Second Wind Part 19

He greeted me with a yelp and a crus.h.i.+ng hug, and I suffered similar warm squeezing all round the office. Comment on thinness and gauntness could last only minutes when, to the relief of the forecaster standing by to give the kids the damp news for squibs, reliable old Stuart had returned from the dead and popped up on time.

Kris himself looked spectacularly tanned with sun brightened hair and mustache, and he rose at the sight of me

from gloom to stratosphere as fast as any of his rocket lift-off poems.

"I can't believe it! " His voice could probably be heard all down Wood Lane. "How come you're here? We all thought your gran a bit touched yesterday, insisting you'd have got a message to her if you'd drowned! " We walked along a quiet pa.s.sage towards the room we all shared between appearances--all except the guru, who had a retreat to himself--and Kris, with small skips and jumps like a young boy, told me that he in the life raft had scudded with the wind across the western edge of Odin for days until Robin's hired helicopter operators had spotted him and winched him up. The description of his rescue poured out of him like an uncorked flood, as if to prevent any other subject surfacing, but in the end I put an anchoring hand on his arm and congratulated him on his engagement to Bell.

"Don't tell her father, " he said in alarm. "Old Caspar wouldn't exactly have wept if he'd had to get someone else to tell him it was hay-cutting time. " There was too much truth in that to be funny. I let it go without contradiction and asked instead, "What did Robin Darcy say about losing his airplane? " "I haven't talked to him since that morning we set off.

If I call his home in Sand Dollar Beach I just get Evelyn's voice on an answering machine. But poor old Robin, what can he say?

It was he who urged us to go. " "Well... " I frowned. "What did he really want you to do on that island? " "Trox? " "Yes, of course, Trox. " "How should I know? " Kris shrugged absentmindedly, then suddenly looked wary.

"Perhaps, " I mildly suggested, "because he himself told you. " Kris slowed and stopped in two paces as if he had just remembered he'd given me two different answers already to that question.

"I'm so glad, " he said explosively. "I'm really so pleased you're alive. " "So am I that you are. " We beamed at each other, and whatever else was said, that was the truth.

We shouldered through a swinging door into a change clothes and brush-hair environment, where s.h.i.+ny foreheads and noses were dusted to matte by a lady dragon of twenty three who tended to follow one into camera range waving a powder puff. Kris fell into flirtatious chat with her, but kept glancing my way from under his eyelids as if half hoping that I would after all disappear.

Instead I asked, but lightheartedly, as if it were a joke, "What did Robin say about our wheels-up' approach to Trox Island? " "Nothing. I haven't talked to him. I told you. " The drago ness had been darkening his almost white eyebrows. Kris, irritated by my tactlessness in reminding him of his imperfection, pushed her hand away sharply and snappily told me no one was perfect all the time. It wasn't exactly the moment, I decided, to tell him I knew the right-hand--starboard-engine had stopped only because the pilot had forgotten to flip the switch from the empty fuel tank to the full one.

Flying though a hurricane had been stress enough. Kris had forgotten the switch until too late and dealing with the unbalancing weight of a dead engine as well had been beyond his limits.

The Cayman Trench was one of the deepest valleys in the world's ocean floor, and unless Robin went to the unlikely and expensive trouble of finding and raising the wreckage, Kris's last-second panicked too late wild yell and stretch-out-toward the-switch would remain forever his secret.

I did, though, want him to tell me truthfully why we'd gone to Trox at all, and in the end, in exasperation, he moodily gave m.

"It's no big deal, " he said. "All Robin wanted me to do on Trox Island was to collect a folder of papers that had been left behind by mistake, and bring them back to him without you having a good look at them first. Don't ask me why he didn't want you to, I don't know, but, like I said before, you and I both owed him a lot, so I agreed. He said his folder was in a desk in one of the thick-walled huts, and he wanted me to collect it safely before it was blown away by Hurricane Odin.

But when we got there I couldn't even find the desk. All the furniture had gone already. " "And... um... " I pondered. "You didn't tell Robin.. " "No, I didn't. Apparently when we didn't return according to our flight plan the control tower people in Grand Cayman got in touch with Evelyn on the Darcy answering machine, and it was Evelyn, that pearly old duck, who paid for the search helicopter to go out looking for me and you as soon as the weather was possible. " - I asked wryly, "Will she send us a bill? " "Which would you rather be, " Kris asked, "broke or dead? " DkIFTED ROUND the Weather Centre all afternoon catching up on the past two weeks of wind and gossip and preparing and presenting at six-thirty and nine-thirty the shape of things to come.

Friday, the next day, the Fifth of November, Gunpowder, Treason, and Plot, looked like being a groan again for dads and children alike. A band of rain would cross the whole British area between lunch and bedtime the next day, starting in the west of Scotland and traveling south and counterclockwise, with veering winds later in the day bringing clouds and drizzle across southern England to mess up the Catherine wheels of Ess.e.x. Light the sodden blue touch-paper and retire to bed.

I spent a quiet late evening with my grandmother and Jett van Els, a muscle and mind respite, a doze-on, doze-off breathing spell split only twice, first by Kris on a high at ten-thirty, giving a long TV funny overview of November fog banks.

Second, when Jett had begun the slow tough task of my grandmother's Tarzan act from wheelchair to nighttime comfort, the telephone rang clamorously andJett briskly answered it, but instead of a reply to the usual type of magazine question like,

"How does one paint one's toenails if one can't feel one's toes, " we had Jeff's no-nonsense inquiry, "I'll ask when he'll be available. Who shall I say called? John Rupert? " She lifted her eyebrows comically, and I stretched out a hand to the receiver and said,

"h.e.l.lo? " He had a ghostwriter for me, he said straightforwardly, and I agreed to meet the ghost between broadcasts in the morning.

Later, with my grandmother as always only fitfully asleep in her airy room, Jett and I took a couple of cus.h.i.+ons and sat, well wrapped in Edwardian-type fur-lined car rugs, on a stone seat for two in a small gla.s.s-windowed entrance porch built to keep nineteen-o-eight ladies dry from carriage to gentlemen's beds.

The night air felt fresh and smelled of low-tide mud. We sat close to each other for warmth and didn't talk much. If the whole of life were simple like this, I thought, there would be peace among seagulls and no wind to speak of. I kissedJett van Els without heeding my grandmother's fears, and got kissed cheerfully back, and many things became understood between us in an oasis of tranquillity.

But there's a calm spell at the center of every hurricane. The fury of the second wind was as always round the corner.

IN THE VERY early morning I shed my grandmother's comfortable sofa in time to appear on her screen at breakfast, and did my best to soften the rainy news for the nation. The celebration night of the brave traitor and his low-grade explosive was going to pa.s.s as unsatisfactorily as the first, whatever I said.

During the morning, between rueful appearances steering short of apology, I made a quick trip by bus to Kensington and rode the elevator to the seventh floor to discuss a book on depression with a ghost.

I accepted a so-so chair and coffee with ginger snaps, listening to John Rupert's rational plans for a book not about depressions, but about storms, which he said would sell better.

Was he serious about a book? I asked, and he said civilly why not? Books had been written about shark's teeth before now.

"And incidentally, " he murmured, eating the ginger cookie set out for me, "it was How they brought the good news from Ghent to Air. " "Whatever, " I said.

"Robert Browning, " he added.

The door quietly opened, admitting an unmistakable ghost, a feeble-looking grandfather with thin white hair and strong sinews for shaking hands.

They introduced him to me without melodrama by name as

"Ghost, " no Mr.... no first name, just Ghost, and John Rupert calmly asked me to repeat what I'd told him the day before.

"Say it all again? " I protested.

"Say it again, but different, so while Ghost understands it for the first time, I see things more clearly. " I sighed. "Well then... Say that by mistake a folder of papers has been left on a Caribbean island, and the island has no radio, no telephone, no mail service and no people... but it does have a usable airstrip. " I continued with breaks for thought, and for Ghost's a.s.similation of what had happened.

"Say it is essential to retrieve the folder. " A break...

"Say there is a suitable aircraft available, but no discreet pilot, as yours has been killed in a car crash. " - | Another break.

"Then at a lunch party in England a pilot appears who longs to fly through the eye of a hurricane. He's a meteorologist, and there's a hurricane in the offing in the Caribbean-Nicky--and it is hurricane season in general. A flight through a hurricane is offered in return for a simple side trip to collect the folder of papers. " "Reasonable, " Ghost said.

"Mm. The pilot took along another meteorologist friend as a navigator and general helper... " "And the friend was you?

"John Rupert said.

I nodded. "Our flight through the hurricane ended in the sea. The pilot was saved by helicopter, and I was thrown back onto the island by the currents. I came across the folder of letters, but I didn't know they were important, or at least not to begin with... They were written in many different scripts and languages. " "And you have them? " The ghost showed great excitement, a matter of twitches and s.h.i.+vers very like Oliver Quigley.

"No. " I disappointed him. "I did read everything as best

I.

could, but I didn't speak any of the languages... " I picked absentmindedly at my fingers, but I was certain about what I said,

"One of the languages was Russian. " John Rupert, sitting on a corner of the desk and swinging a leg, interestedly asked, "So why was it Russian? And how did you know? " I explained, "There's a letter and a number combination that jumps off the page at anyone with the slightest bit of scientific knowledge, and it is U-235. On one of those foreign language pages, that combination was written Y-235, and that symbol Y is Russian for uranium. " I drew Y-235 to show them and said, "That sort of uranium has been enriched and condensed from U-238 by a process called sieving or gas diffusion. Pu-239 is enriched plutonium Pu-240. They are the materials for nuclear weapons. " They asked with frowns for more.

"Starting from U-235 as a fact"--I smiled faintly--"either that same letter and numbers combination, or that of Pu-239, reappeared somewhere in different scripts on every page in the folder. If I could guess at understanding, I'd say that what I've thought of as correspondence were definitely also lists. Lists in Greek and German and Arabic and Russian, and probably Hebrew. As for the others... I didn't know enough, but some of the other numbers had different appearances and might have been dates or prices. " "Lists... Lists of what, exactly? " "Lists of ingredients of nuclear explosive devices. They are, aren't they, the ultra sensitive package you were talking about? " They were unready to commit themselves.

I said,

"As far as I could understand those pages, I could see they were a sort of shopping list. Some of them stated what fissile material was available, and where. And some of them stated what was wanted. If those pages are lists of goods wanted and goods for sale, it means the Unified Trading Company are in essence middlemen. " There was a short silence. Neither Ghost nor John Rupert ridiculed the notion, so I went on. "There's a world shortage of many types of fissile material--that is, the wherewithal of making nuclear bombs. And there's a world glut of legitimate sovereign states and general brutish terrorists who know how to make them. They're not extraordinarily difficult to construct.

Only there's--thank G.o.d--not enough enriched uranium and plutonium to go round. There's a world shortage, as I said.

"Those letters in that package, I'm as sure as one can be, are notes of what's now out on the market. A high proportion of the world's bomb-making capacity has been locked up in Russia since the end of the Cold War. The old Soviet bloc don't want the dangerous makings scattered about any more than we do, and they guard them carefully, but there are thieves and schemers everywhere. I'd guess if anyone like you managed to put the Unified Trading Company out of business there would soon be someone else taking their place. " "One less is always significant, " Ghost said primly.