‘Great,’ I said, though half-heartedly, with reservations. ‘But we still need a map.’
Kris surrendered. ‘All right. All right. We’ll take a bloody map. I’ll go and get one.’
I went with him this time, across the tarmac to a small building set apart from the main passenger areas and into a busy private pilots’ room filled with tables, chairs, a rudimentary cafeteria selling coffee and Danish pastries and eight or nine amateur aviators with strung-up nerves pretending icy calm in face of the cross-hurricane adventure.
Odin in all its terror claimed maximum attention, an update of its position and composition being displayed continuously on a television-type screen. Hurricane Odin, with winds now reported at 155 mph in the eye-wall, had just about reached Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale. The eye was currently located at 17.04 degrees North, 78.3 degrees west, and was moving north-west at 6 miles an hour. Pressure in the eye had last been measured at 930 millibars, having dropped from 967 overnight. The eye at present measured 11 miles across.
Two steps at a time, Kris went up the stairs which apparently led to the desk receiving flight plans and to a kiosk selling small necessities for pathfinding, including topographical and radio maps. Kris bought both, carrying them down like trophies
While he was gone, one of the other pilots, following Kris with his gaze, said regretfully, ‘Sad about Bob Farraday, wasn’t it?’
I said, ‘Er...’ and was told Bob Farraday, Amy Ford’s instructor, had been killed in a car crash a month ago. ‘She sold her plane then, the one you and your friend are flying in. I thought you knew.’
I shook my head, but it explained why she’d sold such a gem.
The consensus among the earnest hurricane hunters all around us put the true direction of the eye at 152 degrees from Grand Cayman’s Owen Roberts airport, but that figure had to be modified by the awkward facts that compass needles didn’t point to true north, and that the cyclonic winds would change the aircraft’s heading from minute to minute. Naturally the whole eye, also, was on the move.
Listening to the knowledgeable chatter of the others, I thought that Kris and I were attempting an impossible task, but Kris himself, bouncing with energy and grinning with joy, simply took me and the maps back to Robin’s Piper and spread the maps out on the table.
‘The eye to Odin is there,’ he said firmly, drawing in pencil a small circle on the radio map and, with the dexterity I was used to in him, he worked out, with the aid of a pocket calculator, the heading and speed at which he should travel to reach his target. It was, to do him justice, almost exactly the course he’d been going to fly even if I hadn’t insisted on the maps. He’d written his chosen headings on half a postcard, which at that point he produced with satisfaction from his shirt pocket: and there were other numbers written below the way to the eye, which after a pause he explained.
‘I suppose you’d better know. Well, this figure, this second one, is the magnetic heading from Cayman to Trox Island. The next one is from Trox Island to Odin’s eye, and the fourth one is from the eye back to Cayman. If we go right now, these headings will take us round, you’ll see.’
I stared at him, thinking him halfway to insane. This Piper aeroplane, though, unlike Kris’s own Cherokee at White Waltham, this luxurious little transport did have all sorts of electronic capabilities, so while Kris did all his remaining checks meticulously, I read the slim instruction booklet on how to navigate by radio transmissions.
The whole enterprise, I reckoned, would degenerate into a jolly little flip far away from Odin, from which calm corner we could return to Grand Cayman safely, thanks to various land-based transmitters called non-directional beacons, or NDBs, for short.
I learned much later that low-level navigation over the western Caribbean had once been easy, thanks to three strong directional beacons positioned at Panama, Swan Island and Bimini (in the Bahamas) but that with the advent of the global positioning system used by commercial aircraft, the amateurs’ stand-bys had been dismantled. Kris and I, the day we set off in blithe ignorance to Trox Island, could have benefited hugely from cross references from beacons at Panama, Swan Island and Bimini.
With Kris’s basic navigating kit always containing a set of plastic measuring pieces, I ruled a straight track line from Grand Cayman to Trox on both maps and, having squeezed the information out of Kris, who was still inclined to look backward to his feeling of obligation and to his new alliance with Robin, wrote in the airspeed, and consequently the time, that should deliver us to Trox.
My arrival time and heading weren’t much different from Kris’s own calculations. ‘I told you so,’ he said.
I sat back in my chair. ‘What does Robin want us to do on Trox Island? You keep avoiding any details. He’s spent a lot of money, as you’ve said, but we still don’t know why.’
‘He wants you to take photographs.’ He — and Robin also — who’d come out of the Ford house in his pyjamas to wave us off in the truck, had checked that I hadn’t forgotten my camera.
‘Photographs? What of?’
Kris shifted in his seat. ‘He just said photographs... as if you would know what he wanted when you saw it.’ But Kris, I knew later, was concocting again.
The enterprise looked less and less sensible to me, but in a stab at normal procedures I suggested we put on the life jackets at that point, leaving them of course uninflated, but ready if necessary.
Kris, having won the bigger battle, meekly strapped himself into the flat orange life vest and ignored it.
Along the row of parked light aircraft two or three were on the move. With a sharp inspection of his watch, and a grumble about a lot of time wasted, Kris climbed forward into the captain’s seat and, looking relieved not to have to answer more questions, finished his pre-take off checks by winding his altimeter needle to zero to give the home airfield’s present air pressure, which at sea level read 1002 on the millibar scale. Then he started the engines and asked the Tower for permission to taxi.
I put on headphones, like Kris, and from the co-pilot’s seat, asked for permission for take-off.
Permission was granted laconically, the Tower on the whole preferring only authorised military aircraft to chase a hurricane’s eye. Kris, though, with determination and skill roared down the runway, soared out over water, and steered straight for Odin.
My surprise lasted about as far as the line-of-sight horizon from Grand Cayman, and then with the ground’s attention on the next plane after us, and the next after that, Kris altered course abruptly and headed instead for the mushrooms of Trox.
Kris was busy with hands on switches and when everything had settled, I found that we were no longer in radio contact with anyone, as the pilot had systematically turned the tuning dials to indicate out-of-area frequencies. We were, as no doubt he and Robin had planned, alone in the wide sky: and the wide sky was developing rough gusty patches, even though the outer edges of the hurricane lay by forecast a long way ahead.
Through the headsets which we both still wore, Kris said, ‘Flight time to Trox should now be twenty minutes, but the winds are stronger than I planned for. Start looking ahead in ten minutes. Robin said the island’s sometimes difficult to see.’
I said I thought our radio silence was madness. Kris merely grinned.
Ten minutes passed, and twenty. The wave crests multiplied over the grey water below us, the cloud shreds were thickening and the aircraft bumped heavily in increasingly unstable air.