Kris, sweating, pushed the nose down and let the aeroplane rise like a hawk, and within a minute we were at three thousand feet and climbing, and Trox Island had disappeared into the murk behind us.
It wasn’t until that moment that I realised that in our urgent race to be airborne I had somehow dropped my camera. All those careful pictures for nothing! I searched all my pockets and all round my right-hand flight deck seat, but without success.
Cursing, I told Kris.
‘Well, we’re not going back to look for it.’ He sounded annoyed, but found this idea preposterous, as I did. It was all he could do to hold the plane steady, but he was also happy to be back in the air, and with visible relief fished in his shirt pocket for his lunatic flight plan.
‘Steer zero eight zero, just north of east,’ he shouted, giving me instructions while he fished around for his head-set and settled the microphone near his mouth. ‘That should take us to the eye.’
‘The eye isn’t where it was yesterday,’ I yelled back, handing over the controls and putting on my own head-set, in my turn.
‘I thought of that,’ Kris said, ‘and factored it in.’
What he hadn’t factored in, though we didn’t know it at the moment, was that Odin, as hurricanes were likely to do, had thoroughly and suddenly changed course. The whole circulating mass was now heading due west, which would, within twenty-four hours, take it inexorably over the island we’d left.
At Trox we’d taken off our life jackets and left them lying in the cabin, and I went back there, once Kris looked more in control, and put mine on again. I took Kris’s forward and against his inclination made him put his on also.
‘We’re not going to ditch,’ he protested.
‘All the same...’
With reluctance he let me put the flat orange jacket over his head and fasten the tapes round his waist.
Our progress towards the centre of Odin wasn’t in the, least orderly or controlled. Clouds whipped past the window and gradually grew thicker and darker until we were frankly flying in a hundred per cent humidity, or in other words, rain.
Though with his own furrowed forehead and tight mouth giving every physical impression of justifiable worry, Kris told me truculently that we weren’t giving up, however adverse the weather. The aeroplane, he insisted, was tough enough for the job and if I wanted to chicken out I should have done so back in Newmarket.
‘Are you talking to yourself?’ I asked. It was, indeed, hard to hear each other even through the head-sets. ‘How fast are we going?’
Kris didn’t reply. I reckoned that we had had the wind in its fury sweeping us sideways and we were now flying very fast in and through the circulatory pattern. I couldn’t even guess at our position on either map and with force insisted that we should join the world again by setting bona-fide frequencies on the radio. Kris tacitly gave in, but I harvested only shrieks and whistles and, for human contact, weak and far away, a woman’s voice speaking Spanish.
The re-awakened radio however prodded me into clearer thought, and so, despite the bumping tumult all around us, I switched on both of Robin’s special measuring instruments, ignoring Kris’s yelled protests that they were for use only in the eye and eye-wall. He shut up, though, and his eyes widened in incredulity when he saw the millibar indicator on the modified radio altimeter descend from the 990 we’d set on Trox down through 980 and 970 and 960 and waver on 950 before shaking there and falling towards 940.
If we followed the descent of the millibars, surely we would find that they bottomed out in the eye? The air pressure was at its lowest in the eye. Kris, converted by the sliding figures, began slowly and progressively steering left, going round with the winds.
Regular altimeters measured the outside pressure. Pilots set the sea level pressure on the instrument and the change between the two was displayed as the altitude in feet. The radio altimeter measured our height by bouncing a radio wave back from the surface of the sea like radar. Without it we would have been in real trouble as we wouldn’t have known the sea-level pressure even if the sea had been level. If we flew too low, we could hit the waves. It would have helped if I’d been given hours of instruction instead of simply pressing ‘Start’ buttons when I felt like it.
The millibar count went on shrinking fast from 940 to 935... 930... 924. Too low, I thought. The new instrument had to be wrong. Had to be... or I was misreading it... yet 880 had been clocked in a storm in the past. 924 wasn’t impossible, but 923? 921? We were lost, I thought. My theory was destroying us... 920... 919... it was over. The eye’s pressure had stood at 930 at Cayman that morning... it couldn’t possibly have dropped so fast... But 919... 919 and still falling. I glanced at the regular altimeter and tried to do the mental arithmetic. We were almost down at sea level... dangerous... ‘Don’t go lower,’ I told Kris urgently. ‘We’re in cloud just above the water... Go up, go up, we’ll hit
Kris was a good pilot for a lunch trip to Newmarket. Neither of us had imagined the standard of skill a hurricane demanded. With a stubbornly locked jaw he made a slow left turn at 919 millibars, inching lower... lower... Then 919 steadied on the nose, and I held my breath...
At just touching 918 millibars on the scale we burst out of cloud into bright sunlight.
We had hit the eye! We had actually done it! We were at the very heart of Odin. It was in a way our Everest, our lives’ peak, the summit we would never see again. To fly through the eye of a hurricane... I had wanted to, but only at that moment did I realise how much.
We were scraping the limits at 918 millibars. Huge waves like mountains moved close below us, smoothly powerful but not licking upward to swallow our remarkable world.
There were tears on Kris’s pale cheeks and I daresay on mine also.
In that amazing moment of revelation and fulfilment I felt overwhelmingly and unconditionally grateful to Robin Darcy. Never mind that I didn’t trust him across a peanut, never mind that he’d persuaded Kris to lie to me, never mind that the escapade to Trox had seriously endangered us, if it hadn’t been for his money, his aeroplane, his instruments, his enthusiasm and, yes — his hidden and possibly criminal purposes — we would both have been keeping our feet on the ground and following Odin’s progress from afar on a television screen, and we could never have said, like my grandmother, ‘Been there. Done that.’
According to the airspeed indicator we were travelling fast enough to give us barely three minutes of calm before we flew into the fearsome winds in the eye-wall opposite, and Kris, making the same calculations, immediately began to hold us in a tight circle, so that we stayed in Odin’s calm hub long enough to get used to it.
Below us — perhaps only two hundred feet below us — the moving sea was blue from the amazing sunshine that shone brightly also on the aeroplane, and threw angled shadows on our faces. Above us, the funnel, with only soft spirals of cloud in it, led far upwards to brief glimpses of blue sky. Kris kept the aeroplane circling in a slow climb until we were at, perhaps, four or five thousand feet above sea level, and had become accustomed to our extraordinary situation, and would remember it.
We were alone in the eye. Down to blue sea, up to blue sky, no one else shared our strange revolving world.
‘Stadium effect,’ Kris noted happily.
I nodded. The stadium effect meant that the eye was wider at the top, and narrower at the water’s surface; like a sports stadium, in fact.