As a committed fly-through prospect, the satellite picture of Odin was soul-shrink daunting. Did I really intend to fly with Kris into the centre of that?
I had brought with me by habit my small accurate camera, but even given the best lens in the world, I was not going to see any satellite’s-eye view. The circling top of a great hurricane, where the winds were coldest, rose to maybe fifty or sixty thousand feet; Kris and I, without oxygen, couldn’t go much higher than ten thousand. We would fly into the quiet central hub, read and note the air pressure there, ditto the wind speeds in the eye-wall, and fly out on the other side to make our way back to the home field. For most of the way, might we not be buffeted about in rain cloud? But we would be travelling faster than the wind.
How the hell, I thought privately, did one find the eye? How was I supposed to navigate? I’d had no rehearsals. Who would give me a quick course in hurricane dead reckoning? Who would distract me from the word ‘dead’?
Why did I, all the same, want to do that flight more than anything else?
The Weather Channel went on chattering in civilised tones about the downward march of millibars, those useful measurements of lowering air pressure and forthcoming disaster.
The television screen in the Ford house looked out from a clearly expensive wall fitment, and Amy, Michael and I sat around in lush armchairs glancing occasionally at the image of the wide white swirling mass while they told me that historically Grand Cayman had suffered few major direct hits, but that of course there was always a first time. Their blithe voices, though, said they didn’t believe it.
I’d heard jockeys describe the atmosphere in the changing-room before they’d gone out to partner half a ton of horse in the Grand National over the biggest, most demanding jumps in the sport. They were going into break-neck paraplegic country, and they did it for love. I’d wondered why they felt compelled; and in the Fords’ clean bright wealthy sitting-room, I found I knew.
During the several idle hours before Robin and Kris reappeared, I learned among other things that in the United States Amy had owned, managed and sold a string of video rental stores, while Michael equipped gymnasiums and collected membership money.
They were both proud of their achievements, also proud of each other, and in those areas talked freely.
I learned that neither Amy nor Michael were themselves licensed pilots, though Amy had been taking instruction before she sold her aircraft to Robin.
‘Why did you sell it to Robin?’ I asked Amy without pressure, more as time-filling chit chat than as a purposeful enquiry.
Michael made a damping movement of his hand as if urging caution, but Amy answered limpidly, ‘He wanted it. He made a good offer, so I agreed.’ She finished her tall glass of orange mixture. ‘If you want to know why he bought it, you’ll have to ask him.’
Robin and Kris came back at that moment in good spirits, so I did ask him straight out, lightly, there and then, as if it were merely again a conversational opening without purpose.
Robin blinked, paused, smiled, and in the same misleading way answered, ‘Amy wouldn’t want me to tell you that she could buy a diamond necklace if she sold me her airplane.’
‘And more besides,’ Michael heartily said, relieved.
I smiled warmly. They were all capable liars. Amy gave Kris a tall glass tinkling with ice and I told him neutrally, ‘Mine has rum in it.’
He was halfway up to a manic high, but non-alcoholic, as usual. He looked piercingly at the almost full glass standing beside me on a small table, then he tasted his own, set it down, and with sizzling enthusiasm told me the news.
‘It’s a terrific plane. Two engines. I had an instructor put me through its paces. Passed with OK. OK, Robin’s happy. Everyone’s happy. Mind you, most people think amateurs should stay strictly away from storms, but they’ll take account of what we’ll measure, even if we don’t have a fully equipped flying laboratory...’
‘When are we going?’ I asked.
Everyone looked at the Weather Channel’s update. Odin by that moment had dropped another couple of frightening millibars and had moved one minute north-west. A bright-mannered elderly studio visitor with — I guessed — a pay-off from the tourist trade — rejoiced that Odin was circling over water and doing no harm to holiday makers or people vacationing ashore. Kris looked at me cynically and shrugged since, in circling over a warm sea, Odin was strengthening all the time.
‘Tomorrow morning,’ Kris said, ‘0800. Eight o’clock. Before it gets too hot.’
Michael and Amy had insisted on having Robin, Kris and me all stay overnight in their house. They gave us unending drinks, more rather than less alcoholic, to Kris’s embarrassment, and Michael grilled steaks on a brick-built barbecue with a flourish of proprietorial strength inside a shiny vinyl apron.
Kris and I were given small tasks to do, like folding napkins and filling a tub with ice cubes; small tasks that kept us close to Amy’s side. It became somehow understood that neither of us should wander away, and with Robin’s alarm system in mind, I stayed where my hosts wanted. It felt to me a shade like luxurious imprisonment, but I had little money and no good excuse for insisting on a hotel instead.
Michael, besides, though on the surface all friendly, a genial cook, had also, I slowly realised, an agility with all those muscles that spoke of combat rather than the exercise machines he had dealt in.
Odin on the television moved slowly, dangerously, north-west.
Amy, pleasantly, with my help, laying plates at a dining table in an insect-screened porch near the barbecue, exclaimed suddenly to the rest of us ‘How good looking Kris is! And you too, of course, Perry. Does the BBC choose the forecasters for their ultra attractive faces?’
Kris grinned. ‘All the time.’
I was used to the way Kris looked, but it was true, I knew, that at one time he’d clung onto his job in the aftermath of one of his more outrageous statements only because of the swoon factor in women viewers. Rarely, though, for such a handsome person, he was equally liked by men, and that, I thought, lay somewhere in his manic-depressive spectrum, from which he offered a friendship that could be wildly scatty but had no sex in it. His reliance on me was in the nature of an expedition leader being certain that whatever the catastrophe, he could absolutely rely on base camp being there for him.
He brought zany lightheartedness to that strange evening in Cayman, but he refused Robin’s request for a repeat recital of the Cape Canaveral verses; asked why not, he replied that the genesis of the verses had lain in depression and should stay there.
I watched Robin thoughtfully contemplate Kris. Robin had got himself more than a good amateur pilot, he’d got a British national celebrity, and I wondered if in his so far unexplained planning, this celebrity factor had been intentional or unforeseen.
By six-thirty the next morning, Odin had been firmly declared a Category 4 hurricane, travelling north-west at less than 7 miles an hour.
Straight ahead, if it continued on that path, it would in a day or two smash into the house of Michael and Amy, blowing away its opulence, sweeping through the bright little room with a hundred tons of sand-heavy water.
Kris came to stand beside me, watching the deadly drama on the screen and being pleased at the sharp definition of the eye.
‘Come on then,’ he said, ‘we might as well go.’ His eyes shone like a child’s ready for a party. ‘We’re not the only people flying,’ he added, ‘and I’d better file a flight plan.’