Which is why both of us manly men were stunned when the kid beached the kayak, stepped out, took off the helmet, and shook out that head of flaming red hair that beautifully set off Mariah’s dark green eyes. I think Jerry fell in love the instant she flashed him that smile of hers.
Mariah and Jerry began to see a lot of each other in the next few months after our meeting on the lower Youg. He told me that she was an accomplished hang glider, sailplane pilot, and sport parachute enthusiast. From his tone I knew he was hooked, big time. Well, it was just a short step for Jerry to get Mariah to try jumping a few storms. Before long she was better at navigating the erratic winds than anyone else on our team. She was a natural and, frighteningly fast, acquired an expert’s skill. Trouble was, she got so damn good that hubris reared its ugly head: She felt she could do no wrong and wanted to start pushing the envelope.
There was a hell of a row between the two of them over where to draw the line between risk and foolhardiness. Mariah’s style was the opposite of Jerry’s. She was the daredevil of the pair, willing to risk everything on the chance, providing the payoff was worth it. Specifically, she wanted to try jumping the squall fronts that moved like freight trains across the Oklahoma plains. Everyone, even the craziest storm jumpers, thought the idea was too dangerous to even think about it. Jerry carefully explained to her that those type of storms were too poorly organized and unpredictable to jump safely. It did no good, but he did try to talk her out of it.
The result of all the talks and discussions and warnings was that Mariah did some squall line jumping on her own, including one autumn jump with some experimental gear that Jerry had devised for our hurricane assault. To prove that everyone else was wrong she had ridden a roaring monster of a tornado for nearly twelve kilometers across Oklahoma, clocking ground speeds of nearly three hundred, and lived to tell about it. That storm blew her clear across the state before depositing her in the only tree within ten kilometers of her landing site. So what if she broke both legs, not to mention a dozen or more other minor and major bones in the attempt—she had proven that she could do what the veterans said couldn’t be done!
Jerry proposed to her in the hospital while she was lying there, defenseless in her casts and semi-comatose from the sedatives. He figured that someone who could ride a tornado and survive was worth holding onto. Can’t say I blamed him. I was best man at their wedding—which occurred between fifteen hundred and a thousand meters, surrounded by the rest of the jump club, and a very, very scared-looking minister. After that it was taken for granted that Mariah would be going with us when we tackled the big one.
The change in the pitch of the engines, the chiming of the tone, and the announcement from the stew to put our seatbelts on brought me back to the present. The plane abruptly began its descent. On the way down the crosswinds made the plane lean sickeningly to one side, slip, and then come back level. A kid in the back started to cry. The wind managed to smash us around a few more times before our wheels banged three times onto the rain-slick runway and started rolling down the seemingly endless taxi run to the Charleston terminal.
The wind-driven force of the rain beat a steady drum roll on the roof of the rental car as I recovered my luggage and drove to pick up Jerry and Mariah and drive to the harbor. To all those around me the rain, wind, and thunder may have just been aspects of another summer storm, but I knew better; even from a thousand miles away my Janice was already calling me into her arms.
Late the next day the deck of Jerry’s “research” boat dropped under my feet as the twelve meter wall of white flecked, gray water rose behind the stem. Up and up, towering higher than I could see, the immense wall rose as we dropped further into the trough. Finally the crest rose far above, where the one hundred kilometer per hour winds would be blowing the white froth off its top, that was something I couldn’t see because of the helmet’s restriction on my head movement. What would this wind be on the Beaufort scale, I wondered? Force eleven or better for sure! The wall moved relentlessly away from me, a vast mountain of water racing away from our stern and leaving us in a watery valley, surrounded by huge peaks of moving, liquid geography.
I wasn’t worried about the survivability of the boat: The Valkyrie had been a completely enclosed, stress tested, air-droppable attack ship before the wave of peace came over the world and made military surplus a growth industry. She could be dropped from a plane going at over two hundred kilometers per hour, bob to the surface, and have her engines going immediately. No little hurricane could harm her. Jerry had found her the perfect vessel for our planned assault on the hurricane.
As soon as we reached the trough the deck started to rise like a rising elevator, faster and faster as another wave moved beneath us. I was forced to brace myself as the boat tipped backward on the slope of the wave. Only the strength of the clamps on my boots and the line from the reel at my back held me from tumbling off the stern. Finally we reached the apogee and were exposed to the full force of the wind that drove a solid sheet of water horizontally across the deck. The deluge obscured my faceplate and prevented any view of the surrounding seas. Of course, this close to the storm you couldn’t see more than a few meters in any direction anyhow, so I wasn’t missing much.
“Pressure just went below 980 millibars,” the intercom crackled in my ear. “We’re approaching your outer rainwall. Better get ready to leave.”
“Check your gear,” Jerry’s voice said unnecessarily over the intercom. I glanced to my right and saw him wave one orange arm. While we were plowing our way from Charleston harbor into the Atlantic I’d already checked every item of my equipment ten times at least, and did a final check before coming out to get into position on the deck. But caution was ever the watchword for a jumper so I dutifully ran down my mental checklist one more time. With a snap of my chin I brought the heads-up displays that were projected onto the inside of my faceplate, confirming the captain’s pressure reading with bright red numbers. The altitude reading below it showed us varying from plus to minus twelve meters: Since we were in the middle of the tropical depression surrounding hurricane Janice, the GPS reading would show us to be above the Earth’s ideal spherical surface at the crest of the waves and below it on the troughs. Heading, attitude, speed, rate of climb, and all of the other minutiae of this venture were checked and confirmed in the display.
I reached up and felt for the oxygen bottle strapped to my shoulder, the battery pack was attached on the opposite side, and confirmed that my helmet was strapped tightly to my skull with the face mask clamps tightened down. The jump we were about to make was very much like climbing a very, very tall mountain. Up at the top we’d be at nearly seven kilometers with the air pressure down to a mere four or five hundred millibars—not too healthy for human lungs and consciousness, to be certain.
Next I tested each of the straps securing my parachutes into place, giving a tug to make sure that their lines hadn’t become tangled since the last time I checked. The chutes were all connected, each one would pull the other as it was released through a sutliff shroud arrangement. We’d have no time to bother with release and deployment once we were on our way, so everything that could was arranged to happen without human intervention. The eight linked chutes, four in front and four behind, gave the three of us a comical look—like a group of brightly colored, rotund beetles. I reached behind me and felt the release on the hook of the take-up reel and the boot clamps, tracing the pull cord around my waist to the handle at the front, right beside my left hand. The other handle, on the right side, was for the ribbon chute, my primary deployment.