Second Wind Part 12

We were alone in the eye. Down to blue sea, up to blue sky, no one else shared our strange revolving world.

"Stadium effect, " Kris noted happily.

I nodded. The stadium effect meant that the eye was wider at the top, and narrower at the water's surface, like a sports stadium, in fact.

All around the calm hub the terrifying winds in the whirling wall looked impenetrable. It was one thing to reach the golden sun in the center, but now we had to calculate the way home. Kris again produced the card with the headings, though even he admitted that the fourth set was no longer right.

"Work it out, " he told me. "You can do it. " We hadn't even tried to follow the professional hurricane hunters' flight pattern of three pa.s.ses straight through the eye at ten thousand feet. We were, in effect, on our own.

I reckoned by computer that if we headed north we would make a landfall, if not in Cayman, actually a small target, then in Jamaica, or as a last resort, Cuba. We just had time and gas to stay aloft for that, and with luck, long before then we would be alive on the radio again and could ask for directions.

Embarra.s.sing, but better than crashing.

Kris agreed to fly north in general but to head east to enter the eye wall, as the counterclockwise winds that were at their maximum there would tend to sweep us round to the north anyway, until we were clear of the first sixty miles or so and had reached the outer areas of the hurricane.

The second wind of a hurricane on the ground came when the eye had pa.s.sed, taking with it the illusion that the storm was over. The second wind of a hurricane hit from the southwest like a moving wall of concrete, catastrophically destroying everything that had survived the first onslaught.

The second wind of a Category 5 hurricane screamed and shrieked and traveled faster than a champion could serve a tennis ace. The second wind brought inches, torrents, of mud-liquefying rain. It brought misery and homelessness and washed away bridges--and to get back safe to Grand Cayman we had to fly again through the storm's fury.

"Work out our height, " Kris said. His voice sounded unsteady and his eyes were alarmed. I made the simple calculation that air pressure normally fell by one millibar every thirty feet of height... but mental concentration always fell l l with alt.i.tude... and neither Kris nor I were any longer razor sharp because of the by-then buffeting noisy leap-around world enveloping us.

Kris headed east and, at eight thousand feet on the altimeter, resolutely set course for land. Even with full power thundering in the engines we were both sure that we'd underestimated drift and that the rotating wind system was blowing us anywhere but where we wanted to go.

Blue sky had vanished. The sea tumbled and raced, gray and brown.

Cloud and rain closed around us. We were blind, and couldn't measure our forward progress. Kris was giving up trying. His thoughts were a straight line.

For minutes I lived with the certainty that Kris and I and the airplane weren't up to the job. My grandmother's heebiejeebies raised my skin in b.u.mps. Kris, visibly losing his nerve, said, "Mayday, Mayday, Mayday" repeatedly into the headset, broadcasting a plea that no one heard.

We might have made it, even then, if we'd held to the northerly course and if nothing had gone wrong, but from one second to the next, with the speed of most disasters, a simple mechanical change tossed us straight into the realms of chaos, to the turbulent territory of all the demons.

The right-hand engine stopped.

Immediately the whole aircraft lost its balance, tipped sideways, spun in a circle, put its nose up, put it down again..

Kris was shouting,

"Full opposite rudder, stick forward, full opposite rudder, " and stamping hard down with his left foot, and I remembered that "stick forward, full opposite rudder" brought a single-engined airplane out of a spin, and I didn't know if it made the asymmetric wildness of a dead twin engine better or worse. I tried the radio again, to broadcast Kris's voice, and heard only Spanish, very faint.

s.p.a.ce and time got jumbled. Thought became reduced for both of us to one idea at a time. My own mind clamped down onto the one rea.s.surance that there was a life raft dinghy behind me in the pa.s.senger cabin, and that as airplanes didn't float, we would need it.

Bashing around in the restricted tumbling s.p.a.ces I somehow got my hands onto the big bundle and clutched it, holding on even when any sort of steering became doubtful and Kris, still hauling rightly or wrongly at the control column, began chanting again over and over, "Mayday, Mayday, stick forward, full opposite rudder... Mayday... " and in desperation, "I'm heading back to Trox Island. Back to Trox. " Though his voice chattered on uselessly he nevertheless successfully muscled a lopsided control of the bucking, twisting, rocking aircraft while it dropped against his will from about eight thousand feet, and only when I yelled at him to be ready to jump did he seem to realize that having only one embattled and hard-worked engine overheating in that tempest meant that we were losing the fight. He could see the galloping waves, but even then would have denied their inevitability... except that seawater splashed on the windshield.

With a screech of awakening terror he stretched out stiff fingers to the switches and pulled the nose up crookedly, with the port engine and propeller still racing at full power, and somehow we met the water flat on the belly on a frightful

I.

" accelerating wave. At first contact the Piper skipped back up into the air twisting violently to the left and dropping its nose.

The second strike was heavier and, in that strange way that the mind wanders even in emergencies, I thought of the exam question, set long ago, which discussed the best material for a seat belt and how it had to stretch and absorb the kinetic energy to protect the occupant in a sudden collision. As the airplane buried itself into the near vertical face of the next towering whitecap, our seat belts fulfilled their purpose, absorbed our energy and brought us to a teeth-rattling halt.

Almost in the second of impact I kicked open the rear door and jumped into the raging water, clutching the dinghy with me for precious survival and yanking at the cord that inflated it. It swelled hugely at once and as it unfolded the weight of it tore it out of my arms, all except a narrow rope circling it, for people in the water to hang onto. I did hang on for a very short while, but the screaming gale made a farce of any strength I might have thought I had, and I devastatingly knew I couldn't hold it in place while Kris too unbuckled himself and left the sinking ship.

He came very fast indeed out of the front door, though, and by luck jumped first with one foot onto the already flooded wing and then fell straight into the almost fully inflated dinghy, at the moment it tore itself out of my hands. The wind and waves seized the expanding craft instantly and blew it a great way from the sinking airplane, and for a moment I could see Kris's long horror-filled face looking back at me. Then clouds and rain enveloped and parted us violently into invisibility and for only a brief time longer could I see even the waterlogged airplane until it completed a fast wing-down sliding disappearance into oblivion and was gone forever.

Without much hope I pulled the inflation cords of the life jacket that represented my only chance of survival, and the fact that the jacket ini lated swiftly in the designed manner seemed truly the only faint shred of possible security, and not much of that, anyway.

My shoes came off, and I slid also out of my pants, so that I wore on]y underpants and a once-white shirt and the orange fluorescent life jacket. The Caribbean water, comparatively warm, might throw me about, but I wasn't going to die of hypothermia. There were comforting stories of lost sailors being picked up after days at sea. Disregard, I thought, the awkward info that they hadn't been battling hurricane-size waves.

It was daylight, and my watch had stopped, water-filled, at 2,15 P. M. , when we had ditched. At home I kept a cheap waterproof watch for swimming, idiotic that I hadn't brought it.

Such silly thoughts. Time had no meaning in the sea.

Yet when Kris and I didn't reappear at the Cayman airport, Robin Darcy would surely send out rescuers. Kris's orange dinghy could be seen for miles, and my life jacket, though a smaller dot in the ocean, was purposely bright. I shut my mind to the driving rain and fearsome colossal waves that would keep a life-jacket-seeking helicopter safe on the ground at home.

Odin was a slow-moving hurricane, but even the slow ones eventually pa.s.sed. I, to live, had first to outlast Odin, and then to be visible, and then to be preferably visible on a regular cross-Caribbean air route.

, l Thoughts came slowly, none of them joyful. For instance, a thought unwelcome, the Caribbean was a very big sea. For another instance, another thought, I might be a practiced surf rider, but first, I didn't have a surfboard handy, and second, no surfboard ever could realistically ride a thirty-foot storm surge.

With useless jumbled thought, then, and no constructive decisions, I struggled simply to stay afloat with my head up out of the water. The life jacket was at least one of those with the main flotation collar in front supporting one's chin, so that even when overwhelmed by the curling crest of a towering wave, the life jacket slowly righted its wearer--like a saturated..

cora rlsmg.

One could swallow salt.w.a.ter and gasp painfully for air.

One could claw oneself constantly upright into surface-whipping winds and stay there for a while, just able to breathe, but after the late afternoon had pa.s.sed miserably into darkness, one could begin, in the endless heavy battering of racing waves, to feel that nothing, now, could grant deliverance, or reprieve.

One could pa.s.s into delirium, and one could drown.

LONGTIME AFTER coherent thought of any kind had stopped... when flashes of illusion still made me believe my grandmother in silver was swimming in the waves not far ahead... a long time after the apparitions of Robin and Kris, holding hands, had dissolved from beckoning me wetly towards them to be shot... in the roaring nonhuman severity of Odin, while the remains of instinct flickered still in heart valves and groped for life in brain stem, a monstrous wave picked me up and lifted me high and flung the rag doll I'd become against an impossibly towering peak.

The peak wasn't water... it was rock.

Far from giving me joy, it knocked me out.

This gift of a spared life, I gleaned a fair time later, came from the rock wall forming one end of the deserted jetty where ships had once docked to unload the life-blood stores for Trox Island.

There were the remains of scrubby bushes and stick like saplings still growing indomitably from cracks and ledges, and it was among them, and gripped by them against an uneven and abrasive rock face, that I had come to rest.

Held fast there, I slowly seeped back to consciousness, and it seemed at first natural, and then with woozy reflection, extremely unnatural, that I should know where I was.

The knowledge came without strength or desire to do anything about it. I turned myself slightly to look along to the end of the dock and found that more than half of the structure, though built of very heavy timber and rooted in concrete, had been torn away as if made of cardboard.

Consciousness drifted away again into a troubled bad dream-filled utterly exhausted state that was as much daze as sleep.

Several centuries or so later I noticed it had been raining ever since I'd opened my salt.w.a.ter-swollen eyes. Rain washed the salt from my limbs but all my skin was crinkled from too long an immersion, and in spite of water water everywhere nor any drop to drink, I had like any ancient mariner a scorchingly painful salt-induced thirst.

Rain... I opened my mouth to it hungrily. It filled my throat, it filled my mind. I realized that my grandmother wasn't really out there in silver, swimming. Robin Darcy's gun was back in Sand Dollar Beach, scaring the s.h.i.t out of intruders.