‘Good heavens!’ Amy exclaimed. ‘How dreadful!’
‘Are you going to the police?’ Michael asked, frowning.
‘I shouldn’t think so,’ I confessed. ‘I don’t want to get that crew into trouble. I don’t think they were pleased I was on the island, but, even if they tied me up to do it, they did bring me back here safely. Whatever they were doing there, it’s none of my business.’
Michael and Amy smiled broadly with evident approval. I didn’t tell them I knew for a certainty that three of my captors/rescuers had been Michael and Amy themselves, and Robin Darcy too.
I didn’t thank them for working out how to get me back to civilisation without my seeing their faces, though I was pleased they had done it.
I didn’t say that I’d had ages to memorise the aircraft’s registration letters and number — which began with N, and were therefore American.
I certainly didn’t tell them I’d opened their safe and had had little else to do for lengthy days but try to decipher the messages of the foreign language letters.
Amy crossed the sitting-room, raised her arms again, stood on tiptoes and kissed my cheek. She smelled sweetly of the same scent as one of the crew, the slender guard who had had to stretch up high to tie the blindfold tightly round my head.
Robin, rotund round Robin, had had to wear his just visible heavily framed glasses inside his silver helmet to see what he was doing, and also, in the sort of unconscious mannerism everyone has, he had stood with his wrists crossed below his stomach, as he had done both in Newmarket and on his own terrace when the police had come to deal with his ‘intruder’.
Amy, short and slender, and Michael, broad shouldered and bow legged, had completed and revealed the trio’s back-view unmistakably as they walked away from the aircraft towards the thick-walled huts.
Identifying them, in view of their intention not to be known, had sent the severe flutter of fear through my gut that had kept me silent, passive and concentrated in front of their guns.
With excuses of real tiredness I put an early end to the smiling artificiality of the evening and, to my hosts’ perceptible relief, went to bed.
Odin, as I discovered heavy-eyed from the television after another night of bad dreams, had changed direction yet again since Kris and I had left Trox Island to search for the eye.
Michael having waved me permissively towards his telephone, I reached my meteorological colleague in Miami and shocked him into believing that Lazarus had nothing on P. Stuart.
When I asked if he could spare the time to see me in his office on my way back to England, he said with enthusiasm that he’d leave word at the front desk, and later that day, after the friendliest of farewells from Michael and Amy, who drove me to Owen Roberts airport in their orange truck, I landed in Miami, sought out my so far unseen good telephone pal, and was shown into the tracking heart of the Hurricane Center.
My pal, Will, turned out to be about twenty-five, tall, thin, dedicated and full of welcome.
‘You’re in here only because you’re you,’ he said. ‘Your BBC employers gave you the thumbs up.’
‘Good of them.’
He looked sharply at my face, correctly interpreted my mild cynicism, and took me to meet the team of meteorologists dealing with Odin. So it was I who was the other damn fool, they said, who’d flown through Odin’s eye and ditched near the eye-wall? I was.
It was crazy to have attempted a fly-through, they said. Amateur hurricane hunters were a pest. The US Air Force’s 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Flight alone had enough experience and instrumentation.
I meekly agreed. My pal Will returned my cynicism double, accepted my contrition and showed me how the storm trackers were still worried about Odin, which had changed direction yet again and was now very slowly passing from the Caribbean into the Gulf of Mexico, where it at present distantly threatened Galveston in Texas. The warm Gulf waters were again strengthening the circulation dangerously. Neither Will nor I could understand how I’d survived the weight of the towering seas.
When I suggested a thank-you drink at the end of his shift Will looked at his watch and said he’d already arranged for me to meet someone I might find interesting, and when we were settled at a small pavement table under a red and blue sun umbrella, we were joined by a lanky bearded sixtyish eccentric who slapped Will vigorously on the back, told me his name was Unwin, and demanded, ‘What exactly do you want to know about Trox Island?’
Taken by surprise I said ‘Er...’ irresolutely, and then with gratitude, ‘more or less anything you can tell me.’
He could tell me about forty minutes’ worth, he said. He’d done the research for a book on Trox, but couldn’t find a publisher interested. He had been to the island many times himself as pilot of the weekly Dakota, an ancient DC3 that had flown in with perishable supplies for the thirty or more people who lived there.
He said those residents were mostly meteorologists and seismologists — who employed him — and mushroom growers and timber and coconut merchants, and in the past there had been a great trade in guano. He said there were thousands of booby birds making the guano and hundreds of thousands of iguanas doing nothing. He said the island had once been used as a communications post by undercover agents from the United States, but the CIA were now denying it. They had built the runway, though, and they once had a radio transmitter there, but it had been dismantled years ago.
I asked to whom the island belonged, and Unwin took a long time over his reply. ‘Once it was British, then American,’ he said eventually. ‘Then a whole bunch of South American countries claimed it, but no one wanted to keep it longer than for their own purposes because there’s no running water there, only rain caught in cisterns, and no electricity, since one group who took it over looted the generator. So when they’ve finished with it, each group just abandons it, it-seems to me. Long before hurricane Nicky, let alone Odin, a company called the Unified Trading Company were running things, but about a month ago they suddenly slammed down the shutters on harmless people like me.’ He grinned, unexpectedly showing large yellow teeth. ‘If you want to own the island yourself, just go and live there, say it’s yours, and fight off all boarders.’
He interrupted his saga to attend to the cold Heineken ordered for us all by Will, and then, as if delighted to open the flood gates, went on.
‘There was something funny about those mushrooms. I mean, a couple of real mushroom farmers I talked to said you’d never try to grow even exotic mushrooms on a commercial basis on such a small scale. They were experimental mushrooms, people said, but the Unified Trading Company brought in their own workers, from Europe, so no one local even knew what was really going on. And it was the same for the cows.’
‘Cows?’ Will asked, mystified. ‘What cows?’
Unwin the Trox specialist showed his teeth again. ‘One day when I was there a whole shipload of bulls and cows was disembarked and they walked up from the jetty, and through the village, and spread out all over the island. There was a heck of a fuss about it with the residents, but the bulls never chased or gored any humans. They just gored each other and rogered the cows, and bit by bit they grew tamer and had calves and spent most of their time keeping the runway grass short. Hell knows what Odin did to them. I should think they all died.’
Will reminded him I’d been on the island since Odin, and I told him how the cattle survived by huddling flat on their stomachs all together like a carpet. And why were they there in the first place? I asked, but the expert said he didn’t know.