Hammond Innes - Atlantic Fury

‘… I can see it is … Aye, well you check with the Met. Office… Damned if I do. You tell him yourself. He’s down at Leverburgh, but he’ll be back soon. Eleven at the latest, he said, and he’ll be mad as hell when he hears … Laddie, you haven’t met the man. He’ll be across to see you…. Okay, I’ll tell him.’ He put the phone down and looked at me. ‘Can I help you?’

‘My name’s Ross,’ I said. ‘I wanted to see Major Braddock.’

‘He’s out at the moment.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Back in about twenty minutes. Is he expecting you?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I don’t know whether he’ll have time. He’s very busy at the moment. Could you tell me what it’s about?’

‘A private matter,’ I said. ‘I’d like to talk to him personally.’

‘Well, I don’t know…’

His voice doubtful. ‘Depends whether this flight’s on or not.’ He reached for his pad. ‘Ross, you said? Aye, I’ll tell him.’ He made a note of it and that was that. Nothing else I could do for the moment.

‘Could you tell me where I’ll find Cliff Morgan?’ I said. ‘He’s a meteorologist at Northton.’

‘Either at the Met. Office or in the bachelor quarters.’ He picked up the phone. ‘I’ll just check for you whether he’s on duty this morning. Get me the Met. Office, will you.’ He cupped his hand over the mouthpiece. ‘There are two of them there and they work it in shifts. Hello. That you Cliff? Well now look, laddie, drum up a decent forecast, will you. Ronnie Adams is on his way over to see you and he doesn’t like the look of the weather…. Yes, Himself — and he’ll raise hell if the flight’s off. Okay. And there’s a Mr Ross in my office. Wants to see you…. Yes, Ross.’

‘Donald Ross,’ I said.

‘Mr Donald Ross…. Aye, I’ll send him over.’ He put down the phone. ‘Yes, Cliffs on the morning shift. You’ll find the Met. Office right opposite you as you go out of the main gate. It’s below the Control Tower, facing the landing apron. And I’ll tell Major Braddock you’re here as soon as he gets back from Leverburgh.’

I wished then that I hadn’t given my name. But it couldn’t be helped. I zipped up my windbreaker, buttoning it tight across my throat. It was raining harder now and I hurried out through the gate and along the road to the hangar. Pools of rain lay on the parking apron where an Army helicopter stood like some pond insect, dripping moisture. The bulk of Chaipaval was blotted out by a squall. Rain lashed at the glistening surface of the tarmac. I ran for, the shelter of the tower, a raw concrete structure, ugly as a gun emplacement. Inside it had the same damp, musty smell. The Met. Office was on the ground floor. I knocked and went in.

It was a bleak dug-out of a room. Two steps led up to a sort of dais and a long, sloped desk that filled all the window space. The vertical backboard had a clock in the centre, wind speed and direction indicators; flanking these were schedules and code tables, routine information. The dust-blown windows, streaked with rain, filtered a cold, grey light. They faced south-west and the view was impressive because of the enormous expanse of sky. On the wall to my right were the instruments for measuring atmospheric pressure — a barograph and two mercury barometers. A Baby Belling cooker stood on a table in the corner and from a small room leading off came the clack of teleprinters.

The place was stuffy, the atmosphere stale with cigarette smoke. Two men were at the desk, their heads bent over a weather report. They looked round as I entered. One of them wore battledress trousers and an old leather flying jacket. He was thin-faced, sad-looking. His helmet and gloves lay on the desk, which was littered with forms and pencils, unwashed cups and old tobacco tin tops full of the stubbed-out butts of cigarettes. The other was a smaller man, short and black-haired, dressed in an open-necked shirt and an old cardigan. He stared at me short-sightedly through thick-lensed glasses. ‘Mr Ross?’ He had a ruler in his hand, holding it with fingers stained brown with nicotine. ‘My publishers wrote me you would be coming.’ He smiled. ‘It was a good jacket design you did for my book.’

I thanked him, glad that Robinson had taken the trouble to write. It made it easier. The clack of the teleprinter ceased abruptly. ‘No hurry,’ I said. ‘I’ll wait till you’ve finished.’

‘Sit down then, man, and make yourself comfortable.’ He turned his back on me then, leaning on the tubular frame of his swivel seat to continue his briefing.

‘…Surface wind speed twenty to twenty-five knots. Ousting perhaps forty. Rain squalls. Seven-eighths cloud at five hundred…. ‘ His voice droned on, touched with the lilt of his native valleys.

I was glad of the chance to study him, to check what I knew of Cliff Morgan against the man himself. If I hadn’t read his book I shouldn’t have known there was anything unusual about him. At first glance he looked just an ordinary man doing an ordinary routine job. He was a Welshman and he obviously took too little exercise. It showed in his flabby body and in the unhealthy pallor of his face. The shirt he wore was frayed and none too clean, the grey flannels shapeless and without crease, his shoes worn at the heels. And yet, concentrated now on his briefing, there was something about him that made my fingers itch to draw. The man, the setting, the pilot leaning beside him — it all came together, and I knew this would have made a better jacket for his book than the one I’d done.

The background of his book was a strange one. He had written it in prison, pouring into it all his enthusiasm for the unseen world of air currents and temperatures, of cold and warm fronts and the global movements of great masses of the earth’s atmosphere. It had been an outlet for his frustration, filled with the excitement he felt for each new weather pattern, the sense of discovery as the first pencilled circle — a fall in pressure of a single millibar perhaps reported by a ship out in the Atlantic — indicated the birth of a new storm centre. His quick, vivid turn of phrase had breathed life into the every-day meteorological reports and the fact that he was an amateur radio operator, a ‘ham’ in his spare time, had added to the fascination of the book, for his contacts were the weather ships, the wireless operators of distant steamers, other meteorologists, and as a result the scope of his observations was much wider than that of the ordinary airport weather man taking all his information from teleprinted bulletins.

How such a man came to be stationed in a God-forsaken little outpost like Northton needs some explanation. Though I didn’t know it at the time, there was already a good deal of gossip about him. He had been up there over six months, which was plenty of time for the facts to seep through, even to that out-of-the-way place. The gossip I don’t intend to repeat, but since the facts are common knowledge I will simply say this: there was apparently something in his metabolism that made him sexually an exhibitionist and attractive to women. He had becomemixed up in a complex affair involving two Society women. One of them was married and a rather sordid divorce casehad followed, as a result of which he had faceda criminal charge, had been found guilty and sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment. He had been a meteorologist at London Airport at the time. On his release from prison the Air Ministry had posted him to Northton, where I suppose it was presumed he could do little or no harm. But a man’s glands don’t stop functioning because he’s posted to a cold climate. Nor, thank God, do his wits — a whole ship’s company were to owe their lives to the accuracy of his predictions, amounting almost to a sixth sense where weather was concerned.