All around the calm hub the terrifying winds in the whirling wall looked impenetrable. It was one thing to reach the golden sun in the centre, but now we had to calculate the way home. Kris again produced the card with the headings, though even he admitted that the fourth set was no longer right.
‘Work it out,’ he told me. ‘You can do it.’
We hadn’t even tried to follow the professional hurricane hunters’ flight pattern of three passes straight through the eye at ten thousand feet. We were, in effect, on our own.
I reckoned by computer that if we headed north we would make a landfall, if not in Cayman, actually a small target, then in Jamaica, or as a last resort, Cuba. We just had time and petrol to stay aloft for that, and with luck, long before then we would be alive on the radio again and could ask for directions. Embarrassing, but better than crashing.
Kris agreed to fly north in general but to head east to enter the eye-wall, as the anticlockwise winds, that were at their maximum there, would tend to sweep us round to the north anyway, until we were clear of the first sixty miles or so and had reached the outer areas of the hurricane.
The second wind of a hurricane on the ground came when the eye had passed, taking with it the illusion that the storm was over. The second wind of a hurricane hit from the south-west like a moving wall of concrete, catastrophically destroying everything that had survived the first onslaught.
The second wind of a Category 5 hurricane screamed and shrieked and travelled faster than a champion could serve a tennis ace. The second wind brought inches, torrents, of mud-liquefying rain. It brought misery and homelessness and washed away bridges — and to get back safe to Grand Cayman we had to fly again through the storm’s fury.
‘Work out our height,’ Kris said. His voice sounded unsteady and his eyes were alarmed. I made the simple calculation that air pressure normally fell by one millibar every thirty feet of height — but mental concentration always fell with altitude, and neither Kris nor I were any longer razor sharp because of the by then buffeting noisy leap-around world enveloping us.
Kris headed east and, at eight thousand feet on the altimeter, resolutely set course for land. Even with full power thundering in the engines we were both sure that we’d underestimated drift and that the rotating wind system was blowing us anywhere but where we wanted to go.
Blue sky had vanished. The sea tumbled and raced, grey and brown.
Cloud and rain closed around us. We were blind, and couldn’t measure our forward progress. Kris was giving up trying. His thoughts were a straight line.
For minutes I lived with the certainty that Kris and I and the aeroplane weren’t up to the job. My grandmother’s heebie-jeebies raised my skin in bumps. Kris, visibly losing his nerve, said ‘Mayday, mayday, mayday’ repeatedly into the headset, broadcasting a plea that no one heard.
We might have made it, even then, if we’d held to the northerly course and if nothing had gone wrong, but from one second to the next, with the speed of most disasters, a simple mechanical change tossed us straight into the realms of chaos, to the turbulent territory of all the demons.
The right-hand engine stopped.
Immediately the whole aircraft lost its balance, tipped sideways, spun in a circle, put its nose up, put it down again. Kris was shouting, ‘Full opposite rudder, stick forward, full opposite rudder,’ and stamping hard down with his left foot, and I remembered that ‘stick forward, full opposite rudder’ brought a single-engined aeroplane out of a spin, and I didn’t know if it made the asymmetric wildness of a dead twin-engine better or worse. I tried the radio again, to broadcast Kris’s voice, and heard only Spanish, very faint.
Space and time got jumbled. Thought became reduced for both of us to one idea at a time. My own mind clamped down onto the one reassurance that there was a life-raft dinghy behind me in the passenger cabin, and that as aeroplanes didn’t float, we would need it.
Bashing around in the restricted tumbling spaces I somehow got my hands onto the big bundle and clutched it, holding on even when any sort of steering became doubtful and Kris, still hauling rightly or wrongly at the control column began chanting again over and over, ‘Mayday, mayday, stick forward, full opposite rudder... mayday...’ and in desperation, ‘I’m heading back to Trox Island. Back to Trox.’
Though his voice chattered on uselessly he nevertheless successfully muscled a lop-sided control of the bucking, twisting, rocking aircraft while it dropped against his will from about eight thousand feet, and only when I yelled at him to be ready to jump did he seem to realise that having only one embattled and hard-worked engine overheating in that tempest meant that we were losing the fight. He could see the galloping waves, but even then would have denied their inevitability... except that sea water splashed on the windscreen.
With a screech of awakening terror he stretched out stiff fingers to the switches and pulled the nose up crookedly, with the port engine and propeller still racing at full power, and somehow we met the water flat on the belly on a frightful accelerating wave. At first contact the Piper skipped back up into the air twisting violently to the left and dropping its nose. The second strike was heavier and, in that strange way that the mind wanders even in emergencies, I thought of the exam question, set long ago, which discussed the best material for a seat-belt and how it had to stretch and absorb the kinetic energy to protect the occupant in a sudden collision. As the aeroplane buried itself into the near vertical face of the next towering whitecap, our seat-belts fulfilled their purpose, absorbed our energy and brought us to a teeth-rattling halt.
Almost in the second of impact I kicked open the rear door and jumped into the raging water, clutching the dinghy with me for precious survival and yanking at the cord that inflated it. It swelled hugely at once and as it unfolded the weight of it tore it out of my arms, all except a narrow rope circling it, for people in the water to hang onto. I did hang on for a very short while, but the screaming gale made a farce of any strength I might have thought I had, and I devastatingly knew I couldn’t hold it in place while Kris too unbuckled himself and left the sinking ship.
He came very fast indeed out of the front door, though, and by luck jumped first with one foot onto the already flooded wing and then fell straight into the almost fully inflated dinghy at the moment it tore itself out of my hands. The wind and waves seized the expanding craft instantly and blew it a great way from the sinking aeroplane, and for a moment I could see Kris’s long horror-filled face looking back at me. Then clouds and rain enveloped and parted us violently into invisibility and for only a brief time longer could I see even the waterlogged aeroplane until it completed a fast wing-down sliding disappearance into oblivion and was gone for ever.
Without much hope I pulled the inflation cords of the life jacket that represented my only chance of survival, and the fact that the jacket inflated swiftly in the designed manner seemed truly the only faint shred of possible security, and not much of that, anyway.
My shoes came off, and I slid out of my trousers, so that I wore only underpants and a once-white shirt and the orange fluorescent life jacket. The Caribbean water, comparatively warm, might throw me about, but I wasn’t going to die of hypothermia. There were comforting stories of lost sailors being picked up after days at sea. Disregard, I thought, the awkward gen that they hadn’t been battling hurricane-size waves.
It was daylight, and my watch had stopped, water-filled, at 2:15 pm, when we had ditched. At home I kept a cheap waterproof watch for swimming: idiotic that I hadn’t brought it. Such silly thoughts. Time had no meaning in the sea.