As I hung there and carefully guided the chute into the rising river of air being sucked into the storm from the surface of the raging seas below, I wondered at the calm that had overtaken me. My heart monitor showed me back to an exhilarating normal, just as if I were jogging along at a nice aerobic rate. I was now moving with the winds, leaving the relative safety of the boat far below and behind as I drew closer to the heart of Janice—her inflowing eyewall. Unassisted, her winds would take me in and down drawing me to her destructive comma and sure death. Only my skill at guiding the expanses of inflated fabric above me would overcome that event. I carefully noted every aspect of the wind and movement, checking the pressure readings each second to make sure they kept moving in the right direction.
Jerry’s helmet displays were rather sophisticated derivations of the basic GPS data. To save weight, which means eliminating as many heavy batteries as possible, Jerry used a small processor to calculate ground speed, altitude, rates of climb, and position from the signals being beamed from the twenty-four orbiting GPS satellites far above the storm. The only other instruments we carried were the redundant and passive pressure gauges threaded into our suits and helmets. Within the margin of error the data on the displays were better than we could get from even kilograms of standard instruments and batteries weighing us down. Jerry’s electronics only added a mere five hundred grams, half a kilo, including the batteries.
Whoops! The rate of climb suddenly dipped, indicating that I had gone too far in one direction. Struggling with the heavy straps I managed to steer back into the upward winds. Largely you had to work by feel and hunch where reading was impossible through the shaking and rocking the winds caused. The turbulence wasn’t nearly what I expected to find farther in, but was still considerable and took all of my strength to overcome. If I let the wind take control the buffeting could become more than I could handle. At this point Janice had to be handled with some delicacy, like an exlover at the end of an affair.
Suddenly there was that empty feeling in the pit of my stomach as I started climbing at an increasing rate. The rate of climb was now reading in meters per second, not minutes, and my horizontal speed was way down to a mere eighty kilometers per hour. In my mind’s eye I recalled the geometry of this part of Janice from our model. The winds would be rising on a sixty or seventy degree angle from below as they circled Janice’s center, being pulled up into the vacuum above. The pressure readings dropped with every few meters of altitude. When the rise started I had seen something around nine hundred millibars. The figure was now closer to eight hundred. I confirmed with the altimeter reading that I was already at the two thousand meter level, which was right on the profile. To maintain my place I started a lazy track left and right, tending more left than right to accommodate the curvature of the winds. You had to be cautious at this level. With no reference points in sight you could have a serious problem with orientation; the old diving syndrome that was the bane of high altitude hang-gliding. With this level of wind force you could easily be flying upside down to the ground, or any other orientation, for that matter. Only the helmet display kept me oriented as to up and down. I’d learned over the years to completely ignore my body’s signals, since they could kill you if you trusted them too far.
I keyed the relative display onto the left side of the display and saw that I was still around sixty-five klicks from the eye, which again was right on the profile. I continued my sweeping tactic, keeping my eye on pressure, rate of climb, and speed.
At seven hundred and fifty millibars I cranked the oxygen flow into action and took a heady whiff to clear my head. Above this level the headaches and nausea from oxygen deficiency from my exertions would start without the breathing mask. The storm wasn’t too bad at this level, over three thousand meters, especially since most of the moisture was traveling along with me. I watched the pressure drop, drop, drop as I continued to rise.
A long while later, somewhere along about six hundred and fifty millibars, visibility improved momentarily and I thought I saw a flash of color beside me, but wasn’t sure. Suddenly I noted that my ground speed was increasing, as was my calculated distance from the eye. Without warning I had been thrown out of the rainwall stack and was being swept by the cyclonic outflow into the intermediate cirrus formations, from which there would be a major downflow. For some reason Janice had chosen to be contrary and forced me out of her rainwall far sooner than expected. The model said that I should have had another thousand meters of altitude from this formation!
I tugged the lines around and started to sail back eyeward, losing altitude even as the storm blew me backwards. Suddenly the rate of climb indicator went crazy, rising swiftly and just as quickly dropping. Somehow I had gone right through the rising flow and emerged into the back of the rainwall. I started to lose altitude immediately.
If I didn’t do something right away I’d be swept too quickly into the eyewall to clear the comma. I released the parasail and dipped with a stomach churning twist as the ejection pulled out the next offering in my assault on Janice. I could feel the wetness at the seat of my suit as my bladder let loose with the jerk of acceleration. Above me a bright red balloon chute was expanding. With my left hand I reached over and twisted the knob on the tank anchored to the straps, feeding an extra measure of gas into the expanding balloon. In a few seconds the arrangement had achieved positive buoyancy and began to lift me. The ground speed increased enormously, rising to nearly 150 kilometers per hour. With a heave and twist of my shoulders I turned the harness so that the wind was striking me from directly ahead. This would let the cyclonic winds draw me inward even as I gained altitude.
The balloon chute was Jerry’s most significant contribution to jumping, and probably made it possible. Kotsch called it the “ugliest damn flying device ever invented” and most people who weren’t jumpers agreed with him. When you are dealing with hypersonic and turbulent winds of a major storm most standard designs just won’t work. The balloon chute looked like a misshapen sausage that had sprouted stubby and assymmetrical wings at various points. The bulbous top faired back in a tear-shaped cross section while the lower cross sections were more nearly elliptical. The control lines were tied to each set of “wings” so they would move in concert and bend the balloon at the same time. Ungainly as it looked it did provide both lift and control under extreme wind force conditions.
Soon I was climbing through thin wispy clouds that had to be the cirrus from the rainwall stack. For a moment I broke through into some clear air and could finally see more than a few meters around me. Matter of fact, due to some anomaly of storm winds I had entered a volume relatively free of rain and cloud.
Off to my right I could make out the convoluted shape of the rainwall and, far above it, the bottom of the outflow’s cirrus layer. In between there was clear air, an area of seeming calm that was belied by the rapidly mounting numbers of my ground speed indicator.