The highest estimated wind-speed in Mabel’s gusts had been 170 miles an hour, producing pressures of well over a hundred pounds a square foot. Enough to pick a man off his feet and hurl him through the air as far as the wind cared to take him. Enough to lean on the side of a house and cave it in. Enough to uproot a strong tree, to rip the surface soil from a field, to destroy a plantation, to level a shanty town to the raw earth from which it had sprung.

Wyatt, therefore, listened to the raging of the wind with unusual interest.

Meanwhile, he held his head down and sat with Causton and Dawson in a hole full of water. The two drains spouted like fire hoses at full pressure, yet the hole never emptied. It was like sitting in the middle of a river. All around them streams of water gushed down the slope of the ridge, inches deep, carving courses in the soft earth. Wyatt knew that would not last long — as the wind-speed increased it would become strong enough to lift up that surface water and make it airborne again in a driving mist of fine spray. That was one thing — no one he had heard of had died of thirst in a hurricane.

This rain, falling in millions of tons, was the engine which drove the monster. On every square mile over which the hurricane passed it would drop, on average, half a million tons of water, thus releasing vast quantities of heat to power the circular winds. It was a great turbine — three hundred miles in diameter and with almost unimaginable power.

Causton’s thoughts were very different. For the first time in his life he was really frightened. In his work he covered the activities of men, and man, the political animal, he thought he understood. His beat was the world and he found himself in trouble-spots where students rioted in the streets of big cities and where bush wars flared in the green jungles. Other men covered the earthquakes, the tidal waves, the avalanches — the natural disasters.

He had always known that if he got into trouble he could somehow talk his way out of it because he was dealing with men and men could be reasoned with. Now, for the first time in his life, he found himself in trouble where talking was futile. One could no more reason with a hurricane than with a Bengal tiger; in fact, it was worse — one could at least shoot the tiger.

He had listened with vague interest to Wyatt’s lecture on hurricanes back at Cap Sarrat Base, but he had been more curious about Wyatt than about the subject under discussion. Now he wished he had listened more closely and taken a keener interest. He nudged Wyatt, and shouted, ‘How long will this go on?’

The dark shape of Wyatt turned towards him and he felt warm breath in his ear. ‘What did you say?’

He put his mouth next to Wyatt’s ear, and bellowed, ‘How long will this go on?’

Wyatt turned again. ‘About eight hours — then we’ll have a short rest.’

‘Then what happens?’

‘Another ten hours, but coming from the opposite direction.’

Causton was shocked at the length of time he would have to undergo this ordeal. He had been thinking in terms of three or four hours only. He shouted, ‘Will it get worse?’

It was difficult to detect any emotion in Wyatt’s answering shout, but he thought he heard a cold humour. ‘It hasn’t really started yet.’

Causton crouched deeper in the hole with the rain flailing his head and thought in despair: How can it get worse?

The sun had set and it was pitchy black, the impenetrable darkness broken only by the lightning flashes which were becoming more frequent. Any thunder there might have been was lost in the general uproar of the gale, which, to Wyatt’s ear, was taking on a sharper edge — the wind-speed was still increasing, although it was impossible to tell without instruments any reasonably exact speed. One thing was certain, though — it was pushed well over the further edge of the Beaufort Scale.

Wyatt thought with grim amusement of Causton’s question: will it get worse? The man had no conception of the forces of nature. One could explode an atomic bomb in the middle of this hurricane and the puny added energy would be lost — swallowed up in the greater cataclysm. And this was not too bad. True, Mabel was a bad bitch, but there had been worse — and there had been far greater wind-speeds recorded.

He closed his mind to the howling of the wind. Now what was it — oh, yes — two hundred and thirty-one miles an hour recorded at Mount Washington before the instrument smashed — that was the record reading. And then there were the theoretical speeds of the tornadoes. No chance of recording those, of course — the very fast winds in excess of six hundred miles an hour — but it took a fast wind to drive a straw through an inch-thick plank of wood.

And yet tornadoes were small. Comparing a tornado with a hurricane was like comparing a fighter plane with a bomber — the fighter is faster, but the bomber has more total power. And a hurricane has immeasurably more power than any tornado, more power than any other wind system on earth. He remembered the really bad one that crossed the Atlantic when he had been a student in England back in 1953. It had been the very devil in the west Atlantic, but then it had crossed and passed to the north of England, choking up the waters of the North Sea very much as Mabel was doing down there in Santego Bay. The dykes of Holland had been overwhelmed and the waters had surged over East Anglia, bringing the worst weather disaster Europe had known for hundreds of years. The hurricane was the devil among winds.

Dawson held his hands to his chest. He was soaked to the skin and felt that he would never be dry again. Had he not liked game fishing, he thought that he would have spent the rest of his life in some nice desert which never knew a wind like this — say, Death Valley. But he did like fishing and these were the waters for it and he knew that if he survived this experience he would come back. On the other hand — why go away at all? Why not settle in San Fernandez? There was nothing to keep him in New York now and he might as well live where he liked.

He grinned tightly as he thought that even in this he would be continuing the programme mapped out for him by his press agent, Wiseman, who had plotted mightily to cut Hemingway’s mantle to fit Dawson’s different figure. Hadn’t Hemingway lived in Cuba? To hell with that! It was what he wanted to do and he would do it.

Curiously enough, he was not frightened. The unexpected courage he had found in facing up to Roseau and his thugs followed by the catharsis of his confession to Wyatt had released something within him, some fount of manhood that had been blocked and diverted to corrupt ends. He should have been frightened because this was the most frightening thing that had ever happened to him, but he was not and the knowledge filled him with strength.