“CLAW, this is CAESAR, over,” Johns called on his radio.
“I read you, CAESAR.”
“How’s the weather ahead look?”
“Bad, sir. Recommend that you head west, find a spot to climb over, and try to approach from the Pacific side.”
Willis scanned the navigational display. “Uh-uh.”
“CLAW, we just gained about five-kay pounds in weight. We, uh, looks like we need another way.”
“Sir, the storm is moving west at fifteen knots, and your course to Panama takes you into the lower-right quadrant.”
Headwinds all the way, PJ told himself.
“Give me a number.”
“Estimated peak winds on your course home are seven-zero knots.”
“Great!” Willis observed. “That makes us marginal for Panama, sir. Very damned marginal.”
Johns nodded. The winds were bad enough. The rain that came with them would greatly reduce engine efficiency. His flight range might be less than half of what it should be… no way he could tank in the storm… the smart move would be to find a place to land and stay there, but he couldn’t do that either… Johns keyed his radio yet again.
“CLAW, this is CAESAR. We are heading for Alternate One.”
“Are you out of your skull?” Francie Montaigne replied.
“I don’t like it, sir,” Willis said.
“Fine. You can testify to that effect someday. It’s only a hundred miles off the coast, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll use the winds to slingshot us around. CLAW, I need a position check on Alternate One.”
“You crazy fucker,” Montaigne breathed. To her communications people: “Call up Alternate One. I need a position check and I need it now.”
Murray was not having any fun at all. Though Adele wasn’t really a major hurricane, Wegener had told him, it was more than he had ever expected to see. The seas had been forty feet, and though once Panache had looked like a white steel cliff alongside the dock, she now rode like a child’s toy in a bathtub. The FBI agent had a scopolamine patch stuck to his head below and behind his ear to combat motion-sickness, but it wasn’t fighting hard enough at the moment. But Wegener was just sitting in his bridge chair, smoking his pipe like the Old Man of the Sea while Murray held on to the grab-bar over his head, feeling like the man on the flying trapeze.
They were not in their programmed position. Wegener had explained to his visitor that there was only one place they could be. It moved, but that’s where they had to be, and Murray was distantly thankful that the seas weren’t quite as bad as they had been. He worked his way over to the door and looked out at the towering cylinder of cloud.
“Panache, this is CLAW, over,” the speaker said. Wegener rose to take the mike.
“CLAW, this is Panache. Your signal is weak but readable, over.”
“Position check, over.”
Wegener gave it to the pilot, who sounded like a girl, he thought. Christ, they were everywhere now.
“CAESAR is inbound yours.”
“Roger. Please advise CAESAR that conditions are below margins. I say again, it is not good down here at the moment.” :
“Roger, copy. Stand by.” The voice came back two minutes later. “Panache, this is CLAW. CAESAR says he wants to try it. If he can’t do it, he plans to HIFR. Can you handle that, over.”
“That’s affirmative, we can sure as hell try. Give me an ETA, over.”
“Estimate six-zero minutes.”
“Roger, we’ll be ready. Keep us posted. Out.” Wegener looked across his bridge. “Miss Walters, I have the conn. I want chiefs Oreza and Riley on the bridge, now.”
“Captain has the conn,” Ensign Walters said. She was disappointed. Here she was in the middle of a goddamned tropical storm and having the time of her young life. She wasn’t even ill from it, though many of the crew were. So why couldn’t the skipper let her keep the goddamned conn?
“Left standard rudder,” Wegener ordered. “Come to new course three-three-five. All ahead two-thirds.”
“Left standard rudder, aye, coming to new course three-three-five.” The helmsman turned the wheel, then reached for the throttle controls. “Two thirds, sir.”
“Very well. How you feel, Obrecki?” the skipper asked.
“Hell of a coaster, but I’m wondering when the ride is going to stop, sir.” The youngster grinned, but didn’t take his eyes off the compass.
“You’re doing just fine. Let me know if you get tired, though.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Oreza and Riley appeared a minute later. “What gives?” the former asked.
“We go to flight quarters in thirty minutes,” the captain told them.
“Oh, fuck!” Riley observed. “Excuse me, Red, but… shit!”
“Okay, Master Chief, now that we’ve gotten that behind us, I’m depending on you to get it done,” Wegener said sternly. Riley accepted the rebuke like the pro he was.
“Beg pardon, Cap’n, you’ll get my best shot. Put the XO in the tower?”
Wegener nodded. The executive officer was the best man to command the evolution from the flight-control station. “Go get him.” Riley left and Wegener turned to his quartermaster.
“Portagee, I want you on the wheel when we go Hotel Corpin. I’ll have the conn.”
“Sir, there ain’t no Hotel Corpin.”
“That’s why you’re on the wheel. Relieve Obrecki in half an hour and get a feel for her. We gotta give him the best target we can.”
“Jesus.” Oreza looked out the windows. “You got it, Red.”
Johns held the aircraft down, staying a scant five hundred feet above ground level. He disengaged the automatic flight controls, trusting more to his skill and instinct now, leaving the throttle to Willis and concentrating on his instruments as much as he could. It started in an instant. One moment they were flying in clear air, the next there was rain pelting the aircraft.
“This isn’t so bad,” Johns lied outrageously over the intercom.
“They even pay us to do it,” Willis agreed with no small irony.
PJ checked the navigation display. The winds were from the northwest at the moment, slowing the helicopter somewhat, but that would change. His eyes flickered from the airspeed indicator to another one that worked off a Doppler-radar aimed at the ground. Satellite and inertial navigation systems told a computer display where he was and where he wanted to go, a red dot. Another screen held the display of a radar system that interrogated the storm ahead, showing the worst sections in red. He’d try to avoid those, but the yellow areas he had to fly through were bad enough.
“Shit!” Willis shouted. Both pilots yanked up on the collective and twisted to maximum power. They’d caught a downdraft. Both pairs of eyes locked onto the dial that gave them vertical velocity in feet per minute. For an instant they were headed down at over a thousand, less than thirty seconds of life for an aircraft at five hundred feet. But microbursts like that are localized phenomena. The helicopter bottomed out at two hundred and clawed its way back up. PJ decided that seven hundred feet was a safer cruise altitude at the moment. He said one word:
“Close.”
Willis grunted by way of reply.
In back, men were strapped down to the floor. Ryan had already done that, and was holding onto his minigun mount as though it would make a difference. He could see out the open door – at nothing, really. Just a mass of gray darkness occasionally lit by lightning. The helicopter was jolting up and down, tossed like a child’s kite by the moving masses of air, except that the helicopter weighed forty thousand pounds. But there was nothing he could do. His fate was in the hands of others, and nothing he knew or did mattered now. Even vomiting didn’t make him feel any better, though he and others were doing that. He just wanted it to be over, and only intellect told him that he really did care how it ended – didn’t he?
The buffeting continued, but the winds shifted as the helicopter penetrated the storm. They had started off from the northeast, but shifted with measurable speed counterclockwise, and were soon on the port quarter of the aircraft. That increased their ground speed. With an airspeed of one-fifty, they now had a ground speed of one-ninety and increasing.
“This is doing wonders for our fuel economy,” Johns noted.
“Fifty miles,” Willis replied.
“CAESAR, this is CLAW, over.”
“Roger, CLAW, we are five-zero miles from Alternate One, and it’s a little bumpy -” A little bumpy, my ass, Captain Montaigne thought, roller-coastering through lighter weather a hundred miles away “- otherwise okay,” Johns reported. “If we cannot make the landing, I think we can try to slingshot out the other side and make for the Panamanian coast.” Johns frowned as more water struck the windshield. Some was ingested into the engines at the same time.
“Flameout! We’ve lost Number Two.”
“Restart it,” Johns said, still trying to be cool. He lowered the nose and traded altitude for speed to get out of the heavy rain. That, too, was supposed to be a local phenomenon. Supposed to be.