Lanyon shook his head. "No, as a matter of fact I will be, Captain."
"Wait a minute, sir," Matheson started to cut in, but Lanyon waved him back.
"It's O.K., Paul. I'd like to have a look at the scenery."
Matheson made a further token protest, then said no more.
They made their way out to the transport bay, the sounds of the wind growing steadily louder as they passed down the corridors. Revolving doors had been built into the exits, each operated by a couple of men with powerful winches.
They picked up the driver and Lanyon turned to Matheson. "I'll call you in six hours' time, when we make the border. Check with Hendrix here and let me know if anything comes in from Tunis."
Zipping his jacket, he nodded to the driver and stepped through into the entry section of the door. The men on the winch cranked it around and Lanyon stepped out into sharp daylight and a vicious tornado of air that whirled past him, jockeying him across a narrow yard between two high concrete buildings. Stinging clouds 0f grit and sand sang through the air, lashing at his face and legs. Before he could grab it, his peaked cap sailed up into the air and shot away on a tremendous updraught.
Holding tight to the map wallets, he lurched across to the troop carrier, a squat 12-wheeler with sandbags strapped to the hood and over the windshield, and heavy steel shutters welded to the window grilles.
Inside, two orderlies squatted down silently on a mattress. They were wearing one-piece plastic suits fitted with hoods roped tightly around their faces, so that only their eyes and mouths showed. Bulky goggles hung from their necks. Lanyon climbed over into the co-driver's seat and waited for the driver to bolt up the doors. It was dim and cold inside the carrier, the sole light coming from the wide periscope mirror mounted over the dashboard. The doors and control pedals were taped with cotton wadding, but a steady stream of air whistled through the clutch and brake housings, chilling Lanyon's legs.
He peered through the periscope. Directly ahead, straight into the wind, he could see down a narrow asphalt roadway past a line of high buildings, the rear walls of the sub-pens. A quarter of a mile away was what looked like the remains of a boundary fence, tilting posts from which straggled a few strands of barbed wire. Beyond the boundary was a thick gray haze, blurred and shimmering, a tremendous surface duststorm two or three hundred feet high, which headed straight toward them and then passed overhead. Look ing up, he saw that it contained thousands of miscellaneous objects-bits of paper and refuse, rooftiles, leaves, and fragments of glass-all borne aloft on a huge sweeping tide of dust.
The driver took his seat, switched on the radio and spoke to Traffic Control. Receiving his clearance, he gunned the engine and edged forward into the wind.
The carrier ground along at a steady ten miles an hour, passed the sub-pens and then turned along the boundary road. As it pivoted, the whole vehicle tilted sideways, caught and held by the tremendous power of the wind. No longer shielded by the sandbags, there was a continuous clatter and rattle as scores of hard objects bounced off the sloping sides of the carrier, each report as loud as a ricocheting bullet.
"Feels like a space ship going through a meteor shower," Lanyon commented.
The driver, a tough young Brookiyner called Goldman, nodded. "Yeah, there's some really big stuff moving now, Commander."
Lanyon looked out through the periscope. This had a 90-degree traverse and afforded a satisfactorily wide sweep of the road ahead. A quarter of a mile away were the gates into the base and a cluster of single-story guard houses, half obscured by the low-lying dust cloud. On the right were big two- and three-story blocks, fuel depots, with their underground tanks, windows sand-bagged, exposed service plant swathed in canvas.
Genoa lay behind them to the south, hidden in the haze. They swung out through the gateway and took the coast road that ran about half a mile inland, a wide concrete motorway cut into the leeward side of the low hills reaching toward the mountain shield at Alassio. All the crops in the adjacent fields had long been flattened, but the heavy stone farmhouses nestling in saddles between the hills were still intact, their roofs weighed down with tiers of flagstones.
They passed through a succession of drab villages, windows boarded up against the storm, alleyways jammed with the wrecks of old cars and farm implements. In the main square of Larghetto a bus lay on its side, and headless statues stood over the empty fountains. The roof of the 14th-century town hall had gone, but most of the buildings and houses they saw, despite their superficially decrepit appearance, were well able to withstand the hurricane-force winds. They were probably stronger than the mass-produced modem split levels and ranch homes of the big housing developments back in the States.
"Can you pick up any news on this rig?" Lanyon asked Goldman, pointing to the radio.
The driver switched on and swung the dials, avoiding the army and navy channels.
"For once the air force got nothing to say," he commented with a short laugh. "AFN Munich should still be on the air."
A rain of pebbles against the side of the carrier drowned out a newscaster's voice, but turning up the volume Lanyon heard:
"… no news available on the Pacific area, but heavy flooding and winds of hurricane force are believed to have caused thousands of casualties in islands as far apart as Okinawa and the Solomons. Indian Prime Minister Pandit Nehru has outlined full-scale relief measures, and Iraq and Persia are to collaborate in organizing essential supplies to stricken towns and villages. In the UN Assembly the Afro-Asian bloc has tabled a resolution calling on the United Nations to launch a global relief mission. Widespread flooding has brought unprecedented damage to the Middle West. Damage is estimated at four hundred million dollars, but so far few lives have been taken…"
That's one good thing, Lanyon thought. The flooding might bring the danger of typhoid and cholera, but so far, at least, even in the Pacific area, loss of life had been low. A hurricane like the one he had seen down at the base at Key West two years earlier had swooped in from the Caribbean without any warning, and just about the whole Atlantic seaboard had been caught without warning. Scores of people had been killed driving their cars home. This time, though, the gradual build-up in speed, the steady five miles an hour daily increase, had given everyone a chance to nail the roof down, dig a deep shelter in the garden or basement, lay in food stocks.
They passed through San Remo, the lines of hotels shuddering as the wind thrashed across the hundreds of shuttered balconies. Below, the sea writhed and flickered with mountainous waves, and spray dropped the visibility down to little more than a mile.
One or two vehicles passed them, crawling along under loads of sandbags. Most of them were Italian military or police trucks, patrolling the windswept empty streets.
Lanyon dozed off in the cold greasy air inside the carrier. He woke just as they crossed the main square of a small town and heard a heavy pounding on the steel plates behind his head.
The blows repeated themselves at rapid intervals, and through the thick armor plating Lanyon heard the dim sounds of someone shouting.
He sat up and peered into the periscope, but the cobbled street ahead was empty.
"What's going on?" he asked the driver.
Goldman flipped away the butt of his cigarette. "Some sort of rumpus back there, Commander. Couldn't make it out exactly."
He leaned a little harder on the accelerator, pushed the carrier's speed up to 15 miles an hour. The pounding stopped, then took up again more insistently, the voice hoarser above the wind.
Lanyon tapped the steering wheel. "Slow down for a second. I'll go back and check."
Goldman started to protest, but Lanyon straddled the back of his seat, stepped past the two orderlies sitting on the mattress, and got to the rear doors. He slipped back the shutters, peered out through the grille. A small group of people clustered around the porch of a gray-walled church on the north side of the square. There were several women among them, all wearing black shawls over their heads, backing into the recessed entranceway. A loose heap of rubble lay in the square at their feet and clouds of dust and mortar were failing around them.