We had developed our storm jumping techniques gradually, leaping out of airplanes into thunderheads with various types of sport chutes to start and worked our way up to tackling the edges of the hurricanes in the south Atlantic and far Pacific, where they still call them typhoons despite international attempts to standardize weather terminology. Each of our jumps was designed to perfect some point of technique or test a new wrinkle in technology. Most led to the development of yet another innovation, such as the balloon chute combination that I carried as my numbers four and six.
The sails and chutes in my inventory were partly Jerry’s innovations; modifications to the early Irwin Eagle parasail models. Every one of them was proven using wind tunnels and simulations that tested the radical designs. The ribs were inflated by the wind’s shock wave as the sutliff pulled the deployment shroud away. This gave the sail’s reinforced dacron added structural strength and turned the chute into an airfoil. The modern jumper’s standard rig was a cross between a hang glider and a sport parachute, modified for the high winds you normally encountered within a storm front. They were every bit as advanced a technology as the suit’s heads-up displays, and the GPS receiver in my helmet.
There wasn’t much I could do about the suit, aside from ensuring that the seals were all closed and that the battery pack was firmly attached at my waist. The suits were the latest innovation Mariah had uncovered. She’d discovered the material on one of her systems searches for new technology we could use. Our suits were layers of space-age materials that embraced us like a second skin. The outside was a waterproof and thermally protecting layer that would keep most of the external environment away from our frail bodies. Their strong elastic would also, Jerry observed with his obsessive attention to detail, hold us together if we broke anything, like an arm or leg, during the jump. All the suits were colored to have high visibility in dark and stormy waters. Jerry had selected the usual international orange while I chose the sailor’s survival red. Mariah, with her usual attention to style and a desire to be different, was garbed in gear dyed a flaming fluorescent pink, for heaven’s sake!
Next to our skins we wore a thin set of underwear that would pass most of our perspiration and retain our body heat. This was just another version of the polypropylene underwear that had been around for years and was still the best thing you could have next to your body, except another body, that is.
The middle layer of the suit was the critical one. This was the micropore fabric that was the latest in survival technology. The layer was composed of thousands and thousands of cells, each of which had their own function to perform. One type would reverse the flow of heat from one direction to the other like miniature heat pumps. If the external environment was cooler than a certain level it would not allow any heat to escape from the body. If it was warmer, as it was at the moment on the deck of the ship where the temperature was nearly thirty-two degrees Centigrade, it would allow the heat to escape to the outer skin, where it would evaporate and provide a measure of cooling. A second type of suit cell reacted to pressure, filling its volume with scavenged fluid, no problem with the amount of work we’d be doing, and becoming rigid as the air pressure lowered, sealing the suit, and keeping our blood from boiling. The third type of cells were mediators, governing the range of behavior of the others and which were themselves controlled by the small computer built into the suit’s battery pack. I glanced down to make sure its tiny red telltale was winking. All considered the suit was one step short of qualifying as a primitive life form.
“Why do you want to waste your time checking this stuff again?” Mariah’s voice crackled over the intercom. “It will either work or not at this point. You certainly aren’t going to back out now!” That was just like Mariah, fractious as hell before a jump, more so than normal, given our current situation. Jerry got picky-picky, covering his nervousness with constant confirmation that everything was in readiness while Mariah was more of a “spit on it and go” philosophy. I never could understand how the two of them had thought their marriage could succeed with such disparate styles.
Despite their different styles both Jerry and Mariah were meticulous about our preparations. Nothing was going to be used that hadn’t been tested under extreme conditions a dozen times or more. Every step of our jump was carefully planned down to the most picky detail. Step by step procedures were drawn for every possible contingency and scenarios were run a hundred times to make sure we knew all the dangers Janice could offer. It was only after all the details were settled that Mariah’s basic personality came to the fore; her “let’s get on with it,” panache.
It had been Jerry’s cool head and credentials that had held off the Coast Guard until we could get our boat beyond the limit. “We are a weather research craft, fully rigged for heavy weathers,” he had advised them when they hovered to tell us to turn back. That wasn’t a lie. We were a fully recognized arm of the GDN Foundation, a preeminent weather research institution well known for its airborne sensors. Jerry had started the foundation with the profits from his parachute business and used his jumpers as mobile collection platforms. Each of Jerry’s helmets collected continual readings from GPS as well as pressure. With rather exacting precision the foundation could report the precise wind flows as the jumper transits the storm. The information was invaluable, since no unmaneuvered balloon could possibly reach the places we went.
Naturally the Coast Guard knew who we really were and what we were about to do, but they had to observe the forms dictated by their regulations. Our refusal to heed their fair warning relieved them of any responsibility for whatever might occur. Once we stated our credentials and were on the high seas we were on our own recognizance, to survive or fail on our own.
I tried to imagine what it must look like from their safe perspective as the Coast Guard vessel turned back. Here I was, clamped to the deck of a heaving ship heading into the teeth of a major hurricane, burdened with nearly two hundred kilograms of parachutes, electronics, and survival gear, and ready to leap off into the wind-driven seas. Crazy bastards, they would probably think, wondering what motivated us. How could I explain how it felt to try for the big one, the thing that had never been done before—a complete closed circuit of a major hurricane!
The circuit was a natural progression for us. We had practiced by riding the faces of the big storms, flying before the heavy winds for the past three years. Jerry and I had skirted the periphery of the typhoons in the Pacific, bouncing around the inner rainwalls, riding the updrafts to three or four thousand meters before bailing out. Making a complete circuit of the heart of the hurricane was something others had tried while we practiced and perfected. The last three tries had resulted in two jumpers dead and one missing, all drowned or presumed drowned in the turbulent seas after having their gear ripped apart by the ferocious winds. “One must surmount the comma,” Jerry had proclaimed one evening as we were planning our assault, tracing an arching line above the heavy winds and turbulence of the eyewall on the three dimensional wind model we had downloaded from the NOAA board.
A hurricane can be thought of as a concentric ring of rainwalls ranging up to a thousand kilometers away from the eye, each one a raging torus of cyclonic winds and rising thermals. The most forceful winds of the central eyewall exist at the one o’clock position to the storm’s track and close to the bottom of the rising stack of warm air, the primary energy cell that forms the eye. It is the rising warm air within this cell that fuels the hurricane’s fury. Sucking latent heat energy from the surface the air rises clear to the stratosphere in enormous volumes, dropping part into the quiescent eye and the rest into the overflowing storm shield. Most of the energy transfer occurs at various levels of the stack, dropping the temperature as the warm, moisture-laden air condenses out and releases its energy.