Christopher Nicole: Her Name Will Be Faith

Josephine (Jo), Englishwoman on editorial staff of Profiles magazine

Michael, junior, her husband, partner in the New York stockbroking firm of Donnelly and Son

Owen Michael, their son

Tamsin, their daughter

Michael, senior (Big Mike), Michael’s father and senior partner in Donnelly and Son

Barbara (Babs), his wife

Belle Garr, their elder daughter

Lawson Garr, son-in-law, real estate agent in Nassau, Bahamas

Marcia, their younger daughter, an artist

Benny, her fiancé

Dale, their younger son

Florence Bennett, Jo Donnelly’s housekeeper

J. Calthrop White, President and chief shareholder

Kiley, Executive Vice-President

Richard Connors, chief weather forecaster

Julian Summers, his assistant

Jayme, his secretary

Dave, newsreader

Rod Kimmelman, reporter

Maisie, switchboard operator

Joe Murray, J. Calthrop White’s chauffeur

Dr Eisener, official at the United States Hurricane Tracking Center, Coral Gables, Florida

Captain Mark Hammond, United States Navy, seconded to the Weather Bureau

Bob Landry, his co-pilot

Mackenzie, his navigator

Neal, friend of the Donnellys

Margaret (Meg), his wife

James, their son

Suzanne, their daughter

Larry Simmons

Pete Albicete

Mark Godwin

Jon Tremayne

Sam Davenport

Sally, Sam’s wife (not in crew)

Beth, Larry’s wife (not in crew)

Melba, the Donnellys’ cook

Josh, her husband, their gardener Goodson, their nephew

Christabel, airline agent

Washington Jones, janitor at the junior Donnellys’ New York apartment building

Celestine, his wife Patsy, their daughter

Lila Vail, widow from Florida, now living in New York with Tootsie, her widowed sister

Dai Evans, their neighbor

Nancy Duval, Joe’s hairdresser

Bill, her husband Ernest, his brother

Alfred Muldoon, a New York cab driver

Stuart Alloan, a dropout

Garcia, a criminal fugitive, his friend

Commissioner Grundy

Assistant Commissioner McGrath

Captain Harmon

Captain Wright

Captain Jonsson

Captain Luther

Bert, Florence Bennett’s husband

Ed Kowicz, Managing Editor of Profiles

Gordon, a Florida weather forecaster

Bill Naseby, Mayor of New York Mitch, his assistant

Seth Hatton, President of the Hunt National Bank

The President of the United States.

The big amphibian was alone in the sky. Four hundred miles due east of Puerto Rico, Captain Mark Hammond looked down on fleecy white clouds, and, where they had drifted apart, on to the surging blue of the North Atlantic Ocean.

It was a sight with which he was thoroughly familiar. Since his secondment to the Weather Service a year earlier, he had flown out here at least once a week, looking, watching… May was traditionally the quietest month of the year, weather-wise, but there had been major storms in May before. And now the month was drawing to a close; next Thursday would mark the official beginning of the hurricane season. If there was a Tropical Storm about, it was his duty to find it, and let the scientists determine its potential, long before it could approach land.

Dr Eisener was at his shoulder. “You can take her down now, Mark.”

Mark’s long thin neck moved as he nodded; his neck matched both his body, which seemed to be coiled even in the spacious flight deck, and his face, in which a long nose and pointed chin gave him a certain resemblance to a cigar-store Indian. A Californian, he had volunteered for a spell in the Weather Service to see how the other half of the country lived, and often wished he had stayed at home: Miami to him was like a poor man’s San Francisco… and California had been hit by three hurricanes last year: Florida, protected by the natural breakwaters of Cuba and the Bahamas, by none at all.

He gave the signal to his co-pilot, and the aircraft began to sink through the clouds. If she wore navy colors, she was still the very latest in flying laboratories, only a few hundred hours old, with sensors protruding from her roof and wings and belly to record every possible aspect of the atmosphere in which she found herself… and her true commander was

Eisener, surrounded back in the main cabin by his staff and their various computers and radars; if the satellites whirling high in space above their heads were photographing every cloud over the ocean, it was Eisener who was going to add the fine print for the nation’s busy weather forecasters.

Mark certainly didn’t wish a major storm on anyone. But as discovering such an event was, at the moment, his sole reason for existing, he hoped one day to justify that existence. There hadn’t been a truly major storm, a Category Four hurricane; for instance, in the North Atlantic since before he had been born. So Category Three storms, of which Gloria back in 1985 remained the most famous, could do a whole lot of damage — it was still the possibility of a really big one, which fascinated everyone connected with Atlantic weather. One was about due.

The aircraft sank lower and lower. The clouds were above them now, the dark blue of the ocean below them coming closer every second. There was clearly very little wind; only the occasional wave flopped into a whitecap, dissolving in a splurge of foam; even the trade wind was in a May-like mood.

Now Mark was skimming the surface of the sea, the huge turbos throttled back almost to stalling point as he allowed Eisener to suck seawater into his tanks. Although it was calm enough to splash down without difficulty — and get up again — if he had to, this was always the most tense part of the patrol; he breathed a sigh of relief when Eisener’s voice came through the intercom, “Okay, Mark, take her up.”

The engines increased power, the plane rose like a bird, and a moment later was through the clouds.

“Home, I think,” Eisener said, coming up to the flight deck. “Anything?” Mark asked.

“Why, yes. Something.”

Mark turned his head in surprise. “Today? It all looks pretty good to me.”

“It all is pretty good,” Eisener agreed. “Save for the water temperature. I have a reading of 27° Centigrade.”

“At the end of May?”

“Interesting, isn’t it? Especially when we add it to all those other readings.”

“Yeah, Doctor,” Mark said. “Goddamned interesting.”

The aircraft droned back over Puerto Rico and Haiti, gaining height to fly across the serrated mountains of Communist Cuba, then dipping lower again as the tiny Bahamian islands came into view — splashes of green against the pale colors of the immense sandbank on which they rested — before landing at Key West soon after six. Mark went straight to the public telephone after debriefing, dialed a New York number. “Hi,” he said. “Richard about?” He waited, drumming a finger on the glass wall of the booth.