Second Wind Part 10

While he was gone, one of the other pilots, following Kris with his gaze, said regretfully,

"Sad about Bob Farraday, wasn't it?

I said, "Er... " and was told Bob Farraday, Amy Ford's instructor, had been killed in a car crash a month ago. "She sold her plane then, the one you and your friend are flying in.

I thought you knew. " I shook my head, but it explained why she'd sold such a gem.

The consensus among the earnest hurricane hunters all around us put the true direction of the eye at 152 degrees from Grand Cayman's Owen Roberts airport, but that figure had to be modified by the awkward facts that compa.s.s needles didn't point to true north, and that the cyclonic winds would change the aircraft's heading from minute to minute. Naturally the whole eye, also, was on the move.

Listening to the knowledgeable chatter of the others, I thought that Kris and I were attempting an impossible task, but Kris himself, bouncing with energy and grinning with joy, simply took me and the maps back to Robin's Piper and spread the maps out on the table.

"The eye to Odin is there, " he said firmly, drawing in pencil a small circle on the radio map, and, with the dexterity

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was used to in him, he worked out, with the aid of a pocket calculator, the heading and speed at which he should travel to reach his target. It was, to do him justice, almost exactly the course he'd been going to fly even if I hadn't insisted on the maps. He'd written his chosen headings on half a postcard, which at that point he produced with satisfaction from his s.h.i.+rt pocket, and there were other numbers written below the way to the eye, which after a pause he explained.

"I suppose you'd better know.... Well, this figure, this second one, is the magnetic heading from Cayman to Trox Island.

The next one is from Trox Island to Odin's eye, and the fourth

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one is from the eye back to Cayman. If we go right now, these headings will take us round, you'll see. " I stared at him, thinking him halfway to insane. This Piper airplane, though, unlike Kris's own Cherokee at White Waltham, this luxurious little transport did have all sorts of electronic capabilities, so while Kris did all his remaining checks meticulously, I read the slim instruction booklet on how to navigate by radio transmissions.

The whole enterprise, I reckoned, would degenerate into a jolly little flip far away from Odin, from which calm corner we could return to Grand Cayman safely, thanks to various land based transmitters called non-directional beacons, or NDBs for short.

I learned much later that low-level navigation over the western Caribbean had once been easy, thanks to three strong directional beacons positioned at Panama, Swan Island and Bimini (in the Bahamas), but that with the advent of the global positioning system used by commercial aircraft, the amateurs' standbys had been dismantled. Kris and I, the day we set off in blithe ignorance to Trox Island, could have benefited hugely from cross references from beacons at Panama, Swan Island and Bimini.

With Kris's basic navigating kit containing always a set of plastic measuring pieces, I ruled a straight track line from Grand Cayman to Trox on both maps and, having squeezed the information out of Kris, who was still inclined to look backward to his feeling of obligation and to his new alliance with Robin, wrote in the airspeed, and consequently the time, that should deliver us to Trox.

My arrival time and heading weren't much different from Kris's own calculations, and

"I told you so, " he said.

I sat back in my chair. "What does Robin want us to do on Trox Island? You keep avoiding any details. He's spent a lot of money, as you've said, but we still don't know why. " "He wants you to take photographs. " He--and Robin also--who'd come out of the Ford house in his sleeping pajamas to wave us off in the truck, had checked that I hadn't forgotten my camera.

"Photographs? What of? " Kris s.h.i.+fted in his seat. "He just said photographs..

as if you would know what he wanted when you saw it. " But Kris, I knew later, was concocting again.

The enterprise looked less and less sensible to me, but in a stab at normal procedures I suggested we put on the life jackets at that point, leaving them of course un inflated but ready if necessary.

Kris, having won the bigger battle, meekly strapped himself into the flat orange life vest and ignored it.

Along the row of parked light aircraft two or three were on the move. With a sharp inspection of his watch, and a grumble about a lot of time wasted, Kris climbed forward into the captain's seat and, looking relieved not to have to answer more questions, finished his pre-takeoff checks by winding his altimeter needle to zero to give the home airfield's present air pressure, which at sea level read 1002 on the millibar scale.

Then he started the engines and asked the tower for permission to taxi.

I put on headphones, like Kris, and from the co-pilot's seat, asked for permission for takeoff.

Permission was granted laconically, the tower on the whole preferring only authorized military aircraft to chase a hurricane's eye. Kris, though, with determination and skill roared down the runway, soared out over water, and steered straight for Odin.

My surprise lasted about as far as the line-of-sight horizon from Grand Cayman, and then with the ground's attention on the next plane after us, and the next after that, Kris altered course abruptly and headed instead for the mushrooms of rTv lrox.

Kris was busy with hands on switches, and when everything had settled I found that we were no longer in radio contact with anyone, as the pilot had systematically turned the tuning dials to indicate out-of-area frequencies. We were, as no doubt he and Robin had planned, alone in the wide sky, and the wide sky was developing rough gusty patches, even though the outer edges of the hurricane lay by forecast a long way ahead.

Through the headsets which we both still wore, Kris said, "Flight time to Trox should now be twenty minutes, but the winds are stronger than I planned for. Start looking ahead in ten minutes. Robin said the island's sometimes difficult to see.

" I said I thought our radio silence was madness. Kris merely grinned.

Ten minutes pa.s.sed, and twenty. The wave crests multiplied over the gray water below us, the cloud shreds were thickening and the aircraft b.u.mped heavily in increasingly unstable air.

No island. No small insignificant guano-covered rock. I redid all the navigational calculations, and they put us still on course.

Trox Island, when to my vast relief it at last appeared visibly on our starboard bow, looked at first only like a straighter, longer, white-breaking wave crest. I shook Kris's arm and pointed ahead and downwards, and saw the unacknowledged anxiety clear in a flash from his forehead.

He grinned again, vindicated. He lowered the aircraft from two thousand feet down to a few hundred, circling the narrow strip of dark-looking land carefully so as not to lose sight of it in the increasing cloud. He'd been told by Robin of the existence of the landing strip, but, look as we might, neither Kris nor I could distinguish it until he made an almost despairing pa.s.s across the narrowest width of land at no higher than three hundred feet, and again, as all my attention was looking for it, it was I who first spotted the indistinct flat road like line along the center length of the otherwise rocky strip. The runway, disconcertingly, was greenish-gray, not tarmac, and was made of flattened, consolidated earth, overgrown with gra.s.s.

Kris, seeing the rudimentary strip also, swung closely round and flew the whole length of it at barely more than a hundred feet off the ground, but neither to his eyes nor mine were there any rocks or any other obstructions along its length.

"Robin swore we could land here. " Kris's voice through the headphones sounded more brave than convinced.

I thought that Robin hadn't taken the fierce crosswind into account. Had Robin ever landed on the strip himself at all?

Robin wasn't a flier. But then, nor was I... but I did at least understand wind.

Hands gripping the control yoke, Kris with tension in his whole body increased the engines' power to near maximum and flew round the island again, gaining height and coming in finally to land from the other end of the runway, still in a @ crosswind but at least this time with a pa.s.sable on-the-nose l component.

Fighting the gusts, Kris forgot to lower the wheels--his Cherokee at White Waltham had a fixed undercarriage--and he looked horrified for all of five seconds while I pointed silently at the three lights that should have been green, but weren't. Three green lights, I'd once read in a flying book, meant that all three landing wheels were down and locked in the landing position.

"G.o.d, " Kris shouted, "I've forgotten the downwind checks... I've jorgotten them all... Brakes off, undercarriage down, fuel mixture rich, propellers fully fine... " His busy fingers set everything right... all, I guessed, except his selfrespect. "Harness buckled, hatches closed and locked, autopilot disengaged, as if I'd engaged the b.l.o.o.d.y thing in the first place, hold on, Perry, hold on, here we go.

, , He made, in the circ.u.mstances, a commendably adequate landing, and I'd been in some commercial tooth-rattlers that had shaken one's spine a great deal worse.

"Sorry, " he said, which was unlike him. He stretched his fingers, loosening the muscles. "I forgot those b.l.o.o.d.y checks! " He sounded tragedy-stricken.

"How could I? " "We got down. Stop fussing, " I said. "What do we do next? " "Um... " In an absentminded trance he could think of nothing but his oversights.

I tried again. "Kris, we landed safely, didn't we? So here we are, safe. " "Well... yes. Have you looked at the altimeter? " I hadn't, but I did then. The millibar scale still read 1002, but the needle gave our alt.i.tude at sea level as minus 360 feet.

When Kris wound the needle again to zero, the millibars had dropped to 990, and he gazed at this result as if mesmerized.

"Well, we're not staying here at the end of the runway forever, are we? " I asked. "So how about snapping out of it?

There's Odin, don't forget. " His awareness seemed to click at once back to normal and as if I were stupid to ask, he said,